Suicide Prevention is Pick Up

Apparently Oasis references can save lives.

I'm part of a fandom online -- rather, I'm usually a lurker, but I registered on a particular site yesterday. I wanted to join in the discussion, so I brought up the most recent posts, one of which was a stranger's suicide note.

This was probably more a cry for attention, but I am Matthew Pecot; I posted, saying that if she wanted to talk, I'd be happy to listen. It went back and forth -- me, one of her friends, and another stranger -- making no clear progress, until I called her "morning glory".

Fast forward to this evening, and she's still active. She hasn't posted anything, but she's Liked some pictures, so I know she's still alive. I'm smart enough to know that there was other stuff going on, that other people (especially her friend) were already talking to her. Most of the credit probably goes to them and what they said; at most, I helped crack a veneer of angst.

But the idea that pick-up, for all that people call it sleazy (usually myself included), could help to save lives? A fascinating, bizarre notion.


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That's not the only interesting thing about this, though. One-liners below:


"I want a gif of Flynn (from Adventure Time) running around with his hands wobbling in the air, caption 'I DON'T KNOW SHIIIIIIIIIIIIT'".

--This is exactly how it felt. I fell back on the Morning Glory line because I had nothing else I could pull from. For fuck's sake, I'm a professional face, working as a community manager, and I still felt helpless to help her. When just saying "If you need to talk, I want to listen" isn't enough, how can a stranger help?

--I'm going to ask around for resources on how to help prevent suicide. The entire time this was happening, a part of my brain was screaming that I don't know what I'm doing.


In any traumatic situation, as the wait time increases, so too does the chance of getting bored and checking Facebook.

--Seriously. After I and the stranger made our latest posts, there wasn't much we could do besides wait. I didn't feel comfortable starting up a game, but being on call meant I couldn't go to sleep, either. So eventually, I spent an hour going through imgur, checking every few minutes in case she responded.

--It was odd and disheartening how disconnected I felt the whole time. Don't get me wrong, I hoped and hoped that it would turn out OK, but I also didn't feel like my life or happiness was resting on the outcome. It was very disheartening to think that, if someone died who I'd tried to help, I would probably be able to get through the next day.



So... there's a story about how Oasis could save lives. I don't really know how to wrap this up; on the one hand, I'm feeling disconnected enough that I could maybe write out a moral, but I'm also still digesting this. I guess take it as a story of how complicated people are.

Because they are. Dear God, are people complicated. If I didn't know before, now I know from the stranger in the conversation say that she could empathize, because she's traumatized and she  does BDSM and "every time she lets someone top her, she has to tell them that she won't stop them if they try to kill her."

To quote South Park, and I think the man Himself would agree, "Jesus FUCK," dude. People are complicated, and I can only hope I helped.

Gaming -- the Mid-Year Roundup

I’ve been playing a shit-ton of games over the past six months, and they’ve almost all been excellent. It’s frankly kind of insane how lucky I’ve been… although the fact that I’m months (or years) late to the party on some games is a contributing factor.

This isn’t meant to be a “Top 10, Play What I’m Playing” wankfest. This is part gratitude for how good these games are, part trying to identify the best parts of them. If I want to be a creator someday, I want to know what to take inspiration from.

Mass Effect series (October? to March?)

Hands-down, the best AAA long-form game/series I’ve ever played. Yes, better than BioShock Infinite… much as that pains me to admit, in the post-completion afterglow. The series as a whole is the new standard for both epic and personal gaming experiences. It was so well realized that a few months after I finished the series, I saw a stranger and thought, “That’s my Shepard.”

“Mass Effect 2: Doing bad things, to bad people, to unlock cut scenes.”

My own experience of this series is colored by themes I’m interested in, primarily sunsets and the sense of things coming to an end. Yes, the third game is my favorite – doesn’t hurt that it was the only one I tried to 100%. I also watched the director’s cut of the ending. Since I felt like the entire third game was a long goodbye, the quality of the actual ending didn’t much matter to me. Your mileage may vary.

Takeaway: Teams and NPCs. The best part of these games was your team, beyond question, and from the inter-battle cut scenes to the downtime, they were the reason to play. If we could combine the companion AI and battlefield interaction of Elizabeth (from Infinite) with a team like this, endless fountains of fan art would result.

BioShock (April)

Would you kindly read the rest of this article as well? The twist in this game is spectacular, absolutely phenomenal. Before that was good, but not amazing. I don’t think I need to explain why this game is good – it’s part of the gaming canon. I’m not even going to make the twist the key takeaway.

This isn’t going into my personal canon, though. The twist is going on my list, but the rest of my game isn’t there. I have the same complaint as everyone else – the rest of the story after the twist is pretty ehhhh. I had also played the first three hours of Bioshock a couple times before, so the setting didn’t hit me as hard. I also am not a big fan of the gameplay itself, mainly because I get confused and lost in shooters.

Takeaway: The intro. My God, the intro for this is perfect. You get shown everything you need to know, you panic without being able to screw yourself over, it’s amazing. It was so good, they used it again. It plays like the first read of Atlas Shrugged, when the characters are superheroes and you get swept away – then you start to reflect on it, and wonder whether it could really work, and you see the depths to which it falls. The Big Daddy reveal, and realizing that eventually you’re going to fight one, is huge.

Takeaway: The setting. The city doesn’t need to be a character as much as in BioShock or in film noir, but exploring a place like this adds hugely to the fantasy and the mood. If you’re going to set your game in a drab world of cityscapes and forests, it had damned well better be because it helps the story.

BioShock Infinite (June)

Disclaimer, when I originally wrote this article, I was writing this in the afterglow. I played most of BioShock Infinite in an uninterrupted, twelve-hour chunk. I am writing this having eaten two bowls of oatmeal and one granola bar over the past 48 hours. After finishing the game, I spent two hours reading up on the ending and critiques.

You might say I enjoyed it.

I’m not going to be able to bring much more to the conversation on Infinite than what’s already been said. The violence is important, but the visceral relish the game takes in it isn’t; the setting and art direction is spectacular; Elizabeth is a very well-made character; the ending is thought provoking. It gets a 9/10, and would probably go into my Greatest Of All Time list if the dialog were snappier and more frequent.

Takeaway: Every developer making an AI companion should be brain-melded with this game. The mechanics themselves are designed to drive attachment to Elizabeth -- from her calling out priority targets to scrounging up life-saving ammo, salts and health. Even better, she seems to prioritize finding exactly what you need at that moment! Without this mechanic, the game’s combat would be a long distraction from its real focus. With it, it makes the characters’ relationship and trust shared by the player, and makes the portions without Elizabeth hit the player like a gut-punch.

Champions Online (Ongoing)

I work on this game. Am I cheating? Absolutely. But (Takeaway) the costume creator… dear God, the costume creator. What genuinely talented people have made is amazing, to the point where joke characters as niche as “Retina Regular” can exist. Even someone like me can poke around with the randomizer until I find inspiration, then build a new costume in about an hour. That costume is a new perspective on an existing character, and it reveals more about her.

FTL

FTL wants you to lose. FTL is very good at getting what it wants. Here’s what I think holds FTL back from being a truly great game, though: It doesn’t have much that gets you attached to a play-through, and it doesn’t have all-in mechanics. I’m going to be drawing a lot of comparisons to XCOM to make these points.

First, I don’t get attached to the characters or the ship in each play-through. I may feel really damned good about getting five Mantises, but each Mantis doesn’t matter. There wasn’t anything unique in each run, so there wasn’t any reason to claw my way back from the abyss in a run – I was better off letting myself die and using a different strategy.

The other issue is similar, because in XCOM, I sometimes had a favorite character go down, and I went all-in to save her. Not that it was the best decision, but it spiked the tension and made the best game. In FTL, though, there’s no all-in mechanic, nothing that lets me decide that something really matters to me. Irrationality is investment.

Takeaway: I want more genres of roguelikes. The only other roguelike that hit it big(ish) was Spelunky, and this proves that almost any genre can handle random levels, emergent gameplay, and permadeath. I’m waiting for Rock Band: Rogue Edition.

Additional Takeaway: This is how micromanagement should be, without sucking up too much time or leaving you feeling grindy. In FTL, pause-play gameplay works because it’s more like yelling at the bridge crew to target their engines, hold fire for a broadside, and desperately relaying directions to your boarding team. It’s not about pausing your entire offensive to order a single division around. Micromanagement should be five seconds of play for a single second of pause, I’m going to say.

League of Legends

Do I even need to go into this one? I’ve been playing LoL for about two years now, and it remains an exceedingly well-crafted game. It’s never going to be great-tier, because some of the things that make it so good are psychological tricks – but damn, this is good.

Forty minutes. Ten players. Five roles. Three lanes. And I’ve played something like 415+ hours of this.

Takeaway: This is how you do free-to-play when you have the luxury of having made a really good game to work with. It’s addictive as heroin – I chase the dragon when I’ve been on a losing streak. Forty minutes is the perfect time to create a feedback loop, where it’s long enough to get seriously invested, but not long enough that you can’t play one more game.

XCOM

Bluh. XCOM. Best strategy game system I’ve ever played, hands down. XCOM has some bad pacing issues in the campaign, but in a given mission you can reach climaxes of tension and panic in a single-hour mission. And because it’s all emergent gameplay, the tension is just as intense with every play-through.

I do want to point out the flaws, though. The aliens getting free moves when you discover them is obvious bullshit, but the pacing of the campaign was what really got me. First off, if you get yourself ahead in economics – which takes re-rolling instead of getting an actual in-game briefing – you’ll never suffer from want. You’ll have moments of tactical tension, but the grand plan will never be derailed. And the fact that I only got the psykers at a point when I could just click through to start the final battle… I should get a while to play with all the toys, not have them handed to me just before nap time.

Takeaway: I guess this is simplicity, just as much as TBP. The clarity of it, from what kinds of cover you’re in to what kinds of risks you’ll face, is spectacular and fast. Grand strategy games take ages to deliver feedback on whether you’re playing well, and tactical games (that I’ve played) tend to fall back on complexity and end up unsatisfying. XCOM makes high-tension, deeply-personal outcomes from relatively few moving pieces, and it shows all the moving pieces.

They Bleed Pixels

This is a better hardcore platformer than Super Meat Boy. I said it, now you can argue about it until the end of time. I swore more often, and louder, in TPB. Note: I’m aware that you can’t directly compare the short-level vs checkpoints paradigms that the two games take.

I felt taxed harder and better in TBP. In particular, the level paradigm meant that you could get all the way through an unbelievably difficult chain of jumps then see the bullshit waiting on the other side, and having (limited) health meant that a dumb slip was penalized, but not fatal. You then had to claw your way through with a single heart, which amped up tension even more.

Plus there’s the aesthetics. As much as I liked the setting and style of some SMB levels, the mythos in TPB is something that I could see incorporated into the larger Lovecraft mythos.

Takeaway: Simple and difficult. Two buttons, very few moves, but incredibly difficult. Reducing the number of moving parts meant that there were no bullshit issues like getting caught on geometry, getting confused, being slammed by a million enemies. Simple design, difficult challenges. (Additional takeaway: I hate feeling confused.)

Lord Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle

The only free indie on the list – my, times have changed for me. I think I found this one while looking for a customization-heavy JRPG, in the aftermath of finishing Mass Effect. This is decidedly not that game, but I lucked into this beautiful send-up of JRPGs. I compare it to Recittear, except you’re playing as the princess who gets rescued, after the rescuing already happened.

Also, it has one of the best uses of a major trope ever.

Takeaway: The dialog is spectacular. Better than Portal, hear me? The writing is perfectly-paced nerd humor at the intersection of D&D, anime and JRPGs. I have three-and-a-third pages of quotes and one-liners from Embric, most of it M-rated. Almost all of the game has a breakneck pace of hilarious dialog, and every comedic game writer should play this.

Mirror's Edge Analysis - Surprisingly BioShock-ish!

I just finished Mirror's Edge. Naturally, that means that rather than sleep, I have to digest and write about it. Spoilers are... well, it's not like there's too much lost if the plot's spoiled, but mid-tier spoilers.

1) Faith's character

The plot may not be stellar, but Faith is an interesting character. "Amoral" doesn't quite fit the bill. In my opinion, she can be seen in two ways: resistance fighter, or cynical veteran of nonviolent protesting.

Mirror's Edge's plot is very MTV cartoon, both in depth and in tone. This means that some of the subleties of a character don't always come through. There also isn't much dialog or cut-scene to reveal her character, so the real character-building moments happen during gameplay.

Personally, there's enough of a split between the two ways of playing the game (stealth-alike runner versus kill everything) that I feel it's fair to split Faith's character into two possibilities. Both are interesting, and she's a strong character regardless -- but the sheer nebulousness of Faith is kinda fascinating. I have a mental image of her (in the cutscene, cartoon form) holding an M4.

Anyway. Interesting character, and an interesting example of how gameplay determines how players view the characer.

2) Feminism: It's Good!

How many other games hit all of these criteria?

a) Passes the Bechdel test

b) Features a female protagonist (or main character)

c) Is a AAA, mainstream game

d) Doesn't sexualize the female protagonist. Or in this case, any character, period.

I know I'll be drawing comparisons to BioShock Infinite later, but Infinite's one of the only other games I can think of, off the top of my head (your mileage may vary on Infinite). Faith and Celeste are buds, Faith and Kate are sisters, and they all talk like real humans. Faith's is sexy because she's a smart, fit and extremely capable person, not because of her outfit -- call her an Alyx Vance type of character, if that helps explain the kind of healthy sexy I mean. And at no point does the script play up any sexuality.

Don't misinterpret me, I'm not praising Mirror's Edge for being clinical and sexless, but it feels like almost every other game with a strong female protagonist (Mass Effect, say) at least taps into that vein of being willing to be sexy and/or sensual. There's room in the gaming world for sexless games with female protagonists, as there is for them with male protagonists, and it's good to see Mirror's Edge fit that space.

(Note: While I try to promote feminism, especially in games, please don't hesitate to call me out if you see a flaw in what I say hear -- whether I missed something horrifying, or if I mis-present feminism's case on this. Also, yes, I'm aware that movements aren't monolithic, yadda yadda I was a sociology major I will conditionalize until I talk myself to death if no one stops me.)

3) Comparing Mirror's Edge to BioShock

I'm definitely a horrible person, because very few games compare well to Ken Levine's baby, both original and Infinite. It's a worthwhile comparison though, in this case, because all of these are games with some non-shooter spark that gets tripped up by (some of) their shooter baggage.

In my opinion, Mirror's Edge is a puzzle game when it's at its best. The best moment I had had zero flow, zero combat, and zero guidance from the game beyond "Get to this location." If you've played, it's the sequence in climbing to the top floor of the mall under construction, where the walkway at each floor is built, but they aren't connected.

And then immediately afterwards, you're tasked with descending down the other side of the mall, in a wide stairwell filled with enemies. Worse, the space is designed so that it actually strips away your normal runner "vocabulary" of actions: There's no ledge to jump to, allowing you to bypass guards, and if you try to just sprint past them, the stairwell is big and open enough that you just get gunned down. Personally, I had to go into shooter mode, which the game is eminently bad at.

There are a couple of these encounters that are just plain bad. Even if I wanted to play Faith as a shooty character, the difficulty comes from swarms of enemies, and tactical depth is limited to just trying to kite enemies away from each other, so you can run in and grab dropped weapons after your own runs dry. And since my interpretation of Faith's character depends on whether she shoots and kills enemies, having that decision forced on me by bad game design rankles.

It reminds me a lot of some of the fights in BioShock Infinite. We can all agree Infinite wasn't about the shooting, right? It usually did it pretty well, but it could've existed in another genre and still had the same essence. In particular, I'm thinking of the ghost boss. That goddamn ghost boss. I had that same sense of frustration in Mirror's Edge in the later combat set pieces. (There were other issues I had with Infinite rooted in its shooting, but that's the big example.)

Look, I work in the industry. I know that having some shooting pieces probably helped the game sell... maybe three times as much. Could well be. But evaluating it as a game, the sheer frustration these caused me knocked the game down a lot in my book.

And there you have it! Well worth the... what is it, $10 now? It's not a full-price game, but a good game to get on sale.

Drinking Whiskey, Step By Step

I've been trying to write more often, but I'm not quite managing to pull my main project together. For the moment, I've been writing whatever strikes my fancy, preferably visceral, description-heavy pieces. Such as this step-by-step description of drinking and tasting whiskey.

(Fun fact: I was using cheap whiskey for this, so you could probably use Control-F to make this about Listerine, too!)

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Take a sip. It starts with the crackle of pop rocks, spreading through the amber and fizzing away like fireworks. Stir it, and the sparks catch into a Listerene burn. The pocket of air at the roof of your mouth gets colder and colder, as the numbness spreads from the whiskey.

Blind-firing neurons start carving trenches across your tongue as your heartbeat rises, your taste buds caught between the whiskey tide and the hammering pulse. Finally, your tongue starts to pull, to twist, with the burning subsiding into a slow pressure that inverts the tip of your tongue.

Swallow, and feel the ridges along the roof of your mouth, slick with relief. They’re cast into sharp profile by your pulse, still heavy in your mouth. Open and breathe, the air hot as it races through the cavern of your jaw, and your eyes droop as you exhale.

Now. Eye the glass again.

Serenity Analysis -- Mal's Story

I re-watched Serenity at Baycon yesterday – eight years or so after I first watched Firefly, I understand movies better.

The first time around with Serenity, I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I could say why. The writing isn’t nearly as good as the series proper, most of the cast has no character development, and the business issues kept the Firefly name and theme song out of Serenity. But it was still satisfying, and now I understand why: Mal is a perfect example of the hero’s journey.

For those who don’t know, the Hero’s Journey is a story structure that’s an expansion on the standard three-act template; you’ll hear people refer to Star Wars (Episode IV) especially. If you look at the way Serenity is structured, it’s very similar to A New Hope, with some of the exact same story beats (dead family on a desert planet, anyone?).

The entire point of Serenity is Mal. Period. Other characters reach endings, but only Mal develops and overcomes challenges. And every change that happens and decision that Mal makes is reflected in the wider world. He travels out to and back from places when he’s making a spiritual pilgrimage, and the Serenity herself suffers as he does. It’s this reflection that makes his hero’s journey so satisfying.

The constant movement from world to world punctuates each stage of the hero’s journey. There are twelve stages to the hero’s journey, and generally they’re a progression as the hero learns more and more —except there points where the hero is set back, or returns to the scene of an earlier defeat with the tools to triumph. Mal and the Serenity have two returns in Serenity: going back to Book, and returning from Miranda.

In the first case, it’s the refusal to face the Alliance, and trying to run from the fight again. As Jayne puts it, it’s hiding under the Shepherd’s skirts. For the first part of the movie, Mal has tried everything to keep his ship flying, and he’s been willing to cut out crew and hide with a monastery to do it. This return is a failure – page through your dictionary and find the phrase “Carthiginian peace”.

When he’s coming back from Miranda, though, he’s finally achieved apotheosis. He’s returning and bringing the truth, and charging straight into the guns of the Alliance with it; the fact that the truth is a fleet of murderous Reavers is just a physical manifestation of his own determination to see justice served.

The other way Mal’s journey is illustrated is in the Serenity herself. The Serenity was always the tenth character on the show, and because Mal is The Captain and the ship is his home, it’s a powerful mirror for him. When the Serenity is desecrated to pass as a Reaver ship, it hurts as much because it’s scarring the Serenity as because they’re desecrating the dead. (Maybe more, if you’re cynical.) No grim and gritty statement from Mal could ever show his willingness to go savage as scarring his home. This corresponds to the descent into the underworld – the grim second movie of the trilogy, if you will, when the hero gives into anger and flirts with the dark side.

The flip side is the return to Mr. Universe’s planet, and the destruction of the Serenity as they pass the blockade. Unless I missed something, the Serenity has burnt off its obscene decorations and fixed the smudge trail, purging Mal’s dark side. Instead, it gets the shit kicked out of it – the same way that Mal does as he fights the Operative. The only thing Mal has that keeps him flying is gumption, same as the Serenity, and the damage on his ship amps up just how close he gets pushed. The fact that the Serenity never actually gets destroyed is a complete reflection of Mal’s character, though, and patching her back up in the dénouement also reflects his completion of his journey.  

Additional note: The final battle the rest of the crew fights, where they’re holding the line against Reavers? The Battle of Serenity Valley. It’s a perfect bookend with the series’ opening scene, with Mal getting to go back to when he believed – and this time, he gets to win.

So, tl;dr version? Serenity is the hero’s journey, starring Captain Malcom Reynolds, and the use of setting and the Serenity herself is one of the best implementations of the hero’s journey that I’ve ever seen. There are tons of other issues with the movie, and an ensemble franchise like this is done a disservice by focusing exclusively on one character, but

(Also, I know someone’s going to say it – no, this story had nothing to do with River. She is not Character Arc B. I’m sorry, but her character arc was going from being crazy with an unstoppable mode, to being a crazy who can intentionally activate unstoppable mode, with nothing in between. River was a part of the plot, like the rest of the crew, rather than actually being a driving character.)

Autocomplete: Criminal Edition

Today, I tried going to OhJoySexToy.com, the new webcomic by Erika Moen (an excellent, primarily-autobiographical cartoonist), typing in simply “sex” and letting Google do the rest. The result?

… what the fuck, Google?

Facebook One-Liners (Repost)

Writing! I've been putting together a ton of one-liners for Facebook, and here's my claim to eventual Mitch Hedberg levels of fame.

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My Facebook ads used to be all for dating sites; now they're all "New game for Men 21+" game ads. Even Facebook's given up on me.

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Maturity isn't fighting, fucking, or paying bills. Maturity is choosing not to watch one more episode or playing one more turn, and I will never be an adult.

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The Final Fantasy dev team must be the worst in bed. "Sure, the first twelve hours are gonna SUCK, but after that it gets pretty okay!"

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In English, our curse words are spiritual, sexual, and scatological. With a combination like that, no wonder we're so weird.

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Forget the power of house and happy hardcore, for so much has been forgotten, never to be raved again. Forget the promise of ambient and synthpop, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only THE DROP.

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Okay, my company officially needs to get me Photoshop. My preview gifs to sell upcoming taunts are outclassed by Tumblr porn.

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I want to play a 4X strategy game with Axe doing voiceover.

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I wrote something today. Doesn't matter how small, doesn't matter how good, doesn't matter if it only took an hour -- these are the four magic words that make the other eight hours you spent on Civ 5 totally okay.

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Irony: Spending twenty minutes choosing the perfect relaxing video to fall asleep to.

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K. A. Applegate wrote Harlequin novels under a pen name. I kinda want to read them, just to watch my childhood squirm.

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"It is well that League is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it."

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There's nothing dumber than spending an hour vigorously french kissing the food stuck in your teeth before realizing, "Hey, I'm at home; I own floss."

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"Danger is my middle name" implies weird parents. "Danger is my maiden name" implies the most badass wedding reception ever.

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Pants on or off, eating and porn don't mix.

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Pants are like goldfish. We all had them in elementary school; they're generally unnoticed, unless they're disproportionately-sized; and if you forget about them long enough, eventually a kid's going to go into hysterics.