And they’re mostly (but not entirely) wrong. It’s far from flawless, but it’s perfectly fine as a post-2001 franchise reboot. And even with all its problems, it’s still the second best Superman movie ever made. But that’s admittedly low bar, because Superman is an absolutely terrible character to be making movies about.

Before anybody argues that point, I’m going to remind you that the best Superman movie ever made ends with Superman flying around the earth so fast that he turns back time. Not to mention the scene with Lois speak-singing “Can You Read My Mind?”.

You won’t believe that kind of thing will fly in 2013, and we comic book nerds have ourselves (and Richard Donner’s Superman, for that matter) to blame for that. Decades of being defensive about comics being “not just for kids” means that nobody’s going to approve of Silver Age hijinks anymore. Or the Batdance. Or, for the love of Pete Ross, amnesia kiss powers and a de-powering ray with inside-or-outside-the-booth settings. It also means we get movies like the first two X-Men and The Avengers, though, so: net win.

The reasons that stuff worked in Superman were because: a) it was the 70s; and b) Superman wasn’t really about Superman, it was about the boundless spectacle and wonder of comic books. The most successful modern adaptations of the Superman story have been either: a romantic comedy disguised as a Superman story, a millennial Buffy-inspired teen action/drama, or animated.

Stories about Superman are notoriously difficult to make interesting, because he can do just about anything, and because there’s little dramatic conflict to be found with a character who always does the right thing. It’s easier to do in comics and animation than live action, but even in the comics, the most memorable “classic” Superman stories have been meta-stories.

So I don’t think that a more straightforward, less fantastic version of Superman — comic creator Mark Waid said that Man of Steel was fine as a sci-fi movie, but not as a superhero movie — was a bad decision at all. I’d say it was all but essential in an environment where comic book movies have become the norm instead of a novelty. I’ve complained several times about the Dark Knight series for being so preoccupied with making Batman “realistic,” but I think that approach mostly works for Man of Steel. I definitely don’t think Batman needs to be campy, but I do believe that when you remove that layer of the fantastic, it becomes just a story about a mentally disturbed billionaire orphan who dresses up in a weird suit and beats up psychopaths in Chicago. Even when you try to make Superman “realistic” though, it’s still about an alien from a doomed planet who hides among Earthlings in order to save them. The fantasy’s baked in.

Just a Friend from Another Star

Usually, Superman’s origin is just used as back-story to set up the interesting part of the story, which is his adventures in Metropolis. In Man of Steel, they went with the idea that Superman’s being an alien is the interesting part of the story. It becomes a mash-up of Superman, Superman II, and, for some reason, David Lynch’s Dune.

When I’d heard that the new Superman reboot was going to be executive produced by Christopher Nolan and directed by Zack Snyder, I’d expected to see the worst excesses of both. All the dark, ponderous joylessness of the Dark Knight series combined with Snyder’s pretty-but-vapid mishmash of scenes designed to appeal to sexually confused fourteen year old boys.

And Man of Steel is indeed almost entirely humorless. I counted exactly two moments of light-heartedness in the entire thing: one was a character simply stating the obvious (that Henry Cavill as Superman is impossibly hot); the other was a startlingly tone-deaf attempt at romantic banter between two characters standing in the desolate ruins of what was once a city with millions of people.

And the movie is indeed full of scenes that try far too hard to be spectacular and just end up feeling stupid. Especially during the last thirty minutes or so, which stops being “climactic clash of titans” and starts just being “Tim the Enchanter.”

But somehow, the excesses cancel each other out. As much as I tend to dislike Snyder’s movies, they are usually filled with some fantastic imagery, and that layer of fantasy helps keep a “realistic” take on Superman from being just tedious. And as much as I tend to dislike Nolan’s movies, he is an extremely good storyteller, and he along with screenwriter David Goyer manage to make the entire thing make sense. More or less. It establishes a central theme for the movie — pre-destination versus choice. And that’s always been one of the most interesting things about the Superman character: he’s not a hero because of his powers, but because he always chooses to do the right thing.

(Spoilers follow)

Can You Break My Neck?

The two most common complaints about the movie have been about the crass and excessive disaster-porn that make up most of the last half of the movie, and the climactic scene in which Superman kills General Zod by snapping his neck.

There’s definitely something to be said for the former. The scenes of destruction just go on and on, even after huge stretches of Metropolis are shown to be a smoldering, post-Apocalyptic crater. And the way many of the scenes are filmed is simply tasteless. They show frightened people running down towards the camera as clouds of smoke come barreling down the street and skyscrapers collapse in the distance; it’s unimaginable that it wasn’t intended to evoke memories of 9/11. Even without the offensive imagery, it’s numbing in its excessiveness. It feels like someone wanted to see stuff get blowed up real good and didn’t know when to quit.

That said, it does strike me as deeply hypocritical to complain about the concept of a city being devastated in a superhero movie. What did people think was happening in The Avengers, or any of the thousands of Superman stories that have larger-than-life threats to the Earth that only Superman can stop? The message from these complaints seems to be that mass destruction is fine as long as you don’t actually show stuff being destroyed. Violence is okay as long as it’s without consequence. It’s A-Team morality: you can show someone firing a missile into a truck and the truck rolling down into a ravine, as long as there’s a shot of everyone getting out of the truck and brushing themselves off.

And it’s similar to the complaints about Superman killing General Zod. Superman never kills people! Except, of course, in Superman II, where he breaks all of the bones in Zod’s hand and then tosses him (now de-powered) down a bottomless pit. Where it’s played for laughs; the villain getting his comeuppance. Unless I suppose the Fortress of Solitude has cushions and safety mats at the bottom of all its bottomless pits?

According to Comics Alliance, Christopher Nolan wasn’t happy with the scene, either. Which is kind of odd, since the entire theme of the movie made the ending inevitable. It’s not a subtle screenplay; Zod comes right out and says exactly what his motivation is, and it’s to “preserve Krypton” no matter the cost. He’s programmed to do it. In a movie that’s about Superman as an alien more than Superman as a generic all-powerful super-hero, it’s the point that defines his character: he’s not just a super-powered outsider sent to protect the Earth, like Martian Manhunter or Doctor Manhattan. He was given the choice between Krypton and Earth, and he chose Earth. He tells a soldier, “I grew up in Kansas.” (Again, not a subtle screenplay).

To compare it with Superman II again: as fantastic as Terrence Stamp’s performance as Zod was, the character was still nothing more than a sneering super-villain. There was the potential for an interesting message there, in that it’s not Superman’s powers that make him great, but his morality. The movie didn’t do anything with that, however, and even violated that entire premise with its finale: it’s only by keeping his powers and removing theirs that he’s able to defeat the bad guys. I’ll take a scene with him frustrated and outraged at being forced to kill an unstoppable monster, over a scene where he uses an implausible gimmick to trick the bad guys into losing their powers and then casually throwing the villain to his death.

The real problem with all the destruction in Man of Steel is that it undermines Superman’s role as Earth’s protector and savior, since he does a pretty lousy job of saving people. While they’re casually blowing up buildings and crashing jet fighters into streets and tossing each other through architecture, there’s almost no consideration for who all is getting caught in the crossfire. (That’s one of the reasons The Avengers worked better as a super-hero movie; during the finale, half the team stayed behind just to rescue people). When Superman catches Lois after she’s thrown from the tail end of a bomber, it doesn’t seem heroic so much as inept. He’s only rescuing the important people. Sorry, Richard Schiff! That’s what you get for being a supporting character!

You’ll Believe A Dong Can Fly

So far, I’ve just said “better than Superman II,” which is a very low bar to set. What about Man of Steel makes it any good on its own merits?

Here’s what I disliked about the movie:

• Kal-El as Messiah: Superman as Secular Jesus isn’t a new idea, and if it’s done subtly it can actually be a good idea. Man of Steel doesn’t do it subtly. Instead, we’re told that he’s 33 years old, he has to walk the earth on his own to test himself and find his purpose, and there are lots of scenes with him floating in mid-air, legs together and arms outstretched. For anyone in the audience who still doesn’t get it, there’s a scene in the church with him framed against stained glass depictions of Christ.
• It’s Not an S, It means Exposition: Kudos to Russell Crowe for actually walking and flying on things and jumping around, unlike Brando’s pontificating in a white pantsuit. But an unforgivably big chunk of the movie is Jor-El just repeating back-story that we’ve already heard while CG nanobots recreate backdrops from the BioShock games behind him.
• Tentacle Boredom: Apparently, Krypton exploded because they’d over-mined the planet’s core for its rich supply of tiresome CG effects. They overdid it with the liquid-metal display things, but it’s somewhat forgivable as consistent alien art direction. Where it’s not okay is when you have Superman fighting character-less CG tentacles for what seems like an hour, while all the interesting villains are literally on the other side of the planet.
• Would You Just Put the Peg in the Hole Already: When Jor-El was explaining phantom gates to Lois Lane, it looked like she was actually going to get the chance for some action hero stuff for once, instead of just being The Woman Superman Keeps Rescuing. But as it turned out, all she did was say “phantom gates” to a couple of people, and then try to put a pentagonal peg into a pentagonal hole. And fail to do it, until she fell out of the plane so that a man could come in and figure out what was the problem.
• Smallville Moments Brought to you by the Foundation for a Better Life: There were tons of cool, albeit disconnected, moments designed simply to be iconic, and several of the best were used in the trailer. But that means there were also several cheesy moments, like young Clark running around the Kent farm using a red towel as a cape, while someone played a heartwarming tune on a piano. Or the aforementioned scene in a church, which went nowhere and accomplished nothing.
• Everything’s repeated, and everything’s told a second time: I can’t think of a single plot point, character description, or concept that was delivered once and left to stand on its own. Every single thing, from the fact that Kal-El was Krypton’s first traditional birth in centuries, to the hand-waving explanation of how to defeat General Zod, was repeated at least twice.
• Krypton as 70s Prog Rock Album Cover: I had a similar problem with Sucker Punch, where the imagery was kind of cool while still feeling somehow familiar and unoriginal. Like an album cover, or a painting in OMNI magazine. Krypton gets similar treatment here, but it’s hard to be too upset about it, because it’s one of the first attempts to make Krypton actually interesting, instead of just “alien.” (Grant Morrison’s new Action Comics has done a lot with it, as well). And it’s better, albeit less memorable, than just saying “CRYSTALS!” for everything and making all the equipment look like stuff from The Container Store.

But here’s what I liked:

• Outstanding casting: Henry Cavill, in addition to being astoundingly hot, does an excellent job as Superman. As a friend said on Facebook, he does all the standard Superman poses but somehow manages to make them look natural. As he’s discovering his powers, he genuinely seems like an alien; when he’s in Smallville, he genuinely seems human. Laurence Fishburne is excellent as Perry White, an unexpected bit of casting for what’s usually a cartoonish character. Diane Lane is another bit of unexpected casting as Martha Kent, and it’s one of the most honest and believable portrayals of that character that I’ve ever seen. Amy Adams is naturally fantastic in everything without even trying. And Russell Crowe is very, very handsome.
• The Top Gun Effect: Ever since 300, Zack Snyder’s movies have always had this layer of homophobia about them, but I’ve never been able to take it too seriously. I mean, Frank Miller can go screw himself, but Snyder’s take has never struck me as malignant, but just a kind of adolescent posturing. And whether it’s true or not — I’m refusing to read any interviews with Snyder because I desperately want it to be true — it’s hilarious to me to think that he keeps trying to make gung-ho men’s movies that inadvertently turn out hopelessly gay. In Man of Steel, we get a shirtless and impossibly ripped Clark Kent — who just seconds earlier was literally flaming — grunting as he holds up the burning remains of an oil platform, and the camera focuses on his abs as if it were a Calvin Klein ad. Before that, back on Krypton, the movie dispensed with the two-dimensional-pentagon version of the Phantom Zone and instead had Zod and his posse imprisoned in cocoons and sent to a spaceship. And the scene looks exactly like a fleet of dildos launching into the air. I guess this all should be considered a negative, but I just can’t help thinking it’s charmingly inept.
• Lois Isn’t An Idiot: Yes, she goes out in sub-freezing temperatures and climbs along a crumbling cliff without telling anyone where she is. And the “comparing dicks” line was glaring as Dialogue A Man Would Write. But for the most part, she’s shown to be smart, capable, and fearless, without overcompensating too much to make her seem super-human.
• “Welcome to the Planet.”: I loved Lois’s last line to Clark Kent at the end of the movie, both as a double entendre and as the absolutely perfect way to sum up the first movie and set up their relationship for the second. I’d been worried, earlier on, that they’d completely blown the Lois & Clark relationship by having her be the first one to discover him in the Kryptonian ship, as opposed to him finding the Fortress of Solitude by himself. But it ended up perfectly fitting in, again, with the central theme of “Is he an alien or is he an Earthling?” And it solved what’s long been the biggest problem of Superman: how can Lois not recognize Clark Kent as Superman without being a complete mental deficient?
• “You are my son.”: Kevin Costner’s voice cracks as he delivers this line, and his delivery is absolutely perfect. It’s so good it makes up for any number of bad English accents, and almost makes up for Waterworld
• Superman: Birthright: Mark Waid was taking partial credit for his story being the inspiration for much of Man of Steel. I haven’t yet read it, so I can’t comment on that, but I do like that Man of Steel takes Superman’s origin story, which has been told over and over so many times that I’d thought there was no way to make it interesting, and makes it interesting. Having him as an adult thinking back on his life in Smallville means that we see the pivotal moments that define his character, without having to slog through a story we’ve already seen dozens of times.

So on the whole, I say it’s a positive. Based on the several mentions of Lexcorp in the background scenery (again, nothing in the movie is left to stand on its own), I predict that they’re going to try to give this the same arc as the Batman movies: origin story, strong second part focusing on the hero’s most famous villain, and then some kind of meta-textual finale to end it. If the second movie manages to be as good as The Dark Knight, then we may finally see DC able to hold its own against Marvel in the movie franchise business. I already liked Man of Steel more than I liked Batman Begins, so I’m really looking forward to what comes next.

(I say “almost” no editorial tricks because one particularly crackpot theory is followed with Jack Torrance telling Lloyd the bartender “Whatever you say, Lloyd. Whatever you say.”)

It’s a neat example of the form of the documentary furthering its meaning. Or at least, what I interpret to be its meaning, which is about the act of interpretation itself. It’s essentially a case study of How Art Works.

One of the statements from one of the speakers is given prominence towards the end of the film, in which he talks about post modern film criticism and the notion that ideas and symbols exist within a work of art whether or not the artist was conscious of them. When delivered by a man who’s spent the last hour going into detail about his theory of how The Shining is actually a condemnation of the genocide of Native Americans, it’s easy to recognize that for what it typically is: a bullshit attempt by an academic to cover his ass, allowing him to come up with any crackpot interpretation imaginable without fear of being challenged. It’s the Montessori School of film criticism, and you’ll see it a lot in any cinema studies course. Everybody’s right!

But when you hear it in the larger context of the whole documentary, it becomes a somewhat appealing concept again. Since Room 237 doesn’t make any value judgments about the individual interpretations, and instead lets them speak and shows you exactly what they see — often frame by frame, looped, paused, reversed, or superimposed — the documentary becomes less about the conclusions and more about the process of interpretation itself.

The bit I mentioned earlier might not’ve been from the guy who believed The Shining is about the genocide of Native Americans; it could’ve been the guy who claims it’s Stanley Kubrick’s coded confession about faking the Apollo moon landing footage. Or the one who claims it’s about the Holocaust. I know it’s not the one who saw the image of the Minotaur in a poster of a skier, because that was a woman. But none of the speakers are shown, they only exist as voices. And they’re introduced individually at the beginning, but then intermingle through the rest of the documentary. You’re bombarded with theories ranging from obsessive to outright insane, but they all coexist, with a detail having one meaning to one speaker and a different meaning to another.

Turn Me On Dead Man

Kubrick’s hand is so obvious in The Shining that even to a non-obssessive viewer, it seems like an intricate, disorienting puzzle box. You don’t necessarily have to “solve” the puzzle box to have fun with it. And you can appreciate the process of picking out tiny details and stringing them together into some grander storyline, even if you think the storyline is absolutely nuts.

Incidentally (and really, any one interpretation is almost incidental at this point) the only take presented in the documented that I agree with at all is from the woman who saw the Minotaur. Not for the Minotaur part — she’s the most rational of all the subjects, and the idea of the labyrinth theme getting even more representation is a nice one, but most of her examples are a real reach. I agree with the conclusion that the disorienting and inconsistent layout of the hotel, the slow dissolves, the weird framing of scenes, and the “errors” in continuity, are all intended to be unsettling and uncanny. You become trapped in a space that couldn’t possibly exist, and as the movie goes on, you get the growing suspicion that you won’t be able to find your way out.

Watching Room 237 reminded me of the time I spent working the late shift at a computer lab in college. Stuck in an empty room at midnight, the only thing to do was go on USENET and stumble down one rabbit hole or another filled with ghost stories, urban legends, and rumors. One of the creepiest and most entertaining was exploring all the details of the “Paul McCartney is dead” urban legend — details hidden in album covers or backwards-masked song lyrics, interviews, and old photos. Obviously my rational mind knew it was all nonsense, but it was fascinating to see the almost-near-plausibility of the ridiculously elaborate story that people had concocted. And by the time I got to the butcher cover (which I’d never seen before), I was completely and thoroughly creeped out.

The documentary has the same effect: faceless voices (one with an excessively creepy laugh) recounting elaborate but obviously false stories, finding details that simply don’t exist, played on top of creepy images from Faust or Eyes Wide Shut or old newsreels, synched with scenes from The Shining that show (or pointedly don’t show, in several cases) exactly what the speaker is talking about, all played on top of unsettling and increasingly loud synthesizer droning. (My one technical complaint about Room 237 is that the background music often overpowers the voices). I’ve watched The Shining at least a dozen times, but last night after watching Room 237 was the first time I’ve had to sleep with a light on.

Unlike the unsettling horror of The Shining, though, the creepiness of the documentary is short-lived and disappears the next morning. I did go away wishing that the movie had presented at least one more plausible theory. Not something to convince me, necessarily, but at least one that would leave the barest hint of a “well, maybe…” doubt.

Speaking of going down an internet rabbit hole: a while ago, I stumbled on this analysis of The Shining by Rob Ager, which is full of obsessive detail and all kinds of connections stretched tenuously thin. I don’t mean to sound completely dismissive; while I don’t believe any of Ager’s theories, I think they’re fascinating and remarkably well-presented. The most unsettling to me was his theory about hints of a history of sexual abuse in the movie.

Am I convinced? No, if only because the connections would ascribe a god-like level of oversight and prescience to Stanley Kubrick that even a genius isn’t capable of. But there are still details that I can’t dismiss as easily as the cans of Calumet baking powder or occurrences of the number 42 that are presented in Room 237. Why would Jack Torrance be reading a copy of Playgirl, and why would it even be in a hotel lobby in the first place? Why is there so much soft-core porn hanging up everywhere? Why does the TV not have a cord? (The last is a detail that’s mentioned in the documentary, but none of the speakers gives a particularly compelling explanation).

I’d been hoping that Room 237 would have more material like that. But for all its mimicry of The Shining‘s advertising and presentation, and despite its tag-line describing it as “an inquiry into The Shining in 9 parts,” it really seems to be less interested in what the interpretations reveal about the movie as it is interested in the act of interpretation itself. I got the sense from the documentary that Kubrick’s genius — at least where this film is concerned — wasn’t in constructing an elaborate hidden puzzle for viewers to “solve.” It was in making something so meticulously crafted and so filled with memorable images that audiences could study it for over thirty years and still not feel as if they’d discovered everything.

Bullshit and Its Relation to the Unconscious

In a fantastic review of Room 237, Robert Greene calls it “the first great comedy about film criticism.” He points out that Ascher doesn’t mock his subjects; if anything, with the meticulous editing and assemblage of found footage, he obsesses over their interpretations almost as much as they do over Kubrick’s film. By letting their analyses “proceed to their gloriously ridiculous ends,” Greene says that Ascher has made something of a horror-comedy about the mental process of critiquing a film.

These characters are not “proper” film critics. But their obsessive readings can be seen as a metaphor for all film analysis. That burning need to scrutinize—to interpret and explain—is the soul of even the most sophisticated criticism. What Room 237 does is take that internal desire to understand and transforms it into a raging, slobbering, terribly funny movie monster.

I watched it with hands over mouth, openly terrified of this new screen villain, the id critic.

Greene ends up being relatively sanguine about it, but he points to this hilarious blog entry/rant by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who’s having absolutely none of it. Rosenbaum calls Room 237 “reprehensible.” He says that because Ascher doesn’t distinguish the crackpot theories from the sound ones, he presents the idea that they’re all part of this melange of general “film criticism,” where everything has equal weight and value.

Rosenbaum says that Ascher “inevitably winds up undermining criticism itself by making it all seem like a disreputable, absurd activity.” He says that because Ascher doesn’t call out the obvious problems with the theory that The Shining is Kubrick’s coded confession for faking the Apollo moon landing footage, or that it’s a commentary on the Holocaust or the genocide of native peoples by Europeans, he makes even the more reasonable subjects seem like cranks.

And then Rosenbaum goes on a fairly extended tirade drawing parallels between Room 237 and supporters of Mitt Romney in the recent Presidential election. Like I said: hilarious. I wish Rosenbaum hadn’t earlier on been so dismissive of irony (“the perpetual escape hatch,”) since he’s clearly a master of it.

We All Shine On

The larger irony is that the impartiality of Room 237 ends up saying pretty much the opposite of what Rosenbaum accuses. By refusing to declare a “winner,” the documentary invites you to make your own interpretation. Here’s what these people see; what do you see? I didn’t take it as a mockery of film criticism so much as a celebration of it.

Both Greene and Rosenbaum — although Greene’s a lot more magnanimous and self-deprecating about it — are looking at Room 237 as a commentary on them and what they do. There’s a sense of film criticism as a rigorous field of study that should only be undertaken by trained professionals. Even though I very rarely see accessible, non-academic commentary on film that actually uses the language of film in its analysis — most popular film criticism is just an assemblage of facts from the press kit, combined with some comparisons to other movies the writer’s seen, to form an essay that’s just the writer’s interoperation of what the filmmaker was trying to say. A lot of it’s great, but it’s not exactly formal enough to require a cinema studies degree.

Several of the subjects of Room 237 try to bolster their own credentials as well. The Holocaust guy reiterates that he viewed The Shining as a historian. Faked moon landing guy insists that he consulted several experts on the process of front-screen projection who all agree with him. Superimpose the movie backwards-and-forwards guy explains (I think) that the movie made him want to be a filmmaker, and he’s studying it from the perspective of a filmmaker.

All of them have a sense of “we can see something you can’t.” It’s made explicit late in the documentary, as one of the subjects makes a comparison between watching the film and finding its hidden meanings, and the shining that Danny and Halloran have as described in the book and the film. Analysis like this is a special gift, and not everybody can do it.

But again, I got the sense that Room 237 is a rejection of that idea. Its impartiality says that everybody can do this, but only some people can do it well. (And “well” is for you to decide yourself). It’s not as interested in formal training or qualifications so much as the entirety of what you bring to the interpretation. Each of the subjects gets the chance to put a personal spin on their take: a short animated sequence where one of the speakers describes her young son talking about a “splitting headache,” and its synchronicity with one of the images in The Shining. A speaker talks about a vacation to Costa Rica where he meets a few other people obsessed with the film. One speaker describes his first viewing of the movie in detail. One speaker comments about the increasingly unnerving similarities between his own life and Jack Torrance’s, and gives another nervous laugh.

Amidst the freeze frames, zoomed-in set decorations, superimposed images, and detailed maps of the Overlook, those personal moments stand out. Room 237 doesn’t seem as interested in what Kubrick hid inside The Shining as what we all bring to it and how we’re affected by it.

Two Thumbs Up

Which dovetails into my thoughts about Roger Ebert’s career. (He doesn’t seem to have reviewed Room 237, which is unfortunate since I would’ve been very interested in what he had to say about it).

I was surprised by how saddened I was when I heard that Ebert had died. I was immediately taken over by whatever it is that compels people to try and eulogize celebrities they’d never met in social media, but I had trouble figuring out exactly what I wanted to say.

My first attempt was “I hardly ever agreed with Ebert’s reviews, but I always respected him.” But that was as bald-faced a lie as I’ve ever told on the internet. I never liked that he wrote so many reviews completely trashing a movie — instead of trying to meet the filmmakers halfway — that he could fill two whole books with them. It’s not just that I didn’t agree with his reviews; I thought many of them were vapid or missed the point entirely. Of course I didn’t respect where he eventually landed on the “are video games art?” conundrum. And back when I was a pretentious wannabe film student, I was even worse: I hated that they’d reduced all the subtlety and nuance of a film to a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. “I can’t believe they gave this guy a Pulitzer just for writing about someone else’s work!” is an actual thing that dumb, younger me said. Out loud.

It took me a while to realize that the fact 16-year-old me and 40-year-old me were both bitching about this guy was a sign of how long he’s been relevant, and how much of an impact he’s had on what I do and what I like. And the fact that I spent a couple of decades disagreeing with him meant that he’d done something remarkable: opened the discussion up to everyone. Even pretentious 16-year-olds.

Ebert brought film criticism to the mainstream. I don’t really know the details, since I was completely unaware of him before At the Movies played on the local PBS channel, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that pop film critics like Leonard Maltin had been doing their thing for longer. But Ebert was the mainstream film reviewer who gave the impression that he really knew what he was talking about. He was reviewing movies — even the cheesy summer blockbusters — as works of art.

And you might be justified in looking at all the movie review blogs, star reviews, viewers’ comments, and imdb ratings, and thinking that a world full of film critics is not an achievement to be celebrated. But that’s not the great achievement: a world full of art critics really is something significant.

When I was growing up, film criticism was pretty much exactly what Rosenbaum describes: a rarefied environment of academics and film journals. On the more low-brow side, you’d have movie magazines like Fangoria and Starlog that essentially catered to obsessives. And on the shallow side, each metro area would have its own local reviewers who’d give the new releases a number of stars or a clapping man. What At the Movies did was take it nation-wide and make it accessible to everyone. You didn’t necessarily have to be a movie obsessive to be interested in a critical analysis of movies. Audiences were every bit as capable as film reviewers of watching movies as more than just diversions. And giving their analyses of movies with more depth than just “I liked it” or “I hated it.” You don’t have to use terms like mise en scene (in fact, I’d strongly suggest you didn’t) to think about how a movie works and why it makes you feel the way it does.

And of course that goes beyond just inspiring film critics, and it even goes beyond film. When you open up cinema and invite everyone in the audience to look at the movie critically and analytically, you’ve encouraged them to do the same for everything. That two-way communication, where the artist and audience are both exchanging ideas, is how entertainment becomes art.

Should be, but to hear the internet tell it, the news is “tragic” and spells the death of their most formative years. The closure of LucasArts caused a huge uptick in the number of online hagiographies, but strangely made no significant difference in the number of LucasArts games sold.

Okay, that’s an easy, cheap shot. Why can’t I just leave everyone to their eulogizing? Why not let people get sentimental about an environment that hasn’t existed for over a decade, if in fact it ever existed? I already said my piece on Facebook, a few times: it sucks that so many people are out of a job — especially since everybody involved in 1313 seemed to be proud of what they were making — but this is hardly unexpected, and it’s been a long time coming. Management has let in-house development falter while the standout games have been third-party licenses. And getting angry at Disney for “killing” LucasArts is like watching someone with a beautiful, pristine sports car let it slowly, slowly coast head-first over a cliff, and then getting mad at the insurance company for totaling it.

Still, it seems like it should be a big deal. That job and that company were life-changing for me in just about every way possible. It meant leaving my family and friends to move 3000 miles away to a state where I knew almost no one apart from my co-workers. For years, everyone I knew was either directly or indirectly through LucasArts. Every job I’ve had since then, except for one, was a result of knowing people at LEC. (And even at that one job, we spent most of the interview talking about the problems of LucasArts). I’ve worked for two studios that were formed mainly from ex-Lucas employees. The most rewarding work of my career to date was the “spiritual successor” to one of LucasArts’s classic games. I can’t say I’ve really missed LEC, since I feel like I’ve never entirely gotten out from under its shadow.

Ultimately, I think that’s why — at the risk of sounding selfish, callous, and flippant to all the people who lost their jobs — I can’t get all that upset about the closure of the studio. As far as I’m concerned, it served its purpose, and that’s nothing to be sad about. It completely changed my perception of crunch time and the creative process; and it had a huge influence on the development of games as a medium, an influence that’s not only still alive, but thriving.

What It Takes to Make Something Great

On Facebook, there’ve been a lot of ex-Lucas employees posting their memories of the company. Several of them have ended by saying that it was the best job they’d ever had, which just made me feel guilty for my good fortune, because I’ve had a whole string of jobs that were much better.

And then there’s this eulogy for LucasArts written by one of the employees directly affected by the closure. I don’t want to sound dismissive of it, and I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I’m mocking it, since it was well-done and heartfelt. More importantly, it was about the people there, and it’s always been the people, not the licenses, that made the company. It’s just that looking at the pictures, I realized that there’s been so much turn-over through the years that I recognized only one of the dozens of people still working there. But reading the text — with the description of extended crunch time, missed once-in-a-lifetime family obligations, having to put family on hold for the sake of work, and having to suffer through the consequences of poor decisions by management — I thought: that’s the LucasArts I remember.

What’s most frustrating about these accounts is the underlying sense that crunch time is inevitable. That it’s all part of the sacrifices required to make something outstanding. That attitude is endemic to almost every game development studio, but it was particularly heavy at LEC. And it’s nonsense. If you’re working crunch time, that means simply that someone has fucked up. It could be the producer who made the schedule. It could be the executive who insisted on a totally unrealistic deadline. It could be the designer or lead whose direction was ambiguous and resulted in a huge re-working. It could be the co-worker who made a mistake and left it for you to clean up. And if it’s none of those people, then it’s you. Either for not making good estimates, or for not managing your time well.

Whatever the case, it’s an error, a mistake, something to be fixed. Just because it always happens doesn’t mean that it’s inevitable. If a studio doesn’t treat it as a mistake to be learned from, then they’re going to just write it into their schedules, and it’s never going to change. And if a company is still making the same mistakes in 2013 that they were making in 1999, then they deserve to go out of business. Even if they did make Day of the Tentacle.

A Family Company

Before this post is interpreted as a curmudgeonly “Good riddance, LucasArts!” we should all be clear on one thing: I was, and remain, a hopeless, stuttering fan of the “good old days” of the company. I’ve said it before, but The Secret of Monkey Island was the game that made me switch majors in college; it showed me that video games could be a viable medium for storytelling, and not just a diversion. I went on to buy every LucasArts game sight unseen. Almost immediately after I finished Full Throttle, I decided that was enough, and I had to send in a resume “cold.” I was ecstatic when I got an interview. They took me to Skywalker Ranch and casually showed me the display case holding C-3P0′s arm and the Holy Grail. They told me I was interviewing for a job on a sequel to Monkey Island and my stomach flipped and I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. The “test” for the job was getting to play around with SCUMM for a few hours, using characters from Full Throttle against backdrops from Hit the Road. When I left, I said that even if I didn’t get the job, I’d be happy just having toured the studio and meeting the people, and I meant every word of it. And a few weeks later, when I found out I’d gotten the job, I just lost it. I kind of collapsed on the couch in my apartment and just cried for like ten minutes straight. (Something I’d repeat several times over the next few years, but for very different reasons).

As far as I was concerned, I was Charlie Bucket in the Wonkavator.

There wasn’t anything particularly special about that; a ton of people were there because they were fans of Star Wars or Tucker: The Man and His Dream. As the years went on, there were more of us who weren’t just fans of Lucasfilm, but of the games division in particular. Which is fortunate; few people ever get to work at a place they love so much. The problem is when it gets corrupted to the point where being a super-fan isn’t just creepy and excessive, but expected.

And LucasArts definitely took advantage of it. Sometimes it was explicit — at a review I had a manager acknowledge that the company paid less than the industry standard, but they believed that one of the benefits of working at LucasArts was getting to work at LucasArts. A lot of the time, it wasn’t — you don’t need to keep cracking the whip and shouting “you’re lucky we let you work here” when you’ve got people who already believe it. I don’t even think it was entirely malicious; I’m sure a lot of people really believed that that kind of devotion is required to make great games.

Whatever the reason, it got to be pervasive and destructive. It meant getting burnt out from working nights and weekends, constantly having to manage people’s defensiveness and insecurity, and an environment where even asking for scheduled vacation time had this layer of guilt slathered on top of it. You weren’t just letting down the team, you were letting down the family.

The standout for me was when my boss was in the middle of berating me for something or other (a general bad attitude, if I remember correctly) and said, “You are not to question me.” That surprised me for two reasons: first, because I didn’t think people actually ever said that. I’d always put it in the same category as “I’m getting too old for this shit” and “He’s a loose cannon, but he’s the best there is;” Things People Only Say In Movies.

The other reason it surprised me was because until that point, it’d never even occurred to me to question him. Question some of his decisions, sure. Question the direction my career was going and whether I wanted to keep doing that, definitely. But I never once doubted that the game was going to brilliant, that all the hours and all the stress was going to be worth it, and that the lousy time I was having was just the kind of sacrifice you had to make if you wanted to make something great. If ever my life called for a “glass shattering” sound effect, it was then.

So what? Everybody’s had a boss they didn’t agree with, and everybody’s had to work on a mismanaged project at one time or another. But my moment of clarity came from realizing that it’s not so simple as we tend to think of it: callous execs taking advantage of people just trying to make an honest living. We’re all culpable to one degree or another. If I’ve learned anything about con artists from movies and TV, it’s that the trap you set for someone else is never as reliable as the trap they set for themselves. And best of all is the trap that they demand you let them walk into. A lot of times, we wear overtime as a badge of honor — adversity keeps the team together, working long hours shows how passionate and committed we are — instead of acknowledging it as unnecessary, and a sign that something’s gone wrong.

Years later I went on to work at Electronic Arts for Maxis on SimCity 4. It was another sequel to one of my favorite games at one of my favorite studios. I’m still as proud of that game as anything else I’ve worked on. And I wasn’t keeping track, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I spent more hours on just the first eight or nine months there than I did the entire time I was at LucasArts. I later went on to the infamous “EA Spouse” project (I still say “the infamous EA Spouse project” is a better title than what the game actually shipped with), and that experience was every bit as awful as a class action suit would imply.

Still, I would’ve signed on for a dozen more of those before I would’ve gone back to LEC. The difference was that nobody at EA had any illusions that it was anything other than a bunch of competent adults working together in a mutually beneficial business arrangement. It was the first time in my adult life I was able to get out of debt — it’s amazing how much better people work when they’re not constantly worried about money. It required a ton of hours, but a technical director was frequently checking in, looking specifically for signs of burn-out and enforcing time off if we shoed any. It was all so gloriously impersonal.

It helped not being subjected to enforced whimsy, and it was nice not having to hear constantly how much better things used to be at Kerner. Best of all, though, was I didn’t have to hear the voice in my head telling me how lucky I was to be working there. Pride in the game and respect for the team just came naturally.

So I guess I have LucasArts to “thank” for that particular epiphany. Objecting to crunch time isn’t objecting to work; it’s objecting to unnecessary work. And there’s nothing callous or Machiavellian about looking into the cost versus benefit of everything you do. The people who are benefitting monetarily from your work almost certainly aren’t you (unless you’ve got a better arrangement than I’ve ever seen in video game development), and they’re almost never around on nights and weekends. It’s not money, so always ask yourself honestly what it is that you’re getting out of your own work. If you’re putting the effort in because you genuinely think it’ll make the game better, then go for it. But if it’s out of some sense of obligation, or an attempt to demonstrate how passionate you are about your job, then you’ve got to ask yourself if it’s really worth it. (It never is).

Happily Ever After, or, Why Won’t You Just Die Already?

Clearly I’m still holding onto a lot of psychic residue from that company. It’s not entirely my fault, though; for a company so fixated on storytelling, LucasArts has failed to stick to a good narrative. It started out good enough: a billionaire filmmaker gathering the best talent he could find, Charlie’s Angels-style, and putting them to work at a secluded ranch north of San Francisco, where they’d go on to redefine an entire medium. Not long after that, though, it just degrades into a predictable story of the brash young creatives vs. a bunch of commerce-oriented “suits” milking the hell out of a bunch of licenses.

As for my part: instead of stepping into the Wonkavator and then flying over the Marin headlands followed by a graceful fade to black, the story I’d set up for myself in college has just dragged on and on. In terms of dramatic structure, it’s been a disaster. Story lines that go nowhere. All the cathartic scenes where I finally get to tell off the People Who’ve Done Me Wrong have never happened, and at this point, the whole reason for those scenes is long forgotten. Big character reveals that happen way, way too late in the story.

And there’s been absolutely no closure on the whole LucasArts chapter. I’d thought there’d be some satisfaction from leaving the company, but it just kind of petered out. I went to work with a bunch of other LEC refugees. Good job, but not a clean break.

Over the years, tons of people left the company to go on to other studios, or start their own. At one point, it sounded like the entire company had been laid off. But it’d always come back in some form or another, and everyone would insist that this time would be different, and this time it was going to go back to like it was in the old days.

For me, I thought the company as I knew it was dead as soon as they stopped publishing The Adventurer. It was the SCUMM games that made me a fan of the games, but The Adventurer that made me a fan of LucasArts. Of course, it was my first exposure to Sam & Max. And reading the previews and interviews and game reviews made it seem as if the company had a soul that existed entirely separate from Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Over time, though, it became more and more just a merchandise catalog and an extension of the marketing arm, until it was wiped out completely. I can’t even remember when exactly they stopped making them — it might’ve even been when I was still working there. Whatever the case, it was something that you couldn’t exactly mourn, but its absence made everything else feel hollow.

As I said, the most rewarding work I’ve had in my entire career has been at another studio formed by ex-LucasArts employees, working with the characters that had made it seem as if LEC had a soul. Even as we tried — and succeeded — to do something new, there was always the very vocal contingent that just wanted to hold a bunch of games from 20 years ago over our heads. (I can remember being asked to be on some panel at PAX one year, and when asked about fan fiction, I said that pretty much my entire career had been based on sequels and licenses, so I was essentially a professional fan fiction writer. It got a laugh from the audience, but still convinced me that a change was in order).

Most recently, there was what felt like another last-gasp attempt to revitalize the “good old” LucasArts by releasing special editions of the first two Monkey Island games. And I was surprised to discover that I just didn’t enjoy them that much anymore. At some point in there, I’d changed without realizing it. And even if they somehow brought the old company back to life entirely, it’s not what I’d want.

I think that’s why many of the eulogies and reminiscences have seemed misguided to me: pointing at Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle and The Secret of Monkey Island, or even The Curse of Monkey Island, isn’t an homage, it’s a straitjacket. It says that all that creativity was in the past, and the best we could hope for would be to duplicate it, in the same narrow parameters established back in 1990. I’ve gotten to the point where I’d rather fail doing something original than be successful at just duplicating someone else’s work. That’s why I respect Double Fine’s resistance to sequels and remakes.

And it’s another big part of why I can’t be upset about the closure of LucasArts. I don’t think it’s disrespectful to want all of that stuff to remain in the past. Even if the studio had stayed open after the sale of Lucasfilm, if you haven’t seen your Day of the Tentacle sequel by 2013, it’s probably time to let go. And I’m highly skeptical that the sequel would be what players really want. (I’d be happy to be proven wrong).

Star Wars: Dark Forces III: Jedi Knight II: The Legacy of Kyle Katarn

Finally, speaking of stories: every story needs a good villain, so why not Disney? It lets LucasArts — the company privately owned by a billionaire — be the plucky underdogs once again. Instead of comically shooting themselves repeatedly in the foot for ten years, they’re instead recast as the last keepers of the flame of originality, snuffed out by an unfeeling corporate giant.

Even though LucasArts has had the most of its success as a licensor over the past few years. (It’s unfortunate that some of the employees take that as an insult or a reflection on their own efforts, when it’s not; we can’t be aware of their efforts internally if we haven’t been allowed to see it). And Disney’s much better at managing licensing deals with external studios than handing in-house development. Now, the licenses can ideally go to studios who really want to work with Star Wars (and possibly one day Indiana Jones), instead of to in-house developers who are obligated to crank out another iteration of the Death Star trench run or the Hoth battle.

So people have been lamenting the death of LucasArts, and I’m asking what died, exactly? Apart from a good team, which will undoubtedly find work elsewhere, there’s a brand and years of terrible management. The big licenses obviously aren’t going anywhere; they were worth four and a half billion dollars.

One of LucasArts’s best games was Dark Forces, and it was a game that only LEC could make. And not for the obvious reason, because LEC had a lock on the Star Wars license. The company could’ve made a straight DOOM clone, slapped a Star Wars skin on it, and it would’ve sold like crazy. Instead, they treated it like a game being published by the interactive arm of a movie company: lots of emphasis on story, cinematics, and cinematic presentation in the level design.

Obviously, RPGs had an emphasis on story, and a lot of them were evolving out of their niche audience by incorporating elements of FPS games. But Dark Forces gave it a wide audience, and it asserted the idea that story is important. I know that until then, I always separated video games into two distinct categories: the adventure games that had interesting stories and characters, and games like DOOM that were rock-stupid but fun. Dark Forces was the first attempt I’d ever seen to accomplish both. I say that without it and Jedi Knight, there wouldn’t have been Half-Life. And without that, the entire state of video game storytelling would be vastly different, if it even existed at all in anything other than niche audiences.

So now we have Portal and Portal 2, two games that recreate the feeling of playing the old adventure games better than any game in recent memory — including the remakes of the old adventures. And I’ve been playing BioShock Infinite, which is a character-driven story set in a cinematic world with wide vistas and plenty of levels devoted entirely to exposition. And I’m looking at all the eulogies of LucasArts and asking, who died? Whether you love it, hate it, or remain in denial about it, the potential of video games as a storytelling medium has been well established.

And for the people lamenting that the end of LucasArts means it’s extremely unlikely we’ll ever see anyone revisit the smaller, original titles: never forget that a big part of what made those games great was their originality.

As far as I’m concerned: I think LucasArts gave us a reminder that talented people are more important than any license. And a lesson about the different ways that passion and commitment can be twisted, not just by employers but by ourselves. And a legacy of storytelling in games with so much potential that we haven’t even begun to explore all the possibilities. I say that the man who got everything he ever wanted didn’t necessarily live happily ever after; he just had to keep coming up with new stuff to want.

As for why the issue angered so many people, you’re not going to find a better summation than Glen Weldon’s essay on NPR.org:

But when we do see [Superman] for the very first time, these are the first words that appear directly below, the first epithet applied to this newly-minted creation as it was unleashed upon the world:

Champion of the Oppressed.

There it is, coded into his creative DNA from the very beginning: He fights for the little guy.

And that’s why this bugs me, and why I’m not the least bit curious about what Card’s Superman might be like.

DC Comics has handed the keys to the “Champion of the Oppressed” to a guy who has dedicated himself to oppress me, and my partner, and millions of people like us. It represents a fundamental misread of who the character is, and what he means.

(Incidentally: I think that a lot of other writers, when trying to summarize the whole story, over-sold the idea that the character of Superman has particular resonance with gay people. I don’t think he does; Weldon does a good job making it clear that Superman is everybody’s hero, and no particular group has any special or specific ownership of him. It is an interesting idea, though, that Superman is a long-lasting and purely secular symbol of goodness, truth, and justice, which could appeal to a lot of gay people who feel that religion has abandoned or betrayed them).

As for me, I’m really glad to see Card being held accountable for his statements and his actions. Even if it is just in the court of public opinion, since DC stuck with their decision to hire Card, and Sprouse distanced himself from the controversy but not Card himself. Still, blogs and comments can be enough in this case. There tends to be a kind of lazy defeatism disguised as cynicism whenever ethics meets commerce, where we hear “It’s just business!” used as an excuse for everything from giving production money & producer credit to a bigot, to publishing “speculative” fiction from a murderer.

It’s nice to see more people slowly realizing that only courts and governments are obligated to remain impartial. Commerce, on the other hand, is all about playing favorites, rewarding the people that you like and refusing to support the ones that you don’t. Anybody who tells you that’s not the case — whether it’s in regards to comics, advertising campaigns, or chicken sandwiches — has an agenda of his own.

That’s what started me down this train of thought: a few hours spent following a chain of links across the internet, the kind of thing you can really only do when you’re supposed to be busy doing something else. It started with this series of articles about comics retailers’ reactions to the Adventures of Superman controversy, then eventually made its way to comics writer & editor Mark Waid’s twitter feed and his attempts to deal with pinheads talking about the freedom of speech.

It’s not about homophobia, or misogyny, or racism: certainly not. The people eager to defend Card, or Frank Miller, or Mark Millar, are eager to explain that the big picture is about the importance of the free exchange of ideas, even if those ideas are repugnant to us. In the past, I’ve always tried to keep an open mind and accept arguments like that at face value. I still think they’re dead wrong, but I never thought they were being duplicitous. It was just a different viewpoint and different set of priorities than my own.

But last week I started following some of the commenters on those blog posts, and the people screaming at Mark Waid on Twitter. And I was genuinely surprised to find that without exception, every single one of the people insisting that it was about freedom of speech and not homophobia, could be found elsewhere on the internet arguing against marriage equality.

And you don’t even have to look that closely, and you certainly don’t have to get into creepy invasion-of-privacy territory; it’s right there in their twitter feeds or comments on other blog posts. I’d always assumed that there was a bell curve to these discussions, with the actual outright homophobes being a relative minority, but it turns out that I’d just never bothered to actually follow up on that assumption. It’s revealing to see the free speech that free speech advocates actually engage in when they think nobody’s listening.

Am I claiming that it’s impossible that people could be arguing for Card’s freedom of speech without undermining the rights and equality of gay people? I don’t ever like to say something’s “impossible” — for instance, I’m not willing to completely rule out the possibility that a man can fly. I’ve just never seen anyone do it.

I’m not claiming that everybody who waves the freedom of speech flag is a homophobe, just that a depressing majority of them are. One obvious exception would be comic book (and occasionally video game) writer Peter David. He’s an outspoken proponent of marriage equality and gay rights in general, has been since long before it was “fashionable,” and he’s been awarded for his support. (I also just found out through a web search that Mr. David recently suffered a stroke, and his website has information on how you can help him recover and help with his medical bills).

He also wrote dialogue for a video game that was based on an IP by Orson Scott Card. A few years ago, that game created a controversy similar to that around Adventures of Superman. In response, Mr. David vehemently argued against a boycott of the game, describing the “chilling effect” that can happen when an artist’s work is punished for the views of the artist himself.

It’d be idiotic to even imply that Mr. David’s argument was homophobic, but he was still dead wrong. The problem is that it’s not possible to defend Card’s rights without undermining the rights of me and other gay people.

Obviously, there’s my right to get married without some lunatic Mormon threatening to overthrow the government. Most of the media coverage around the issue of marriage equality is phrased in terms of opinion polls and the turning tide of sentiment among particular demographics and popular votes. That can make it sound like equality is a matter of opinion, like your favorite color or whether you enjoy bacon. But the fact is that there’s a blatant inequality in the US. Thinking of it as a difference of opinion is much like asking someone’s opinion whether the Earth is flat or dinosaurs coexisted with humans. The situation is unfair; the only difference of opinion is whether you believe it’s all right that it’s unfair.

On top of that is the attempt to frame it as a question of freedom of religion — President Obama and others have been extremely careful not to offend any religious groups by asserting that adults in the United States should be able to marry the people they love. The unspoken message there, of course, is that everyone else’s right to freedom of religion trumps our right to marry.

It’s the same whenever an artist’s work raises threats of a boycott: the artist’s freedom of speech is sacrosanct! What’s unspoken is that Card’s right to say that homosexuals are weak-willed and mentally ill trumps my right to say that nobody should give money to a bigoted asshole. We’re told that by trying to silence Card, we’re killing a society that thrives on the free exchange of contrary ideas.

Bullshit. In fact, the usual response to that is to point out the basics of free speech and commerce: it’s not censorship because we’re not trying to silence opposing viewpoints, we’re merely choosing not to support them. I don’t think that’s even necessary. I sure am trying to silence Card. His writing is toxic and provides absolutely no benefit to society. He deserves to be silenced. We needn’t entertain his opinions any more than we should be encouraging those who advocate teaching creationism as science, or making anti-vaccination claims that have no basis in science.

Chastising me for advocating a boycott against a homophobe is like seeing me take an antibiotic and protesting for the right to life of the bacteria. It fails for the same reason that right-wingers’ idiotic complaints of “liberal intolerance” against bigots are idiotic: because there’s no false equivalence or moral relativism involved; there’s right and wrong. The idea that any of us are obligated to support people who are in the wrong is ludicrous. And the idea that their right to spread their toxic beliefs trumps my right to call them toxic is offensive.

So the next time I read someone making a passionate statement in defense of a bigot’s right to express himself, I’m going to think about Superman. And how often he saved Lex Luthor’s life from some disaster of Luthor’s own creation, because it was the right thing to do, and that’s what Superman’s all about. And how every time, Luthor would immediately turn around and start thinking about how to destroy Superman. And how, after the first few times I saw this same cycle repeat itself, Superman started to seem like a real chump.

In the movie (I still haven’t read the book), Pi explicitly says what bothered him about it: after all they’d been through, and all the time they spent together, the tiger didn’t acknowledge him at all. The whole experience that had been so profound for Pi meant nothing to Richard Parker. That goes back to the argument Pi had with his father when younger: Pi insisted that the animals must have a soul because he could see it in their eyes; his father said that it was just a reflection, and Pi was seeing nothing more than what he wanted to see.

When the tiger goes into the jungle without acknowledging him, Pi takes that to mean that his father was right. The tiger had no soul, and he’d never been a rival or a companion. He was just a dumb animal.

That’s the part that’s spelled out explicitly. But the larger context of the story is about faith and belief vs. logic and reason. We end with two different versions of Pi’s experience: the story with Richard Parker and all the other animals, and the story in which they all represent people on board the ship and Pi himself. One is wildly implausible but more engaging and ultimately more satisfying. The other is much more believable, but it’s not a good story because it doesn’t “mean” anything. It’s just horrible. There are no epiphanies or moments of wonder; it’s just an account of human beings acting with the savagery of animals. They have no souls and are driven simply by the need to survive.

Leave it at that, and you just have the two extremes of spirituality vs. atheism. Believers need to have their existence fit into a narrative, where everything happens for a reason, and their existence means something. Skeptics reject the fantastic and are more concerned about getting to the bottom of what really happened, which implies that their existence isn’t driven or guided by anything other than what they make of it. If there were nothing more to the story than Pi’s two accounts of what happened, then it would be an allegory of the oldest and simplest complaints that religious and non-religious people have of each other: that the non-religious can’t appreciate beauty and wonder, or that the religious are simply making up stories to make themselves feel better instead of searching for the truth.

The final scene with the tiger throws a complication into the works. The most satisfying version of the story would’ve actually ended with Richard Parker stopping and looking back to Pi, to acknowledge that they had a shared experience together, one that was meaningful to the both of them. Instead, he just wanders off into the jungle, driven by whatever base needs or desires drive a wild animal. The story doesn’t have a happy or even a satisfying ending; in fact, it doesn’t really have an ending at all. Pi doesn’t learn that animals really do have souls after all. With all the wondrous things he saw, he didn’t share any of them with another living creature — he was genuinely alone, and he had nothing except his own memory to verify that any of it actually happened.

The counterpart to that, to a lesser degree, is Pi’s description of the cook aboard the lifeboat. The movie doesn’t linger on the second story for nearly as long as the first, but we do hear about the cook’s senseless brutality, and how Pi was forced to go against his true nature and kill the cook. What was a gruesome but realistic example of the laws of nature in the Animal version of the story, becomes a story of evil and revenge when the animals are re-cast as humans. There’s a clear villain, and the players now have motivations. In a sense, the human version of the story is less satisfying not just because it’s more horrific, but also because it’s so (horrifically) straightforward.

So we’re left with one version of the story that seems more plausible at first. But it also has the lingering feeling of something that Pi could’ve told the agents just because he knew it was the only thing that they’d be able to believe. In other words: an explanation that he made up to make the skeptics feel better, instead of understanding the complexity of the true version.

And on the other side, we’re left with a fantastic and implausible story that defies rational explanation. But we’re left without an ending, without the acknowledgement that yes, our hunch was right and that this is what it all means. We want to believe, but we can never really know. As the movie says, “And so it is with God.”

So that’s why Richard Parker doesn’t look back: because God doesn’t ever give us simple acknowledgement, a reassurance that what we’re going through means something. Religious belief isn’t something that can be tested and verified; it’s not a case of each of us choosing a side and waiting to be proven right. Faith means belief without reassurance, because we’re not going to get the answers in this lifetime. And the story never goes for the easy answer of saying that the faithful are making up fantasies and the rational are directionless, unethical nihilists; instead it makes the case for faith without ever dismissing or undermining the need for reason.

And while I’m thinking about it: I never really understood the part where Pi’s uncle has supposedly told the writer that his story “will make you believe in God.” I’d always thought that making someone believe in God meant giving them some proof that God exists. But now I understand that the story is saying that there will never be proof; therefore, the belief itself is everything. You could say that Pi’s story is like the story of Job, but the difference is that Job eventually got some answers. He spoke to God, and he was able to find out the reason for and purpose behind all of his tribulations. But there’s no event in Pi’s story that makes a case for the existence of God. Instead, it’s the entirety of Pi’s story that shows the value of believing even when there’s no way to see if you’re right, and of continuing to ask questions even when you know you’re never going to get an answer.

Now for the other people who stumble onto this blog by searching for “I hate Georgia” or “I don’t like Mad Men“: I can’t help you there.

Or more accurately: I don’t think it’s funny, while millions of other people — including many in my peer group! — absolutely love it.

And I think that’s ultimately the entire problem. There’s a blog post called “The Problem With The Big Bang Theory” that was passed around back in September of last year, and now for whatever reason has been getting a lot of circulation again in the past few days. In it, the author explains how the show doesn’t celebrate nerds, but simply continues to mock them. The character of Penny, the normal one, is the only character the audience is supposed to identify with; the others are supposed to be seen as weird and alien. Plus it’s a little racist, a good bit misogynist, homophobic, and it makes fun of people with genuine mental disabilities.

The only part of that post that I agree with is the one complaint that the author quickly dismisses: the show relies on lazy humor. It has references for their own sake, not as part of a well-constructed joke, or even to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and inclusion over a shared memory. The references just come across as pandering.

I wouldn’t be able to go into detail, since I’ve only seen a handful of scenes from the series and never a full episode; my opinion of the show sounds about the same as Angus T. Jones’s opinion of Two and a Half Men. But in one of those scenes, as the characters were fighting to be heard over the laughter, there was a whiteboard in the foreground covered with an Objective C class diagram. For those of us who roll our eyes whenever we’re subjected to ridiculous abuses of technology in CSI and the like, an accurate inclusion of something real computer programmers would actually use would seem to be entertainment nirvana. But in the show, it just sat there, inert. It might as well have had an arrow pointing to it, with the caption YOU RECOGNIZE THIS.

Turning It Off And Back On Again

You could contrast it with The IT Crowd, a series which inverted the power dynamic of The Big Bang Theory by making its nerds and geeks identifiable, and making its “normal” character the subject of mockery. You could say that, but you don’t have to, ’cause you got pronouns, you can say: The IT Crowd understood how to include familiar references without drawing attention to them. It made its references both more subtle and more absurd. The nerd-pandering EFF stickers and action figures and T-shirts (for which Graham Linehan requested recommendations on Twitter) are kept to the background and almost never explicitly acknowledged. The only episodes that were explicitly about technology were deliberately ridiculous, centering around Friendface or convincing someone that the Internet was a black box with a light on it.

While I think it’s true, more or less, that The IT Crowd flipped the predictable premise by making the nerds the heroes and making fun of the normals, I don’t think that says anything of merit. For one, because The IT Crowd wasn’t about IT any more than Father Ted was about Catholicism. And more importantly, because The IT Crowd didn’t choose sides. It made fun of all of its characters. It spent as much time making fun of Moss for being dysfunctional and weird, and Roy for being insecure, horny, and a little homophobic; as it made fun of Jen for being dense and shallow.

That blog post tries to compare Big Bang Theory to Community, and concludes that the latter is better, partly because the audience is meant to identify with Abed. I say that’s absurd; almost half the episodes showed how Abed is deeply dysfunctional. Community was meta-television — often self-consciously so — that made fun of the idea of protagonists vs. villains, identifying with any character over the others, and the entire premise of a situation comedy.

In fact, both Community and Big Bang Theory started with the same structure; Community presented itself as a fish-out-of-water premise with Jeff Winger as the normal guy surrounded by a bunch of crazies. It then dismantled that premise by making it clear that he was every bit as messed up as the other characters, but they all grew to depend on each other. That doesn’t sound so different from the first season or two of Big Bang Theory. The biggest difference is that Big Bang Theory focused on the old “Will They Or Won’t They?” storyline, while Community referenced it, mocked it, rejected it, and then repeatedly used it.

Nerd Blackface

All of that leads me to two conclusions:

1. The whole “geek chic” thing is gradually turning into something malignant; and
2. Don’t attribute to complex social dynamics and inequalities of power what can be more easily explained by inequalities of talent.

For the first part: I’ve seen The Big Bang Theory described several times as “nerd blackface,” which makes this all heartbreaking because I absolutely love that term. But the problem with it is that it results in weirdly defensive over-reactions, and it relies on simplistic assumptions that act as if Revenge of the Nerds were a documentary.

For instance, that blog post, in which the author feels obliged to establish her [I'm assuming, based on the rest of the blog] geek cred. It’s always a little sad to see someone feeling it necessary to establish themselves as a geek when their blog is full of animated GIFs from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; you’ve already made it quite clear you’re a nerd, and to be clear that is awesome. It’s like a few weeks ago, when the ridiculous “fake nerd girl” kerfluffle arose, and a lot of women responded by establishing themselves as legit nerds. Instead of doing the more sensible thing and simply pointing out that the entire notion of a “fake nerd” of any type is asinine and immediately dismissible.

Another example: this honest, heartfelt, and probably well-intentioned post (in Gawker-friendly list format!) by Annalee Newitz called “Six Good Habits I Learned From Being Bullied as a Geeky Kid.” Sincere kudos to Newitz for putting herself and her experiences out there, and it’s always welcome to see a reminder not to let yourself be driven by what other people think of you. But the whole thing seems to be predicated on the old ideas that nerds are somehow more discerning than the mainstream; and that the best revenge is being successful while seeing the people who bullied you fall to obscurity and realize that their best days are behind them.

The first idea is belied by The Big Bang Theory. It’s a Chuck Lorre television series, which almost by definition means it’s mainstream. And a ton of nerds love it, to the point of buying the merchandise, identifying with the characters, and naming scientific discoveries after catch phrases from the show. Plus it’s a mainstream television series that must have a sizable percentage of nerds on staff, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to have whiteboards full of Cocoa Touch class names. (Or for that matter, have frequent guest appearances by celebrity nerd hero Wil Wheaton).

That Tumblr post specifically calls out Wheaton, Sara Gilbert, and Jim Parsons for being more or less Uncle Toms because of their participation in the show; I say that’s absurd. Their participation should be a clear sign that the whole notion of Jocks vs. Nerds is simplistic and exclusionary. “Nerd” isn’t some homogenous group — even if you try to subdivide it into geeks, dweebs, and geeky dweebs — everybody’s into weird stuff and has had their own experiences of feeling rejected or feeling like an outsider, to some degree. If that were in doubt, I’d think the revelations that Rosario Dawson knows Klingon and Vin Diesel plays D&D would’ve laid waste to that tired old notion. But still, I frequently see people trying to martyr themselves and put forth the idea that nerds are somehow The Chosen Ones, suffering nobly until their time in the spotlight. In fact, what they’re doing is anything but inclusive; it’s building an internet treehouse and attaching the sign “No Pretty People Allowed” out front.

The most blatant example of that is The Guild music video “I’m the One That’s Cool”, which I find disturbing in at least a dozen ways. How is it that a bunch of actors wearing unflattering hair styles and accentuating their overbites is not as much a case of “Nerd Blackface” as anything on The Big Bang Theory? Is it because actress and producer Felicia Day has firmly established her geek cred, while a Jewish television writer — who ends every episode of every series with a wall-of-text vanity card only legible to those who record the show and pause it — is one of those beautiful people jocks? (And while I’m at it, one of Lorre’s high-profile privileged early jobs was writing for Roseanne, just like another television series creator who never earned his geek credentials).

Even more important than the question of “who’s this coming from?” is whether it’s a good message to be sending at all. It ignores the fact that some of the biggest bullies I’ve ever encountered were nerds who themselves got bullied when younger and were trying to over-compensate for it in adulthood. Or that if you’re an adult and still complaining about the jerk who pantsed you in high school, that means you haven’t really gotten over it and moved on.

“Nerd” or “Geek” isn’t a protected class, and it shouldn’t be one. Some of the most awful people I’ve run into have been at nerd conventions, and some of the friendliest people I’ve encountered have been at board game conventions. The stuff nerds like isn’t necessarily any better or smarter than the mainstream; for the record, I don’t personally like The Guild at all, either, but I’m glad that it exists and that there are tons of people who can enjoy it. If the thing that unites a “community” of nerds is that they’re really, really invested in the stuff they enjoy, then shouldn’t that be the focus, instead of bitterness over the people who don’t appreciate it?

So essentially, I’m saying: Get off the 20-sided dice, we need the plastic.

How Not To Tell People How To Make A Rape Joke

And then there’s the attempt to attribute the problems of the show to some imbalance of power between Normals vs Nerds, or Gays vs Straights. That’s a lazy trend that I’ve been seeing more and more of lately, and it’s worse than just a Geek Pride debate because it actually intersects with genuinely serious issues.

A couple of months ago, there was an internet controversy when Daniel Tosh insulted a heckler with a stupid and insensitive comment about rape, and hundreds of people were tripping over themselves to be the most vocal to condemn it. There was a post called “How to Make a Rape Joke” on Jezebel — Internet go-to site for shallow social analysis — that correctly called out Tosh for being a moron, but then went off into straight-up BS territory by trying to establish what’s offensive vs. what’s acceptable, and trying to explain to readers how exactly to tell an offensive joke. The author insisted that it’s about context, that sexual assault is more statistically likely to be sensitive to more members of the audience than other horrific events, and that it is ultimately about making jokes from a position of power mocking those with less power. She concluded by trying to explain why when Tosh makes a rape joke it’s offensive, but when Louis CK makes a rape joke it’s funny: it’s because Louis CK has spent 20 years making it clear that he’s on the side of good, and that he’s against rape.

Which is bullshit. What makes one offensive and the other funny is that Tosh is an opportunistic hack, and Louis CK is actually an extremely talented comedian. Lindy West’s claim that there’s some kind of hierarchy of offensiveness, where sexual assault trumps cancer, AIDS, industrial accidents, and infant death, is just plain ghoulish. And her tortured attempts to explain it in terms of actuarial tables based on CDC data is 100 kinds of wrong-headed bullshit. The only difference between Tosh’s comments and Louis CK’s joke is that the author thinks one is stupid and the other is funny.

And she’s right, but for all the wrong reasons. Louis CK has built a career out of being an awkward misanthrope, and he’s made fun of women, men, rape, race, politically correct language, and repeatedly called his children little shits. A huge part of his stand-up material depends on shock value. Tosh’s depends on shock value, too. To imply, as that Jezebel article does, that Tosh actually believes what he’s saying, and he hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt because he may actually be in support of sexual assault and complicit in “rape culture,” is ludicrous. Louis CK didn’t spend the last 20 years earning the right to not have audiences automatically assume he’s pro-rape. Unless you’re a writer for a blog that makes ad revenue off of links to controversy, you should automatically assume that no one is actually making light of rape, until they prove otherwise.

What Louis CK spent the last 20 years doing is learning how to construct a joke. Louis CK’s joke that West quotes depends on shock value just like Tosh’s comments; the difference is that one was cleverly constructed, while Tosh’s comments are the shallowest version of “wouldn’t this be shocking?” possible. Tosh’s whole schtick is firing a shotgun blast of every racist, misogynist, homophobic, or otherwise offensive thing he can think of — and from what I’ve seen, I’d guess it’s literally every single one he can think of — and grin through the whole thing because he’s being naughty and subversive. There’s little cleverness or originality to it, and he almost never takes it any farther than the initial shock value. (I’ll admit that I’ve laughed at some of Tosh’s material on the YouTube clip show, but always when he takes the joke to an absurd extreme, instead of just going for the obvious “old joke about Mexicans/blacks/gay people/asians/women”).

A lot of people have defended Tosh by pointing out that he makes fun of everything and everyone, which is something that West acknowledges and then dismisses. She tries to counter by explaining how there are things that are appropriate and inappropriate to make fun of, which is missing the point entirely. The defense, such as it is, isn’t that Tosh is making fun of the wrong things. The defense is that by making fun of everything, he’s in reality making fun of nothing. It’s simply crossing the line for its own sake. Contrast it with, say, Sarah Silverman, whose stand-up routine is a similar uninterrupted string of offensive, shocking things, but who’s a lot more clever about making it clear whom she’s mocking. To put it in Big Lebowski terms: Silverman is clearly opposed to conservatism, misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism. Tosh believes in nothing.

What’s most heartbreaking is that the Louis CK joke that West quotes in her article isn’t really a “rape joke” at all, but instead makes fun of and dismisses her entire argument. The entire shock value of the joke comes from the initial implication that there’s ever an acceptable excuse for rape, or in fact that there are degrees of acceptability when talking about horrible things. It doesn’t depend on context at all; it’d be funny no matter who told it, because it only requires the audience to know the difference between right and wrong. Please, bloggers, if you’re going to take it upon yourselves to explain jokes to people, at least take a few minutes to study how jokes actually work.

Everything I Know About Human Interaction I Learned From Buffy the Vampire Slayer

And “how jokes work” gets back to why I’ve got a problem with that attempt at analyzing of The Big Bang Theory. It tries to drag in issues of social inequality, popular culture’s representation of women, and homophobia when the better explanation is that the jokes simply don’t work for some of us.

I blame Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or really, the fact that popular entertainment started getting really good around the same time that self-publishing in the form of blogs became really viable. It meant that “low art” like Buffy — which was designed to be as easy to pick apart as any good parable or fairy tale — got analyzed and over-analyzed, to the point where self-apparent interpretations were accepted as genuine insight. Back when colleges first started offering courses that gave literary analysis of Watchmen, or discussed Buffy in the context of feminism or folklore, people commented on how unusual it was. But it quickly became accepted as commonplace. That, along with Oprah and TV psychologists, meant that pop psychology or social studies came to be seen as on the same level as academics.

And anyone who thinks I’m being overly dismissive of “low art” or pop culture is free to read any of my long dissertations in defense of pop culture. In brief, though: my defense of “low art” and rejection of “high art” is not that low art is as nuanced or as complex, but that art is about communication, and there’s no inherent superiority of obscurity for its own sake. A piece of entertainment that is intended to be “easily digestible” — e.g. how Buffy the Vampire Slayer used the supernatural to intensify the trials of adolescence and young adulthood — can be every bit as valid as something that invites multiple interpretations.

In any case, and whether that’s the actual cause or whether I’m full of it, the result has been a glut of shallow interpretations of media and popular culture passed off as more complex and insightful analyses. For example, using cultural context and background to determine the right way to make light of sexual assault. It’s similar to how some feminist blogs explain their use of the word “bitch;” or Dan Savage’s stunt attempt to “take back” the word “faggot;” or the people who twist themselves into knots explaining exactly how and when it is or isn’t appropriate to use the n-word, based on the race and cultural background of the speaker and his or her audience. In reality, though, it’s all much more simple: the n-word (and for that matter, the c-word) is fucking irredeemably hateful and offensive, and no one should use it, ever.

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen the same type of false logic used to try and explain how the game Cards Against Humanity is “problematic,” how certain scenes in American Horror Story are objectionable while others are fine as lurid entertainment, and why the violence in Tomb Raider is more objectionable than the violence in any other video game. With the first two, at least, it’s a misguided attempt to establish a “do not cross” line with something that exists entirely to make the “line” irrelevant. And all of them to one degree or another assume that modern audiences are primarily made up of sociopaths, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, unable to tell even the difference between right and wrong. And yet, somehow able to discern what it is that makes death from AIDS or the Holocaust somehow less sensitive than sexual assault or racism. It assumes that the audience is actually reveling in or making light of the horrific, and then compounds that by suggesting that there are degrees of what’s horrific and what’s appropriate fodder for comedy.

Even worse than that, it makes discussions about actual issues spin out of control and descend into unproductive noise. It’s how “you don’t understand a joke” gets interpreted as “you can’t take a joke.” Or “your analysis has no merit” gets interpreted as “your premise has no merit” and then “racism/misogyny/homophobia don’t exist.” And why people so often get infuriated to hear “You’re over-thinking it,” when the actual complaint is “You’re making an easily-dismissible mockery of what is actually a serious but ultimately simple issue.”

Which is the most roundabout possible way of explaining my accusation: that article about The Big Bang Theory is over-thinking it. That’s not to say that smart, tech-savvy women aren’t grossly under-represented in the media. It’s not to say that homophobia is no big deal. It’s not to say that it’s okay to make fun of people with mental disabilities, and it’s not to undermine the damage caused by being bullied or socially ostracized.

All I’m saying is that you don’t need to mention any of that to explain why the jokes in Big Bang Theory feel uninspired and clumsy. Or if you do use that as your justification, then you have to explain why it’s okay for The IT Crowd to make fun of nerds and gay people, Community to make fun of the mentally disabled, and The Guild to pander to an audience of self-described geeks, but not okay when Big Bang Theory does the same thing.

Instead of trying to come up with a tortured explanation involving in-groups and outsiders, traditional inequities of cultural power, gender roles and role reversal, and institutionalized sexism and racism, the simplest explanation works best. All require people to be able to laugh at themselves, some people are simply better at writing jokes than others, and not everyone is going to find the same thing funny.

The premise is that you and the rest of your Space Team, each equipped with an iOS device with a control panel, have to guide your spaceship through dangerous territory. Instructions come through on your device (e.g. “Set Kinetic Flow to Maximum!”; you can follow the Spaceteam Autopilot on Twitter for more periodic nonsense). The instructions are (usually) intended for the other players’ control panels. That results in a lot of yelling back and forth. If you can complete the instructions, you advance to the next sector. Mess up, and your ship runs into asteroids, wormholes, magnetic distortions, and lots of other mayhem.

I’ve never played Space Alert, but from what I understand, Spaceteam would be somewhat similar, if you removed everything from Space Alert that was orderly or made sense.

It’s a purely social game — while it doesn’t exactly encourage people to look up from their cell phones, it at least gets us back to the old days where friends would scream random nonsense at each other. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that makes independent game development a good idea.

Spaceteam is free on the App Store, but you can (and should) buy “Upgrades” to support the development. As the latest update notes say, “You can now Frog Blast the Vent Core.”

Thirty Flights of Loving

Blendo is dependably brilliant, but even by that high standard, 30 Flights of Loving is remarkable. It’s ostensibly a sequel (I guess? Prequel maybe?) to Gravity Bone, but in character design and game engine only. The game itself is completely nuts: an experiment in cinematic, non-linear storytelling in a medium that does pretty much everything it can to discourage non-linear storytelling.

The game is constantly lurching forwards and backwards in time, going from flashback to flashback within a flashback; dropping you into situations with no context, leaving you to figure it what’s going on; and editing out stretches of action while you’re taking part in them. It’s all stuff we take for granted in movies, but would seem to be impossible in a medium where you control a character in first person and in real time.

Does it work? I’m still not sure. I still can’t quite piece together what the narrative is, so if clarity’s your thing, you might be disappointed. Did I enjoy it? Definitely. It’s overloaded with style and imagination, and it perfectly demonstrates the power of suggestion.

Whenever I hear the complaint that adventure games aren’t really games, my response has always been that of course they are; the object of the game is to finish the story. It feels as if 30 Flights of Loving takes this one step further: the object of the game is to figure out the story. You see suggestions of story elements — a band of rebels, a betrayal, a wedding reception, a frantic escape — and have to piece them together. Each is a billion times more provocative than a more traditional presentation would give them. By dropping you into a story with no context, and by filling the game with brilliant world-building details (Blendo’s the best at made-up place names), everything is more real and more memorable than a simple linear action story.

Maybe the highest compliment I can give 30 Flights of Loving is that it made me feel lazy. I’ve been speculating about how narratives work in a medium where the player’s in complete control over the pacing, how unreliable narrators could work in games, and how to borrow aspects of cinematic storytelling without losing the essence of what makes a game. And then Brendon Chung just came along and did it all, and took the experiment even farther than I would’ve thought was possible.

FTL

I contributed to the Kickstarter for Faster Than Light because it seemed to have an aggressively old-school mentality: you’re in control of everything, and more significantly, the game doesn’t care if you live or die. Making a roguelike in a non-fantasy setting that lets you blow up enemy spaceships is such a no-brainer that everybody should buy it and play it.

I still haven’t finished a game; in fact I think the farthest I’ve gotten is about a third of the way through. There’s two reasons for that: one, I keep underestimating how devastating a fire in a major system area can be, and two, I convinced myself that “normal” difficulty was the way to go. That’s actually the cruelest trick of the game designers: actually, “easy” is normal and “normal” is really unforgiving. It took me a few games to swallow my pride and choose the “easy” setting, but doing that made the game a lot more enjoyable for me. Not getting annihilated in sector two helps a lot.

Karateka

I played the original only once, so it’s not nostalgia that’s making me like the new remake of Karateka. It’s that they took a straightforward game and made all the right decisions with the update. There’s the clever teaser video by Adam Lisagor. There’s the great character design. The soundtrack that’s a lot more polished than you’d expect from a game of this scope. The forethought to make it available on every platform, and to make sure that it plays as well on iOS as it does on Xbox. And there’s the simplicity of the controls: it’s essentially a rhythm game, where your accuracy at blocking attacks determines how many hits you can get in.

My favorite aspect of it, though, is how it perfectly integrates difficulty with the storyline. You get three “lives” in the form of three different characters all trying to save the princess. If you mess up on your first go-round, then you can still finish the game… but the ending won’t be quite as satisfying, because you failed to reunite the princess with her True Love. (For the record, the only time I finished was with The Brute, and even that was after a couple of failed attempts). It’s ingenious.

On top of everything else, the game is exactly as big as it needs to be. There’s no sign of bloat, absolutely nothing that’s extraneous. Characters are established with nothing more than character design and animation, and you get a complete story of a daring assault on a castle to rescue a princess from an evil warlord. (And his asshole hawk).

You Don’t Know Jack

I love You Don’t Know Jack, but ever since its original glory (the Movies edition is possibly the best written video game ever made), they’ve never quite nailed the distribution. There was diminishing returns on the original sets; the randomization of the questions was unpredictable, but also meant that you’d get repeats of some of the questions before you’d seen all of the content. By the time The Ride was released, I’d pretty much lost interest. Later on, with the dedicated website and daily games, it got to be kind of a chore to keep up with them: you’d have to dedicate a good 20 minutes or so each day to go through a game. And the recent console release fixed a lot of the problems with repetition that the originals had, but still felt somewhat static. If you had a party to play with, it could be fun; otherwise, I didn’t have much compelling me to finish all the episodes.

The current Facebook incarnation nails it. It turns out that five questions is the perfect length, there’s a good variety of question types, the achievements kept me engaged longer than I ever was with the website version, and the asynchronous competition against Facebook friends makes it perfect to play against people you can never get into the same room. Even better, they’ve released iOS versions that integrate with Facebook, so you don’t even have to open a web browser to play.

If there were any lingering doubt that 2012 was a tremendous year for video games, I only have six words to offer as proof: Elephant, Mustard, Teddy Roosevelt, or Dracula.

Of course, it would’ve been even better to see it pay off while I was still at the company, but I’ll be gracious for once and just be happy to see my friends becoming successful. Suck it, Morrissey.

The other thing that was remarkable about the VGAs was that not one of the nominees for Game of the Year was a bad, lazy, or uninspired game. Mass Effect 3 and Assassin’s Creed 3 were the obvious front-runners, as big franchises with huge marketing budgets behind them, but by all accounts — I haven’t played either yet — they were thoughtful, well-produced, and had stories more sophisticated than “Space Marines” or “the invasion of Normandy.” Dishonored (I haven’t played it yet, either) had beautiful art direction, and Journey was a masterpiece.

Even more surprising, my own favorite game of the year was more “mainstream” and traditional than any of the games nominated for the VGAs. With so many good-to-outstanding video games being made, it’s getting harder to be a smug hipster, complaining about the 7-10 review scale and lamenting that the popular trash overshadows the misunderstood gems of indie genius.

I’ve played almost none of the “major” games released this year, the kind that’ll dominate conversations and other Game Of The Year lists. But here are the best games I played in 2012, in no particular order except for the last.

Journey

I already wrote about why I liked Journey, but I’d mostly forgotten about it, until I saw it being played again a few weeks ago. With the music, the art direction, the natural-feeling controls, and the simple but profound theme, it would’ve been a standout game even if it were just a sequel to Flower.

But the inclusion of anonymous multiplayer is what makes it amazing. I’ve seen that final ascent up the mountain about five times now, three times on my own and twice watching someone else play it. Each time played out slightly differently, but it changed the meaning of the game significantly. As somebody who always considered multiplayer to be a completely separable and smaller component of video games, it took Journey (and video of Johann Sebastian Joust) to remind me that the social aspect of games has enormous potential that’s still just barely been explored.

The Unfinished Swan

I’d been interested in The Unfinished Swan ever since video of the first tech demo started circulating. I’d expected the entire game to be exactly that demo — using splatters of paint to reveal detail in a stark white environment — and I still think that that would’ve been perfectly novel and interesting. But instead, the game quickly expands on that idea with variation after variation, each focused on exploring environments in indirect and unexpected ways. It’s almost perfectly paced, throwing a new mechanic at you just as you feel you’ve mastered the previous one, so that nothing feels as if it’s gotten tiresome.

Plus, they actually got Terry Gilliam to do a voice!

The Room

The Room is a game for iOS in which you have to unlock a sequence of puzzle boxes. I’d seen the listing for it and some of the buzz around it, but just dismissed it as another of those pretty but vapid “hidden object” games that have overwhelmed the mobile market almost as much as tower defense games. It also reminded me of The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, and I’ve always hated games that just present puzzles as puzzles for their own sake. Add that to my lack of patience for real-world puzzle boxes or other physical puzzles, and it seemed clear that I was absolutely not in the target demographic for this game.

My friend Matt convinced me to try it out, though, and I’m glad, because I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I was completely engrossed for the two or three days it took me to solve everything, long past the point where I’d expected to lose interest. The key differences, I think, are the tactile interactions with all of the devices, and the way the puzzles build on each other both conceptually and physically.

It’s perfectly suited to an OS designed for touch screens, since you’re not simply tapping objects in the world. You’re grabbing them, spinning them, pushing sliders, turning cranks, and even shaking the thing as you would if you were holding the real-world equivalent. The only point that I had a problem with was when it required you to tilt the device for a certain puzzle to work — the tilt sensors seemed like a good idea when mobile games were first becoming a thing, but the reality is that I spent as much time playing the game lying down as I was sitting upright. Toilets and busses are just two of the many places we play mobile games.

And after spending a few years getting tired of puzzles in general, it was refreshing to see a set that was so well-designed. Most remarkable was that none of the puzzles required any outside knowledge; from start to finish, it was just a case of observation and deduction. Even the vaguely Lovecraftian story was somewhat interesting, so I’m very much looking forward to more games in the series.

Bastion

Technically I haven’t gotten far enough into the game to be putting it on any lists. But the music is fantastic, the narrator is a great idea, and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played so far. Assuming that the game doesn’t suddenly become racist or misogynist, or feature quick time events, it’s safe to assume that I’m going to like the rest.

Torchlight 2

It’s not just everything I wanted from a sequel to Torchlight, it’s also everything I wanted from a sequel to Diablo 2. The art direction, the scope and amount of content, and just the way the combat feels are all pretty much dead-on for what this type of game should be. The first Torchlight felt like a well-made Diablo clone that would tide us over until the next “real” release in the series; with Torchlight 2 I think they’ve taken over the title of Best Action RPG.

Mark of the Ninja

And this is the game I wanted Shank to be, and everything I wanted the Metal Gear games to be like. Klei’s outstanding character design and animation, combined with a stealth mechanic that removes all ambiguity (and does it with style) and makes stealth games actually fun again.

My biggest complaint is that the game rewards nonlethal, non-confrontational ninjas, while at the same time making the ninja kill animations impossibly bad ass. It’s like giving a kid a huge birthday cake and telling him he’ll get all of his presents only if he doesn’t eat it.

The Walking Dead

I’ve already written a ton about The Walking Dead, both here and in various message board arguments, so I don’t have too much to add. It really is the best work that Telltale’s done (although Sam & Max will always be my favorite). And knowing a little bit about how these episodic games are made, I’m most impressed by the fact that Walking Dead feels like a single, cohesive work. In a way, it reminds me more of the old LucasArts games than any other of the Telltale series — not by emulating the games directly, but by feeling as if it was made not by a licensor rounding out a brand, but by a group of people who had a story they wanted to tell and a type of game they wanted to make.

After five episodes, I’m less confident than I was earlier that it’s an entirely new type of game, or more accurately, that the type of game I wanted it to be is the type of game that would be as successful. Towards the end of the series, it felt as if experiential choices were being de-emphasized in favor of visible ones. I was reading people in a forum recounting one of the episodes, and it was only there that I found out it was possible for a major character to die in a battle, as a result of a choice you’d made earlier. (And possibly as a result of how “well” you did a particular Quick Time Event).

I definitely have no problem with your actions resulting in the death of a character; the potential for that is baked into the entire premise of the game. Where I have a problem with it is when it takes a story event that significant and makes it optional. What the most vocal complainers have called “railroading,” I say is essential to making the story a dialogue between creator and player, and not just a game that echoes your choices back to you. (Like the game literally does in the final episode). If whether a character lives or dies is as insignificant as whether Clementine’s wearing a sundress or a hoodie, then why do I care about that character at all?

I don’t know whether a game reliant entirely on experiential choices would be possible, much less whether it would be successful. Shadow of the Colossus and BioShock both had an element of “how does what you’re doing make you feel?” but neither relied entirely on that. I’d like to see more experimentation with it, though, before concluding that the visible choices are the only ones that players care about.

Whatever the case, I don’t want to underestimate the puzzle design, system design, art direction, cinematics, or vocal performances of the game, because they all came together in The Walking Dead in a way that was unprecedented — I always knew that we were making better cut-scenes than anybody else in video games, but never had a game popular enough for people to recognize that. But overall, it’s the emphasis on writing and storytelling that made the series. As somebody who’s spent an entire career hoping for storytelling to be at the forefront of a popular game again, the success of The Walking Dead has been fantastic to see.

The Sims 3 Supernatural

I’m begrudgingly including this, just for accuracy’s sake. Because I don’t like that I like The Sims 3 so much; I still think that Sims 2 was a lot more clever and got at the heart of what I think the game should be.

But the fact is that I downloaded the new expansion pack, and the game once again took hold over me to a bizarre and not entirely healthy degree. I don’t play The Sims that often, but when I do, it’s less “play session” and more “bender.” I go into an hours-long fugue state in which I’m more concerned about the food and bladder needs of tiny computer people than I am for my own. On the rare occasions I do venture out of the apartment, I spend the whole time looking for buildings I can try to recreate inside the game.

It doesn’t take any real perception to realize that the appeal is having tiny people whose lives I can control, when I’m feeling like I can’t quite control my own. What isn’t as easily explainable is why that’s more fun when I can make my surrogate Sim a werewolf who starts dating a vampire.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is pretty buggy, kind of corny, predictable in some places, infuriating in others. I had the game hit an unrecoverable lock-up on my first play through. A problem with Steam saves wiped out my second play through. My third reached the final battle and cut-scene, followed by an ending screen telling me that I’d lost the game. (I went into the final battle right as the last nation was going to pull funding, so the simulation ticked over in the game-time clock while I was still in the process of defeating the aliens and saving the planet once and for all).

Still, it’s by far my favorite game of the year. I’ve loved X-COM ever since I first played through the original, but was never able to come even close to finishing a game. Firaxis made a version that captured everything I loved about the original — the suspense of going into a building or rounding a corner knowing that an unstoppable enemy was waiting inside, the feeling of building a soldier through the ranks only to see them die unceremoniously in battle, the balance of tactical combat with higher-level strategy — but delivered it in a form that actually wanted me to be able to finish. I’ve known about Chryssalids and Cyberdiscs for years, but Enemy Unknown is the first time I actually got to see them.

And although the “story” is overwhelmingly generic, the character design fairly uninspired, and the final battle tedious and anti-climactic in its attempt at storytelling, there’s enough holding it all together to feel like a sci-fi B-movie with some genuinely clever moments. Seeing your control room cheer after you shoot down your first alien ship is fantastic. So is watching your crew chatting in the bar in base, or working out in the exercise room, or watching the alien you’ve kept in storage. The autopsy scenes, complete with bits of gore splatting against the camera lens, are somehow the perfect reward for defeating a new type of alien. And little touches — like seeing the Skyranger touch down in front of a gas station with realistic near-future gas prices — abound. It even makes up for when you’re sent on a mission to China and land at a country and western bar with English signage.

There’ve been plenty of attempts over the years to recreate X-COM, but they all failed either by being too slavish a recreation, or by under-emphasizing some element of what made the original so engrossing. Firaxis made pretty much all of the right choices, going through each component of the original game and trying to recreate the feel instead of duplicating it exactly. There’s little surprise or sense of discovery through experimentation, but there’s also little time wasted figuring out exactly the right balance of scientists to engineers, or which branches of the tech tree are worth exploring. The strategy layer is much simpler and more limited, but with more sense that your decisions are having significant effects and aren’t just arbitrary shots in the dark. You’re not as free to equip your characters or time out their actions, but you’re also not counting up Time Units or accidentally leaving weapons behind in the battlefield. And you can’t get shot and killed while stepping off of the Skyranger, but there’s still the overwhelming sense that your squaddies are extremely vulnerable and completely outnumbered and outgunned.

While battles in the original game felt like a tactical combat simulation (and an extremely unfair one at that), the battles in Enemy Unknown feel like the highlights reel of an 80s sci-fi action movie. The maps are smaller, but that means that there’s just enough tension at the beginning of a level before the action starts. There are fewer enemies per map, but that means that encounters have a cinematic rhythm to them — a few skirmishes against lower-level bad guys, punctuated with tension as you fan out to find the next wave of enemies, culminating against a showdown against the most powerful aliens. That aesthetic, going for the feel of Commando or Aliens, carries through just about every aspect of the game. And it never, ever stops being entertaining when a soldier is standing right next to an open door, but instead smashes through the window and jumps through.

I can’t get all that excited about the first batch of downloadable content, but I’m hoping more general-purpose DLC is scheduled for later. Really, though, the game doesn’t need a ton of expansion. I’m due at least one more play through (hopefully after the most egregious bugs are patched up), and a dozen or so hours of More Of The Same would be fine by me.

Seeing the actual play didn’t clear things up, either. The Playbill had a helpful synopsis and glossary (and I think maps and timelines were also included; they didn’t make any assumptions about the intelligence of the audience), but the only seat I could afford was in the orchestra, directly behind a support pole. With as little as I could see, it was roughly equivalent to just listening to the soundtrack again. I still wasn’t able to piece together more than “ex-convict adopts a little girl and then there’s a rebellion.”

Finally, tonight, I saw Les Misérables on film, where there’s not a bad seat in the theater, and it’s impossible not to follow the story. And as it turns out, the story really is basically “ex-convict adopts a little girl and then there’s a rebellion.” I realize that when the competition is “deformed guy kidnaps opera singer” and “cats tell stories,” the bar for complex storytelling is set pretty low. Still, I’d always thought there was more to it, especially since the novel is pretty long.

Sarcasm aside, that pretty much sums up what you get when you make a cinematic version of a musical: what seems epic on a stage loses something when you try to make it real. The filmmakers were going for realism, and I think they made the right choices every step of the way: they cast actors who could sing, instead of simply putting a camera on performers used to musical theater. The songs were performed “live” — as we’re reminded with every single bit of promotion around the movie — instead of lip-syncing a studio recording; the effect is that the actors are playing out a story in which they just happen to be singing. Most of the songs are treated as monologues or dialogues instead of musical numbers, and when they make an exception to film a straightforward musical number, it’s usually the right choice. The costumes and sets are, for the most part, perfect, and the overall look is similar to the historical dramas from the late 60s and 70s, where the filmmakers used cramped spaces and natural lighting to make it absolutely clear they weren’t on a set.

But the realism is at odds with the fact that everyone is singing, constantly. Or that each of the characters is a melodramatic caricature, specifically written so that after one song, a person from the back row of the theater could understand their entire back story. The pieces that are done like a traditional musical — Javert’s two soliloquies on rooftops or bridges around Paris; and Fantine’s descent into prostitution during “Lovely Ladies” — are more familiar, but also draw attention to the fact that significant chunks of the story are being condensed into a single scene.

It’s the most jarring during the “Master of the House” scene. It’s important for the show, because otherwise you’d have three hours of people just being, well, miserable. And Sacha Baron Coen and Helena Bonham Carter camp it up, just like they’re supposed to and they were hired to do. But again, what works on the stage doesn’t play as well in a movie so committed to realism. One of the oldest complaints about musicals is that the characters suddenly break into song. And I’ve always thought it was a particularly stupid complaint, so it’s somewhat strange that the first time it’s ever bothered me is in a movie where the characters sing throughout.

Although I was familiar with the soundtrack, I’ve never followed the show closely enough to be one of those people who calls it “Les Miz.” So I wasn’t aware that the actor who originally played Jean Valjean was cast as the Bishop who rescues Jean Valjean, which was a clever touch. And I wouldn’t be able to say anything about the vocal performances with any authority, except that everybody sounded fine to me. Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway were clearly emphasizing the dramatic performance over the vocal one, which is clearly the way to go when all of your dialogue is sung through and the camera is going to have you in close-up. Hugh Jackman’s voice gets a little Anthony Newly-ish, and it was obvious even to me that “Bring Him Home” was out of his comfortable vocal range, but he never once looks uncomfortable or unnatural. He gives every song his absolute conviction, and he ends up selling it.

I was most surprised that Amanda Seyfried could sing, since I was only familiar with her in movies aimed at teenagers. She and the actor playing Marius are well cast vocally, since they play the typical star-crossed lovers, and their voices sound like reincarnations of the leads in 1930s musicals. It struck me as remarkable that a movie like this could even be made, finding enough high-caliber actors who could also sing well enough to carry one of the most popular stage musicals. Dubbing a performance like in West Side Story or The King and I wouldn’t fly in a post-Milli Vanilli society, I guess.

I thought the standout, by far, was Samantha Barks as Éponine, and not just because “On My Own” is my favorite song from the show. She makes the singing look effortless, and her songs were the only times I was genuinely engrossed in the story, instead of being aware that I was watching a movie musical. She was amazing; it’s just a shame about the face. Speaking of which: Russell Crowe was probably the weakest singer of all the leads. He wasn’t bad, he just came across as a guy with an average-to-good singing voice, who wasn’t used to belting out a song, Broadway-style, cast as a lead in a show that demands the cast to belt out a song, Broadway-style. You could tell that he got the part mostly because he looks like Russell Crowe. Which is good, because the movie spends a lot of time showing him in close-up. I really didn’t mind, which is probably why I’m not going to be that critical about the singing.

Ultimately, I think that this version of Les Misérables is about as good a job as anyone could possibly do making a cinematic version of the musical. It tells the story with clarity. It sets the action in real places — a church, or a hospital, or the sewers beneath Paris — instead of mere suggestions. It takes a musical with almost no dialogue and delivers the songs as if they were dialogue. It finally shows the real scope of the barricade against the rest of the city, and the guns and cannon fire. And it ends beautifully; I’ve heard the songs countless times, and for the first time, the line “to love another person is to see the face of God” almost had me tearing up.

The only question is whether a cinematic version of the musical is a good idea in the first place, or whether translating it from a stage production to a Major Motion Picture causes it to lose everything that makes the stage production feel epic. In the worst case, it’ll give a ton of people who’ve never been able to see the stage production a chance to see what all the fuss was about. Considering it’s one of the most successful and longest-running musicals ever made, it’s entirely possible that I’m the only one who was disappointed to finally see it after 20 years, and realize that there wasn’t more to it.