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“My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know this, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking.”
– Elizabeth, Volume II Chapter I

I have been digging into Jane Austen’s big book lately, and it feels good to be reading something so unabashedly English again, both in terms of complex language and plot. The English is beautiful, of course, though it takes some practice to be able to read this dense style efficiently. The ideas being expressed aren’t so different from our own, though the infrastructure of meaning, the words and flowing sentences, are more ornate and complicated. An acceptance that words are going to be used in ways that are slightly different than our own usage is a must. Daring explorers are rewarded with a trove, a bounty, of lovely interesting phrases.

“ready acquiescence”

“these sort of inconstancies are very frequent.”

“thwarted”

The unique way that Austen folds sarcasm and cutting evaluations of character into intricate, vocabulary-dense sentences is surely part of why she is such a famous and beloved writer. But sometimes the bullshit is slashed right through, and we are shown gems like the quotation at the top of this post. There, Lizzy speaks directly to what everybody, reader included, had been thinking for the past hundred or so pages: Mr. Collins is a dipshit and an idiot. I laughed when I reached that sentence, because it is so different than the language we are accustomed to in the novel and because the feeling conveyed is not one minute out of date. We say the same things in the same way about people when comforting our friends today, except the words and phrasing is a little different.

Between these glimmers of light are long periods of visitation in which language must be employed like a dagger between a smile. If life was anything like the novels say, being of the higher class in old England sounds like a major chore. Neighbors and family could descend upon your household at any time, and polite custom was that you’d entertain them. From Defoe to Austen we find the living room to be a maze of endless small talk and gossip. Protagonists have to fake ill just to escape. The neighbors are trying to pry open your brain with blunt talk of the weather! I argued, once, that the English custom of visits acted as a kind of social prison, a living room panopticon. The constant surveillance from visiting neighbors ensures that perverse, criminal, or marginal behaviors are neatly suppressed. And in novels, the surveillance really does seem constant! Every other chapter of Pride and Prejudice takes place in a dining room or living room and seems to surround the visit of somebody or other.

It is refreshing when Elizabeth breaks free and let’s something real slip out. She is a wonderful protagonist precisely because she manages to break rules constantly. She’s like a bull in a language china shop. I am just making my way into the second volume of the book now, and I am unspoiled. I have no clue what will happen to the characters beyond a general sense that Darcy will turn out to be an okay guy in the end. I wonder, however, if the prospect of getting married will force Lizzy into conforming and putting aside her rebellious charm. That would be a tragic low point!

            Last month, Sam crossed a trickle of a stream in the woods and found himself in a place that he could only describe as another world. The colors seemed to stand out stronger there, and the light was so bright that it almost hurt to look beyond the shadows of the trees. He wanted to go back to this magical forest, his secret place, but instead he sat at his desk, chin on his hand, bored in school. The fifth grade had nothing to teach him. He already read books on his own, and he could multiply well enough to get by in math. Under his elbow sat his math textbook open to page 57. The class was somewhere on page 32, but, since Sam possessed an uncanny ability to focus on tasks, he went on ahead whenever he finished a set of problems. The class seemed to move in predictable circles. Whenever his teacher, Ms. Bucket, began to even hint at talking about something new or interesting, a troublemaker across the room would swear or shout and then Ms. Bucket would start shushing and disciplining and nothing would get done. Both Ms. Bucket and the students left that classroom every afternoon feeling exasperated and worn out, and neither learned much of anything.

Soon, Ms. Bucket would see that Sam had completed more than enough extra pages of worksheets for one afternoon and give him permission him to grab a laptop from the cart. This was Sam’s favorite part of every class because he was left mostly free to explore the internet as he pleased. He was supposed to use the laptop to log into IXL and complete even more math problems online, but he preferred to look stuff up in the search bar. He loved to look up cute pictures of baby animals, or pictures of games he wanted to play but couldn’t. Sometimes he looked up creepy things like organs or giant wasps or monsters and freaked himself out. He wished he could just stay home and play on the computer there rather than come all the way to school to do it.

Ms. Bucket did soon notice that Sam was bored, and she went up to his desk with an apologetic curve of her eyebrows and a smile. “Wow, you did all that?”

Sam looked at his hands and nodded. “Yes, it wasn’t very hard.”

“Awesome work as always, Sam. You can go grab a Chromebook.”

Sam did as he was asked, and soon he was surfing the web while the jeering class moved on around him. He thought that today he would do some research on his magical place in the woods, so looked up the word the keyword “forest.” He was met with a sprawling page of boxes, each containing a picture of a lush, green forest. Some of them were bright orange, images of the woods during Fall when the leaves change into beautiful warm colors and die off the branches. Some of the pictures were of jungles, the wet and misty rain forests. Only one picture reminded him of his magical forest. It showed a tree so bright that its cracked, brown bark looked orange, and massive dragon scales of bark flowed down the trunk of the tree like lava. Sam read the caption to himself:

“Redwood Forests of California.”

I discovered this unfinished opinion piece in my hard drive.

-BEGIN TRANSCRIPT-

It’s shiny, it’s smooth, it’s packed with expensive components, it’s competitively priced. It’s the Steam Deck.

There are a few reasons the Steam Deck has me going wild. First and foremost, Valve’s latest project speaks to me on an instinctual, almost primordial level. I am a Gameboy baby. Always have been. In fact, I grew from a Nintendo playing baby to a Nintendo playing adult, and these days I’ve spend more time looking at a Switch screen than I care to admit. I also really like computers in general. Spending time with them is cathartic. I like installing things and browsing internet forums and generally wasting time on a screen. The problem with Nintendo systems like the Gameboy and the Switch is that they don’t let you do very much with them besides play games. The Steam Deck promises to take the beautiful concept of a personal computer and merge it with a portable gaming console under one sexy plastic package.

Do you even know what I’m talking about? It occurs to me that unless you are already immersed in the computer gaming world, the Steam Deck might be niche knowledge. If you aren’t in the know, Valve, creator of the venerated gaming platform Steam, is creating its own portable gaming system. It’s basically a grey Nintendo Switch without detachable controllers. In turn, a Switch is a sort of really powerful Gameboy. A Gameboy was like a phone before there were phones, except that it can’t make calls or texts or access the internet. You used to look like a tool for carrying around a Gameboy, but look now—everybody is glued to their phone screens. I like to consider the Steam Deck the latest in a lineage of Gameboys stretching as far back as the history of electronic gaming itself. The Steam Deck is a very fat Gameboy.

Besides its drab color scheme and bulkier design, the Steam Deck performs a similar role to Nintendo’s product. The Switch was a major step forward in portable gaming because it could bring large 3D games like Zelda portable. Before, such titles were relegated to home consoles. The deck can play high quality games portably, and it can be docked and attached to a monitor or television to project its screen onto a larger display. For folks that mainly game in their homes with immobile Playstations or Wiis or PCs, this may not seem particularly interesting (although there ARE reasons stationary gamers might be interested in a Deck, to be discussed later). To longtime Gameboy babies, however, the Steam Deck represents the culmination of a decade spanning project to liberate quality gaming experiences from the confines of the home.

The history of mobile gaming is long and fractured. Before the iPhone made it cool to stare at a computer screen in public, there were Gameboys. I inherited the original Gameboy from my father and a Gameboy Color from somebody (maybe my brother), but I was too young to really use these things. They were arcane toys that beeped, and without backlit screens, actually seeing what was going on on screen was difficult. I remember there being a booklight adapter for them that could be clipped to the Gameboy to illuminate the screen in the dark. I didn’t really “get” the Gameboy until I got my first Gameboy SP sometime in the early 2000s. I had a Yoshi’s Island Cartridge with it, and while I wasn’t very good or successful with the games, I was in love. Super Mario World on the Gameboy was one of the first games I ever beat all by myself. When I finally realized you could escape your bedroom in Pokemon Ruby by setting the clock, the course of my childhood changed forever. Pokemon and Mario were my Gods. The Gameboy eventually became the DS which eventually became the Switch. PSPs, Ipod Touches, and phones also entered the mix.

The problem with mobile gaming for many years was that the quality of the experience was always a few steps behind that of the immobile console and computer games. For example, most of my favorite games on the Gameboy SP were ports of SNES games. While Gamecube players were experiencing beautiful 3D gameplay in Wind Waker and Sunshine, the Gameboy were largely stuck with games made a decade ago. If it wasn’t a ported platformer, Metroid, or Kirby, I was probably playing an RPG like Pokemon or Fire Emblem. While 2D platformers and turn based RPGs flourished on the Gameboy, it could not capture the kind of immersive 3D experiences that was being developed for the more expensive equipement. The DS opened with Super Mario 64 DS, a port of the genre defining 3D platforming masterpiece that was originally released a decade before. Even the 3DS, though it had some truly console quality experiences in the likes of Smash 4, was mostly a Pokemon/Fire Emblem machine. These Gameboy style games were fun and addictive, but you weren’t playing Dark Souls. As PC gaming and the indie revolution really took off in the 2010s, the DS line felt increasingly lackluster. It wasn’t until the release of the Switch in 2017 that modern gaming experiences could finally be had on a portable platform. Until then, mobile gaming was usually second rate.

I love the Switch, I really do. The thing is, I don’t use it for the Nintendo games anymore. At least, I’m not using the ones Nintendo wants me to use. Like the Gameboy that came before it, the Switch has an expansive library of ports. A slew of indie games previously only available on PC or console have never been better after finding a home on the Switch. You can also hack the Switch to emulate pretty much everything up to the N64 (and even PSP games to an imperfect extent). I particularly like having Dark Souls portable.

-END TRANSCRIPT-

It is a little scatterbrained. I was pretty hyped for Valve’s handheld.

The Steam Deck is actually in my hands now. In some ways, it makes me miss my old Gameboy SP. It is far too large for comfort (though resting it on my belly in bed takes much of the load off), and the battery life is awful. On the other hand, the Deck is providing me the greatest portable Minecraft experience I have ever seen. I can play Better Than Wolves in bed. That’s incredible.

I plan to write a real Steam Deck review sometime. It’s is a fantastic project littered with bugs and flaws. It is a project so fantastic that the flaws barely matter.

Happy Solstice! I love the long afternoons of June.

An animator that I subscribe to on YouTube, vewn, recently released a wonderful (and long!) new project called Catopolis. I recommend checking it out here. Watching this video brought down the rabbit hole and I stumbled across an older animation of hers that I happen to love:

FLOATLAND

The animation depicts a nostalgic scene: messy cozy carpeted bedroom, big CRT, and an even bigger game for the protagonist to get lost inside. The main character, lit by that warm static glow, smiles with glee as she builds up a digital garden, fights monsters, and flirts with the game’s charming romance avatar. The images are edenic, a gamer’s paradise. She seems to have endless free time to enjoy an open ended gaming experience, and there is seemingly nobody around to disturb it. The pure joy of the immersion eventually gives way to boredom, of course, and then a depression. She ignores texts from friends. The alcohol bottles and burnt cigarette butts begin to stand out a lot more. The loneliness is palpable here.

Despite the spiral into despondency, the video does not actually end on a sour note. It’s hopeful, actually. The protagonist eventually completes the game. She reaches level 99 in all of the game’s various activities and discovers “true love” with the romance guy. From there, the game ends, and the protagonist peels away from the screen, crawls across her room, and opens a window. Natural light and color return!

“You’ve reached your fullest potential here in Floatland. It’s time to say goodbye.”

Anyone that has played a game like this, be it World of Warcraft or Runescape or Minecraft or Sonic Adventure 2 Battle Chao Garden, might see the fantasy here. Open ended games don’t usually say goodbye. They are designed, in fact, to be lived in. Players can grind and build endlessly until the gameplay loops feel familiar. I find that the allusions to drug use in this animation are apt–nothing makes life in the virtual world more engaging than a drink or a smoke. Even when all the pleasure and surprise is utterly sucked dry, the habits can feel like a cage. The game isn’t going to give you a key anytime soon.

And that is why I love how this animation ends. After the climactic existential moment, there is a true release. Vewn doesn’t actually provide us any concrete escape. In fact, the protagonist doesn’t even smile as she looks beyond her window, but a weight is lifted nonetheless.

I have found that, as I get older, my hunger for stimulation has not abated, but compelling myself to discover new sources for that stimulation has gotten more difficult. It is easier to sit in my chair and stare at virtual worlds both new and well trodden than to get up and go outside. When I do finally get out there, however, I am reminded that the physical world, forests and fields and cities, are a thousand thousand times more complex and interesting than anything anybody has ever rendered in a game. A drink and a smoke make these places more interesting too, so best take that habit outside too if you really must.

The Lawn of Legend

There was a brief period of time when I was a kid, a few weeks at most, when the backyard did not get mowed. I don’t remember how old I was, but I do remember the glory of it. The grass rose up like a forest, boundless blue-green tufted by seedy, serrated sheaths. The unmowed grass grew timidly at first, but once it realized that no blades were coming to bother it, the lawn transformed itself into prairie fit to devour an eight-year-old. Compared to the fungal waste that our yard would come to resemble over the following decade, that period of uncut grass seemed like the very beginning of the world.

We would play Pokémon in that grass, my cousin and I hollering and rolling as we imagined all the different varieties that could inhabit our own personal corner of the wilderness. Meanwhile, real animal life seemed to pour forth from the dirt like the tenets of a plague. Stalks swayed and flicked as bony grasshoppers leapt and dove between laden seed pods. A rodent living underneath the shed grew bold enough to reclaim his proper title as “field mouse.” The wheat, sensing rightly that this unchecked period was as transitory as the moths, birthed an entire ecosystem in the span of a week.

I was generally terrified of insects and birds and anything that moved unseen and unpredictably, but I played in that grass every day. I rolled in it, crawled through it, and watched it. Officially speaking, we were forbidden from touching the backyard at all during this period. My mother screamed about ticks and other disease-carrying arthropods. My best friend’s mom had an even more aggressive response. Grass stains can kill, apparently.

The grass hurt my father the most. Each green needle stabbed at his pride and caused his skin, usually so rough and calloused, to bleed beads of shame. It seemed this riotous grass was the latest slight in an endless train of frustrations that stretched back to before I was born. He would sigh over and grass and yell at the grass. He would complain of unheard whispers from the neighborhood about how terrible our lawn looked, about property values and the steady decline of suburban integrity. The grass is destroying us! We are the neighborhood laughingstock!

I don’t remember exactly why the grass had been allowed to grow so tall in the first place. Maybe the ridable mower, that herbivorous shark of a machine with aerodynamic hull and one-thousand speeds, finally croaked. Maybe mom was in the hospital again. I really don’t remember, but the issue did clear up eventually. The giga-mower roared back to life one day and the tall grass was gone in an hour with nothing but a haze of pollen to indicate that anything strange and unearthly had ever been allowed to grow back there at all. I’m sure the ordeal killed my lungs, stuffed my nose, and forced my eyeballs shut for a week.

Many years later, the third-grade teacher that lived across the street got a divorce and moved away. In her place came an Indian family containing a mother, father, and a little son that liked to wander and gape at every corner of his new yard. Perhaps he had never had a yard before. This turn of events gave the rest of the neighborhood something new to chitter about. I began to notice little comments, a remark about catching a whiff of curry every time the neighbors opened their doors to step outside. Sometimes the father didn’t wave or smile eagerly enough when the Lexus SUVs drove by. An exotic new neighbor gives a once-new suburb excitement to feed upon for months.

Among all the little peeves was one crucial flaw—our new neighbors did not know how to take care of their lawn. As their stay grew longer, so did their grass, and before long the entire front lawn resembled the primordial grove of legend. The toddler was likewise entranced. The tiny blades that had once cushioned his feet now swallowed his head. His little head could be seen bobbing as he endlessly marched his matted stretch of wilderness like a conquistador. I’m sure the experience enriched that toddler’s life immensely, but the lawn was a bane to the neighborhood. Old griefs were born anew in my father, and he began to complain loudly about the embarrassment across the street. His imagination likely swam with nightmares of plummeting property values and changing times.

“Is the guy going to hire a crew?”

“Has he ever owned a lawn before?”

My father eventually settled on the theory that our neighbor was some big city tech-wizard that had come to colonize our slice of American suburbia. There are no lawns in the concrete jungle. Frustration turned to pity, and my dad took it upon himself to lay the green menace low. He rode his monster mower across the street and cleaned up the place in no time at all. The crickets and butterflies and mastodons returned to the earth just as quickly as they had emerged, and our neighbors learned soon after to keep it that way.

I don’t live there anymore, but I imagine the lawns are still as flat and brown as ever. An unpruned landscape is a very dangerous thing.

Replaying the original Pikmin game after Pikmin 3 reveals a forgotten truth about the game’s titular critters: Pikmin used to be really stupid. This fact becomes increasingly obvious as the game progresses and the areas become more complex. Leaving the landing site in the Forest Navel illustrates Pikmin stupidity very well. You have to carefully weave your Pikmin around a gauntlet of potential distractions just to get to the action. Blades of grass, tiny rocks, insect corpses, and budding plants all provide a convenient excuse for a portion of your Pikmin army to lose focus and disconnect. And when they aren’t being distracted, they trip, or fall under a ramp and trap themselves before being left behind. Forget about crossing bridges over water—if your army is sufficiently large, some Pikmin WILL fall off the side of the bridge and drown.

At first, I would stop the march after every little hiccup and wait for the stragglers to catch up. “No Pikmin left behind!” was the motto from my childhood, but it seems my old heart has hardened. I used to become so upset by Pikmin death that I would play extremely cautiously. The GameCube would not remain on long enough for all of the Pikmin to die in the event of a major workplace accident. Now, I find myself weighing the cost of indulging stupid mistakes:

“I’ll go back for those assholes later, I still have enough Pikmin to carry the treasure.”

When a lose a few Pikmin in a tough battle, my instinctual remorse is quickly replaced by a numbers game:

“Okay, I can replace those losses with the bug I just killed.”

Or, more callous still:

“I have a two hundred of these guys in storage, I’ll just restock on my next loop around.”

The random tripping and similar distraction mechanics creates interesting gameplay near day’s end when the desire to finish a task or escort treasure is pit against the paternal instinct to save a stranded Pikmin. Rescue missions are a huge part of the experience. Since there are not multiple captains at your disposal in Pikmin 1, sending Olimar across the map to save Pikmin is a real risk. Pikmin 3 gives you so much map control at once with three captains that the gameplay becomes less about managing risk and more about pushing your multitasking powers to the limit.

Unfortunately for my stupid Pikmin, I found myself caring less and less about saving them from themselves as the population at my disposal shot up. Stranded dots on the map were met with spite. In my mind, Pikmin that couldn’t keep up deserved to die. Stupid bastards. The characterization of the Pikmin as lazy, lovable idiots is pushed well in this game. Once while I was taking an army from basecamp toward a battle, a convoy of Pikmin carrying a corpse happened to cross my path and pass through my ranks. My soldiers jumped at the opportunity to dodge duty and a few yellow Pikmin grabbed hold of the corpse and headed home. I let the fools go. They lived to fight another day.

And days did come when I had to dig into my Pikmin reserves. Playing fast and loose lets you progress quickly, but some losses were severe. I lost an entire army of blue Pikmin to a pale wollywog in the Forest Navel, and this forced me to head to the impact site for a little R&R (Regrowth and Retribution). This vacation, however, caused the creatures in the Forest Navel to repopulate, which lost me a day at least. The final boss really tested my Pikmin reserves. He managed to stomp an entire army of 70+ Pikmin into oblivion with a single leap. If I did not exploit a soft reset, I would have ran out of yellow Pikmin entirely. In this case, the reset mechanic saved me time and angst at the cost of interesting gameplay that would have forced me to revisit old parts of the map in search of Pikmin building material.

Speaking of the final boss, I finally spoiled myself on how to beat him. Despite watching people beat the Emperor Bulblax in one cycle, I have never been able to kill him without multiple days of effort and an incredible loss of life. This is because I never realized that there is a special stun animation that you can force the bulblax into by having bomb rocks explode right when his tongue touches them. My approach has always been to have him eat the bomb rocks, but this only puts him out of commission for a few seconds. Since the bulblax has the power to instantly wipe out an army, killing him quickly is the best option. Despite my advanced gaming powers, the bulblax fight set me back three days. This put me at a day 19 launch, which feels unimpressive to me. That’s the beauty of Pikmin 1, though… the game is tight enough to play again and again.

My Pikmin 1 victory lap may have to wait a while. The next victim of my coronavirus game binge was Wind Waker, which I intend to write about next. For reasons that I will describe, Wind Waker, despite being the best of the old school 3D Zelda games, feels terribly dated. I might jump that ship for Pikmin 2. THEN, maybe Pikmin 1 will return. I do not think I will ever play Pikmin 3 again. That game feels hollow. When the Pikmin aren’t tripping over themselves and getting into trouble, the game becomes a pure RTS grind.

I love Pikmin. It’s still one of the greats!

Will Kentucky pay for orphanages? Of course not. It’s easy to pass laws, hard to pay for them, so they leave the paying to us.

Covid-19 visited my household again last week, except this time I was the one that had it. The elementary schoolers with their dripping noses and unwashed hands finally got me. The ensuing quarantine forced me to miss work and stay away from supermarkets and friends. Usually I am psyched for an excuse to sit on my computer all day, but this weekend greeted me with a sensation that I haven’t experienced in some time…  utter boredom. Crushing boredom. My body felt tired and sick, but my brain was active and would not quit. I could not bring myself to do anything. 3 am rolled around on a Sunday and I decided to act on a subtle craving that I have nursed for maybe a year. It is a craving that hits me at regular intervals, but I only indulge it once every half decade or longer. I booted up the CRT and played Pikmin.

My setup is pretty much ideal. I couldn’t sleep in my room with my GF because of my virus, so I took up residence in my grandfather’s room. My grandfather’s room is a doorless alcove with a leather couch taking up most of it. The space could probably be called a sunroom, except that the curtains are drawn constantly. When he is home, my grandfather spends most of the day lounging on the couch, watching movies and smoking his pipe. You can probably guess the smell in there. The subtle rankness of decades of tobacco smoke is cozy, and I have improved the comfort of the room with blankets, a wii, and a tiny baby CRT. The old TV combined with the plush carpets and wallpaper create a scene directly out of the 20^th century. If I were a kid in the 90s, I’d probably feel nostalgic about it.

The Nintendo GameCube was my childhood console. I remember seeing Mario Sunshine at a kiosk in some toy store as a kid and thinking Bianco Hills was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen rendered on a screen. I would wake up early in the morning and lay on my dad’s legs watching him play it. We also had Mario Party 4 and Super Smash Brothers Melee. The games were a little too hard for my soft, illiterate brain to play myself at first (and Petey Piranha scared the shit out of me), but I loved loved LOVED to watch people play. Before there were Lets Plays on YouTube, there were parents, older cousins, and babysitters. My babysitter, Gina, had a GameCube of her own, and she knew even more amazing games. She took us to Blockbuster one day and forced me to rent Wind Waker. She insisted it was amazing. I couldn’t read well enough to progress past the tutorial island, but crawling around/playing pretend on Outset was more than enough stimulation for young me. My babysitter, however, had a functional adult brain; she could read. I watched as she went through the game. She sailed the seas, I would beg her to read every dialogue bubble and she would generally tell me to shut up, but I absorbed absolutely everything I could.

Another game that Gina introduced me to was Pikmin. I’ll keep the gushing brief, but Pikmin gripped me. Pikmin 2 was still a new game in 2004, and the sheer size of the experience knocked me off my feet. The adventure seemed endless. Every cavern had amazing creatures hiding in them. My childhood stuffed animal was a white Pikmin named Whitey. The pretend games I would play with my toys often involved crash landing somewhere and needing to repair the ship. I would flip through the Pikmin 2 guidebook and marvel at the insect encyclopedia. I ruined a good guidebook cutting out pictures to play with!

The game I didn’t have was Pikmin 1. I had heard of it, but I was too nervous to play it. Pikmin 2 is a sandbox, but Pikmin 1 is a game of survival. After 30 days, Olimar’s life support fails and he dies. I didn’t beat the game myself until I was older, maybe 11 or 12. Well, as a 24-year-old I managed to beat it in two sessions. I’ll detail my observations in the next post.

;p

Elden Ring is a strange and fabulous addition to the Dark Souls series. While I was at first shocked by how similar the game is to FromSoft’s previous medieval-themed titles, I quickly settled in to a sprawling adventure laden with surprises and glorious freedom. The new recurring enemy types, like the living jars, empty bowled giants, and the large domed Cuckoo mages, pleased me immensely. I loved fighting armored mounted enemies, though there are far too few of them, though I must admit that the dragon encounters that litter the landscape were too easy for my draconic tastes. I want my dragons impervious and deadly! The landscapes, of course, are beautiful. Caelid, with its rotting pink flora and blood sky, is probably my favorite region in a Dark Souls game to date, and I loved even more that I could explore these areas by my own will. Dark Souls 1 finally has a proper sequel in Elden Ring–exploration is open and nonlinear, and the secret passages, sequence breaks, and skips are as arcane as they’ve ever been. While the open world can sometimes feel directionless or empty, the sense of travel invoked by approaching a distant tower on horseback more than makes up for these occasional doldrums.

Unless you want to play multiplayer coop with a friend.

You see, after my first playthrough I was amped to start a brand new run with a friend of mine. We picked out starting gear, planned some builds, and, after a bit of item muling shenanigans, were eventually ready to set off on a fresh tramp through Middle Earth AHEM The Lands Between. Once we figured out how to make the special item required for summoning, we set right to work exploring Limgrave anew. We decided to hit the mines first for some crafting materials, and FOG WALL.

As you can see, not much has changed since Dark Souls 1. During multiplayer sessions in older games, fog walls would pop up to keep the play area fairly limited. I assume the primary reason for this is rendering–you couldn’t just keep the entire map loaded for multiple players to travel in opposing directions in! Especially in a PS3 game. The MP fog walls could be annoying in early areas of the game due to their greater interconnected-ness, but in dungeons it became pretty much unnoticeable. In Dark Souls 3 it was not much of an issue at all because each zone was usually a massive, sprawling area. And frankly, these limitations made sense in games not specifically marketed as massive open world experiences. DS titles before Elden Ring were corridor crawlers–even the largest areas in Dark Souls 3 were broken into linear albeit vertically overlapping paths between bonfires. Elden Ring, however, is a modern open world experience, but the Dark Souls multiplayer system has not been adjusted at all to fit the new paradigm.

So, how do you explore the Limgrave mine with your friend? Well, first you have to disconnect from him. Doing this sends you back to wherever you were before being summoned., which could be very far away. You keep none of the progress you and your buddy made in his world, so you have to retrace your steps alone to the mine. Then you have to enter the the mine and put down a new summoning sign in there. After that, your friend can then summon you and finally resume the jolly cooperation. The whole ordeal is painfully clunky. This summoning sign system was charming in older DS games, but when I have to travel a couple miles just to cross a fog door, the charm is gone. I would have preferred a nice Multiplayer menu that lets me place my sign down right next to whatever bonfire my friend is waiting at. Better yet, I would have preferred a multiplayer system that lets me just teleport to my friend without him having to wait for a summoning sign to appear at all!

I understand why the fog wall is there–the game literally cannot handle rendering the underground and above ground portions at the same time. So why not have an instance gate or something (think World of Warcraft dungeon raids) that lets me and my friend choose to load up a new area together?

The problems with Elden Ring’s open world coop go further than clunky fog doors. When you spend so much time walking across fields, through forests, and over canyons with your buddy, you tend to pass a lot of bonfires and hidden items. The visiting player is not allowed to interact with these things at all. The visitor can thankfully still receive mob drops and gather plants growing in the world, but no exploratory progress carries over when visiting. This makes playing open world coop rather unrewarding for the visitor. Horses are disabled too, which discourages coop play even further. The cherry on top comes when you inevitably die. Since you aren’t activating the same bonfires as the host, you are set back a ton. In short, the fantasy of exploring Elden Ring’s vast landscape with a pal is undercut by a clunky multiplayer system that has persisted since 2010. I wish there was an option to share a world instance with another player. I want the same items, bonfires, and boss progress! You could call it Elden Ring MMO!

A Dark Souls MMO would fail, of course, because FromSoft can’t do netcode. I could ignore all of the above issues if the current system was not laden with bugs. In my play session with Mark, I probably random disconnected four different times. An invader popped into the world behind us and, as I went to confront him, I disconnected randomly. It was unplayable, literally.

I would like to highlight that my criticisms are aimed primarily at the open world segments of the game, specifically the COOP side of it. Invasions in the open world can be quite fun, offering plenty of places to hide and stalk prey (and the free teleportation items solve those instances when you just can’t locate the target). In dungeons, multiplayer gets way better, both COOP and PVP. The more linear progression and tighter play areas hide the flaws inherent in the system, and its frankly just as fun as older titles. I have had tons of fun exploring Raya Lucaria academy with friends and strangers.

I think that’s the way to do it: multiplayer in the open world is rough. If you are adventuring with a friend, skip straight to the dungeons and play those together. Raya Lucaria, Godrick’s Castle, and other zones offer unlimited fun with friends, but big fat Limgrave sucks. Of course, disregard all of this if the random disconnections hit you. You are shit out of luck there, sorry.

This is the story of Perfection Eden, a Factorio Death World that has seen the rise and fall of many great civilizations.

In my exploration of robinsonades (novels/stories about castaways surviving in remote locations alone), I cannot help but look to my favorite video games as contemporary leaders in the narrative tradition. Video games are capable of taking survival narratives further than books by allowing players to actually undertake the kinds of creative processes that protagonists in survival novels can only go so far as to describe in text. The Crusoe fever dream that so enraptures childrens’ imaginations can be brought to life through gameplay. Like playing pretend with rocks and sticks in a forest, games offer “playgrounds” or “sandboxes” where imaginative play can thrive even among adults that haven’t used their childhood imaginations in decades. This post is about a particularly magical situation I managed to play out in Factorio, a game that, according to Steam, has devoured over 200 hours of my life.

Factorio is the perfect example of a robinsonade game not only because it arranges its players in a scifi castaway scenario on an alien planet, but because it forces players to consider their own footprint as a castaway. What sets Robinson Crusoe and its heirs apart from other wilderness survival tales is that distinct relationship that the castaway forms between himself and his island (or in this case, planet) and the natives that already inhabit the land. Henry David Thoreau had a grand old time learning about his little forest, but he didn’t have to worry about disturbing Indians. So much of the tension in Robinson Crusoe hinges on his fear of being set upon by cannibals, and Factorio sets up the same relationship between the player and the alien planet’s voracious insectoid lifeforms. Crusoe sets out from the start to build a camouflaged, defensible fortress in anticipation of attack, and Factorio players that wish to live long enough to get off the rock and return home would be wise to do the same…

But is this true? Do you really need to construct hard walls and endless lines of automated machine gun turrets in order to survive and thrive? Like any great sandbox game, Factorio makes few strict demands of the player, and a few months ago I found myself in an incredible situation that changed my entire perspective on the game. Violence is an effective answer to many problems in Factorio just as it is for Robinson Crusoe himself, but when the biters came to devour my factory, I was forced to find an alternative path.

Here is the scenario: my friend Mark and I had generated a Death World, a map variant loaded with a huge quantity of biter nests (biters are the name for the alien insects that live throughout the Factorio world). The biters are set up to multiply and seek the player more rapidly, and respond more ferociously to the player’s actions, than in the default game. We felt the pressure immediately: the more biters we gunned down, the more seemed to emerge from the forests to take their place. Our defensive walls needed constant maintenance, and we could barely produce enough bullets to meet demand. We forged on, however, extracting and burning ever greater quantities of wood and coal to keep our boilers running. The factory must grow, and there was no Lorax around to warn us of impending consequences! We did not quite realize that a storm was brewing beyond our borders.

Interlude: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a work that I suspect holds some influence on Factorio, poses a similar relationship between humans and giant insects. Nausicaa takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting in which humanity clings to life on the fringes of vast, poisonous fungal forests inhabited by large and potential sentient bugs. As the story goes, greed eventually propels these human kingdoms to seek the industrial powers of the past and wage war across the land. Bombs and chemical biological warfare return, and this destruction of the land triggers an event known as the “Daikaisho,” a great wave of insects that emerge from the forest to flatten humanity. Nausicaa takes place on the verge of one of these prophesied daikaisho events, and the titular protagonist Nausicaa desperately seeks a way for humans to live at peace with the forest and its inhabitants.

Little did Mark and I realize that our own Daikaisho was at hand. The biters that surrounded our factory fortress were incensed, and they came upon us from all directions at once. We were overwhelmed–our beautiful production lines, rows of belts and machines, were crushed and devoured. Our walls crumbled away as the reserves of bullets drained. The steam engines slowed as the flow of coal become a trickle. Soon, they were dormant, the cold heart of a factory that no longer existed. Hours of work had been lost, literally eaten, before our very eyes. Mark gave up and disconnected, but I decided to play on.

While the biters had their way with my factory, I fled east. Before the Daikaisho, Mark and I had established our very first rail line with plans to establish an eastern mining outpost that would have given us more iron than we could have ever used. Thankfully, our train was not yet destroyed, though the outpost with its many expensive electrical miners was surely gone. Locomotives, marvels of engineering they might be, are not very useful without goods to transport and rail lines to follow. I rode the track for a while before hopping off near a strand of undisturbed trees in the wilderness. Exiled and forlorn, I wandered into the woods and settled into a clearing. I was a little depressed, if I can speak honestly. I didn’t move for some time. I mostly watched the dwindling map feed of my old base as the insects crushed it to nothing. My bird’s eye view of the carnage shrunk as radio dishes lost power or were eaten, and eventually the feed cut out entirely. I was completely cut off then. Alone.

After many days and nights I woke myself up and took stock of my situation.

I had in my possession a few rounds of ammunition, a machine gun, various crafting odds and ends, automation machines, belts, and a solar panel. That last item was the product of some new energy research that had been completed shortly before the fall. Among all the weapons science that we had conducted to stave off the biters, how fortunate that we bothered to make any solar panels at all! Even with my boilers silent and many miles removed, I could still harness the power of electricity. I immediately installed the panel and hooked it up to some crafting machines set to transform my pockets of crude metal into the armaments of vengeance. My encampment was cozy, if anything. I had a few storage bins loaded mostly with junk, the means to craft complex items on a very small scare, and a natural wall of trees to hide me from the biters. I set my crafting machines to pump out bullets and dumped all the metal I had into the input bins. I didn’t think anything else could have been useful.

The factory was dead, but I suspected it was not entirely obliterated. Perhaps I could take it back and restart the steam engines? Certainly, there could be materials enough left over to craft even more bullets. Yes, I decided then that all hope was not lost.

TO BE CONTINUED…

With fresh ammo and an unquenchable thirst for biter blood, I set off to my old factory to take it back. What I find there brings me to the brink of despair.

This post contains spoilers. Some pretty amazing things happen throughout this manga, so if you want to experience them blind, do not read further.

This morning I finished Nausicaa. I didn’t feel anything at first. I felt kind of empty, actually. As the morning progressed into the afternoon, I realized I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It is sad in the same way that Lord of the Rings is sad, and I can easily see the lineage of environmental fantasy from LOTR to Ghibli. If you need another comparison, think of it this way: Nausicaa does for storytelling what Breath of the Wild does for gaming. I read Dune this year as well, and they follow a similar track. I’ve been blessed with great media this year. In short, if you feel very deeply for trees and living things, read Nausicaa!

The movie is amazing, but it is only a shadow of the sprawling adventure held within the manga. So many great characters and moments, not to mention the entirety of Dorok, are cut. I recommend watching the movie first, then trying the manga. It took me a while to build the motivation to hook myself. Exposure to Dune and Moebius help.

War manga? Environmental Apocalypse? Coming of Age story? Medieval Fantasy? Nausicaa has it all.

It is such a moving work, and it is cool too. I mean, it does every cool thing I can think of. It invokes and possibly helps to originate one of my favorite tropes, THE DEVIL MACHINE. I don’t exactly remember where I found the term, but I think its from Earthbound. Giygas lives within this massive organ, a mechanical atrocity that someone in the game calls a “Devil Machine.” It is horrific, and stepping inside it is possibly one of the most memorable moments in gaming, especially as a final boss. The Devil Machine lurks in Nausicaa’s world as well, a perfect “boss” if you will for a war manga like this..

Perhaps I’ll elaborate more, but for now, I need to enjoy a beautiful Friday.

If you hated Holden Caulfield back in high school, you were experiencing The Catcher in the Rye as intended. Cold stoicism is baked so heavily into our upbringings that Holden’s inability to read a room or shut the fuck up is disgusting. Holden is a loathsome, whiney little crab on an exhausting trek across New York City. He often makes decisions that induce an immediate butt pucker response in teenage readers desperately convinced that they would never act so cringe in their own lives. Like so many protagonists in high school literature, his suffering is a direct affront to the ice cold self reliance mythologically greasing the wheels of a wealthy Tri-town. Holden is all too smug for somebody showing so much vulnerability. Why doesn’t he take this fantastic opportunity his parents are giving him and make some correct decisions for the first time in his life?

Well, I think I tried to argue as much in my essay for Mrs. Deorocki. I recall disagreeing with the premise of the assignment (the essay was likely to diagnose him with a mental illness), instead choosing to analyze how Holden’s various decisions lead him into trouble. Fortunately, that essay is lost to time. There were some serious miscommunications going on in sophomore English. We pretty much unanimously thought Holden was a helplessly annoying fuck, and Deorocki’s attempts to paint Holden as a rebellious hero fell on deaf ears. All the angles are a failure: how do you convince a bunch conservatively raised elitists afraid to upset their own helicopter parents to see a cringelord as a countercultural hero? And how do we convince this repressed, extremely depressed group of post-9/11 proto zoomers to feel anything for this cingelord’s depression. As far as we were concernced, Holden just needed to get a grip on himself and face the facts. We were coping, why couldn’t he? Loathing loathing loathing at Masco. On the counterculture angle… I think that’s just dated. Did people really ever resonate with the “phony” thing? Was that cool at some point? We 21st century zoomers were a lot more sophisticated than that. We also curated finstas… so perhaps not.

As an adult, it is a lot easier to disentangle oneself from the Holden nightmare and appreciate The Catcher in the Rye for what it is–an extremely well written novel loaded with bizarre, entertaining dialogue spurned on by the brief misadventure of an unwell kid. Salinger’s book is seriously entertaining to read, and the language is so plain that the pages flow like water. It’s like if Donald Trump monologued a coherent narrative. Here is a favorite passage of mine:

The cab I had was a real old one that smelled like someone’d just tossed his cookies in it. I always get those vomity kind of cabs if I go anywhere late at night. What made it worse, it was so quiet and lonesome out, even though it was Saturday night. I didn’t see hardly anybody on the street. Now and then you just saw a man and a girl crossing a street, with their arms around each other’s waists and all, or a bunch of hoodlumy-looking guys and their dates, all of them laughing like hyenas at something you could bet wasn’t funny. New York’s terrible when somebody laughs on the street very late at night. You can hear it for miles. It makes you feel so lonesome and depressed. I kept wishing I could go home and shoot the bull for a while with old Phoebe. But finally,after I was riding a while, the cab driver and I sort of struck up a conversation. His name was Horwitz. He was a much better guy than the other driver I’d had. Anyway, I thought maybe he might know about the ducks.

“Hey, Horwitz,” I said. “You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central Park South?”

“The what?“

“The lagoon. That little lake, like, there. Where the ducks are. You know.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?”

“Where who goes?”

“The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves–go south or something?”

Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn’t a bad guy, though. “How the hell should I know?” he said.

“How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?”

“Well, don’t get sore about it,” I said. He was sore about it or something.

“Who’s sore? Nobody’s sore.”

I stopped having a conversation with him, if he was going to get so damn touchy about it. But he started it up again himself. He turned all the way around again, and said,

“The fish don’t go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.”

“The fish–that’s different. The fish is different. I’m talking about the ducks,” I said.

“What’s different about it? Nothin’s different about it,” Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. “It’s tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake.”

I didn’t say anything for about a minute. Then I said, “All right. What do they do, the fish and all, when that whole little lake’s a solid block of ice, people skating on it and all?”

Old Horwitz turned around again. “What the hellaya mean what do they do?” he yelled at me. “They stay right where they are, for Chrissake.”

“They can’t just ignore the ice. They can’t just ignore it.”

“Who’s ignoring it? Nobody’s ignoring it!” Horwitz said. He got so damn excited and all, I was afraid he was going to drive the cab right into a lamppost or something.

“They live right in the goddam ice. It’s their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter.”

“Yeah? What do they eat, then? I mean if they’re frozen solid, they can’t swim around looking for food and all.”

“Their bodies, for Chrissake–what’sa matter with ya? Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that’s in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time. That’s their nature, for Chrissake. See what I mean?” He turned way the hell around again to look at me.

“Oh,” I said. I let it drop. I was afraid he was going to crack the damn taxi up or something. Besides, he was such a touchy guy, it wasn’t any pleasure discussing anything with him. “Would you care to stop off and have a drink with me somewhere?” I said.

The book is loaded with gems like this interaction. It is a ridiculous, meandering narrative, but Salinger’s power of characterization transforms Holden’s seemingly pointless depression quest into a gripping novel.

I think the hatred that Holden invoked in my adolescent self deserves a deeper look. Perhaps you felt it too? Whether in Salinger’s time or our own, kids seem to always get to hating themselves. Why? Why?

A week or so back I posted a short rant about how the MBTA had adopted all of these TV screens and were using them as ad space rather than to communicate useful information. Well, as if god himself were listening, my very next trip to Malden Center proved me wrong.

Of course, this critical message was only one of many images in the rotation. It shows for a brief segment of time before switching back to ads. If you’ve grown to realize, like me, that the TVs have nothing more interesting than military recruitment posters, then why would you ever watch them for alerts in the first place? The fact that you have to endure advertisements to see if crucial ride information might pop up in the rotation is ridiculous.

One of these panels should be permanently set to rider information and alerts! It can be a permanent billboard, well labeled and specifically dedicated to announcements of this kind.

I am going to chalk this one up to ignorant design. I’m sure the MBTA can’t really afford the brainpower required to integrate a straightforward system on top of their existing information spaghetti of websites and apps. It is a miracle we get to ride the orange line in the first place. That said, if somebody consciously decided to mix alerts with the ads in order to force train goers to watch them all just in case an alert shows up… that’s evil man.

After completing my thesis, the academic portion of my brain shut down for a long time. It has been almost a year now since I have seriously written an essay or even read an academic text. A part of me (mainly the brain) feels very guilty about this, but the more physical portions of my body sigh relief every day. The work of creating an essay is long and thankless. It is hard on the body too, like inverse exercise. When seriously writing, I become nocturnal, I eat very little, and I jerk off constantly to the point of exhaustion. It isn’t a pretty sight.

Well, the old itch is starting to act up again. Now that my Minecraft mod is complete, memories of writing projects and ideas are starting to trickle back into my shower thoughts. Now that I am not shackled to a University, I can focus on exploring ideas that really speak to my interests. Of course, a lot of it surrounds video games. Now that I am not explicitly studying English, I can remove the explicit literary basis of my work and focus specifically on video games and gaming culture. I would like to attempt a true video game essay, and this time I want to do it write. No deadlines, no nocturnal cycles–writing for myself! And if it is good enough, perhaps I can share it with the world. I am old enough now to realize that greatness in writing takes endurance.

So, what have I been thinking about? My thesis focused on Robinsonades and ends with an analysis of “Robinsonade Games,” pretty much only talking about Minecraft. A Robinsonade, if you don’t know, is a genre of survival stories that begins with a shipwreck/planecrash/whatever and follows the adventures of trials of a protagonist surviving and thriving in the wild. “Robinsonade Games” is a term I have coined to describe video games that use this premise as a basis for open-ended gameplay loops. The popular but less descriptive term is “open world” games. As I detail briefly in my thesis, these kinds of games have dominated the popular market. From Minecraft to Breath of the Wild to the new and fantastic Elden Ring, open world exploration coupled with crafting and unscripted engagement with game objects has absolutely captivated the world.

These kinds of games are captivating because they cast aside traditional media tropes like linear plot and dialogue in favor of a more intuitive approach to play. They do not bog players down with tutorials or rules because there is intrinsic fun in discovering the game for oneself. Open world games often resemble toys (or a SANDBOX) more than traditional, story driven games. Like a bag of blocks or a forest trail, the game world provides players everything they need to make their own fun. What REALLY captivates me about these kinds of games how, in the absence of prescribed gameplay, players and communities of players invent their own styles of play. THAT is what my essays will seek to explore.

One of the few good parts of my thesis are the segments in which I attempt to describe how the popular approaches to playing Minecraft have changed over the course of a decade. I cite early survival tutorials and Lets Plays from 2011 and compare them to Dream’s Manhunts (if you don’t know what those are, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7t5B69G0Dw — A+ Minecraft content!!!). The popular Minecraft content from 2011-2012 presents the game as a kind of Crusoe-esque roleplay. The modern speedrunning tradition spearheaded by the likes of Dream, or the esport-ish Hypixel minigame servers, use Minecraft in a totally new way that redefine how the game is perceived. In my view, the power of these video games is that they provide a means for transforming gameplay into narrative. Really great games offer an unlimited potential for narrative building. I want to dig into this diversity of gameplay and explore how communities of players can influence popular modes of play, or innovate play, or create new and unintended experiences in the virtual world.

This is all pretty rough, as you can tell. I think I want to start with Factorio, a brilliant Robinsonade Game about an industrialist crash landing on an alien planet and exploiting the land to build automated factories and kill natives. Sci-fi Hatchet! Until then, thanks for reading.

OR… I could just work on Super Better Than Wolves version 2.0… 😛

Not a commercially viable product, but it sure is fun.