We've Gotta Stay Positive

A friend of mine once said she didn't like Woody Allen's stuff because it felt like he was using the movie as his psychiatrist. I wonder if I'm guilty of the same thing here. As is standard operating procedure when one of my posts don't have a demos tag, it's about intensely personal stuff (read: girls), goes up and down like a roller coaster and then hopefully finds a happy ending that feels natural and not put on.


Yesterday, on the strong urging of a friend of Eleven Names, I went to my college's Counseling Center, to talk about a girl. I have spoken about her before. I spoke about how I feel it's her social group I've inherited or been promoted in and I wonder if she believes me to be enough of an emotional liability to keep tabs on me by well-meaning friends.

We used to date and, well, go to the above link and read it. I'll be here when you get back.

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I told the very nice woman that I probably wouldn't be in her physical presence until commencement, so now was probably a safe time to come up with some coping mechanisms and strategies.I left armed the office with a little pamphlet and the feeling that I've got a little bit of time.

Two hours later I see her taking out money from the campus' ATM right in front of me. She sees me, smiles and says the following:

I'm just a figment of your imagination.

She was only stopping by for a half hour at most on her way back from the north side of the state, needed to be back in her hometown in two hours.

I could only sigh.

I get out of talking to the counseling center about her and she shows up (even for a moment) not two hours later? Seriously. Does she plan it? Because one of the big ideas I tried to explain to the very nice woman listening to me was that she just can has a way of knowing what's going on and showing up with an impeccable sense of timing.

I, very carefully, try to explain that it's not like a spider at the center of a web or like a puppeteer looking down on their pieces, because that's too sinister, but, she shows up again, after I put all my anxieties on being paranoid (and even believing it!). I was getting ready to believe it. She's the Metal Gear Solid 2 of my life, because, after playing that game, for six months afterwards, I would peek around corners, expecting a armed patrol of terrorist gangs. Now, I peer down corridors of conversation and expect to hear the thump thump of her mental mercenaries approaching on the minimap of my mind.

It's an extended metaphor, but the surveillance I worry about is real in my mind. Her communicative dexterity is greater than my distaste for social games and well, I'm sick of feeling like I'm an emotional liability. She has the talent and the desire, occasionally, to do good things, which as I've learned from Eric Burns, is the way to really screw things up.

I'm just a figment of your imagination, she says.

She's right. All of my anxiety (well, most of it) about her is manufactured by me. I'm like America in the 80s, the troops and cities I'm afraid of are all Potemkin in construction. There's nothing to them. My imagination, I think, has a military-industrial complex.

It's what my imagination knows how to do, so I guess I can't technically begurdge it, but I have to move forward. The beat will go on, no matter what I do. Forward motion is hard, especially when I can see that the last four years have taken a toll on me, noticed these ways over the last six days, tops.

You look like shit.
You sound like you're going through a break-up.
You look worse than I feel.

This is what the college does to me. I'm not tired. I'm exhausted. I need to get the hell out of Meadville, on foot if I have to. But, I've done that already. Time for something new. Time for something far more awesome and positive. And that is where the title (stolen from the Hold Steady) comes from.

That title might seem now, like a cruel reminder of just how fucked I am, that the phrase no matter how earnestly meant, might feel sarcastic or disingenuous, but, its what I'm keeping inside my head. No matter how many times I think my life sucks, the only way it's going to get better is if I stay positive.

It is hard more often than not, but the road I've taken is not easy or clear. Reminders are tough. They come and they go and depression sticks around, like a black cloud, forever on the periphery of my horizon. My favorite lyricist, Aaron Bedard, tends to find the light at the end of tunnel, in his band, Bane and I try to draw strength from his words. In that vein, I think, the more I hear about Kurt Vonnegut, the more I'd like his books. He, so I hear, finds the humor and the joy in life that seems to elude a lot of other authors.

And sometimes (but only sometimes) the light is real and it is the end of the tunnel. Even less often, I find it, but for now, I think I'm going to finish the post and move toward that light.

Said Vonnegut's uncle, appropriated for A Man Without A Country: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I am alive. I have ingested coffee and that will keep me going until my group's formal, in which case I ought to sail on based off little more than adrenaline and pure joy for a) having gotten this far, b) being a part of a group that is not Greek that has a large formal and c) being a part of a formal that is silly and may involve lolcats. Lots of lolcats, and if those three things, put together, aren't nice, I don't know what is.

Finished Demos: The Ideal

I don't know how much else is left to say. I think this game (Six Days in Fallujah) is going to fail. I think it's too big for the development team. I hope it doesn't, but there's too much other shit going on around this game. Case in point: I doubt that the dev team and the bigwigs are on the same page when the bigwigs say that "We're not trying to make social commentary...We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable" and one of the stated goal of the game is to give players ethical dilemas in the shoes of real soldiers.

But, before the game finds a life in the hands of Papa Bear and his ilk (not that I'm singling out Bill O'Reilly here), I wanted to talk about it in tones that are respectful and distant, if not hopeful. I'm pessimistic. This needs to succeed in a way to shake up gamers, the press and eveyrone looking over the team's shoulder. There's an outside chance that the people making this have that kind of a game in them, but I'm not holding my breath.

Not that my two cents carries much weight.

Anyway. The title is a song by the Explosion, off of their near-perfect Jade Tree full length called Flash Flash Flash. Go buy the CD right now and listen to one of the best punk rock records put to tape this decade. The Ideal starts with the lyric: "There are no good Samaritans. There are no proud Americans. This isn't my idea of success."

Perfect.



“Six Days In Fallujah” is a third-person shooter game set to be released sometime in 2010.

I usually don't get too concerned when I hear titles, but when I heard about the game I seized up. The president of Atomic Games, the company producing the game in conjunction with the Marine Corps and Activision, says they want “Six Days In Fallujah” to be the most realistic military shooter ever.

As a genre, shooters are not known for careful examination of their surroundings. Look at Gears of War 2. That game was as deep as a dog's water dish, but is a fantastic success, not just because it's executed nearly perfectly, but also because it didn't really challenge players. (Okay, Dom tried to find his wife and players complained that he was "too bitchy" during the game.) So a game based on a real-life six-day battle is going to be a tough sell—not to mention a difficult thing to write, script and program.

“Six Days In Fallujah” is based on a careful recreation of one of the longest instances of close-quarters combat the U.S. Marine Corps has been involved in since World War II. To get it right, the developers took the extra step of talking to some of the insurgents involved as well as Fallujah’s civilians.

Read that last sentence again. That's gonna be a sticking point.

Even ignoring the inevitable public outrage over the background work (which in any other medium would be reasonable), there is the larger issue of whose interests the developers are looking out for or sweeping under the rug.

The civilians are going to have a different perspective on the fighting and the tactics employed by both the insurgents who came to Iraq to fight the Jihad and the indiscriminate use of firepower by members of the United States Marine Corps. Oh, and both the irregulars fighting against the Americans and the Marines are going to have different (and truthful) perspectives that are going to skew how the game ought to be portrayed.

The Marines aren't going to be happy if the creators mention the pre-attack bombings Fallujah was subject to or the military’s offensive use of white phosphorous. The insurgents who risked their lives to talk to the game’s developers aren't going to be happy if the fact that members of their group used the civilian population as shields for their indiscriminate attacks is revealed. Oh, and let's not forget a coherent, well-designed game has to be made out of this, one that will make Activision and consumers happy.

“Six Days In Fallujah” has a lot of external hurdles ahead of it — a public suspicious of videogames and commentators looking for an easy topic to boost ratings.

But I think the biggest problem is internal. There's a lot of conflicting, accurate representations of those six days, so how do you pare down the experiences from all these different perspectives to something that resembles the truth? How do you put an ESRB rating on it?

“Six Days In Fallujah” frightens me because this game’s going to be in the spotlight and the creators have the time and money to dig themselves into a pretty big hole. To get the experience right, “Six Days in Fallujah” needs to set a milestone in storytelling. Frankly, I doubt the team is up to the challenge. I want them to succeed, but everyone looking over their shoulder has a different measure of success. And these are just the thematic concerns.

How, exactly, do you make a scripted third person shooter that acknowledges the claustrophobia of high density urban combat and still remains fun? Realism is hard to acknowledge when the actual soldiers can only clear buildings for an hour or two, tops and regularly pass out from heat exhaustion. If it's going to be realistic, then there is going to have to be an imposing penalty for using heavy automatic weapons on the map and huge bonuses for using less heavy weapons, which runs counter intuitive to the expectations the traditional player base.

The parallel that leaps to mind is Rainbow Six videogame series, which was realistic enough to dictate that when of the members of your unit got shot, they were pretty much down for the count if they were lucky. If they weren't, they're dead. Unfortunately, Fallujah isn't a series of three story office buildings or flat surfaces and building clearing is nerve wracking, when your enemies choose where, when and how the fight is happening is not what gamers are used to.

Gamers (I include myself in this) are used to having nigh-invincible, emotionally vacant, masculine demi-gods as their avatars, ones that have exquisite fire control and never empty a clip of ammunition to a room of people or prisoners because they've just been psychologically broken by seeing their friend's head explode in front of them. Are the developers of Six Days really going to digitally wrest control from the player at times and possibly alienate the players and force them to acknowledge how far removed our digital heroes are from flesh and blood?

Sherman said war is hell and I'd be willing to bet that with that description most gamers would expect "Doom". Let's hope I'm wrong.