Good Morning, Dave. Open the Airlock, Dave.

The third part of Josh Forman’s 3 part series on gamasutra about storytelling techniques inspired this post, although it’s not required reading. Still, it might help to read his ideas about medium before reading this. Here’s a link.

Anyway, to point:

Games are built on abstractions, both from the design standpoint and the player standpoint. There’s no point in “real life” where pressing X makes a person perform a jump, or a kick, or whatever. It’s an abstraction. Game designers provide a world where players connect the relationship between pressing X and jumping, and players accept that in order make their avatar jump they have to press X.

However, button input is inherently disconnected and artificial – it’s abstracted from what “really” performing that action would take. An action which might have many steps in the real world (brewing a potion, hijacking a car, performing a spinning slash, commanding an army to move, etc.) is abstracted to a single step for two reasons: adding much more development time to decrease the abstraction isn’t generally worth it for the player’s enjoyment, but also because performing multiple in-game actions takes awhile for players without added benefit.

To draw out some of the meat of this distinction, let’s talk about Heavy Rain, because Heavy Rain is a game that attempts to give players less abstraction. Players must move the controller in 3D space, simulate actions with repetitive motion (if the “real-life” version of that action requires something similar), and perform multiple steps on the route to one action. The game even supports the Playstation Move controller, which allows for less button pressing and more movement. However, even with that said: the control scheme is still VERY abstract. Shaking a controller to dry hair is more like drying hair than pressing a button, but still a long way from the actual experience. Despite strides forward by the Heavy Rain team, there is still a huge level of abstraction in the controls.

The first few hours of Heavy Rain, which you can argue are necessary from an “immersive experience” standpoint, are absolutely awful from a game standpoint. They are filled with tedious and mind-numbing actions. This isn’t, as you’d think, only due to the fact that the character is performing actions which are even boring in real life: showering, setting the table, etc. That’s certainly part of it, but the more important part is this: most of the reason these actions in the game are tedious is that many actions in the game require more skill and effort in the game than they require in real-life.

Abstraction provides us with a way to make players more skilled, faster, stronger, and better than they are in real life. A person cannot lift a car in real life, but a player can press X to lift a car in a game.

Pressing a button and shaking a controller to collect a towel and dry your hair isn’t necessarily any more interesting, from a player’s perspective, than simply pressing one button to perform the whole sequence. Pressing a button and shaking a controller is still so unlike the actual actions (despite being more like them than just pressing a button) that the additional layer of “realism” adds nothing. The control scheme in Heavy Rain too complex considering the amount of abstraction the interface is burdened with. I can set a table in real life faster than I can set on in the game, simply because the control scheme is still abstracted enough that it cannot be a simulation, which is the intent. Thus, the extra actions add more abstraction without adding the sensation of more interaction.

This isn’t the fault of Heavy Rain, but a limitation of plastic controllers and buttons.

However, there is still a lesson to draw from this, too. Adding more actions still does, at least in some fashion, somewhat decrease abstraction, even if the level of abstraction is still high. Indeed, in order to make more “immersive” and “realistic” games, we must add more representative actions to everything the player must do. The further we move from abstraction, the closer we move to direct simulation, rather than abstracted simulation. However, there are several very large problems with adding more steps to in-game actions in order to decrease abstraction:

The first and most pressing issue is the sheer number of actions a player must be taught in order to replicate the number of steps needed to perform almost any task with limited abstraction. Think about it. In real life doing anything as simple as taking a shower comes with hundreds of tiny actions. Not only would it be unfeasible to teach players an abstracted control scheme and method for each one of these actions (press X to grab the shampoo, Press Y to open the cap, Press X+Y to flip the bottle, Press X and Down Arrow multiple times to shake the bottle) the standard interfaces we use today to play games do not support it. Heavy Rain gets around this issue by using a “quick time event” system and context sensitive commands, but this still makes each short action sequence a linear enterprise, even if the game provides large “set piece” choices. A true immersive experience would allow players to choose the order of all the tiny actions, which means knowing the controls for every single one of those tiny actions. This just isn’t feasible from a learning curve standpoint.

But even beyond the large huge hurdle that the control scheme would need to be complex enough, in order to differentiate between all those actions, that there is almost no chance of a player performing those actions in the correct order in anything even close to real time. If you must teach the player even fifty commands the player will take a very long time to gain fluency with those commands. That’s why we use abstraction in games in the first place.

What does this mean if we’d like to add more actions and continue to remove abstraction? It means that a different controlling interface is needed. The control interface must support many more action combinations than today’s present interfaces, but also must be intuitive and natural enough to allow players to acquire the skills with the controlling interface quickly and in almost real time. There is only one control interface I know of that allows these things: the human body.

Our current level of technology is such that the only way for developers and players to perform actions in the game is through a high level of abstraction, since button and even touch control schemes are so distant from actual experience. Also, due to the learning limitations of our current control schemes (the player must learn that X makes his avatar jump and O makes his avatar shoot), there is a limit to the number of actions a player can learn and utilize in any amount of time.

In order to lessen the amount of abstraction, we need to increase the number of actions a player can perform in a small amount of time. We also need that performance to mimic the “realistic” performance of that action as closely as possible. Finally, we need a control scheme that allows players to perform actions intuitively even though they may have never played the game before. Without that intuitive performance there is no feasible way of players learning and utilizing the actions they must perform in a reasonable length of time.

This is why “body” control systems like the Kinect, the Move, and the Wii are the future, even for the hardcore gamer. To most hardcore gamers these control schemes are currently jokes, but only because the technology is lacking. Currently even the most sensitive “body” controller in the consumer market are laggy, insensitive, inaccurate, and don’t have the fine recognition to differentiate between nuanced movements. Currently, controllers allow for more accurate actions per second, even though pressing buttons is a higher level of abstraction than using one’s body for movements. However, the more accurate body controllers get and the more developers who learn to use them to create new experiences, the chance for a game experience with less abstraction will be irresistible even for hardcore gamers.

Until we have full body controls and full-body tactile feedback for our games, games will always rely on some systems of abstraction. However, until we have skin suits, Kinect Gen23, brainjacks, or anything else that allows us to minimize abstraction, we can still minimize abstraction with good game design choices:

Eliminate Any of Loss of Player Control – Anything that takes control from the player adds more abstraction to the game should be eliminated. When in real life do you watch cut scenes? When do you stop between rooms to load the next area? Never, that’s when. Game worlds should be seamless and never restrain the player with mechanics. Any time the player has to wait or only watch the game is unacceptable.

Make Players Do Things – If you want your player to perform an action in the game, make the player do it with several steps. Cooking Mama, Majicka, Flight Sims – these games all make players perform steps to create an outcome, rather than relying on single-button abstractions.

Create Open, Realistic Worlds – This one is pretty self explanatory. There’s a reason that Western RPGs are beating JRPGs and it’s because a linear hallway simulator (FF13, ugh!) adds much more abstraction to a game than an open world.

Use Intuitive Controls – Apple touch devices are lauded because they are intuitive. Or, to put it the way a really smart guy put it: The interface fundamentally determines the behavior.  (Link to that smart guy) If you want players to quickly learn controls, make the controls mimic what they would intuitively do as much as possible.

Keep Pushing Movement Controllers Forward – The Move, the Kinect, and the Wii aren’t good enough. Make better, more accurate, and more immersive control schemes.

Develop More Tactile Feedback and Immersion – Rumble controllers are the only mainstream tactile feedback created since the creation of the mouse, the button, the controller, and the switch. Well, Rock Band added some feedback with things like the drums and that DJ device, I suppose, but those are specific to a specific genre of games that involves the abstraction of an activity that is already an abstraction: playing music. Also, sure, there’s the Novint Falcon, but that’s hardly mainstream. We need more tactile feedback to remove abstraction. Rumble, sensation, variant surfaces, haptic stuff, and whatever else.

Aside from that – there needs to be more immersion in audio and video. 3D stuff is one step that’s happening, but where is the mainstream version of the wrap-around-your-head video device? Why are we making larger and larger televisions when we should be making personal screens that fully immerse players? Screens that allow users to have outside peripheral vision are woefully outdated. Can’t we make flexible OLED screens now? Didn’t I read that somewhere? What’s the holdup?

So – that’s what I’ve got so far. Other ideas to minimize abstraction?

The Expendables is fucking awesome. I was very apprehensive walking into the theater; I knew the stakes were high and the outcome could be disastrous if the film took itself too seriously, but I can now attest it delivers on every promise it made to its audience.  It proves to us that the 1980s action movie essence is alive and well in twenty-first century America. The Expendables has everything I could ever want—hilarious one-liners, over-the-top action scenes, complete disregard for human life, ignorance and simplification of exotic cultures, and unabashed, flaming homoeroticism.

For 103 minutes, my eyes were wide, my jaw was slack, and my erection was zipper-straining. I was so excited I forgot about the hooch-filled flask that I customarily sneak into public theaters.  That’s right, I was so excited, I FORGOT TO DRINK.  I was taken back to my childhood, when muscle flexing by big sweaty Adonises was the only thing that could save us from two bit banana republic baddies and a Republican administration was bankrupting the country and prostituting our collective dignity under the guise of “Morning in America.” This was a time when hardworking Americans spent their devaluing dollars on action films that by and large subscribed to a few core conservative principles.  The Expendables carries this same torch, and comfortably fits up there with the best of hypermacho cock-fests of the 80s.

Most of the attention for this movie centers on how they crammed nearly every single major action star and muscle-bound badass of the last quarter century into a single movie.  I’m sure you’ve already heard the roll call, but it merits repeating: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts UFC’s Randy Couture, NFL’s Terry Crews, WWF’s Steve Austin, David Zayas (from Dexter and Oz), and a few more UFC fighters.  And this is a fraction of the original line-up. Turns out Steven Segal turned down a role because he has issues with one of the producers, Van Damme didn’t want to be in it just for the sake of being in it and Wesley Snipes had the Terry Crews role, but had to decline it because he’s going to jail.

I told my father, who shares my love for mid-80s big-screen fascism, about this impressive cast list and he asked “Wow, what’s it about?” and I could only respond “I don’t care!”  As I’ve said before, we’re not talking about a plot-driven movie, here.

For anyone who intends to pay more attention than I did, the details include something about a professional team of mercenaries called “The Expendables” who have to save some fictional Central American country from some two-peso generalissimo who turned on his CIA masters and decided he hates Yanks more than he loves butchering his own people.  Even this hearkens back to the 1980s, when the CIA and American government propped up and armed thuggish dictators, guerillas and death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala who murdered tens of thousands. But fuck that boring history shit; let’s talk about ‘splosions!

It was impossible to keep a tally, but in this movie, at least five hundred people are shot, stabbed, beaten, bludgeoned, strangled and exploded. Stallone, who has come back to directing in recent years, has really established himself and clearly knows how to give the audience what they want, and what they want is blood by the barrel.  This was the strategy that worked so well for him in Rambo IV, wherein Stallone resurrected a long-obsolete and tired character in order to give us one of the best body counts–in both quality and quantity–in film history. Wanton violence is Stallone’s trade and he’s got a skill for depicting it.  In The Expendables, Jason Statham holds a guy while Jet Li breaks his neck and his head nearly comes off.  While being shot at during a highspeed chase, Dolph stomps a man’s face into the dashboard of a car killing him and leaving bootprints. “INSECT!” Dolph yells. In one of my favorite scenes, Stallone overflies a pier two football fields-wide and dumps jet fuel on three dozen human beings while Statham ignites a flare, instantly liquefying everyone that wasn’t given a line of dialogue. Fucking great.

Speaking of dialogue, The Expendables has some amazing one-liners—Statham and Stallone go undercover on the exotic island of Vilena to plan their eventual mission.  When the customs guy asks them their business, they flex twenty-inch biceps and reply “We’re ornithologists” with straight faces. Unintentional maybe, but I thought it was hilarious.  Statham’s pocket starts buzzing during a Mexican standoff: “Getting’ a text,” he says before shooting five people. Awesome. Then there’s Dolph again, who screams “I’m firing a warning shot!” before shooting a man’s torso off.  Terry Crews saves his partners’ butts by mowing down a dozen men and he shouts to his buddies “you better remember this shit at Christmas!”

Most of the great lines, however, are reserved for Eric Roberts, who has apparently decided to become one of the all time go-to heavies in movies over the last ten years. This time he’s a rogue CIA agent who plays great lines off of Zayas’s evil General Garza:

General: “Some things just aren’t worth the money.
Roberts (matter-of-factly): “Yes they are.”

General: “We don’t kill family!”
Roberts: “Come to my house on Thanksgiving.”

General, talking to a man he’s accusing of stealing from him: “How can I know you are telling the truth if I can’t see inside you?”
Roberts walks in, shoots the man in the head: “I can see inside him, and all I see is LIES!”

Great stuff.

Anyone who says that Stallone and the rest are too old clearly hasn’t seen Rambo IV, where he proves that social security checks won’t stop him from tearing out the jugular of someone half his age.  I mean, Stallone is 64 fucking years old and look at him on the set of The Expendables:

Fucking stacked.

For a long time I wondered how 80s action movies could be so homoerotic and somehow so oblivious at the same time.  But after seeing The Expendables, I said, “Thank God they finally get it.” Stallone clearly knows how gay this stuff really is.  There’s no way he directed and edited an this entire film without getting it.  To start with, throughout the film, the Expendables keep talking to each other about their “relationship” and Dolph even terms their fights “Lover’s Quarrels.” Not enough? How about the fact they all hang out at a bar called Tool’s.

Need more? Mickey Rourke plays a former “Expendable” who has retired, saying “I don’t want to die in the mud, I want to die next to a woman,” which is probably the least stupid thing I’ve ever heard anyone say in an action film, but Stallone looks visibly disgusted at the idea.  Rourke talks a lot about getting pussy, but we all know he’s still fighting the beast inside. Take the scene where Stallone shows up at Rourke’s place while Rourke is on a date.  Instead of telling Stallone to fuck off so he get laid, he sends the girl away, and Stallone whips off his shirt and Rourke gets on top of him and gives him a tattoo. Statham walks in and the go on about how sexy he’d look with another tattoo and how women are unreliable.  Remember, Rourke is doing all this instead of entertaining a promiscuous (albeit trashy) woman upstairs.

I can keep going: Stallone doesn’t even bother to kiss the babe at the end of the film when he clearly has the opportunity. When Jet Li mentions he has a son, every other guy in the room is surprised, because they never expected him to have actually had sex with a woman. Jason Statham loves to shoves his knife (read: penis) into men and does it about 200 times, a little gratuitous even for my tastes.  Overall this movie probably has more penetration of the flesh than an average porno, and it’s all man-on-man.  As the Pièce de résistance, Jason Statham confronts a team of sweaty, semi-nude men on a basketball court.  He puts his hands all over them, kicks the shit out of them and then pulls out a knife, and stabs their basketball.  His line?—“Next time I’ll deflate all of your balls!” Um, yeah, into his mouth, maybe.  Seriously, how in any conceivable universe is that not gay? There’s no way Stallone is not trying to tell us something here.  I’d also like to say that while cruising the IMDB chat boards, I came across a topic titled “Name a movie gayer than Expendables” with the first post simply reading “I DARE YOU!”

But it’s more than that hypocritical homophobia, though, that shows how far Stallone has come—it’s the little things. Remember Eric Roberts is a U.S. Government agent who was in charge of sedating and controlling Latin American countries. His character’s name is James Monroe.  Why is this funny?  James Monroe, the fifth president, is best known for establishing the Monroe Doctrine, a piece of policy basically saying the United States has exclusive rights to fuck with any country it wants in the Western Hemisphere. Back in the 80s this kind of thinking led to death squads and Iran-Contra—anyway the name is a subtle but revealing joke.

Perhaps the most layered scene, however, is when Bruce Willis calls up rival mercenaries Schwarzenegger and Stallone to talk business about a job.  Willis basically calls them both gay and asks if they suck each others’ dicks.  Schwarzenegger and Stallone don’t deny it and share a meaningful glance. After more playful banter, Schwarzenegger essentially calls Stallone a retard and walks off.  “What’s the fuck’s his problem?” asks Willis.  “He wants to be president,” quips Stallone.  Basically this is how I imagine the last Planet Hollywood shareholders meeting went.

Is this movie stupid? Without a doubt (in one scene, Statham is undercover in a hostile foreign country with army guys crawling all over, he sees a woman and yells “Hey, are you our contact?!” across a public bar).  But Stallone knows just how stupid it should be.  Is this the best time I’ve had in a movie theater in months?  FUCK YES!

Braaaaiiiinnnns!

Trends in popular literature come and go all the time, but ever since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, people have had a fascination with the walking dead that has only grown as time has gone on. The funny thing is now that so much zombie media has been produced over the years many fans become defensive about what view of zombies are the “best.” Is it the slow, shambling, glassy-eyed zombies of early Romero fame, or the new generation of vicious, sprinting, diseased sort-of-undead horrors common to the newer fictional treatments of the walking dead? I have seen rather heated debates in real life and online on this very topic, but very few people know much about historical zombie lore and how influences from many cultures have created the horror icons that we know today.

As an addendum, I am also personally fascinated by the concept of “zombie apocalypse.” It’s not just the end of the world as we know it – it also comes with flesh-eating zombies! It is its own sub-genre though, with its own conventions and expectations, and I have often wondered what makes a good zombie apocalypse story. The goal of my article here is two-fold: one, to offer a history of zombies in world lore and how it pertains to the modern zombie vogue; and two, to pose the question of “what makes a good zombie story?”

A Feral Ghoul from Fallout 3 (Bethesda Games)

I started thinking about the whole zombie apoc thing a while ago, while playing Fallout 3, watching Zombieland, and then very recently watching a new anime called High School of the Dead. In each case we have zombies – Fallout has always had them, the Ghouls, who in Fallout 3 came in two flavors: Sentient, sane, but horribly mutated and radioactively charred folks perfectly satisfied with not eating your liver while you watch, and then there are the Feral Ghouls. They look like classical zombies, they charge at you at speed, and they do like to snack on peoples’ internal organs with mindless glee. They didn’t cause the apocalypse, though, but were instead by-products of all-consuming nuclear holocaust. Zombieland was a comedic treatment of the genre, spoofing on a wide-range of zombie-movie lore, sort of a film version of the “Zombie Survival Guide.” Having such a movie around, and the other similar spoof-treatments the genre gets, lets you know just how ingrained zombie lore is in our society. And then I saw High School of the Dead. It’s like Ikki Tousen meets Night of the Living Dead. Weird stuff. Now, the walking dead have been used in Japanese media before, but given the tenor of H.O.T.D (as it is known in common parlance) I remarked on just how western the concept of the modern zombie is, despite the fact that zombie lore is definitely non-Euro-American in origin. We can thank George Romero for that, taking a concept originally drawn from Voodoo (Vodoun) beliefs and Middle Eastern legends and altering it to specifically strike at something primal and fearful in human nature.

Historically the zombi of Voodoo myth was drawn from a much older Congolese word, nzambi, which refers to the spirit of a person who died. In Voodoo it refers to a trapped spirit, held in the body of the dead by a bokor (sorcerer, one who deals with the petro, or negative, aspects of the loa). The bokor uses a substance called “zombie powder,” made from a mixture of highly toxic elements, including puffer fish, toxic plants, tree frog skins, and the ashes of a human corpse, among other things. They then control the zombie with a thing called a “zombie’s cucumber,” a plant that has been filled and treated with a dozen or more narcotic, alkaloid substances such as solanine. Voudonistas believe the zombie is a true animated corpse, while others who have studied the lore believe these would-be walking corpses are actually still living people whose minds have been so corrupted by the zombie powder that they have simply lost conscious function. Voodoo zombies are not flesh-eating monsters, but were instead used as slave labor according to legends. In fact, the very concept of flesh-eating undead horrors is not a western concept at all. Few cultures have had any concept of the corporeal dead, but thousands upon thousands of myths concerning the incorporeal dead (ghosts, specters, poltergeists, etc) abound. The few myths of corporeal undead come from spiritual sources, such as the draugr of Norse myth, the ch’ing shih and k’uei of Chinese myth, and the zalozhniy of Russian folklore, all creatures dishonored or forgotten at the time of death and either filled with rage or compelled by evil spirits to do the living harm. The modern zombie concept is instead a marriage of the original zombi myth and the traditions of the Indian subcontinent and Middle East, where creatures such as the Hindu bhuta and the Arabic ghul (ghoul) originated. The bhuta was an unhallowed corpse possessed by a rakshasa and sent to savage the living. Meanwhile, the ghul (literally “demon” in Arabic) was not actually dead, but was a jinn, sired by Iblis/Shaytan (the Devil of Muslim belief) that would feed on human corpses, as well as lure the living far from help before slaying them and consuming them, possibly also stealing their material wealth. They were shapeshifters, often appearing as hyenas, rather than the slavering, pale-skinned humanoid monsters of Dungeons and Dragons fame, or the modern flesh-eating zombies. The early film White Zombie was the first to deal directly with the original zombie myth, but has since been superseded by the Romero-zombies and their successors.

28 Days Later

Why is that, though? The greatest reason in my mind is because each myth plays on different fears. Vodounistas for instance are not so much afraid of zombies as they are of becoming zombies. Remember that these are a people intimately familiar with the concept of slavery and loss of free will on a deeply cultural level. Haiti was born from slave revolt, the only nation to be created as such, and so the fear of loss of free will has to be terrifying even more so for them given their history. Certainly we non-Haitians can also understand that fear, but when George Romero made his zombies rise seemingly of their own accord and hunt and devour the living, it did something else for us that went beyond the rational fear of loss of free will. We, as a species, have worked damned hard to be on the top of the food chain, and if anything scares a human it is being hunted by something that wants to eat you. The fear is compounded when the thing that wants to eat you was once like you – cannibals evoke this sense of fear, for instance. Add to that the sense of otherness produced by something that should not be possible (a corpse that moves on its own) and you have a terror trifecta that goes right to the hind brain and rattles the heebie-geebie sensor to the point of overload.

As a society, though, we quickly become used to such things and after a while the slow, shambling zombies of the original Night of the Living Dead were just not “scary” enough for us. They were too easy to kill, even in numbers, and you could just whack them with a stick and kill them, as long as you didn’t become overwhelmed. Shaun of the Dead made light of this film-fact particularly well, and games like Dungeons and Dragons just treat zombies like common fodder for sword-slinging adventurers. So what else scares us? Shortening our reaction times for one. The fast-zombie, introduced in the remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead brought us the new zombie breed, and it has quickly become the preferred zombie-type among many. Modern zombies are also running into the present obsession with pseudo-scientific reasoning. Before the zombies were just there – zombies, boom, at your brains. But what made them rise? It was never defined in the early films, but sources such as exotic radiation, aliens, magic, demons, or disease are the most common sources. Disease is an especially common animating factor now, rather than the radiation fears of the 50’s and 60’s when the potential cloud of nuclear war hung over the world at the time. Disease, likewise, speaks to deeply rooted human fears, and is something we can more readily accept animating corpses than radiation or something even more esoteric. 28 Days Later brought such a change, with the zombies not even being properly dead, but instead infected to the point where their rage-response controls were so damaged that they became raving psychotics. However, they needed to eat, but couldn’t, and so their lifespans were very short. In all these cases, though, the zombies did not just kill and eat us; we could become them – very easily, too. Soon fan conflicts began to arise as to which presentation of zombies is the best.

High-School of the Dead/Gakuen-Mokushiroku

Personally, all of these variants can exist, but they all have to speak to what we fear now to be effective. Zombies have become a classic horror story device, and they reflect what is happening to us in the here and now. Good uses of zombies, like George Romero’s stories, use them as a means of expressing societal issues, while other stories focus on the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse and what happens to mankind when the dust clears. Zombie chic has coincided with the new wave of apocalypse fears as we near the end of the Mayan calendar and another fistful of doomsday prophecies, and we wonder if such a ridiculous thing were to happen, what would people do? The conflict and survival in such a case is a much smaller part of the story than what happens afterwards. Will people rise above the horror and make a better world, or will we be consumed by our own fears and finally destroy the last vestiges of our kind? Even in post-apoc stories that do don’t have zombies many of these same fears are tackled, such as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. There the very real threat lies in cannibalistic raiders, surviving on the flesh of their fellow man since animal life also took a devastating hit in the aftermath of the global holocaust. In zombie apoc stories though, the added threat of fighting an implacable, remorseless, once-human foe that outnumbers you hundreds to one and that can wrest from you your very identity and turn you on your former friends hits even deeper fears. The fear of the “other” combines with the fear of powerlessness, and we seek to answer the question of “how can we survive this with our humanity in check?”

So there’s my question to all of you out there: What makes a good zombie story or post-apocalyptic tale, and what makes others flop? What are some examples of zombie stories you like, and what about them makes you enjoy them? Include the humorous with the serious by all means, since it’s all connected. I’d love to hear what you all think. Catch you all later, then.

Everyone on the net is trying to explain why Wave didn’t take off. I can’t speak for everyone (just the trees – you can call me the Lorax), but I can tell you why I tried Wave and didn’t like it, or at least, didn’t find it useful. I’m trying my best to not fill this article with wave-based puns, but no promises. One or two might roll in. Ack!

Anyway, the reason Wave wasn’t as popular as it should have been is twofold: one, it didn’t have much user adoption and it was a closed system, so you could really only talk to people in Wave who were using Wave. If you’d been able to link the functionality with other systems – say, if you could email a Wave, text message a Wave, or integrate other communication techs that people already use, users would have been more likely to try it out.

Secondly, and this is by far the most important thing, Google Wave had terrible mobile support. I want to explain why this matters so much:

I was in college before I got high-speed internet, but once I did, I had my favorite communication technology, instant messaging (AOL’s IM client) running 24×7. So did all my friends. It functioned as a real-time chat client, an answering machine, and a way to tell who was still awake playing counter-strike at 3AM and might want to go grab some food at the all-night diner. It was great.

But then mobile phones and text messaging took off. Text messaging, in the early days, was pretty expensive, but it had one major advantage over instant messaging – you could get texts anywhere, all the time. You didn’t have to be sitting at your computer.

We were all sitting at our computers all the time during college, but once we graduated we got jobs sitting at a computer all day, so we didn’t want to do it at home, too. This made text messaging even stronger. Then came facebook and gchat, which brought in chat without client-installed software, and instant messaging is mostly dead. People still use it, but not nearly to the extent that we did when it was all we had.

Smartphones sealed the deal. Text messaging, facebook messaging, email, voice, data – all these things can be accessed on the fly, anywhere, anytime. Wave died because its mobile support was limited, cumbersome, and in some cases, not really supported. Wave wanted a return to sitting at the computer to communicate, like in the old instant messaging days, and that’s never going to happen.

There is a possibility that Wave would have succeeded if it had been built from the ground up as a mobile technology with a web-based option, instead of the other way around. The only way a new communication medium could possibly live up to all the hype Wave received is if the technology was focused on mobile support as its most important goal.

I don’t want to sit at my computer anymore to communicate and no one else does, either.

(Man, I need an awesome sign-off line. I always feel the urge to say, “And that’s the Word” at the end of these posts. But that’s just rank plagiarism. Anyone have any ideas?)

Now, WoW gets a lot of bad press for being an addictive tinksink, and while that may be true, there are some worthwhile skills there to be learned as long as the game is played with moderation. I don’t play WoW anymore, but I did play the game for about four years, off and on. The Yahoo post didn’t cover everything I think feel like I there is to be learned from WoW – there’s a few things it missed. So here we go:

Persistence

MMORPGs in general, and WoW in particular, are designed to keep you playing for long periods. Their revenue model is subscription based, so the longer they can keep you playing, the more money they make. While this may seem nefarious at first (and it certainly can be, if not kept in check), after months and years spent playing working toward in-game rewards, I found it much easier to focus and work singularly on creative projects. I don’t know if I’d have completed half of the creative projects I’ve finished without learning what it meant to sit there, day after day, and slowly grind something to completion. This is a skill I knew before, but WoW brought me to a whole new level. The ironic thing is, once WoW taught me all that persistence, I realized I had better things to while away the hours than play WoW. Go figure.

Research and Planning

There are aspects to WoW’s gameplay that require obscure knowledge of in-game items, locations, and game mechanics. Some of the game’s battle and character systems are so convoluted that it takes complicated algebra and mathematics to determine which in-game item is better to improve a character. While this may be a flaw for the game itself, for the players, these convoluted systems encourage extensive web research, planning, and the ability to analyze vast quantities of technical and jargon-filled information. WoW is its own world – you don’t just play it, you live in it – the ability to find out what you need quickly using the research tools you have available is essential to succeeding in the game. I’ve found these research skills carry easily to other knowledge areas – picking up jargon via in-context immersion is a skill WoW encouraged.

Leadership and Organization

I spent several months in the game as a member of guild leadership, organizing twenty-five people several times a week to conquer in-game objectives. Some of these objects require all 25 people to work in tandem for fifteen minutes straight, with every member needing to know their role and individual responsibilities for the entire fifteen minutes, changing their role every few seconds. Organizing this many people over the internet with only voice and text communication tools  is incredibly taxing, but also teaches valuable leadership, organizational, and motivational skills.

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Strategy

Much of WoW’s gameplay involves reacting to stressors in a timely manner with a situation-tailored response. This sounds dry when phrased like that, but I can phrase it more interestingly, too: the best part of playing WoW is trying to figure out how to react in the span of half a second when a gigantic fire-breathing dragon is charging your ass, half your teammates are dead, and you have two minutes before he goes berserk and kills everyone else, costing your team thirty minutes of progression and maybe putting off the encounter for another week. You better make the right choices.

The thing that differentiates MMORPGs from other types of games is that the tools the player has to solve any situation rarely change (maybe once every year, after an expansion). The rest of the time, the player uses the same abilities in different ways. Snap choices must be made, based on familiarity with the problems, tools, and team members. At the highest levels of play, encounters must be strategized for, execution must be practiced, and all team members must be able to think on-the-fly to make good choices. This ability to plan ahead and think on your feet while dealing with stress translates well to other situations.

Have I missed any?

And none-too-soon, because the AVP films were some awful shit.  Harkening back to the classic age of Universal movie monsters, 20^th Century Fox had teamed up its two most unique and terrifying sci-fi monsters in an effort to reignite both franchises.  The idea, originating in Predator 2 (1990) and several comic books and games, was wildly kick-ass in theory; I mean, why wouldn’t the universe’s most advanced hunter chose to pursue the universe’s most dangerous beast?

Fans were let down, however, and the first Alien vs. Predator (2004) was eventually directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, a man who specializes in popcorn video game movies like Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil ( call him a slightly more talented Uwe Boll).  Eagerly anticipated by fans, AVP, as it was dubbed (…groan…), turned out to be a watered-down and infantilized cash-in, featuring some of the worst dialogue of that or any other year.  AVP was released PG-13 (odd considering all previous six films across this two franchises were universally Rated R) and even Lance Henriksen’s sallow crags couldn’t save it.

The sequel, Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), turned out to be nearly as bad. Both were terrible retreads offering nothing new to the mythos, save the dreadful Predalien (half Alien, half Predator, get it?).  Hey, Hollywood producers, the Alien was one of the most terrifying movie inventions of all time, but Predalien is just…Poochie*; it’s like putting gaudy rims on a Ferrari or skittles in a milkshake; I mean…why? Thank Christ there were only two AVPs, as I was fully expecting the obligatory third outing of Alien vs. Predator Meets Abbott and Costello.

Note: Predalien died on the way back to his home planet

Anyway, Predators is quite a step up in every possible way, largely because it necessarily and wisely ignores the AVPs, as well as most of Predator 2, and recaptures most of thrill of the original 1987 Schwarzenegger vehicle.  Predators evokes the suspense and intrigue of the first, and seems to use most of the original, tense score.  The Predator always had several really cool characteristics that seemed to be largely wasted and even taken for granted in the last few movies. But this time, the audience is with the characters as they terrifyingly discover, piece by piece that–holy shit–these things have targeting lasers, can see in infrared, and are fucking invisible.

The premise is simple and keeps in line with the primary foundations of the Predator concept; in this installment, rather than hunt on earth, the Predators kidnap a handful of mercenaries, thugs and psychopaths from around the world, air-drop them onto a strange jungle planet, hand them a bunch of giant machine guns, and stalk and slaughter them for sport. Headed by an ex-special forces American (played by Academy Award winner Adrien Brody) our prey for this outing is some of the worst of the worst, including a Russian fighting in Chechnya, an Israeli Sniper, a Yakuza enforcer, Mexican cartel foot soldier, an death squad soldier from Sierra Leone. Oh… and Topher Grace as Topher Grace. Pretty horrifying people all around.  All they’re missing is Pol Pot and Ratko Mladic.  Probably one of my favorite things about this movie, as we discover, is that these guys aren’t gonna get out alive. Unlike other hunting-people-for-sport films (Surviving the Game, Hard Target, The Running Man), they aren’t going to get set free if they survive long enough or get far enough away.  They’re just going to be stuck there until Predators eventually kill them all.  Pretty bleak stuff. (“They’re bad, but they’ll die, so I like it”)

Great idea, though, right? Hell, when I first saw the previews, I thought to myself, “this is a movie that thrills the viewer with the threat of being stranded on a deadly, alien planet with an ugly, battle-scarred, merciless killing machine… named Danny Trejo.” And I guess I was excited when I found out Predators were involved too.

Messrs. Trejo and Predator

When I heard Robert Rodriguez was involved, I had mixed expectations.  In his time, he’s directed some pretty entertaining movies (Desperado, Sin City), some intriguingly bad movies (Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Planet Terror), and a lot that was aimed a completely different viewer than I (Spy Kids 1-17).  Luckily, Predators is in that first category.

It’s entertaining and well-paced and (except for the samurai sword scene) never distractingly stupid.  Adrien Brody is good even though his character never says more than what is absolutely required and during the climactic battle when he doffs his shirt is pretty impressive, in that his abs are bitchin’ enough to actually distract from his cubist face (seriously, you can see three sides of it at once).

On a funny sidenote, right before this movie started filming, my friend Dana actually met Adrien Brody randomly in a bar (yes, it was him). He was dressed down and Dana, not having any idea who he really was and never guessing he’d actually show up there, proceeded to flirt with him for half an hour. Later the friends who with her had to tell her she just hung out with an Oscar Winner. So she and Adrien Brody did they end up doing right before he went off to shoot Predators?  They played Big Buck Hunter.  Take that for what it is.

Anyway, for the price of admission, you even get to see a decent cameo by Laurence Fishburne (SPOILER: anyone else think that he gets chopped into Cowboy Curtis Kibble pretty easily given he’s supposed to have been there for ten years?) And at the very least, it’s enough Rodriguez and Trejo to get fans through the summer until Machete comes out in August.

Verdict: If you enjoyed the first Predator, you’ll largely enjoy this one.  If you miss for the storytelling of AVP, then you’re just an idiot.

*(Read Ruthlessreviews.com)

Not on trial here though. Come on. It's a metaphor.

In summer the need for genre reading grips me, stacks of fat squat books howling my name like newsprint-scented wolves. I love serious fiction. There are Great Books gathering dust unread on my shelf. But ultimately the call of the genre will get me, wrap me up in a quick-drawn world and plot-drive me where it will. The inevitability makes me wonder how bad a fate that is.

[Want to know what I mean by genre? Luckily I told you here.]

Most of genre is reading for entertainment—it’s choosing Saturday morning cartoons and blow-stuff-up movies instead of Citizen Kane or something poetic and subtitled. And let’s all say it together: “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

But literary empty calories do cost. When I’ve been reading genre, I speed through with barely a thought about whether I can trust the narrator, or whether all is what it seems—unless the author wants me to think something’s fishy, which is generally noted with a line like, “Samara thought something seemed fishy.” I don’t think about symbolism. The emotional weight of what happens to the characters doesn’t hit me—even if the murder victim is the sleuth’s dear ol’ grandma, I know she’s basically a blue-haired, peppermint-scented MacGuffin, nothing more than an excuse to push the plot forward.  I excuse clichés and flat characters and terrible writing with hardly a thought.

And then I find myself writing things like “with hardly a thought”—tied-up stiff phrases that mean next to nothing. It’s contagious. If you’re a writer, genre can cost more than time. Garbage in, garbage out.

If you’re an omnivorous reader, think of the bad reading habits genre forms—skimming, speed-reading, ignoring insignificant details, expecting side players to come from Stock Characters ‘R’ Us and avoid unnecessary movement. That hurts anyone who wants to appreciate what the written word can do for truth and beauty.

But there’s also something to be said for these plot-driven page-turners. Genre opens doors to other worlds, often wider and brighter-lit doors than the narrow crevices of Serious Fiction.

Barbara Neely’s Blanche White series of the 90s is definitely genre—but it’s edgy, political, and some of the best writing on contemporary African-American culture in the business. In 2000, Neely told Ms. magazine, “I thought I was writing a novel that happened to have murder in it… But when the book did so well, I realized the mystery genre was perfect to talk about serious subjects, and it could carry the political fiction I wanted to write.”

Science fiction genre entries usually involve ludicrous sexual politics and at least one scientific impossibility, but many books use the “speculative fiction” angle to tease out questions of morality and philosophy, or toy with the consequences of real developments. The Laws of Robotics are the classic example, but I’ve also read stories from midcentury discussing the backlash from an issue as seemingly modern as in vitro fertilization—before the first human test succeeded, of course. Then there are the books that blend mythology into their plotlines, passing on centuries-old folktales in a new guise.

As for romance, that behemoth of fiction sales, the genres within it break down in their own ways. But some of those bodice-rippers involve real history, accurate portrayals contemporary conditions and plenty of period research. Some are half travel log or Dirty Jobs episode. When the plotline and outcome of the story are basically a given, you’d better have some pretty great window dressing to control 60% of the fiction market. Legal and military thrillers, likewise, can use their platforms to educate as they titillate, competing between books for the most “authentic” issues as well as the most exciting.

And then there are the methods any decent genre writer has mastered—the kind of thing plenty of weightier wannabes could do well to learn. Pacing. Suspense. Tight plotting. Giving just enough of the big reveal to keep us one step behind the game. Those are not simple techniques, and yet read enough genre, and you can manipulate that familiar dance to whatever ends you can imagine. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose is a masterful exploitation of those cues—I really want to spoil it, but I won’t here. Read it.

There’s no point arguing, really. Genre is and undoubtedly will remain the silent bulk of books read and written, whether it’s classed as pure brain candy or some potentially redeemable sort of light snack. The pack is calling me regardless. But as I reach for my beach reads, I’m going to remind myself about all those mitigating circumstances.

Anybody have a recommendation?

Kefka from FF6 (credit: Square Enix)

A few months ago I was arguing on facebook with a guy about Kefka from Final Fantasy 6. The guy claimed Kefka was an awesome video game villain. I didn’t agree with him, but it took me awhile to fully formulate my arguments. This post is the result of that formulation. I present to you, for your unadulterated amusement, what makes a good video game villain.

The thing is – I believe Kefka, while better than some, is just a poor villain masquerading as a good one. If you don’t play video games, or have never played Final Fantasy 6, this post is still useful to you – some of the criteria surely surpasses both the specific game and the medium. Anyway, here are the essential characteristics of a good video game villain:

Actions that Betray a Low Pathos

The best villains act in a way that demonstrates their lack of human concern. This, unlike the Greek tragic hero, whose fatal flaw is traditionally hubris, is the fatal flaw that makes a villain a villain (though hubris can lead to a lack of pathos). They have a personal agenda that must be satisfied no matter what. Good villains always think the ends justify the means. The best villains care about the carnage they inflict on other human lives, but don’t care enough to stop.

An Understandable Motivation, Explainable by Cause and Effect

I absolute loathe villains that are just evil for the sake of evil. This is the lamest motivation a villain can have. People like that don’t exist. This is especially loathsome for the standard video game villain endgame: destroying the world while laughing like a hyena. I just don’t buy it.

I mean, if you live on the world, why the hell would you want to destroy it? Being batshit insane is the only motivation that explains this desire, unless the dude is so bummed that he wants to kill himself and take the world with him. But still. It’s so dumb.

Money and Power do in a pinch here if motivation is needed, but only if the reason for wanting to acquire those things is explainable. A guy who wants to get rich to just be rich is a poor villain. A guy who wants to get rich to save his family, buy a specific item for important reasons, or has a direct personal motivation (dude was poor when he was a kid) to acquire riches is a good villain. This explainable motivation is the key difference, especially for the “I’m evil so I want to destroy the world types.”

The very best villains are presented with dire circumstances and you understand why they made the choices they made. Even if you wouldn’t have made the same choices, you understand how a sane human being could make those choices, too. This is why Kefka is a lame duck villain. He has no motivation  beyond abject insanity.

Personal Choice (As Opposed to Fate)

Personal choice is as essential to a villain as it is to the hero. If anything, a good hero and a good villain are flipsides of the same coin – when presented with an awful situation, the hero decides to do the right thing and the villain decides to do the wrong thing. But the point is: the choice matters.

So many games try to flit around this point (probably because it’s damn difficult to pull off as a storyteller) but including some type of “fate.” While this is a lazy story telling technique for both heroes (“Because you are the one, Neo.”) and villains, it’s especially asinine with villains. What kind of lame villain is so spineless that he’s fated to be evil and he just accepts it? If there’s no personal choice, there’s no drama.

Again, the best villains are placed in a situation where you can understand their choices and you understand exactly why they made them.

Can Only Be Overcome By the Growth of the Hero

If Superman fights a normal gun-wielding yahoo, it’s no contest. The bullets bounce off his manly star-emblazoned chest while he laughs at their ineptitude before punching them in the face and going to make time with Lois Lane. Get the point? You have to have villains that are powerful enough that they can only be overcome by personal growth of the hero, but not so powerful that the hero’s growth is unrealistic.

An ant is not a good villain for Superman, but an ant could be a great villain for a termite. Superman needs world-class villains. World-class villains need world-class heroes.

Conclusion

So those are the four main things I think makes a good video game villain. Before I close and ask you want you think, I want to present some examples:

Awesome Villains

Sephiroth

Darth Vader

That fat guy from Jurassic Park

Satan

HAL 9000

Hannibal Lecter

Agent Smith

Poor Villians

Kefka

Carnage

Professor Moriarty

Most Greek Gods

Nature and Bad Weather

If you agree or not, drop me a line in the comments and we’ll argue. C’mon. It’ll be fun.

Excel Saga, Volume 1, Viz Media English Translation

As with most anime, Excel Saga was based on a manga version, but in this case only very loosely. When I first read the Excel Saga manga, I was expecting more of the same, but I was pleased to find that the original source material was quite a bit different than its anime variant. Now mind you I found the anime amusing (as long as I could get around Jessica Calvello’s ear-splitting rendition of Excel in the dub version, which was very hard to do), but the manga is truly a different animal all together.

The basic plot is this: The clandestine organization ACROSS, led by the enigmatic Il Palazzo, pursues their ultimate goal of revealing to the ignorant masses that the world is utterly corrupt, and that it would do well with ACROSS leading the way. However, since world domination is a messy and time consuming process, ACROSS has chosen to start small, and is attempting to take control of the city of Fukuoka, Japan as a jumping-off point (Rikudo Koshi’s home city). To aid him in his mission, his two (later, three) agents, codenamed Excel and Hyatt (later adding Elgala) are sent forth to secure the way for their Lord’s inevitable ascendancy by spreading his message. The major problem with this plan is that the entirety of the organization is made of Il Palazzo, his two-to-three henchwomen, and a small dog, Menchi/Mince kept by Excel as an emergency food supply. While enthusiastic for their mission, the ACROSS girls are also hopelessly incompetent and in the early part of the manga mostly get stuck working a number of menial, low-paying temp jobs to finance their march to conquest while Il Palazzo does… whatever he does.

Municipal Force Daitenzin, Kabapu's pet obsession

Meanwhile, ACROSS is opposed by Dr. Kabapu, the director of the City Environmental Security Agency and his four employees, Watanabe, Iwata, Sumiyoshi, and Matsuya. Unfortunately for these four normal, everyday people simply looking for normal, everyday government work, they are roped into the Super Sentai (super hero group) fantasy of their mentally deranged boss, and are forced to combat this mysterious ACROSS organization, often in rather embarrassing Power Ranger-style costumes.

The focus of the story from the beginning is largely a forum for Rikudo-san to riff on different elements of Japanese society, politics, and culture, as well as the anime/manga industry, by showing what happens when normal people try to act like manga characters in real life. Dan Kanemitsu, a well-known translator and Japanese cultural consultant, once described Excel Saga as if “Michael Moore had directed the Power Rangers.” Yeah, it’s unusual stuff. The series is surprisingly deep in its range of humor, and in addition to being uproariously funny, the reader also has the opportunity to learn a number of things about the culture in which the manga is written.

An annoyed Lord Il Palazzo, about to send Excel on a short trip down a deep hole.

Viz Media editor Carl Horn, Jr. assists the non-Japanese reader with in-depth notes in the back of each volume in a section called the “Oubliette,” named for the pit that Il Palazzo forces Excel down with a pull of his rope whenever she becomes too frantic and screwy during their meetings. It’s very interesting stuff, educational while also being entertaining. But the style of humor in the manga is much more adult-focused than the anime, which focused far more on the slapstick gags rather than socio-political humor, which are both equally represented in the manga. The prime age-range of Excel Saga fans lies in the 18-24 range, but with a fairly even representation of fans in the 14-18 and 25-30+ brackets as well, since its humor appeals to a very large range of readers. It is generally defined as a seinen (young man) manga – one focused on the college-age bracket and above (including businessmen in their 30’s and 40’s), as opposed to shonen (young boy) titles like Bleach and Naruto, or shojo (young girl) titles like Ciao and Nakayoshi.

Vol. 20, featuring Excel, Elgala, and Mince, from left to right.

Admittedly the first three volumes are the weakest of the series and might keep some fans away, as these first steps are on the much sillier side of the humor spectrum. The art style was still rough, compared to Rikudo-san’s far more refined work later in the series, but the first Excel Saga stories were originally nothing more than doujin (independent comics, typically of adult-orientation. This is where “dirty” adult can often be applied, but not always). However, the commercial success of these early volumes encouraged Rikudo-san to more fully develop the plot, which has become a highly satisfying mystery combined with an irreverent sense of humor.

I highly recommend the series, which is still on-going at 21 volumes, and so far is expected to continue for the next couple of years at the least. Speculation on the Excel Saga forums guesstimates the series will be complete at vol. 24-25 based on present trends in the story, but it may exceed even this. English translations, which have been caught-up to their Japanese counterparts for the past several volumes, are published once or twice a year as they are compiled from Excel Saga’s monthly publication in Young King Ours, and translated by Mr. Horn and published through Viz Media. The volumes typically sell for $9.99 MSRP, except for the two rarer volumes, 7 and 8, which have been out of print for a while and the supply of which was much smaller than normal. Getting a hold of vol. 8 in particular is tricky, as Viz downsized their publication run of Excel Saga at that time since it is, admittedly, not their biggest seller. Scans may be available since it does not appear that Viz Media will be republishing it any time soon, and it sells on sites like Ebay for $40-50. An unfortunate situation, since it is such an important volume in the series, as it fully introduces the third ACROSS member, Elgala, who acts as Excel’s foil for much of the series from then on.

Nevertheless, it is a series worth pursuing, as it combines bizzaro humor and socio-political wit in a compelling mix that is rarely seen in any one work, be it a book, comic, or film/TV series. The characters are very engaging, and they grow and develop throughout the series (in often very strange and interesting ways, I might add), and the mystery of the story is genuinely compelling, as fans still speculate on the truth behind the series. Those who wish to learn more should visit Excel Saga’s “unofficially official” English-translation fan site, excelsagaforum.com, and check out the community there. Mr. Horn has directed would-be fans to this privately owned and operated site for years, as there is no official company-bound site for the series. It is a small board, of which I am a member, but it is a great source for information and news concerning the series, and members there are willing to look out for the rarer volumes for new fans who have been unable to find certain volumes. Happy reading, everyone, and I hope you give this series a shot and enjoy it as much as I do, because it is really worth the effort.

The Bestseller: Reads what’s in the airport bookstores, what’s on the talk shows, any book you can see two or more people reading in the same public space. Strangers feel a comforting sense of familiarity standing in front of their bookshelves. So zeitgeisty!

Subset: The Book Clubber: This person will have read a surprising swath of the recent bestsellers but will not like, understand, or have an opinion on at least half. Most comments will begin with the phrase, “Well, I didn’t finish it, but…” Will probably like red wine though.

The Genre Reader: This person may read a great deal, but mainly sticks to one of the genre categories: mystery, romance, thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, King, Grisham, Clancy. No qualms about the thickness of the spine up to around 600 pages, at which point second thoughts set in for all but the most devoted.

The Classicist: “Life’s too short to waste reading unimportant junk.” Reads things from “the canon” because contemporary authors are unproven and may be terrible, while Tolstoy, Hemingway, and Melville, et al. probably are not going to rot your brain/waste your potential/turn out not to be cool anymore. (To bait, utter the phrase “dead white men.”)

The Literate Hipster: “I’m reading this amazing novel right now—oh, you probably haven’t heard of him, but he’s very well known in [foreign country/elite professional subclass/literary journals].” Just ask if they have any good dish about MFA programs.

Subset: The Hot New Thing: “Oh yeah, I’m reading it an advance copy right now and it’s going to be amazing.” Do not display jealousy. Remember most people who come by galleys frequently are either too busy to read them or their excitement node has died. Remember that people who obtain galleys infrequently are really hoping they turn out well, or at least okay, so they can talk about how they got a galley. People who fall between these two have terrible, terrible jobs and you should let them gloat.

The Nonfictionist: Reads about things based in fact, with no literary license taken. Probably listens to NPR and/or knows an unusual amount about the Civil War. This person is very educational but probably from another species.

Boring caveats: None of this applies 100% to all people, lots of people (including me) are prone to skip between these types; yes, I’m making fun of you; no, I don’t think you should get all worked up about it; no, I think your mother’s very nice. Glad that’s done with!

Have I missed anyone?