Release date: Out Now

Formats: PC, PS3, XBOX 360

Price: £23.99

UK, June 26^th 2009 – God, I love power. It gives me a fat, densely-veined horn. I would piss all over my grandmother if she saluted me in return.

If you’ve ever wanted to hear these words spoken by Hannah Montana, you should buy this game immediately.

Let’s start with a little History. The first American towns were remote islands in a vast sea of wheat, held together by the oppression of their Puritan faith. The Community was all; neighbour told tale on neighbour, and all backs were bowed under the crushing weight of Dogma. With the modern age came the veneer of civilisation, but under the surface of every provincial American town lurks the spectre of fundamentalism; the seed of something great, and dark, and ugly.

This time, the seed has found fruitful soil and grown. It has grown into Hannah Montana.

Child’s Play

In this inspirational kids’ game, based on the 2009 movie by Darren Aronofsky, you play a young and dead-eyed religious fanatic whose dream is to rise from simple Southern schoolgirl to the religious Messiah of her entire town. Along the way you’ll learn important lessons about friends, responsibility, and practical mass suicide techniques.

So come on come on / Point out the unbeliever / Reveal his sin unto the Lord / And let him be purified by fire this day

HM: TM plays like Grand Theft Auto crossed with The Waltons. As you roam, sandbox-style, around your small town (controlled via a sometimes clunky third-person camera), your job is to win over the other inhabitants to your faith with fun song-and-dance routines, coupled with physical violence and the threat of eternal damnation.

Each follower brings revenue, and greater numbers allow you to hire out successively larger venues for your performances. You’ll go from Lord-themed disco all the way up to football stadium, and then who knows… maybe you’ll even take your fans to Heaven itself.

Montana paces her home, deep in thought. Her step-parents have been instructed never to look her in the face.

You Know… For Kids

Although the game features scenes of religious hatred on a huge scale, the designers are ever aware that it’s aimed at a younger audience. For this reason, God is represented by an alpaca.

Father Alpaca, benevolent Lord… and regretful Punisher.

Father Alpaca is also your in-game guide, giving you mission objectives and letting you know when you’re falling short of His Holy Ideal.

Father Alpaca looks on. “Why must I be so hard on myself”, Hannah asks of him. “Because you are dirty, child; dirty in the eyes of the Alpaca.”

This Little Piggy Runs A Book Shop

God is always guiding Hannah, using visions to show her the true way to righteousness. In the game, this is done via the AlpacaCam. It acts as an extra vision mode, activated by the Q key (PC), which allows you to see people the way Montana sees them: as ignorant animals who must be herded… or eaten.

Annie the Grocer is an emu because she hides her head in the sand; she will be easy to control. Her husband Elmore is a pig. He is a man, and filthy, and good only for the slaughter.

This mechanic is a magical way to show children how to break other people down into simple, easily definable stereotypes. That way, they will know whose arguments to ignore in real life.

When persuading new followers, you must select the most appropriate brainwashing method depending on what kind of animal they are. The AlpacaCam gives valuable clues here.

With A Little Help From My Cousins

Words are one thing, but before your commune can really take off, you also need to make sure you can maintain discipline. First, you must select your Cousins. These will be your closest followers and the harbingers of your will, ready to die – and kill – for you. This mechanic is vaguely similar to Black & White, in that you reward the Cousins for appropriate behaviour, and punish them for bad. Spend too little time refining their will to hurt, and they may get soft on you later, costing you valuable prestige, and even allowing usurpers to take your place.

“Show me how you’d do it, Caleb. Show me how you’d twist her head right off. You’re a good boy, Caleb.”

The best way to train your Cousins is to start them slow, on defenceless targets, such as women. Do it right, and no more than a few beatings will be necessary.

Montana takes her two new Cousins on a milk run. This time it’s just talking, but later in the game you can unlock blunt instruments, water boards and Medieval Inquisition relics in order to ensure maximum fealty.

This section of the game is maddeningly addictive, and I often found myself returning to the same victims because they were just so much fun to play through.

The errant emu has now been returned to the flock. If she knows what’s good for her, she will surrender a daily tithe of melons for the glory of the Alpaca.

Sometimes you actually get to control the Cousins directly, in a variety of fun torture-based mini-games which never get boring.

In “Baptism Pool”, you must hold dissenters’ heads under the water until they admit the Truth into their hearts. If a victim drowns, you lose points, and the frogs (your followers) laugh at you. Laughing, always laughing, just like the other kids in your class. Before you showed them.

A Staged Epiphany

But the main focus of the game is the concert. Dressed in a lurid blonde wig designed to appeal to the lowest Aryan denominator (there are no black people in the game, possibly to save on hard-drive space), your task is to lead your followers, or “Alpacolytes”, in song. Depending on your needs, you can choose a song that increases Fervour, leading to new followers, or Hate, useful when there are dissenters in your flock who must be weeded out.

Hateful lyrics are represented by the yellow button, Fervent ones by the blue. At higher detail settings, you can actually make out the froth collecting around your fans’ mouths as they chant your insipid drivel back at you.

“Without the shades and the hair / we are all babies, smooth and pure / so shave the heretic, strip him of clothes / and welcome him, screaming, born again /  from the womb of bloody suffering”

A skillful player will combine Hate and Fervour to create terrified fanatics completely immune to logic, but this takes patience to perfect. On Easy difficulty, you can speed up the process by burning down the town library.

Montana teaches her followers the ways of AlpacaBaiting, the confrontational techniques used to subdue enemies.

We’ve Created A Montana

Let’s forget gameplay for a minute: everyone knows that a game lives or dies purely on its story, and you’ll be glad to know that HM: TM has one of the best.

The game draws heavily on the movie’s dark themes, giving them a cute fluffy twist to delight young children. In a series of animated cut-scenes, you learn that Montana’s parents home-schooled her, using a self-made curriculum of Creationist pamphlets and regular beatings. Montana didn’t need their hugs, anyway; she had her stuffed animals, and she had The Lord. At her first Bible meeting, as Montana stood before the wide-eyed faces and sang ditties of Hellfire, she tasted power, and knew that it was sweet.

Without school to hold her back, the little girl grew up prodigiously fast, unfettered by the lies of literature and Liberalism. She was a prodigy. But she could never be good enough for her parents. Never never never. What did happen to them, anyway?

A secret door in Montanas’s apartment hides her Toys from view. In the boxes are the mummified remains of her parents, and various of their trinkets that Montana cries over when she is alone.

What I love most about the story is the sense of pathos for Montana herself. Underneath the frozen exterior, you are simply scared; scared of the weakness inside you. To overcome weakness, you know that it is necessary to make hard decisions. Sometimes those decisions will be unpopular, and people will not understand. Well, child, you must harden your heart. This is the will of the Alpaca; he has told you in your brain.

Montana rides out. Alone, she is vulnerable. It is a time to cry, and to rail at the inner voices that so jeer and mock. But you must bury your demons deep down. Dissolve their faces in quicklime if necessary.

Endgame

If Hannah cannot find peace, then surely no one else can. Not on this earth, anyway. Montana’s ultimate aim, therefore,  is the most glorious mass suicide the world has ever known. The Rapture. It requires 100,000 followers and a whole lotta nerve gas, so you should expect a good 20 hours of play before you’re ready to crack open the kegs and inhale the acrid scent of victory.

See how the audience cheer, but their faces are blank; soulless. They are now utterly within Montana’s thrall. You currently have 8750 followers and 4 canisters of nerve gas; not quite ready for the Rapture. Keep singin’!

I’ve played to the end, and let me tell you: seeing all those twitching bodies and knowing that you’re responsible is a wonderful feeling, and something that kids everywhere should share.

Multiplayer

There are two multiplayer modes. The first is Band Of Cousins, a Guitar Hero-style playathon in which you and three friends make up Hannah Montana’s backing band. Fail to keep up the Fervour levels, and the other players are given permission to set upon you with their instruments. This is particularly effective with The Wiimote, as each swing is accompanied by appropriate splats and crunches.

If all the Cousins screw up at once, Montana’s “plan” reveals itself in an in-engine cut-scene that frankly should have merited an 18+ rating.

The second and more ambitious multiplayer mode is Siege Of Alpacolyte Farm, an online team game for up to 32 players. One team is led by Hannah, the other by the SWAT leader sent to take her and her sick little coven down. But this is no Counterstrike. As the Alpacolytes, you must find a way to kill all of your own side before the SWAT team can capture anyone alive. You are given a strictly limited number of bullets; enough to fend off the SWATs, if you use them judiciously, but not enough to finish every one of your followers. You must be creative and quick-witted if you want to send them all to the Alpaca before the game is up.

Fire and physics are your friends here.

The SWAT team are just outside the barn. Everyone is indeed waiting in Heaven for the final few followers. But how will you get rid of them? Perhaps the cows can help…

Verdict

Hannah Montana: The Movie is not without its flaws. The Religious Education mini-games are fun, but nothing we haven’t seen in Postal 2, and it does get frustrating having to micro-manage every single beating; some kind of RTS-style automation would have helped here.

Nevertheless, HM:TM is a fun and inspiring story of what one young American is capable of if she puts her mind to it. I love the central message that no matter how stupid you are; no matter how backwards or ill-educated, the power is within you to change the world profoundly for the worse. And that’s a great feeling.

The blurb on the back of the box says it best, really:

“Imagine, if you will, a boot stamping upon a human face forever. Now imagine that you are doing the stamping, and that the boot is pink and covered with kittens.

Welcome, friend. Welcome to the world of Hannah Montana.”

“Let our voice come out from under / and our holy knives shine in the daylight / they will learn to fear us / oh yea, surely they will tremble before the end.”

DUBIOUS REVIEW SCORE: 82%

I chose the third option, and I have never looked back. Mainly because it would scare the shit out of me.

Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of hidden benefits to being a cyclist.

For one, there are special national festivals that only cyclists know about, such as Get In My Fucking Way Day, Open Your Door Right In My Goddamned Face Week, and the Dickhead Bus Jam Jamboree.

Secondly, there are no more dreary, identical commutes for you, since every day brings a new and exciting way for your bike to go wrong. Getting bored with that constant unidentifiable scraping? No worries, because tomorrow your whole wheel will fall off! Sick of fretting about the brake pads wearing murderously low? Not a problem, because your pedal is about to work loose in the middle of the road, causing you to caroom screaming left and right until you slam into a stationary car and fly right over the handlebars, hurtling across the pavement and coming to rest on top of three grandmothers and a dog. But it’s ok, because you are Saving Money.

On the upside, you are wearing a really sweet hat.

That’s the mantra of the cyclist. Every time something degrading happens to him at the hands of a motorist, he calms himself with the Zen-like repetition of the holy phrases “I’m saving money I’m saving money” and “I’m getting fit I’m getting fit“. But both ring hollow when the aforementioned Toyota Flange Chasm suddenly cuts right in front of you, forcing you to veer straight into the lane of oncoming traffic.

At times like this, one has to prioritise, and bladder control is not on the top of the list. If by some miracle you do avoid becoming a fleshy verge decoration, you then wobble pathetically off, Catherine-Wheeling a steady spray of urine from your back tyre as you run through all the insults you’d love to hurl at that Toyota-driving bastard if he wasn’t already half a mile away, whistling merrily to himself.

And then it rains.

By my life, sir! You cycle like a satchel full of piss!

There has never been a poem written that can adequately express the misery of cycling through the rain.

For starters, raincoats are virtually useless, since you’ll get clammier than a fat man in a Turkish brothel unless you’ve spent a fortune on something breathable. But if you had that kind of money, you’d be taking the sodding bus anyway. So you’re faced with getting soaked either by your own sweat or by God’s hilarious effluence.

Regardless, the road is quickly becoming a puddle-strewn mire which clings at your tyres like a recently ran-over cat, slowing you down to Crying Pace as the rain filters through the holes in your crash helmet, partially blinding you; a job which is completed by your first venture through a roadside puddle stirred up to a muddy foam by a hundred passing cars. One sploosh later, and your entire body is spunked with mud from head to toe. “GET A MUDGUARD!” yells the smug pro-cyclist as he shoots past on what looks like two gossamer hula hoops bound together with lace. Well, you’ve got a rear mudguard, but this hasn’t stopped your arse getting so wet that ferry lines are commuting between your crack and your junk. “This is CRAP”, you shout at the deluge. “This is BOLLOCKS.”

But don’t give up, young Cyclist, because at the end of all this misery lies a glittering reward. The reward of arriving at work.

It looks like the kid is injured, but actually he is just lazy.

Is it any wonder, given all this, that cyclists tend to bend the rules a bit? Dodge and weave when perhaps it’s not totally appropriate, or blast through lights that are not entirely green? I know I am guilty of this. I dash into the narrowest of gaps, causing multiple near-death experiences while simultaneously berating the irresponsible drivers who turn our roads into death traps. We’ll take any advantage we can get, you see, because cyclists are the Untermenschen of the roads. We’re the tiny mammals skittering between the legs of dinosaurs, and in the battle between Cyclist and Car, there can be only two losers: you, and the poor bastard who has to scrape your testicles off the tarmac.

How did the flying bike not already win this race?

It’s not always this bad, of course. Some days, cycling is a joy.

With a blue sky and the wind at your back, it is bliss to sashay gaily through a traffic jam, casually flipping off the stationary vehicles and humming a happy tune. The birds are tweeting, your leg muscles are writhing like weasels in a sack, and there’s nothing between you and infinity except for a few other cyclists.

Ah, but there’s the rub. It seems that every cyclist other than you is a habitual drug-user who shoots up just before taking to the road, because half of them are catatonic sloths, clumping together as if they’re in some kind of Thorazine Marathon, and the other half find it pressingly vital to tear-arse past you while you’re already cycling at maximum speed, causing you to emit a terrified “GYAAAAH” and swallow a bumblebee.

The Great Vacuum-Maw gloats in triumph. Once again, his pretty lures have found him dinner.

Oh, and let’s not forget the connoisseur’s selection of thrilling injuries you can collect.

Now, before you start, I’ve read all the books about stretching. I stretch like a motherfucker. And yet I’ve still managed to acquire Cyclist’s Knees, Cyclist’s Back, Cyclist’s Dick, Cyclist’s Pancreas and a panoply of other agues that make me hobble around like Thora Hird after a witch trial. I’m now at the peak of fitness, and I’ve never felt so shite in my life.

But you know what? After all this, I still love cycling. Nothing can compare to the first whoosh as you sweep out of your house onto an empty road; nor the thrill that grips you at the crest of a hill, as gravity takes the reins and starts pulling you down. It’s just… It’s just that one day, I know I’m going to end up driving that Toyota. Not because I’m going to sell out; no, not even because my knees are about to pop like hedgehogs in a bonfire. No; I will buy a Toyota because of one sad yet inescapable fact: no matter how cheap they are, you simply cannot use a bicycle to kerb-crawl for whores.

There is a culture and a beauty to good cheating.

Cheat codes were originally there so that programmers could test their games without going insane, but kids soon became obsessed with finding every code, not least because you bloody needed to cheat in order to finish some of those old “classics”.

In the 80’s, programmers seemed to regard games as a punishment they could visit upon the rest of the world for denying them the touch of a woman. Some games were literally impossible (Ghosts N Goblins, you stand condemned); others were merely dick-severingly difficult. So the cheat code was not just a luxury: it was a virtual necessity.

Jet Set Willy. When a game starts you off with 12 lives, it’s a fairly solid hint that you are about to get a ramming.

Soon, canny publicists realised that there was an  emerging “cult of cheating” which could be encouraged and exploited. Game magazines rushed to publish the latest cheats, let slip by the developers with an astonishingly capricious regularity. And all over the world, games that took years to create were being nonchalantly broken by dishonest little crap-kickers who didn’t even know they were ruining the spirit of sportsmanship.

Those were the days.

How I became a bad person

I used to own a Commodore Amiga, one of the most hilarious sumps of dishonesty ever created.

Every kid lusted after them, but the buggers were £300, an absolute fortune in 1988. There was seemingly no hope of getting one. But kids are clever. “It’s for my homework”, was the endlessly repeated line. “It can print stuff out, dad! It can do the maths that you are mentally incapable of doing, thereby sparing you the shame of failure as a father!” In the end, the parents caved into our relentless pleas. They knew in their hearts that they were being bullshitted, but they chose to believe otherwise because it was the path of least resistance. They were so very tired.

Not only was the Amiga’s butt bigger than your mother’s; the power pack was almost as ponderous as my dick.

This was the way I got my Amiga. I got it through lying. Through cheating. With this in mind, it was inevitable that I would cheat at the very games I bullshitted so hard to obtain, and the Amiga made it stupidly easy to do so. You could buy an external cartridge called the Action Replay which slotted into the side of your computer, allowing you to hack into the code of any program and change whatever variable you wanted. God knows how, but the cartridge even zeroed in on the code responsible for things like lives and ammo.

Suddenly, every game became an exercise in pointlessness as you sailed right through to the end in a soft, gay cloud of invulnerability. This should have killed all enjoyment, but oddly, it didn’t. When I think back to old classics like Turrican and Battle Squadron, I remember fondly how difficult they were, and how great I felt when I finally beat them. I conveniently forget that I beat them approximately 11 minutes after first loading them, because I gave myself infinite lives and used Action Replay to skip right to the end.

My whole life, basically, is a lie.

Winners don’t use drugs. They use dismal-looking 80’s peripherals.

And if I can fool myself so successfully about games, what else have I fabricated? Did my grandparents really move to Weston-Super-Mare? And why wouldn’t I let anyone disturb the two piles of dirt in the backyard? No one cares anymore but me, of course, so I shouldn’t beat myself up about whom I might or might not have murdered.

DOOOOOOOOOOOOM

With the golden age of PC games, cheating faced a new challenge. Games were no longer impossibly grim struggles retched out by programmers who never got breast-fed; they were now stories with some semblance of narrative, where you were expected to reach the end. Suddenly vanilla cheating began to lose its allure. There were some wonderful exceptions, however. Take Doom: it took the unprecedented step of giving you the ability to save anywhere, making cheats irrelevant unless you were cripplingly spasticated or a parent. So cheating assumed a new purpose: that of screwing with the game itself.

By far the most enjoyable cheat of this kind was a catchy little fellow called idspispopd, which turned clipping off, allowing you to walk right through walls as if ain’t nuthin. This, needless to say, was shit-awesome. Millions of kids had their first taste of existentialism when they thought “hey, I wonder what’s behind this wall” and discovered the brain-buggering paradox of an Absolute Nothingness that stretched on forever in all directions.

Turn 90 degrees right! Walk ten paces! Blow Mind!

There should have been idspispopd-related help groups. If only we had known, the world wouldn’t now be full of terrified hipsters wearing aviator shades to disguise their thousand-yard stares. Let that be a lesson to the next generation: it is not appropriate to confront the futility of existence while fucking about on Level Three.

The age of the meta-cheat

Amazingly, some game programmers became so cocky that they designed areas you could only access through cheating.

In Ultima 7, you can visit a pirate town called Buccaneer’s Den, which houses a dark and completely ridiculous secret. There’s a sealed room which you must cheat yourself into. Within this room is a dead alligator. Reward enough, you might think, but stick your arm inside the alligator, and what do you find but an entire grandfather clock! Evidently, Captain Hook not only had an evil sense of irony, but also various old heirlooms that were just cluttering up the house. They should have turned this into a regular feature, I feel. I’d pay good money for a game that gives you Achievements for finding all 45 mice with candles in their anuses.

QUICK! SEARCH THE FOX’S SPHINCTER FOR ASHTRAYS!

The cheat and the game… Become One.

In a flash of genius, 1999’s AvP turned the cheat into something you could actually earn, rewarding you for completing the game by giving you the opportunity to break it. Each time you hit a certain performance target, you unlocked a new cheat mode, although “cheat” should be taken loosely here, since some of them actually turned the game into a sadistic, vomit-spewing nightmare. But the crowning refinement of the cheating oeuvre? The games so creative that they make you feel as if you’re cheating, without even needing to do so. Take Jedi Knight. Without the Force Powers, it’s a straight first-person shooter, with guns, bad people and ludicrously unjustified levels of carnage. A solid 75-percenter, in other words. But add the Force, and suddenly you have all these fun ways to bend the rules of the genre.

Thinking quickly, Kyle activates Force Mincing and gays his way towards the opponent.

Here’s an example. You’re ambling down a corridor, lost in your thoughts, when suddenly you see a Rodian coming towards you with a big laser, and you think “ahh shit, I still owe that guy twenty! If only I could become…invisible…”

With a shimmer, you disappear. The Rodian walks up to where you were standing, sniffs the air with his nauseating proboscis, and mutters “hmm; could have sworn I saw Steve.” But Steve is long gone, Zoobydoob, and he used your money to buy low-grade porn.

Tim Cameron is a writer for www.TheSillyAddiction.com. He is aware that you’re already reading his site, thus making a blurb unnecessary, but he is including it anyway because it makes him feel like a big shot.

The other day, I was having a discussion with my woman about photography, and she made the point that we are fast becoming a non-photogenic generation.

I agreed with her instantly, of course, but later (during some mental downtime) I actually thought about what she was saying, and realised that she made a surprisingly interesting point. When my parents were kids, they used to play in the street, laughing, japing and dazzling passers-by with their implausibly rosy cheeks. It was a world without paedophiles. By the time I reached Japing Age, though, the rot had already set in. Kids were spending all their evenings on Spectrums and C64s, scowling at anyone with the temerity to open the curtains or disturb the filth accumulating in great drifts in the corners of their bedrooms. And as they grew up, their insular lifestyles grew with them. That’s why our photo albums now consist of weddings and holidays and not much else. We’ve lost something; something that no amount of exploding things can make up for.

Remember the Kodak Carousel scene in Mad Men? If you haven’t seen it, it’s a profoundly moving piece of drama. Ad-man Don Draper plays a photographic slideshow of his life to a stunned audience, who watch him building a treehouse with his kids, falling in love, holding his newborn baby; all the beautiful, lost moments of his life. But imagine how it would have played out if Don Draper had been a member of the Sun-Fearing generation. If he had been me, in fact.

A little different, I’ll wager.

For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that someone has been lurking in my bedroom for the past twenty years, taking photos of me during my most intimate moments. Sort of like a sex-offender version of Edward Cullen. But that’s another article in itself.

Let’s begin.

DUCK: Here they come, gentlemen. Don, it’s your show now.  Just… if I can offer one word of advice, please don’t do that thing you always do. You know the thing I’m talking about.

DON: Don’t worry, Duck. This one’s in the bag.

The KODAK MEN are shown into the conference room.

DON: Welcome, gentlemen. Please take a seat.

The KODAK MEN sit down alongside the MAD MEN. One of the KODAK MEN takes out a slide wheel and places it on the table.

KODAK MAN 1: We appreciate that you’ll have a hard time selling this. We’re aware that the Wheel is seen as old technology now. Extremely old technology, since for the creaky premise of this comedy article, we’re currently in 2009.

DUCK: That shouldn’t be a problem for Don. He’s not just an all-round swell guy: he’s also a creative genius.

DON: Thank you, Duck.

DUCK: I’ll put that one on the tab.

Everyone laughs. Don turns back to the KODAK MEN.

DON: Back when I was just a junior ad man, I spent a lot of time on the Counterstrike forums. It was the perfect place to learn about the darker side of people; what really makes them tick. I made a lot of good friends there, but there was one particular man who became a mentor to me, and whose guidance I heed to this day. His name was Commodore Fuckburger. He taught me that people are never happy with what they’ve got. They always want what they had.

The KODAK MEN listen, interested.

“Don_ZeDong,” he once said to me, “just look at Counterstrike. A few years ago, it got upgraded: new graphics, new gameplay. People should have been grateful, but they weren’t. For some reason, they hankered after the old Counterstrike, bitching on endlessly about how this new version was just for faggots and gays. It wasn’t, of course. It was actually pretty sweet. They did change the names of all the guns though, which was a totally homo thing to do.”

DON: What Fuckburger was saying here was that gamers weren’t really hankering after the old game. No, they missed the memory – the nostalgia – of those vanished days of their lives. It’s something you ache for. Something you can never get back. Sweetheart?

ASSISTANT LADY starts the projector. The room is darkened.

DON: In Greek, nostalgia literally means “the pain of returning home.” And that’s exactly what you feel when you look at my personal photographs. Pain.

The Wheel clicks, and the first slide displays a teenager, beswamped with acne. It is 1996. On the screen stands Lara Croft in her most primitive incarnation. Her buttocks are like two mouldy cardboard boxes. Her mouth clings desperately to her face, like a butterfly to a windswept cliff. There is very little to arouse here, yet the boy’s brow clenches as he masturbates with grim determination. He will make it, no matter how long and arduous the journey.

DON: It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called the Circle Of Sadness. It transports us back to a time where we succeeded in escaping; where each evening was a journey to a far-away place, full of magic and endless possibility. When we were kids, our playgrounds weren’t parks or streets: they were balconies suspended in space.

Click

Submarines hugging the floor of the Mariana trench.

Click

Quaint Italian towns, haunted by the disembodied voice of Pavarotti.

Click

DON: But it wasn’t really the games themselves that brought us there; it was our own imaginations. The games were just the stepping stones. And that’s why you can never truly go back, no matter how hard you may try. Because you’ve changed now, and those places in your dreams have evaporated, leaving only cold, hard adulthood behind.

The next slide shows Don, aged 32, wearing nothing but a tattered pair of Aliens boxer shorts, sloganed “Butt Huggers”. His stubbled, tear-streaked face is bathed in the light of Aliens Versus Predator. His belly droops low, but not low enough to obscure the moth-holes in his underpants. Through one of them, his penis peeks out.

DON: Sometimes, when you look at these pictures… you wish you could go back to the very beginning, and warn yourself. Stop now, while you can.

Don is six years old, in his grandparents’ living room. He stares, wide-eyed, at the white dot bouncing from left to right and back again. His sister will quickly grow bored with the game, but Don will stay in the room all night, playing Pong until his eyes hurt and his t-shirt becomes crusted with dribble.

DON: But you can’t. You never know where the future will lead. And perhaps it’s better that way.

A huge crowd. Don, naked, is fourteenth-from-left. He is one of the Squatters; there are an equal number of people lying supine on the ground. It is the biggest teabagging session ever attempted in a computer game. All around the world, teenagers are hi-fiving themselves and shaking uncontrollably as the Mountain Dew courses through their veins. Don reclines, a look of blissful calm upon his face. This is the finest moment of his entire life.

The slides end, and the lights go up.

KODAK MAN 1: There were… There were an awful lot of shots of your dick in there, Mr. Draper.

KODAK MAN 2: Pretty much every shot, in fact.

KODAK MAN 1: You’re actually touching your dick right now.

DON: Yes I am. And that’s the point. The Circle Of Sadness conveys a very profound message, and because of my time on the Counterstrike forums, I know exactly what that message is, and how it should be expressed.

Duck groans quietly.

KODAK MAN 2: And what exactly is your message, Mr Draper?

DON leans forward.

DON: Would you like me to lay it on the table for you gentlemen?

KODAK MAN 1: Please do.

There is a sad, wet thump.

Don looks expectantly at the KODAK MEN.

DON: That’s my message, gentlemen. Take it or leave it.

The KODAK MEN exchange glances, then get up and leave without saying a word.

DUCK: Good luck at your next… ahhh, fuck it.

Today I want to talk to you about being alone. Really, truly alone. So put on some My Chemical Romance and get comfortable.

In terms of fatness, though, these markers are reversed.

Loneliness. Online gaming can give you a peculiar appreciation for it. You cower in your curtained grotto, a hermit wizened before your time, tapping and clicking while your family laugh and bond in some other room. The people you talk to online aren’t people, really, just blue sentences scrolling up the screen, friends so fickle that they disappear every time you reach the score limit. For social awkwards such as ourselves, there’s something comforting about this cosy loneliness, something we grow to depend on.

But this is nothing. Do you really want to be alone? Try creating a multiplayer game where you’re the only player; where you can be the only player. How? By making a peer-to-peer game, and telling no one of the I.P. address required to join. This is worse than just logging onto an empty server. Even if the server is password-protected, you’re still aware that other people are lurking just outside the boundaries, curious about what’s going on. But when you create a private peer-to-peer session, there is no one. No one at all, except for you. Your game world is a tiny ephemeral bubble in the ether, a place that exists only while you exist in it, and from which there is no escape.

A long time ago, in a bedroom far, far from clean…

Back in the really early days, I was addicted to Jedi Knight. I remember the first time I tried to start a multiplayer deathmatch game; unaware of how everything worked, I just assumed that people would find the game and join in. So I loaded up a map and started walking around. Fittingly, the map was Bespin, a city suspended in the clouds; a speck in a vast pink limbo. Minutes passed. After I’d paced every inch of the map and gone from expectation through confusion to annoyance, my footsteps slowed to a stop, and I listened. Where the hell was everybody?

Vague tendrils of unease coiled around the corridors and gantries. The place was so quiet. Quieter than an empty crèche. Nothing moved, except for the scattered weapon pickups, dismally rotating as they waited for a battle that would evidently never come. I walked again, aimless. My invisible feet took me outside, to the frail gangways suspended in mid-air, infinity above and infinity below. With an ominous weight upon me, I wandered to the edge of one and stared down at the endless clouds. What would happen if I jumped off, I pondered.

Bespin. Majestic, gravity-defying and utterly implausible; much like your butt.

But this was getting retarded. Something had to be done; anything to relieve the oppressive tedium. I resolved to pick up every last piece of weaponry and armour just in case someone joined the game. This kept me busy for a few minutes. But the silence was getting to me. I started firing at walls, senselessly unloading my lasers at those maddeningly impervious barriers that absorbed every hit without a scratch. Out onto the gantries again. There was a wind sample that was cutting into my bones. All ammo exhausted now, I walked up to the precipice and stared. Why not jump? What difference would it make? What else, when you got right fucking down to it, was there to do? I glanced behind me, and saw that all the weapons and armour had respawned, just where they had been before. That did it, really.

So I hopped off. I fell a thousand feet, screaming and flailing. The screen went red. There was a little click, and I reappeared with a shimmer in one of the map’s many strategically placed spawn points. The scorecard registered that I had killed myself, and was now on a score of -1. In a game with no other players, I was contriving to lose. And there was nothing else I could do; nothing but die again and again, until the act lost all meaning. I was stuck in a digital version of Groundhog Day in which there was no happy ending, no groundhog, and no ground.

Jedi Knight: Enter the world of STUNNING REALISM

Feeling slightly sick, I hit escape and destroyed the sad little universe I had created, resolving never to go there alone again. Over the next few months I discovered how to make real online games, and I even found a few ludicrously-named friends to game with. But here’s the thing: something kept drawing me back. I was like Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. I’d stared Oblivion in the face, and now I saw his curiously hairy cheeks every time I closed my eyes. So I went back. I spent longer and longer periods of time skulking around empty maps, ostensibly so that I could learn their secrets in order to get an edge over Wolfspite, who was a cunt, but in reality because I couldn’t keep away from the emptiness.

I recall this one particular place. It was a swamp on Dagobah, dark and moist and tangled with vines. I never played that map with another person, and yet I found myself returning there again and again. There was something else in that swamp: a little screechy maggot-like creature called a Ysalamir, placed there purely for decoration. But it was something. Another creature in the tiny empty universe I had created. Thus, I decided that the Ysalamir would be my Groundhog. Our conversations were not profound; I lectured it on its own futility, being a computer-generated collection of pointless polygons, a window-dressing in a mall where everybody was dead. It replied by flapping its tail and emitting a continuous grating screech. We had good times. There were no infinite chasms here, so eventually I would conclude the conversation by shooting rockets at the nearest wall until the backblast blew me to pieces. Then I ended the level. In my quiet moments, I wondered if the Ysalamir missed me while he was busy not existing.

“So… I see you have constructed a new Ysalamir. Indeed you are retarded, as the Emperor has forseen.”

If I can digress for a moment: there’s a short story by D.H. Lawrence called The Man Who Loved Islands, the sadness of which has always stayed with me. The protagonist is a man who loves pornography. And also islands, which is ultimately his destruction. When we begin the tale, he has just acquired a manor house on a large island, and thinks himself happy; but his thirst for isolation leads him to sell the place, get rid of his servants and retreat to a small cottage on a nearby islet. Eventually, even this is too much for him, and he ends the story (and his life) shivering and insane, hunched on a tiny rock skerry with only bird droppings and a huge collection of tentacle hentai to keep him company.

Lawrence’s face:  merely the arena for a titanic battle ‘twixt Beard and Quiff.

I mention this story because the analogy applies to any type of desire. Lust is infinitely reducible. Sate it today, and it will return tomorrow with more stringent demands. In my little digital bubble, even though I was totally alone, I had to be even more totally alone. I started using mods so dreadful that no one else would dream of joining a game running them, even if they randomly hit upon the right IP address. But it wasn’t enough. Later I retreated from the net entirely; I made LAN games on a non-existent network with the name “FUCK OFF” and the password “d578chd£@~Ukf4dsfjgl5jgSS£L$Jf<YAAAA”, but satisfaction yet eluded me. I caroomed drunkenly around desolate levels dressed as a woman, howling poorly sampled Chewbacca noises at the empty corners, but still I did not feel the solitude I craved.

Then one day, as I stood in the Dagobah swamp, nude, viciously punching Alan the Ysalamir while screeching an effeminate descant harmony, the reason came to me. This world of mine would never be truly empty, because one person would always be in it.

Me.

Briefly I considered creating a game with no players whatsoever, but no. That would have been silly.

]]> http://thesillyaddiction.com/2009/05/the-loneliness-of-the-online-gamer/feed/ 26 http://thesillyaddiction.com/2009/05/the-loneliness-of-the-online-gamer/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thesillyaddiction/~3/9aCNRTiqOkY/ http://thesillyaddiction.com/2008/10/artist-needed/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:09:44 +0000 The Silly Addiction http://thesillyaddiction.com/?p=252 My next article is going to be a short story, about 5 to 6 thousand words long. It will of course be vaguely retarded, and will feature computer game characters in frankly hilarious situations.

I’m thinking it’ll be a million times better with some occasional illustrations, so if you’re the artistic type and fancy helping out with a few sketches, please email me.

I don’t make any money out of this site so can’t pay you, but you will of course get full credit and a link back to your own site if you have one, plus my eternal gratitude, which as usual will be expressed using graphic photos of my penis.

I’m hoping to upload the story by the end of next week; I’ll send you what I’ve got if you’re interested.

What was that thing I just fell off?

Oh. It was a wagon.

It’s fucking Fallout’s fault. A few months ago, I saw a compilation of Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics on sale for five pounds. Five pounds, for heck’s sake. That’s basically 0.25 handjobs without the self-loathing and friction burns. How could one resist.

I’d never played any of these titles before and was already feeling the hype of the upcoming Fallout 3, so I wasted no time in buying the games. And then promptly spent the next five months not playing them, because I had suddenly decided to give up gaming forever. For a while, life was good. My fabulous literary articles made me the talk of the town; I was quite the eligible card in the London season, with many a doe-eyed beauty hanging sleepily from my arm. My monocle was sick. Then, without warning, my creative inspiration ran dry, and before you could say “hypocrite”, I was once again hunched before the old flickering screen, spittle flecking my lips, myriad empty dinner bowls festering like porcelain toadstools in the corners of my room. I thought I had quit for good, but something pulled me back in. Something inarguable and utterly inescapable.

And that thing was groin punching.

This is the reason games exist.

Let me elaborate. Fallout is a brilliant RPG set in a post-apocalyptic future, where tired oxen drag caravans made of cloth-covered car skeletons, and the only remaining unit of currency is the bottle cap. The game’s atmosphere is unequalled, but that’s not the thing that hooked me. It’s the targeting system, which allows you to select exactly which of your enemy’s body parts you want to make all hurty. This taps into a deep human need. You know the need I mean. When you’ve woken at 6 AM with the dread of the day already clinging to your limbs; when you’ve slumped into work rain-drenched and broken, and spent the next eight hours getting pooped on by a consortium of morons; when you’ve staggered two miles home with the wind pushed up against your face like a redneck with a grudge, and there’s nothing in the house but beans; when all this happens every damn day, only one thing will make you feel better at the end of it.

Hitting someone really hard in the dick.

…or the udder, if your boss happens to be a) a radioactive mutant two-headed cow, and b) an asshole.

I still consider myself to be a non-gamer, despite the fact that I am about fifteen hours into Fallout with no sign of stopping.  I’m actually finding this to be a positive experience, firstly since I was hitherto unaware of how great I am at living a lie, but also because this highly localised physical violence has given me a new sense of joi de vivre. Come on. You’ve played Fallout. Tell me you sat through your first successful crotch attack without feeling a thrill of affirmation; a sudden epiphany that there are no limits to this universe, nor your potency within it. And for those of you who haven’t played the game yet, let me ask you a question: have you ever clenched your fist, stared at a rat’s junk and dreamed? Well, dream no more, child. Dream no more.

This experience has opened my mind, and for the first time I find myself truly caring about the history of dick-hitting. How did our older, wiser ancestors practice the Art, and can we learn anything from their techniques? Tragically the internet lets us down, with not even a Geocities page devoted to archaic groinal combat. Undaunted, I have decided to create the first entry myself, in the hope that other Crotch Historians will continue in my footsteps.

The Crotch Punch (history of)

Chapter 1: The Bourbon-Lancy cave paintings

A visitor to rural France in search of history could do worse than visit Bourbon-Lancy. This ancient spa town, situated far South of Paris, contains a beautifully preserved Mediaeval walled district that has changed little over the past seven hundred years. Impressive, certainly; yet this gulf of time shrinks to a gnat’s wing when one ventures into the nearby caves, and views the treasures contained therein.

Carved by water from the native limestone, the Bourbon-Lancy Caves were havens for Mesolithic man, who used them as places of ritual and celebration rather than habitation, preferring a more nomadic existence. The soil reveals animal bones (possibly sacrifices), shaped semi-precious gems, and stone tools of primitive yet effective design. But the greatest trove by far is the collection of paintings on the walls of these caves. Sheltered from the elements, these pictorial histories have endured for tens of thousands of years and, Lord willing, will last tens of thousands more.

The imagery is surprisingly delicate, composed of flowing line-drawn figures full of kinetic beauty. In one picture, characters are seen attacking a bison, spears arcing from their bodies in subtly observed parabolas. Other scenes are more intimate: families clustered around a hearth; dogs fighting for scraps; a baby suckling at its mother’s breast.

The most instructive of these images, known to historians as B-L/7, provides a vital clue to the trials of hierarchy in this primitive society. One figure, presumably male, is engaged in a dramatic act of movement, thrusting powerfully with his fist at a second figure, who attempts to dodge. Another illustration follows (possibly the first recorded instance of the comic book format) in which the fist lands a solid blow on the opponent’s upper thigh / lower torso area. Anthropologists believe that the penis and testicles are the target of this assault. In the final “frame” of the series, the victorious figure squats over the head of the loser as he lies in a supine position, and then appears to lower his pelvis onto the figure’s face. What he is doing in this picture is not known. It is, however, clear that a move for social dominance has been attempted and has met with success; at least until the victor receives a crotch punch of his own. Such is the peril of primacy.

Bourbon-Lancy. A place of beauty, mystery, and cockviolence.

What strikes the viewer most is the poignant beauty of this scene. Unlike today’s ugly and functional representations of scrotal assault, these paintings have an emotional directness that belies the supposed primitive nature of their society. One feels a profound sense of continuity; for all our technological advancement, today’s modern crotches are still punched in the same way as those of our ancestors. One wonders how a Mesolithic man would feel, were he to awake miraculously in this era, if you immediately struck him very hard in his glans and / or nutsacks, and then dangled your balls over his face.

Comforted, I should wager.

By the way, I’ve still quit gaming. I’m just a non-gamer who happens to be playing Fallout right now. Anyone arguing with this will receive a special type of physical retaliation; one that has e’er been dear to my heart.

It rhymes with “Scotch Lunch”.

This is so fucking true.

If you make an effort, you can fill real life with all the things you used to love doing in computer games, and you’ll feel a genuine sense of achievement too! So why not put on your Reality Pants and fire up a session of Real Life: The Ultimate Adventure Game.

Remember, this is a feel-good exercise, intended to show you that there’s always a positive way you can look at any situation. So read on, and get ready to smile!

The ability to fly

When I was a gamer, my favourite game was, of course, Microsoft Gannet Simulator. I loved the freedom it gave my imagination as I soared majestically over cliffs and skerries, seas and estuaries, my craw writhing with whitebait that I would later regurgitate into the screeching throats of my young. That was what gaming was all about.

I used to believe that I would never be able to fly in the real world, due to my poor vision and air-rage restraining order. However, I was wrong. Real Life can take you anywhere in the universe, thanks to a little “game” all of us play every night. It’s called dreaming, it doesn’t cost a penny, and we all have them every night.

And every morning, when we wake up into the yawning horror of our wasted lives, we just need to remember that new dreams wait for us, a mere 15 soul-crushing hours away.

Dreams.

Reloading

In games, if you make a mistake, you die in a cloud of flying giblets and are forced to reload. Real Life is kind of like this, but instead of dying, you disappoint your family and irreparably damage your chances of career advancement. You can always reload, though! All it takes is a slide into drug and alcohol abuse, followed by an epiphanic rebirth one drizzly Thursday evening at the Scarborough Evangelist Society. As you sit on the hard wooden schoolchair, sipping your tea and nibbling on your custard cream, Donald (his cardigan grey as the overcast sky) will explain that God has been trying to talk to you all these years; you just didn’t hear him because there were too many laser explosions happening.

You will walk out a changed man, bathed in fuzzy euphoria. You need no longer be afraid. From now on, your life will be filled with an overriding sense of purpose, and you will almost completely convince yourself that there isn’t still a huge, howling hole in the world that can never be filled. So, don’t despair. You can reload.

Fall under a bus and you’re fucked, though.

Teabagging your enemies

The funniest part of online shooters wasn’t the shooting, maiming and slaughtering, although they were pretty darned spiffing. No, it was the humiliation you could bestow upon your enemies after defeating them. This, when you get right down to it, is the sole reason for a man’s existence. In games such as Halo, you could do a crude approximation of a Tea Bag by squatting your character over the corpse of your enemy and allowing your imagination to fill in the gonad-shaped blanks. It didn’t matter that you had no balls; the enemy still knew that he was beaten. He had been teabagged by a metaphor.

The seeming irony of Real Life is that you have balls but no way of using them offensively. Taking them out in public is seen as a crime, and even if you could use them without getting arrested, your years of cloistered game slavery have made you look like an emaciated grasshopper who’s been tortured on a rack. You will never be able to teabag a real person because you are a total, unmitigated loser.

But this is where magazines can help. They are filled to the brim with handsome icons of success: those shining beacons of fucking bastardry who make you feel like an awful failure whenever you look at their beautiful faces. They have achieved so much, and you have achieved so little. But now the tables will turn, because only one of you will end up with your balls on his face. And it’s not you.

Go on, rest those bad boys on George Clooney. Makes you feel an awful lot better, doesn’t it. What computer game lets you achieve actual ball-to-celebrity contact? Why not take it a step further and take clandestine photos of your boss, or the last girl who turned you down with a vague shiver of disgust, and then relax upon them? The great thing about teabagging their photos is that they won’t even know of their own defeat. But you will know.

Thank you, Real Life, for providing a healthy and exciting way to aerate one’s crotch.

Levelling up

Games offer a satisfying sense of progression. The more experience you get, the higher your level becomes, until you are the supremely capable master of your world. But Real Life offers this feature too! You’ll level up every single year – it’s called Getting Older! When you reach the higher levels, you gain access to certain special powers, also known as Responsibilities, and this is where the real depth and complexity of Real Life shows itself. You’ll learn to hone your micro-management skills as you try to balance a mortgage with a fuel-guzzling car, food-guzzling kids and the cash-guzzling prostitute whom you only sleep with because you feel scared and lonely, and you forgot how to talk to your wife years ago.

You’ll also get the chance of promotion, though a well-balanced game knows not to give you too much reward or you’ll grow bored. This why Real Life will usually keep promotions just out of reach, in order to give you something to hope for while you shiver listlessly in your battery cage, your optimism burned to a stub by the corporate machine. Remember to take a break every once in a while! Get up and walk around, stretch those legs.

Upgrading

For many, the real thrill of gaming isn’t even playing the games: it’s lusting perennially after the latest and greatest piece of hardware. Does your PC gradually become outdated, meaning that you can’t run the latest games because it’s too slow? Well, Real Life does the same thing! The older you get, the more of your basic bodily functions will start shutting down, until you become a curiously shrunken sultana of a man, spending your last days pushing a zimmer frame down the street in a perpetual losing race against death!

Death waits to claim his prize. “OLD PEOPLE SMELL LIKE VINEGAR”, he muses.

“Great! But how can I upgrade myself?”, you’re probably asking. Well, the trick is to have kids. After you grow withered and useless and are picked off by one of Real Life’s countless viruses, they will be the Next Gen, ensuring that a tiny part of you is passed down into immortality. Call it a God Mode, if you like.

Except that within two generations, no one alive will ever have heard the sound of your voice.

Also your great-great-grandkids are dicks.

Well, for all those people who feeling down about quitting, unsure as to whether real life offers the same thrill-a-minute excitement as Halo, I hope this has cheered you up and given you the confidence you need to quit gaming for good. Who needs games when you’ve got Real Life!

Meeeeeeee.

EXT. WAREHOUSE.