Poverty Sucks--Pinball Rules

Originally published in January of 2011 by Classy Hands.

Proof that I am an immortal. In Fayetteville, NC, anyhow.

 

 

Poverty sucks, so I went to the cheap theater.

Now, when I was a kid, this joint was called the dollar theater, because… y’know… all movies cost a dollar to see. But due to inflation it’s gone up to two or three bucks a ticket, which is a real tragedy because “dollar theater” has such a nice ring to it. Regardless of the increase in price, however, you get what you pay for. These are the movies that have been available to rent for months, and aren’t terribly high caliber stuff anyhow. Even when I was little and was perfectly content to watch the afternoon lineup of “Step By Step” and “Full House”, I could tell that most of the movies at the dollar theater sucked. Stuff like “Ernest Rapes The Milkman” or “The Pebble and the Penguin 2: Gacy’s Revenge”. But what did we have to complain about? We were kids, and alone in a movie theater that we could afford–it was a level of freedom we had not yet seen at that point in our adorable, rapeless lives. We were bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, filled with excitement, mirth, and not even a teaspoon of undesired semen. I mean, none of us were catholic, so that put us at a disadvantage right there, but really–not even a case of having some dude in a trenchcoat expose himself to us. I mean, that’s got to be a break of some sort of statistic–I don’t know. But we weren’t really a good-looking bunch of kids, so that might explain it. But seriously–not even once.

…Anyways…

I was in poverty and bored–funny how the two go together. I went to the cheap theater to see Aaron Sorkin’s “Guys Who Speak With A Better Vocabulary Than You”. It just came out, and I hear there’s a lot of Oscar buzz around it, largely because the members of the Academy fear Aaron Sorkin, who is known to roam the streets of Los Angeles, wielding an Emmy like a club and muttering darkly about “Sports Night”. Hollywood executives warn their children that if they don’t eat all of their gefilte fish, Sorkin will creep into their room while they’re sleeping and edit their screenplays into small piles of dust, leaving the fledgling screenwriters so demoralized that they’ll settle for meager jobs in the upper echelons of the Smithsonian Institute or the Federal Reserve.

The movie wasn’t half bad.

But what really struck me was where I ended up next. Everyone was filing out and I followed them. Because it was Saturday night and a high school girl had made eyes at me? Hell no. Because it was Saturday night and several high school girls had made eyes at me. A door near the rear of the theater lobby was opened, and dozens of them filed through. I crept in the background, hoping that they were leading me to a poorly-lit alleyway where they experimented with their first tabs of LSD and group sex. What I found behind that door was so much better.

Arcades are getting harder and harder to find. But when you do happen upon one at my age, you are filled with various degrees of excitement, fear, and a little bit of horniness. The trepidation comes largely from the arrival of a few new faces. “Dance Dance Revolution” and “Guitar Hero” have squeezed their way between the old cabs of “Street Fighter 2″ and even “Joust”. Even more frightening is the fact that it costs more than a quarter to play a stinking game of Ms. Pacman (which I will not play out of fear of getting beaten up by one of these surly teenagers). The most popular games in my old arcades were mostly concerned with beating the shit out of your opponent, whether with a gun, or more likely your oversized fist.

But nowadays, the most popular games are based on rhythm and matching colors and shapes to the tune of popular music. Think “R. Kelly goes to Kindergarten”. On second thought, don’t think that.

Ever.

Happily, the new mixes fairly well with the old. All the same, visiting an arcade in your late twenties is like attending your high school reunion. You see a collection of old friends that you haven’t seen in a decade. Like the “X-Men” or “Star Wars Trilogy” arcade games, some of them are just as freaking cool as you remember them. And you remember having a huge crush on the wild and crazy antics of “Mortal Kombat” (who had C cups as early as 7th grade), but now that you see her again ten years later, you can’t help but wonder what the big deal was about. And then there’s those other games, like “Revolution X: Featuring Aerosmith!” where music was the fucking weapon!

No, seriously–you blasted bad guys with CDs.

And if you’re like me, the gauntlet of nostalgia and fear brings you to the pinball machines. Like the girl you dated for a year and half as an upperclassman, you greet each other with a bit of awkwardness, but a definite twinkle in your eye. You make small talk, casually graze her flippers, and before you know it, you’re grunting and banging away in the corner while everyone pretends not to notice. Yeah, that’s right girl–tilt for me, baby. But the pinball machine is a fickle bitch–the only game in the world where you can rack up 9 million points and still feel like a damn loser. And tattooed in red ink she still has the initials of all the guys who did a better job than you. And you’re a freak and a failure (but mostly you’re out of tokens), and in the shadow of the nearly-as-cheap-as-a-dollar theater, you know that you’ll be back tomorrow.

Tomorrow that bitch will feel the pain.

Also, while I have your attention, I'd just like to say, "Fuck Sagat".

Let's Be A Bad Guy.

In my latest editorial at Bell of Lost Souls, I asked a simple question: What attracts us to the bad guy?  The response was varied in both passion and opinion.  Some posited that everyone sees their actions as justified, and therefore there are no real villains.  Others drew cultural lines.  Others still argued that villains tend to have the best uniforms.

No comment.

Certainly this has been a question on everyone's lips, as it seems our culture just can't get enough of the villain lately.  Everything from the resurgence of the vampire as an antihero, to zombie fixation, to Walter White and Tyrion Lannister--we just can't help but root for the bad guy.  My hypothesis is that we envy their freedom.  Villains follow no code or logic beyond their own, whereas even the roughest, toughest good guy has some sort of moral compass to follow.  That's what makes him a good guy. 

In theory, anyway.

And so, despite all the horrors a villain submits his friends, family, and community to, we're thrilled and awed by his or her ability to do just anything that they want.  And if they can do it with style?  Even better.

Now this is all very well and good for a passive form of entertainment like a book, movie or comic--but what about a game?  The infamous "morality meter" has been a hook for many games over the past decade, and our heroes are getting more antihero by the second (see: Max Payne vs. Max Payne 3--in which they somehow did the impossible in making Max even more broodish and hard-boiled).  And when it comes to making choices in games, I tend to go with the more tenderhearted route. 

But does playing a villain effect my overall enjoyment of the game?

Thus I am planning a reoccurring series of essays entitled "Let's Be A Bad Guy", wherein I will take you through my experience of playing a video game as the villain.  This might involve choosing less than moral choices on a morality meter (Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic), games where your protagonist exists permanently in the gray area of good and evil (Papers Please, GTA), and games where your character is clearly on the side of scum and villainy (Overlord, Deadpool).

Of course, the very notion of what makes a character "good" or "bad" is highly subjective, and there's a good chance that people will argue about their opinion, and that will lead to fighting which will lead to murder and blood in the streets.

And then I'll ask if pushing that domino effect into existence makes me evil.

A Snippet From "Why Do We Love To Play The Bad Guy?"

I keep writing and I don't know how to stop.  Here's a love tap from my latest editorial for Bell of Lost Souls.

"So how did I get there in the first place?  Everyone has their "main", and at gaming events you can see the line drawn in the sand.  An obvious example of this is Warhammer 40k, where the divide appears to be between the Imperium and the Xenos/Heretic.  And you Black Library fans out there can affirm that our supposed "heroes" of the Imperium are... well...

Well, they're just bad, bad people."

Soak up my drippy words with your ShamWOW eyes here.

A Snippet From "Counts As Awesome"

Here's a rumbling from my latest editorial for Bell Of Lost Souls:

"Citizens of the Imperium lie awake in their beds imagining the horrible screams of terror as a horrendously scarred and babbling Pinkie Pie leads the charge of swarms of vicious little ponies.  Their cries of agony go unheard as bones are torn from the socket by the most adorable monsters the universe has yet seen.  Seriously: through all the blood, the whole thing's just precious."

Read the whole ridiculous thing here.

Why Books Are Books And Movies Are Movies.

I'm getting sick of adaptations--even when they're good.

When I taught playwriting, there was always a very important lesson that I tried to put as early on in my schedule as possible.  The lesson was fairly simple, and began with a single question:

Why are you writing a play?

I didn't (and don't) mean that in some sort of extreme, existential way.  Indeed, my least favorite day of any art school class was when the professor insisted on writing "What Is Art?" on the dry erase board.  No, I mean that question in a very practical sense: why is your story a play?  Why not a short story?  Why not a poem, or a screenplay?  The question came from years of watching myself and others write plays that included a couch dominating the center of the stage.  Or a hundred thousand scene changes.  We weren't writing plays, we were writing teleplays and screenplays. 

So why did we keep falling back on plays?  Well, it's simple to pull off a play, in the grand scheme of things.  People have been doing it for millennia.  You've got the high school auditorium and fifty bucks to spend at the goodwill on ill-fitting costumes?  You've got yourself a play, my friend.  And I don't care what your friends smoking skunkweed outside of the Starbucks told you: plays are not inherently better than film or television.  Not as far as the medium itself is concerned.  A medium is simply the ocean you float your story-raft on.  And with recent word that the World of Warcraft movie is officially a thing that is happening, I think it's important to remember that video games are a medium that is just as valid as any other, and that adapting them to any other medium isn't necessarily some sort of victory, whether that adaptation is a film, television show, or even a book.

Daniel Hope recently published a column on LitReactor entitled Five Video Games That Would Have Made Better Novels, and I'll admit that it pissed me off.  Daniel didn't set out to do that.  Indeed, his column is well-written and not snarky toward gamers in the slightest.  He clearly set out to make the piece fun and as non-controversial as possible.

And yet I was still angry.

If you parse the comments section, you'll see a tepid response from me, and that was only because I knew I needed to go home and eat an egg salad sandwich and collect my thoughts before I became some sort of gamer troll that blows up at the tiniest provocation. 

That'll do, internet.  That'll do.

 

My frustration stems from the notion that books as a medium are superior.  That any story or any idea is made better by it being a novel.  Which, I'm sorry fellow nerds, is nonsense.  Games are having a hard enough time being taken seriously as an art form without it being implied that everyone involved in making them is essentially too lazy to tap out 100,000 words instead.  That notion is insulting and ridiculous.  Take, for example, his choice of "Any LucasArts Adventure Game".  He says that "every last one of these games are perfect".  Well, if that's true, why are they on the list?  Curse Of Monkey Island isn't made somehow superior if it's written out as a novel.  It's already done.

 

Don't misunderstand me: I love books.  I truly do.  Anyone who utters the words "I don't like reading" around me might as well not exist--they have been written off in my mind.  But interactive activities such as video games are no less an artform.  Sure--we've got 12 year olds screaming slurs into headsets all over the country, but that doesn't make Papers, Please or Spec Ops: The Line any less magnificent.  Neither would accomplish half of what they do as books or films, because they are saying something that only properly comes across when being played.  You need to interact with them for them to work their magic.  And as long as Twilight, Pride & Prejudice With Zombies, and Snooki's autobiography exist, books aren't allowed to claim some sort of immunity to the disease that is cultural idiocy.

 

Daniel Hope isn't some video game virgin--reading his article proves that he knows his business well enough.  But to suggest, for example, that we're missing out on something in Bioshock by actively experiencing the world around us instead of reading about it through the eyes of a third person, is damned insulting, and misses the point entirely.  The failed paradise of Rapture, the dream of Andrew Ryan, the terrifying Big Daddies, the sweeping twist and the illusion of independence--all of this is experienced, firsthand, by the player.  I have no doubt that a talented author could make something terrific out of that. 

But it's already done.  And it's done incredibly.  And to suggest that it would have been better as a book seemingly because "books are better" only relegates this artform into the kiddie pool when it has barely cracked the shell that surrounds it. 

 

Hope was clearly trying to make something fun out of this list.  His addition of Duck Hunt to the list makes that clear.  And that's fine.  But I seriously doubt that I'm the only person who found this whole notion pretty insulting.  Games are capable of so very much--but the longer you pigeonhole them as a medium that is somehow "less than", the longer you have to wait for the next work of art to hit your computer or your console.

 

And Fifty Shades Of Grey would have made a better Mario game, so bite me.