MDA in Photopia and Menu-Based Interactive Fiction

MDA in Photopia and Menu-based Interactive Fiction

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

― Patrick Rothfuss,The Name of the Wind

Comparing Photopia and a game like Choice of the Dragon feels like comparing Schindler’s List to Big Trouble in Little China, both great but aside from the medium they share, they are different in just about every way from the inside out. I would however, put forth the idea that menu systems verses parsers have very little to do with the major stylistic difference, so much as the stories themselves, or in other words, it’s about the difference between Aesthetics not Mechanics.

Mechanics:

Photopia is a nonlinear parser, which tells a huge ensemble story by switching between its many protagonists, all revolving around a young woman named Alley. You type in commands and attempt to interact with the environment, sometimes you’re in a made up fantasy world and have to find your way out, other times you’re simply driving, waiting for time to pass until the story itself takes you to the next event/character.

Choice of the Dragon is a horse of a different color, it’s a menu-based system where you select your choices as opposed to typing them in. Despite sounding more limited, Choice of the Dragon ends up being the far more open ended game. You control an up and coming dragon trying hard to establish dominance in the land either through cunning, honor, vigilance, or disdain. The story can go quite a few different ways depending on how you want your dragon to end up.

Dynamics:

Choice of the Dragon and Photopia are both quite good about sucking you into their worlds. Time passed as I played both games and I forgot where I was — I was simply absorbed. Neither game is really a struggle to play, Photopia will straight up give you the answer to solutions if you wait around enough. Choice of the Dragon similarly is only hard if your dragon lacks the necessary stats. As long as you play up the right stats you can handle any situation, whether it be a knight coming to claim your hoard or a rival dragon on the rise. Again, reinforcing the idea that Dragon is about you and your character, whereas Photopia is about a character—Alley.

Aesthetics:

Photopia is certainly a cut above the usual text adventure, because at the end of the day its all about Alley not you. Each stage or level feels like uncovering a mystery, not creating your own story. That is ultimately why it is a linear story, not out of laziness but to lock you in a certain mindset. Every character and their scene is only significant in their relevance to Alley; a young woman who meets an untimely death. It’s about who she was, and how her life was cut short. Choice of the Dragon, like the Patrick Rothfuss quote is more concerned with you, the player. Who are you? What does your dragon say about you? To use a metaphor, if Photopia is a painting, than CotD is more like a mirror. That being the case I would place CotD assuredly into Games as Expression, as it functions to help us reveal ourselves while Photopia is almost certainly an example of Games as Narrative. It’s a front seat to a spellbinding drama about other people, their problems, and ultimately their life lessons. But Games as Fantasy is also applicable here because both put you in the shoes of fantastical characters, although Photopia only does so for portions of its tale, while the rest is grounded in heady realism.

Rick and Morty Spec Script

Rick-and-Morty-Spec-Script.pdf

Mr. Howards

Portal Quest Fantasy

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king”
(pg 167) (Gandalf in a letter to Frodo about the nature of Strider a.k.a Aragorn)

I want to begin this analysis by saying that this is my personal favorite quote from any LOTR book–it’s plain, it’s beautiful, and it really reveals the character of J.R.R. Tolkien. He was a man who had hope in good things, and the eventual triumph of light versus dark.

“All that is gold does not glitter… Not all those who wander are lost” is the phrase that sticks out to me in this passage. I would say this shows the hopefulness and wonder of Portal Quest fantasy. You could almost imagine these words being in the Hobbit. The poem essentially tells us that heroes come in all shapes and sizes and that their physical appearance isn’t necessarily indicative of the content of their character.

When you think about it, most of the protagonists of Portal Quest are unlikely heroes, from Bilbo to Frodo, to Lucy in the Chronicles of Narnia; these are not characters that you would’ve guessed had it in them to aspire to great deeds of any sort.

I think this is backed up by the style of the poem, which is confident, matter-of-fact, and brimming with wisdom—which makes sense because it’s coming from the mentor figure of our story, and is our guide who we can rely on.

But it also partially relies on Intrusion Fantasy with the phrases like “Deep roots are not reached by the frost” and “A light from the shadows shall spring” as if to suggest that there are evil beings attempting to penetrate the peaceful worlds of the Shire and Rivendell, but that there is overall a power of light at work that keeps them at bay. Darkness is coming on, but there is a failsafe at work to fight back against it. Unlike H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu the intruding force doesn’t get to run rampant through the world it’s invading, there are forces strong enough to push it away.

Which circles back to the “All that is gold does not glitter” and “Not All Those That Wander Are Lost”, it is in the hands of those people, the little folks, the unforeseen heroes that the fate of our future relies on. It’s through their actions that peace will be restored to the land of middle earth.

The Hero’s Journey and the River Marah

La Mujer: [after taking a drink from a river] It’s bitter.

El Topo: Moses found water in the desert. The people tried to drink it but were unable to because it was bitter. They named the water Marah.

La Mujer: [after taking another drink from the river] It has turned sweet!

El Topo: I shall call you Marah, because you are bitter like water

–El Topo, dir. Alejando Jodorowsky

It is hard to foresee any universe where Alejandro Jodorowsky and C.S. Lewis would be friends, or for that matter if Lewis would see the value in having his work compared to either a video game or a Chilean midnight acid flick like El Topo. But both men seem to believe in the idea of following a path, a path that is not made to be easy but vexing, difficult, and most of all uncomfortable—and so does Jenova Chen’s video game Journey.

We will set to prove that across the mediums of film, print, and videogames, beyond the tenements of Christianity and Pagan Mysticism—the idea of a journey that does not bend to you but you to it, is universal—and unlike the typical view of the hero’s journey, the threats here are not external so much as they are internal.

Though ostensibly a Christian, C.S. Lewis is in many ways an outlier in his faith. Similar to how Jodorowsky transforms the action-oriented west into a biblical allegory, and how Chen takes the normally light-hearted genre of adventure and morphs it into a brooding post-apocalyptic fairy tale, Lewis takes one look at the concept of Heaven as an easy-going place and turns it on its head.

His book The Great Divorce is a theological dream vision that follows a fictionalized version of himself, as he wanders a ghostly town stuck in purgatory and eventually makes his way into the foothills of a strange afterlife. Like the heroes of a SNES RPG, Lewis and his company make their way into this heaven expecting ease and comfort… and instead are met with horror.

“The men were as they had always been; as all the men I had known perhaps, it was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn’t break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn’t twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond” (Lewis 21)

It is as if the ground itself is unwilling to bend to the newcomers, it is only through accepting the pain and the change that the residents of the ghost town can even begin to entertain the thought of entering into Heaven for more than a jaunt. As the party journeys on, members start to become weeded out and eventually the ghosts make the acquaintance of some of Heaven’s permanent residents, who offer the visitors a tough choice — “Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?” (Lewis 39)

At first is the key phrase here. The solid people are not asking Lewis and company to suffer forever but to forget themselves for a moment in exchange for a better life. Essentially the spirit is asking for the people to drink from the river Marah until it begins to taste sweet. So why does Lewis bring us to the foothills of Heaven? It is because he has an enemy to expose—the idea of a Hero’s Journey being an external one rather than a deeply internal one. Ascending the mountain isn’t an end to itself, only a means to an end—to transform us into something more closely resembling the mountain. As Lewis once said in Book IV of Mere Christianity;

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house… He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to?… You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” (Lewis 110)

But what has any of that got to do with Jenova Chen’s fun and touching little yarn: Journey? The journey that Lewis talks about is the same that appears in Chen’s video game. You have to imagine the Hero’s Journey as the river Marah, a vast flowing thing whose tendrils appear in art of all sorts from the slight to the bizarre to the wonderfully sad.

Like the protagonist in the Great Divorce, Journey’s hero is about an ethereal being making its way up a mountain to escape an existence grounded in the mundane. But what lies at the summit? MDA show us the way.

Mechanics: You move your little fabric person with the left stick, move the camera with the right, press x to jump, and circle to chime attracting cloth fragments to yourself—this is also your only way to communicate with other players. Your goal is to solve puzzles, collect fragments which increase your power (or solidity as Lewis might see it) find other players and ascend to the peak.

Dynamics: I began my journey alone, in a wilderness not too dissimilar from the scorched wastelands of the Mad Max films. As I made my way to my vague and strange goal I like Lewis would sometimes encounter a being on my travels but never for too long—mine was for the most part a mission I had to take alone.

Aesthetics: All in all, my own journey was a pleasant one, in an era where most games give your humble narrator terrible motion sickness, this luckily did not. I was however left with a different sickness… one of longing for a place I could do remember except that it feels real to me and as painful as the grass in the foothills of Heaven.

As anyone who has played the game knows, your ending is not of the Disney variety. All your effort and toil is greeted with a white screen as the game resets. You are back at square one. Older, wiser, and perhaps a bit more bitter.

Like the fabric people awaking at the foot of the mountain, Lewis awaking from his dream vision, or Jodorowsky finding himself still stranded in the desert, we are back at the start of things—a little enlightened but still heavy with questions. That speaks to what these stories try to communicate to us, that the Hero’s Journey is less about happiness than it is about satisfaction—less about turning the river water sweet than it is about learning to love bitterness.

Lil Steve

The Mastery Loop and Time Loop

“Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes and the poison arrows fall from the sky and the

pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says ‘Give me your best

shot. I can take it.’” -Big Trouble in Little China

Starting in the 1980’s, the young medium of video games and the aging medium of film began to cross pollinate, contributing to each other’s form in bigger and bigger ways. It is no stretch of the imagination to say that without the films of John Carpenter (The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, They Live), James Cameron (The Terminator, Aliens), and Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead) the entire landscape of gaming in the 90’s would be unrecognizable (the creators of Mortal Kombat, Metroid, Duke Nukem, and Metal Gear have all admitted to borrowing ideas hand over fist from these filmmakers).

With that being said, it doesn’t seem too strange to think that Groundhog Dayand other movies from that era of filmmaking may have had some influence on the most important game of the 2010’s: From Software’s Dark Souls. The connection between Groundhog Day, Dark Souls, and the veritable pool of fantasy films that spawned from the 80’s might seem tenuous or even flat-out nonexistent—but spiritually these things are kindred souls.

They are about characters who, through sheer force of will, are able to overcome incredible challenges. In Alien, Ellen Ripley had to defeat a vicious Xenomorph, so a decade later Samus Aran had to fight unrelenting space pirates, and when They Live’s John Nada had to expose an Alien conspiracy, so too did Duke Nukem who in turn stole Nada’s looks and catchphrase… so what did Groundhog Day add to the formula, and how did that same formula by means of emulation and osmosis end up in Dark Souls?

From a certain viewpoint, Groundhog Day contains the quintessence of life in its plot. It centers on a vain, arrogant and downright devious weatherman named Phil (played pitch perfectly by a sly and sardonic Bill Murray) who must begin his pilgrimage to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to report on the annual ground hog day celebration. With Phil is a sweet woman named Rita, and his long-suffering cameraman; Larry. Murray doesn’t resort to shouting or theatrics to show us what a perfect bastard Phil is; he instead shows his true face in smaller subtle ways. One way or another, jabs and putdowns always slither out of mouth. “Come on, all the long-distance lines are down? What about the satellite? Is it snowing in space?

Don’t you have some kind of a line that you keep open for emergencies or for celebrities? I’m both. I’m a celebrity in an emergency” Ironically for Phil, a dark cloud hangs over him and he’s really not even aware of how miserable he is—Until he enters Punxsutawney and begins his transformation. Upon performing his duties, Phil attempts to escape back into his cozy old life before a deus ex machina keeps him in town—a violent snow storm. It is at this point that the story takes a Souls-esque turn; as Phil awakens the next day and realizes that despite the events of yesterday he is still back on Feb 2; Groundhog Day.

No matter his actions, he is forced to repeat February 2^ndindefinitely while the rest of the town lives in blissful ignorance of what’s going on—like a vinyl record they’re always stuck on their set grooves while Phil moves as the only free agent. This is not only where Groundhog Day begins to move towards Dark Souls but also where it diverges from films of the past. John Carpenter’s Jack Burton could always outmaneuver the challenges he faced; James Cameron’s Sarah Connor always stopped Judgement Day, and across three films Ash Williams always defeated the Deadites (even if he lost a limb or two)—but all of that changes for Phil Connors—he is for all intents and proposes, trapped in his world. For a man that always seems to have a witty comeback, Phil cannot trump Groundhog Day but instead must submit to his invisible captor. He doesn’t outsmart anyone or anything other than himself.

It is with this flourish that director Harold Ramis plucked Phil Connors out of the realm of the genres of the past and put him into a timeless parable for our material age. Even Phil’s love interest Rita, isn’t a prize at the end of the journey—he himself is the only obstacle in the way of their relationship. That is the challenge he faces. “I think you’re the kindest, sweetest, prettiest person I’ve ever met in my life. I’ve never seen anyone that’s nicer to people than you are. The first time I saw you… something happened to me. I never told you but… I knew that I wanted to hold you as hard as I could. I don’t deserve someone like you.

But if I ever could, I swear I would love you for the rest of my life” The film spoke, but its deeper philosophical nature went unnoticed until years later, with Roger Ebert going so far as to say, “Groundhog Day is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable… you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is” But did Hollywood really embrace the Groundhog Daystructure? Its progenitors are with us in the form of movies like Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, Run Lola Run, but perhaps video games may be the better vessel for parables about repeating mistakes over and over again until we reach a sort of xen state. It is impossible to measure the impact of Dark Souls or what exactly influenced it.

We can say with certainty however that as the movies of the 1990’s began to remix the characters and ideas of the 1980’s so too did Souls take what we expected from Video Games and morphed it into something completely different. It is ironic that at one-point Phil calls himself the god of Punxsutawney, because Dark Souls is essentially about becoming god—by killing the old one. Mechanics: You are an Undead; a cursed being that is sent to dwell in the Undead Asylum until the end of days.

But like Bill Murray, your set route in life is diverted down a strange path. A dying knight calls you chosen and tells you that you should begin your pilgrimage to Lordran—a once great land that is now rotten with age. Using what is perhaps the best fighting system in games, you use your joysticks to lock on to targets, dodge roll away, and every other button is just a means to dispose of your opponents.

With nothing to your name but the clothes on your back and a terrible starting weapon, you must best your way to Lord Gwyn and decide if you will continue his age of fire, or kick start an age of dark—where men forget their gods and move on. This task would prove impossible for any human, but luckily as an undead you have been gifted immortality. Despite your frailty and the fact that your skin is rotting off, every time you die you awaken at the nearest bonfire, what is essentially a checkpoint in between all the madness of Lordran where you can rest. As your morose but honest fellow traveler tells you:

“Oh, your face! You’re practically Hollow. But who knows, going Hollow could solve quite a bit! Hah hah hah hah…”

Being undead also grants you the ability to collect souls, level up, and revert back to your human state allowing you to summon friendly NPC phantoms—all of which is put in place to help you complete your pilgrimage. You are essentially free to besiege every castle, enemy, and boss encounter an infinite amount of times until you get it right—much like a certain weatherman.

Dynamics: It felt almost like destiny when I bought Dark Souls from my local thrift store. It seemed almost barely used, as if the person before me maybe had given up a long time ago. I awoke in the Undead Asylum as a pale skinned, red headed, thin little creature. It was as I started playing that I knew that for some reason—I had to keep going. Like Phil, there was no going back. This was the hardest game I had played since Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, but unlike that NES rainbow drenched fever dream… this was a battle I had to finish. But why persevere? There was one point where a certain boss stabbed me to death over thirty times in a row, each time my willpower did not fade but grew. As Jack Burton had said: I can take it.

Aesthetics: As my long-suffering companion: Solaire and I plunged our swords deep into Lord Gwyn’s gut; sending him back to the mud, I could feel something I hadn’t felt since I was a kid playing videogames—satisfaction. Why don’t all games carry with them that innate feeling of elation over a victory? It is notable that in most video games you are fighting against the agent of change, the cancerous thing that pervades an otherwise peaceful world—the ape that steals the girlfriend, the wizard who conquers the kingdom, the pigs who steal the eggs, but in Dark Souls you are the change. It makes you feel the wonder of Discovery and the satisfaction of Challenge, but from a completely different vantage point. Dark Souls defies the limits of the MDA framework, all eight aesthetics make appearances but in unconventional ways. You experience Fellowship but are forced to not only be alone most of the game but also watch as most of your fellow adventures die or lose their minds. There is a strong Narrative here, but it is hidden and transitory, for most of the game all you have to go on is hearsay, as your first friend tells you:

“There are actually two Bells of Awakening. One’s up above, in the Undead Church. The other is far, far below in the ruins at the base of Blighttown. Ring them both, and something happens… Brilliant, right? Not much to go on, but I have a feeling that won’t stop you.”

All of which supports the idea that Dark Souls took what its forerunners did and inverted it—by making it more of a repeated cycle. After fighting against the environment for a long enough time, the chosen undead becomes his environment—and I think Phil Conner’s last words are key here “Let’s live here together”—in other words let’s not treat our world as a prison but rather as a paradise.

The thing that separates works like Groundhog Day and Dark Soulsapart from their predecessors, is that they don’t expect perfection from their protagonists (and players)—just perseverance. As a beloved teacher once told me “Just be the best you that you can be”. In the end Phil didn’t save Punxsutawney, and the Chosen Undead didn’t really save Lordran—what they did was finish a very long cycle, that spins upward towards some sort of redemption. It is the moment Phil’s day ends, the moment Truman Burbank steps through that stage, when Humphrey Bogart sends Ingrid Bergman off on that plane, and honestly, none of us knows what lies beyond that point.

Some of my references if anyone is especially curious: 3:29 is where the designer of Meroid admits the Alien influence https://youtu.be/EnXPLhf91rM And here is where you can see Mortal Kombat designers talk about how much they took from Big Trouble in Little China. http://mentalfloss.com/article/62727/15-things-you-might-not-know-about-mortal-kombat Here is where you can read about how Solid Snake is a direct homage to Snake Plissken from John Carpenter’s Escape From New York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_Plissken And for the biggest and most blatant influence

https://youtu.be/Wp_K8prLfso featured image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Time-Travel.jpg

Quests and MDA

“A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There’s this only because there’s that; if we don’t look up, we’ll never know what’s down. Think of it, boy. We find ourselves only by looking at what we’re not. You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.”

-Paul Auster, Moon Palace

If every quest is as Jeff Howard says “a journey across a symbolic, fantastic, landscape” (xi), then we must first diagnose what the symbolism of Superbrothers:Sword and Sorcery EP is. The well here is deep, and resonant, but the one theme that permeates the work like soft rain, is the idea that a balance must be struck in our lives. Between sleep and dreams, between when we play games and when we step away from them, when we’re deeply in love, and when we’re deeply alone. In this age when we focus on doing the right thing, avoiding the wrong, and having priorities, Sword and Sorcery raises a finger and tells us that we must strive for moderation in things above all else. To quote the narrator of this tale:

“We think of wakefulness & the mythopoetic psychocosmology of dreams as separate states, however they interoperate in curious ways.
The threshold of liminality is a space in-between wakefulness & dreams where directed thought is impossible.
Seek the warm hearth & allow sleep to come to discover the threshold of liminality”

The Archetype

Think of sleep here as synecdoche for all aspects of life. The game itself asks you to play only in sessions–We must unite all sides of our lives not only to beat the game, but also to succeed outside the world of the game.

Mechanics: Sword and Sorcery is a game that seems to have very little pretensions of being a played as a game. It instead refers to its episodes as “sessions” that are specifically for people suffering from “acute soul sickness”, what this all means is up for interpretation but it reinforces the idea that S&S is aims to be more therapeutic than entertaining. You control a nameless warrior known only as the Sythian, by tapping where to go and what interact with. She is on a woeful errand that is in many ways, a wicked satire of the standard adventure, collecting maguffins, dueling monsters, and talking to npcs. But the main mechanic that sticks out, is when you shift worlds from the waking to the dream world, and also when you switch from the game world to reality at the end of the session. S&S wants your time away from it to be just as important as your time playing.

Dynamics: If I was to ascribe one word to describe how playing Sword and Sorcery feels like, it would be pensive—S&S is about an attitude, not story. As I played I got sucked into the music, into the feel of the world, not the story or the characters themselves. To use a metaphor, it’s more abstract than pastoral in nature. Rather than inhabiting the Sythian like most video game protagonists, I felt like we were working in partnership to complete goals. Playing the game in effect felt like reading an episodic story rather than a standard game plot as it encourages us stop and take in what you’ve experienced before continuing. The more I played it, the more I realized it is not a game about challenge or competition so much as a game about giving you dream fuel, food for thought, and other things to ponder on. As it’s name suggests, it’s more song than game—you need to let it wash over you.

Aesthetics: According to Howard, “The meanings of quest games emerge from strategic actions, but these actions have thematic, narrative, and personal implications” (xiii) we usually play games for the sheer experience, putting the world outside aside to be enveloped. There is a beauty in this, to be sure, to lose oneself to another world entirely. But according to this description, if quest games are supposed to have personal implications, which mean that there are elements besides the quest itself. Without coming back to reality, without waking from our dream it is all for naught. Constantly in S&S: EP there is a theme of waking and sleep (partaking of the mushrooms, searching logfella’s dream etc.) of fighting followed by calm, and so on. It goes back to Jeff Howard, and even further back to Joseph Campbell’s original Hero of a Thousand Faces, to quote Campbell’s book directly:

As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. (33.2)

Every time we play a video game, we are in a sense inhabiting two disparate worlds. Quests by Jeff Howard’s definition and Campbell’s operate on a similar principle. A hero leaves his old world behind and enters another one, or the quest proper begins. But it’s the new beginning, the “Life-enhancing return” at the end of the adventure that makes the journey meaningful, and sadly we are forgetting that in all forms of escapism. The escape becomes all there is to it. Sword and Sorcery wants us to find meaning in both worlds… to take the third pill.

MDA in The Stanley Parable or Her Story

MDA in The Stanley Parable or Her Story

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

― Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland

The Stanley Parable operates on many levels, but the main one—or rather the one I find most interesting is its obsession with choices. Choices aren’t a selling point of video games so much as they are treated as the main all-encompassing point of the medium. The Parable is a double agent so to speak, in that it is a game that offers a variety of options but then begins to point out the flaws in having such a system, to quote the game directly, when the narrator specifically says,

“But now here comes the real question: what do you think would have happened if you had told me that you wanted this to stop? Do you think it would have been particularly different? Would I have taken this same idea but rephrased it superficially to fit that answer?”

The Parable has its mind set on pulling the rug out from under the idea that games can have an endless amount of choices, and intents to debunk the notion, while at the same time having a laugh at it all. Here is how I think it goes about this:

Mechanics: Parable is all about hiding in plain sight, and that can be felt on a molecular level right down to its game play. It presents a First Person Perspective with standard movement inputs. Arrows to move, mouse to look around, and you click on objects to interact with them. But there is no challenge outside decision making, you play as Stanley, a man who leaves his office one day to discover all his co-workers were gone… what could it mean? All the while an omniscient narrator dissects all of your actions. Stanley must decide how to follow this narrative; does he stay in his office? Does he go through the left or right door? This is all you’ll really do for the entirety of the game but it ends being crucial to the Aesthetics of the game.

Dynamics: It had been many years since I had been drawn into a game the way I was drawn into The Stanley Parable. I realized aspects of my own personality as I blatantly disobeyed the narrator at every turn, delighting in his dissatisfaction–willfully ignoring his attempts to shoo me onto the right path. Eventually my personal quest escalated into not just doing the fun endings but finding all the endings and pushing the game’s boundaries to the breaking point. By doing this, little did I realize I was playing right into the game’s hands, it wanted me not to make choices so much as compare and contrast choices. Getting one ending in The Stanley Parable is not enough; you must experience all of them for the full effect. No matter what, we always wake up in that same room… ready to play again. No ending grants the greater meaning we’re looking for, or resolves the mystery. Even the paths that seem to break the game were intended all along.

Aesthetics: The Stanley Parable, like the Cheshire Cat, is quick to offer directions and nudges on where to go, but reminds us that no matter what path we take, we’ll always wake up in the same room, ready to take another path. The game doesn’t take issue with branching narrative, nor does it think there needs to be a solution to the limited nature of interactive fiction, it just invites you to contemplate on the matter. For this reason, I do not think it fits into any category of the eight Aesthetics but blazes a new one entirely; Satire, or games as social commentary on other games. It’s about examining and analysis and more than anything else, it wants to change the way you look at other games not just itself.

Luis Bunuel

“The Good Spaniard
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
(Shakespeare Act III Scene I, Prospero)

Luis Buñuel seemed like a troubled man—not in a destructive way like Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, or Errol Flynn, but in his thoughts, anxieties, and concerns. Reading his vivid biography reveals a person consumed with death, memory, and how every moment of our life is eventually lost in time like tears in rain—it is in a sense his main theme.

Like the films he made in life, he starts the biography nonlinearly from the end. He is growing old; his memory has started to fade, and he recalls how his own mother lost her mind to the point where she could not even recognize Luis anymore. He feels like he is waiting for the fog of old age to scramble and obscure his own memories; “I search and search, but it’s always futile, and I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s” (Buñuel 96).

It is 1982, a year before the great filmmaker would depart this world, and Buñuel is starting to sound a lot like Shakespeare’s Prospero. Like the wizard, the aging artist has broken his own magic staff so to speak, he has retired from filmmaking where his anxieties, worries, and futile outlook were boons rather than deterrents.

The book is aptly named; Buñuel is more than aware that his book really is his last sigh in a weary world that is marching defiantly on. And so, the great man had not much left but to ponder the life he had left behind—but even that is difficult for Buñuel. Like Marcel Proust before him, he mistrusts his own memory, knowing full well that he is the director of his past memories the same way he would direct a film.

Our imagination, our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths. Of course fantasy and reality are equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance (Buñuel 117).

However, the great thing about memory is how freeing it is, like the best Buñuel pictures his biography is not limited to space and time and so we travel back, before the cameras started rolling, before Franco fell, to a small village in southern Spain that obstinately refused to change its ways or fall prey to outside trends—Calanda.

The year is 1900, and Leonardo Buñuel and Maria Portoles are about to have their first of seven children: Luis Buñuel Portoles. Reflecting back on his youth, Buñuel would describe Calanda as a place where “the middle ages lasted until World War I” (Buñuel 138), an untouched setting where progress is seen as a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy. It was at this age that he would have a long-lasting encounter with death, after discovering the carcass of a rotting animal (the residents of Calanda believing that the corpses were good for the crops);

A dead donkey lay about a hundred yards away, swollen and mangled, serving as a banquet for a dozen vultures, not to mention several dogs. The sight of it both attracted and repelled me… I stood there hypnotized, sensing that beyond this rotten carcass lay some obscure metaphysical significance (Buñuel 185).

Thus, began Buñuel’s long journey away from orthodox believer to an irreverent iconoclast. Death was only one of the many interests that would come to dominate his later work. In his formative teenage years, he would grow to reject the omnipresent Catholic church, decrying it as corrupt. He would later say of his relationship to God:

What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn’t pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it’s as if he didn’t. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery… And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I’ve chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact (Buñuel 2726).

When I think of Buñuel, I don’t get the impression of Woody Allen-esque hopelessness, but a detached ironic amusement. Watching his films of the 70’s, he shows a bizarre and out-of-synch world devoid of meaning, but instead of being sad—Buñuel laughs. The late Roger Ebert would say of the filmmaker:

Buñuel was cynical, but not depressed. We say one thing and do another, yes, but that doesn’t make us evil–only human and, from his point of view, funny. He has been called a cruel filmmaker, but the more I look at his films the more wisdom and acceptance I find (Ebert).

It is safe to assume that living through the Spanish Civil War, a strong Catholic upbringing, and his painful transition to America, all gave the filmmaker a rather harsh view of the world, but it seems as he was always armed with humor. The world is terrible according to Buñuel, but also hilarious and fascinating in an almost anthropological sense. He was in some ways the forerunner of hipster auteur Wes Anderson whose own films are both highly melancholic yet filled with dry comedic moments. Again, quoting Ebert,

“Most of the films of Luis Buñuel are comedies in one way or another, but he doesn’t go for gags and punch lines; his comedy is more like a dig in the ribs, sly and painful” (Ebert).

After a long career in Spain, France, Mexico and America, Luis Buñuel would spend his last weeks of life in a Mexico City hospital supposedly debating theology with longtime friend Julian Pablo. He died July 29, 1983. True to his character, most accounts say he wasn’t scared of death. His lifelong friend, Jean-Claude Carrière would say of him:

Luis waited for death for a long time, like a good Spaniard, and when he died, he was ready. His relationship with death was like that one has with a woman. He felt the love, hate, tenderness, ironical detachment of a long relationship, and he didn’t want to miss the last encounter (Carriere).

And so, much like Prospero, Luis Buñuel; giant of the cinema, did not rage against the dying light but merely with almost transcendent acceptance retired and died, his imagination, and presumably his memories lost in time—luckily for us though, we still have his films.

Works Cited

Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Carriere, Jean-Claude. Luis Buñuel Remembered by Jean-Claude Carriere. Retrieved from https://magicktheatre.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/luis-bunuel-remembered-by-jean-claude-carriere/. Accessed 18 Feb 2019.
Ebert, Roger. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Roger Ebert.com. Retrieved from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-discreet-charm-of-the-bourgeoisie-1972. Accessed 18 Feb 2019.
Shakespeare. The Tempest. Act III, SceneI. Retrieved from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/full.html. Accessed 18 Feb 2019.

The Lost Scientist

“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
-David Cronenberg

There is a particular movie hero that is lost to time, that existed briefly, flourished and then vanished at the dawn of the 1960’s, never to be seen again—the 50’s B-Movie Scientist. Movies change. The tides ebb and flow, the moon waxes and wanes, presidents come and go, and even movies aren’t the same as they were. In the 1950’s the landscape of film was steeped in the atomic age. Suddenly Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, and their friends weren’t scary anymore—we needed monsters that were capable of conquering the entire world, whether they were aliens, science experiments gone awry, or a gorilla wearing a space helmet (that last one actually gets the closest out of any of them).

But man has fought monsters on film for as long as movies have existed, Thomas Edison himself was responsible for some of these early… let’s be charitable here film experiments. But there is one thing that sets the horde of 50’s shlock B movies apart from the rest of the crowd—the scientist hero. It has long been my theory that each decade espouses its own movie hero, its ideal, its Charles Atlas for us to look up to. In the 30’s and 40’s we had the jaded detective (Maltese Falcon, Dark Passage, The Big Sleep) in the 80’s thanks in large part to WrestleMania, the testosterone and the violence was pumped up, suddenly, we needed action heroes who weren’t just mentally up the task but physically too (Predator, Robocop, Commando, First Blood).

This smoothed out in the 90’s into the more relatable everyman protagonist (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard) who still had to kick ass but was emotional, unsure of himself, and had a down to earth personality. All of this leaves the peculiar brand of 1950’s scientist heroes oddly alone. It would not be hard to imagine a scenario where Sam Spade would share drinks and stories with Robocop and Roger Murtaugh, but what about Dr. Cal Meacham from This Island Earth, Dr. Miles Bennell form Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Commander John J. Adams from Forbidden Planet? They are in some ways the spiritual successors of Arthur’s Knights, with the stiff upper lip of the British mixed lovingly with the cocksure bravado that comes with being American. But that alone is not what makes them different.

In the decades before, Raymond Chandler would lay out the qualities the ideal hero would have to possess; “He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” The heroes of the atomic age were no different, but we saw fit to add one more crucial quality to the formula—raw intelligence.

Dr. Miles Bennell was likeable, smooth talking, and honorable to be sure, but he came equipped with intellect, deductive reasoning, and a PhD in Psychology. He is an analyzer not a man of action, his chief weapon against the aliens is his brain.

“Maybe they’re the result of atomic radiation on plant life or animal life. Some weird alien organism—a mutation of some kind… whatever it is, whatever intelligence or instinct it is that
govern the forming of human flesh and blood out of thin air, is fantastically powerful…All that body in your cellar needed was a mind…”

Miles is by no means an isolated case, looking around the veritable explosion of science fiction films of the time reveals almost nothing but doctors. The Fly’s Andre Delambre, the unnamed Professor from Robot Monster, the entire horde of scientists’ aboard steamboat Rita in Creature from the Black Lagoon, noble scientists were as viral as the chicken pox—but why?

Why for an entire decade of film history was the average American in love with the idea of a scientist hero, who wore lab coats instead of fedoras—I have a theory. When the nightmare that was World War II ended America now looked for new terrors, threats beyond our solar system, the fear of technology gone awry, but there was something else—a hope for a new kind of lifestyle, and a new kind of man. If the monsters in these movies represented our fear and paranoia, the scientists represent mankind’s perseverance, intellect, and ability to reason.

All of these films would pave the way for the next generation of sci-fi heroes. The negative and ugly sides of scientific progress would fall by the wayside, as Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek would go on to focus on the idealism and the romance of the cosmos. James T. Kirk would embody the smarts and heroism of his ancestors, but he was never corrupted, never succumbed to some horrible fate, and always preserved in the face of evil.

Through all our existence, the frightened and faint hearted have been warning men not to push any further, not to learn any more, not to hope grow, and exceed themselves. I don’t believe we can stop I don’t believe we’re meant to… I must point out the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk is our business.

By the time the 70’s rolled around, the mantle of sci-fi hero passed from Kirk to Skywalker, whose intellect took a back seat to spirituality—but the idealism remained. The lone scientist hero may indeed seem a pastiche from a bygone era, but their spirit lives on. The Scientist and his reluctance to violence, slowness to anger, and intellectual pursuits can still be seen today, in the forms of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Dr. Stephen Strange, and other Marvel mainstays. They are, if anything else, a reminder to analyze our surroundings, to question authority, and to fight back against the unknown till our knuckles bleed and our life spark goes out.

“Alta, about a million years from now the human race will have crawled up to where the Krell stood in their great moment of triumph and tragedy. And your father’s name will shine again like a beacon in the galaxy. It’s true, it will remind us that we are, after all, not God.”
-Forbidden Planet

Arthurian Seasons

“And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury, Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the Summer Sea.”

-The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

As the embers of the bonfire flared before my character in Dark Souls, I exhaled stress and breathed in relief. I set the controller down—it was time for a break. My mind began to drift, and I began asking myself “Why do I do this? Why do I do anything?” It seemed to me that most of what I did, in school, in work, and in relationships was Sisyphean in nature, requiring so much effort for little to no payoff. Sadness consumed me, it seemed year after year I was losing my idealism layer by layer like a snowman left out in the rain. Then it hit me… I was like one of Arthur’s knights in a way.

We wander strange paths in this life we call home. Our quest for meaning seems to begin as soon as we leave the womb, agitated and acutely aware to our first new sensation—discomfort.

Strangest of all though, is what we do after the halcyon days of childhood. Faced with an uncaring world and a seemingly indifferent universe, most of us turn to art & entertainment to help soothe us. But is our art so different from the chaotic lives we lead?

While there is a continual glut of safe, conventional, sitcom TV to pacify us, the remarkable thing are the stories that endure for centuries. What really seems to beguile us are the open-ended stories, tales that refuse to give us closure, the ones with dreams that stay distant, like the green light at the end of Gatsby’s pier, Kane’s sled burning in the fire, it is the leopard that sits atop Kilimanjaro seeking who knows what—it is the yearning for more. In his last play The Tempest, Shakespeare wrote:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.”

It would seem, we humans have a strange fascination with the questions we seem to have no answers to, the puzzles that are unsolvable, and the journeys that go on indefinitely. It’s why we play Dark Souls even though we die, die, and die again and why we love Game of Thrones even when our favorite character is beheaded… But long before From Software’s Dark Souls was formed, before F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the last lines to the Great Gatsby, and before even the Bard himself lived, there was another story about an endless quest—the Arthurian Legend. In many ways it is the bedrock of our modern-day stories, containing the romance of a bygone period, flights of fantasy, and the nightmare of reality. So how did echoes of it end up in Dark Souls? And what exactly is the moral, if any of this rather sad story? We must go deeper.

Strange Heroes and Unheeded Warnings

The many stories that surround Arthur come from different authors, across various languages, countries, and time periods (with the majority emerging from the late 11^th the 13^th centuries) but it wasn’t until Chretien De Troye’s Story of the Grail, that the titular Grail was introduced as the end all be all quest…and more importantly it shifts the mantle of hero from Arthur to another knight—Percival. Whereas Arthur was cunning, intelligent, and up to task, Percival is described as something of a hayseed, a dirty peasant who isn’t even aware of what a knight is. As Crash Course History’s Mike Rugnetta puts it:

“[Percival] is maybe not the kind of knight you’re used to, he’s a very brave young man but he’s not the sharpest lance in the armory… it also turns out his chivalry and naiveté play big parts in his Hero’s Journey. When our story begins Percival is living alone with his mom in the Waste Forest… which sounds unpleasant”

My mind went back to Dark Souls, my own hero and yet another connection to the Arthur myth. He looked more like a putrefying corpse that happens to walk upright—hardly anyone you’d expect to take up a heroic pilgrimage. And like Percival, our Chosen Undead arrives not in a glamorous wonderland but in a wasteland—a place that needs healing. On top of all that, instead of a wise old sage, the only mentor the Chosen Undead has is a sardonic and mean-spirited wanderer who has given up on life.

“Well, what do we have here? You must be a new arrival.
Let me guess. Fate of the Undead, right? Well, you’re not the first.
But there’s no salvation here. You’d have done better to rot in the Undead Asylum… But, too late now. Well, since you’re here… Let me help you out..”

This is for better or worse, your call to adventure. No grand heroic tidings or princesses are promised you—you’re only warned. The Chosen Undead may not look the part, but he certainly acts it. Despite the sensible warnings of the Crestfallen Warrior, he pressed on towards an uncertain and mysterious goal—maybe out of an absurd desire, perhaps just because there aren’t other options given you.

All of which mirrors Percival’s own call to adventure. After discovering that he indeed is of noble heritage, he sets off on his own quest. But Percy’s mother is a woman of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Her husband and Percival’s brothers were knights who were killed in battle—and so now she must confront him about the real down-to-earth dangers of knighthood—the nightmares of reality.

496 His mother did all she could

497 to keep him there and make him stay

498 while she prepared his trappings:

506 but she could only keep him three days, no longer!

507 Her cajoling became useless.

508 Then his mother was seized by a strange mourning.

509 In tears, kissing him, embracing him,

510 she said, “I feel very sad

511 my beloved son, seeing you leave.

512 You will go to the King’s court,

513 and you will ask him to give you arms.

514 He won’t argue,

515 he’ll give them to you, I’m sure.

516 But when the time comes to bear them

517 and to use them, what will happen then?

518 How will you succeed

519 in something you have never done,

520 nor seen another do?

In our minds quests always have happy endings, but in the real world, in Arthurian tales, and yes even in Dark Souls—the truth is that quests are dangerous, ill-advised, and often result in failure. But perhaps that’s just it, we need something that we’re willing to die for… or perhaps live for is the better way of putting it. The aesthetic distance between art and reality was closing in on me.

With these warnings our quests almost seem too foolhardy to even attempt. It was beginning to get harder and harder to separate myself from my player character, and from Perceval himself. Was the Chosen Undead the insane one for wanting to continue on, or was I the one forcing us to wander into a strange questline? After all who was making the decisions here? I reflected back on what brought me to these thoughts… relationships that stifled and disintegrated, unrequited love, questions of my own faith, existence, all things that seemed to recede into the mist like the holy grail itself—leaving not a rack behind.

Sacrifices and Unhappy Endings

It’s the late 1990’s, I have a portable TV set, and a stack of VHS tapes from which to choose, but among those, one is my personal favorite, it wasn’t Disney, it wasn’t even animated, and it certainly wasn’t for children—but that didn’t stop me. When you started the film, you were greeted by amazing music and white titles on a black background that read:

England

932 A.D.

Shimmering dark grey mists rolled over green terrain, the sound of hooves, and out of the fog came two men, one hunched and filth covered (I would one day look up to the actor playing this man as one of my all-time heroes, but for now I just see him as a guy covered in shit) the other, is regal, bearded, and wears a crown. It should be noted however, that they are not mounted on horses but are pantomiming riding horses (my mom explains to me that it’s a joke, I don’t know if I quite understand but it’s still fascinating) and the sound of hooves is actually the filth covered man banging halves of coconuts together. The film as you might have guessed, is the 1975 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, directed by Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam, and it was both my favorite film and my first exposure to King Arthur, his Knights, Camelot (a silly place), and the Holy Grail.

I loved that movie, for me it was pure escapism—and somehow it all managed to be funny even though not a single person in that film acts anything but deadly serious. I didn’t have a clue who Monty Python was or what he had to do with the movie, but who cares when the story is so wonderful? However, there was one thing I never understood about that film. It baffled me for years and seemed oddly out of place (even for a movie with a flying killer rabbit)—it was the bizarre and anticlimactic ending.

Arthur has only one surviving knight, Bedivere the wise, as the two make their way on a ghostly ship to a castle on a lake where the Holy Grail is being held. They arrive at the front entrance… whereupon they are greeted by having shit dumped all over them from the battlements by their mortal enemies—the French.

They slink away, and amass a large army out of seemingly nowhere, and are about to lay siege to the French, and recover the grail once and for all—they charge.

“French persons! Today the blood of many a valiant knight shall be avenged. In the name of God, we shall not stop our fight till each one of you lies dead and the Holy Grail returns to those whom God has chosen”

They charge. All of a sudden modern-day policemen show up, arrest King Arthur without a word, and shut down the films production. That’s it. My favorite movie builds to a grand finale but just ends without a word or any sign of resolution.

Little did I know that this is quite literally how all stories about Arthur end. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Story of the Grail, the text that introduces the Grail, ends abruptly in the middle of Percy’s quest, Chretien De Troye never even finished the story. Perceval learns the truth about the Grail, that in his questing he caused his mother to die of grief—and now must seek penitence for his selfishness—and then nothing. We never see his quest all the way through. It turns out that the funhouse mirror version of Arthur’s Knight found in the world of Monty Python is actually a replica of how his adventure really ended.

While Percival’s story is sad, Arthur’s tale is downright tragic. In Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, after pages upon pages of Arthur trying to put down the usurper, Mordred (his own son), he crowns himself king right under Arthur’s very nose. It is at this point that Mallory himself chimes in to offer his own sorrows.

“Lo, ye, all Englysshemen, se ye nat what a myschyff here was? For he that was the moste kynge and nobelyst knyght of the worlde, and most loved the felyshyp of noble knyghtes – and by hym they all were upholdyn – and yet myght nat thes Englyshemen holde them contente with hym. Lo, thus was the olde custom and usayges of thys londe; and men say that we of thys londe have nat yet loste that custom.” (680.25-31)

Mallory places the blame on Arthur’s political defeat on mankind’s longing for “new fangill”or in modern day speak; preferring novelty to the status quo, and fads to the long-standing tradition. In effect, Arthur loses his throne due to being too good and far too conventional—which sounds sadly none too different from our own times. The values that were the bedrock for Arthur’s Kingdom are thrown out and replaced by evil—in the end it wasn’t an invading army or a horrible monster that uprooted Camelot, it was mere boredom.

But what does any of that have to do with Dark Souls, and my own life? Your own Chosen Undead’s choices aren’t much better at the end of your quest. Either light a bonfire that enables dying gods to continue to wilt for another century or so until another usurper takes over your spot, or let the flame die out and let the age of men begin, ushering a short time where you are now king—but again that only lasts until the next cycle, where a new Undead will have to do the exact same thing—are we stuck in a pattern? After all, Arthur’s kingdom fades away not long after he dies, quickly corruption spreads into his court and his age of chivalry gives way to greed. So, if quests are in vain, only cause grief, and seem bound to fail no matter how long the good times last… then the real question is, why even bother?

Resurrection and the Hope that Remains

It’s 2014, and I haven’t been in America for a long time now. I teach English in the city of Hradec Kralove, East of Prague. My students are a group of extremely enthusiastic young people, some have even said I changed their lives and that I’m their best friend. I care about all of them, but one of them stands out from the rest. She’s 18 years old, with jet black hair, glasses, pale skin, and almost always wears slick stockings—her name is Susan. It’s an open secret that we’re in love with each other, the students know, the other teachers know—everyone knows. Even Adam, the strict by the books Englishman who’s assigned to watch over me, if anything overtly romantic happens between Susan and me, he’s the one to turn me over to my boss. Maybe it’s because Adam was my best friend at the time, and that after years of abuse from our fellow staff he finally had found someone who he could be himself around. Regardless of his reasons why, he never says anything to anyone. The truth is, that everyone loved Susan. When she walks into the room, I can hear other students whisper under their breath how bewitched they are, and even the other teachers, none too subtlety allude to her attractiveness. For whatever reason, she sees past them all and chooses to spend her time with me. For a few months, things are bliss. But something does happen—they decide to transfer me hundreds of miles away.

I’m not happy. That night I’m bombarded with phone calls and texts from students and friends to find out if I’m leaving—they take the news better than I do. Susan sends me a vague text saying she has one final gift for me… my fellow staff and I all wonder what it could be. I’ll find out soon as I wait for her, wearing my red wool hat so she’ll find me in the crowd. Susan finds me in no time, hugs me, and presses a letter into my hand. We talk about things I can’t remember, but it will be the last time we see each other for a very long time. She’s heading to Paris, and I’m heading West to Moravia. When we part, Adam, who had been watching the whole affair, walks up to me and scolds me for hugging her—twice. I shrug it off, he has yet to make good on any of his threats. Later that week, he too would be saying goodbye to me—but he took it much harder than Susan did. Getting on the bus, I could see him out the window staring at me. He smiles at me and I realize that tears are streaming down his cheeks as his face turns red.

It sets in that I have not only lost the only girl who ever loved me, but three of my best friends, and a horde of students—most of whom I would find out, stopped going after I left. I pull out the iPod I smuggled for the five-hour journey, my boss thinks it’s full of good Christian Hymns but really, it’s loaded up with the Beatles, the song I play is She’s Leaving Home. As my bus leaves Hradec Kralove, I pull out the letter and begin to read. That was the Spring, before everything went so horribly wrong. I don’t know it yet, but I’m about to embark on three and a half years of depression, therapy, and hardship. I cling to that memory because it was the moment I knew that no matter what happens next, I had made Hradec Kralove a better place.

It’s the present once again, and my Chosen Undead has just killed the Lord of Cinder, my hours of toil, blood, sweat, and tears are done. I take a moment to drink it all in, after all, once I light that final bonfire it’s all over. After my character reaches his pale hand into the darkness and sets himself and the surrounding area on fire, I have only one question on my mind. “Now it’s time for Dark Souls 2”—that’s how I feel after every game, like I’m going onto the next story, group of characters, and land that needs healing. I think in his own way, that’s what Arthur thought as he lay dying on the Isle of Avalon, that perhaps he would one day return to bring his golden age back from legends into reality, but for now he has to go to the land of the dead. In the end, maybe our life’s journey isn’t to fix things forever but to make things better for a season, to experience wonderful springs, long summers, and tragic winters. As I close the book on another year, my mind goes to the words on Arthur’s gravestone.

Here lies Arthur, king who was and King who will be.

MDA in Atari Adventure and Colossal Cave Adventure

“Somewhere lost in the clouded annals of history lies a place that few have seen—a mysterious place called the Unknown, where long forgotten stories are revealed to those who travel through the wood” – Over the Garden Wall

To play games like Colossal Cave Adventure and its companion piece Atari Adventure is in many ways entering the Unknown—with only text as our guide in the former, and with extremely rudimentary graphics in the latter, we are left to ourselves to find the adventure, create the characters, and the motivations.

Going through these narratives (especially Colossal Cave Adventure) I found myself experiencing a feeling I haven’t felt in a video game since Earthbound—the feeling of being lost, and of not knowing how to proceed… and it was beautiful. The Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics all work together to create that feeling of losing yourself to an environment–of walking into another world. Rather than being disparate elements, they’re all working together in harmony to evoke that mysterious feeling—to get sucked into the Unknown.

Mechanics play a strong role towards that feeling of being lost, Colossal Cave Adventure throws you into a forest beside a house with no map and only vaguely tells you how to begin your quest. The lack of tutorial I think is key here. If the game had laid out precisely what to do or had some sort of fairy guide character I think the effect would be ruined.

To move our adventurer you simply type where to go and which objects to interact with. You have an inventory with a limited number of slots for items, and later on you learn magic spells to teleport you around (adding to the maze like nature of the CCA). The mechanics here are essential to that feeling of wonder. With no visuals, you are left to your own accord to draw up a map, and discover which directions you’ve traveled.

Atari Adventure begins in a very similar fashion, you start off in a cave and once again you aren’t given much background information. You move left and right, pick up objects, and avoid dragons that look suspiciously like giant ducks. Your goal is to retrieve a chalice from an evil wizard. Not unlike CCA the mechanics reinforce the feeling of entering a new space, of entering into the Unknown. What these objects are and what you do with them to advance is up for you to find out.

Dynamics: Starting CCA felt like waking up with amnesia, simply finding my bearings proved difficult as I wandered meadows, rivers, and eventually worked my way into the cave. I wrestled with the text trying desperately to unlock the grate, and found myself sinking into that other worldly feeling of being a lost adventurer.

Atari Adventure unlike Colossal Cave Adventure begins you in the cave, and as soon as I began to move those terrible dragons descended upon me, blocking my progress at every point. It took an online glossary for me to realize that the arrow thing was indeed a sword. It was touch and go, but my avatar and I made it through.

Aesthetics really are the pinnacle of this mountain; I firmly believe that the motive behind both Colossal Cave Adventure and Atari Adventure wasn’t to create a time killing program but to walk past normal life and evoke a fantasy setting—with all of the ups and downs that come with that strange world. They both undoubtedly fall into Fantasy or Games as Make Believe but also Discovery as both games are predicated on finding or searching both times without maps or notes beyond the instruction manuals.

In these stories you stride forth into the shadows… and hopefully like Greg and Wirt, eventually find the way back out again.

I Have A Plan

Arthur Miller

“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life” – Arthur Miller

When I think of Arthur Miller I cannot help but think of the harsh realism he portrays in his plays. Nowhere is this more evident than in Death of A Salesmen, a stark look at a decaying family through the eyes of an increasingly cruel and mentally unstable man—Willy Loman.

Willy is a senile old salesman, failing in his work, alienating his family, and slipping in and out of paranoid delusions. Miller does not simply give us these characters to pity or gawk at them, but to ask a question. What is the American dream — is it attainable? And what led Willy to his untimely downfall?

The play never really answers that question, but the ride it took me on was one I will scarcely forget anytime soon. Everyone I have met has had different reactions to this play, its characters, and the morality of it. From the very get go, I despise Willy more than I pity him and I find Biff to be the most like-able of the cast, and yet others feel exactly the opposite.

The complete and utter subjectivity of it all is what makes it an incredible rare experience. Watching this play is like peering into fog — you can make out shapes but you cannot discern what’s going on behind the scenes.

Death of A Salesmen is not an easy play; it is not escapism so much as a hard slap of realism, but it is also thoughtful and makes even the lowliest characters admirable in some way. It is a tour de force on every level.

Mechanics as Metaphor in Thomas Was Alone and Loneliness / One and One Story

Mechanics as Metaphor

in Thomas Was Alone and Loneliness

— One and One Story

“The Medium is the Message”

-Marshall McLuhan

What a wonderful game. While guiding the blocky hero of Thomas was Alone from portal to portal in his sad world, I was reminded of the oldest piece of writing advice there is; Show Don’t Tell. If I were to make one adjustment to that phrase to better fit the structure of a Video Game, it would be Play Don’t Tell.

Take away the context and Thomas was Alone is no better than an Atari 2600 game that’s been left out in the rain. The game is merely shapes moving left and right, jumping, and seeking out the exit to a level. But with that marvelous narration, all of sudden this becomes an involved story and every action the tiny A.I.s take becomes part of their little character. Being able to change characters also adds flavor to what would have been a bland play through. You get to experience the world as multiple characters, which make you understand them so much more deeply. Take Chris for example, the sad bitter cube who follows Thomas and the buoyant John on their adventures. We don’t just accept Chris as a sad sack because we’re explicitly told he is, it’s that he plays like a loser.

While Thomas and John were always bouncy and fun, the struggle I had with Chris was excruciatingly painful at times, every time I missed a jump with the little guy I could hear his internal monologue scream in protest as Thomas once again had to help his friend to an otherwise easily reached ledge. And what about John? The wonderfully charismatic and athletic rectangle that clears gaps with an ease that would make Mario and Luigi bow their heads in shame. It’s when you play as John that you truly understand Chris’s plight– he’s angry because he feels useless in comparison, always holding up the rest of group. In the end I eventually began to love Chris and see him as a guy who was just constantly angry with himself and his shortcomings—I think all of us have been a Chris at one point.

It is easy to think of Thomas Was Alone as the rebuttal to Loneliness, both are about cubes that seek out greater meaning in life. But Loneliness wallows in pity, sadness and misery and offers no answer to end the torment. Thomas is a bit more nuanced, in that it shows us that people (or Artificial Intelligence in this case) can make a difference and even experience change, friendship and meaning but you have to look for it. If Thomas, in all his blocky heroic greatness, could sit down with the unnamed protagonist of Loneliness he would tell him that life is for the living… and then probably help him get to a hard to reach ledge so they could escape—together. The medium truly is the message here, and were Thomas was Alone made in another medium other than a video game it would be as forgettable as tears in rain, but here it is a beautiful and unforgettable fable about an unusual 2D hero and his quest to save his friends.

Enoch’s Big Date

Short silly film for a course at the University of Utah as part of my film major. Thanks to our actors.

Send me no Flowers

Short film for a course at the University of Utah, film and media arts. Music from Doris Day, Send me no Flowers.

Recovery and escape

Recovery and Escape

Then suddenly he stopped…the hobbits sat still before him, enchanted; and it seemed as if, under the spell of his words, the wind had gone and the clouds had dried up, and the day had been withdrawn, and darkness had come from the East and the West, and all the sky was filled with the light of white stars

Whether the morning and evening of one day or of many days had passed Frodo could not tell. He did not feel either hungry or tired, only filled with wonder. The stars shone through the window and the silence of the heavens seemed to be round him. He spoke at last out of his wonder a sudden fear of that silence. (Pg 128-129 )

Frodo in the house of Tom Bombadil.

I can never tell who’s more enchanted by this place – me (the reader) or the protagonist Frodo. I can still recall the first time I came across this passage, it was in a radio dramatization and for a moment I saw in my mind’s eye the tired weary eyes of Tom Bombadil as he sat and time slowed to a halt. Bombadil stands as this great gaping hole in the Tolkien mythos where anything and everything he does is beyond explanation–and it really doesn’t need any explanation.

The day had been withdrawn… In terms of recovery and escape, Tom has delivered the hobbits from more than just Old Man Willow but reality itself, like in this passage, the wind had gone and the clouds had dried up. Is Tolkien speaking purely metaphorically here? As in, being with Bombadil makes it seem like the wind is gone and the clouds have dried up? I don’t think so, I believe entering into Tom’s house is a lot like falling into another dimension, not of sight and sound, but of mind.

He doesn’t just choose to not take part of the events of Middle-Earth, in many ways those events can’t even reach him. It’s as if Tom Bombadil is a book, and once you pick him up and start reading you cannot return to your world, but must enter his. Frodo is not just sitting at his feet listening, but you are too as soon as you read those passages.

There’s certainly fair and perilous parts to this effect, like in this part: he spoke at last out of his wonder a sudden fear of that silence. Losing your own reality and perception of things is not necessarily a pleasant experience. Frodo isn’t exactly thrilled at the feelings he’s having in the House of Bombadil, in many ways being around Tom is a lot like ingesting hallucinogens. You may have a pleasant experience but you open the door to a host of other unpleasant emotions that all have sway over you.

That to me is what enchantment is essentially, good and bad all at once while you’re experiencing it. That’s what makes any fantasy worth picking up and in general what makes life worth living. It’s the contrast between sweetness and bitterness that makes every story interesting, including our own lives. If I were to put this into a category of fantasy I’d have to reach for Liminal, as the hobbits aren’t really aware of what’s happening exactly. They didn’t cross borders into a strange realm, (which would fall into the Portal Quest terminology) they just stayed and listened to a strange man in the woods talk and they felt weird about it. They feel uncertain about the nature of Tom’s existence… and so do we.

Healing the Wasteland — How to write Heroism into a flawed character

Healing the Wasteland (but also the difference between Hollywood Heroes and Real Heroes)

“I’m not living, I’m just killing time”

-True Love Waits, Radiohead

“Once people realized that, ‘Hey, we’re going to be left on Earth here, and everything is going to hell quickly,’ sci-fi soon became about our own self-destruction.”

-Edgar Wright, director of Shaun of the Dead

The tag team of writer/director Edgar Wright and writer/actor Simon Pegg is proof of the vast importance of details in cinema. It is the reason why their underfunded indie Rom-Com Shaun of the Dead is held up as the true successor to George A. Romero’s series as opposed to the now forgotten Resident Evil films. Case in point, Shaun is a great study in heroism and how to write that into a flawed character. Children of Men’s Theo Ferron, The Last of Us’s Joel, Zombieland’s Columbus, these are examples of heroism done right.

Shan and Theo initially want to simply numb the pain of the apocalypse by drinking themselves through it, it’s only when they see how inescapable their situation is that they begin to grow as human beings. Similarly, (though I would argue with less finesse) Joel from the Last of Us really only becomes a hero once he willingly chooses to help Ellie. In order to really heal the wasteland and do something heroic, you cannot just look out for you and your own. It sounds obvious but often this fact ignored, as if being the protagonist is enough to earn an audience member’s affection. Look no further than the movie adaptation of World War Z for how not to write a heroic character, as Matt Stone said of the film during a South Park commentary;

“…Especially in World War Z where they just get the whole hero thing slightly wrong… The best part about World War Z where it shows how bad the hero part of it is, is when he [Gerry Lane] gets on the ship after the whole world has gone to shit and the guy says ‘You’re this great guy we need you to go in and help us’ and he goes ‘I won’t do it’… like what kind of fucking hero are you? Then he goes ‘Well we’ll kick your family off the ship’ and he’s like ‘Alright I’ll do it..’ like you piece of crap…”

Matt Stone may be known for satire, but he shows himself to be an attentive student of what makes a good hero’s story—sacrifice. If Gerry Lane (played with dull indifference by Brad Pitt) was supposed to be any indication of how to heal the wasteland, then we’d all be holed up in our homes without even a second thought for our fellow man. A good way to examine Children of Men, Shaun of the Dead, and The Last of Us, to see if they contain that elusive heroic element, is to look at who the lead character is at the beginning of the story, and who they’ve become at the end.

Shaun (Simon Pegg) for lack of a better term, is a floundering turd at the beginning of his titular film. He is essentially caught in a love triangle between his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) and a parasitic roommate named Ed (Nick Frost) that drains any source of maturity from him like a fat, greasy, vampire. After Liz dumps him, and a zombie infestation hits his town, he still clings to his old life—thinking that somehow, he can marry being a drunken slob with being a stand-up guy. When tasked with coming up with a plan to save Liz, the best he can muster is holing up in his local pub.

“Take car. Go to mum’s. Kill Phil, grab Liz, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over. How’s that for a slice of fried gold?”

Children of Men’s Theo Ferron (Clive Owen) is no better, though he retains a stiff upper lip, he is essentially a ghost floating through life. An aging bureaucrat, Theo resides in a world where women have become sterile leading mankind to dwindle on the brink of collapse. Robbed of a sense of purpose and renewal, humanity now just watches the clock until the last human drops dead. Theo himself was once a proud activist but having lost his own son now just twiddles his thumbs as he waits for judgement day.

“I can’t really remember when I last had any hope, and I certainly can’t remember when anyone else did either. Because really, since women stopped being able to have babies, what’s left to hope for?”

Which leaves us with The Last of Us, a horror game by Naughty Dog. Shedding their tradition of guns, adventures, beautiful women, and exotic locales, The Last of Us is a dreary, end of days fairy tale bereft of fun but heavy on emotion. The game’s protagonist is Joel (Troy Baker), whose idealism long since faded even before his apocalypse started. After losing his daughter in an attempt to escape an outbreak of human Cordyceps, (Read: Mushroom Zombies) Joel now exists in a state of limbo, surviving but not really for any purpose. Robbed of his fatherhood, now he seeks shelter in an uncaring world.

“People say you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Truth us, you knew what you had, you just never thought you’d lose it”

So far, all of these characters have succumbed to the wasteland. They’ve all been dealt bad hands and in a way are undead themselves, as a great Radiohead song once said: They’re not living, they’re just killing time. The twilight is setting fast for these men and unless something changes, they’ll exit their mortal plane as confused and unfulfilled as they entered it.

Shaun of the Dead, Children of Men, and The Last of Us all end up being stories about conclusion and transitions. Shaun may treat the zombie apocalypse the same way he treats everything, with squeamishness and hesitation—but once he sees his own mother become infected suddenly his maturation is sped up. It’s no longer merely an inconvenience and there is no Winchester to go back to. What’s done is done.

“[breaking down in tears] I don’t think I’ve got it in me to shoot my flatmate, my mum and my girlfriend all in the same evening”

Similarly, once Theo Ferron sees his estranged wife Julian (Julianne Moore) shot to death in front of him, he realizes that there are still things to lose, still things worth protecting—which prompts him to reach out towards a new person and thus a new mode of being. After meeting a young woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) who is miraculously pregnant, Theo now feels duty bound to his dead wife to escort her to the human project—a safe haven where her and the baby might be able to live free.

Perhaps due to the limitations of the medium, The Last of Us does not really have an exact moment you can point to and go “Ah yes this is the moment Joel becomes a hero”, it’s more a prolonged progression towards redemption. However, there are moments across the twelve-hour experience that when taken as a whole Joel’s movement towards heroism. He ends up being trusted with a girl named Ellie (Ashley Johnson) who proves to be immune to the Cordycep bite, meaning that she could be monumental in pursuing a cure. After discovering that a resistance movement called the Fireflies might not have Ellie’s best interests in mind, he takes matters into his own hands and escorts her personally. As seasons change, and fall turns to winter—you get the sense that there is a kindred spark between these two, and that for all his roughness, Joel is starting to thaw inside.

For any story to carry sort of weight, for it be lifted from entertainment to parable—change must be an element. In a Xen sort of way, the Wasteland can only be healed once we allow the waters of change and self-sacrifice to seep in. It’s the reason why the Arthurian legend lives on to this day, and why Hollywood fodder like World War Z falls to the wayside, forgotten by time. In the end, Shaun accepts that he must sacrifice his baser tendencies to deserve a woman like Liz, Theo understands that despite his loss of a child that does disqualify him from participating in humanity and Joel…. does exactly the same thing. It is at the end of the day, the difference between living and killing time.

Some references

https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/film/time-out-with-the-worlds-ends-edgar-wright-simon-pegg-and-nick-frost

True Love Waits – Radiohead [A Moon Shaped Pool 2016] from PLK on Vimeo.

Young Men Dead

A lonely knight was asleep in the saddle. Above him only stars and swaying trees greeted him as his horse strode forward slowly, the breeze messing up his hair as he slept. But, not far off in the brush… a band of highwaymen laid in wait for unsuspecting travelers. One of them sprang.The man in the saddle stirred just in time to deflect the bandit’s first blow with his short sword… only to be knocked in the back of the head by unseen enemy.

The strike knocked the young knight from his horse, after which he remembered no more. For what seemed like an eternity, he sunk into the mire of his mind, not knowing if he was awake or asleep.

All he could make out, all he could see, feel or touch, was a distant memory, now playing on an eternal loop in his brain. Of a cobblestone road, trees swaying in a summer breeze, a cottage, a family, and a young girl with red hair holding a pale of water. She was 12 years old. Suddenly she drops the bucket and runs away.

He neither fully comprehended nor attempted to make sense of these images. They simply were there, repeating themselves, again, and again, and again. He tried speaking to her once, but his words were unintelligible. The scene never changed or updated in plot. Until one day the girl was not there. She was no where. Fear seized him as he looked frantically.

When Alister awoke, he felt as though he had aged a million years in his sleep. Blood filled his mouth, his eyes could not open, and he had no idea where, or when he was. He could barely move one arm, the rest of his body seemed buried under a great amount of earth. Immovable from fingertips to toes.

He attempted to open his eyes. Blurred shapes greeted him as he turned his head to take in his surroundings. He saw colors and little else, green, yellow, and brown was all he could make out. Making a fist, he scooped up some earth and brought it close to his face. Mud. Sloppy, thick, mud, that chokes even the most resilient plants and animals. It was a far cry from the shallow puddles and streams Alister remembered dipping his feet into as a child, and the river Serni flowing peacefully beside his home. This was a bog. His strength failing him, his consciousness faded.

He had loved someone once. Still thought of her everyday in the saddle. The scene at the cottage returned, this time the trees had no leaves on them, the sky had transformed from pale blue to a burnt orange. The house was abandoned, and there was no sign of any girl.

Whether it was a shadow of the past or a vision of a near future, Alister could not say. As he stared he saw men in black approaching from the bad lands to the east.

He awoke. His eyes adjusted to the darkness surrounding him. Finally, after some effort, he could see where he was. He was covered in hardened mud up to his neck, with only his right arm completely free from the dirt. Above him tall trees swayed in an evening breeze. His horse had long since abandoned him, and now he lay motionless in the muck, the weight of his armor coupled with immense fatigue trapping him in silt.

He remembered now, he was in the land of Andrath, and he carried an urgent message. All that now all that seemed trivial and meaningless. The message, like every other event in his seemingly meaningless existence, would go unsung and unheard. Alister remembered the promise he had made to himself, to search for her, to make amends, to find the happiness that had eluded him his entire life.

“You filth… you’re lower than the pond scum you now lie in”

The trees seemed to sneer at him as he sunk deeper into mud and misery. He wanted to cover his face with hands and weep but he couldn’t even manage that in this state, so the tears fell into the earth. Suddenly the air grew chill, fear trickled into his heart and mixed with the despair that was already there. A dark figure was approaching him on foot from beyond the trees. Tall hooded, and carrying a sword, the other worldly looking thing seemed ripped out of the stuff of nightmares, of old ghost stories his nan would scare him with. Alister’s breath fogged out into tiny ghosts in the chill air. A cold sweat seized him.

He knew it was presumptuous, but he felt certain that this being was the perpetrator that had left him in this state… or was somehow connected. His movement was surprisingly fast, swaying between trees and shrubs, all the while walking closer and closer towards where he lay.

The hooded man was now only a few yards away. His demise seemingly imminent. Alister closed his eyes and through caked on dirt and blood, simply mouthed the words

“Help me”

Blue light burst from the trees, the dark figure shrieked, dropped its sword, and fled into the woods, its shape seeming to vanish like a shadow subjected to sunlight. Warmth encompassed Alister where before there had only been cold. Footsteps. Dry twigs snapped and from beyond the trees emerged a man, clad all in blue, with a Snow White beard. In one hand he held a wooden staff, and in the other a long pipe.

His eyes rested on the knight. They were old eyes, bright and full of wisdom. He breathed in and blew out a smoke ring.

“My, my but aren’t you in a spot of trouble”

His voice sounded a great deal younger than the figure it echoed out from. He strode forward, put his pipe in his mouth, and with one hand and a stunning amount of strength pulled Alister out of the mud. He let go, letting Alister collapse to the ground beside the mud. The young knight coughed and drew in heavy breathes.

“Not quite the best day you’ve been having now eh?”

Alister just stared at him.

“Silence is sometimes the best option eh?”

The old man sat on a stone across from him, took a long inhale from his pipe and blew out a glorious pink smoke ring that shimmered in the evening light and hung there indefinitely. Once again he spoke.

“You are a man of decidedly stubborn willpower Alister…. “

The knight blinked at him in disbelief.

“Yes I know your name… don’t bother asking why… just consider me your life advisor”

He blew out another smoke ring, this time bright orange.

“You’ve managed to stay angry at your parents for six years… sleeping under the hedge, living by the sword… and you almost died by the sword just now, had I not intervened on your behalf”

He smoked and looked off hard into the distance.

“Your father is dying… he can now count his life in months. I think you’d best make haste to his bedside”

He stood up, gathered up his walking stick, and began moving back into the wilderness where he had come from. As he was almost out of view though, he turned and said

“Ah yes… and she’ll be there too. I think you’ll find the years have been kind to her”

And with that the old man disappeared into the brush. Alister had said nothing during the whole exchange. He merely laid in the dirt, freed from his prison but startled, confused, and more than a little uneasy.

The Stranger in blue had known far too many details about his life. He was wonderful and terrible at the same time, and Alister quickly realized that without his help, he surely would have died at the hands of his mysterious attacker. What had been that foul creature’s goal? Alister knew nothing… and more importantly he wanted to keep it that way.

He felt a soft wetness on his cheek. He turned to find his horse suddenly beside him. So it hadn’t abandoned him after all…

He used the animal to pull himself up and steady himself. With that he departed into the brush. He never told anyone of the strange man in the woods but he never did forget him. At his fathers bedside, after having been reinstated to his household, he thanked the old man in his heart.

He continued silently thanking him the day he married the young red headed girl, and he thanked him the day he died, old, grey, and satisfied. He never did find out the old man’s purpose or what had brought him to his side… but one thing he was certain of–he was not of this world.

Golden Exits

Golden Exits is a confused film, not in plot but also in its execution. As a viewer you don’t get the sense of a three-act structure, but more of a day-to-day travel log that starts abruptly and ends just as suddenly.

It revolves around a young Australian girl named Naomi (played by Emily Browning) as she moves to New York for the summer to work as archivist for a married man named Nick (played, interestingly enough by Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys) whose advances toward her make their working environment tense if anything else. Along the way she meets Buddy, another married American fellow who she actually takes an interest in. Meanwhile, the wives of these men sit and wonder if their men are still faithful to them in the face of the enormous temptation that Naomi presents. Along for the ride is Alyssa’s sister Gwendolyn, whose hatred of Nick and his past infidelities is so tantamount that it feels as though it’s dripping right through the screen.

Months pass and the movie teases the audience mercilessly over whether or not Nick/Buddy will eventually sleep with Naomi, while the long suffering wives/sisters-in-laws of these men sit with their friends and pontificate about life, romance, and many other subjects that populate the frame of mind of the typical chatty art house character.

The main conceit of the film is the question of whether or not couples can sustain a loving, and loyal relationship in the long term or if they’ll simply ‘exit’ at the first sight of another, younger sexual partner. We’re given characters like Buddy and his wife Sam, who remain hopeful and even behind closed doors seem to genuinely love each other, and then people like Nick and his wife Alyssa whose romance is so completely nonexistent that it makes one wonder why they’re even together in the first place. At the center of it all is Naomi. She is both the first, and last thing we ever see in this film, and most conversations are either with her or are directly about her.

But she’s far from heroic or noble, she just seems to be there to fill the role of “the temptation” and indeed, though she refuses Nick’s advantages she has no qualms whatsoever about having an affair with Buddy, whose faithfulness to his wife is one of the few moments of heroism in the whole piece. In fact, aside from Buddy, none of these characters are presented as particularly good, they just live their often self absorbed lives and we’re simply supposed to view it.

The style of Golden Exits is pure 90’s mumble core, no one emotes very heavily besides an evil look here and there, and every scene is merely a conversation being held in a sparsely decorated room. There are no flourishes in the deco, the camera movement, or even the music, imagine if you can a Wes Anderson film but with the colors, all traces of humor, and the 70’s soundtrack all thrown out.

Overall, it’s a somber film that gives us characters with no real redeeming qualities; it shuns the usual narrative in favor of a slice of life approach to storytelling, going at a very slow but deliberate pace. It does not even attempt to answer any of the philosophical questions it throws at us like a barrage of stones, but simply leaves us with the pieces. Just like Naomi’s transient stay in New York City, it comes, baffles, entices, but then exits as about as nonchalantly as it entered.

Ready Player One — Quests and Avatar

“I am malformed, scarred, and small, but… abed, when the candles are blown out, I am made no worse than other men. In the dark, I am the Knight of Flowers”

–Tyrion Lannister, A Storm of Swords

Wade, the protagonist of Ready Player One, is in many ways hiding in the shadows. He has aspirations of being one of the fabled heroes of lore, he chooses to don the name Parzival after one of the original grail knights, he sets himself on an almost religious quest to give himself meaning in life, and he falls in love with not so much a woman but a funhouse mirror version of a woman. All of this however, is rooted in the strange world of the OASIS.

“Anonymity was one of the major perks of the OASIS.” (2.8)

“I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills.” (2.19)

In the real world, Wade must hide in the shadows both literally and figuratively. He’s overweight, socially awkward, and lives a lonely existence in a dystopian ghetto. The OASIS represents that mysterious other world for him, to really be that courageous knight, to show that he’s “no worse than other men”. It’s almost as if that “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar” song plays constantly in his head. In effect, you could read this whole song as Wade’s reason for his quixotic lifestyle.

He wants someone to “Hang with me in my MMO” because he’s horribly alone in real life, he’s desperate to go “many places” because he’s financially and geographically trapped in real life, and he dreads people to “see my actual face” because it’s acne ridden and chubby. But here’s the sad part, he’s “craving to emote with you” because he has no one to share his feeling with in the waking world.

“My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have any teenage acne.” (2.5)

It’s worth nothing that Wade is so in love, so in need of this other life, that when both his and Art3mis’s avatars cross paths for the first time, he refers to meeting her “in person”

“[Art3mis] was even cooler in person than I’d imagined.” (9.43)

Wade might live in a semi-dream world, but it is not completely false. Like Don Quixote of old, Wade’s adventure might be unusual and deviate from the normal parameters of a journey in that he doesn’t actually leave home, but in my estimation it is a hero’s journey in the classical sense.

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.”
― Joseph CampbellThe Hero With a Thousand Faces

Does that not describe Wade? He is searching for what is his own “life-giving elixir”and he does feel like he is lacking something in his normal human experience. Are we to deny that to him? Haven’t we all felt at some point, that we need an escape? Even though Halliday is the one who creates the quest, it is Wade who gives it his own meaning; it is him who gives it its importance, who hangs it to be the sun in the sky of his universe. This fact, is what separates him from living a Truman Show-esque existence… Wade knows he is in a mirror world, but during most of the quest, he accepts it.

Which takes us to the ending. This is where the book takes what is perhaps its most unforgiving misstep. Halliday, a man who even more so than Wade should know the great shelter that the OASIS provides for outcasts, cannot simply tell him to unplug and walk away. OASIS doesn’t have to be a wholly negative thing for Wade or anyone. Telling him to put it away is like burning Tyrion Lannister’s book collection, in my mind it’s simply unjust.

As a lover of art, and fiction I earnest believe that the world outside of this one has merits and must be kept safe guarded. As Sword & Sorcery EP taught, sometimes we just need a little balance between the real and the fiction. Without both we are cursed and cursed again… knowing very little and getting that small fragment wrong too.

Dante Alighieri and St Augustine

Abundantly clear to anyone comparing the two authors, St. Augustine and Dante Alighieri are like oil and water when it comes to their opinion of pagan works such as Virgil’s Aeneid or Homer’s Iliad. Augustine rebukes the material as “foolish delusions” (37) Book 17, while Dante showers praise upon Virgil from the very onset when he casts him as his very own guide in Inferno, saying about the man:

O light and honor of all other poets,
may my long study and the intense love
that made me search your volume serve me now.
You are my master and my author, you
– the only one from whom my writing drew
the noble style for which I have been honored.” (Inf. I, 79-87)

Why the stark contrast when both writers are devout Christians attempting to bring their readers closer to God? The answer to Augustine’s disdainful view on pagan literature as opposed to Dante’s more embracing and positive outlook on the subject, reflects their separate journeys through Christianity– which I believe is the root of the difference and ultimately what inspired them to write such different works.

Confessions, especially at the first can be seen in many ways as a cautionary tale, listing the various ways not to spend young adulthood. Long before he wrote the book, Augustine was himself a pagan and spent his life chasing after hedonistic pursuits, including sex, petty theft, and an academic career. In light of this, we can see why Augustine places the Aeneid alongside his past sins and merely categorizes it as distraction from one’s duty to love and worship God.

Dante finds a way to marry his love for Virgil and the Aeneid with his love for God, justifying that while it may indeed be pagan there is a light, a worth to be found in great literature no matter where it comes from. That detail seems to show Dante as a forward thinker as he is willing and able to cross-pollinate his work with earlier poems.
One could in fact make the argument that Augustine begrudgingly drew about as much from the Aeneid for his Confessions as did Dante for his Inferno, and it is more a matter of the intent in which they did so — Dante to honor the classics, and Augustine to push back against them.

It does not end there, Inferno could be perceived as suggesting that that true evil is not found in pagans like Virgil, or Homer who are simply portraying what they believe to be true, but in people such as Pope Boniface, who wear the mask of good believing men, but secretly serve their own selfish ends. Dante the author makes this abundantly upon introducing the former Pope Nicolas III as a resident of the eighth circle of Hell, when Dante Pilgrim compares him to a common idol worshiper:

You deify silver and gold; how are you sundered
In any fashion from the idolater,
Save that he serves one god and you an hundred? (Inf 19, 112-114)

That solidifies the ultimate difference between Augustine and Dante, the former believes that the sin lies with himself and his past hero of Virgil, while the letter having seen true corruption and evil lurking beneath the surface of his beloved church, places blame on the very leaders of his religion.

While the similarities between The Inferno and Confessions are many, after revisiting both pieces I would have to refute the notion that Dante intended to rewrite the work of Augustine and concede that it is a beast of a different color.

The relationship between St. Augustine’s Confessions and The Divine Comedy is a complicated one indeed. Both authors are devoted Christians who are attempting mainly to stimulate and inspire belief in God. However the devil is in the details I believe, as these works are quite different in their overall intent, with Augustine aiming his contempt towards himself, and seems to suggest that every man’s greatest enemy is within, as he says in Confessions:

And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought… The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder

Dante on the other hand is an exile from his own homeland, betrayed by the man who should’ve been his greatest friend: Pope Boniface. Dante can be seen using his poem to critique not himself but the evil he sees in his own church and the corrupt leaders who doomed his fate.

When flipping through the pages of Confessions, Augustine does not seem to take fault with his Christian church; on the contrary he views it as the dividing line between his salvation and damnation. Dante does not share this outlook, as not only does he disagree with the current pope’s actions but also literally shows his precursor Nicolas III waiting to receive him. Dante chastises Nicolas and accuses him of Simony of which Nicolas freely admits:

I was a son of the she-bear, so greedy to advance her cubs that I pocketed wealth up there, and myself down here. (Inf. 19 70-72)

In terms of style Confessions and Inferno could be seen as complimentary but their content is different, their goals separate, and their ultimate message differs. Augustine wants his readers to turn inwardly and cast out the demons that they may hold within, while Dante asks his audience to look outwardly at the evil that could be hiding in our fellow man.

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Silas is a screenplay I wrote while at Chapman University Dodge School of Media and Film, 2021. Featured film in SeriesFest 2023.

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