The last episode is called “The City That Dares Not Sleep”, was written by me, directed by Jake RRODkin, and made by lots and lots of people at Telltale. I haven’t gotten to play it yet (and probably won’t until I get back from Georgia), but I’m looking forward to it. What I saw during recording the DVD commentary looked like they knocked the presentation up several notches.

My favorite joke in the game, assuming it stayed in: look at the TV screen in the arm controls. Or the based-on text. I’m also happy that it managed to cram in references to Space: 1999, The Wrath of Khan, every previous Sam & Max game, R’lyeh, Fantastic Voyage, The Beast Must Die!, William Butler Yeats, two of Steve’s gags from brainstorming, rampant misogyny, and poop jokes. Definitive proof that Roger Ebert was wrong.

Season one took a while to get up to speed — it wasn’t exactly clear whether or not they were actually in on the joke. Season two had some amazing moments, but you had to slog through lots of pointless subplots and tedious month-long orgies to get to them. But season three has been firing on all cylinders. It’s got the big mystery (what is Sookie Stackhouse?), a fantastic villain, a ton of interesting side characters, and finally, they’ve completely embraced being on HBO.

Before, it’s always felt like they’re kind of holding back or saving themselves for big moments. This season, the HBO-ness never quite stops. I think every episode has had the Nudity Violence Adult Language warning, but this year they really hit their stride at combining all of those at the same time. This episode started with a blood-covered shower sex scene that would’ve been the climax of any other HBO series, but that was tame compared to everything else and in retrospect actually kind of sweet, in True Blood terms. (Incidentally, with as much fluid exchange as goes on in this series, I’ve got to wonder why they haven’t spent more time talking about STDs). You’d think that you can only go over the top once or twice, but now they just keep stacking more top. And going from really, genuinely dark, to laugh-out-loud funny over the course of one scene.

The end of the most recent episode (“Everything is Broken”) sums up everything that’s great about this season — a creepy-sexy scene in a limo followed immediately by a tour de force performance that’s both hilarious and horrifying. And I never say “tour de force” so you know he knocked it out of the park. And they didn’t even need to ramp it up that much, considering they already had the scene with him narrating his evil plan of revenge to a crystal goblet filled with vampire remains.

I’m not saying it’s all been great. I like the subplots with Sam and Jason in theory — if you spent too much time focused on vampire royalty and Nazi werewolves, it could get too fruity. Even if the werewolves are mostly biker trash. True Blood does need to have a steady supply of straight-up white trash. And this season’s definitely delivered, but there’s the problem: even if your dog fighting rednecks are shapeshifters and your meth dealers are some yet-to-be-determined supernaturals (probably shapeshifters), it’s still hard for that to compete with vampire royalty and Nazi werewolves. You can’t really bash a guy’s head in with a mace and then cut to the dog fight and expect it to be horrific. I’m a little curious to see what the meth dealers turn out to be, but I’ll definitely be happy when Sam’s brother and the rest of his family go the way of Eggs.

I already said that Denis O’Hare is amazing as Russell Edgington, and I also want to go on record as saying I’m on Team Alcide all the way. And Alfre Woodard is pretty fantastic with just a few lines here and there as Lafayette’s mostly-crazy mother, but she’s Alfre Woodard so that’s more or less to be expected.

But the actor who doesn’t get nearly enough credit is Carrie Preston as Arlene. It’s kind of a thankless part, but I think the show would be a lot worse without her stabilizing everything. She’s not the only actress on the show who’s much better-looking in real life (Rutina Wesley really needs a scene where she’s not tied up or crying) but she is the only one who’s really having to walk the line between comic relief and drama. In less competent hands, she could’ve ended up just a caricature. But she manages to make an over-dramatic and a little racist stereotypical character and make her really sympathetic. On a show like True Blood, that can go from sad to horrifying to hilarious at a moment’s notice, you need somebody who gets it.

So that’s all I’ve got about True Blood, and it only took up a little less than an hour. I’ve still got to wait a week until the next episode.

But I don’t want to pick on io9 or Cyriaque Lamar, the author of that article — io9 the only Gawker blog I can still stand to read, and looking for trends in pop culture is what they’re supposed to be doing. Plus, their review of the movie is dead-on correct. What I do want to pick on is one of the posts Lamar gives far too much credit to by calling it an “intriguing essay.” It’s a post by blogger Abigail Nussbaum wondering why she enjoyed the movie despite its “misogyny”; it calls the movie “toxic” and says “there is no defense” for it; and it’s just awful. It also spoils pretty much the entire movie, so I only recommend reading it if you’ve already seen the movie.

The “intriguing essay” is exactly the kind of feminism-via-self-righteous-victimization that would justifiably be ignored except for three things: 1) It oversteps its bounds by so recklessly tossing around the word “misogynistic”, assuming that a woman’s interpretation of a movie as offensive to women automatically becomes an unblockable combo move. 2) As evidenced by my last two blog posts, the topics of feminism and Scott Pilgrim have been most on my mind lately, so I found Nussbaum’s post (and her reactions in the comments) particularly offensive. 3) It gives me an excuse to keep talking about and try to better explain what I liked best about the movie.

What’s best about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it doesn’t try to explain everything. Even after all my complaints about box office being irrelevant, it’s interesting — and, if I’m being honest, a little frustrating — that Inception made more money last weekend, because the two movies are almost complete opposites in that regard. Both have dream sequences and fantastic breaks from reality. But Inception goes out of its way to make sure that absolutely no one is left behind. It has to make sure that everyone in the audience knows exactly what is going on at every second, up until the very last moment, when it finally trusts us enough to leave us with a tiny sliver of ambiguity. And it still has a distressing number of people calling it “mind-blowing.” (To be clear: I liked Inception a lot, I just wish it’d been able to relax and let itself get fantastic).

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World starts out by assuming that everyone in the audience has been alive and conscious in the past 30 years, and that we’re all on board. It doesn’t stop every few minutes to ask the audience, “That was a flashback. Did I just blow your mind?” I can only recall two points in the entire movie where any of the characters even acknowledge that anything particularly weird is happening: once, Scott asks “is this really happening?” and later, he asks the perpetually-cursing Julie Powers “how do you do that thing with your mouth?” In anything else, this would be an example of breaking the fourth wall. But this is a movie that has already shattered the fourth wall by the time the Universal logo has stopped playing. It’s not stepping out of the movie, it’s actually pulling the audience back in. It reminds you that all of the visual effects aren’t just cinematic tics layered on top of the story, they’re an integral part of the world these characters are living in.

That distinction is crucial to understanding why the movie works as more than just visuals an in-jokes. It’s what changes the story from an underdeveloped slacker romance that makes a lot of references to videogames and comic books, to a very sincere love story that’s told in the language of videogames and comic books. It’s also why Nussbaum’s arguments fail, and I’ll pick out a few of the most egregious ones:

The fights between Scott and Ramona’s exes are explicitly described as duels in which Ramona is the prize…

Scott Pilgrim is explicitly shown head-butting a guy so hard he explodes into coins. This is not a movie for people who do not understand metaphor.

The seven evil exes are a metaphor for the baggage that Ramona and Scott are bringing to the start of a new relationship. That is hardly a mind-alteringly insightful observation; it’s said explicitly in the trailer. Several commenters — all of them male, Nussbaum is quick to point out — mention that the entire premise of the movie is a metaphor, but she quotes a different line from the trailer as an attempt at counter-argument: “If you want to be with me, you may have to defeat my seven evil exes.” She insists on a literal interpretation of a line in a movie that defies you to take anything literally.

Even outside of Scott’s self-absorbed point of view, the film’s treatment of its female characters leaves much to be desired. Ramona is a near-blank whose attraction to Scott never really makes sense.

There’s no going “outside of Scott’s self-absorbed point of view,” as that’s the entire movie. The movie assumes that audience will understand the concept of an unreliable narrator, even in a movie without explicit first-person narration.

And this is a story told from Scott Pilgrim’s — not Edgar Wright’s, and presumably not Brian Lee O’Malley’s — viewpoint. Your first clue: the title of the movie. Your second clue: the little title card that pops up saying “Scott Pilgrim Rating: Awesome.” The third clue: everything else. It’s a story told from the viewpoint of a self-absorbed slacker who relates everything to videogames. (Again, this stuff is pretty much all self-evident; I’m not exactly venturing into Cahiers du Cinema territory here).

Ramona is a near-blank because Scott doesn’t understand her. It’s not a case of the movie excising so much of the comic, either — I’ve gotten through four volumes now, and it’s only at the end of the fourth that she progresses past “mysterious.” (Seriously, her character introduction is “Age: Unknown. Is still relatively mysterious.”) She has more lines of dialogue in the comic than in the movie, but it’s mostly the kind of early-20s slacker babble that fills up space in real conversation. And hey, there’s even a line from the comic that’s used in the movie to that effect: “I know you play mysterious and aloof to avoid getting hurt.”

That’s not to say Ramona remains a cipher for the entire movie. We (meaning Scott) get flashes of insight into her character, what she used to be like, all the way from childhood up to right before she came to Canada. It happens six times, in fact. Almost as if these battles against the seven evil exes were a representation of Scott finding out more about Ramona as a person, instead of just as an object of desire or a prize to be won in a videogame. I only wish there were some word to describe when something is used to represent something else without explicitly saying you’re making a comparison….

Finally, Ramona’s behavior in the film’s last act is inexplicably out of character, and turns out to be the result of mind-control, a condition whose significance the film all but ignores and which is resolved with no fanfare whatsoever.

Here, I don’t know whether to be annoyed or sad. I like to think that all of us have been through at least one experience of being so completely, inexplicably infatuated with someone that we do things against our own better judgement. If not, I’d hope at least that the concept isn’t so alien to us that we can’t relate to it. And I’d especially hope that we don’t need to elevate a simile to a metaphor, and explain that being attracted to someone who’s bad for you is only like having a mind control chip implanted in the back of your neck.

The other stuff potentially spoils the end of the movie — it’s not a particularly plot-heavy story, so revealing the ending won’t ruin the movie by any stretch. But the very end is well done, and I was glad I didn’t know what was going to happen. So read on at your own risk.

Scott defeats Gideon by, as the film puts it, gaining the power of self-esteem (which is represented by a sword), but it’s not as if a tendency to be self-abnegating or retiring was ever this kid’s problem–if anything he’s overconfident, taking it for granted that his selfishness and failures as a boyfriend will be shrugged off and forgiven [...] more like the standard Hollywood template of what character growth at the end of a summer blockbuster should look like than anything relating to who Scott actually is.

First off, as a commenter mentions, it’s self-respect in the movie, which is a subtle but pretty important difference. But that’s still the least wrong thing about that passage.

The first thing anybody should be aware of when trying to interpret Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that Scott Pilgrim is kind of a dick. He’s whiny, lazy, self-absorbed, and sees the whole world as out to get him. Nussbaum seems to grasp this on some level later on when she says “Scott isn’t a manchild; he’s just a child.” What she either doesn’t get or refuses to accept is that this is the story of a man-child becoming a man.

You could point out that this idea gets more play in the comics, but it’s hardly under-developed in the movie. I believe every character in the movie calls him an asshole at least once. It’s repeatedly shown how he is carried through life instead of making his way, and the movie includes the comic’s line: “If your life had a face, I would punch it.” His overconfidence isn’t a sign of self-respect, but the opposite. He’s overconfident because he’s never had to do anything real, anything that he values.

The one thing that I’ll concede was more clearly handled in the comics than in the movie: Scott’s relationship with Envy Adams. It’s understandable why it was cut short, because it would’ve been devastating for the movie’s pacing, but the scenes in the movie don’t make it as explicitly obvious why “the power of self-respect” is what Scott needs more than “the power of love.” And according to the comments, it’s called “the power of understanding” in the book, but changing it to “self-respect” is infinitely more insightful. In the book, it’s pounded home a lot more that the break-up with Envy Adams was completely devastating for Scott, and what a huge contrast there was between the brash version you see at the beginning of the story and the pathetic version his friends have had to deal with for the past year.

Soon after her crisis of conscience that she might possibly be a “Bad Feminist” is when Nussbaum claims that Scott’s a child, not a man-child. Her justification for claiming this is that Scott is basically asexual, and his pursuit of Ramona (and Knives) is emotional instead of sexual objectification. And I hate to spoil the party, but there is a lot more to being a man than wanting to have sex with a woman. And — this is scandalous, but bear with me — there’s even more to being a man than being able to understand a woman’s needs.

Scott breezes past the guards and eventually defeats Gideon and wins over Ramona, but not with the power of love. He gets killed, as a matter of fact. And in these crazy new “videogames” that all the kids are into these days, an extra life gives you the chance to go back and redo things the right way. That’s not just a superficial reference, either: it’s an explicit acknowledgement of the very thing Nussbaum claims the movie just shrugs off. The “standard Hollywood template” says that if you just love someone enough, or you try hard enough, you can “win.” That’s exactly the kind of simplistic, childish overconfidence that Scott’s had up to that point.

Apologizing to Knives Chau was necessary for him to “win,” but calling that “understanding” would have even more simplistic and offensive than saying “love” is enough. (I haven’t read the final volume of the comics yet, so I don’t know how O’Malley handled it. I’m just saying it would’ve been completely wrong for the events as presented in the movie). Scott was hopelessly in love with Envy Adams, but the break-up left him devastated. Knives Chau was his rebound. He wanted a childish relationship instead of having to deal with a grown-up one, and he liked her because she propped up his ego so much. If he just “understood” how Knives felt and apologized, that’s fine for her, but it doesn’t address the root of the problem: he needed someone else to make him feel better about himself. Calling that “understanding” just flips the man’s role from objectifier-of-women to satisfier-of-women.

What Scott really needed was the power of genuine self-respect, so he can finally function as an adult instead of needing to be continually reminded that he’s awesome. Once he had that, he could acknowledge that he was a jerk to Knives and apologize to her. He could acknowledge that Young Neil was a better bass player. He defeated Gideon by doing what Gideon couldn’t: acknowledging that Ramona wasn’t just a prize to be won to make himself feel better. And he could finally start a genuinely adult relationship with Ramona because he could understand his own baggage from past relationships.

In the original comics, I’m told, there is a character called nega-Scott who forces Scott to face up to his self-serving recollections of his past relationships, and to the hurt he’s caused the women in his life, which is more like the kind of growth this character needs, but in the film nega-Scott is done away with with an (admittedly quite funny) gag.

It’s more than just a funny gag; it’s a funny gag that reinforces all the character development of the scenes before and after it. Anything the movie could’ve accomplished by showing the battle was already accomplished by showing Scott earning his self-respect. Instead of having him destroy all the bad aspects of himself and declare “I can date you now that I am a good person,” it’s a lot more interesting to have him reach genuine self-realization. It’s a lot more mature to be able to say, “Hey, turns out I’m not that bad a guy. I just need to stop over-compensating and start treating people as people instead of how they relate to me.”

More importantly: a surprise boss-fight against Nega-Scott is exactly the kind of trite and predictable climax that’s endemic to videogames and to the “standard Hollywood blockbuster template.” This is a movie directed at an audience so familiar with the way movies and videogames work, it’s become part of our language. It had an apartment scene that began with the theme from Seinfeld and was overlaid with a laugh track — an explicit acknowledgement that the movie, like the audience, is so self-aware it’s mocking its own self-awareness. Usually, that can just deteriorate into a black hole of irony from which nothing real can escape. But the Nega-Scott gag spins that into sincerity: the reason the gag works is because it deflates the audience’s expectations, and the reason the final scene works is because it leaves us not knowing what to expect. The movie’s acknowledged that here is where it’s stopped being a videogame or a movie (or a sitcom), and it’s showing you something genuine. Scott and Ramona have broken through their guardedness and overconfidence, their surface affectations, and all the self-doubt from previous relationships, and can walk through the star doorway into subspace as genuine adults.

I do have a little bit of sympathy for the old people reviewers though, since it’s a movie that constantly makes you question whether you belong in the audience. I mean, I love videogames and comic books, so I’m part of the group, right? But then… I am pushing forty, and if not for arrested development I’d have kids the age of the people in this movie, and I’m not even a little bit Canadian (thank God). Did any young people see me walk into the theater? They’ll know they’ll know!

It even gets worse: I’m not a particularly big fan of the comic book. I only got three volumes in before I had to give up — there was a lot I loved about it, but the rest just kept pushing me away from it. And most damning of all: I’m not a big fan of Edgar Wright’s other stuff, either. I always feel like I should like it more than I do. Spaced was the most frustrating, since it seemed overwhelmingly targeted at me. Directionless videogame-obsessed manchildren; I even had almost all of the music on the soundtrack. But again, every time I’d find myself enjoying it, it’d just take it a step too far, crossing the line from being in on the joke, to trying way too hard.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World definitely isn’t subtle. Or understated. And I think that’s a big part of why it works so well. It’s so gloriously sure of itself that you’re just forced to go along with it or be left behind. There’ve been so many attempts to be The Voice of My Generation that never got it quite right, we basically ended up without one. So I guess we have to hitch a ride on the next generation and borrow theirs.

What killed most of the attempts is that they could never just jump on the spiral of self-awareness without keeping a hand out to steady themselves. There’s always been a sense of people appointing themselves as ambassadors, explaining this nutty world of videogames and comic books to the Normals out there in Real Life. So everything gets buried under layers of reference and parody. For all the people who are complaining that the movie is inaccessible, all they see is a bunch of references to and parodies of stuff they don’t understand, and they’re pissed that the movie doesn’t step out of itself to pull them in.

And that’s pretty much how I felt about the comic book. The movie gets it right by not treating itself as an extended reference. In the scene where Scott meets Roxy Richter, she says something and he asks, “Where’s that from?” Her answer: “From my brain.” On the surface, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a comic book movie slacker love story overloaded with audiovisual references to comics, music, and videogames. What it really is: a love story about people whose entire world is steeped in videogames, comic books, music, movies, and irony. The Zelda music and 1-Ups and pixellated effects aren’t really references any more than I’m making references to English when I write this post. At some point, you’ve got to stop pointing at what a novel sub-culture you’ve created for yourself, and realize that it’s really not that novel anymore.

That doesn’t make them any less impressive: the movie is pretty fantastic throughout, and I was grinning like an idiot the whole time I wasn’t laughing out loud. Just because it’s not constantly, self-consciously saying “look how cool this is” doesn’t mean it’s any less cool. The penultimate fight (with the Katayanagi Twins) is a lot more spectacular than the actual climax, but the ending is still satisfying. All the casting is pretty much perfect. And the part that seemed like the biggest false note in the comic — the extended Dragonball Z/vegan parody — was wisely toned way down for the movie.

This review on the AV Club complains that the movie seems like it should be better than it really is, but that there’s no emotional center to it: it’s buried under irony and special effects. I say that that’s a perfect example of being on the inside looking out and looking back in. The target audience for Scott Pilgrim has always prided itself on being this insular group, extremely self-aware, targeted by Outsiders for their purchasing power. That mentality is so ingrained, that it seems completely foreign to have a movie that tells its story without translating it for anyone else.

He says “the intensity of Scott’s feelings for Ramona are never articulated,” which is absurd. The movie is the most self-evident allegory possible for infatuation and the beginning of a relationship. And characters frequently say exactly what they’re feeling. It just so happens that they all sound sarcastic while they’re saying it. Anybody who’s been on the irony carousel as much as an Onion AV Club writer should get that.

It’s an even-handed article, but there are two pretty clear targets for criticism: focus testing and, for lack of a more convenient word, sexism. I was reminded of Alexander’s article by a post by my ex-coworker Brett Douville’s blog talking about the focus-testing aspect of the story. I don’t have much to add, there, since it’s fairly straightforward: big companies make decisions based on focus testing; making decisions based on focus-grouped metrics and sales figures is deadly to creativity and innovation; individual developers, and studios seeking publishing or buy-out agreements, need to know the extent a publisher makes decisions based on focus testing, so they can decide who to work for or who to make business deals with.

I will say a couple of things, though: first, focus testing isn’t inherently evil. (Whether Activision is, is still up for debate). It’s easy to decry it as the most obvious example of The Suits keeping down The Creatives — I’ve done plenty of decrying myself — but if used correctly, it can be extremely valuable. Back before they merged with the taint of Activision, and were still just known for making preposterously well-balanced and polished games, Blizzard touted frequent play-testing and iteration as one of the keys to their success. Same with Valve, who is, at the time of this writing, yet to make itself known as evil. “Creative control” is laudable up to the point where you’ve clung to your own personal vision at the expense of everything else — the trick is being able to distinguish when you’re getting useful feedback from when you’re getting arbitrary meddling.

And speaking of arbitrary: would focus testing and publisher interference be given so much attention if the situation had been reversed? If a studio had been developing a game with a male space marine as its lead character, and the publisher had insisted that it be switched to a woman, for no better reason than because “women are under-represented” or even “games with chicks sell better,” would that get such a negative response? I’m skeptical.

The only other bit I wanted to mention from Brett’s post was in response to this: “It’s also worth noting that this article received more than ten dozen comments, which is far more than any other news item in the last week or so… clearly this touches some sort of nerve.” And I’d say yes, it touched a nerve because it was designed to: sexism + the current Evil Giant Corporation in the minds of videogamers + creative control ripped from honest developers == instant internet indignation. But I’ve got to point out that the bulk of those ten dozen comments — at least the ones I got through before I remembered why I never read blog comments anymore — were a couple of cranks having a typical pointless internet message board argument. Whenever you’re dealing with Things People Say On The Internet, it’s important not to confuse quantity with quality, or relevance.

And hey, quality over quantity is a good lead-in to what I really wanted to talk about: the sexy, sexy business of making videogames.

Portals versus Rifles

While making the case that games with female main characters do so sell well, Alexander mentions Tomb Raider, Metroid, Mirror’s Edge, and devotes a whole paragraph to Portal [bolding mine]:

And though Portal’s first-person mechanics emphasize the game’s interface and not its jumpsuited leading woman Chell, the Valve team went one step further with GLaDOS, the female-voiced AI whose villainy stemmed from maternal instincts gone twisted. Now GLaDOS is on the fast track to becoming one of gaming’s most beloved characters, and the overwhelming reception for Portal’s originality — plus major anticipation for the sequel — demonstrate that “females don’t sell” could indeed be false logic.

This was the part that caught my attention, because it undermines the entire rest of the article. For starters, I think Alexander is conflating the critical and “mind-share” success of Portal with its financial impact. I don’t know the exact numbers, and I don’t doubt the game has done well for the company. But I can all but guarantee that the types of publishers that are looking to focus groups for their creative decisions are going to be trying to emulate Grand Theft Auto 4 and Modern Warfare before they look to a game like Portal.

Second, I would love to see the industry learn lessons from Portal and follow its example. But of all the interesting things about that game, the fact that the lead character and villain are both “female” is the least relevant. Is this really the prime example of how we can reach better representation of women in games?

The main character is a complete cipher, even more devoid of personality than Gordon Freeman. Her gender — and the use of the phrase “take your daughter to work day” — is completely arbitrary. It’s a case of favoring representation over relevance. Much like how it’s become standard practice to use “she” as the gender-neutral third-person pronoun, e.g. “If a customer wants to buy a beard trimmer, she can find one at Target.” It’s every bit as arbitrary as continuing to use “he,” no more correct but now with the false connotation of being more “respectful.”

GLaDOS is more of a character than Chell, but there’s a problem with that, too: she’s not female. She is, as pointed out, a female-voiced AI. I wouldn’t call out Bobby Hill or Bart Simpson as increased exposure for women in the media, and whenever I’m waiting for a BART train or I reach someone’s voicemail, I don’t think “Girl Power!”

As for GLaDOS’s personality, I think that the idea of “maternal instincts gone twisted” is an enormous reach. I’ve played through the game twice now, and I never once perceived any aspect of femininity in the GLaDOS character. If anything, it varies between phone-operator-neutral, and sarcastic dude in his mid-30s. That could be because I knew going in who wrote the game, or it could be because of my own bias. By the end of the game, I pictured not a female AI or even a computer, but one of my ex-bosses, and I wanted nothing more than to destroy him/it completely. But whatever the case, there’s no dialogue in the game that suggests a maternal relationship.

So the question is: are you just looking for games that have arbitrarily female characters, or have something inherently feminine? Portal is, for the most part, a non-violent game. It emphasizes problem-solving over direct violence. If you want to get Freudian with it, you have a gun that shoots holes instead of bullets. One of the main characters is a box with a heart on it. The game involves baking. At what point does this kind of analysis of a game cross the line from “equal gender representation and empowerment” to “insulting sexism?” I just know that my own take on Portal is that it’s an absolutely brilliant puzzle game that was written like an Old Man Murray post. That’s a compliment, not an insult, but it’s still the direct opposite of “feminine.”

Ciphers versus Sex Objects

So how about the other examples? Samus Arun from the Metroid series is about the worst example possible, considering that the big surprise of the first game was that she was a female at all. If your main character’s gender is secret, you can’t use it as an example of gender making a difference.

Lara Croft? Alexander delivers a good line in saying that the recent incarnations “show more spine than skin,” and I’ll have to take her word for it, since I haven’t played any Tomb Raider games since the first one. And in the first one, she was the worst kind of female character: she was female solely to titillate the predominantly male audience, and her value was measured only in how much money she’d inherited, and how she could do the same things that men can do.

I haven’t played Mirror’s Edge, either, but even on the surface I can recognize it as a step up. (Or maybe leap up followed by a backwards roll?) I never saw any press devoted to the fact that the main character was a woman — or for that matter, an Asian who isn’t a wise sage or a math genius. And it’s not completely arbitrary that she’s female, either: the game requires a lead character who’s athletic, limber and flexible, the opposite of the huge-necked Gears of War dudes.

Because it’s a fairly subtle distinction: I acknowledge that Alexander is not making the case that female characters sell games, just attempting to refute the claim that games with female characters don’t sell.

But there does have to be a stronger justification for making a character female than just “it does no harm” or even “there aren’t enough female characters in games.” I’ve seen too many cases of its being done to pander; for the sake of arbitrary tokenism; or lazy, disingenuous faux-feminism.

In my own experience, I’ve written male characters for games and been asked “why not make him a woman?” It contributes nothing, and it puts the writer on the defensive: suddenly I’m having to defend what was originally an arbitrary decision against an equally arbitrary decision, or otherwise I’m misogynist or at best, insensitive. When it’s completely arbitrary, like Chell in Portal, then there’s nothing gained or lost, so sure, why not make it a woman? But if you’re taking an existing character and insisting on the change, you need to be able to justify changing the “he” to “she” or it’s every bit as pointless and damaging as Alexander’s example of changing “she” to “he.” (Example of a valid reason for the change: if you can get Angelina Jolie-level box office).

My Soul is in the Lost and Found

I’ve got to acknowledge that everything I say is going to be immediately suspect, since I’m what Roy Blount, Jr. calls the most politically-incorrect demographic there is: a white, English-speaking, Christian male from the southern United States. But I’d like to see a game that lets me play as a well-made female character, because that’s a big part of what games are about: letting people do things they can’t do normally.

And you wouldn’t believe it after hearing how under-represented female characters are in games, but there’s actually a ton of games that let you play as a female character, many of them huge sellers: World of Warcraft. Fallout 3. Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. Dragon Age: Origins. The Sims 3. You don’t hear much about that, and for good reason: it’s almost purely cosmetic. Granted I haven’t played Mass Effect long enough to get to the hot hot girl-on-girl scenes, but from what I have seen, it makes no difference to the game whether Captain Shepherd is a man or a woman.

I tend to make male characters, but when you get right down to it, it’s for the same reason that a lot of guys make female characters: it’s not who they want to be, but who they want to look at for the next 10-50 hours. I don’t know how it is for female players — and I’d like to hear, in the comments — but among male players, there’s a choice between role-playing escapism and good, old-fashioned exploitation, and each aspect gets roughly equal play-time.

For a perfect example of that, look at Half-Life 2 and its episodes. I said that Chell in Portal is a cipher, and by all accounts, Gordon Freeman should be as well. But he’s definitely not — it’s one of the best-written games available, but it’s still every bit the escapist wish-fulfillment that GTA and God of War are.

Like Chell, Gordon Freeman is completely mute and very rarely (if ever) seen in the game. And let’s be honest here: Gordon Freeman is a borderline idiot. He’s constantly falling off things or running into danger. He’s ostensibly a genius physicist, but he has to be given explicit, repeated instructions on how to press buttons or walk in a straight line. Still, the other characters are constantly commenting on his genius, praising him for accomplishing the most basic tasks, or flirting with him. (I picture him as the videogame equivalent of Jon Hamm’s character on “30 Rock.”)

In a different game, Alyx Vance could be precisely the kind of strong female character that people have been clamoring for. But here, she exists only to support Gordon Freeman, both physically in the game’s combat, and emotionally by being incredibly turned on by his silence and complete absence of personality. When she’s not macking on Gordon, she’s lying unconscious waiting to be rescued by him, or she’s getting weepy about her dad. It says a lot about how well she’s written, modeled, animated, and voice-acted, that you tend not to notice that she exists solely for the benefit of men.

While we’re lamenting the fact that publishers chase after a simplistic idea of what will sell to the still-predominantly-male videogame audience, it’d be a good idea to make sure that what we’re hoping for isn’t every bit as simplistic. Nobody in good conscience is going to propose cooking games and dating sims as “see, girls can play their own games!” But do we want the distinction between male and female characters to be as superficial as hair color? Do we want to measure the quality of a female character in terms of whether she can fight and shoot as well as a man? Do we want to keep the genders completely interchangeable, and make sure that 52% of games have female lead characters and 48% have males?

I think it’d be a lot more interesting to play a game that actually has me playing as a woman, to a degree that it makes a difference. What does that mean, exactly? I dunno, since I’m not a woman — that’s why I’d need to play the game to know what it’s like. Would that game sell? I bet it would, as long as it were a good enough game. Would it sell as well as GTA4 or Modern Warfare? Probably not anytime soon — we’d have to make more games that genuinely appeal to women before there’s enough monetary incentive to make higher-budget games for women. Until then, you can just try it out, and focus test the hell out of it.

The games that get the most play-time on my phone are the ones that support portrait orientation (Drop 7, Words With Friends, Helsing’s Fire, Bejeweled, etc), partly because I can jump in for a quick game while I’m otherwise occupied (read: on the toilet). If a game only supports landscape or plays better in landscape, I treat it more like a “real” game: I only start it up when I’m ready to devote a big chunk of time to it. If you play games on your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone, or whatever, help me out by answering the poll.

(If you feel inclined to explain, feel free to leave a comment too).

But at some point — I’m guessing very close to the end of the process — somebody decided that this didn’t have to be just another silly and forgettable movie and could very easily be turned into Relevant Social Commentary. They tacked on a jab at the government bailouts, literally at the last minute, which would have just seemed like another gag that wasn’t quite inflated enough: I was left thinking, “Really? That’s all they’re doing with that whole Anne Heche subplot?” But then over the closing credits, they pounded it home with a series of animated infographics about Ponzi schemes, Bernie Madoff, and the cost of bailing out AIG and others.

The whole movie is built around not knowing when to quit. You can tell they’ve got their own little formula going, making movies based on the idea that if you get Will Ferrell in front of a camera with a bunch of reasonably funny people and a sliver of a concept, you can just let the camera roll and eventually you’ll end up with gold. And it mostly works. Sure, the scenes tend to go on a little bit too long, and there are several you can tell aren’t as funny as they were hoping they’d be, and the movie doesn’t really arc so much as gradually deflate. But there’s nothing that falls absolutely flat, everyone in the cast does a good job with the material, and there are several moments that are really funny.

But it’s not strong enough to outweigh the bad taste left by that ending. It’s like having a pretty good but not outstanding dinner and not finding the hair on the plate until the last few bites. Because these just don’t seem like people who can get away with complaining about excessive spending.

I doubt that Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are pulling in the ludicrous salaries of corporate execs, but I’m pretty sure they don’t work cheap. And the rest of the cast (apart from Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, who pretty much had to be in the movie for it to work at all) aren’t super-expensive A-Listers, but most of them were at one point or another. Even discounting the fact that most of them are probably friends of the filmmakers or people treating it as an extended Funny or Die project, it seemed like kind of a waste of casting money. Throughout I kept thinking, “Did you really need to spring for Anne Heche for such a small part?” Or “Titus Pullo should either have more action scenes or better dialogue.” Or even “That’s the woman from all that stuff whose name I can never remember. She should have more than four lines.”

What’s weird is that I never think about that kind of thing during movies. But all through this one, even before the ending, I kept going into producer mode, thinking how expensive everything must’ve been. There are at least fifty demolished cars, and at most five of them were needed for a punchline. (No seriously: they have a Prius drive over the tops of two other cars after a gag is over, just to show it driving away). At least one helicopter explodes, and I don’t have any idea many real-world helicopters that ends up being. Multiple buildings and storefronts are blown up or demolished. Scenes are filmed in penthouses and soon-to-be-demolished offices which can’t be cheap. I had a dollar-to-joke-payoff counter running through my head the whole time, and after the first thirty minutes or so, it wasn’t giving a very good return on investment.

But even with all that, they didn’t know when to quit. After all, being expensive isn’t the same thing as being evil, and I’ve got little doubt the movie will end up making money, even without the product placement money from Bed Bath and Beyond. (And Toyota, assuming all the exposure for the Prius outweighed having characters compare it to a vagina). I got about ten bucks’ worth of entertainment out of it, the theaters were pretty full so no doubt the investors will make their money back, everybody wins. It’d be hard to equate even an over-budgeted movie with large-scale corporate corruption.

Except the little infographics at the end tried to put a populist spin on everything. They had a little chart showing how everyone’s 401(k) is worth half as much as it was before the sub-prime mortgage collapse. And a little elevator showing the increasing pay disparity between corporate CEOs and regular employees. And a businessman on a hammock with a big number over his head showing how much CEOs of failed companies made in bonuses.

And that’s where they lost me. Because I couldn’t help but take a couple zeroes off that number and reckon that that’s how much Will Ferrell or Mark Wahlberg have made for a couple of movies. Or that just one of those scenes with a gag that didn’t quite pay off probably cost as much as I’ll make in two years of working. Or that some guys made millions from running their companies into the ground, and other guys are making millions by making repeated jokes about TLC in 2010. Either way, they’re seeing a lot more money than I am. And that’s not exactly something you want to be drawing attention to.

I guess in the end, I would’ve rather seen a movie about the first guys. Because every second of Samuel Jackson and The Rock going over the top was worth every smashed car, bus, and facade of the Trump Tower it took to make it.

Then again, it kind of makes sense — what’s most remarkable about Sin Titulo is its pacing, which should be familiar to someone who’s got a career laying out comic panels. But that doesn’t account for how natural the dialogue is. Or some of the unexpected and genuinely creepy turns the story takes. Or how well the mood is conveyed throughout, building up the tension and unease to just above unbearable and then pulling back for a flashback or the relief of a narrow escape.

Okay, I’m jealous.

The only problem now is that I’ve read three years’ worth of content in a few hours, and now I’ve got to wait days or weeks in between story updates. It’s like having to watch Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive (except you care about what’s happening to the characters), but in interrupted spurts of five minutes.

(Also notice the donate button on the site, since it’s a self-funded comic separate from his commercial work).

“Big surprise! We expected nothing different from Judge Vaughn Walker, after the biased way he conducted this trial,” said Brian Brown, President of NOM. “With a stroke of his pen, Judge Walker has overruled the votes and values of 7 million Californians who voted for marriage as one man and one woman….”

Their desire for appeal is understandable, considering the clear bias of Walker, who is, of course openly gay. (And who was originally nominated by Ronald Reagan, failed to be confirmed because of liberal opposition to his “insensitivity” towards homosexuals, was again nominated by George H.W. Bush, and was unanimously approved by a Republican-majority Senate).

This outrageous demonstration of the separation of powers has sent shockwaves throughout the nation, raising deeper questions about the fundamentals of American government, such as: “Have any of you people ever read a high school Civics textbook?” Understandably, the defendants in the case were quick to express their outrage:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: “For the hundreds of thousands of Californians in gay and lesbian households who are managing their day-to-day lives, this decision affirms the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves. At the same time, it provides an opportunity for all Californians to consider our history of leading the way to the future, and our growing reputation of treating all people and their relationships with equal respect and dignity.”

California Attorney General Jerry Brown: “In striking down Proposition 8, Judge Walker came to the same conclusion I did when I declined to defend it: Proposition 8 violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution by taking away the right of same-sex couples to marry, without a sufficient governmental interest.”

Supporters of Proposition 8 — who are not homophobic, just deeply committed to states’ rights and the freedom of religion, no honest — lament this as yet another example of the long, unsettling history of judicial activism in the United States. Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board of Education, where does it all end? The very concept of activist judges legislating from the bench is the antithesis of the ideals our country was founded on.

Brian Raum of the “Alliance Defense Fund” — again, not persecuting gays but defending the democratic process — paints a nightmare scenario:

“The majority of California voters simply wished to preserve the historic definition of marriage. The other side’s attack upon their good will and motives is lamentable and preposterous,” Mr. Raum said. “Imagine what would happen if every state constitutional amendment could be eliminated by small groups of wealthy activists who malign the intent of the people. It would no longer be America, but a tyranny of elitists.”

Imagine what would happen if every citizen’s rights could be eliminated by large groups of wealthy religious activists from out of state who introduce new discrimination into a state’s constitution under the hypocritical guise of “defending” an institution. It would no longer be America, but a tyranny of bigots.

After all, seven million people voted in favor of Proposition 8. Are we going to say that the opinions of seven million people are less valid than the opinion of one man? (Well, one man and the 6.4 million men and women who voted against the proposition?)

As Fox News responsibly asks: “I’m not sure but shouldn’t voters views count for something?” The ballot didn’t even include an “I’m not sure” option; it reduced it to a simple “for” or “against”. (Well, a simple “for a ban against the right of same-sex couples to marry” or “against the ban for the right of same-sex couples to not marry.”) If we can’t trust the right of disinterested strangers to make uneducated decisions about the rights of others, then where would we be? Advancing the issue to an appointed third party who makes decisions based on nothing more than years of legal training, familiarity with constitutional law, the merit of the prosecution and defense’s cases, weeks of deliberation, and a public ruling subject to appeal? In America?

Meanwhile, thousands of gay men and women were unavailable for comment at press time, as they are waiting for the judicial process to continue through a lengthy series of appeals and continued deliberation while watching thousands of their friends and relatives in real relationships have their marriages acknowledged without resistance. Or were spending years if not decades praying to be “cured,” waking up every day filled with self-loathing and a desperate wish to no longer be different from everyone else, lying in bed staring at the ceiling contemplating the likelihood of dying alone and wondering if suicide would be better. Or running for office on an anti-gay-rights platform.

(And incidentally, to the helpful people pointing out that marriages shouldn’t be the responsibility of government in the first place: Feel free to introduce a separate proposition outlawing civil marriage in California, and see how far you get with that. Until then, back the fuck out of the business of the thousands of people who believe in marriage, have spent their whole lives picturing themselves getting married just like their parents and friends did, want to share that marriage with the world, but can’t because they’ve had to spend years hearing assholes trying to convince them that they chose to be perverted or that they were born “broken.”)

Maybe “hate” is too strong, but it’s fair enough to say that the first StarCraft and I have a troubled history. The troubles went way past any one game, though; this was an abusive relationship that soured me on an entire genre. Maybe an analogy will help clarify:

Before I played StarCraft, it was a completely alien concept that I could be bad at videogames. I mean, I can and will lose games if pitted against another human, and there are things like racing games that I’ll never be good at because I can’t be bothered to care. But the idea that there could be a videogame with robots and spaceships and lasers in it, that I could play by myself against the computer on normal difficulty, and lose? Inconceivable!

It wasn’t a quick and merciful smackdown, either, but a prolonged bare-assed spanking. I’d believe I was doing fine and then slowly, systematically, and rigorously corrected. My breaking point? As early as the third mission in the game, where I’d have to defend a base against Zerg attacks for 30 minutes. I’d try it over and over again, each time thinking Now I know what I’m doing! and each time waiting 25 minutes until my inevitable destruction.

I don’t even want to think about multiplayer. I’ve seen otherwise relatively normal people sit down in front of StarCraft and become transformed, like a cyber-nano-hacker from a syndicated sci-fi series getting jacked into the FutureNet. Their eyes glaze over, their fingers begin furiously tapping keyboard shortcuts, things start blowing up and they’re freaking out over choke points. Even if it were at all possible for me to win against that, there’d be no joy in it, I’d be more machine than man at that point.

So by the time StarCraft 2 was announced, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Here was a game tailor made for the Blizzard obsessives who get obscenely fixated on damage per second. For people who’d spent the last 12 years playing this game, presumably making it past the third mission. Screenshots of the sequel were almost indistinguishable from the original (and from each other). It was, by most accounts, more of the same.

But I bought it anyway. And it is, indeed, instantly recognizable and familiar. And I did progress through a couple of simple missions that convinced me I knew what I was doing before hitting one that had me defending my base against Zerg attacks for 20 minutes.

Except this time, I did it. I definitely haven’t gotten better at RTS games in the years since the first game, so I can only figure that Blizzard applied their usual level of exhaustive playtesting to the game to make sure that people like me could play.

The single-player campaign on normal difficulty is right at my level of comfort: easy enough that I haven’t given up in frustration yet, but not so easy that I feel as if I’m being patronized. Plus, the single-player campaign feels like a real game, not just a series of levels tied together with cut-scenes that say “Look How Much We’ve Seen Aliens!” You can choose between different missions to take, there’s a little bit of character building and customization as you collect research and money to make unit upgrades, and you get to hang out in different rooms of your own spaceship.

All the cut-scenes are done in engine, too, which is kind of astounding. It’s fairly standard redneck space marine stuff, but it looks great. And the storytelling within the missions is a huge improvement on the first game’s, too. My first reaction when seeing the game in action was that I’d spent far too long seeing games with short development cycles. There’s a ton of content in StarCraft 2, and you can see all the years of development on the screen.

People better-versed in strategy games could describe the mission balance, unit variety, player matching, and multiplayer. I’m still early in the game; currently in the middle of a mission that has me defending my base against zombified colonists that only come out at night. That’s about five or six missions in, and each one has had its own hook to make it seem distinct. And even if things go downhill from here, I’m happy that the game’s already accomplished the impossible: I’m actually having fun playing the single-player campaign of an RTS. Everything looks, sounds, and feels like StarCraft, except I’m actually looking forward to getting back into it.

Now they just need to hurry up with Diablo 3 already.