An Act of God

When the ur-blizzard hit and turned New York City into fucking HOTH on 26 December 2010 I was intensely sad at the thought of missing it. Some people think my approach to cold is crazy, but I have a tendency to turn anything truly painful into a life-affirming experience. Whether I learned this from the Marines, reading Boethius, or a hardy Presbyterian upbringing is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, when I am tromping through snow with the wind pelting my face with micro-sickles of ice, I force myself to remember that as long as I’m feeling pain I’m still alive, so it can’t be that bad. If the weather gets particularly gruesome I go full Lieutenant Dan and start asking God if that’s the best he’s got, this while my ears are threatening frost bite or the Las Vegas sun is stripping moisture from my throat or eyeballs.

Missing the New York blizzard was in many ways like missing a major sporting event or concert. All my friends went. Their Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds were constant reminders they were all attending a party of sadness to which I had to send my regrets due to prior obligations in Florida. There are three broad types of New Yorkers, and if pressed (sometimes when you truly don’t care) we can all argue extensively about who loves the city more. Natives, non-natives, and tourists. We all hate each other. I am clearly of the last ilk. New York anneals the strangers who become its citizens. The close confines of living and walking become second nature. What first seems like universal rudeness eventually shows itself to merely be brusque and, when you go somewhere else, is a longed-for frankness. The weather is brutal, but it marks the passage of time the way medals accrue on a soldier's uniform. Shopping in Tampa is so simple and casual, whereas getting your Christmas shopping done in one day in Manhattan is an achievement so rare as to be mythic.

After wandering around the country for years looking for something like Home, I've grown attached to New York in a manner less befitting a city than a long-term girlfriend or wife. Sure, we have spats-- we might even yell at each other-- but there's real love there. When I return to my city my friends will all have tales of adventure and derring do with my metropolis girlfriend. They will talk about being barricaded in their homes behind snow with their families, about the subways being covered in snow. I will tell them how Florida was not as warm as it should have been, although my mother's car often seemed like a greenhouse because her air conditioner wasn't working.

Truth be told, there is nothing I could have done. I know this. The snow started falling the day after Christmas, and travel through JFK has been next to impossible since then. I watched the weather reports with a strange meteorological parody of survivor’s guilt and thanked Heaven that since my flight was on Wednesday at least my travel wouldn’t be affected. I religiously checked TripIt, the site/phone app I use to track my flights, and there were no signs of change. It looked like I would be home Wednesday morning at 8am. Tuesday night my phone rang, though, and a JetBlue recording told me my flight had been canceled. I called them immediately and received something like the following phone message:

“We’re experiencing extremely high call volumes, and all our operators are busy. This call will end now. We’re doing the best we can to fix everything, but please try your call at a later time.”

After which message the JetBlue 1-800 number hung up on me. I was not surprised, so I shrugged and went about my business. After all, even counting all the above I couldn’t complain too much about being in Florida.

The next morning I woke up at 06:30, two hours after my 06:05 flight would have required, and I called JetBlue while I still had sleep in my eyes. A message told me I would be on hold for more than an hour. No problem. I walked my dog with my speakerphone on. I bought coffee at Starbucks with my speakerphone on. I went about my day for an hour and a half, and while making my rounds on the Internet, the 80’s rock hits Jetblue plays to make your wait seem less awful stopped, and I heard the familiar buzzing of a ringing phone.

An operator picked up…

…for approximately one second.

I don’t lose my temper with customer service people. Never mind that they’re usually inured to furious customers; I’ve found, over and over again, that you catch more flies with honey. When I got cut off from my JetBlue agent I plum ran out of honey, and the bottom of the pot was filled with a whole lot of f-words screamed at high volume. Or so my mother reported to me later.

I tried calling a few more times and received the same voice message as the night before. I scribbled an e-mail quickly and tried to contain my venom, cf. above re: flies/honey. I think the most annoyed things I said were, “I don’t have an unlimited calling plan,” and “This is unacceptable.” I had tickets to a fabulous party on New Year’s Eve, and I’d swim to New York before I stood up my beautiful date. I had to get to New York, and here I’d missed the blizzard and run up against an impenetrable wall of customer service. Though a seasoned traveler I did not know what to do, so I decided to do the only thing I could do at a time like this.

I complained on Twitter.

08:32, @thompsonplyler: “After an hour and a half on hold with @Jetblue, I got disconnected when the operator picked up. Now I can't get through. Was not mad before.”

Oh, yeah, that's the stuff. That felt gooooood. Sure, I only had 130 followers, but they’d know how angry I was with Jetblue, yes siree!

08:35, @thompsonplyler: “Running out of hate for United States airlines. @usairways is the worst, but @JetBlue has been so terrible through this weather.”*

Now we were cooking. I started a mental clock. In another hour and a half, I was going to unleash vulgarity Hell, because I'm a classy guy.

08:37, @thompsonplyler: “Buy more whatever you need to buy to handle this customer service crisis. Outsource what you need to. Fix my flight, @Jetblue.”

I knew from my fuming at US Air** over Twitter that my words were just hitting some wall that was probably never observed by even a low level worker bee, and this was the digital equivalent of leaving prayers in a corporate wall. Still, I had vitriol to spare, and it’s not like I had a flight to catch.

It turns out some prayers get answered.

08:38, @Jetblue: “@thompsonplyler Please follow us; we'll DM.”

I believe my first action, upon seeing that message on my monitor, was to sit and blink repeatedly for ten solid seconds.

08:38, @thompsonplyler: “@JetBlue Followed. I can scarcely believe I'm interacting with a human.”

08:40, @Jetblue (in a direct message): “Believe it!! What's your reservation number? Do you need rebooking options or a refund? ^gt”

08:41, @thompsonplyler (in a direct message): “I want to get to NYC as soon as possible. I'm blown away right now. XXXXXX”

08:49, @Jetblue (in a direct message): “There are thousands of customers throughout all airlines being reaccommodated. Typically we aren't seeing options through 1/3 or 1/4.”

I was afraid of this. The news showed shot after shot of people standing around in airports, and the backup was likely to be overwhelming Jetblue. Although I was glad to be interacting with a real person—shocked to be doing so through a corporate interface at Twitter—my heart thudded to the ground. I was going to miss New Year’s Eve in New York City, and this on the tail of missing the big blizzard of 2010.

08:50, @thompsonplyler (in a direct message): “To be clear, you're saying you don't think I'll be able to get back to NYC before 1/3 or 1/4? Ugh. Okay. Damn. This is even if I spend $$?”

Before you read the next line, I want you to take a minute and dust off your nearest copy of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I’ll wait.

08:51, @Jetblue (in a direct message): “BUT - a miracle just happened and I had one seat pop up for you on 12/31.”

FOR THE LORD GOD OMNIPOTENT REIGNETH!
HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!

08:52, @thompsonplyler (in a direct message): “You're a god/goddess. Book it. n.b. I have and paid for my dog.”

Like any man who’s recently had a religious experience, I shouted it from the mountaintops to all 130 people waiting in the Twitterspace—waiting on tenterhooks each one of them—to see how the drama of my return trip unfolded.

08:57, @thompsonplyler: “Currently in DM chat with @Jetblue, where my situation is being resolved. My jaw is on the floor right now. Thanks @Jetblue and @Twitter!”

09:48, @JetBlue (in a direct message): “It's Lindsey, actually. Sorry - dealing with a lot of DMs. You’ve been rebooked. Let me know if all is well.”

KING OF KINGS! AND LORD OF LORDS!
KING OF KINGS! AND LORD OF LORDS!
AND HE SHALL REIGN FOREVER AND EVER!
HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!

09:55, @thompsonplyler: “Lindsey, the @Jetblue Twitter ninja rep just fixed all my flight travails. Heading out on Friday, and I'll make in time for NYE. Bazinga!”

09:57, @thompsonplyler: “Hey, @USAirways, you should learn how to do customer service from @Jetblue. Got my whole problem solved over @Twitter. For comparison, when I presented my ire and frustration to @USAirways re: their pet policy a few months back, I received a form letter. @Jetblue ftw.”

So there you have it. This Friday I’ll be on my way back to New York City, where a beautiful woman will not be disappointed, all thanks to Jetblue (especially Lindsey, @linzlinzlinz on Twitter) being ridiculously on the ball with modern technology. I’ve been completely ignored by US Airways in the aftermath of customer service problems, and the other airlines have never been much better. I was not an early adopter of Twitter. I thought it was nothing more than the newest iteration of carving dirty limericks on bathroom stalls: here’s my stupid brain, now let’s see how many idiots can read its contents! During the 2009 riots in Iran, angry Iranians used Twitter to broadcast the injustices of the local authorities. That was when I reassessed Twitter as a real force in the world and began to see how powerful micro-updates like Twitter could be. This was nothing like that, though. This was me ranting into the wilderness and cursing the name of the gods, only to have them turn an ear to me and ask, “What seems to be the problem?”

Welcome to the future.

*-- Earlier this year US Airways refused to let me fly with my dog because he couldn’t turn around in his carrier. This carrier has a big, honkin’ Delta on its side and has carried my dog on every airline except the ridiculous and poorly catered U.S. Airways. I try not to mention airlines on my Facebook or Twitter without badmouthing them because all I can do is vote with my wallet and spread bad word of mouth.

**-- US Airways: “We learn from every crash.”

Sharing Google Reader Articles on Twitter

Despite an exhaustive search of the first five links offered by a Google search for "most popular rss readers," I am not sure whether the rest of the Internet is as enamored of Google Reader as I am, but for my purposes the word "Internet" is synonymous with Twitter and Google Reader. I was so zealous about Reader that I urged my friends to share links through Reader rather than Facebook or Twitter. Given that Reader's user statistics are COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND and Facebook is the third largest country in the world, you can imagine how successful my campaign was.

Even on my end, though, I have trouble figuring out how to share whatever I want to share with my friends. I locked down my Facebook by culling people I was only ever acquaintances with and shoving almost everyone else into a limited profile ghetto. About 30 people can see my full profile, and the rest get referred to my Twitter account (the result of this awesome social backlash, by the way, was NOT an upsurge in my Twitter following).

There's the rub. If I want to share anything with the random people of the Internet, I have explicitly told people to follow my Twitter feed. Yet, I have asked others to share (and I continue to share) via Google Reader.

Enter twitterfeed.com.

This handy site will stream any RSS feed directly into your Twitter feed. Following the steps on the cleverly named article "How to Share Articles in Google Reader on Twitter" at Quick Online Tips (from the very nearly Jurassic 2008), my shared items now feed into my Twitter, all with a single click!

Got a Novel?

I know I'm not the only one among my friends who has a book in his head but keeps finding five or six or a skadillion reasons to save the book writing for another day or year. Maybe it's something in the air, but November 2009 sounded just about right time (not too vernal, not too autumnal) to find out if I'm actually a novelist or whether I'm just a creepy little voyeur writing down people's tics on the subway. Not that these are mutually exclusive possibilities. Why November, you ask? Because November is National Novel Writing Month, which means that if you join me in this endeavor you'll also be joining a ton of other writers around the country who are trying to do the same thing, albeit with books that will be far inferior to your masterpiece... if you ever just get around to it. The goal is 50,000 words between November 1 and November 30, which amounts to a little less than 1667 words every day. (For a quick reference, this note is 532 words.)

All this doesn't warrant a note on facebook cross-posted to my blog, though! What the Hell is going on? Telling the unfamiliar about NaNoWriMo warrants a posted link at best. And if I just wanted to rally my friends who might maybe perhaps be interested, I'd do just that and maybe send a group e-mail. And on November 4th I'd be too tired to write. On November 12th I'd be too sad. November 23rd I wouldn't feel creative. Et cetera ad nauseum and all the other reasons writers give themselves to avoid the responsibility to play God.

No way. I am going to write this novel. So let's make this interesting.

If you want to participate, and you live in the New York area, I'm starting a pool. $300 per person. Everyone participating who gets to 50,000 words gets their money back AND we split whatever's left in the pot from whomever didn't finish. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare or Stephanie Meyer. Shit, my novel is probably going to run long, so I'll say right out that you don't even have to finish. You have to reach 50,000 words. In the worst case scenario everyone finishes and walks away with a novel. In the best case scenario, I split a huge pay day with you (cf. above re: I am going to write this novel)

If you're like me, that number made you wince. $300 is a Playstation 3, a 32GB iPhone, or enough pizza to provoke a lard-induced haze that will help you forget that you didn't nut up to being a novelist for yet another year. The number is supposed to intimidate you. It's supposed to seem too expensive. It's supposed to be an amount of money that's hard to lose. That's why I chose that number. It's not a funny amount of money to lose, and it's a pretty exciting amount to win, even if you have to split it with someone.

If you live somewhere else and want in, lemme know, and we'll try to figure something out.

Anyone else want to write a book?

Batman: Arkham Asylum

When I attended New York City Comic Con earlier this year, I saw a panel with some of the people behind the Gears of War series. An audience member asked a question about one of the more absurd elements of the game, although I can't recall if it was the weight of the weapons, the auto-healing, the amount of ammo the characters carry, or what. The developer onstage responded, "If Cliff were here, he'd say, 'gamism,' and that's what I say to you. Gamism."

It shouldn't surprise me that Cliff Bleszinski, a man who has held dominion over a staggering amount of my leisure time with the Unreal series and Gears of War games, had a perfect and succinct term for the parts of games that are necessary for the user experience but demand suspension of disbelief. Why are there so many ammo crates lying around before major battles? Gamism. Why do none of your wounds turn septic? Gamism. And cetera.

Gamism has analogs in every medium, really. In the first five minutes of The Hurt Locker, the audience sees what actually happens when you are in the kill radius of a large explosion. As I watched the character's face explode all over the faceplate of his EOD suite (MSRP: $16,985), my mind stacked images of Stephen Segal, Indiana Jones, Mssrs. Skywalker, and various Jameses Bond flying through the air against an angry orange and yellow backdrops. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. I thought. It doesn't ruin the movie for most audience members, though. In fact, it's probably an unpleasant shock for men raised on action movies to discover that when they are in the presence of an IED or other explosive device in the real Iraq or Afghanistan, they cannot save themselves by running toward the camera and leaping forward with their arms outsplayed.

I’m not a lone voice screaming in the wilderness. In a recent interview at Kotaku, Assassin’s Creed designer Patrice Desilets discussed the design decisions the AC team made to immerse the player fully in the experience… and the concessions to gamism made during the development of Assassin’s Creed 2 in order to avoid losing the player.

Games, unlike movies or books, are burdened with the need to entertain the player at every step. Being frustrated by an interface or being clueless as to what to do next or being bored with repetitious tasks is not entertaining, so

All this is to say that I know why all the stupid Riddler puzzles are scattered around Arkham Asylum, but I can’t help but cringe every time I see a fucking green trophy shimmering behind a grate. I’m Bruce fucking Wayne, haunted eternally by the specter of my parents’ murder. I don’t sleep. I have split personality disorder, as the game points out during the brilliant Scarecrow toxin sequences. I am the Dark fucking Knight. So why am I taking time away from my mission to put the Joker in his place so I can see where the Riddler hid a question mark I can only see in my “detective vision”? Gamism.

As gaming has matured, the presentation of the material has raced down and up the Uncanny Valley, and the effect is to subconsciously elicit greater expectations in at least one surly gamer. The Joker and Batman are rendered gorgeously, and Arkham looks like a place you might be able to visit. The whole effect is compromised with every damned Riddler puzzle thrown in—let’s face it—to give the gamer something else to do. But that last bit is the entire ticket: if you didn’t get to hunt down more Riddler puzzles, you would feel cheated out of a complete gaming experience, and there would be precious seconds or minutes when you might not have something else to do!

On top of all that, Paul Dini was NOT the main talent behind Batman: The Animated Series. That seems to have been Bruce Timm, if Dini’s subsequent work in the comics is any indication. The Arkham Asylum script is a mess despite top-notch performances from Kevin Conroy and Luke Skywalker. No one should ever be allowed to write Batman except Jeph Loeb. (Incidentally, Loeb should never be allowed to write anything except Batman).

I’ve rarely hated and loved a game as much as I did Batman: Arkham Asylum. By the end I was foaming over the shoddy script and the pissy concessions to an ADD-addled marketplace. When the stealth and fighting elements are good enough to inspire active leaderboards, do you really need anything other than combat and stealth set pieces strung together? I submit you don’t. Rent it. You’ll enjoy it. I’m going to punch a wall now.

The Stakes are Never Higher: Death in Fiction

My show last night was a huge success. I dare say it was the best performance I’ve turned in to date. The booker for Jimmy Fallon was in the audience, but I haven’t heard a whisper. If he wasn’t impressed, that’s alright. Three years of performing is still young in the world of stand-up, so if my stuff last night wasn’t good enough, I just have to be Zen about my own growth and development as a performer and as a writer.

Now I’ll talk about video games. That always makes me feel better!

I am going to spoil the unholy bejesus out of the things I talk about here, so if you’re uncomfortable with that, don’t read.

I. Fallout 3

Throughout this year I have kept vivid memories of the last mission I played in Fallout 3. When your character stumbles on Vault 112, the scene is quiet but the feeling of the vault is nonetheless haunted. You guide your vault dweller into a simulation chair and in a flash of light you are no longer scavenging the wasteland as a warrior for light or a scourge in the night. You are in Pleasantville, fully black and white, and the air is thick with menace. Welcome to “Tranquility Lane”. I had my first jaunt through Tranquility Lane shortly after Fallout 3 was released, and I was simply playing it at the wrong time of night in the wrong state of mind. It more or less sent me under my bed and refusing to revisit the Capital Wasteland until the beginning of September.

It turns out I turned in my Pip-Boy 3000 just a hair too early. Vault 112 is where your vault dweller finds his erstwhile father, the original wasteland wanderer whose exodus from Vault 101 prompted your character to forge his wayward destiny at the game’s beginning. Remember, kids, never give into fear.

After your character finds Dad, there are a bunch of relatively boring missions that revolve around rebuilding his great scientific work, Project Purity, a machine designed to purify the millions of gallons of irradiated water in the Capital Wasteland (Go fuck yourself, I told you there would be spoilers). After one of these missions he is forced into a corner by the game’s Big Bad, a representative from the putative elected government of the Capital Wasteland. Forced to choose between giving his work to The People or The Bad Guys, Dad sacrifices himself by massively flooding the Project Purity area with radiation, killing the bad guys and giving you time to head for the hills. It’s all very noble, and Dad is played by Liam Neeson, who continues the Bethesda tradition of being a highly paid actor who phones in his video game lines and gets killed off (as Patrick Stewart did in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion).

Yet I was utterly unmoved. The same game that chilled me in the dead of night failed to elicit any kind of reaction when the main character’s motivational force dies right in front of him. If the same scene played out in the cinema, there would be a close-up and moody lighting. The glass would be fogged with radiation and Dad would be gone… until his hand pounded on the glass and with his final strength he rasped into the intercom, “Run!” Not so in Fallout 3. Your plastic person watches another plastic person lamely collapse to the tune of Liam Neeson’s worst performance.

II. Call of Duty IV: Modern Warfare

COD4 has a slew of amazing death moments. The gameplay treats death like an action movie, although it doesn’t fetishize the violence the same way Fallout 3’s VATS system does with its exploding heads and flying limbs. Nonetheless, there are two jaw-dropping moments that not only highlight the power of the medium but really give death some heft. The first instance is the second mission of the game. The player is dropped behind the eyes of the president of a nameless Arabic country. The president cannot move for the duration of the sequence. He just watches helplessly while his country is overthrown in a military coup. You as the president are eventually tied to a post before a firing squad. There you meet your executioner. He bleats a terrorist screed and raises his pistol. To that point, you the player have had near total control of the camera. No more. The world is out of focus save for that pistol as it’s lowered to the center of your vision…. BOOM.

Later in the game, that same son of a bitch sets off a nuclear bomb in the same country, this time while the player is in control of a U.S. Marine. Your Marine crawls around in the exploded landscape a bit before dying. After that point COD4 is played through the eyes of a British SAS commando, and your job is, more or less, TO AVENGE YOUR OWN DEATH. Rarely has so much emotion been so easily given to a player’s desire to push forward on the control stick and shoot everything wearing an enemy uniform.

III. Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

George R.R. Martin has acquired a reputation for killing characters. He teaches the reader early not to get attached to anyone who would be an obvious series protagonist in another series. Whatever direction you think the story is going to go, don’t count on it. GRRM will kill that character. Late in Storm of Swords, a brilliant chapter describes a scene of tainted revelry that ends in the death of two major characters, one of whom has been the reader’s point of view for the duration of the story to that point. The scene is shocking and painful to read. I was grasping at my neck while I read in the airport. The characters die within a page of one another. Nothing but black and white on a page, nothing fueling the experience but George R.R. Martin’s imagination fusing with my own. No graphics. No Liam Neeson. No nuclear explosion. Just a punch in the gut unlike anything either of the above games provided.

IV: Final Fantasy

I cried when a.) Aeris died b.) Squall almost missed Rinoa in space c.) Yuna ran through Tidus.

V: Planescape: Torment

I wasn’t always an avenging advocate for video games as art, despite the less than manly effect Aeris’s death had on me. My eighth grade self’s reaction to a 3D model’s death seemed a far cry from The Godfather. Then I was asked repeatedly what could change the nature of a man. The stink of death is all over your character in this game, and even though each death doesn’t resonate, the meaning of your own mortality is Torment’s raison d’etre. At some point you ask how much of you is the sum of your thoughts, the sum of your actions, or neither. Who are you, and if you are going to be judged, what goes into that ruling. I was raised on a healthy Bible diet, yet it was Planescape: Torment that left me a drooling wreck on the floor with these kinds of questions.

VI.

There can be little debate that video games are going to be the most important medium of the 21st century. That said, all art is about synecdoche, about shaving away some sliver of your understanding of the world as you understand it and rendering it in the truest way you know how. It’s tempting to write off the lack of investment I feel in Fallout 3 (or Oblivion for that matter, although the latter never tried anywhere near the personal stakes Fallout 3 aims for) as a response to the character models that are somewhere near the bottom of the Uncanny Valley, but that doesn’t explain the emotional effect of Final Fantasy VII or COD4. Modern Warfare’s characters are animated better than the mannequins in the capital wasteland, yes, but the investment has little to do with the realism of the characters. Did anyone cry when the lieutenant got pwned in Gears of War? Of course not.

It’s heartening and frustrating to watch games evolve but not quite make it. The guys at Bioware say they’re going to make us cry with Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins, and if anyone can, I believe it’s either those guys or the bad motherfuckers over at Obsidian.

Whether it’s The Notebook or Titanic or Wedding Crashers or Annie Hall or Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamozov or Hamlet or The Aeneid or The Metamorphosis or The Metamorphoses or The Pillowman or Mama Mia!, we have a wealth of entertainment options in the wide world showing us experiences removed from the adrenaline push and competitive accomplishment cycle that define the modern gaming world. The landscape will change as gaming is accepted as just another medium. I can accept that, but it doesn’t stop me from wishing the modelers, coders, and myriad other development personnel who worked on Fallout 3 could sell a moment of climactic horror after their months of development in a moment of climax with the same fluidity that George R.R. Martin was able to render with only a page of text.

New Facebook Fan Page

I changed the URL here to reflect my website and contact information better, and I also set up a Faacebook fan page... Which is sort of like virtual digital masturbation a la 2009. If you're interested in keeping up with my comedy or when Second Eulogy is screening or when any of my other projects come into fruition, check it out:

Facebook Fan Me! NOW, NOW, NOW!

Killzone 2 at 1Up

There's an enticing video preview of Killzone 2 at 1up.com, and I highly recommend you check it out, if only for the footage of what looks like it might be the best-looking game to date. I hate to admit when I am dazzled by sexy graphics, but I bought an XBox360 and Gears of War without knowing anything besides the fact that it was the most beautiful shooter I'd ever seen. Killzone 2 looks to give the same endorsement for the Playstation 3, which is desperate for such a boost.

Here's the 1up preview.

My favorite part of the video is where the, umm, pizza-inclined David Ellis says, "One thing I think they're going for and I think they've gotten right is the kind of... the general confusion of war." Really, David Ellis? You have a lot of experience with the confusion of war? I have more thoughts on this for later. Check out the video.

Auditorium

I am stunned by Auditorium. I usually click on whatever Tycho posts because the man has shown excellent taste over the past ten years, but I was unprepared for Cipher Prime's demo. If you haven't clicked the link above, do so now:

PLAY AUDITORIUM

When people who care about such things talk about "games as art," everyone has a different idea of what such a classification would mean. Gamers haul out Aeris's death or Rez's "synesthesia" or Braid's relative maturity or Bioshock's lofty creative ambition spread against a brilliantly realized world, and they say, "Surely, this is art!"*

All of those may indeed be art, although I think there are valid counter-arguments for whether or not some of them are good art: Final Fantasy VII, as a whole, reads like it was written by and for sixth graders; Bioshock is far more shooter and environmental design showcase than anything else, and the Rand-esque story elements feel tacked on, probably because they were added fairly late in the development process. Rez is beautiful art.

Auditorium is nothing less than an interactive poem about the creative process. It is the anti-Roger Ebert. Light spews from a single source, and your goal is to guide the light particles around the board so that they hit these panels, these line stacks. When the line stacks are hit, they cue a small music piece. The boards start simply and build, so by the time you are on the eighteenth stage, you are assembling fairly layered musical riffs.

So you have the notion that the creative process is, fundamentally, composed of very few parts. An individual piano has only eight keys. How many core colors did any of the masters use? It was finite. How many words does it take to form a sentence? The core elements are simple. But only with careful, artful arrangement, only with trial and error, can you finally stumble on that moment when your work, your piece, is made whole.

I know it sounds like overblown praise for the game. Keep my reading in mind when you play it, and see what you think.

Play Auditorium!

*-- The people who have this argument may or may not be concerned with whether or not games SHOULD be art because, dammit, they're fun. While I like pleasure for its own sake as much as any other product of the internet porn generation, and I will NEVER play a game that doesn't entertain me, I think this argument is silly. There are too many horrors and problems in the real, real world that to turn one's eye away from them for mere pleasure, i.e. pleasure that doesn't uplift the spirit through art or competition or social congress, is almost certainly a waste of time. There are many ways to have fun, and many of them aren't self-indulgent artifacts from your most childish self. When I call Auditorium the "anti-Roger Ebert," I am in no way chiding Mr. Ebert for a largely correct perception. There is dreck on the shelves both in the form of poorly constructed entertainment and in the form of wonderful entertainments that "represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic. " Note that I say this in full awareness that I am often guilty of this same form of time wasting. That doesn't mean I'm right, and it doesn't mean the distinction between mere entertainment and art isn't an important one to make.