Legged Creatures

Watch now as I construct for you a complex analogy involving an octopus.

I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason to whether or not something catches my interest, whether I find myself invested in someone else's mythology or not. In the end I don't think there's any one thing that I'm looking for, except maybe a balance of all the different sorts of things that typically constitute fiction. When I'm first experiencing something, my nuance tentacles (or tentacles of nuance) reach out simultaneously to explore the terrain - some are seeking out story and characterization, and wrap their loving tendrils around every morsel they find. Others are looking for backstory, narrative voice, cultural context, political satire, religious symbolism, authorial perspective, literary allusion, twists, gimmicks and clever analogies. All these things. Sometimes there's a glut in one area and nothing offered in others. Typical "fantasy" is often like this, offering volumes of blow-by-blow historical background on people and places whose names have too many k's and not enough vowels. Once my "fake history" and "character archetype" tentacles have gorged themselves (which happens pretty quickly), I find myself with about thirty unsatisfied psychological appendages looking immediately elsewhere for sustenance. There are occasional acts of artistic genius that do meet my every need, and in these times I'm never sure quite what to do with myself. Watchmen was kind of like this.

A medium I have a very tenuous relationship with is video games. By their very nature video games involve world creation and exploration, which gives them huge bonus points on my Mythological Octopus Appreciation Scale (MOAS). But they usually stop there. This certainly isn't a rule, but between computer programmers, deadlines and the attention spans of their target demographic, there isn't much pull in the video game community for characterization or subtle machinations of plot (amazingly, this was much less true of games made in the earlynineties).

I actually find myself more interested in reading about games than playing them, browsing review sites and trailers for the most recent offerings then never thinking about them again. This is a purely unconscious act, and I honestly can't explain what the draw is; surely experiencing the product must be more satisfying than hearing someone else describe it? And yet, the reviews usually score better on the MOAS. Think about it. In a review I get a summary of the whole world of the game; where it starts and what points it hits along the way. I get a sense for what the goal is, and what it was like to accomplish it. If I'm lucky I might even get some insight as to what the game means in a larger context, whether it has any importance to the industry or to the person reviewing it. By comparison, the game itself can hardly compete (I think I'm probably in a niche audience for this sort of experience, but I recently ran across a game that offered commentary on the levels as a little bonus feature. As you ran around the lost temple swinging from ledges and looking for treasure, two of the designers would periodically chime in on what they were going for in the current area - how the puzzles had been paced to produce a certain emotional experience, etc. Needless to say, I was enthralled).

In a perfect world video games would all strive to encompass this much meta data. I often fantasize about such games, and I think it would be fair to call the premises of these creations "high concept." I have about half a dozen of them that rotate through my head on a kind of seasonal basis, each one drenched in totally unnecessary mythological depth (and when I use the word 'mythological' here, understand it to mean 'things I'm personally interested in'). When I'm lost in the pleasant haze of working out all the little details I'm convinced that my games would be immediately successful with everyone who played them. But I'm probably wrong about that.

Here's one of my ideas: the game would suppose the existence of a fictional video game company that had been active since the 1980's, a giant in the field along the lines of a Nintendo. Over the course of two decades and a dozen different gaming systems, this company had nurtured a now-veteran cast of video game protaganists, all of whom had appeared in dozens of titles over the years. In recent years the company's popularity had waned, and its characters, once national icons, were now mostly nostalgia fodder as a new generation of gamers moved on to the high-intensity low-value games of the modern era. This game (the one I'm describing) would be a retrospective on these nearly-forgotten characters, a kind of "Behind the Music" biopic (bio-game?) exploring where they were now. Each 'episode' would take the form of an extended interview with one of these gaming stalwarts - let's say "Flario" in this case. As Flario talks about the ups and downs of his career we get to play a level or two from the games that spanned it, starting with the blocky arcade sequences of his initial 1987 showing and working through time, including the misstep side projects ("Flario vs. Trigonometry" and "Flario Gets Sickle-Cell-Anemia"). His retrospective commentary is running through the levels and changes as we play, chiming in with "This was early in my career move, when they still had me wearing a green hat, they were convinced that was going to be such a big deal...not that you can really tell it's a hat, it's like six pixels..." When you awkwardly jump into a pit he would add, "Yeah, shoot, I've fallen into that specific pit about a thousand times. I wasn't very good at jumping then, and they wouldn't let me grab the ledge or anything, I just had to do that shrug-and-fall-in-front-of-the-screen thing. My contract was pretty restrictive in those days." It might get repetitive over time, but the first time you played it would be mind-blowing.

I've got like a dozen of these concepts if anyone's interested in taking one and running with it; they're all about this unnecessarily involved.

Important side story:

I recently got into a spat with one of my roommates. It was over something small and got blown way out of proportion, to the point where he's not really even living in the house anymore though he's still paying rent. I've been a little haunted about the whole thing the past couple weeks, and often find myself thinking about it as I walk to work, wondering whether I'm in the wrong and should apologize, or whether I acted appropriately and am just feeling codependant, etc. Anyway, when I got home yesterday I took off my work shoes and put them on the rack by the door, like I usually do. I've only had these shoes for about a week and I don't usually think much about shoe racks, so yesterday was the first time that I noticed an eerily similar pair sitting next to mine. On closer inspection, I realized that these were in fact the exact same shoes as mine - same brand, size, color, even the same basic wear-and-tear, so that I honestly couldn't identify which pair I should take as my own. In the same moment I realized that I must have been alternating pairs all week without even thinking about it. I wondered who they belonged to, and of my two other roommates (that I'm not in a spat with), one has smaller feet than me, and the other has gone away for three months to Chicago (where he no doubt took his nice dress shoes with him). This lead me finally to a profound realization, the indisputable fact that I have quite literally walked a mile in the other guy's shoes.

I think somebody's trying to tell me something (but I'm not sure what that is).