Point of Ordures

"Forget-me-nots, second thoughts live in isolation
Heads or tails, fairy tales in my mind"

Green Day - Are We the Waiting

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Have you ever heard anyone speak the phrase "I have a meeting today" cheerfully? Me neither. So how did we end up with department meetings in computer games?

 

Rogue Trader got me onto this subject -

Chair recognizes the S&M zombie girls' representative

- though Owlcat in general has made a recurring theme of board meetings, given they've settled into kingdom-building as alternate cRPG game mode. By the third attempt they're even getting halfway good at it. But they're hardly the only ones. Mount&Blade has run with kingdom-making and companion advisors for two decades, King of Dragon Pass had its clan ring, Dead State its pow-wows in the high school gym, etc. and really the peanut gallery was popular from days of yore in the SimCity series for example. As more strategic or worldbuilding elements from outside the adventuring party make their way into cRPGs, council sessions feel like a natural part of that expansion from mere dungeon crawling to fleshing out entire fantastic landscapes. On a simpler level, an entourage makes social apes feel important.

 

Just like in real life, though, listening to your "respected" colleagues' self-important yammering on topics at best tangential to your goals can easily get boring. (Not sure why little miss stabalot gets included in deliberations at all, predictably solving problems with murder; Kibble doesn't have what you'd call a wide range of interests.) The most obvious problem can be loquaciousness, worst in Owlcat's previous title Wrath of the Righteous where you could return to the capital only to get stuck in your throne room for several pages' worth of accumulated meeting after meeting. Even Rogue Trader's best-written quest chain so far, Ablution in Blood, can bench you through a nigh-interminable dozen-participant dialogue chain if, like I did, you decide to let Jocasta handle the initial legwork. But "walls of text" are slandered often enough in user reviews for developers to beware sheer length of interlude. No, currently I see more stumbling on timing and relevance. Ah luvs me sum flavor text, but careful where you stick it.

 

Timing calls back to my comments on cutscenes. Dialoguing through an issue and getting your NPC companions' perspective before making a "mine, farm or road" development decision improves on plain, dry exposition or number-crunching, but let's emphasize it is not the game itself. Otherwise you're falling back on selling text adventures as video games four decades after their glory days. If it's not core gameplay, it must intersperse core gameplay. But those planetary development events pop up when you check on a planet's progress, which itself tends to happen as you're star trekking, that being already a diversion from your RPG party's ruin-combing.

Meetings between quests = great.

Scanning planets between quests = great.

Meetings between scanning planets = ... how long do you think you can get away with that before I start wondering what (mini)game I paid for? (KoDP for instance was fairly careful not to place clan ring sessions back-to-back, never letting you lose track of managing your population and resources for too long in a stretch.)

 

The time my characters spend discussing what to do or was done should be preceded or followed by doing something, but such interludes can too easily drift off into their own separate minigame. Again, viewing such meetings as playable cutscenes, they're basically an extension of the talking heads pre-mission briefings popularized by Starcraft (or, hitting even closer to home, Rogue Trader's immediate predecessor Mechanicus) which have direct relevance to your next mission objectives. But if you want a good example, try a very different RPG.

Warhorse Studios surprised me taking the risk of deliberately portraying a siege as frustrating and time-consuming, especially when you're hilariously forced to wait for trebuchet recalibration, and especially especially as this comes right before the grand finale. It succeeds for various reasons (not least doubling as a victory lap for the player toward the game's end) but for my purpose here it's also a big get-together of all the lords you've been questing for until that point. As they hand you different quests (supplies, messages, intercepting enemy reinforcements, recruiting talent, infiltration and pushing the proverbial big red button) the event basically stalls for days at a time, but you're never left just waiting for it to finish or go from convo to convo. The big discussions tend to lead into gameplay taking advantage of your existing skills, each feeding into a coherent over-arching narrative about trying to get into that damn castle.

 

When it came to the Pribislavitz DLC on the other hand, Warhorse did fall into the trap of letting you build multiple upgrades at once so long as you've got the cash, taking most all the heft out of seeing your town growing as you come and go, then getting hit with back-to-back legal disputes from your peasants.

 

Alternate elements, use them as lead-ins to each other, and always return to core gameplay. I've defended even simple walking so long as it's a meaningful part of a larger task. Puzzles or events handled through an alternate interface, like skill checks in dialogue trees can be great... but the point was they should incorporate existing character development choices and feed into further adventure (see the colossal cave adventure from Pillars of Eternity's White March expansion) not spin off into some separate 41st millennium Dilbert parody.

 

 

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P.S.: I miss Moe Biehl

Afterglow

"You've got to learn to save yourself

Before you find there's nothing left

But bitterness

And hollowness

And afterglow"

 

Garbage - Afterglow

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"This year's football was pulled away from you through the courtesy of women's lib."

Charles Schultz - Peanuts, 1971/09/26

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Fun fact: the first story attempt posted to this blog was titled Ephemeron. I put up the first half, started on the second and only belatedly realized I couldn't decide between two endings. Then decided I liked neither well enough. Thus Ephemeron persists solely in hiding. One of these years I might even complete it. Point being: when I hit a "wtf am I doing, where am I going with this thing?" moment, I simply stopped writing it. Because I could. <- important plot point

 

Anyway, amidst my romp through the Koronus Expanse, I was wondering when I'd once again run into NPC companions so annoying I'd refuse to even run through their introductions. Didn't take long.

The debonair fortune-seeker stereotype peaked in romantic age fiction*, was still celebrated by the time of Errol Flynn, was only barely kept on life support by the likes of Harrison Ford, and has in no way been refreshed since via an infusion of feminism. While the older Zorros' mix of helping the little people and "for the lulz" swashbuckling could be directed against various inimical industries, foreign occupation, decadent aristocrats, a family feud, what-have-you, a female variant will rather invariably (and monotonously) default to fighting against the opposite sex, with any further justification tacked on as an afterthought. So Rogue Trader's Jae Hey-dearie gets introduced as cheated out of her rightful plunder by a sinister bald old male mobster who's intimidated by her sheer curly pouty awesomeness. We immediately proceed to a bar where she shoots her way through three broad-shouldered mooks and is praised as a friend of the people by another woman who's had her jaw broken for talking too openly - presumably in a direct fistfight with The Patriarchy itself.

Well, seeing no option to just kill her, Jae can damn well rot in that bar. Once a story or character dives into the "man bad, woman good" pitfall, it just doesn't dig its way back out. Picking randomly of the endless object lessons out there, you can try a movie called The Snowman, ostensibly about a serial killer in Norway. Quaint in the first place because Norwegians are ~12 times more likely to kill themselves than each other; odder because yes of course the imaginary serial killer targets women whom he considers bad mothers, never mind that in Norway men are as everywhere far more likely to kill each other than raise their hand against a woman, with about half again more male victims of homicide.*** Not odd at all when you realize the only crime our fiction now consistently recognizes is rape (always male on female) and the general existence of men. Though a confused mess, The Snowman makes clear enough whence its confusion stems, its plot, setting and characters mere pretexts to force-feed the audience a maximized lump of propagandist set pieces. There had to be a rape scene, and an evil pimp, and a male domestic abuser, and an overblown subplot dedicated to a prostitution ring with a somehow completely clueless and innocent prostitute, and a man declaring himself worthless next to his wife and child, and the wife legitimizing his worth by returning to him as her mate even-though-he-doesn't-deserve-her, and men failing at fathering, and a woman seducing a man because boys-are-dumb, and men murdering women due to just plain hating women, and a woman driven to madness by the sheer evil of maleness, and a climactic scene where the hero tells the villain he should hate his father instead of his mother. Everything else in the "story" merely scaffolds the holy edifice of misandry. Plus ending with the hero volunteering to investigate yet another ritualistic murder of a woman, because of course.

But that desperate need to cram in yet another repetition of the "man bad, woman good" mantra before the credits, got me thinking about an old observation about webcomics. Most never get a proper ending, their authors' interest or time investment merely running its course to abandonment of the project, left dangling "on hiatus" in perpetuity or until the web host goes under, whichever comes first. But when this happens, check if you can notice a certain pattern to the last note struck more often than others:

- Sufficiently Remarkable -  a slice-of-life comic about an art major gal living the bohemian metropolitan life - ends with her kicking a man into trash before warmly reuniting with her female roommate

- Family Man - I had great hopes for this one, a beautifully researched and culturally developed historical comic about academic inquisitiveness with a shamanistic/lycanthropic twist - unfortunately also a matriarchal twist, and its last panel left off with a woman ordering a man to his knees (purely for his own good of course)

- Weregeek - having devolved from jokes about geeky hobbies to dating dramedy for years, its last story had a woman trouncing men in fencing - ends with her boyfriend proposing marriage in full medieval costume, only for her to rag on him for apparently upstaging her renfaire tournament victory (I would agree based on individuality, but if you can't figure out what's wrong with that scene, reverse the polarity: imagine a man winning a tournament and his girlfriend proposing to him, at which he flies into a rage, humiliating her for it, because how dare she try to muscle in on his moment of glory with her proposal, how. dare!)

- The Meek - fantasy kingdom intrigue by the same indoctrinated pate what brought you Mare Internum, and equally confused in its pre-chewed moralism, its high point being a king flying into a rage and murdering a visiting diplomat through her eye sockets for no reason - ends with a girl standing up for her mother's honor to her father and waxing desperately distraught at him marrying her off

- Bearmageddon - humanity besieged by mutant grizzlies, with all the high-octane gorefest that entails - ends with the revelation that the heroes' grandstanding environmentalist is a hypocrite driving a smog factory of a customized van, and abandoned his pregnant wife to boot!

- The Last Halloween - monsters from the monster dimension murder humanity, and only a little girl can save us - its penultimate page features a recently introduced secondary character finding her abusive boyfriend flayed alive only to abandon him, reassured by her female companion that it's better this way, she's where she belongs, with another woman

I won't sift through all of TopWebComics's pile of outdated links, but you should be spotting a trend.

Granted plenty of other comics have died mid-scene featuring plenty of other objects, elements or themes, but you just don't find a laser battle or car chase reiterated so many times as a comic's last gasp. Most probably peter out at a point invisible to most of us (when donations stop flowing in) but such a recurring coincidence with our society's most pervasive point of greatest moral outrage and grandstanding ("man bad, woman good") should raise an eyebrow. A movie or a video game will continue production to sell the finished product even if it must include one or twenty moronic scenes. But the fate of a serialized solo project the day its creator asks "wtf did I just publish" looking at yesterday's page is far more flexible.

Maybe such authors ran out of proverbial gas already, and only devoted one last stretch of effort towards performing one last ritualistic burning in effigy of a perpetual acceptable target.

Maybe, on the contrary, they simply feel such condemnation has crested their creative apogee, and nothing they further concoct could match the glory of hurling a man in garbage where he belongs. As a meet-cute.

For once though I'll allow myself a creaking, dusty sliver of optimism. Dare one hope you wondered where exactly you're going with this thing, and more importantly why? Realized your creative effort was being derailed by a memetic infection demanding you interject a bad man to be defeated or condescended to by good women, regardless of your story's actual purpose? Sussed contriving reasons to slam down, demonize or skin alive a hated demographic leads down no other narrative path than constantly doubling down on the self-justifying bigotry? Maybe you had not originally intended to manufacture some piece of supremacist propaganda masquerading as "justice" according to your sophomore year creative writing professor's ranting. Coughed at peanut dust from 1971 on a supposedly trendy topic? Grokked dogma as a refuge for the incompetent, an I.O.U. from a bankrupt imagination?

 

Or you just fired up Netflix, viewed one of the endless thousands of feminist propaganda pieces already glutting the zeitgeist and saw your market share for the infinitesimal sliver you'd get by piling on with the most retread moralism in the history of storytelling: man bad, woman good. Well, they say there are many paths to enlightenment. I suppose one of them could meander through the marketing department...

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* Consider that our best modern reference for such characters comes from The Princess Bride, a send-up of their conventions. A sympathetic one, sure, but nonetheless demonstrating an Inigo would be hard to take completely serious nowadays.

** As usual when you find yourself faced with feminist equality, reverse the polarity: show me every popular movie/game male hero introduced as opposing a wicked old woman then shooting several women and being praised for it by another man to demonstrate his righteousness.

*** Granted, that's a far more egalitarian ratio than in most places.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 2

Chipmunk sitting very patiently on a rock waiting for the herd of king kongs to move along so it could cross the path.

 

Sshhh, I'm camouflaged, you can't see me.

Darwednesday

This Darwin Day let's note a funny detail: have you noticed religious fundamentalists are far more obsessed with ol' Chuck than atheists are? Or even biologists? Hell, in a university biology curriculum, you'll probably discuss Darwin less than once a course, with maybe one full lecture on 19th-century evolution debates and excerpts from the Origin of Species to introduce evolutionary biology. And we're done. The 19th century ended 125 years ago. But you wouldn't know that from watching the religious mad scramble to defame Darwin by claiming his old-age ailments were divine punishment for contradicting Tha Bie-buhl, posting pictures of Darwin as Hitler, etc.

 

It just reconfirms that whether by innate stupidity or their communal mental disease, believers are incapable of grasping even the basic notion of reason. Interpreting non-religion the only way they know how, as just another religion, they interpret Darwin as its deity or patron saint, and go on the attack as though it would be some great victory to tear him down. And indeed, if you were to tear down Yahweh or Krishna, none of the nonsensical piles of gibberish comprising Christianity or Islam or Hinduism would retain their appeal, because only the mindless belief in holy books' supposed authors' supernatural power induces anyone to swallow their sadomasochistic ramblings.

 

But here's a shocker: free thinkers don't sleep with a copy of The Descent of Man under their pillows. It's not our holy book and its author is not our holy man. We don't have those things. We don't need them. We don't want them. We value the intellectual advancement of the concept of natural selection because it holds up on its own, and its author only insomuch as he was instrumental in clarifying an explanation of the surrounding world which that world itself evinces as true in a myriad examples. When religious reactionaries manage to erase lessons about Darwin's finches from schoolbooks, finches will continue to exist and their beaks will continue to adapt to local food sources, and anyone who pays attention will be able to rediscover those facts. Reality gives not the slightest shit about your idiotic need to pretend fairytales are real.

 

Neither is natural selection some singular revelation on which the entirety of biological science depends to provide a better explanation for life than a magic beardy man making his clay puppets move. It was a major step in an iterative assessment of evidence. Remember it was prompted as an explanation for the natural world based on Thomas Malthus' observations about the human world. A protestant priest. And a monk, Mendel, gave us the first serious notion of heredity. You think nobody will be able to plant some peas and look at their flowers after you erase those two from textbooks? Or nobody will look at a murder-ridden slum and note not every organism lives to procreate? In fact before Charles Darwin was even born, his gran'pappy Erasmus took part in similar arguments about the malleability of species. And if you're so obsessed with natural selection itself, why do you address none of your vitriol toward Alfred Russel Wallace who independently described and co-presented the concept alongside Darwin? Come on, fundies, up your game, show Alfie some love!

Yet if you erase every famous scientist's name, if you torture to death every existing thinker, better minds than yours among your own children will retort "e pur si muove" and realize their lot can only be improved by working in reality, not make-believe.

 

Wanna know today's greatest significance to atheists? It's a weekday.

Even Potemkin Villages Breed Werewolves

Two days ago I had not yet viewed Bill Maher's latest New Rule, so did not guess that by addressing games which run faster but waste more time I'd once again hit close to one of Real Time's topics of the week. It took me a few years to figure out a couple of you watch that show, when I noticed some of my long-dormant posts getting the odd hit in suspicious correlation with Real Time having just run a tangential topic. Like his "eat the rich" segment and usually some other criticism of conventionally safe sociopolitical stances. You do have to wonder though, if a rant by a celebrity sends you back to a blog by some no-name loser, just how few voices are there in society, public or obscure, willing to speak more honestly than a party mouthpiece or a cult proselytizer?

You only have to look at formerly sane figures like James Lindsay or Bret Weinstein sinking deeper into conspiracy theories to realize that even in the absence of authoritarian pressure, audience capture will still do the work of radicalization. As I formerly put it 'this species' obituary will read "morbid sociability" with a hazard sticker for memetic infection' and I have to wonder how susceptible I'd have been to the same crazyward slide, had this blog ever gotten off the ground. Of course in my case, my own incompetence is my saving grace. But in my defense, I ask ya, who could've predicted that obscure game anecdotes and a flat refusal to cut anyone any slack would fail to induce adoration by the masses?

 

Well, I'm busy bashing FEMale chauvINISTS at the moment, so we'll schedule a cure of faithosis purgatives from... let's say Easter-ish onward? Maybe something about factory farming and checkout jobs? Or, oooohh, "racism week" I've been wanting to do that for years now!

InYourFace Timesinks, Redux with Unskippable Cutscenes

"Dumbstruck, color me stupid
Good luck, you're gonna need it
Where I'm going if I get there at all"

 

Green Day - Waiting

 

 

One of Rogue Trader's more interesting fights tries to recreate Alien's feel of being trapped on a spaceship with large carnivorous lifeforms, appropriate enough as Tyrannids are just xenomorph rip-offs in the first place.

(luckily there's no cat involved)

The genestealers run fast, hit hard and automatically retreat to heal when taking too much damage, even on your own turn, thus excelling at hit-and-run. Well, guess what, so does my make-work evasion tank Kibble! And with two Strategists and an Officer behind her, I can blitz, voice of command, blitz again, danse macabre, blade dance and return to start all day long. Thus the hunter becomes the hunted, muahahahah! In fact I was annoyed to no end at having to reload the mission when it ended prematurely on my reaching the exit, as if I were trying to escape and not slice 'n dice dese foos.

 

All that back-and-forth did take a while though. One such lengthy chase in a campaign comes as an exciting change of pace. If I see it happen a second time, I'll call it a timesink. Ditto for the Nurgle mission with the artifact spawning waves of zombies. Once is brilliant, twice is a chore.

 

A decade and a half ago when I started commenting, the chief marketing gimmick for a computer game was copies sold. Everyone wanted to be in on the next big fad, the next Starcraft or Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. And so I countered by pointing out many lesser-selling niche games were keeping their customers happy and engaged far longer than the lowest-common-denominator shovelware on which you spent your money just because all the cool kids were doing it.

 

Of course any system can be gamed, any metric cheated, thus the top criterion is always faked. As "hours played" rose to primacy in gamers' minds, so did padding in the minds of canny game marketers, to the point Strangeland featured an entire scene mocking such temporizing. Of course it mostly started with MMOs, which had a pre-existing impetus to keep players online with "kill ten rats" quests to make their servers feel alive. Minigames (Witcher, KotOR) already functioned as padding in single-player, as did unskippable cutscenes of Final Fantasy infamy, or gratuitous reloads (Arcanum) or slowly walking across giant maps (Dreamfall, etc.) but as older, more blatant timesinks became recognized by customers, a more subtle version seems to have gained prominence: stalling interface interactions.

I mean not only forcing you to scroll through endless unsortable lists (Skyrim) but basically stretching any and everything you do with barely noticeable or seemingly accidental half-seconds of dead time. Individually they don't seem like much, but adding half a second to millions of clicks adds up to forcing hours and days of dead air on players. And while I've criticized Darkest Dungeon, Battletech or even no-name titles like Ashwalkers on this point, if you want a masterclass in interface timesinks, try Rogue Trader.

Technically you can speed up its combat animations. However, not only does this seemingly not apply to ship combat, which remains slow as molasses with about as much animation as Armageddon to justify it, but it's not each animation itself slowing things down. It's the prep and clean-up phases before and after it compounded by stacking multiple separate movements like the little twirl a blade dancer performs before Acrobatic Artistry. Or really any ability.

See what my character's doing there in the bottom right? Pointing. Pointing is very important. Forget lifting your gun and shooting. Fidgeting and pointing animations are appended to every single ability, even the most routine 0AP universals you use every single round. Multiple such abilities. Every. Single. Round. And. Every. Bonus. Round. And if you're behind cover, which most of your party always should be, every single one of those momentous opportunities to POINT YOUR HAND OMGWTFBBQ!! gets padded with yet another separate animation to rise from cover because you can't POINT YOUR FINGER while crouching, that's crazy-talk, after which you separately perform the pointing animation, after which you again turn and crouch behind your cover as yet another separate animation. If you're shooting, tack on two more animations for raising and lowering your weapon. Do that five or seven times a round for six characters six rounds in a row for six hundred fights and see how much of your "how long to beat" was spent beating around the bush.

And then there's the cargo system.

Ah, yes, the cargo system.

FUCK CARGO!

I'll address its basic validity when discussing the game as a whole. It's a laudable idea in itself: your vendor trash get auto-sorted away from your usable inventory. Except every piece of vendor trash has different values, all getting binned automatically until reaching 100% to be sold as one full container, after which a new bin automatically gets started. The timesink? No sorting algorithm. Overflow can reach 120% with 105% being very common, so let's estimate letting it pile up on its own wastes 10% of your loot on average. The real kicker? Even if you try to do it manually, the interface doesn't work like a normal inventory where you can place and move loot.

- you can only add items to the currently active bin, which defaults to the top unfilled one

- you must split stacks to exact numbers beforehand because the interface won't take shift-clicking

- the gigantic list jumps around of its own accord as you fill bins, often hiding the next bin above or below the visible area

- stacks in the "to cargo" area also sort themselves of their own accord

- many cargo items share identical icons, forcing you to scroll over them constantly for tooltips

- you can sort the list, but can't view only one category at a time

- you can't move cargo back to your inventory, therefore must perform any sorting in front of a corpse or barrel on some mission map

- players will readily tell you the amount of cargo you find is not enough to satisfy all factions in the first place, so you either do some manual sorting or give up on some rewards

Now that, children, is a helluva timesink. Keep in mind they deliberately spent development work-hours, paid for by you yourself, to program a secondary inventory interface to put you through this idiotic chore.

And while I'm only using Rogue Trader as emblematic of an industry-wide problem, I do have to wonder why Owlcat, whose games do in fact hold quite respectable amounts of content under objective analysis, competitive in their field, have in all three cases transparently inflated their size like bags of potato chips.

Time Enough for Love

"Your goddess is bathed in gold while keeping us in line
We're killing each other for a woman in the sky"

 

"The end is the same for everyone
Should be enough for us to be as one
Watch me fall apart over you
Watch me fall apart tryin' to please you"

 

Nothing But Thieves - I'm Not Made By Design / Six Billion

 

 

Though marketed as a novel, we're really talking about a collection of short to novella-length stories, plus a couple sets of aphorisms composing The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - a fix-up novel if there ever was one. But being a fan generally of Heinlein's other work, the book also carries a bitter note. Time Enough for Love marks the beginning of the end, the tipping point of decline in the master's career, after which he focused increasingly on the "world as myth" notion which bore little fruit despite encompassing four volumes and spare.

 

I'll grant I'm also biased against its central figure. Though Lazarus Long has been touted as Heinlein's chief protagonist (and is indeed the most recurring one) I've always considered Jubal Harshaw the better type specimen. Where Heinlein's earlier works (especially the "juveniles") promoted boy scout grade honesty, as he aged his heroes acquired more and more of a distasteful taste for lying under the moral umbrella of some underdog status, e.g. Friday. In Time Enough for Love at least, the heavy emphasis on Lazarus as unreliable narrator and lovable scoundrel begins to wear on itself after the twentieth repetition.

But most will focus on the collection's recurring theme of, well, love. Illicit love. Illicit sexual love. Computer programs, age differences, homosexuality, prostitution and especially incest in several directions. If it seems a tad over-stretched, consider it was published in 1973, as the hippie era waned and free love was once again ground under the heel of Americans' habitual puritanical repression. The book reads, more than anything, like a last orgasmic gasp of the sexual revolution before being subverted by superstitious ritual, romantic fables and (in a sudden yet inevitable betrayal) feminist condemnation of sexuality as male aggression.

He takes it in some odd directions even by his own standards, for instance the stance he adopted in more than one book that overpopulation should not be addressed by population control but by interplanetary and interstellar travel, a new wave of colonial expansion. Unrealistic from simple thermodynamics, but also leading more than once to passages sublimating the joy of sex into a pregnancy fetish, a bit Freudian as the author himself died childless. The lengthy discussion of the twue meaning of wuv winds down into the same unintended(?) head-trip as it seems Lazarus' entanglement with Dora instilled both romantic love and a death wish in him. Reading through not just that but the passages at the end where Lazarus is shamed by his family into enlisting to die in WW1 (an echo of that nastier Starship Troopers machismo Heinlein normally kept in check) put me in mind of one of my older linguistic observations.

I find the phrase "make love" both primitively hokey and weirdly apt. Pair-bonding is the fabrication of attachment, literally making emotion in another, inducing devotion to be cashed in later, a spell serving the caster not the target. And that, in turn, makes me think of the one story in Time Enough for Love not dealing with love as a primary topic: that of the lazy farm-boy who ends up dodging his way through the military for a pension, and surviving, and thriving, instead of being packed off to death in the trenches with a white feather because a man's gotta do. I very much doubt Heinlein intended his book to send the message that for men love is death, at least not consciously, but given enough rope he would appear to have hanged himself.