Conversations With My Wife
SCENE: The wife and I have snuggled for an hour after a hard week, recharging her wifely batteries.
GINI (not leaving my embrace): I feel so much better.
ME: Aww, yeah. That’s your daily dosage of Vitamin F talkin’.
GINI: Okay.
ME: Which isn’t actually a real vitamin.
GINI: Okay.
ME: Because I’m vaguely worried if you thought it was, you’d divorce me and go get a supplement.
GINI (snuggles closer): Oh, you know I prefer getting my vitamins naturally anyway.
Why I Hate Stealth Games, Or: How I Discovered Roger Ebert Was Right
So as a reward for, you know, selling a novel, I finally got a PS4 after months of hand-wringing. (Yes, I abandoned my good ol’ XBox 360 after years of racking up achievements, and it feels a little sad to have all my Rock Band ‘cheevos gathering dust at the ass-end of a hard drive now. But looks like the XBone’s a loser in this generation’s console wars.)
Anyway, so flush with triumph, I got two games – Shadows of Mordor, because I was excited about the orc vengeance system, and The Last Of Us, which I was excited about because it was a zombie game.
Both turned out to be stealth games.
Oh Christ, I fucking hate stealth games.
This is not to say that your great love of stealth games is the work of Satan’s anal warts, but I fucking hate every aspect of stealth games. Because it’s like programming. Because it’s like writing.
Look, in my day and my night job, I spend many hours painstakingly mapping approaches to complex problems. I have to do a lot of tedious research to scout out the landscape, looking carefully ahead for hidden problems, analyzing the pros and cons of whether this methodology would be more effective, everything proceeding at a snail’s creep. And when I’ve set up the plan and want to explode out of the gate, I still proceed at a dim crawl, because every line is critical and I need to get each of them right.
It’s nice when I finally triumph. It is.
But when I settle down to game, I want to blow shit up.
Plus, most stealth games are actually incredibly tedious puzzle games. “But you can approach the guards in any order!” you cry. Well, kinda. You can have your take of one of two approaches, through this corridor or that tunnel, maybe branching to three if you throw a brick to distract them. In actuality, what you have is an incredibly constricted experience, where there are basically a handful of strategies that work and infinite strategies that won’t.
Plus, I never feel like the guards are humans, because they’re incredibly fucking stupid – oh, hey, I’ll just walk in the same circles all the time, what’s that, I guess everything’s normal, UURRK MY THROAT.
I don’t feel like I’m outwitting a bunch of clever opponents. I am patently fighting a modified computer AI, where if I step one foot here then I am VISIBLE and all the guards will converge on me at once, and if I am here then I am the THIEF OF THE NIGHT.
So when I do win, I get little sense of triumph. I don’t feel like I’m Batman – I feel like Ferrett, sitting on a couch, having vanquished a bunch of arbitrary and maddening rules to achieve a marginal result.
That is my day job.
I hate being weak enough that any time I annoy two guards, I’m all but dead. I hate having to manage ammunition. I hate having to crouch everywhere when what I want to do is LEEEEROY JENKINS my way to success. There’s nothing wrong with stealth in general, but my preferred game mode is charging in with some limited strategy, maybe a minute’s worth of scouting the field before going, “Okay, reflexes, you can take it from here.”
I almost returned The Last Of Us to GameStop, even though I was really enjoying the story, because the bullshit one-hit-kill Clickers were really pissing me off. Then Gini said, “You paid for it, you should enjoy it,” and after wrestling me to the ground in a no-holds-barred match, ultimately convinced me to –
– and I am loath to admit this before a group of gamers –
– lower the difficulty.
I had never lowered the difficulty this early in a game before. (I did once before, on Dragon Age, on the final level, just because yes I could win the final battle against the fire-resistant dragon with my fireball-slinging mage, but it was taking forever and I was getting very very bored.) But I did with The Last of Us because I really did like the story, and so I basically treated The Last Of Us like a very slow and clumsy movie, where I ran past a lot of zombies (who, on the lowest difficulty level, were no challenge at all) to be treated to snippets of cinema.
It was good cinema. But the gameplay was highly unsatisfying. Now we had something where stealth was clearly the way you were supposed to go, but if you want to screw up then fine, kill seven soldiers with a brick while standing in the middle of a field, whatever, do what you like. It felt, honestly, pretty condescending as a gameplay experience.
And I realized that part of the reason games work is that you do feel the tension along with the characters. When it was hard slipping past the fucking clickers, I felt a horrible fear for everyone involved in the game, and when I got to the next segment of the story I felt both triumph at having propelled myself to the next objective, and fear because I knew just how hard it was for them. For the first time, I understood Roger Ebert’s criticism that videogames were just bad movies, because once I actively disdained the gameplay, well, The Last of Us was about as good as it gets in a videogame storywise, and the fairly lengthy cut-scenes were padded by these even longer annoying segments of what I can only describe as violent paperwork.
And I realized: I need to go out there and get back into a style of videogame that rewards what I like to do. That is not a stealth game. A stealth game is just a continuation of the most frustrating things in my life, and so this weekend I’ll probably seek out Infamous: Second Son or play the new Civilization (which punishes imperfect strategy, but one can play quite profitably against computer AI up to Prince level without thinking too hard) or anything that involves blatant power plays and not sneaking.
I do not like to sneak. Plotting and planning is my life, and I wish to escape my life.
Hand me the gun. Leave that barrier behind. I’ma charge into battle, because today I want to be a superhero.
Is It Any Wonder I Fell In Love With The Flash So Quickly?
I hadn’t been planning on watching The Flash, because, well, I’m a little tired of superhero TV shows. Agents of SHIELD just hasn’t floated my boat this season, and Gotham has been getting such mixed reviews we haven’t even started it, so even though The Flash is one of my great childhood heroes, I didn’t start it.
No. That’s wrong.
Because The Flash is one of my great childhood heroes, I didn’t start it. I’m attached to The Flash. If they got him wrong, it’d just make me sad that this grim-and-gritty misfire was the face of one of my favorite superheroes. So I tuned out.
Until my friend Guthrie emailed me to say, “Please tell me you’re enjoying The Flash as much as I am.” I trust Guthrie. He’s a Green Lantern guy, I’m a Flash fan, so we obviously have our differences, but the Flash and Green Lantern can still team up to be buddies.
And I was all like, Well, if Guthrie loves it, I’ll give it a shot.
So we sat down last night and I fell in love.
It’s rare that any show nails what I consider to be the heart of a comic book character, because any long-running comic book character has many hearts. Like when I saw The Dark Knight with my friend Dana. I thought it was a brilliant interpretation, but Dana’s Batman-heart was “The World’s Greatest Detective,” a dude who relied more on intellect than raw might, and yeah, that Batman wasn’t there. Likewise, for many Batman is an avenging devil, as portrayed by Frank Miller, this gritty guy who’s just a hair better than his enemies – a valid interpretation, but not how I view it. Or Batman’s the goofy 1960s Adam West version, all clean-cut and surrounded by art deco.
They’re all valid. Some interpretations are more popular than others, but each of those Batmen are a Batman that someone grew up and idolized.
There’s no right and wrong here, but there is disappointment if someone emphasizes the wrong character traits.
But no! This Flash is heroic. He is a literal do-gooder – a little naive, but who would risk his life for others like this if he weren’t? He is incredibly smart, but he needs his friends in a way that other superheroes don’t. He is likeable, wisecracking, the kind of superhero you’d want to have a beer with.
My favorite scene in the entire DCU hands-down is where Wally West has the opportunity to beat up a supervillain at the bar, and instead he quietly asks if that villain has been taking his medications, and the villain admits shamefully that he hasn’t, and Wally gets him into treatment. That’s this Flash. He cares. He fights because there aren’t better options, but he’ll cheerfully try to talk if he can.
Now, this Flash is a little heavy on Daddy issues, but I suppose they gotta give him something to work past. We’re only three episodes in. I’ll live with that.
But the action sequences are spiffy and the dialogue is relatively good and I love the simple, bold way they humanize people. There’s not a lot of subtlety in this, but I don’t want deep characterization in my Flash media. I want big damn heroes, and I am hooked.
Maybe Guys Are The More Emotional Sex.
So if you’ve been paying attention to Gamergate, it’s been death threats a-plenty for the women in the gaming industry. But don’t worry, women! Men are getting death threats, too!
Yesterday, the developer of a game death-threatened Gabe Newell, the founder of the Steam game delivery platform, after the game was released marked as “Early Access” instead as a finalized game. Steam found out about the Tweets, terminated his account, and the game he’s worked on for a year has currently sold only 12 copies.
And I think this is an example of Guy Culture at work. Where when a guy gets mad, it’s seen very much as “boys will be boys” and he can scream at whoever he wants because heck, we all know he doesn’t mean it. You see that kind of repellent work in Scorcese movies – the guy-heaviest of guy films – where men routinely humiliate other men. (I’m thinking in particular of The Wolf of Wall Street, wherein the salesmen were routinely abused by the charming and competent leads, and the salesmen loved it because these men were rich and smart and hey, you just expect a little creative abuse, amiright?)
So you have these hothouse cultures where competency matters for everything, and tact matters for nothing – well, actually a lack of tact is frequently seen as proof of competency, because who could possibly dress down someone that harshly unless they were really certain? So you wind up with an atmosphere where intellectual issues are hashed out in screaming matches, and incompetency is met with streams of over-the-top swearing.
What we’re starting to see is that clash of cultures – where programmer dudebros, conditioned by years of condoned hothouse-flower environments where losing your shit is just Part Of The Process, are running into other cultures where threatening to cut someone’s balls off is seen as the cheap intimidation tactic it is.
And what you’ve got is this weird mess. Because afterwards, you’re going to get some weird mix of “Okay, I probably shouldn’t have done that” followed by “But he should know I wasn’t really going to kill him!” Yet what you never get to is the truth of “I wasn’t actually going to kill him, but I just wanted to express all my murderous rage without any filters, because a lot of the time threatening people actually works for me.”
We have this idea that women are the crazy emotional ones in this society, led around by their soft estrogen-producing wombs, just crying at the drop of a hat. And frankly, I’d prefer we didn’t stereotype any gender with the label of “They’re the ones who can’t control themselves,” because frankly I think any sort of lack of control comes down to culture and mental health, not gender.
But what we’ve seen lately are a lot of men who are used to getting their way, and they lose their shit if anything goes wrong. That’s a culture that’s trained them to be that way. And so you have a bunch of very machismo men who have translated their bad-boy private outbursts into embarrassing online outbursts, and it does not go over nearly as well online.
They will see this as proof that Men Can’t Be Men! Whereas I – a man – see that as proof that Some Men Can’t Be Men. They can only be modified toddlers, screaming the worst things they can think of whenever they don’t get their way. Worse, there’s whole cultures where that behavior is rewarded, and encouraged, and respected – and seen, internally, as the only real place where smart men can thrive, these constant Darwinistic showdowns where tearing each other apart is the only true way to find optimal solutions.
Nah. There are other ways of doing things that get you results just as good. But you don’t get the catharsis of yelling at people.
Maybe it’s time you admitted you value the catharsis over actual results.
My Mixed Feelings On Doxxing
I had an essay geared up in my head for tomorrow’s posting on doxxing, and why I have weirdly mixed feelings about revealing someone’s name (not their address or other identifying details) because while in theory, anonymity is used to shield the weak from the predations of the strong, in practice anonymity too often allows people to exist as harmful assholes without any drawbacks.
Then Robert J. Bennett went and wrote everything I was going to say, except, like a thousand times better.
So read what he had to say. He’s a smart dude.