Congratulations on Establishing a Context Where You Aren't a Loser!

In this context, apes will rule the planets and your hygiene, giant forehead and hairy brow will all be considered socially acceptable and desirable traits. Your love of reggaeton and your terrible taste in clothing and food will also be in line with ape-fashion and, as a result, will be considered quite gauche.

In this scenario, apes will murder people en masse on a whim. Ape-rape will be commonplace, human reproduction tightly controlled. A gathering of more than three humans away from work will be strictly prohibited by ape-law, which is fine by you because you’re never invited to parties anyway.

In this scenario you’d be a perfect under-lieutenant for the apes, which would make you less of a loser than you are in the real world, where you work fourteen hours a week in a video rental store while living in your parent’s basement. It will take a lot of work to establish this context, and we respect that, but we’d still prefer you stopped trying to make it into a reality, because if it works we’ll all be in big trouble. When you come up with it tonight, just write it down and take some solace in the fact that maybe, just maybe, there’s a version of you out there who doesn’t suck at life.

Congratulations on Establishing a Context Where You Aren’t a Loser!

Congratulations on Oblierating the City from Orbit!

The ship will ease into orbit silently, a city unto itself, towering mire of steel set in the sky, immobile by the merit of the application of constant force, constant effort against the laws of physics preventing it from descending into the well of the planet’s gravity, from whence escape would be all but impossible.

The helmsman will sip his coffee nervously as the captain makes his rounds. The captain will be frowning the way he always does when you have this sort of job, but he won’t say anything. He’ll just nod at you, at the gunnery console, and you’ll nod back.

The calculations will be set, trajectories double checked. There will be no room for error here, which will seem a little ironic to you, but you won’t say anything. You’ll just sit there silently while the captain paces, the helmsman sips his coffee and the rest of the bridge does everything they can to avoid looking at you.

It’ll take the magistrate five minutes to arrive from his quarters, but it will feel like an eternity. When he steps on the bridge, sash barely buckled, belly bulging from his waistband, he’ll be sucking his breath like he just sprinted up a staircase, a fact made all the more puzzling by the absence of stairs on the ship. He’ll barely seem aware of where he is, and the odor of liquor will emenate from his body, permeating the entire bridge.

His assistant will trail him, a thin lipped man whose face will have long since forgotten how to smile. He’ll carry paperwork with him, paperwork he’ll hand to the magistrate, who will flip through it briefly before he mumbles, more to himself than to the captain:

“Guilty. Carry it out.”

The captain will sigh and nod in response.

“Gunnery officer,” he’ll shout tonelessly. “Ready firing solution.”

“Ready,” you’ll respond, the tension you feel somehow absent from your voice.

“City guilty of crimes against space,” the captain will say. “Execute sentence.”

“Aye,” you’ll shout before pressing the big red button on your console. It’ll have fire stenciled on it in giant white letters, and it’ll load a giant chunk of rock into the magnetic accelerator that runs along the spine of the ship. The accelerator will charge the rock up to sub-luminal but not inconsiderable speeds. The rock will then enter the upper atmosphere and descend along the trajectory you calculated. It will press past whipping winds and split clouds before it finds its mark, striking the city with a ballistic force equivalent to a nuclear bomb. The force of the impact, the shockwave, will crush buildings and force a ring of debris outward and upward in a plume of dust and smoke visible from space. In an instant the city, twelve miles edge to edge to edge, will be gone, replaced by a hole in the ground.

The magistrate will leave before the dust has begun to settle, his assistant trailing. When the two depart it’ll feel as if the bridge took a collective sigh of relief, though no one will make a sound.

“Helmsman,” the captain will shout. “Plot a course away.”

“Aye,” the helmsman will respond, relief palpable in his voice.

You’ll be left to sit at your station and calculate theoretical vectors for theoretical asteroids that might one day strike theoretical targets, a peaceful activity when compared to devising and reviewing the math required to destroy a city of fourteen million people in an instant. You’ll know how to do both things, but you’ll prefer the former.

You’ll have a moment of epiphany, during a particularly interesting calculation, that although you know many things about the math associated with resolving them, you won’t actually be entirely sure what “space crimes” are. You’ll ponder asking the captain for a moment, but given the gravity of the situation you just resolved, that’ll seem like a bad idea. The question will stick in your mind, however, and calculations will become, for a time, much more difficult than they need to be.

Congratulations on Obliterating the City from Orbit!

Congratulations on Whisking Her Away!

There are many ways to show your love, like a kiss on the cheek or a flower or a heart shaped balloon. If you’re really old school you can rest your hand on your lover’s hand until she starts to weep softly and you pull her in and kiss her on the cheek and then light yourselves on fire. Or you can use any number of cards devised specifically for the purpose of informing a loved one just how much you care. We’re not trying to note you to death here, just give you some options.

Because the way you’re going to express your love today isn’t really appropriate. At all. We understand that love is a confusing emotion and that we all process it a little differently. But when you kidnap a woman and bind her in your basement you’re taking it a little far. And when you shove roses down her throat until she chokes to death, you’re taking it way too far. When you start stirring her bones in a cauldron so that you can eradicate them from existence and make a sort of gelatin substrate that will allow you to, with a little work, make a scale statue of your lady love before she was whisked into oblivion.

When you’re done you’ll have your paste, but you won’t have thought ahead far enough to prepare a mold in her shape. You’ll be undone by your own hubris, left with a puddle of rapidly cooling gelatin and no one to help you stir it. The irony of the situation will be lost on you, which is good because irony drives you to kill, and we’ve already seen what you do when you just want to love.

We don’t want to see a scenario where you explicitly intend to harm someone.

Congratulations on Whisking Her Away!

Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Examples of Narrative in The Path!

There are a number of ways we can investigate the narratives surrounding these young women. We can do so at a surface level, chortling at the fact that these young women each endure what could be considered a “tiny death,” a fact that is not lost upon Tale of Tales, who cast many of the revelations that these young women undergo in an explicitly or potentially sexualized light. But if we go deeper, we can see the structural elements assembled to convey the experience of each individual girl.

Because even as the player exerts literal control over the young woman he or she guides through the forest we can find concrete elements that players are encouraged or forced to interact with. The elements of dialogue unique to each young woman, the gestures that they make as they approach each element of the environment surrounding them, these are the framework that generate the effective poem of The Path. And through these objects we find a narrative structure not unlike that of a conventional poem.

Pacing substitutes for things like meter and line, the word choice for word choice, art and action for tone and style. If we have to establish a parallel of theme than our reader may, perhaps, be beyond convincing of the validity of games as an art form (I’ll grant you that writing in games is very, very different from writing in poems, hence my grasp at wit above) so let’s just agree for convenience that theme is readily apparent in both games and poems. My point is that we’re looking at a game and we’re seeing concrete, constructed elements provided expressly for us to interact with. Which is pretty effing cool in and of itself! But what’s really cool is that interacting with any of those objects is a choice, even if the choice is between interacting with an object and quitting the game (though that’s never the only choice with The Path).

And the elements themselves in The Path are fairly sparse: while the forest is an interesting place to play, there isn’t a whole lot to it when you really come down to it. Compared to many games, The Path is spare and, if you’re not willing to meet it half way, kind of boring. Poems, similarly, are often separated from prose by their sparse elements which require the involvement of the reader in order for cohesion to take shape. In this way the player of The Path becomes the equivalent of the reader of a poem: they become an agent of change in the game’s world, giving form and meaning to the elements of the game by choosing which ones to interact with and how.

And depending on your approach you can emerge from each of the vignettes that make up The Path with very different experiences. The actions you take during your journey with each girl has a profound impact on your outcome. One might guide Ginger, the tomboyish thirteen year old, through her travels with relatively little event, as I did, delivering her unintentionally to her wolf, a young woman waiting in a field to entreat her to an (implied) lesbian experience, and come away with a sense of tragedy afterwards. I spent so little time with this lively character and saw so little of the world with her and the moment of happiness she found seemed to fill her with such shame and dread that she had no means by which to process it except to drag her heels and return to her path, to the house where she was expected and find her quiet, literal death within the home of her family.

But another player, might have spent more time with Ginger. They might have explored the woods thoroughly and not found her wolf at all, instead eventually guiding her to her grandmother’s house after growing frustrated at her liveliness and excitement at the world around her. They might’ve taken some time to guide other girls through the woods before returning to Ginger’s vignette with a more complete understanding of the woods and their nature and the journey that each of these young women is on. And when they guided her to her wolf, they might’ve felt joy at the fullness of her experience and woe and frustration for her shame.

This is more or less exactly what I experienced with Carmen, the fifteen year old sister who is undergoing a more conventional sexual awakening. Upon my first attempt to guide Carmen through the woods I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get her to interact with her wolf. I figured out more or less where it was supposed to be, who it was supposed to be, but I couldn’t actually get the events to sequence correctly. I’d started the journey off thinking that Carmen was a frustrating ditz, and as it progressed that opinion was reinforced pretty thoroughly: Carmen was little interested in the sort of childish or profound play that I was looking for in the woods, she was far more interested in trying to fuck boys and drink beer which, in her mind, was the perfect way to realize her goal of fucking some boys.

She was the only girl I guided to grandmother’s house without first meeting her wolf, which was a strange experience. Knowing what I knew about her character from exploring the woods with her I found a kind of horror in the quiet of grandmother’s house, a sort of cruel repression that seemed to strip Carmen of what made her…her. And when I finally discovered her wolf (more accurately, how to get her wolf to pay attention to her and grant her the sexytimes that she spent most of her journey in the woods trying to find) I felt a profound sympathy for her and the world that her grandmother’s house had become. Spinning, pulsing steel and flesh consuming itself composed the house now, formless horrors of concrete physicality replacing the horrid quiet that had been there before. Carmen seemed to find the world after sex every bit as horrible as the way she’d seen it beforehand. I walked away from her scenario angry, not just as Carmen, but at Tale of Tales for making me relate to a character I hated so thoroughly.

If the game had been more structured, I might’ve been able to distance myself from Carmen’s journey. I might’ve been able to snort at her awakenings and ignore her set pieces as a construct separate from myself, a forced series of actions that I disagreed with.

But every action, even success or failure, is conditional in The Path, an event requiring the effort and intervention of the player. And when Carmen “failed” at dying, I had to come back to her, get a more robust sense of who she was and re-explore the woods with her to get her where she needed to go. I had to become the agent of narrative fulfillment required by every poem and, by most turns, every game. The only real difference here was that I knew I was doing that, knew how active I was in this process.

In the end, I was forced by the permissive mechanics and loose construction of The Path into constructing a more complex and engaging female character, a protagonist I could find meaning and resonance with. The formlessness of the experience forced me into generating a narrative and a suite of emotions in order to engage with the game at all. If The Path was just a series of linear puzzles that I had to “complete” in order to unlock the next scene, I might have found the stories of the characters within it trite. But because it forced me to construct my own meaning (by providing me with engaging set pieces to construct it from, of course) it allowed for the construction of a deeply nuanced treatment of gender, sexuality and the nature of womanhood, all rendered through a video game, a member of a medium often rightly reviled for infantilizing women, for casting them in parallel to masculine roles or for turning their sexuality against them in order to generate a sense of objectification or absurdity.

Take Lara Croft of Tomb Raider for instance: she was constructed as a “female Indiana Jones” rather than a character in her own right, an archetype of masculinity imposed on a feminine frame rather than a uniquely female protagonist. Even if she could be taken seriously as a character on a thematic level we’d never know, since her appear has been so ridiculously overblown, an exaggerated confluence of masculine and feminine images mashed together haphazardly. Just look at her, sporting two massive pistols and tremendous, absurd breasts that defy physics. She’ll climb up an ancient temple without breaking a sweat, kill dozens of men to get to her goal and then drown underwater and essentially have an orgasm as she twitches and dies, running out of air.

Even her serious moments are undercut by deliberate attempts to feminize her character and make her seem less threatening, less like a construct of power and more like an agent of a power structure who reinforces that structure even as she’s subjugated by it. Romantic subplots are injected, Lara is captured, a love of money sidetracks her attentions. To be fair, efforts are emerging to try and counter this pattern, even within the Tomb Raider series: Lara is being rebooted as a (normally bodied) young woman who is shipwrecked on an island and has to use her wits and her resilience to save herself. But it remains to be seen how well this attempt will follow its archetype, indeed if it will succeed at all.

But there’s reason to take heart and hope for a more progressive portrayal of women in games, even those with more conventional narratives. It comes from, among other places, the Portal series of games, and it’s going to be the subject of next week’s SNS, and hopefully tie this topic together. Thanks for bearing with me!

Congratulations on Uncovering Those Ancient Ruins!

Your journey began on Wednesday, as many journeys do, and it’s been anything but dull. After arriving by plane in godless Mexico City on Thursday morning you took a ramshackle bus to the Yucatan Peninsula. Your bus was, natch, attacked by cannibals who killed most of the crew, but thanks to your honed survival skills (the product of years of thieving) you managed to come out of the whole affair more or less unscathed, with a few cannibal dicks for your belt.

After that you started wandering around the Yucatan which, by the way, means walking around for days on end without a ready source of fresh water or food. You occasionally found tourist traps, such as “working cattle ranches” and “shacks without windows” that had a few jugs of water and some sub-standard granola bars for trade. But nothing substantial.

This trend will continue until you reach your destination, early this morning.

You’ll more stumble upon the ruins than find them: they’ll leap out of the jungle at you, rising up from the earth into the skyline. Vines will have grown over the stones, stones that time has grown into the ground, out of the dirt. Bones will be scattered around the stones, animal and “other.” And, shockingly enough, there will be a Whole Foods standing in the center of the Mayan ruins, its bright green letters staring down at you. A bearded man will be sitting outside on his smoke break. As you pass by him he will not acknowledge you. He will simply stare ahead blindly.

Once you enter the building it’ll become quite obvious that he’s the only employee there. Most of the shelves will be unstocked, the produce will be rotting and the bread will be slightly staler than it usually is at Whole Foods.

The only thing that a yuppie would find familiar will be a massive granola bar display in the center of the store. It’ll essentially consist of a ziggurat built from granola bar boxes with Mayan statues and unfamiliar writing on them. They’ll rise well above your head, easing their way towards the ceiling. The bars displayed on the boxes will look a great deal like the one you found in the museum earlier this week.

You’ll grab one of the boxes and, after a cursory look around to make sure the Whole Foods employee isn’t watching you, you’ll tear out a bar and rip into it with your aching teeth.

It’ll taste just as grand as the other granola bar, better perhaps for your hunger.

You’ll open up your duffel bag, your knap sack and your empty water bottle and begin stuffing granola bars into all of them. When you’re finished you’ll be thoroughly weighed down with granola bars, but the display will still be towering above you, monstrously. You won’t be worried about not leaving behind granola bars for future generations. Quite the opposite, the sheer scope of the display will make you wonder if some force greater than man made these bars to keep us bound to this planet, for space seems at best a distraction when beset by such granola bars.

As you leave the man you saw as you entered will still be sitting outside, smoking the same cigarette. He’ll nod at you this time and mumble something that will sound vaguely like “thanks for shopping at Whole Foods.” You won’t respond as you walk off into the woods, beginning your harrowing journey home.

Congratulations on Uncovering Those Ancient Ruins!

Congratulations on Winning at Your Ethics Hearing!

Usually at ethics hearings, people try to justify the weird shit they did in all kinds of ways. “I had a devil inside me” or “I thought I was doing something legal but kind of morally questionable” are two things you hear all the time at those fuckshows.

But you ain’t gonna do none of that shit. You’re just gonna walk up to the podium, pull out a little notebook, and announce to the crowd.

“I thought I’d make a shitload of money.”

The chair of the ethics committee will curve his ear towards you when you say that. Then he’ll gavel his gavel to bring the court to attention before he asks you to clarify: “That isn’t really related to ethics.”

“That isn’t really a clarifying question,” you’ll quip back.

Then he and the rest of the ethics committee will just sit there, stupefied for a few minutes while you figure how to get the microphone off its little standy-thing in front of the podium. Then you’ll drop it on the ground and walk away. Halfway down the aisle two bailiffs will grab you and escort you into a holding area, where you’ll be kept until the ethics committee can decide what the fuck to do with you.

Congratulations on Winning at Your Ethics Hearing!

Congratulations on Locating the Device Those Aliens Implanted In Your Wife!

It made for a pretty good sex game these last few years: find the alien tracking device implanted inside your wife. It let you explore a lot of things you might have engaged with if you didn’t have a good excuse to try them: nasal, anal and aural all had their rightful place in your sexcapades as long as you were looking for that device.

You even worked in blood play (what if it’s in her blood?), breath play (lungs!) and something called kidney play (interstitial redacted). But none of these fetishes really bore fruit. You started talking to doctors (real ones) and sexperts (not real doctors) to come up with new ways to explore your wife’s body, hoping to discover the tracking device that those aliens use to find her, even when you’re fucking in the woods, and take unfortunate pictures of her while the two of you are boning.

Today you’re going to find it, and boy are you ever going to be embarrassed.

You’ll be fucking your wife doggy style for the first time since the abduction four years ago and, in the throes of passion, you’ll slap her ass good and hard. As your palm impacts her buttock you’ll make a strong, hard sound, and you’ll feel something, something unfamiliar. You’ll give her another slap just to be sure and there it will be again: something small, rigid, immobile and hard. You’ll stop moving inside her mid thrust and rest your hand on the mass, puzzling over it for a moment.

“Honey,” you’ll say. “I think I found it.”

The two of you will cease your erotic intermission, disentangle yourselves from one another, put on clothes and head to the doctor’s office. Once there a CAT scan will reveal an object unlike anything the radiologist has ever seen. We wish we could tell you that this would be the end of your weird sex times and alien related troubles, but really this will just spark a heated chase that will lead to some really dark stuff going down between you, your wife, your radiologist and a young, impressionable lady FBI agent with really nice hair and skin. We suggest you make the best of it.

Congratulations on Locating the Device Those Aliens Implanted In Your Wife!