Some quick thoughts.

A little over a year ago I wrote a short, half-baked thing for Infinite Lives, Why “virtual reality” will never catch on. Now, fewer than 400 days later, my little treatise already seems outdated and quaint. Oh, sure, the crux of my argument remains true: there is virtually (hah! Virtually) no way to not look like a complete idiot while wearing a VR headset. But now I have to begrudgingly admit VR is a fad that will not pass.

New World Notes, a blog heretofore known for its Second Life coverage, has been following the Oculus Rift with great interest all this month. That’s because, in late April, Linden Lab confirmed plans to integrate the Oculus Rift headset with Second Life. (Before Second Life, Linden Lab itself aspired to create a virtual reality metaverse, headset and all. What we call “Second Life” was originally just a proprietary creative toolbox, intended for building virtual-reality environments.)

In a post titled Oculus Rift Makes Virtual Reality a Shared Group Experience, New World Notes includes this delightful video. In it, Katie—she’s the one in the VR headset, on the verge of toppling—needs to be held upright.

A recent research article, Rats! Why virtual reality doesn’t feel ‘real’, explains what is the matter with poor Katie. She is experiencing a kind of VR-made “vestibular dysfunction,” a sense of off-kilteredness that lives somewhere between the inner ear and Katie’s own neurons. Her neurons, by the way, are doing a bangarang job of misinterpreting the Rift’s onscreen visual data—none of which jibes with real-world data like “I’m trying to get my physical bearings in this kitchen”—and as a direct result, Burly Friend has to kind of scoop her up.

I know you’re never supposed to read the YouTube comments, much less respond to them, but I kind of just couldn’t help myself:

It is possible to play with an Oculus Rift and stand upright at the same time, and it’ll be fascinating to witness how gamers gradually rewire ourselves to accommodate this new technology.

Anyway, here’s a Vine I took at Giant Robot LA a few nights ago. A thoroughly disoriented young woman is attempting to play with the Oculus Rift using Kinect hand gestures; meanwhile, an early adopter of Google Glass surreptitiously films her by brushing his index finger along the Glass’s stem.

We are truly embarking on a brave new world, here. I was recently advised to read Snow Crash in preparation.

potential triggers: depression, suicide, bullying

I don’t know whether it’s okay to talk about this. Maybe it doesn’t help.

At present, we don’t actually know for certain whether a game designer has taken her own life. We don’t know any concrete details leading up to it. All we have is speculation, conjecture.

Although she had a fan following, she was not a “public” figure by any stretch of the word.

We do know with certainty, however, she’d recently become the target of incessant bullying. Shortly before she made the gruesome announcement, she presented an Internet forum with a screenshot of her inbox, indicating that most of these attacks were cruel remarks about her birth gender. She may have been trans, maybe not.

There isn’t a word for how horrifying. I hope she’s alive. I hope she only decided to take a temporary break from the Internet and that she will have an opportunity to get on with her life. Or I hope her suicide attempt failed. I hope she intended it to fail.

We do know this: while the rate of attempted suicide among the general population is 1.6%, as many as 41% of transpeople have attempted suicide. The numbers of LGBT children who have attempted suicide hover around a similarly startling 30-40%. Familial rejection, economic strife, and systemic or institutionalized transphobia and homophobia all play roles in these suicide attempts.

But let’s not minimize the incredibly damaging effects of outright bullying.

In early 2012 the Center for Disease Control noted that the rate of teen suicide has spiked in recent years. The CDC’s 2012 report went on to estimate that one in 12 teenagers has attempted suicide, with 20% of teenagers indicating they have been bullied. Among schoolchildren, girls plan or attempt suicide in greater numbers than boys.

There are other risk factors in play, of course. The CDC lists physical illness, isolation, clinical depression, loss, and hopelessness as factors. There are genetic and environmental factors to consider, as well—I find “local epidemics of suicide” to be among the more chilling.

Bullying is so insidious, though, because it takes most of these preexisting risk factors and escalates them in the worst possible way. Bullying among schoolchildren is consistently diminished or shrugged off as the natural order of things, even as children gain greater access to communications technologies that allow their meanspiritedness to be “liked,” be “shared,” and “go viral.” School administrators seem especially complicit, probably out of helplessness and inefficacy.

School shootings and suicide have stoked concern about youth bullying, but acknowledging so-called “adult bullying” is still very much taboo. In those cases we especially expect the victim to “shake it off” and “toughen up.” Bullying can happen to anybody.

Bullying has always existed, but culture at large has changed. We like to think the Internet is a “great equalizer,” thanks to the ease with which a flip commenter can take anyone else down and bury her. We are all armchair critics now; thanks to anonymity and the “submit” button, we can escalate attacks from the professional to the personal with a single carriage return. We can research other people for “ammo.” We can orchestrate entire mob-like pile-ons. Long after we’ve forgotten typing an insult, the victim will remember it. She can probably quote it word-for-word. She can call it up using a search engine and stare at it until she drives herself over the edge.

I feel like I don’t get bullied very much anymore, least of all professionally, since I’ve had the luxury of picking and choosing my own readership. I’m also very aggressive about choosing my own close friends. But in the past I have been a bully, and it required other people to call me out on my bullshit for me to even notice. I think, given the right circumstances, anyone can become a bully.

I am trying to practice empathy in my daily life, but sometimes it’s a challenge. I find, in my stabs at becoming a better friend and ally, I buy a lot of books, do a lot of weird leisure reading. I constantly have to reevaluate myself, reeducate myself.

We have to be so careful with our fellow humankind. We must exercise personal responsibility on a macro scale.

Hey! What is this doing on a videogames blog?

Yeah, take a look around. We celebrate homogeneity and conformism like no one else. We are the sum opposite of progressive. We think apathy is cool, even though apathy literally kills other people. Sometimes industry “luminaries” say things and you, like, have to just stare in awesome embarrassment, as if that person were your beloved-but-totally-racist grandfather instead of a comparatively spry fortysomething.

No, no deep thoughts here; just unfocused, blanket alarm.

May is National Mental Health Awareness Month. I’ll go first: I suffer from crippling anxiety and I struggle to leave the house. A sports writer named Scott Neumyer recently published a piece titled “I Am Royce White,” which describes panic attacks better than I ever could. A surprising number of industry types wrestle with anxiety, OCD, or clinical depression. Games are just one way of connecting. I’m happy to share that priority in common with you, dear reader.

In a perfect world we’d all be much more open with our personal struggles, although—in these contemporary times, where Facebook and Twitter are all part of the individual’s “brand identity”—I understand why that isn’t feasible. In fact, I think persistent connectedness has made us all much less eager to share, more invested in privacy and obfuscation.

Probably the best we can do for ourselves and for one another is to remember we are loved, know we are loved, actively work to surround ourselves with love instead of toxicity, and practice self-love. (Not like that, necessarily, but whatever helps!) I also recommend becoming a dog owner, but that might just be me.

I just don’t know what else to say. There are resources, and there are people who love you. You are loved.

• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
• Samaritans
• The Trevor Project
• Take This

Stock photo via Mom It Forward. Yes, really.

First there was Lost Levels, a rotating, three-ring speaking engagement held one afternoon in the Yerba Buena Gardens. That event was exciting in a punk-rock “this is our happening!” way. And except for I quickly discovered I suffer from serious allergies—the venue was mostly shorn lawn, and more than one person wondered aloud why I was apparently crying—Lost Levels’s freeform “microtalks” were among the GDC’s very best.

Then there was Ahhhcade, an interactive games gallery held on the first floor of the SF MOMA. It was similar to Lost Levels and in multiple ways: it was a one-day event; it was open and free to the public; it was also maybe poorly documented. (GDC panels and talks are usually filmed and stuffed into “the Vault,” which is to say, though the conference itself can be inaccessible for some, the talks are generally available.)

Ahhhcade, curated by Sarah Brin and Babycastles, was wonderful. Anthony Carboni, tireless friend to Indies, will explain:

For my own part, I was so excited to finally play Ian Bogost’s Guru Meditation as it was meant to be played! (I own the iOS version of that game, knowing full well it is a flimsy facsimile of the original Atari 2600 software.) I am a great fan of 2600 homebrew as it is; meanwhile, Professor Bogost’s software gamifies my favorite pastime, which is sitting still. I decided—in hopes of being the first person in the world to try this, actually—to play the iOS and 2600 versions simultaneously. To do it, I seated myself on the balance board and opened the game on my iPhone.

My hands were trembling. The experiment was a total failure. Still, Professor Bogost encouraged me, and my good friend Brian Taylor captured it:

The real reason I attended Ahhhcade, though, was to experience Doug Wilson’s latest collaboration, Marvelous Melodies of Mutazione.

And the reason I decided to attend GDC itself was to co-host the ordinarily-London-based radio program One Life Left! It’s really the only radio program or podcast to which you ever need to listen, and what an honor and pleasure to participate!

In our final GDC episode, fellow host Ann Scantlebury and I excitedly flip out on poor Doug (14:44). I loved my Mutazione experience, and I kind of get lost in explaining why. Ah! I am the worst interviewer in the world.

Incidentally, I do not at all remember recording the first episode of One Life Left’s GDC series, which is incredibly funny because, in it, I clearly state that my goals for the week include “remember an evening after it happens.”

For fuck’s sake, Internet. What are you even trying to do to me.

I laughed and cried a lot today. I did those two things at my laptop, and also in the real world.

I have had the strangest—and yes, since you are wondering, the drunkest—week. (I try to warn against using alcohol as a crutch, because that attitude is dangerous, but there’s also a palpable reason nine or ten brain-murdering beers are popularly accepted as a legitimate type of “truth serum.”)

Ah. About this week. Here are all my work-related updates: in a career highlight, my friendly acquaintance Maura interviewed me about Boyfriend Maker, an iOS game. My ire at a dictionary became a hot story at Boing Boing. For one brief, shining moment, women in the games industry suddenly became an important subject, and I was privileged to add my voice to their numbers.

Today people contacted me privately, sometimes about my mom’s death, but sometimes about my ongoing patience and generosity (ha!) as I’ve gleefully engaged in online conversations about misogyny and misandry. Some of those private remarks—again, remarks on both topics, death and sexism, really weird for me—came from people from my past: old roommates, classmates, coworkers, friends from junior high who also knew my mother. Thank you.

It is a wonderful feeling, sometimes, just to not be alone. It is why anyone logs onto the Internet ever.

Meanwhile, in real life, a pastor friend invited me to a poetry slam. Another family adopted me for Thanksgiving. My best friend drove over to my house with toilet paper because I can barely take care of myself. I recently made a phone call to my local Internet service provider’s billing department, and when I gave the woman—a complete stranger—the name on the account, she fell silent. “Girl,” she said finally. “Oh, girl.”

There is nothing so debilitating as crying while you try to pay a stinking bill. I also consistently cry at the veterinary clinic.

Since September, every day of my life has been a challenge, a battle, a chore. The things I do every day—all boring, unfortunately—are my biggest, saddest, most boring secret.

I hope I only share the good parts, though. Actually—and it’s strange to admit this, even as life as I once knew it has effectively crumbled—mostly there have been only good parts.

I am going to write about games writing now, AS I DO. Here are some quick thoughts, organized in no way whatsoever.

On the one hand, cynicism is an important defense mechanism. It’s a type of filter. We all employ it, particularly when we lead these bizarre shadow lives on the snarky, snarky Internet, these lives that invariably mirror—but very seldom mimic—our real, waking lives, our everyday interactions with friends, family, coworkers. Attorneys. Funeral directors. Cousins. Therapists. The lady at the convenience store. If we didn’t find filters for our feelings, we would be overwhelmed by them. We would all be absolutely traumatized by our own weird brains.

On the other hand, cynicism is stupid, lazy, and boring. It’s a type of fear, and it’s an awful shortcut to take. It’s how we dismiss other people’s feelings, yes yes, but especially our own.

I don’t want to be that person ever. I want to always give the benefit of the doubt.

(Please note: “irreverence” is different. Irreverence is acknowledging a crisis’s horrible worth and then undermining it for sheer comedic value. Levity! Please, some levity!)

In February, after I’d written a rant and posted it, a longtime friend politely cautioned me against masquerading as a cynic and a villain. “You don’t want it to become true,” he said something like.

I was, and am, gobsmacked by how correct he is. Cynicism—even the very façade, which is what it almost always is, anyway, a façade—is an incredibly dangerous trick to play on yourself. It is a cruel lie we do unto ourselves because the reality of all things is just too marvelous, too outstanding.

Here is the reality: we are all dying. Every one of us will die before his time. None of us will ever be older than a very expensive old chair. Nothing you do matters, really, except that the rest of us are all right here, dying with you, either slower or faster, but always definitely. Someday, if you’re very lucky, you will have a reader or a child—same thing—who is born into a mean world you, thank God, finally left.

You can write a pained, grief-stricken article about your mother, but in a few short years, months, or weeks, someone else is going to describe you even better. It’s all useless. It’s vain, useless hubris to even try.

This isn’t sad. This isn’t scary. It’s only unfair. It’s only life. Time and love march on without us.

That is the human condition—it’s this gigantic, crippling, paralyzing, existential thing—and we often combat it with cynicism.

We always aim to shoot from the brain, but we tend instead to shoot from the heart, despite our very best efforts. We want to rely on science and numbers because memory is unreliable, but in the end it’s only feelings that are “true” anyway, because feelings are just there. They’re always valid, even when they don’t make any sense. I think John Hodgman probably did it best when he wrote a column railing against the word “meh.”

Well.

I think video games—more than writing, believe it or not—have the capacity to take all these disparate, diverse human experiences and reframe them in a way that helps, not just life, but every individual life, make so much more sense. That’s because the best video game, like the best writing, puts you into someone else’s shoes for minutes, hours, or days at a time. While you are wearing those shoes it becomes profoundly easy to understand how the shoes’ owner makes emotional sense. I think that is so important, to realize you are just one, and yours is unique and important, but you are just one.

The game developer Phil Fish, a couple years ago, said he didn’t understand how I cope. (I’ll thank you to know he is an extremely sensitive individual and oh my God if he ever sees this, know that I hereby bequeath my childhood unicorn collection to one Kathleen Sanders, because I am going to be murdered in cold blood.)

“Beer,” I joked to him. Then I immediately voiced my astonishment: Phil, Phil of all people, understands fear, anxiety, anticipatory grief, loss, and the sheer pain of waiting, of worrying things are about to go all wrong.

I reminded him, then, and let me remind you, too: I’m fortunate. I’m lucky. What I endured is what you all will endure, if you’re only just lucky enough to have old parents. If you have fine old parents, you will someday know the long, plodding, metered grief of watching them slip away. I’m 30 now—I gave my youth to an unwinnable fight—but I’m 30, I’m still so young, and I’m not sorry, I’m not sorry, not for one second.

I think a lot of my columns this year were letters I sent from the depths of my grief, but if you think for one second I’m ungrateful, I’ve done us all a disservice. I know how lucky I am. And I’m so proud. And I’m proud of my parents—over time, they let me use them as examples, let me humiliate them in my writing—and I’m just so proud of my high school guidance counselor mother and my farmer father.

This year—slowly, so slowly, as I’ve braced for my nightmare while also piecing together my hilariously unironic and literal worldview—I have been enormously gratified to befriend a number of new people. I used to think I didn’t need any new friends, that I’d had quite enough of everyone ever. (I’m still the world’s worst friend, but this issue tends only to come up around holidays.)

“Actually,” I typed to one Richard Clark earlier today, stunned at myself, “2012 was not such a bad year.”

It’s all been building and growing. Anna Anthropy taught me about the diversity of voice, of video games’ enormous, indescribable value as a medium and a force. She and Daphny David have helped me understand the value of sharing those experiences in a way that makes emotional and rational sense to the end user. Together, they’ve taught me to stop apologizing for feeling feelings. Or—it’s even murkier than that. Those two women advocate making things, writing things, doing things, not because you will strike on fundamental, universal human truths, but because there is only the funny possibility you might. That is the endlessly funny thing about being alive.

Mattie Brice—another among a pool of impossibly talented critics, and she is so good to me because I introduced myself by picking a fight with her—very recently taught me that emotional vulnerability is a type of courage and strength. (She teaches me things every day, but this is the one I’m stuck on currently.)

Patricia Hernandez, an important writer who has at an impossibly young age found her voice, consistently imparts the importance of taking an idea and then murdering to death it in an IM window. Brian Taylor and Gus Mastrapa helped me understand ordinary anxiety, of using “personal essay” to cope with great big lonely fear feelings. Leigh Alexander has assisted—as a professional first, friend next, as a writer, confidante, gamer, person, woman, and then feminist, in descending order—by promising me the work I’m doing is good. A games critic named Tom Francis made a video that I think I perhaps didn’t agree with at first, only because it threatened to mitigate my ire at things, but I’ve found my ideas of compassion very slowly changing as a result of his sheer mellowness, and it’s adapted anything I write. Philippa Warr helped me understand the tremendous value of simply asking other people for help. One woman—I don’t know her name—contacted me after I told a short anecdote about Second Life online, because she recognized herself as the other person in the story (I told her, and it is true, that she changed how I write and what I want to write about). My good, good friend, colleague, and collaborator Cara Ellison has helped me make sense of the bizarre ecosystem that threads sex, sexuality, gender, feeling, and compassion into one magnificent tangle.

There are so many others—Lana! Luke! Brendan! Ben! Others! So many others!—who have shown me that writing about “games” can be anything, do anything. You can be smart, can be funny, can literally do anything inside of a single and potentially incoherent sentence. I’m so, so proud of everyone I know.

This is not name-dropping—this is annotation. These are those thank-you letters I never remember to send right after Christmas, the emails I forget to send.

This year, I’ve also met my most valuable editors.

Stu has advocated my setting exactly what I think and feel on paper, even when I fear (or know!) I am wrong. Ian Miles has been a sounding-board for all of my strangest thoughts, from the academic to the neurotic, helping me parse all of them. Chris—whom I’ve known for awhile and am privileged to work with again, this time as a sort of peer—was the first editor who made sense of my brain and heart thoughts with tough line edits and furious marginalia. (“You think you’re editing, but you’re actually doing the work of a cognitive behavioral therapist.”) Joey—ah, Joey!—aggressively headhunted me, coaxing me into writing by assuring my of my writing’s very marketability and merit.

Similarly, there are other editors and bosses who have entrusted me with certain writerly and ethical responsibilities, and I am always torn between “Thanks” and “What is the matter with you.”

I have two best friends. Three. Possibly five. But one of them is a woman called Whitney. She used to be my boss. Another best friend is my high school English teacher. Obviously I have some trouble keeping personal and professional friendships straight or separate, and I am the luckiest for it.

All right. There is an article I wrote very recently—we published it today as part of Unwinnable’s “Family Week”—owing very heavily to all these people. It is titled “Allow Natural Death.” (My editor at Unwinnable, Stu, did me a profound solid just by titling it for me—once the draft was finalized, I could not even pretend I was emotionally equipped to so much as try to put a name on the top of it.)

I also owe a few game developers—specifically three distinct, radically different people—for talking to me privately, helping me sort rational thoughts and irrational feelings into numbered lists and taxonomies. I think, because game design approaches our unique experiences in this holistic way—algorithmically, mathematically, narratalogically, rhymically, graphically, musically, poetically—these folks, whether they know it or not, really are best at glancing over my wholly alien experiences and weighing in, and in stunning, remarkable ways, on whether my writing or ideas make any sort of “design sense.”

I want to thank Terry above all for placing sustained faith and support in me—in my voice, my literal, out-loud, spoken voice, of all things—and for making Super Hexagon. I have now repeatedly teased him about my projecting ponderous meanings to his scrupulously economical work. His difficult, torturous, brilliantly sparse games change how I want to write—you know, not in this case, this mess of a Livejournal blog, but in general.

You probably don’t care to know this, but once I watched that video of Super Hexagon’s endgame—and I was already thinking about all these people, all these things—my column about my mother farted out of me in about a half of an hour, almost fully formed.

A few people wondered how that column relates to games. On the one hand, I don’t know. On the other, that is exactly how.

Oh, yes, this was supposed to be about writing, wasn’t it.

It was not my strongest piece but, as anyone who saw the first draft might attest (the piece was largely unchanged, but it was ultimately lengthened), it was me at my tersest. I tended toward very simple sentences, few of which were overworked.

About simple sentences: we seldom have “complicated” feelings; what we really experience, instead, are nineteen simple feelings simultaneously.

I would change a lot about my column if I could. (My close friend Dan—who was my counselor at writing camp when I was a teenager—knew exactly where I was going when I unsubtly, ham-fistedly mentioned my fear of needles. I knew I went wrong there. I just knew it!)

What I’m saying is, I’m pleased that anyone has related to my strange lack of finesse, to bare and utterly artless bones. I think, even at our maddest or saddest or most hopeless, we strive for a type of authenticity or sincerity. I do, too.

I did not always feel that way. For many years, my favorite work was a play called “The Cocktail Party,” written by the miserable Christian existentialist T.S. Eliot, who was a man who really liked cats, if that tells you anything. He maintained that every person is an island and that we all die in either physical or emotional solitude, hopelessly misunderstood.

Games prove Eliot wrong.

I began all this with a brief rumination on cynicism, my least favorite type of lie, and I want to hop back into it.

Cynicism is a valuable filter. Cynicism, very literally, is a defense mechanism, the very act of refusing to put hope and love and faith and trust in things, or in people.

But people are so much more valuable.

I have slowly discovered that if you consult people—if you crowdsource a single idea, a single feeling, or if you beg your friends to very honestly and cruelly edit you—people will edit you, will help you master your thoughts or feelings, can order you to cope even when you don’t want to cope. People aren’t a crutch: they’re an ally, a sort of ability.

You can embrace people, not cynicism, and your fellow humankind can serve as your filter instead—wading through your ideas for you, finding the good ones.

I think I run the danger of sounding incredibly self-congratulatory here. For that reason, and in the interest of transparency, here is my disclosure: I am not particularly powerful or competent or patient or generous. I’ve sent three emails in the last 60 days that each demonstrated, each in a very ugly way, my capacity for being small and mean and powerfully unfair. My unfortunate instinct is to burn bridges, not forge them.

Also, I am trying to learn to be kinder to myself, yes.

Anyway. When I look at the work you do, whoever you are, I am reminded again that the world is so much bigger than my small heart, and that I want to be better than myself.

I have said this before, but we are all linking arms on the lifeboats. That is all there is.

Thank you for helping my contemplate in so many meaningful ways. For better or worse, I didn’t write about my mother at all. You did.

In other news, since you are wondering about my boring, boring life: tonight I wrote the hardest email of my life, explaining to a relative why she may not have my mother’s dog.

“This responsibility is a real privilege,” I told her. “She gets me out of the house. She gets me up in the morning. She gives me something to do, someone to take care of, somebody to love.” Then I sincerely thanked her for volunteering.

One last thing, and although it does have to do with both earnestness and with crowd-sourcing, I admit I am now being incredibly shameless:

“So your article is doing well,” my best childhood friend Cassie said to me this morning. “That’s neat. When all those people click to read it, do you get a lot of ad, uh—”

I stared at her. She stared back, and for a split second I swear I saw her eyes cross.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“My bad,” I replied.

I am livid. Which superficially might sound very stupid, except that this kerfuffle combines ethics, DRM, social networking, and my integrity, all in an interesting and infuriating tangle.

I was at breakfast with one of my very closest friends—a retired English and Latin teacher—and her son. Her son and I had just started arguing over the pronunciation of the word “diaspora” when, half-joking, I pulled my phone out of my handbag and played a recording of the word aloud at the table.

Then I stared down at my phone. I frowned. My friend wanted to know what the matter was.

“Um,” I said, blushing furiously. “Um. This is weird. My cell phone is accusing me of stealing the Oxford Dictionary of English.” I blinked. “That was a really expensive piece of software.”

Some of you might already know about the Enfour dust-up. Here’s a quick recap anyway: at the beginning of this month, the developers at Enfour announced they were putting anti-piracy measures into their software. (Enfour develops and publishes iOS versions of the Oxford Dictionary of English and the American Heritage Dictionary, among others.)

How did Enfour intend to combat piracy? By auto-posting tweets to their users’ Twitter accounts! But the clever plan backfired when the tweet—a confession of “software piracy”—began appearing on legitimate users’ Twitter accounts, too.

How about we all stop using pirated iOS apps? I promise to stop. I really will.#softwarepirateconfession

— Jenn Frank (@jennatar) November 24, 2012

Enfour has since launched a “crucial maintenance release” to iTunes, and the issue has seemingly been resolved.

Of course, that makes little difference to the Enfour customer who, ahem, discovers that a “critical update” is waiting for her in the app store queue only after she has confessed, to 3,454 of her readers (not to boast or anything), that she stole some software. (Until hours ago, Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman had confessed to the same crime via Twitter as well.)

Worse, Enfour’s software has a built-in “nag” notification. “I am a software thief!” the Oxford Dictionary of English repeatedly told me. It continued to notify me of my crime—and, inexplicably, in first-person tense—until I had gotten to a WiFi network to update the software.

I found Enfour’s accusation especially insulting given the price I paid for the software—US$55. That is to say, the iOS version of the Oxford Dictionary of English costs the equivalent of a dense printed-and-bound volume of the very same. Worse, I grumblingly upgraded from the 3G to the 4S a year ago explicitly to purchase this expensive dictionary software (in fact, it was the very first purchase I made in iTunes once I was home from the AT&T store). I have frequently taken to Twitter to manufacture arguments over the cost of Enfour’s Oxford application, always defending my purchase.

Some are wondering whether the auto-posted tweet constitutes “libel”; still others wonder why a customer would ever permit the Oxford Dictionary access to her Twitter account. I remember seeing the app’s request pop up, and I’d simply assumed the dictionary had added some sort of social networking functionality, something like “share this crazy new word with your friends!” or whatever. (Enfour’s software integrates very nicely with another app, the excellent Terminology, which does indeed include a “Twitter” button along with each definition.) At no point did Enfour disclose its intention to “post to Twitter on [my] behalf,” however. The request seemed perfectly innocuous.

One user did deny Enfour this permission request, and he discovered that Oxford booted him from the software entirely. This is to say, he could not use Enfour’s Oxford at all unless he granted the dictionary permission to humiliate him publicly.

Enfour has since admitted there was a “glitch” that caused “false positives” in the software. What’s especially harrowing, though, is that Enfour apparently mined the data in the iPhone itself in an effort to determine, not whether Enfour’s own software is pirated, but whether any software on the iOS device is pirated. This is ominous news for anyone with a jailbroken phone; for my own part, my device is perfectly legal (to a fault), but I do have a copy of TestFlight, a type of software that allows me to test beta builds of developers’ apps.

The timing of my auto-posted tweet was ironic, to be sure: at breakfast I had been crowing about finally rooting my Nook Glow. That is because I will endure DRM safeguards if I must, but I would also like to read my already-legally-purchased Kindle books—anthologies, mostly—on the e-reader of my choice. (“What if you purchased a book but you could only read it in the kitchen,” I reasoned aloud to my friend and her son, “never in your living room?” I’m pretty sure my greatest crime here is “voiding a Nook warranty.”)

I am a longtime and fanatical opponent of DRM—well, and of proprietary software in general. It’s taken me a long time to get my Mac to stream to my Xbox, my iCal to sync with my GoogleCal. Not only do I dual-boot into both OSX and Windows, I frequently run my Mac in “coherence” mode, an unholy mishmash of both operating systems. Years ago I did build a “Hackintosh,” but I used a real, out-of-use copy of OSX to do it. I’m willing to go the extra mile to avoid “brand loyalty”—whatever it takes, thanks.

Some years ago I needed to review a game for Computer Gaming World; the game, a commercial build, was reinforced with Stardock protection. (Edit: Here, a reader suggests I probably mean StarForce. While that makes a lot more sense, I remember it differently. It was a Sherlock Holmes game, which is Stardock, but a quick search says my beef is really with TAGES.) When I attempted to run the game on a MacBook Pro using a real copy of Parallels, and in a paid-for copy of XP—see a pattern emerging here?—I was notified of my piracy, and the game would not run. I did review the game using my office PC, but only in my off-hours, meaning I had to take a cab home every night. In short, that turned into a pretty expensive review for me. (This summer, outraged customers encountered the same headaches when they tried to emulate legitimately-purchased copies of Diablo 3 from within Linux environments.)

So DRM measures consistently have this problem, and it’s the reason lie detector test results are legally inadmissible in court: alas, the “false positive.”

I’m not saying that piracy is okay—the truth is, it never is. Unless, of course, you’re trying to watch foreign television programs, or build your own DVR. Or convert your legally-purchased iTunes library to stream to your Xbox. Or make your friend a mix CD for her bridal shower. Or upload a supercut to YouTube. Hmm. Okay. Maybe it’s the litigiousness of things like DRM and SOPA that go a long way in revealing exactly how much gray space there really is.

Sure, it’s okay, even noble, to combat piracy. In a way, Enfour’s decision to post auto-tweets from seemingly counterfeit software makes hilarious sense: culture has shifted so that we now post an announcement to our “timelines” anytime we log hours into a video game or throw financial support into a Kickstarter. Instead of “gamifying” only our achievements, why not also gamify shame?

I’ve stated this before, publicly and privately, but as a freelance writer my only real collateral is my sense of integrity. That is what I have to trade on. There is something peculiarly invasive about having an attack on my integrity come from my own phone—from my dictionary!—and posted to my own Twitter timeline. I think I would still feel that way even if I had stolen software for iOS, in fact.

And there’s the rub again, that issue of the “false positive.” It’s very Minority Report: as Enfour has proven, you can’t just use an algorithm to weed the unethical from the ethical. Using “workarounds” and “hacks” may well be suspicious, but it sure isn’t unscrupulous.

Edit: I meant to say it somewhere in the course of writing this diatribe, but I got a little trigger-happy. Anyway, I thought Jonatan Söderström handled the issue of piracy very elegantly when he politely directed pirates to a Hotline Miami fix. He didn’t say it explicitly, but I feel like there was a subtle message embedded: “Not that I’m judging too harshly, but legit copies of this game are already patched.” Very, very nicely done. Edit #2: This!

Update: Boing Boing is on it.

Also, I apparently missed Enfour’s “apology” [pdf]:

Nevertheless, a number of users with certain system configurations were affected during this time period. Some may still be if they haven’t updated to the fixed version. If you are not running the latest version, we urge you to update your app immediately to avoid the potential embarrassment of an unexpected tweet.

According to Enfour’s apology statement, the errant tweet was sent because I put my phone in “sleep mode” before closing out of the app. (Who closes an iPhone app, like, ever?) The statement goes on to claim the tweet was sent if the user actually chose to “send” a tweet—this simply is not true. Rather, the application asked for permission to access my Twitter account, and then, voila! (Finally, the statement stresses that no data was compromised and that Enfour has “removed” the “anti-piracy module” from the latest software.)

Again, Enfour’s dictionary apps have been “fixed,” but customers who haven’t updated to the newest version are in for a splendid treat. No telling whether Enfour plans to “fix” the module and try to implement it again.

Late last month, in the course of conversation, my colleague J.P. Grant asked me about the business model of any particular blog. Like, how do you curate content? (Or aggregate it, depending on who you ask.) How are writers paid? Are they always paid? How, please, does a website make money?

These are complicated questions. They’re also things I’ve thought about a lot over the years, and if everyone knew all the ways, we could quit our day jobs. Also, they’re things I tend to discuss only with my editor, because business practice is as much a moral debate as it is anything else.

Still, I launched a business seven years ago by hand (my friend is still running it). I know about secure servers; I know how to become an LLC. I’ve worked for a business that makes half its money shipping internationally. I know how to look genuine while selling people on a product I don’t actually like. I know a fair amount about intellectual property; I know how Nigerian scams work. I know how to sound sincere and be insincere. I know how to fill out a shipping form that nearly circumvents customs. I know a surprising lot about user retention, page clicks, traffic, advertising, what a daily scramble is like, and really evil things far, far too nefarious to describe (“the more you can blockquote, the better for SEO,” “forge an intimacy with your readers and they’ll never realize they’re reading a sponsored post”).

“No, these are good questions,” I told J.P., “because these are questions I ask [my editor].” I added that I’m “heavy duty when it comes to being a mercenary businessperson when it is theoretical.”

“Jenn Frank: Theoretically Running This Shit,” J.P. typed.

In the end, if we all did the things we knew how to do in the interest of “success”—whatever “success” is—we would be awful, manipulative people.

Besides, bad ethics really is bad business practice. Most people can guess when they’re being swindled and, if anybody were to ever uncover that a post were sponsored or a system were being gamed, the backlash would be terrible.

Meanwhile, “banner” advertising—a vestige of the print medium—simply doesn’t work, and running them makes your work seem less credible anyway. So even speaking theoretically, my real recommendation is always complete transparency.

I told J.P. a secret, then, about Infinite Lives: it’s already paid for. For the next several years, I can leave it here, only updating it as I like—it’s already paid for.

Donations.

So if I have any debt, it’s a social one. It’s part of an understood contract.

When I realized Infinite Lives was paid for, I stripped the ads, I explained. Then I asked J.P. if he’d ever noticed the donation link. He hadn’t.

Have you? Because there’s a link here somewhere. But it isn’t panhandling, because I respect my readers—a great deal!—and readers don’t like being hit up for spare change.

“In the interest of transparency,” I concluded to J.P., “you have to stop thinking of a website as a magazine or a newspaper. No paid posts, no ads.”

“So is it doubly weird,” J.P. asked me, “when, say, Penny Arcade does the whole ‘pay us to remove ads’ thing? Given that the ads probably aren’t huge moneymakers anyway?”

“I’ve thought a lot about that!” I replied. “This might be an unpopular stance, but I don’t have a problem with it. They are changing the product: a Penny Arcade without ads is a new Penny Arcade.” What I mean here is, according to Kickstarter’s strict rules, one can make the case that Penny Arcade is on the right side of the law.

“Penny Arcade has also proven that readers and players can be unbelievably charitable people,” I continued. ”’Take my money!’ We pay with our wallets. I mean—we VOTE with our—gah!”

I think if you are going to discuss the ethics of monetization, in this era your conversation will always turn toward Kickstarter.

It’s been a really organic evolution, this road to Kickstarter, and not an evolution I think I like. Maybe I should stop thinking of Kickstarter as a bizarre mutation of Save the Children, except that it kinda is.

But Kickstarter is only natural, I guess. It’s the very next step from organizations like Heifer International and Farm Africa, especially since a lot of the time you aren’t really buying a goat.

And because a goat is seldom a goat—sometimes a “goat” is money better spent on other things—we ended up with things like Kiva, all these charities that help jumpstart entrepreneurs with a loan, as opposed to a donation. And here we are now: instead of feeding the poor, we’re funding entire businesses.

I didn’t say all that to J.P.; rather, I said something more like “it’s kind of a jump from Heifer International.”

I went on to say that it ought to be a good model, and it is except, at its potential worst, Kickstarter has become a way of taking pre-orders, of measuring popular opinion.

“And [in the case of games], circumventing a stagnant publisher model,” J.P. added.

“Yes, that’s true,” I said.

But maybe the moral question of Kickstarter—which really is what we were weighing here, even though we’d never outright agreed on those particular terms—was the “expectation of a reward,” J.P. suggested.

I pointed out that a lot of pledge drives do the same thing, except they are very careful to never use the word “reward.” Instead they tell you that, for a donation of a certain size, you’ll receive a ‘gift,’ “as opposed to ‘I am buying an extremely expensive coffee mug,’” I typed.

For J.P., the ethical question was more a matter of, and these are his words, “a limited pool out there among individuals, and this is yet another source that is competing with charity for private dollars, but in a way that blurs the line between donation and investment.”

“As such,” I agreed, ”[my editor] was very surprised when I went off about Tim Schafer’s Kickstarter. About how there ought to be a cap, no one needs all that money, even I need money, how can this many starving people invest in an unannounced game. And then I went on and on about feeding the poor.” Of course I am not really annoyed with Tim Schafer; rather, I’m peeved that more people aren’t upset about starving.

“Well, this is the thing, right,” J.P. replied. “We live in a society, and particularly in gaming culture, where there is this fetishization of owning stuff.

“But more than that, there is this fetishization of private enterprise and a disdain for public interest projects.”

J.P. tied this, then, to politics especially, and only now that I’m reviewing what he wrote, I’m seeing that I could have gone off in another direction.

“Right, so the consumerism thing,” I typed instead. “Oh, boy, was I put off when I had to log into Kickstarter to shut off any social networking stuff—a change that I only knew about thanks to the unsolicited emails about who was now my friend on Kickstarter.

“First of all, I do not care to broadcast the projects I have participated in funding. People can read that in one of two ways. ‘That’s all?’ OR ‘I thought you were unbelievably poor; what are you doing funding all these things?’ You can see what types of things I assist and with what frequency or infrequency. You could, if you were a psycho, attempt to measure my philanthropy in every way.

“So I am agreeing with you, yes, with the idea of gamifying or trophyfying my philanthropy, where instead of being an action, it becomes yet another thing I have.

“Like a star in my crown: I have a car. I have a house. I have a Kickstarter profile. I have a WHAT WAIT WHAT.”

J.P. agreed. “Yes, philanthropy is not a thing you have.” There was a long pause. “Unless you’re a douche,” he concluded.

“Correct,” I typed. “And there’s a certain Joneses benefit dinner mentality there that is really tacky and skeevy.”

I stalled.

“That’s right, tacky,” I continued. “Which I’ve recently realized is a place on my morality spectrum. Some things aren’t morally wrong in a lawfulness sense; they’re just tacky.”

“Heh, I like that,” J.P. typed, but now there was no stopping me.

“Sorry, I’ve been obsessed with types and levels of ‘wrong’ lately, and a few weeks ago I realized that one spot is ‘tacky’.

“Do you know how, if you suffer social anxiety especially, you feel guilt even due to a social faux pas or gaffe? Soon after college I realized that my guilt-o-meter doesn’t understand the difference between types of wrong. Doing something ‘wrong’ socially is of course nothing like doing something ‘wrong’ morally. I’m also a terrible moral relativist, so—
“But a lot of us are taught right from wrong, but not types of right and wrong. So we have the same crippling guilt feeling from using the wrong fork as we might running over a dog. Or at least, I tend toward that, to review a gaffe long after it happened. Like mispronouncing paella in front of my boyfriend’s dad when I was 20.

“So I realized that ‘tackiness’ is a pit stop on this spectrum, and a lot of issues I have morally with Kickstarter aaaaaare… tackiness.”

“Q.E.D.,” J.P. typed.

“And this I said to [my editor],” I continued. “Penny Arcade thing: morally wrong? Nope. Tacky to someone? Maybe. But there is the argument that it isn’t against the rules.

“If the spectrum of wrongness goes God-wrong, law-wrong, socially wrong, tacky, this is pretty much the least offensive of the Wrongs.

“I guess the spectrum of wrong sort of hinges on how many people you can offend in what way. Clashing colors are tacky: aesthetically offensive, but hardly punishable. ...Sorry, again, very obsessed with this new idea.”

J.P.: “Are you? I couldn’t tell.”

Me: “Sigh.”

“Well, on that,” J.P. typed, “I think one of the issues particularly in this space is that many people do not have perspective on where a given incident or thing falls on the spectrum. The reactions are out of proportion with the severity or intensity of the event.

“So you get BS outrages like the Mass Effect 3 ending conflated with actual outrages, like Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian.”

“Right, exactly!” I said. “That’s exactly why I’ve been harping on the spectrum of wrong with myself: so I don’t have guilt or a sense of outrage with myself disproportionate with little daily errors I commit. But yes, exactly. Not that I didn’t love the Mass Effect outrage, where suddenly every gamer was very invested in narratology, in plot! I thought that was hilarious.

“Although…! A lot of skirmishes in public places have to do, not with the offense itself, but with an ongoing argument about where the wrongness DOES fall on a moral spectrum.

“Certainly some gamers feel there is a lack of proportion with the way other gamers respond to certain images or trailers in games. The onus is on other gamers, then, to prove the wherefores of the degree of offense,” I mused, “which is difficult to do, at least in that case.

“So the argument is not only over whether something is right or wrong, but also what type of wrong, to what degree of wrong, how damaging the wrong.”

“Well said,” J.P. said.

“Boy,” I said.

“Yeah,” J.P. said, “I’m reaaaaally glad I only do this shit as a hobby. Wow.”

In said comment, one of Khandaker’s readers took Katie Williams to task. Then his remark alarmingly turned its lens toward Basically All Females Everywhere. I don’t think the comment was intended maliciously, exactly, and there is a great deal to be said for women choosing to behave with force and agency, but the author kinda came off as a sack of shit.

You don’t have to read the reader’s comment at all, though, because someone helpfully created this bit of machinima, forever preserving—nay, immortalizing—this truly brilliant blog comment, for my children and children’s children to always cherish. An Heirloom Comment.

Yeah, yeah, okay. I know I just promised I wouldn’t post any more spit-takes, but you should also know I pressed “play” on this video and then literally spat Diet Coke everywhere.

P.S. Mitu Khandaker was recently interviewed at Electron Dance.

P.P.S. Aha! Speaking of “video games were invented by men,” 1UP.com just published my retrospective of Roberta Williams’s seminal 1980 game Mystery House. Here it is!

Man. Man. I don’t think I’d ever used the word “gender” in a piece of writing until 2010. Wow! What a strange time for me, too. I was three months’ out of my six-year on-and-off romance/cohabitation thing, very freshly single and really bumbling around, extremely “over” writing about video games, and meanwhile I’d begun reading a lot about learned helplessness. You know, just for funsies. Er.

Yep, before 2010, I’d never used the word “gender.” What a dumb word.

Actually, that might be a lie. In school I did write a paper about women who join subcultures: it focused on Flora Belle Jan, the self-identified “flapper” journalist, and also, of all people, Mimi Thi Nguyen, who was a punk zinester and music journalist in the ‘90s. I likened both women to the not-very-fictional Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans, a woman who meticulously works to desex herself (Kerouac tells us she has short hair like a man’s, and that she wears dress slacks), all to be taken seriously as a Beat writer. So I bet the word “gender” must’ve snuck into that college essay somehow.

In Subterraneans Mardou is driven to the brink of her own wits, suddenly all too aware that she is, now and forever, ostracized by her chosen “subculture,” some niche group with which she had once so identified. Jan and Nguyen experienced similar psychological breaking points and very willfully severed themselves from their own established writing careers. In fact, I’m sure in my paper I accused them of “fleeing.”

It was kind of a weird paper to write for Asian-American history class. It was kind of weird that I took the class at all—but I needed a history credit to graduate! Oh, well. I think I got a B.

It would also be weird if, six years after having been suddenly hot-dropped into video games journalism, I were to—very abruptly, and with a personal sense of finality and closure—acknowledge some of my own patterns of experience.

Aha, but that’s just what I did with my current column at Unwinnable, “I Was a Teenage Sexist.”

Oh: what’s the column about? Okay. Well, I was an awful kid, a terrible adolescent girl, and a superficially nice but increasingly hostile young adult, all in spite of myself. I considered myself “one of the guys” and was an absolute horror to other girls.

I also take some space at Unwinnable to describe “internalized sexism,” which is when a woman fancies herself an exception to her own gender—which becomes double-ungood when she uses that same value-set to tacitly condone abuses done either to other women or to herself. I talk about different kinds of hatred, especially a burgeoning, unresolved self-hatred. Basically, it’s like if you combined “Nathan Barley” with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Wait. That cannot be the correct analogy. Oh, dear. You had better just read the piece.

The article is honest and heartfelt even at its worst, but I also think it’s way more guarded than it looks. That cautiousness isn’t necessarily deliberate, either: one person remarked “she got a lot worse than what she put in that article,” which chilled even me, the article’s author, and made me rethink what I’d left out.

But then I decided nothing too important was missing after all, and then I felt really good, like I could probably go the rest of my life without owing anyone whatever bad parts of some story. If someone says, “What was it like for you as a woman,” I can just shrug and say, “I wrote about it once,” and then point at the article instead of the experience itself. That lends a nice, healthy buffer.

The essay is four days old now—well, it’s actually two weeks old, but it only went up four days ago—and I guess what I’m saying is, it takes awhile to internalize certain things, un-internalize them, and process them again. And then there’s the question of whether you want that diarist’s hemorrhage all over your editor Stu’s website. Sorry, Stu!

I guess the column eventually works its way around the room to some other stuff, too. I only later heard it called “Somebody Else’s Problem,” which is really accusatory and uncomfortable!, but I do try to carefully describe that feeling of “That’s Not Me.” As in, “I am not a terrible person who anonymously says terrible things to [group], sight-unseen, for no reason.” The very nicest, kindest people have these very polite blinders on. They keep their heads low and their noses clean. Those are the nice people I mean to poke at with my little column.

And this is a trick I’ll very openly cop to using in my writing, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Look how much nicer you are than I! Poke, poke. It’s so easy for you to be kind and ethical! Poke, poke. Boy, if there were a more vocal majority of nice people, you’d sure be the one for the job! Poke, poke, jab.

For better or worse I don’t think the column ventures into any really strong opinions: it doesn’t take a real stance on the Anita Sarkeesian furor, except to imply that it’s wrong to abuse people on the Internet; it doesn’t explicitly name “rape culture” or use too much gnostic feminist vocabulary; it doesn’t take “female representation” to task in the way you might initially worry; Tosh.0 isn’t mentioned once.

Instead, I am a young feminist, standing on the ground floor, eyeballing the drawing board.

The basic takeaway of the thing, which is the part Kirk Hamilton wanted to share with Kotaku, is the rather benign notion that feminism is simply about anti-sexism.

Of course, the passage Kirk quotes has a very long lede—3500 words go far, spatially, in padding the conclusion’s punch—and although the article itself isn’t too marvelously incendiary, perhaps this little set of parentheses really does make for too punchy an excerpt. Readers will especially be on their guard anyway, so I guess the reader reactions aren’t surprising, even though those reactions are very different from other responses the piece elicited.

A couple people did come to me directly with concerns, and I agree my handling of some subject matter is problematic. Most imminent for me is that needling worry that any mishandled language will cause a type of pain, and I am still trying to decide whether I pass or fail. (This is to say nothing of the brief, sharp, immediate backlash Unwinnable received for including a screenshot of Anita Sarkeesian’s fictionally-but-alarmingly-bludgeoned face, itself a subject for an entirely different article, which already exists, by the way.)

So… why even write about all this stuff now? Just now? So suddenly?

I mean, I sure cooled my heels on this one. Way to hop on that gravy train!

I think Leigh is absolutely en pointe when she addresses a broadening dialogue about the mainstream’s latent, persistent sexism. “Maybe we’re making up for lost time,” she wonders, adding, “People who’ve been silent for a long time are louder when it’s finally time to be heard.”

“We women are learning and exploring too, assessing our own roles in the landscape and how we want to express ourselves,” Leigh continues.

I think that’s also true—not even in a “oh, suddenly we’re all feminists!” way, necessarily.

Like, for my own part I’ve been noodling with creative nonfiction for a (long) while, and even though I don’t think of that genre as particularly gendered, in video games, where this style of writing is still blushing and nascent and new—and probably more the purview of Gus Mastrapa, Tom Bissell, Tim Rogers—I’ve already heard the “personal essay” referred to as a style of “women’s writing.” Ha! That’s weird!

But I get it. There’s a subset of us—although it’s a pretty even sex split, here—who are enthusiastically and supportively yelling at one another to keep it up with this type of writing, and what a strange feeling to stake our flags right in that crevice. And it isn’t exactly “Kotaku Core,” but it isn’t really niche anymore, either!

Wow! We live in such a maddening time! Look at all these people writing, making videos, making video games! A lot of them are very good at it! It’s all very exciting! That is why a lot of people, including women, are very serious when they stress what they have to contribute, and then daringly contribute it. Everybody ought to live that way, with that sense of adventure and passion!

But about that landscape: some terrains still seem to have more silt, or less. What attitudes will be grown in those barren spaces? Why do some people—people who possess passion, the right sense of adventure—get shouted down always? That hardly seems correct. That unnerves me. And now there is this new unnerving thing happening, with all the extra shouting over the din that was already there! I think they’re battle cries, or battle hymns maybe.

For a self-avowed feminist (oh, that word!) I am not very vocal, kind of the way you’d never want to admit to being Lutheran or Libertarian or Occupy. But then I see really good writers and makers being shouted-down. Well, never mind, then; go ahead and add my voice to their numbers! Ah, I’ve again tried to write a concluding paragraph, and it’s just too punchy. Well.

Finally, the darling image up on top—in which an anonymous woman ponders her childhood idol, Rambo—is from Kotaku. (I think that is Kirk’s doing, as well.)

I’d promised to write something, anything!, for Artifice Books, but its editor Tadd was not too sure about my very first pitch, a catalogue of movie clips in which women get punched in the face.

So I scrapped that plan, and instead I have written on the subject of George Buckenham and Jonathan Whiting’s Hefty Seamstress. I recommend playing the game, too (it’s over here).

I got a really nice, personalized press email from “Gnome”—his real name is Konstantinos Dimopoulos, I’ve just learned!—and he is campaigning hard for the Bundle-in-a-Box Adventure Games bundle. As with many other bundles, this collection is pay-what-you-like; not only are seven games included, a copy of the well-received Ben There, Dan That! is in the mix. Why, yes, the games are DRM-free, since you were wondering. In the meantime, the Bundle-in-a-Box heralds the launch of The Sea Will Claim Everything. All this can be yours for just hundreds of pennies! PC adventure gamers, you can’t beat that!

Aled Lewis’s “How They Died” is now available as a T-shirt.

I’m not sure Buff Monster’s new series of minis is supposed to look like Katamari, but ALBOTAS is right to make the comparison anyway.

Foldskool Heroes (via it8bit) is a downloadable template that you can turn into custom papercraft of your own. I really like this! It sort of reminds me of those blank vinyl Soopa Coin-Up Bros figurines.

My last post here was about my friend Brian, and this one is, too.

I don’t think I’ve talked lengthily about anxiety or depression in any public venue, but I will say that, after a pretty serious breakup in college, I tried Celexa. That did not go well. If you are under the age of 24, maybe don’t try that drug. Still, I think I can tell you, without tipping my hand totally, I have a lot of the same problems BT has. I’ve talked a lot about crippling paralysis and numbness, for instance, and when an event throws me off-balance—receiving a text message on Tuesday afternoon, say—it can be hard for me to get all the way out of bed and eat something. It can be a pain to force yourself out of your own head and neuroticism. Leaving the house helps. Taking a little trip might help.

For Brian, a visit to Chicago was just what he needed! No, I wasn’t a particularly helpful friend. But! I did convince BT to play the game Prey. Oh, Prey. What a brilliant, stupid game! It is a little like Portal, a little like Portal 2, and it explains its game mechanics using awful Cherokee stereotypes! Check it out! (It is a genius game, actually, but when Brian shouts from the sofa “How did this even get made?” the implicit answer really is, “Oh, barely.”)

In his latest piece at Unwinnable, “Stuck,” Brian talks a little bit about depression, about “play” as a creative act (oh, it is), and—ahem—especially about Prey.

“You’re constantly moving forward, crossing whatever bridge or going through whatever portal is in front of you because it is in front of you,” Brian writes. Best of all, the game doesn’t want you to get stuck. “That’s a nice feeling,” Brian adds, “to be moving forward.”

Here, Brian is quick to underscore that he isn’t speaking in metaphors at all. In-game progress is no microcosm, no synecdoche, no grand framework for understanding life. Prey—a short game that, in this case, was a steal at eight bucks—is very, very low-investment. But forward movement is forward movement.

So moving through the game is its own success, its own reward, same as making yourself brush your teeth and eat a waffle at 9am. Success!

• Unwinnable.com – Stuck

My friend and colleague Brian Taylor visited Chicago over the weekend, and I tell you, I barely got to drag him all over town the way I’d planned. In another life we might’ve gone to Three Aces, Grange Hall Burger Bar, and all the other places the foodies have not yet discovered and ruined. We did visit Myopic, but there wasn’t time enough to go around the corner to Quimby’s. (We did hit up the Paramount Room, even though I warned the burgers aren’t as good as advertised, and then my hamburger was ridiculously delicious, and then I felt foolish in a really nice way.)

Mr. Taylor and I went directly from the airport to Videogames Then & Now, which is this fantastic store out in Norridge. If you are ever in Chicago, do yourself a favor, rent a Zipcar, and make the drive.

We ought to have recorded ourselves talking in there, because we were hilarious. As a matter of fact, the gentleman behind the counter thanked us for being such lively loiterers, and I admitted to him that ordinarily I am very in-and-out of that store, all business. This time I was excitable, even a little bit twerpy; I’ve seldom had so much fun in public.

BT and I spent a long time among the stacks of NES cartridges. We are both great fans of the MacVenture games and their NES ports, and I found Shadowgate pretty easily. Brian wanted his own copy of Déjà Vu, and I located that pretty nimbly, too. I also snatched up the NES Gyruss—that “tube shooter” is only the greatest arcade machine ever—while Brian, who is even more into hardboiled crime fiction than I could ever aspire, picked up a bizarre little game called Nightshade. I hope he decides to write about it.

BT nearly convinced me to buy NBA Jam for Game Boy; I’d googled game footage on my iPhone right there in the store, and we marveled at what a full game experience was packed onto that tiny cart. (He could not convince me to even consider this abomination, no matter how he tried.)

In the Xbox 360 aisle I began raving about Prey, which I remembered as short, strange, brain-bending, and unironically racist. Used copies were priced to move at just $8, and soon enough I had talked both of us into snagging copies. (BT would find his chance to make good headway through Prey the next day, because I took like two hours to get ready for the concert.)

We also sat down with an old issue of Nintendo Power and basically copy-edited it. We flipped through multiple “how to beat” and “cheat codes” books, too, a couple of which were authored by Jeff Rovin.

“The cover of this book reminds me of—did you ever see that Unauthorized Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book?” I asked Brian.

“I had it!” BT said. “In fact, I think it may have also been written by Jeff Rovin.” (ATTN BRIAN: it sure was!)

Of course I soon began shouting about the perfect invention that is the Nyko Perfect Shot, which is a gun-shaped saddle for the Wii remote. My favorite FPSes are “on rails,” I love light guns, and as something of a former arcade rat I very fervently believe—and I am plagiarizing Margaret Robinson when I say this—“touching hardware matters.”

Now I lamented in-store that I have only one Wii light-gun game (“It’s Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles,” I told Brian, “and I loved co-op because it stopped Nik and me from arguing, for once”). Brian laughed, then assured me that House of the Dead: Overkill would be worth my while.

Then, immediately after we left the game store—and this is the probably most ridiculous part—we popped a U’ey and drove back to a GameStop to look for Dead Space: Extraction.

Back at the ranch, I demanded that BT look at some of my favorite Atari 2600 games. Most of these are really beautiful ports of fuller arcade experiences.

Someday I will write about the thousand iterations of Gyruss—I’m a little horrified by the NES reinvention, actually—but I do believe the 2600 port is the most jaw-dropping of all of them. Seriously, this music is incredible:

I also showed him Berzerk; 2009 was kind of a dark year for me, I explained, so every day after work I’d come home and sit on the floor and play it. It is so spare, so austere. “I don’t think of it as a port,” I told him. “I really think of this as the true version of the game.”

Instead of treating the game as a fast-paced shooter, I make Berzerk into this slow, contemplative thing, where I patiently wait behind electrified walls until the robots destroy themselves. It has never occurred to me to play it any differently, and now I was blurting “I think I’m playing this wrong,” and BT was saying, “I think you are!”

I play videogames on an eight-year-old HD cathode television, and when it finally burns out or breaks, I will probably pay through the nose to have it repaired. This decision has something to do with my affection for light-gun games, which sometimes rely on scan lines, but it has everything else to do with the Atari 2600. Professor Ian Bogost has made much of the value of phosphorescent bleeding, and in a game like Berzerk the walls really do burn blue in the eeriest way. (Here is its original arcade incarnation; note how luminous the walls’ glow.) I explained all this to Brian because I was suddenly embarrassed about my television set.

I also showed BT Solaris (“Like, the Tarkovsky film?” “NO”) and Space Shuttle, which was a gift from Kevin. BT was especially smitten with that game, because—and I did a terrible job of demonstrating this without the game’s reference sheet—the 2600’s six switches are meant to represent the shuttle’s control panel. The game itself is a meticulous procedural.

The Video Game Critic deftly explains:

In addition to the normal joystick controls, Space Shuttle uses all of the console buttons to control things like primary/secondary engines, cargo doors, and landing gear. The manual is a thick, 30-page booklet containing procedures, diagrams, and charts. A quick reference sheet is also included, and there’s even a template to place over your console switches! The screen displays the instrument panel and a view out of the windshield.

BT started talking about what a novel thing it is, to have the hardware itself become such an integral part of the game experience, and I responded with some weird anecdote about a magical game I had played in childhood, but anyway I agreed with Brian. Then we talked about how emulation always fails in some way anyway, but in this case it fails spectacularly.

Brian played Shadowgate for awhile, and then I started playing the NES version of Uninvited. I began to panic as my character was gradually overcome by the forces of evil, shouting that I didn’t realize the NES version had a “time limit.” I shut the console off. (Now I discover that the NES version doesn’t have a time limit—it’s much more insidious than that. I am carrying a single item in my inventory that is A) useless, and B) slowly killing me.)

Later I told Brian we ought to have recorded our reaction shots to the title screen of Solstice. We looked at each other, and our faces were like “Whooooaaaaa!” (If we had only known!)

We were completely stunned. “It’s prog rock!” I shouted. “Fantasy psychedelia! Wizards and mushrooms!” (I’m not actually ‘into’ progressive rock, although I inexplicably become furious whenever I discover someone does not love Electric Light Orchestra.)

And although Solstice is 8-bit, we could absolutely hear what musician Tim Follin was getting at. “Can you hear it?” Brian asked me. “Like a tin whistle?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I agreed. “And this guy is like way into lutes.” Incidentally, with thirty seconds’ research, I located this photo of Follin holding a mandolin, which I figure is close enough.

I regret not knowing about this visionary sooner, as he’s already retired. But I was pleased to discover that Frank Cifaldi interviewed Follin in 2005.

In the end it is probably all right that Brian and I didn’t record ourselves saying or playing anything, because it would’ve gone on for hours and hours.

You know how we love it when you talk about your writing process, so have at it!

If you can’t produce a single original thought about something, you try to stay away from it. Right?

Well. This is a terrible attitude for a would-be writer to have. As a result, you will finish your column on May 20, then sit on it, waiting for thoughts to clarify and the final, original idea to strike. You will be able to use that glimmering original thought as the article’s resolution, you hope, and then you will be able to send this shitty mess of writing to your editor, apologizing the entire time.

But you have, meanwhile, been reading reviews of Diablo III, because these reviews are written by peers and friends. That is when you realize that your summation—that the game is “cute”—is hardly a revelation at all. You wait for inspiration to strike, but soon you have stopped thinking about Diablo III completely.

By yesterday you have decided the piece is dead in the water. So you have to make a choice. Kill it? Or email it to your beleaguered editor?

You finally decide that having an original thought is not the most important thing after all. The most important thing, instead, is to read zero reviews of Diablo III anytime you are trying to write about Diablo III. Because you have, from inside your vacuum, been searching for a point nobody else has already made, but everybody already made it while you were off fretting, and anyway, it is silly to try to make a unique point, since you live in a universe of simultaneities and timely, collective experiences.

A few days ago you went ahead and added a little bit about “spatial working memory,” which is actually a concept you tried to introduce in an article you wrote a long time ago, and boy are you ever a fraud, the way you are recycling material, here. You feel really guilty about this.

Also, the points you make about the third-person vantage being more comfortable than the first-person vantage, you kind of owe all those arguments to a phone conversation you had with your friend Brian Taylor. But at the time Taylor was all “oh, don’t bother mentioning me,” and you realize your writing improves when you cut him out of your column, so you don’t bother mentioning him (in your endless, nervous quest to cite every source, you’ve already mentioned Kurt, Julian, Andy Pressman, and “Sega Juice,” you goddamn name-dropper). (You also guiltily tweet about how much you owe Dave, not in any specific way, but in a vague “thanks Dave” way.)

And now you are helplessly sending your overdue mess of a column to your editor, all the while acknowledging that it is baggy fluff with no honed direction. Great! Now you are supposed to go on your merry way. Do some laundry; live a little.

But you don’t do your laundry; you are supplying your editor with line edits instead. Then! Just as your editor announces he is preparing your piece for publication, you suddenly write five new paragraphs in a span of twenty minutes, all of which insert wholly new ideas about “spatial distortion” into a column that was originally about a game being cute (and then you bizarrely add something else about Disney World). Nice job! These five new paragraphs are supposed to go between the sentences “I can see through walls, here,” and “I have difficulty reconciling ‘space’ and ‘distance.’”

Somewhere in the next time zone, your editor is rolling his eyes. Your poor editor.

So it went with “Diablo III is Adorable,” your newest column at Unwinnable. It is a stupid, nonlinear mess, and you forgot to use spellcheck.

Your editor helped you with line breaks. Smart move, Stu.

• Unwinnable – Diablo III is Adorable

Brandon Boyer, via Twitter, inadvertently (advertently? well, whatever) directed me toward this post at Jezebel about girl games.

Its writer, Anna Breslaw, opens her piece with a quick hat-tip to a 1995 computer game called Chop Suey, which I’ve mentioned on Infinite Lives thrice before and am about to mention again. That’s because it is a great game that isn’t mentioned often enough. I’m trying to change the world, here, people.

But yes, our coincident timing is totally awkward, ha ha. Earlier in the week I’d snuck a bunch of Chop Suey playthrough videos onto YouTube, hoping to jog memories. (For a long time the only footage of the game available online was Bruno’s.)

But also, I was already laboring over this Chop Suey retrospective. Please do read it! It is a tragedy Chop Suey isn’t better remembered: it was celebrated in its day, and with reason. But most people did not use the Internet in 1995, which is to say, Chop Suey and all its accolades have not been very well preserved. (Duncan’s extraordinarily bizarre death doesn’t help anything; it’s almost impossible to discuss Chop Suey without mentioning that part, too, and the game is thusly difficult to google.)

The late ‘80s and early ‘90s were such a great time for edutainment, and while the medium isn’t entirely dead (your child’s school computer lab may yet have Storybook Weaver!), I do think the middle-’90s’ “girl game” craze went a long way in murdering it. Worse, the “girl game” genre probably scared a generation of woulda-been PC gamers away.

Most girls did not actually play girl games in the ‘90s, of course, because most “girl games” were stupid. Girls are not idiots. Girls are not boy-crazy strumpets. Girls are 8. Girls are 9. Girls play Oregon Trail and You Don’t Know Jack. Can people not picture 9-year olds?

This is what girls really want: girls want horse training simulations; they like fortune-telling; girls read spy stories and tales of adventure and daring; girls enjoy the Super Nintendo version of Mario Kart and computer games about being in outer space. Girls would like chemistry lab sets for Christmas, or planetariums and cheap telescopes, or periscopes and walkie-talkies. Girls like crafts. Girls like Minecraft! Girls like dolls, toy theaters, replicas, scale miniatures, and “character editors.” Girls like She-Ra. Girls like Labyrinth. Girls like sci-fi, unless it’s just a bunch of dweeby dudes standing around talking into their own lapels. Girls like pirates and especially stowaways, and especially stowaways who look like boys but are secretly girls. Girls like scrappy heroines—resourceful, freckle-nosed troublemakers—heroines with scraped knees and scuffed shoes. Girls are impatient to learn something new, and if you don’t give them brain-food they eventually wander off. There! There is your blueprint for a “girl game.”

So, yes, Breslaw’s and my Chop Suey -themed posts both went up on May 12, both incorporating that same playthrough footage. Oops! How embarrassing. It’s a little like arriving at a dance in matching dresses.

Fortunately, the dresses aren’t identical! (Ha, ha, ha!) Breslaw’s piece isn’t about Chop Suey at all, thank goodness. It’s actually about a new project called FEMICOM, an online museum that aspires to catalogue and archive every manner of game-for-girls. This is noble work—it’s why I’ve made Chop Suey evangelism one of my pet hobbies, actually—exactly because the project illustrates the enormity of the gulf between “this game or toy is edifying” and “why would you ever give your child that.”

The nicest thing about seeing this article about “girl games” on Jezebel, though? It’s elicited all these comments, where the readers themselves are essentially sorting the lady-treasures from the lady-tripe. One reader mentions Heavenly Sword for PS3. Oh, boy, do girls love that game. (Because we love third-person beat-em-ups starring She-Ra! It’s pretty much the only game you should give an adult woman. There, I said it.)

Other notable “girl-friendly” game mentions: Sim City. The Sims. Little Big Planet. Metroid. Zelda. Carmen Sandiego. Ecco. Pokemon. No One Lives Forever. Nancy Drew games. Street Fighter, Soul Calibur. Doom, Marathon, BioShock. Killer7 (most girls do really well with first-person rail-shooters; this has something to do with spatial attention). Final Fantasy. Fallout. Diablo. Starcraft. Mass Effect. Star Wars KOTOR. Guild Wars. Skyrim. Braid. Age of Empires. Civilization. Portal and its sequel. (“I loved that about Portal…really the only way you knew the character was female was from the brief glimpses you got of yourself if you lined Portals up right. Her female-ness wasn’t a factor one way or the other in the game.” Thank you, Susan Fry! I agree.)

And a thread, four comments long, about Woodruff and the Schnibble.

And also from the Jez comments,

See, this is why I get so frustrated with the whole conversation about games for girls. If you’d tried to design an ideal non-people based game for little girl me, it would have featured dinosaurs fighting each other, not dolphins swimming around being pretty.

• FEMICOM
• Jezebel – On “Girl-Centric” Video Games

• Motherboard – In a Field of ‘90s Barbieland Wreckage, Chop Suey Got Gaming for Girls Totally Right

Me: i was reading this tonight
Me: http://www.electrondance.com/a-theoretical-war-part-3/
Me: i was feeling out how joel goodwin feels
Me: i think i like where he takes it
Me: how much about games criticism do you read

Julian: not much

Me: LUDOLOGY VS NARRATOLOGY: THE FUNNEST ARGUMENT

Julian: man I hate it when things become binary

Me: mhm

Julian: that said, I was thinking that I don’t want my game-playing to be interactive infographs either, you know?

Me: ah, here it is!

Narrow definitions of games are perfectly valid within little contextual spaces. Ludology can have its rules-based framework. Narratology is free to pursue games through narrative. Art games can co-exist with the FPS, the RTS and the platformer. They don’t have to compete. Why can’t we have different theories for different situations, each one handling their own definition of game?

Every voice and viewpoint is valuable. What’s so maddening are the destructive attempts to own the word game. Mathematics blossomed into a thousand different branches, so has games and so should the theory. Some will care about narrative. Some will care about rules. Some will care about player experience. Some will care about monetization. And some will try to change the world.

There’s enough space for everyone.

Julian: music is kind of like that too
Julian: hardcore music theorists are all about structure (and usually against tonality)

Me: i inadvertently read that the wrong way
Me: as people who are not hardcore into music theory,
Me: but rather, into hardcore music……… theory

Julian: haha

(This all came up because Julian had actually sent me this, and I became very, “oh, hmm.” )

(P.S. If you happily follow all Goodwin’s endnotes, you might suddenly discover it is a quarter after 10pm and you have not yet washed a single dish or glass.)

Instead of reading and publishing Kevin’s latest piece, which is still in the queue (sorry, Kevin!), I am directing you toward my newest thing, a review of Anna Anthropy’s debut book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. I might also continue to ignore Kevin. One of my 2012 resolutions is “sly self-promotion,” and I know Kevin will pardon me.

Most people will not read my book review, but I hope they go ahead and read Anna Anthropy’s book. The review itself is about a lot of things, but it’s also about video games and game development and writer’s block and emotional paralysis. I’m a little surprised that Stu used my quaint joke title (“Rise of the Existential Crisis”), but I’m mostly unruffled.

I’m new to freelancing, by the way. Many people were surprised when I gave up the celebrity gossip blogging gig, which was a sure bet, a daily, paid exercise that I enjoyed doing. And anyway, freelancing is hard—really hard. Most people can’t do it. I am not sure I can. I haven’t been any sort of success (hasn’t anyone noticed I’ve only published two things since February?).

At some point I might have to give it up. It makes me very happy, kind of, to sit here and write nothing and hate myself, so I’m not sure I will give up so soon, but I keep thinking about it.

But what no one tells you is that it isn’t a living. In fact it’s the total opposite: it’s figuring out how to afford full-time freelancing.

Writing for yourself is luxurious, and like all luxuries, it can be expensive. Even at this early stage in my tiny career I already waste a lot of time. Mostly I waste time trying to devise sneaky plans to help myself afford this glamorous, bohemian lifestyle.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have been married. I’ve been single for a while now, but this is my first real experiment with being mostly-alone and beholden only to myself. Whenever I sit and rest I suddenly remember I am wasting money. I can’t believe how expensive it is to just sit and breathe.

Emotionally, I didn’t realize the all-or-nothing proposition freelancing would turn everything I write into. I knew that I would need to learn to write faster, sure, but not this much faster. I always thought I was fast. I’m slow. S-L-O-W.

And the stakes for writing were so much lower when I was able to go into a day job, or when I was taking care of my parents! If I published a heap of bullshit, it wasn’t the Worst Thing. Now it is the Worst Thing. (Then again, I am very stingy with what I’ll put my name on. For one thing, I think blogs, sometimes news, are sapping “creative nonfiction,” AKA the Lost Art of the Magazine Article. Internet writing is the norm nowadays, and what we once called “articles” we now call “longreads.”)

Talk about a crisis, though: every day in March, and then April, that I couldn’t seem to finish Anna’s book, was another day of lost wages, never mind my ever-forward march toward an eviction notice and eventual death. (“April writer’s block brings May electricity shut off,” I repeated to myself on the couch, really beginning to lose it.)

This turns an ordinary case of writer’s block into a thunderous chorus, one of your own making, singing a paean to your dreams’ own inefficacy. That’s a terrific feeling! to use every generous window of opportunity others have given you only to prove that, besides not being very good at life, you’re also some sort of couch-bound idiot.

I don’t mean to talk so much about money, but it is an interesting feeling, the feeling of slowly starving to death. It isn’t just money, or misspent time, or whatever, but the starvation part is so much gravy. Or at least I wish it were gravy. Sorry, I’m hungry at this very moment.

(05/07 edit: If you are clever enough, you can eat for just dollars a day, so I hope you ignore journalist Earnest Cavalli when he advises Twitter to “hug me” and mail me instant ramen. For one thing, I already eat enough instant ramen and, if anything, just mail me toilet paper. God, I’m kidding! The point is, these might become things you start planning around, which doesn’t help Writer’s Block any.)

The rest of last month’s crisis is laser-honed on Anna’s book, which itself is a pep talk about getting your ass into gear and not waiting around. The text is meant as empowering, not discouraging, but boy, did it turn me into a mess.

I sent an email early this morning about how, in my role as the “unreliable critic,” I hope other people only feel encouraged. This is a strange thing to say, probably, because I often sound so cynical or depressed. I’m really only sadistic. No, I did not put that part in the email.

What I did put in the email was this, and even though it is really only meant for the one person I wrote it to, I think it does clarify my own slack interest in the nitty-gritty of game development, which doubles as my profound interest in games’ authors themselves: “It is extremely queer,” I wrote my acquaintance, “to dedicate your life and its mission to games. I think—and I agree with Anna here, and this is a real fulcrum of her book—that even just the goal is a profound goal, because it lends so much weight and credence to the form, that so many people would become so dedicated. See?”

“I don’t mean to be so gushy,” I continued in another paragraph, “but we’re a pack of odd ones, aren’t we?”

It’s strange that I used “we” right there, as if I were lumping myself in with some marvelous group. I wasn’t, not intentionally.

Actually, I was thinking of the bizarre people who bizarrely choose freelance. These people sit straight up in bed one night and realize that not being able to write exactly what they’d like to write is WORSE THAN DEATH. WORSE THAN DEATH. That is the only reason you would ever choose freelance-writing over a nice life. Freelance is mostly work and drinking but occasionally includes starvation and folding yourself into a ball on the sofa, where you cry out for intervention. I like to cry out to both God and Steven, but sometimes I phone Cass or my mom instead.

My mother doesn’t think it’s strange that I like writing stuff, but she thinks it’s strange that I mostly like to write about video games. She even thinks it’s strange that I’ve shelved all plans to make a video game. My mother’s attitudes make sense, I guess. But when you play a game, and I play the same game, and then we compare our notes and we’ve had these separate experiences (or maybe the same one), that’s amazing! That’s why people write, too!

Since finishing the book and its review, I’ve gotten only a little better at freelancing. I stay fastened to my laptop a little better—my apologies to Twitter—and I’m getting better at saying “no,” or generally knowing when to excuse myself from friends. In the past you couldn’t get rid of me! Now I’m slightly more aware of a clock ticking. I might even check the time and announce I have to leave! (In some cases I am overdoing this. One text message went “What happened?” and I realized I hadn’t noticed thirty days going by.)

Whitney has taken it best. She says I am a better friend now—more “accessible,” she says!—which is great, that she feels this way, because I am actually ignoring people more than ever.

There’s a book I need to reread called A Writer’s Space. I meant to reread it before publishing the book review, but I guess I had better reread it now. I read it when I was at home alone with my adoptive dad, who had Alzheimer’s at that time, which made writing difficult.

The book is about battling yourself and others—usually friends and relatives who can see at a glance that you are painfully “not busy”—for workspace. The book does not explain how to deal with a family member with Alzheimer’s, but it did teach me how to win a fight against myself, at least.

Of course the doctor who wrote the book talks about deep breathing and feeling very zen. Is that helpful to everybody? Probably not.

In that case, I might also recommend a passage from Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead. She is not so patient. In fact, she is extremely irritated about being interrupted:

I don’t know, maybe if I had an office job people would call me all day and ask me to run out and do things for them, too. But somehow I doubt it. No one ever asks me to take time off for them when I have to teach. Folks respect the fact that I might get in trouble from a boss or disappoint my students. But when I’m my own boss and don’t have a designated space outside the home to call “my office,” it’s a constant battle to get taken seriously. For me, it’s usually a losing battle.

My mother: worst offender. I turn off the phone so I won’t hear from her. In my book review I hyperlink to the full-length version of my interview with Jake Elliott; I inadvertently linked to the page where my mother is shouting—shouting! shouting!—for a slice of pie.

Ariel Gore’s advice is, literally, to outright lie to people, to tell them you’ve left town. I haven’t done this, since I’m usually out of town anyway, but I’m going to start.

Part of defending your workspace, though, is protecting it from yourself. You have to get so much better at not doing what you want to do, which is go out with Robyn, or vacuum. When I have writer’s block, my apartment sparkles. Currently my sink is loaded with dishes, which means I’m in a good headspace.

More than anything, if you have some sort of perverted, demented friend who thinks she can make it as a freelance writer, oh my God, please try to be patient with her. No, she cannot afford to go to the movies, and she isn’t insulting you when she gets off the phone.

I also encourage anyone who is thinking of freelancing or making video games—you know who you are!—to choose the steepest, shittiest path, because you will be so, so pleased with yourself, even though two nights ago you watched Rachael Ray while you ate a Lean Pocket.

***

05/07: This is a murky post, I realize, but I do feel great—only occasionally does the full spectre of my sense of incompetence really loom—and I only want to stress that, if you take it upon yourself to rearrange aspects of your life to allow for freelancing, you can do it.

I want to always be encouraging, if in my usual backhanded way, and I hope you—whoever you are—know that there’s nothing to be scared of. Yes, even if you are freaked out constantly, as I am. OK! Thanks!

Some of you might know that I cultivate and maintain a semi-active Formspring account, where I try to answer both queries about video games and humiliating questions about my personal life just as accurately and plainly as I can.

Recently somebody asked,

What happened to virtual reality? Remember the promise of a Sega Genesis and Atari Jaguar helmet in the mid-90s?

This is a great question! My reply is off-the-cuff, and now that I’ve written it I think I might like to expand on it later. But here is v1.0 anyway:

VR just gets turned into other stuff. Like, Second Life was actually supposed to be a type of VR, with the headset and haptic feedback and everything.

What it really comes down to is, people aren’t ready and willing to look that fucking stupid. And they never will be.

Did you ever see the “early adopter” on the airplane, watching his movie in his little hd widescreen movie spectacles? The year was like 2001ish, and that guy was a full-on dweebazoid. He takes a segway to work, and he’s happy because he’s living in the future, and I’m glad for him, but his eagerness to strap every type of laser to his body will never, ever be cool.

Similarly, I remember seeing a prototype for a type of wearable keyboard—it fit in the palm and it was really easy to learn to touch-type—in a magazine called ‘Shift.’ Boy, did they try to glam up that wearable keyboard, but there was no way. Attaching a computer to your body is not, will not be “cool.” The problem with VR is, if anyone catches you wearing a headset, you might as well close down that OKCupid profile.

I’m borrowing a lot of these points from an article I read—I don’t remember when or where—about the consistent lack of commercial success with all these repeated iterations of the “videophone.” Sure, times have changed since that article was written, insofar as Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are totally viable, but the truth is, I’m not going to take some random call when my hair is a nest and my face is splotchy, just like I’m not going to run down to answer the door.

Here’s an unhappy truth about technology: the real obstacle is vanity. Take elevators, for instance. There once was a hotel elevator, and it was too slow. The elevator’s inventor thought long and hard about how to speed up the elevator’s mechanisms. Do you know what he did instead? He put up a mirror. He hung a mirror right next to the sliding elevator doors, because people wouldn’t notice the subpar elevator technology. They’d be too busy looking at themselves.

I promise, I’m really trying to not use Infinite Lives as my own professional pinboard these days, but I do have a column about Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Rantou Hen at Vice Motherboard:

The game’s wackiness and camp are superficial. They’re just show. All the while, Bakuretsu’s characters and backdrops hint at something darker. To borrow from Baudrillard, there is a gradual “perversion of reality” until, at last, we are looking at a “facsimile” with “no original copy.”

Really, I’ve never had so much fun writing something in my life. Am I really serious? Who can tell!

I also made a supplementary video:

• Motherboard – Adventures in Shit Games: ‘Cho Aniki: Bakuretsu Rantou Hen’

• Aled Lewis, “Hyrule Forever”

Joel Goodwin is not too sure a video game can simulate some of life’s complexities. In his recent “Parenting Is Not an Escort Mission”—an indirect response to a thing I wrote in January about Creatures—he warns against using games to reify life events that are not so simple. Parenting, for instance, is not so simple.

In the same way that I used Creatures to think about parenthood, Goodwin worries that game designers, too, are guilty of the same abstractions. He catalogues some games about parenthood, and almost every single game he names is an “escort mission,” one that reduces love and caregiving to something as banal as “safely haul this potato from point A to point B.” Ehm, my words, not Goodwin’s.

Next he suggests subtler or alternative game mechanics that might go further in reproducing (NO PUN INTENDED) real-life experiences. He poses the possibility of games that, if developed, might represent parenthood in a happier, healthier, more intricate way. (In the comments, some readers name games that do just that.)

It’s a fascinating read, and I wholly recommend it.

I’m a big, big fan of “My World of Flops,” an ongoing series of movie reviews by Nathan Rabin of the A.V. Club. “Flops” conducts post-mortems of critical and commercial failures, reevaluating each film with fresh eyes. And Rabin gives every movie a fair shake (his review of Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered is, in a word, generous), ultimately grading each film as a “failure,” a “fiasco,” or a “secret success.”

I have always held that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the 2600 is a “secret success” (Kevin agrees), and when Rabin first announced to Twitter that he was going to score the video game for “My World of Flops,” I was floored with delight.

For one, this is the first time a video game has ever made it to “Flops,” and E.T.’s notoriety certainly qualifies it for inclusion. For another, the “Flops” series was only meant to last a single year; not only has it endured, it has spiraled out of control! Video games! Licensed video games! What next?

So I was totally thrilled when Rabin tweeted that his review is complete:

@nathanrabin I just turned in my first, and possibly last game-themed My World of Flops piece on Atari’s E.T. It is less than glowing.

In an effort to rally interest in Rabin’s upcoming E.T. review, I took to Twitter to inflict my own opinion of the game on everybody. There are a lot of inactive verbs. The whole thing could stand a rewrite.

Here, now, and unedited for posterity (mostly), are my E.T. tweets.

jennatar In honor of E.T. (Atari 2600, 1982) making it onto @nathanrabin’s Flops, here is my GLOWING review, presented one painful line at a time.

jennatar E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is about an extra-terrestrial named E.T.

jennatar In it, you play ET. You are trying to assemble an “interplanetary” phone, because you believe in liberties and that VOIP ought to be free.

jennatar In the game, your only ally is a 10-year-old child named Elliott, here rendered in stark, rudimentary pixels.

jennatar In the film, Elliott’s idealism and childlike naïveté are tested when Spielberg replaces all the guns with walkie-talkies.

jennatar Your adversaries, alas, are numerous. There are, for instance, a number of gov’t agents who are trying to strip-search you.

jennatar There are also scientists, no doubt working for Big Pharma, who probably want to capitalize on your organs and turn you into the latest pill

jennatar Despite all that, your greatest obstacle, poor ET, is yourself. Yes, the landscape is riddled with enormous pits. Step carefully, ET!

jennatar You could become a captive—by your own hand!—in one of these deep furrows, which itself is a metaphor for the “liminality”

jennatar For you are a stranger in a strange land, stretching yourself across space and time in search of a moment of connection, and small candies

jennatar It is during these liminal fugues, when ET is lower than ground itself, that most players, disgusted, switch the Atari off.

nathanrabin @jennatar Color me impressed. Beats the hell out of my infinitely more verbose take.

jennatar @nathanrabin Shh! Not yet; I’m not finished.

jennatar That players leave w/out finishing—that is, without making “contact” with “home”—is a potent metaphor for a collective lack of agency.

jennatar Finally, the graphics are OK but maybe the framerate could have been better. I’m not sure the 2600 is being pushed to its full potential 3/5

P.S. This E.T. “strategies” video rules (thanks, Andrew!).