Pretender No More: E3 2014

Although I'd felt brief impressions of being a pretender – someone that did not belong, someone that shouldn't be there but had somehow gotten away with a giant con – prior to attending my first production meeting, it wasn't until the introductions and initial briefing were underway that the word "fraud" fully formed in my mind.

Maybe the best way I can describe it...

It could be like the feeling you might have if every day you wished you could visit Paris. Years go by and you think the dream of getting to Paris will never be realized. Then one morning you groggily shake off the remnants of last night's Indian food and lager and realize you're standing on the inexplicably-named Avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt outside Palais de la Decouverte, a stone's throw from La Seine and the Eiffel Tower. To be fair, it would be a hell of a throw to hit the Eiffel Tower from Palais de La Decouverte but that's really beside the point: You're suddenly in Paris!

Did you earn that trip? Deserve it? Did you pay your dues? Work all those extras at a job that pays just enough so you could sock away a few dollars from every pay stub to make your dream a reality? Did you hunt for the best deals on a flight? Figure out where to stay so you could stretch each dollar (or franc or Euro or whatever) to it's fullest?

In my brain, all that preparation stuff – those extra hours, that extra work, all that writing over the course of 15 years with The Armchair Empire – zipped out of my head and I was left with the feeling I imagine most murders feel at some point when they're in large crowds. Someone out there, someone close to you, is about to stand up and, with a Phoenix Wright flourish, call attention to the fact that you are, in fact, a killer.

So, what was this production meeting I'd conned myself into? Where had I arrived that I felt like I didn't deserve to be there?

"Listicle"

It's amazing to me that until recently I had never heard the word "listicle." Out of context, it could describe either a popsicle gone wrong or the way a man walks after having a testicle removed (i.e. listing to the side, like a boat taking on water). For the uniformed (and a reminder to myself), a "listicle" is an article on the Internet which is a list. (They used to call "Top 10's" but for some reason that fell out of favour -- and besides coming up with 10 of anything is hard. The 5-8 range is much easier to hit.)

Topics of these lists oscillate between dumb to incredibly stupid. You've seen them before and you probably haven't seen the last of them.

One that caught my eye recently was posted on Inc.com, "8 Things You Should Never Do in a Job Interview." The list included such common sense items as don't eat during the interview, don't slouch, and don't answer any calls or texts during the meeting but in practicality there's no end to a list like this one, so I present to you "8 Other Things You Should Never Do in a Job Interview."

Don't Shit Your Pants

Take care of any bowel movements prior to the interview. Nothing sinks your chances of a getting a job faster than filling your pants as you say, "It's nice to meet you, too, Gerry."

Additionally, try to empty your bowels at home because you don't want to be known as that would-be employee who fogged the bathroom with an unspeakable and nose-exploding odour. And if you landed the job... It's the kind of thing a person has a hard time living down.

A Metaphor for Maple Syrup

These days I'd like nothing more than to be able to write an epic novel that confounds critics and is generally inscrutable to the general public. After years of public speaking tours and millions of copies sold, most of them to unsuspecting university students since the novel is part of the curriculum, I would be standing at a podium addressing a gaggle of elite academics. I imagine most of them would be either stroking beards or leaning forward on a balled up fist, listening intently.

I would be introduced.

I would approach the podium and offer a brief reading.

Some earnest doctorate student would stand up to ask a question.

"But what does it all mean?"

And I would say, "It's a metaphor for maple syrup."

At which point I would kick the podium over and disappear. Stage right.

From Chapter 1: Some Years Earlier

With all the sensibility borne of a alcohol and a short temper, Roy slammed his forehead with a great crunching sound against the mound of muscle.

And it was right at that moment when time stopped for Aloysious. He glanced around the room. The ceiling fans were stopped. Gina hung motionless above a bank of manufactured cloud that didn’t stir. The mound of muscle was frozen in a grimace of pain, his body in the midst of falling down; the phalanx of equally muscled friends with looks of shock and anger stretched on their faces. Aloysious stood up. Everything remained still then a heartbeat later the world started to vibrate and he exploded in a cacophonous wave that suddenly thawed the motion in the room.

It was a violent thaw -- people knocked against each other, every bottle of booze at the bar shattered, and the closest people, mainly the wall of flesh and his friends, had their clothes shredded.

Gina seemed to be the only one unaffected. Hands on her hips, she actually appeared annoyed that someone had exploded at what was to be the climax of her routine.

Aloysious snapped back into existence. Roy didn’t even have to shout a drunken question at Aloysious before they started stumbling toward the exit.

Aloysious didn’t know what it was, but he knew he had to get the hell outside, to the relative safety of the Murder Capital of the World.

“Hey, boy,” Roy rasped. “What’s happening to your skin?”

Wax On! Wax Off! WAX WAX!

I really did think I would be blogging up a storm about games lately, especially with E3 in the rear-view mirror and the very recent flip-flop from Microsoft regarding their DRM/always on plan and the battle against used game sales, but I'm struggling with actually caring very much about games at the moment.

I'm not sure I want to turn this into a "Dear Diary..." exposition of my personal life but I feel comfortable enough to say that there are a lot of changes happening in my life and a particularly big change in a few weeks: moving.

I'll be honest, I hate moving.

It has a lot to do with the last time we packed up the house and moved everything.

We'd just returned from three weeks away in Florida and after a long drive back home from Seattle -- riding the bleeding edge of a snow/ice storm that turned the highways into bobsled runs -- and thought we were relatively prepared to move prior to leaving on vacation. How wrong we were! During the night, while we tried to shake jet lag, it snowed. Not a ton, but just enough to make manoeuvring a large moving truck extremely tricky. And, well, the list of things that went wrong extended from there -- more snow, taking way too long to pack our truck, etc. -- and at 1:00AM I was single-handedly trying to extricate the moving truck from the alley behind our new home with a shovel, handfuls of salt, and tubs of hot water. It was nasty! That was the first time I've ever been able to honestly say I was "bone tired" because I was barely functioning at the end of it and every step felt like an effort.

Take It to the Grave

One thing about this blog that I constantly struggle with is how much of myself I should reveal, especially because there’s some anxiety – fear? – that my kids or parents will find the blog and suddenly know things they shouldn't. (And just typing that sentence might be enough to get both groups to wondering.)

I’ve always viewed personal blogs as online diaries. But I think a lot of people don’t know how the Internet works.

People pour out their souls and innermost thoughts with little thought on how it might impact their job prospects, dating chances, and so on. Do you really want a potential employer or that cutie responding to your OKCupid profile to have the option of running your name through Google and finding that blog post you wrote about how you like to lick parrots? Or that travelogue of semi-legal houses of prostitution in Nevada? That half-remembered trip to Amsterdam? What about that post where you described in vivid detail the horrible rash developing on your inner thigh? Your marital problems? Your confessional post where you list all the people you ever stole money from?

The Waffle/Spaghetti Divide

Too often I let me brain dip into quasi-philosophy where it has no business dipping. No reason other than the fact I'm so easily sidetracked by other things. Or I start meandering down some critical pathway only to get confused about where I was actually going with my Point.

In trying to order my thoughts and figure out what I actually, you know, think about things it often feels I'm swimming upriver, fighting a current or smacking up against a dam.

Some kind of wall.

 

I chalk it up to the Waffle/Spaghetti Divide. While I'm not one to hold up stereotypes, I will right here.

Think of a man’s mind like a waffle. Neat compartments. Now imagine each of those compartments to contain some problem or issue or thought or syrup. Man comes to a problem in one of those neat pockets, fixes it or addresses it somehow, then moves on. Here’s a problem; come up with a solution.

Think of a woman’s mind like a plate of spaghetti. A woman comes upon a problem – a spaghetti strand – and starts to address it only to find that the strand touches just about everything on the plate. You can’t start solving the first problem without solving or mentioning every other question, issue, or problem that original spaghetti strand touches.

Conflict is the follow-up to this horrible waffle/spaghetti meal.

While a man can pronounce an issue dealt with (therefore, forgotten almost immediately), a woman needs to swiggle all over the place touching on everything from the numbers of pets she had as child, the background of a woman she met last week, and how much she paid for a knickknack two years ago as she discusses with the man why she thinks so-and-so political party will be getting her vote during the upcoming election. But she can get to the point, no matter how circuitous. (Even if the principle thought banging around in the guy's head is, "When is she going to get to the point?")

I think these struggles with quasi-philosophy and trying to run down a point is just a little too close to spaghetti. My brain’s not used to working like that and when I try it not only frustrates me, it frustrates and erodes the patience of the person I'm speaking with.

There is some co-existence required of Waffles/Spaghetti Divide – having a demilitarized zone between each doesn't help anyone – so the next time your significant other tries to sum things up in a single sentence or rambles for 15 minutes before reaching a conclusion, just remember that your problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Love your waffles, love your spaghetti.

A Working E3

The gamer part of my brain truly loves E3.

There’s spectacle, controversy, games, and free food and booze. The order doesn’t really matter, but that’s what my gamer brain starts thinking about when it comes to E3. I conveniently forget about dehydration – my worst headaches are found at E3 – tired feet and almost bitter Los Angeles water. And besides that year in Santa Monica and the year after that at the Los Angeles Convention Centre, my ability to hear things properly quickly degrades.

"Last year my brother was skewered by a moose."

I've started posting items on a more regular basis to the Gaming Enthusiast Press Awards blog and as result I find myself constantly flipping back through the metaphoric pages in my brain looking for "pinnacles" of good writing.

I've already added a post to Old Man Murray's classic feature "Crate Review System" which actually provided quite a bit of mirth back in 2000. Oddly enough, the Crate Review System is still valid twelve years later, possibly more so. But there are other "classics" that stand out over the last decade and one of those is a (fake) Cudgel of Xanthor game preview, penned by Jeff Green back in 2007 (in Computer Gaming World), which I've included below.

The piece does an effective job of completely skewering games writing and lampooning the extremely low bar that many of the enthusiast press aspire to. The article also manages to include just about every cliché about games writing one can find, all the while not saying anything substantive about the game even though the writer was "literally foaming at the mouth" after playing the game.

I present to you the piece in its entirety:

Some Recent Writing

I signed myself up for the annual NaNoWriMo novel writing contest/project for November, so I expect that all available words in my head will be used up for that cause. I'm planning to write a full-length story about Aloysius and Mitchell. I've done some thinking about these characters and I think something longer might actually work, rather than one-off blog posts. ("3rd One Down" and "Aloysius Recounts" if you're interested.)

So, I've been trying to keep my plate clear or at least manageable so I don't get too far behind in terms of game reviews and other articles for November. Here's a few of the more recent articles that have gone up on ae-infinite.com:

• Mass Effect 3 DLC - Leviathan (360)
• The Walking Dead Episode 4: Around Every Corner (PC)
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Origins (360)
• Dishonored (360)

There will no doubt be a bit of a lull on this blog. Like I said, all my words will go toward my novel.

Aloysius Recounts

"When I finally come out of it," Aloysius suddenly stops talking. He swirls the water in his glass then gulps it down. "When I finally come out of it, I have no damn recollection of what happened. Just the last of that third can of Red then I'm stumbling around in an alley somewhere or face down in the middle of a landing strip. Came to in an alley in Hong Kong once, not a shred of information as to how and why."

"Not even a hazy recollection of anything?" Mitchell asked.

"Not ever! No, not a shred!" Aloysius answered. He banged his glass on the table top but the noise was muted against the rolling sand dunes on all sides. "Well, once."

Some Recent Reviews

I know I don't do enough advertising when it comes to my writing, so this post is a bit of a catch-up for Reviews for New Super Mario Bros. 2 (3DS), Ghost Recon: Future Solider (PC), and The Walking Dead: Long Road Ahead (PC).

New Super Mario Bros. 2 (3DS)
I think it speaks volumes that I'm still fooling around with this during my commute. Coin Rush is revisited at least once a day to "challenge" StreetPass records of random strangers, but there's still one "World" I have yet to open and it's bugging the hell out of me. I know there's a way there -- otherwise why would it be included on the map? -- but I'm trying to stay off Gamefaqs. I'd like to find the secret and I'll bet it's a path so obvious that I'm missing it because it's in plain sight. Also: The game is a re-telling of the film Scarface.

12 Years

Celebrating 12 Years!

The date came and went without even a ripple. In fact, it didn't dawn on me until about a week later that The Armchair Empire has been in existence for 12 years.

The official date of registration of the URL -- www.armchairempire.com -- was August 5, 2000, two days before my first son's first birthday and on the same day Alec Guinness died.

That was when all the trouble started.

Reviewing: They Need to Watch

I'm 8 hours deep, but that wasn't nearly enough time to spend with a game that boasted "hundreds!" of hours of content. There's a drone sharing the room with me. The publisher's nameless eyes on the ground -- Darkfriend, some in the office derided -- to ensure I didn't upload the source code to the Internet or pass the disc to a conspirator to copy en masse to sell on street corners.

Occasionally he would shift in his seat, adjust his tie. Maybe take a sip of water. Though I'd never seen the full contractual details, I was pretty sure that as long as I kept playing, he had to stand guard. Watching me. Waiting until the credits rolled.

Hour 9 is when I stand up, sigh, and take off my pants. I kick them into the corner of the room.

Not Quite a Short Story: Free Fall

I wrote this almost two years ago and it was kind of inspired by a level in the game "Wet" and a particular scene from the Bond flick "The Spy Who Loved Me." It was cool to play another scenario like the one below in the opening minutes of "Saints Row: The Third."

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I can hear wind. It's whistling and it feels like I'm falling. I open my eyes in a squint.

I am falling and I grab my chest, clawing at a rip chord that isn't there. It's then that I notice debris falling with me. A fuselage of some kind of plane matches my speed. I point myself toward it. I inch closer to it on the wind and in the dim moonlight the interior becomes visible.

I reach the jagged edge of the fuselage and hold on to it, using what little leverage I have to haul myself in. It's dark so I fumble the walls, floor and ceiling or some order of the three. My fingers touch something familiar.

I strap the parachute to my back and kick off one of the seats to get myself clear of the debris. The ground is so close, I can easily make out features of the city below framed in the glow of streetlights and vehicle traffic. I pull the chord and there's a dull flapping sound and the world jerks up with a punch. My broken ribs scream and my breathing struggles in ragged chunks.

The debris begins to the hit earth.

So very close to the ground, searchlights suddenly hold me. It's quickly followed by a sputtering of gun fire. A massive explosion rocks the area above me, another one a hundred feet to my right.

I steer myself toward a black area and hope for the best. At the rate I'm falling, I should be able to make it, unless the fireworks from the ground manage to punch a hole in my salvation.

3rd One Down

"I've been meaning to ask," Mitchell started, "what's with the beer can utility belt? I've known you for years and you always have three cans of Red's Brew attached to you but I've never seen you actually drink beer. Ever."

Aloysius Gunn scratched the back of his neck, pausing, thinking about the best way to explain the beer. Somewhere from the south a train sounded at a crossing.

"You know how Popeye eats all that spinach and gives him super powers?" Aloysius said. "It's like that. Only with beer. And my powers are unpredictable. And I don't remember what happens after I drink the third one. But it's usually an appropriate response of some kind."

Mitchell raised an eyebrow. "How strong is that beer?"

"Oh, it's not what you think." Aloysius stood up. "When I turned 19, I hit the bar with a few friends. What a night! At least the part I remember... until my third can of Red. That's when I blacked out. It's not strong beer, at all, but it did something to me. Friends took video and pictures of me doing... things. Unexplainable things. Things I don't remember at all, no inkling. Dancing on the ceiling, juggling an entire rack of pool balls while spinning cues with my feet while my entire skeleton glowed through my skin..."

"That's, uh," Mitchell struggled to find the right word. This somehow deserved comment.

"People loved it, thought it was some kind of marketing gimmick or something, even when the videos were uploaded to YouTube, whatnot, no one believed it. Even when I moved outside and started bouncing off buildings like a rubber ball and dancing on a succession of moving cars and trucks while the theme from that old Mission: Impossible show played out of every manhole and window within three blocks... It was weird seeing it after the fact. But still, people chalked up the story to a buncha drunk college kids playing a prank."

"So, uh," Mitchell was still struggling. "Why the three cans?"

"Just in case something happens."

Mitchell waited a beat to see if Aloysius would keep talking. Something sounded ominous, especially when Aloysius squinted and stared into the middle distance like he was doing at that moment.

The real answer came when the new barn the pair had been painting unexpectedly exploded in a shrapnel cloud of splinters.

"Something like this," Aloysius said, the first can of Red already on its way to his mouth. "Better get on the hell out of here, Mitchell. I'll take care of this."

Mitchell turned and ran. Not so much on Aloysius' advice but on the reason for the barn explosion. A huge scaly worm-like beast with tentacles and mandibles, and rows and rows of eyes had shattered the barn. And it looked like it might be gearing up to unleash fire or possibly radiation from its gargantuan maw. Mitchell ran across the yard, turned sharply at the combine and headed down the driveway to the main road.

Aloysius finished the third beer and blacked out.

The ground rolled and sent Mitchell staggering to his knees. He looked back to see a giant figure, covered in slate armour pounding the nightmare into the ground. The giant clamped its impossibly huge hands around the worm and there was a flash and shockwave that sent Mitchell rolling into the drainage ditch.

Then there was silence for a full minute before Mitchell clawed his way up the embankment. A dark cloud of smoke was being carried by the wind and what was left of the yard was covered in gore and viscera but there was no sign of the worm or the giant or Aloysius.

Mitchell walked at a steady pace back to the yard. The combine was ruined, the farm house covered in ooze on the west side, and everything else... well, it was a scene of destruction. Mitchell's mind wandered to his insurance policy.

Aloysius' smoking body was at the bottom of the crater but he was still breathing, coughing out the words again and again, "3rd one down, 3rd one down."

That Part with the Homage to Adventure Games

Writer's Note: While it requires some editing -- I pass from present to past tense seemingly at random -- the bones of this vignette align in my own brain. This acts as a continuance of sorts of my blog post "Hitting the Mat."
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I hear waves.

No explosions, bullets, or foreign voices reach me. The pressure is off my leg and I feel warm. I move my arms and open my good eye.

I'm lying on warm sand.

I struggle to my back and prop myself on my elbows. In front of me, waves roll into the beach but 20 meters beyond the waves an opaque whiteness like a wall or some kind of fog blocks further view. To my right and left the white sand beach extends another 20 meters or so and seemingly blocked by the same fog. I rub my eye. The recent explosions and shockwaves may have done more damage than I realize.

I look again with a fresh eye, trying to blink my way passed the wall of fog.

Directly behind me are three palm trees. Nestled amoung them is a large wooden packing crate with the lid not quite nailed on. Beyond those objects, more fog.

I blink some more then gather myself.  I stumble for a step, but I managed to get my body to the crate and palm trees.

There are two dozen bottles of water, sunscreen, wool emergency blanket, a first aid kit, a bag of netting that turned out to be a hammock, a couple dozen k-rations, and three formal suits.

I stripped down and salved my wounds with ointment, wrapping gauze and bandages where I was bleeding or oozing most. I dry swallowed two pain pills. My stiff fingers worked enough to stretch the hammock between a couple of the trees. The effort exhausted my already spent carcass so with the small amount I had left I eased myself into the sling.

For the next two weeks, I healed under a never-changing sky and perfect weather. I drank most of a bottle of water a day, and what appetite I had was met with stale k-rations. The pain in my side receded to a dull ache and most of the rest of me felt much better in my little beach bubble. But I was restless.

Dam's a'Burstin'

The other day I wrote about being completely blocked up when it came to finishing my feature on Radical Entertainment's 20th anniversary -- I've posted Part I! Read it! -- but on Sunday night, the damn burst.

As fast as I could type, the words poured onto the page, I cut and pasted quotes from the interviews I conducted, and screenshots and pictures materialized -- and it all stitched together. To be sure, there's still some fine tuning involved but it doesn't feel like I should tear the articles apart and start again, which is what I was encountering previously.

Even the capstone -- my little post script where "I" appears -- tumbled off my fingers.

Were the words there all along and they just needed time to percolate in my brain long enough to form into something coherent? Something good? Like sausages? The component parts don't always make sense but grind it all together and fry it with some onions... that's makes for good eating. Or reading, in this case.

That's my hope at least.

I mean, I like reading it. Onions or not.

Against the Clock

For the last couple of months I've been focusing a great deal of my attention on writing a feature on Radical Entertainment's 20 year history. Everything was coming together, despite the lack of any involvement whatsoever of co-founders Ian Wilkinson and Rory Armes, and I felt really good about the whole thing. But something has lodged a Godzilla-sized block in my writing brain.

I've gutted and re-written the feature a few times now but that hasn't deterred me from continuing -- writing through it, sifting the interviews, sorting the facts, etc.

But this is writer's block on a scale that I've only encountered one other time. I was 14 and desperately scrabbling for a satisfying ending to a short story that jumped around like a flea on meth. No matter how many plot lines I ran down, it never came together the way I wanted it to. There was always something that could have, should have, been better. Which is kind of what I think is happening to me right now. I'm not sure if it will ever be good enough.

I imposed a deadline of early March to get the feature posted. And it's early March now and the feature still doesn't seem presentable.

Maybe part of my problem is that a certain level of panic has set in -- and that's a very bad thing. Writing under pressure is one thing, writing in panic is another. I can handle the pressure aspect but the panic... it's a killer.

Even with all that sitting in the back of my head, I'm inexplicably optimistic that it will all come together! It's an emotional roller coaster! You can bet that when I'm "finished" I'll be doing cartwheels. And maybe I'll have just the slightest taste of bile in the back my mouth.

The Curse of HTML (and Other Things)

I've spent a number of hours now -- countless hours because I failed to keep track of them -- slowing wading through the multiple thousands of articles and features posted on The Armchair Empire to change four (4) lines of code on each page. I'm told this is somehow necessary and actually vital to security as it prevents some kind of PHP exploit that is bad. For some reason.

I can't pretend to know 90% of what I should probably know about running a website. More accurately 90% of what I should know about coding for the web. I'm comfortable enough with my basic understanding of how the code part works -- those reams of nonsensical <,> and /'s that seem to control everything behind what a person actually sees -- but beyond a few steps in I'm like the guy that brought a burrito to a knife fight. I'm licked and I know it. I'd love to learn! Finding/making the time for that is pretty damn hard to do.

Vitus is the one with the killer moustache and cape.

I took a course a couple years ago to give me a better grip on things but I think it just made me frustrated that it was going to take me so long to get where I think I should be. And I have these ideas of what changes I want to make to the site overall, but actually implementing them is something entirely different. If I had a job that taught these kinds of lessons while, you know, doing work I wouldn't have a hard time with it. It's the chance to be creative that has been missing from all my day jobs. I've "settled" for things, which seems to be encasing my creative juices in some kind of force field, if that makes any sense. There's this constant feeling that there's something inside me that wants to punch itself out of the top of my head, grab my ears, and steer me toward something I really want to do... something that I should be doing.

I actually felt like that little thing, I'll call him Vitus, was in control a few years ago. Vitus had smacked through my cranium and had me by the ears. And, man, was is exhilarating. There was this cacophonous peak when the world turned into rainbows and my smiling face actually began to cramp up. That was three years ago. And the same thing has not happened since. There have been a few times where I could feel some knocking from inside my skull, but that's not the same. I want Vitus to come out everyday. I want to work in an environment that seeks creativity, no, demands it everyday. A place that feeds and nurtures creativity. Everywhere I turn I'd be challenged with some obstacle that could be overcome by a deft line of dialogue and a three panel sketch of a cyborg smashing a glass-faced alien right in the head! That's what I crave!

I'd still expect to work hard, but I'd be having fun.

There's something so soul-sucking when one of my kids asks, "How was work?" And I have to think hard about what I even did at work, let alone come up with an opinion of what went on, and I sigh in one breath, "Work was work." And after a 12-hour day you'd think I'd have something more exciting to say. Or anything to say.

That's sad and pathetic on a few different levels. And though I feel a slow climb upward, most days I feel like I'm standing still, getting older, while all those opportunities that could have been mine, should have been mine, have sidestepped me altogether and continued on to bump into someone else. I want to tackle the next opportunity to the ground and beat it within an inch of it life.

I'll admit that there's a bit of "oh, woe is me!" going on, but I also have to honest and say it's a pretty small part of it. That will simply get in the way of being focused on what I actually want to do.

I can't give up. My creative drive is too strong. To give up now would be like killing Vitus.

No more cape, no more moustache. That would be sad beyond words.