A Plus Iron's Gotta Do

I bought some generic multivitamins a few months ago. The metabolic differences between the sexes are minor enough as eukaryotes go. Men burn through more iron, women eliminate more calcium, and that's pretty much the one consistent divergence accounted for by our respective multivitamins. So there on the pharmacy shelf sat the usual rows of "men's" and "women's" vitamins. Except for one company progressive enough to rebrand the more offensive of the two. It sold "Women's" vitamins on one hand and vitamins "Plus Iron" on the other.

Well, I'm sure I could complain ... mansplain ... plusironsplain at some length about the mere mention of the word "men" being treated as an unspeakable slur, but I wouldn't want to be a total jew about it, ain't dat right mah niggas?

Dirty Secrets and Pugnacious Framing

The last online game for which I held out great hopes was The Secret World. Despite labeling itself an "M"-MO it resolved, after a while, into yet another woefully repetitive small-team gear-grinding game. However, it was also an adventure game, and that meant lots of cutscenes, storytelling and puzzle-solving. Surprisingly good storytelling, and even decent puzzle-solving, all told. Professional quality voice acting, shockingly expressive and engaging texts, well-fitted aural accompaniment, all drew in a better quality of gamers than you'd usually run across online. For a while. Then the repetition set in and all that was left were the dregs, the mindless grinding rabble.

Currently I've been diving headlong into Warframe, a game designed for mindless grinding rabble. Its writing is abysmally bad. It's largely a simplistic arcade game where you constantly gun down random baddies jumping out of the walls at you from every direction. No planning, no coordination, no player identity or relevant decisions, no logistics or strategy. Just constant action for brainless little twerps whose highest mental functions are limited to reflex. However, it did add quite a bit of variety in weapon and damage types, combat moves, resource acquisition, etc. so that the few who are so inclined can actually think about what they're doing.

TSW's playerbase contained a large proportion of players around my age, thirty-somethings who remembered old-school quality.

Warframe seems almost entirely composed of idiot teenage brats.

TSW's players meekly accepted the game's constant degradation into senseless grinding and can be found repeating the same exact 3% of missions with the same exact fights in the same exact order every time. They whine at the slightest difficulty.

Warframe's players argue about gear loadouts, get excited about new challenges, hunt rather tenaciously for rare drops without specifically being pointed at them, adapt to the game's randomized content.

Why are the ignorant, degenerate snot-nosed little dipshits suddenly looking more alive than my own, more discerning peers?

I have a request for my generation:
Please don't get old.

ST: TNG - The Amenable Ghost of Tasha Yar

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 3.15
Yesterday's Enterprise

Tasha's back, y'all!

And she's wrangled herself a cheesy episodick love interest. You go, girl!
Actually, while there yet stood such dark abodes as book-stores, I remember seeing two characters in this same pose on half the idiotic romance novel covers in history... with the roles reversed.

Anyway, there's a time vortex-y thingy... of some sort... who cares... and the previous Enterprise blasts in from the past. Suddenly, we're at war with the Klingons, Worf's nowhere to be seen and Tasha Yar is back at her old station, never having died at the hands pseudopods of Swamp Thing. History has been changed and our heroes are none the wiser, save wise ol' Guinan. Turns out that by escaping destruction via chrono-sphincter, the E-C allowed war to rage between the Klingons (who'd been introduced in the original series as antagonists) and the Federation, and now must return to kamikaze a peace agreement in the past.

It's a rare case of a TV script retaining coherence both in and out of universe. Once you start with the precept of bringing Tasha back you hit the problem of Worf having ascended to her old station. So you need a reason why a Klingon would <NOT> be aboard a Federation vessel. From there, the plot branches rather seamlessly... which makes it a surprise that the script reached this point working backwards from the idea of the two ships meeting, through three or four major rewrites.

In execution, it falters a bit through overextended dramatic / romantic scenes (the romance angle especially was utterly irrelevant) but makes up for it by stepping up the intensity of the remaining action scenes. The best moment comes when Yar and her toy-boy are sharing a deep, meaningful gaze as an attack strikes. Instantly, they leap over their seats to take their stations while their captain struts purposefully, masterfully to her own chair. In two seconds we go from first-season cheese to watching trained professionals handle a crisis. Quite the statement on the show's growth, intended or not.

But mostly, the whole thing revolves around Guinan's conversation with Tasha, in which the former reveals the latter's untimely demise: "I do know it was an empty death. A death without purpose." One wonders why, if they've known each other for years in this timeline, it took little miss headgear this long to realize something's wrong, especially given her centuries-long lifespan. Maybe she had to bask in the breeze of the chrono-sphincter to get a whiff of the truth? Either way, Tasha joins the other ship to lend her inevitable death some much-needed meaning, and we wrap up a snappily edited finale with the E-D getting slowly murdered but managing to restore the timeline in which everyone (except Tasha) survives.

The End.

(NOT!)

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Seriesdate: 4.06
Legacy

The Enterprise tracks an escape pod to Tasha Yar's home planet. They're met by a Kurt Russel impersonator and the younger of the Yar sisters, a development which is greeted with a great deal more surprise than it warrants. Yes, of course Tasha had family in the place where she was born. Most people do.

Turkana 4 is a lawless urban wilderness... where everyone wears impeccable make-up and over-fluffed '80s rocker hairstyles. Two factions vie for control and the Enterprise almost gets embroiled in their civil war in the attempt to free the captive Federation citizens. By the end, Ishara Yar demonstrates her loyalty lies with her own faction and she'd be more than willing to sacrifice her new space-friends to serve her ignoble cause. The whole affair ends with a cheesy after-school special dialogue about the power of fee-fees.

It could of course have been handled better if the show could afford to challenge its audience's presumptions and reverse the comparison, to compare not only the younger to the older sister but also vice-versa. Maybe Tasha's devotion to the Enterprise was just as primitive and potentially destructive as her sibling's tribalism. But that would've gone against the grain. The excuse of a plot mainly served as a reminder to viewers of the dead Yar's virtues, constantly reiterating her bravery, hardships and dedication every five minutes, setting the stage for the role her name would play in later episodes.

Cheese and ham.
Next!



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Seriesdate: 4.24
The Mind's Eye

Romuloids hacked our engineer!

Boy ain't that always the way? You finally get yourself some vacation time only to be telegrabbed by invisible space pirates who use your cybernetic implants to reprogram you into an undetectable assassin against an empire of space samurai. Happens to all of us.

But, amusingly, by Star Trek standards this is one of the saner plots. They even went to some lengths to explain how it's LaForge's visor implants which allow a hardwired connection to his brain, and the reprogramming is done by providing sensory input, not by any mystical telepathic voodoo. Also, the villains follow a self-interested powermongering scheme and aren't just in it for the sake of being villains. Good stuff, all in all. The Klingons act Klingon, the dramatic reveals aren't belabored, the unstable political triangle between the three major factions is more clearly explained, and the constant fake-outs of priming the audience to expect Geordi to snap (dramatic music, killing O'Brien, etc.) provide just enough red herrings to presage the true, climactic assassination attempt.

More than any other, this episode serves to tie together the major plot threads which had been slowly developing for the past two seasons. We're teased with a possible resolution to Worf's discommendation and a meeesteeeerious shadowy female Romulan makes her first appearance, to be expanded upon later. But to me, it's elevated to first-tier status by the very last scene, in which a bewildered Geordi is being de-programmed by Troi, again not by telepathic nose-twitching but by discussion, by rational re-assessment of the previous weeks' events. This story's all about continuity, both for events and characters. Much like Picard's lingering post-Borg-mindrape trauma that kicked off the season, the last scene reaffirms that these people's lives continue off-camera. It doesn't sound like much, but TV in 1990 was ruled by no-causality, no-continuity, stock-character sitcoms with episodic resets every half hour.

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Seriesdate: 4.26-5.01
Redemption

Already discussed last time. The Klingon civil war is revealed to be stoked by the half-Romulan daughter of a time-traveling Tasha Yar, sent back to the past by the alternate-timeline Picard. (Say that three times fast.) She was the one to order LaForge's brainwashing and now she's smuggling weapons to the Klingon rebels.

Having rebelled against her mother's loyalties, Sela now fanatically serves Romulan interests in dividing the Federation and Klingons by any means necessary. For peak dramatic effect, she coldly recalls betraying her own mother to her death as a child, which would've shocked viewers to no small amount after they were primed to adore the elder Yar, hearing Tasha's praises constantly sung in Yesterday's Enterprise and Legacy. But, though a cheap trick, one can't deny it worked to great dramatic effect, as Sela immediately appears all the more villainous in contrast (and direct enmity) to her sainted mother.

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Seriesdate: 5.07-5.08
Unification

Spock. Is. Awesome!

And I don't mean that Quinto schmuck they're pushing these days. That's Original Recipe Nimoy right there, pure and uncu.... uuh, scratch that last part.

The episode as a whole deserves to be discussed at length some other time. Once again Sela is at the root of a convoluted scheme to stage a sneak-attack, this time against Vulcan. It's almost too bad she didn't re-appear more often on the show, as Crosby made a better hard-nosed sneering Romulan than she ever did a human action girl. Still, as her... average... acting ability wasn't quite up to the task of fleshing out a truly memorable villain, it's probably for the best. (And squaring her off against Nimoy pretty much guaranteed an unflattering comparison of their performances. Now that's just mean.) Her three appearances as Sela did however fit (and helped define) the Machiavellian mold in which the Romulans were cast: proud yet underhanded, training an assassin, smuggling weapons, attacking under a false white flag after baiting a foreign diplomat (Spock) into a vulnerable position.



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I stand by my assessment that Tasha Yar was a misconceived character from the very start, a first-season false start like Q or Wesley or the insectoid body-snatchers which were eventually re-tooled into the more thematically appropriate Borg. She mostly revolved around dropping the phrase "rape gangs" into random conversations and slapping around token males to display female superiority in all things. The petty manner in which she was removed from the show nonetheless lives on as an object lesson in bad writing. I was certainly glad, both as a tween and now, to see her get her well-deserved heroic farewell in Yesterday's Enterprise.

Interestingly, though the character was ill-fitted to the setting, the acting so-so and the plots involving her gratuitous morality plays or worse, the memory of Yar served the show much better. As a symbol of both loyalty and bereavement, she could prop up a villainess in contrast to her posthumously agreed-upon qualities or serve to define the growth of better protagonists like Worf or Data. Whether intentionally or not, Sela in her fanatical Romulan scheming did indeed emulate her mother's supposed perfect bravery as a Starfleet officer. It's a realization which has slowly made its way into roleplaying games as well since the days of TNG: that the stalwart, unbendable paladin may be lawful in adherence to a creed or cause or duty, but is by no means inherently good.

It makes an interesting study in how much a series can achieve by killing off a bad character early on, allowing itself both a powerful symbol within-continuity, and a way of growing by revisiting said symbol from different angles.

I adopted a dog from the pound. It likes to shit in a soup container positioned obliquely.
I'm fostering a can doo attitude.

Heavon Calling!

When you hear rationalists, atheists, anti-theists and other lovable heathens like myself griping about religion, many of our complaints have to do with money. Vaticans are valorized, mullahs need their moolah and Buddhists butter their sculptures on the backside of the public. Powermongering takes money-laundering, and churches' harm could be greatly curbed if they were scrutinized and taxed by governments like the for-profit institutions they are.

Without combing through their ledgers for every last measly milliard they receive, let's address the constant claim that, due to their missionary, charity and other supposed beneficence, religious groups are non-profit organizations.
No.
Recruitment is not charity. Neither is advertisement. Movie companies not uncommonly drop one hundred or two hundred million dollars on advertising just one of their "intellectual" properties. They're not doing it because they're good Samaritans, bad Samaritans or morally conflicted Samaritans, but because they expect huge pay-offs. Neither do priests build youth centers because they want to help youth, but because they want to exploit youth. They are buying an opportunity to indoctrinate, to inject their venomous primitivism into susceptible minds. Then, they bleed you indefinitely. Whether because you're ignorant, desperate, down on your luck, down in the dumps or just have Down's syndrome, you're not their friend or equal. You're their prey, or at best a host organism. All the money they sink into brainwashing you now they expect to get back tenfold through decades' worth of donations of money, property or more likely, free labor.

And, best of all, you've just agreed to form the lowest base in their paradisaical pyramid scheme. Wives drag their husbands to church, bosses rope their underlings into church picnics, mothers beat bibles into their children's heads. Every pissant proselyte promises a continual string of returns through the decades, struggling to justify slavishness by recruiting others to occupy the lowest rung. Stumbling savages with crisp neckties and starched shirts grunting stone-age oaths to ward off the dark. Zombies biting zombies, until the seas boil off and the tectonic plates melt, and the trumpets remain silent.

Causality: The Game

For the past forty years, mass shootings in the United States have prompted at least one very predictable reaction from politicians and commentators: blaming everything on violent movies, violent music, and in later years especially violent video games.

The argument falls flat on its face at the slightest scrutiny from any angle. Yes, of course the shooter played video games. Everyone has played video games! And yet violent crime rates have been dropping slowly but constantly all these decades. Not to mention focusing on any single personality trait or hobby rapidly edges into "Hitler was a vegetarian" territory. Not to mention that billions of fans of heavy metal music or horror movies or first person shooter games have, for the past half a century, testified to their subjective experience that these all work to provide an emotional outlet, to decrease our frustration with the world.

So I'm pretty sure imaginary rocket launchers (RPG RPGs) don't cause school shootings. I do know, however, that after every mass murder the political pressure from the Mrs. Grundys of the world wrests yet more concessions and promises from the game industry to self-censor, to dull, de-fang and castrate their products.

Video games don't cause shootouts, but mass shootings do cause bad game design.

Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker!

"In the year 7510
If God's a-comin' he oughta make it by then
Maybe he'll look around himself and say
Guess it's time for the judgment day"

Zager and Evans - In the Year 2525


_________________________________________
I ... guess I'm giving away the ending? Though Star Maker has no "plot" by any reasonable definition and lays the foreshadowing on so thick as to... well, shit, it's in the title.
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Olaf Stapledon is remembered for what's remained one of the most sweeping and grandiose future histories, Last and First Men, which encompasses human social and physical evolution on an ever-accelerating timescale through the collapse of the solar system. But fewer have bothered reading his sequels to that book. Like me, for one. I only got around to one of them now.

Star Maker distinguishes itself by grasping at even more grandiose fancies. The narrator, after some point-blank philosophical vacillation and by no particular causality, finds himself inexplicably lifted out of his body and relocated as an astral spirit drifting among the stars someplace, sometime, of indeterminate time and place. Observing first a race of humanoids thenceforth to ever more alien aliens, he follows the fate of the galaxy from barbarism to enlightenment and enlightened barbarism, with humans merely a "mostly harmless" footnote to irrelevance. I certainly would not recommend it for anyone who's not already into this sort of thing, but to fans of thoughtful Science Fiction it's as enlightening a read as Last and First Men itself.

Given how many ideas it throws at the reader it's largely pointless to try summarizing the book, but I'd like to focus on two aspects.

1) Telepathy. Is a dead end. For science fiction.
I've said it once and many times since and it only grows truer with every example: of all superpowers, more than even teleportation or time travel, in a universe ruled by materialist causality, telepathy pre-empts, obsoletes and negates so many other technologies and social practices that it rapidly monopolizes all the action. Every problem begs the solution "why don't you just nuke their brains?"
Stapledon casually mentions technological marvels like hollowed-out planetoids or planets-as-spacecraft, but after the "other men" and their haptic radio, tech grows largely irrelevant to the march of galactic civilization. Races contact each other by telepathy, The Federation conducts business by telepathy, symbiotic races arise by telepathy, wars are fought by telepathy, universal one-ness is sought by telepathy, etc., etc., etc. Unlike with the seventeen post-human races of man in the first novel, which largely focused on the interface of biology with the vicissitudes of various environments, the science drops out of Star Maker's fiction very quickly and we're left with nominally alien space wizards squinting and grunting at each other over the interstellar void.

2) Commune-ism.
Stapledon played up, as a virtue no less, telepathy's inherently creepy capacity for effacing the individual."The Community" is synonymous with universal good, escalating into grinding all persons together into a universal singularity with its highest goal to subsume itself into the multiversal singularity of the titular Maker of Stars itself. In contrast to the overblown swashbuckling Messianic macho space opera heroes which predominated the first half of 20th century SciFi, Star Maker's disdain for individual rights and agency and its emphasis on conjoining carries a distinctly Asiatic flair. Nobody could be blamed for assuming it must've been a much later sequel written during the hippie era of the 1960s when gurus were being jai deva-d left and om. Especially if that nobody is yours truly blameless.

Turns out the author died in 1950, however, and Star Maker itself dates from 1937(!) making Stapledon also one of the shamefully few to have openly denounced fascism during its pre-WWII formative years. While that perceived ideological opposition to fascist cults of personality might explain some of the book's obsession with togetherness, it's mythical aspects remain perplexing... until one remembers the cyclical myopia of human culture. As I've been posthumously flagellating this particular equine in my "humanity" posts over the past few years, America and Western Europe's current obsession with destroying Western individualism and individual freedom via political correctness apes to a disturbingly close degree the facetious moralizing and propriety of late 19th and early 20th century culture. They did indeed boast their own brands of fashionably risque Orientalism back then as well, and Star Maker likely both owes much of its spiritualism directly to Madame Blavatsky's insane ramblings and was at the same time reacting to theosophy's less cuddly offshoot of ariosophy.

... And there it is again, that shiver-inducing glint of recognition, the formulaic march of human self-destruction evident in century-old reflections. Anti-intellectual New Age theosophy leading to messianic revolutionary propaganda. Feel-good Pride and safe Community segue into Action and Discipline.

"Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact, the "Other Fascism," complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.
[...]
Of the horrors of this war, of the destruction of city after city, of the panic-stricken, starving hosts that swarmed into the open country, looting and killing, of the starvation and disease, of the disintegration of the social services, of the emergence of ruthless military dictatorships, of the steady or catastrophic decay of culture and of all decency and gentleness in personal relations, of this there is no need to speak in detail.
Instead, I shall try to account for the finality of the disaster which overtook the Other Men. My own human kind, in similar circumstances, would never, surely, have allowed itself to be so completely overwhelmed. No doubt, we ourselves are faced with the possibility of a scarcely less destructive war; but, whatever the agony that awaits us, we shall almost certainly recover. Foolish we may be, but we always manage to avoid falling into the abyss of downright madness. At the last moment sanity falteringly reasserts itself."

- and so does insanity.

Primordia

"If man is still alive
If robot can survive
They may fiiiiiind "

Futurama's parody of "In the Year 2525"


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Contains some spoilers as to the adventure game Primordia, though I'd kept things vague... except for one stupidly obscure visual clue.
Long story short: worth buying.
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This is a game like if WALL-E went goth.

I've gone light on the adventure games these past few years. The emotional gut-punch of The Cat Lady proved a tough act to follow, and as far as gameplay goes there's only so much old-timey pixel-hunting and non-sequitur puzzle solutions I can stomach. Also, I freely scoff at the lo-res pixelated "neo retro" fad in all its hipster glory. Give me my polygons, damnit! Still, Wadjet Eye has published enough thoughtful, memorable interactivity to warrant some trust, so Primordia's languished on my "next to play" list ever since I finished Gemini Rue and Resonance.

Welcome to Metropol.

You are a pious Man-fearing robot named Horatio Nullbuilt Version 5, an amnesiac robbed of your airship's power core (which also doubles as your own life support) at plasma cannon-point by a meeeeesteeerious and laconic boxy bot. Along with your floating head sidekick, you must travel to the center of your known universe to track down your horse thief, escape your encroaching fate, and, while you're at it, rediscover the fate of your previous incarnation. To anyone who's played the Blackwell games, the two-character setup will be instantly familiar (your floating sidekick even shares the voice of Joey Mallone) but Primordia's writer Mark Yohalem also acknowledged a creative debt to the reanimator and floating head of Planescape: Torment. Years later, his treatment of that theme netted him a spot on the writing team for Torment's intended spiritual successor, Tides of Numenera.

I declared T:ToN an excellent game but unfortunately falling short of the original Torment in one respect: as regards the torment. Though presenting at face value many terrible situations, the context, descriptions and dialogues rarely lend them the visceral nihilism of Sigil's slums. But, one of those occasions when Tides rose to the original's depths was the quest "Endless Horror" and the character Inifere, which if Reddit threads are to be believed was largely Yohalem's baby. While Primordia doesn't try to one-up Torment's bleakness, the writer knew enough not to pull his punches when it came to apocalyptic settings.

Caveat emptor: this is an adventure game, and as such suffers from the genre's usual failings dating back to the 1980s. Some of the puzzles are a bit too abstruse and obtuse and memory-based (e.g. Rex's ownership) with little feedback as to whether the steps you've taken are having a desired effect, or overextended to the point you start asking yourself whether this is all going anywhere (Memorious) and some of your MacGyver utensils tend toward redundancy. I had to backtrack from Goliath to the UNNIIC because when I'd unplugged one of my inventory items for transport I'd forgotten to also unplug its plug separately. Also, when I'm supposed to notice and count lights consisting of a five-pixel plus sign, your pixel-hunting's straying dangerously close to hunting literally singular pixels. Not to mention the polar bears in snowstorms:

No, seriously, even with my mouse pointering right at it can you discern what "robot" you're supposed to have spotted in this image? Hint: it's not the one with the printouts.

But, for the most part it's good. You're handed a few quaint tasks you don't see in every adventure title, like drawing lines to represent electrical wires or slapping sticky ends together to recombine a longer code. Some of the random goofiness can be hit-or-miss (I laughed out loud when "b'sod it" finally clicked for me but merely rolled my eyes at Ever-Faithful's merrie olde Englishe) and some of the verbal references fall a bit askew. Why would a bread-less world know what toasters are? Still, overall Primordia's plot, once you get into it, proves solid scifi and a great deal more complex and memorable than we've grown to expect from interactive fiction, retro or not. The ending deserves special mention, as not only is it multifaceted, with all facets carrying some degree of bittersweet or purely bitter loss, but:

- playing the moral choices by ear I pretty much struck my preferred Chaotic Neutral path through the endgame, and shockingly this yielded the most positive denouement of all of them. Maybe I'm just too accustomed to RPGs which try to badger or outright force you to end every hero's journey by becoming a Lawful Good champion of the status quo... or maybe I just can't reconcile this outcome with the minor detail that Mark Yohalem is a freaking lawyer!

Really, you want a puzzle-solving game? Riddle me that one. I can't wrap my head around it. At least it explains Clarity.

Y'know, I may be a worthless being devoid of any positive qualities, personality strengths, intellectual achievements, professional clout or social relevance, unworthy of the oxygen I'm wasting, but it's nice to know in a century or two's time I'll qualify as a blurb on Wikipedia's front page.

Why no, I was not aware that a colonial fur-trapper's aunt managed to convince her sewing circle to simultaneously light their farts on fire on a full moon in 1805. Thank you. Thank you, so much, for that information.

Hey, what do you call three-headed kangaroos?
Cerberoos.

Strategy TurnsTile

"Turn-based squad behavior in games makes more sense to me if I imagine everyone involved to be incredibly British."
Full Frontal Nerdity



Once upon a time, the Banished village of Nyctimus suffered a fire. Its heroic, brilliant and dashingly handsome mayor Werwolfe sprang into action, directing a team of stalwart mountain-folk to rebuild the ruined houses immediately.

And then they got stuck because they rebuilt a house with their backs to impassable terrain, and that was the end of their story because they starved to death a little while later. Ugh. How can you be "educated" and still not find your way out of that situation, Tellen? But hey, at least they died happy. No, really, five happiness stars. Wow. That is some new kind of stupid. Now, of course the real issue is that some of the workers finished construction while others were on the other side, and masoned them in faster than you can say "Amontillado" but visually you also would not have guessed anyone can even become stuck on that wide riverbank. It would be nice to see the tiles which obviously underlay the terrain.

I'm griping about this now after struggling through Pathfinder: Kingmaker's endgame, which was crammed full of repetitive fights against obviously cut and pasted groups of enemies to artificially inflate its length. It does too good a job of aping (in both good and bad points) the old DnD adaptations like Neverwinter Nights and the Infinity Engine titles, cRPGs' answer to stop-motion animation. "Real-time" anything was a point of pride back in 1998, so Baldur's Gate and its offshoots featured real-time combat... which you had to pause every second to order another attack. Real-time combat works fine for a simplified system like The Elder Scrolls: one weapon, two spells, let's rock! Yet even there it was necessary to implement pausing to switch said weapons and spells, even for a single character. When it comes to party-based single-player RPGs, it becomes obvious that you'll spend most of your campaign paused. When every single game that's copied the Baldur's Gate formula keeps running into the same tedium, isn't it about time to admit that "real-time" adds nothing to the recipe except inexact frustration?

The problem is that RPGs in the DnD tradition encompass not only the "feels" of narrative immersion but tactical and strategic planning. Strategy is not a dreamy release. It's wide-eyed, precise, predictive and calculating. Random number generation inserts some unpredictability, but even there it's important to know where the unpredictability comes from. Games have rules, and imprecision in what should be a constant feels like being deliberately cheated. I can handle not knowing what trade boat will pass through my town next (because I'm not supposed to know) but villagers in Banished usually know better than to get stuck on terrain, and to see that steadfast rule broken is both injurious and insulting. I'm supposed to be defeated by my own poor decision-making, not by the interface. For RPGs which promise not only a strategic but a tactical element, knowing exactly when and where something is happening becomes paramount. I've lost quite a few fights in Kingmaker for holding my finger off the PAUSE button just a second too long.

I've lost even more for mistakenly thinking my character was out of range of a melee attack or for thinking I was behind cover when I wasn't. And while such games usually do offer some user interface helper features, they simply can't compensate for the inherent imprecision of their terrain. Take Divinity: Original Sin 2, which was thankfully turn-based but ran into constant problems with its range calculations.

The demon-bat I'm shooting there refused to follow me across the bridge, presumably to prevent players from exploiting its patrol algorithm to split enemy groups. Of course, in more than one fight like this, it was quite possible to exploit the anti-exploit feature itself to arrow the damn thing to death while it refuses to chase me, all because that ravine was a pixel or two too narrow. Rivers again. More trouble than they're worth, I tell you. Building the map out of tiles could've solved that, plus any number of more frustrating situations where you end up misguesstimating unlisted distances.

Here's M.A.X.

Mechanized Assault and Xploration was (despite the stupid name) an exemplary strategy game from Interplay's sunset years, followed by a best forgotten sequel which tried (and failed miserably) to jump on the Dune 2 / Warcraft 2 RTS bandwagon. The original was turn-based and tile-based, dealing in small integer values when it came to everything from unit stats to resources. Its greatest challenge was arguably constructing a contiguous infrastructure with a continuous defense, as the AI had an uncanny knack for exploiting even a single-tile unguarded corridor or cutting off your reinforcements. Hence the convenient bank of map overlay toggles on the left of the screen. Not in the options menu. Information at your fingertips, not in your backpack. Nonetheless estimating radii diagonally still proved a crap-shoot. That's probably why, two decades later, another square tile strategy game, Into the Breach, simply doesn't *do* diagonals, approximating such moves instead by letting your units move and fire separately. Suck on that, Pythagoras.


A hexagonal grid offers smoother, more intuitive turning and circling

- though it should be noted a hex grid doesn't guarantee good strategic balance. The Heroes of Might and Magic series, despite their hex appeal, sacrificed it in endless ways in the interest of providing overpowered yet thematically coherent gameplay options (*cough-cough* VampireLords *cough*) Adopting any actual theme beyond the abstractions of Chess or Go will inevitably entail such sacrifices of function to form. Nevertheless, the pattern is obvious: strategy means discrete tiles and turn-taking, and in fact the first more or less implies the second. Even hopscotch is turn-based!

It's safe to say the Real-Time Strategybutton-mashing genre has not stood the test of time. Starcraft's many copycats from the early 2000s have largely drifted out of memory and Starcraft 2 is by all accounts being kept on life support by a narrow clique of "competitive" powergamers while Civilization's less trendy recipe has retained about the popularity it always had and Master of Orion styled 4X has been making a comeback. As regards roleplaying computer games, let's just make 3 points:

1) Nobody salivates at hearing the phrase "real-time" anymore. It was more of a technological than a stylistic achievement to begin with, a way to push the envelope back in the late '90s, and the pulse-pounding zerg clusterfuck is an artifact of that era. Looking at a hybrid like Spellforce renders the realization doubly glaring, as both its genres suffer from the same undue time pressure. Strategy means turns and tiles and precise execution.

2) For all the immersive, Hollywood envious, amateur theater appeal of role-playing games, let's remember they began as strategy wargames. Other, single-character genres, like survival horror or stealth-based games, are more apt to incorporate the time element smoothly. The option-rich, multi-unit setup was a board game to begin with and still functions best on a board with discrete distances and timing. The central question of an RPG is not how to add strategic value to good/evil 20-level wizard/fighter/thief archetypes, but how to add moral and stylistic roleplaying choices to chess.

3) It's not like you can't build atmosphere in a turn-based, tile-based combat system, as InXile's RPGs (referenced in the Full Frontal Nerdity comic linked up top) readily demonstrate. I specifically chose M.A.X. as my strategy game example because it so regularly gets described as "immersive" or "atmospheric" due to its interface, music, combat sounds, etc. without the need for constantly streaming action-action-action. Alpha Centauri might make an even better example for all the times it's been described as "playing a novel." In fact, a better alternative to the stop-motion claymation of Baldur's Gate was developed at about the same time by some of the same people: let players run around town in real-time and hide the grid while adventuring, but enforce turns and tiles when combat starts. And, for the life of me, I can't imagine any sane analyst claiming that Fallout lacked immersion, no matter how British its combat sequence.

Feel Good, Inc.

"So let's pray for something
To feel good in the morning"

Garbage - Parade
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"I'm gonna make a change
It's gonna feel real good!
Shamone!" [sic]

Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror
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"Well, you know, a protest makes sense if it's part of an ongoing activity. A protest which is just of the kind that unfortunately we have too many of -- "I'm gonna out and protest and then I'll go back home and go back to my ordinary life" -- that's a kind of a feel-good protest. [...] So if protests are part of an active, ongoing engagement, they can be valuable. [...] Otherwise it's kind of like... I'll feel good, I'll see my friends, you know."

Noam Chomsky, answering a question after a 2010 speech on Haiti (minute 1:17:30 in this video)

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"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation?"

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
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"Rinse out the ugly and purge every demon
A small step for progress, a leap on a mine
The smoke never settles where everything's even
A poke in the eye, the equation is nil

Violence for inner peace
Bombing for therapy
Terror is everything you need"

KMFDM - Rubicon

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In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut imagined a society whose religion and customs are officially being repressed by a brutal dictatorship. A chapter or two later (I hope I'm not spoiling too much) it turns out the oppression is a fabrication. The entire populace practices its religion in modest open secrecy, no-one is actually being punished for it and the leader himself is a devotee. The sham serves them well, however, in promoting unity, as railing against their nominal common enemy (da gummint) allows commoners to set aside their differences and live in more or less harmonious solidarity. If Wikipedia's to be believed, Vonnegut supposedly earned himself a Master's degree in anthropology for so adroitly illustrating the all too human truism that tribal loyalties are defined by an in-group / out-group dichotomy. From the floor of any social club, the world is easily divided into the saved and the damned, the righteous and the fiends out there, somewhere, just waiting to pounce.

In the first and second worlds, two generations starting with WWII grew up wiretapping and informing on each other as decadent capitalist subversives or godless communist subversives. But scapegoating for solidarity in the form of witch hunts long predates national governments and is not likely to abate in the near future. In America in the early 2000s, the success of the "War on Terror" rhetoric in continuing the paranoid climate of the Cold War and its pretext for powermongering did not go unnoticed by social activists. Left-wing populists took their cue from both pro-war propaganda and conspiracy theorists: instead of addressing real or wide-ranging issues, any demagogue can cultivate a power base by fencing off some arbitrary sub-grouping of rabble and feeding their sense of moral entitlement over some nominal "other" out there who has sinned against the faithful.

It was observed that social activism makes people feel good. It allows them to blame their problems on their neighbours, hold themselves up as morally superior and provides them with safe, designated acceptable targets for their aggression. In other words it fills the same psychological role as religious fundamentalism or patriotism or any of the other types of jingoism of previous centuries. On an individual level, this industry of entitlement, paranoia and moral outrage can provide an existential justification to the inchoate masses of simian superfluity who might otherwise need to face their own irrelevance. But as a bulwark against existential despair, modern social activism requires a permanence and absolutism which belies the goal-driven nature of old-school socially progressive group action. The more memorable social movements used to have a specific goal: the end of a war or deposing a dictator or the formation of a nation-state or abolishing the legal basis of racial segregation.

Modern social activism exists to provide good feels for its base and sinecures for its rabblerousers, so it cannot risk defining goals which might accidentally be met. Just as the "war on terror" neglected to define what exactly this "terror" is or when it might be declared defeated, social justice warriors rail against "institutionalized" evils which might be claimed, at any time and for any reason, to be embodied in any target of opportunity. Which suits the actual evils of the world just fine. It's called divide and conquer. Blacks against whites, women against men, gays against straights, Manchester United against Real Madrid, and the overtime never ends, baby!

Women of the world! Your oppressor isn't the trust fund bitch in full Prada epic raid gear and a legendary Learjet mount to whom goes three quarters of the value of your grinding. It's your male coworker who might've made an extra four cents on the dollar last paycheck for proving himself a more obsessive wage slave. Ignore the investors bleeding you dry and attack your conveniently hate-able and visible designated enemy. Oh, but don't forget to also take your rage out on your husband for not making an extra four cents on the dollar next month.

Paradoxically escaping the possibility of ever being upset and stirred by being permanently upset and stirred. Active, ongoing engagement with all the least relevant targets. Weeding out the subversives. Don't it keep you moving? Don't it give you fun? Feels good, don't it?