This post original appeared on my old site. It’s not the usual gaming/culture stuff, but variety is the spice of thing.

My doctorb (“The extra ‘b’ is for ‘bargain!’) is awesome. I love Dr. Brunner and I always look forward to seeing him.

I say this because, as a guy, going to the doctor is notable. There’s a difference between men and women. At least one difference. Possibly more, but for the purposes of this post let’s stick with this one difference: guys don’t see doctors. Not as a rule.

Women see doctors. That’s the difference. A friend of mine said “I don’t understand why none of you guys ever go to the doctor!” I esplained.

“Larra,” I said, for such was her name, “you have to imagine what it’s like being a guy and 18,” which is when most of us learn this.

“First, there’s nothing wrong with you at 18. You feel great. You can do pretty much anything, for pretty much as long as you want, and then eat whatever you want or, alternatively, nothing for days and you don’t notice either way. Why on Earth would you go to a doctor?

“Also,” I said, because I really talk like this in person, “you’re going to live forever. You’re basically invincible and essentially immortal and you look at your Dad and he looks, you know…he looks like he’s been rode hard and put away wet, but there doesn’t appear to be anything critically malfunctioning. You look and your Grandpa and he’s active and happy, and then he drops dead unexpectedly and you look at your Dad and you both shrug and say ‘Huh.’” That “Huh” means “that was weird. Probably a freak occurrence. Million-to-one odds.”

The point is that guys tend not to teach their sons good habits when it comes to this stuff. We put off dealing with mortality as long as possible until going to the doctor scares the crap out of you because it’s been 30 years and God knows what kind of stuff is wrong you never knew about. Dad’s not fine, by the way, there’s all sorts of stuff that hurts that didn’t used to but he keeps his mouth shut because usually whatever it is just goes away. Usually.

To give you an example: I burst a blood vessel in my eye a couple years ago. Never happened before, and if it’s never happened to you, let me explain. It doesn’t hurt. You don’t notice it, you can’t feel it, you have no nerves on the surface of your eye. But holy shit does it freak the people out who look at you. Which is a great way to freak YOU out. “Hey Matt, what’s the timeline like on the OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR EYE?”

“OH MY GOD I DON’T KNOW BUT HOLY SHIT IT MUST BE BAD! SOMEONE GIVE ME A MIRROR!”

Everyone sends me IM’s and emails to links explaining that I’m ok and it’s no big deal. My best friend who sat on the other side of the cubical wall gophered up to intone, insightfully:

“Yeah, but it never did that before, did it? You gotta wonder…what’s different now?” He’s not saying that to freak me out…or rather, he’s not only saying that to freak me out, he’s saying that because that’s exactly how he thinks. How we all think. Stuff’s kinda, you know, winding down. But by God we’re not going to see a doctor! A woman would see a doctor. Really, she doesn’t have to “see a doctor” about a burst blood vessel, she only has to make a note to talk to the doctor about it the next time she sees him. This is an alien experience for a lot of us on the spear side.

The first time I saw Dr. Brunner, it’d been 25 years since the last time I saw a doctor and it took 3 hours for me to infodump on him everything I could remember that, had I been a woman…that’s right, I just said that…he’d have been getting all along. This is something called your “medical history” apparently.

So what’s the difference? As you probably know, the difference is: guys don’t have plumbing. Girls have plumbing and apparently they need to get their pipes rotated once a year or something. I cherish my ignorance on the subject.

The point is starting around, say, 12 years old, give or take, Mom takes you (and here I’ve switched who “you” is, so if you’re a guy don’t freak out) to the special girl doctor who doesn’t call himself a girl doctor because that would be silly and instead calls himself a…a gynodoctor or something. A gynechiatrist? I’m sure that’s it.

Moms teach their daughters good habits, Dads teach their sons how to shoot guns. That’s literally true in my case, it’s not just a stereotype.

So my last visit to the esteemed Dr. Brunner, we talked about diet and agreed that I should lose weight. Sure. Easy. I find that if I’m busy, I lose weight. If I’m not, I eat. In fact if I’m busy enough, I’ll go quite a long time without being hungry.

Tonight, for instance, I IM’ed Austin, the aforementioned best friend, and said “I think it’s been about 24 hours since I’ve eaten anything.”

“You should fucking eat something dude.” You see why he’s my best friend.

“Well, I’m not sure I’m hungry.” This is literally true. “I can’t tell if I’m hungry-hungry or bored-hungry.”

Realizing there was no insight to offer on that, he said “holy shit this is the best Dwarf Fortress ever!”

I reasoned that if I were hungry-hungry, I’d know it, and so I should maybe eat something snacky to compensate. I decide to have some popcorn. Ah-hah! The title of this post!

I bought some popcorn a few weeks ago, microwave popcorn, I think we all take that for granted, and I pulled it out to read the calories.

Now, even if the calories were clearly spelled out, I probably would have put the popcorn back down. But I confess I actually put it down because the popcorn confused me.

First, the calories are measured both Popped and Unpopped. Does this make sense to anyone? Why on earth would you want to know the caloric content of unpopped popcorn? The only possible reason someone could want to know that is if they plan on eating unpopped popcorn and that challenges my worldview.

It also measures calories in Servings. Two different measurements here. Servings popped, servings unpopped.  I am old enough to remember when a 12oz can of Coke was 2 servings, but I’ve gotten used to a  kind of sanity where “1 serving” is “one package” for anything that comes individually wrapped. Like popcorn. So one serving should be one bag.

One serving is not one bag. One serving is 3 ounces. 3 ounces of unpoppedpopcorn. How many ounces are in a serving? It doesn’t tell you. You can find out! But first you must convert ounces unpopped into cups of popped popcorn goddamn. I shit you not, you have to BOTH convert between popped and unpopped and ounces and cups. It’s a god-damned two dimensional matrix!

I give up and throw the popcorn away. I’ve probably burned more calories just thinking about how many calories are in the fucking popcorn than the popcorn has, but fuck it.

I have actual popcorn kernels, and vegetable oil. I look at the calories of that, and determine it’s way way lower than microwave popcorn and disnae require any maths.

I have never popped popcorn the, ah, natural way. Even before microwaves, we used Jiffy Pop which unlike a microwave was actually fun. I believe I understand the fundamentals however. I get a pan, I pour in the vegetable oil. I measure out some popcorn kernels into the pan, I turn the heat on medium, and I go watch Mythbusters.

If you are paying close attention, you may have noticed a critical missing element. Don’t shout it out! I’m keen to build suspense.

About 3 minutes in, I begin to hear popcorn popping. Success! Mmm…popcorn. It won’t have any butter, but that’s ok. As it turns out I won’t be having any popcorn. Jiffy Pop and microwaves both work essentially the same. Wait until there’s about 3 seconds between popping sounds, and you’re done. So I wait.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Everything is OBVIOUSLY working according to plan, requiring NO oversight on my part. There are some few of you reading this who know that while I am in some ways a smart dude, this is exactly the manner in which I am really stupid.

At roughly the five minute mark, no audible sign of the popcorn slowing, I realize something is wrong. But not with the popcorn, with the cats.

The cats are freaking out. They’re running around like it’s the goddamned catpocalypse. This is not a typical side-effect of popping popcorn. It is unusual for the cats to go screaming around at all. Often even when there are perfectly legitimate things to run around screaming about. Also, the dog is barking, at first I think at the cats.

She’s barking at me.

“Barky! Barky-bark!”

I sense something is wrong. I sense she’s trying to tell me something. She really does this.

“Cookie?”

“Barky!” *spin in circle*

“Cookie is something wrong?”

“Barky-bark!” *spin in circle*

I stand up. This is the universal Dog Sign for “We’re off! WOOO!”

Cookie sees the sign and immediately runs into the kitchen, because now we’re like hunters and the quarry is in the kitchen.

In the kitchen with the popcorn. The problem is in the kitchen with the popcorn. I begin to realize that there’s something wrong with the popcorn.

Ok, so the first thing I noticed was not the bedding of popcorn about 3 inches deep covering the floor. I can’t see the floor from my vantage point looking through the large window-like hole that allows someone in the living room to see into the kitchen. All I can see is the RAIN of popcorn, the constant fucking SHOWER of popcorn in the kitchen which continues unabated.

I failed to put the lid on the pan. I have inadvertently created what is effectively a kind of automated high-volume popcorn catapult currently sieging the entire kitchen en mass.

This is why the cats are freaking out. Their food dishes are in the kitchen which means it’s currently impossible for them to eat without being constantly pelted by popcorn raining from the heavens. I should say right now, everything’s fine. Brain is fine. No one appears injured.

I bring this up because while all the cats are running around, Brain chose this moment to leap up onto the room divider between the kitchen and living room, through the window/hole thing, and into the living room at such high velocity I did not at first recognize which cat it was.

His tail is on fire.

I’m not making this up.

Looking back, I have to assume Brain was investigating the popcorn on the gas stove, and his tail got too close to the flame. He is now tearing around the house, his claws are scrabbling on the hardwood floor, he’s making the biggest possible circuit he can, ears flattened against his head, just running as fast as his little kitty paws will take him, because he thinks he can run away from his own tail.

They say that, in a disaster, the people who make it, the people who survive, are the people who don’t freeze up. Who keep moving. Who keep thinking and trying to work their way out of the situation. I like to think I’m that guy. Certainly when the disaster is an earthquake, if keeping moving is the survival criteria, I’m going to be the most survingest motherfucker in California.

But I’m paralyzed. My brain is flooded with a cascade of conficting data and reason.

“Brain’s tail is on fire.”

“That’s bad!”

“Yeah. But how do I…how do I put it out?”

“Go chase after him!”

“Ok. Ok, yeah we could do that. What do you think would happen if I suddenly started tearing after the Brain?”

“Ahh…hang on…hang on.”

“Keep in mind, his tail is on fire.”

“Oh my god he’d just freak out more!”

“Yeah, so I shouldn’t chase after him. That would be stupid.”

“Well what’s the alternative?”

“Stand still?”

“Ok, well, that’s what we’re doing now isn’t it?”

“Mission accomplished!”

*high five*

This being really quite frighteningly close to my actual train of thought, I go investigate what was happening in the kitchen. Which is to say, I left the cat’s tail on fire. I’m normally a good kitty-daddy, please believe me.

So, the answer to your next question is…I don’t know. I don’t know how Brain’s tail got put out. It’s not on fire now. It was on fire. It was like someone stuck the Olympic Torch in my cat’s ass. But somehow, between then and dealing with the popcorn, the fire went out. Nearest I can tell, the other animals put it out. So, whatever else you may think, obviously my plan worked.

Dealing with the popcorn wasn’t really difficult, it’s just wading into the ankle-deep popcorn and turning the heat off. It was made more difficult by the fact that previously the cats were “OMG it’s raining popcorn” freaked out. Which is about a 6 on the scale of Cat Freakouts where fireworks is like a 9.

What’s a 10? Turns out a 10 is “HOLY SHIT BRAIN’S TAIL IS ON FIRE!!”

I have, I can show you, I have these large red scratches up my back and on my right shoulder. They are from the Pinky-cat. Because as I was trying to get to the popcorn and shut off the heat, she clawed her way up my back. Then, perched on my shoulder and kind of militantly purred the way only really freaked out cats can purr, I pulled her off my shoulder which caused the big red scratches there.

I turned off the heat. Considering how much popcorn is on the floor, and the countertops and on top of the fridge, and in the sink and behind the blender and inside the toaster, there’s an awful lot of popcorn kernels still in the pan.

It turns out, I put about 400 servings of popcorn in the pan. I think I figured “hey, no butter! I’m free to eat more without feeling guilty.”

And as it turned out, I do not feel guilty!

Wooo! Popcorn diet!

This movie came out in 1979. I saw it in the theaters but like a lot of stuff from the 1970s I was too young to wot of it. I grew up with my memory of this movie being deeply cheesy and mostly awful, but watching it again on a whim, I feel as though perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate it.

Let me make my point clear from the beginning; this is not a good movie. I am not a Black Hole apologist, because such a thing is medically impossible. Nor is it one of my guilty pleasures, like Krull. It’s OK if you like it uncritically, none of us are obligated to be critical all the time. But it’s certainly flawed and arguably a failure, if we had to grade movies on a pass/fail scale against the success of their storytelling.

Happily, we don’t have to do that! We’re free to notice all sorts of really interesting ideas in this movie, and perhaps detect a diamond in the rough, waiting to be polished in the 21st century.

The movie is old enough that I can’t presume you’ve seen it if you’re reading this. It’s from a period, the late ’70s, the early 80′s, when Disney knew it couldn’t keep making Herbie The Love Bug if it wanted to survive. So it bravely struck out and tried to do something different. Never Cry Wolf (which, really, you should see. You’d love it.), Tron, Something Wicked This Way Comes, this movie.

Alas, Disney couldn’t make it work. Not their fault. People just weren’t willing to accept darker, more serious, more experimental fare from Disney. John Riccetello, take note. And Disney was incapable of committing. With this movie, they added a ton of Disney stuff–funny talking robots–the movie didn’t need. In Tron they left the creators completely alone with the result that the plot, story, and dialog were a complete mess. Andrew Stanton, take note.

Plot

In The Black Hole a small, exploratory deep-space ship discovers a massive black hole. So big, it threatens to pull the ship into its grasp. As our heroes fight to claw their way out of the gravity well, they discover there’s a ship much nearer, impossibly nearer, dangerously close to the hole. The Cygnus. It sits near the eye of the storm unscathed and eventually the main characters are forced to land on the Cygnus, exploiting the zone of null-gravity around it.

The mystery ship is a gothic masterpiece, looking like nothing more than a giant cathedral hanging amongst the stars, the great maelstrom of the black hole framing it. Its master is the crazed hermit Dr. Hans Reinhardt. His entire ship apparently run by robots. He is the only human survivor of the Cygnus. Our heroes try to repair their ship and leave while at the same time unraveling the mystery of the robot-run ghost ship. All the while the diabolical Doctor Reinhardt plans to take his ship, and any aboard her, into the black hole. To discover the last, final mystery of the universe.

The Bad Bits

Make no mistake, I just deliberately tried to make the move sound interesting in my description. On paper, it’s a hell of a story. It suffered many blows, mostly its own fault, in execution. Though having the misfortune of being released during the same movie season as Alien meant there was no way The Black Hole could be taken seriously as a gothic space story. The Cygnus is impressive, but it pales in comparison to the Nostromo. Disney was famously betting the house on “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea in space” while Ridley Scott was quietly re-purposing the plot of And Then There Were None. Unfortunately Disney had nothing in their bag of tricks to compete with the twisted vision of H. R. Giger and the penis-headed vagina-beasts that sprung fully realized from the chest of John Hurt. I felt, however, as though there was enough good in here to warrant an exhumation.

Focusing on the weak bits is easy. There are too many characters, Ernest Borgnine is a good example. An exploratory deep-space ship the size of an S.U.V. with a reporter on board? What? It only makes sense once you realize that the writers desperately needed someone to ask certain questions and deliver certain bits of exposition. A reporter is good for that, but the exposition is hamfisted. And Borgnine himself is miscast. He was a good actor, witness Marty, but he became a symbol for a certain kind of studio movie and in the late 70’s, that kind of movie was already obsolete. This is a very Sixties movie as is evidenced by the fact that it was the swan song of many old Hollywood special effects artists. The artists and the techniques they’d been using for thirty years. It would have looked dated even without Alien to compete with.

Dr. Kate McCray is another curio. She’s evidently present to give a more human element to the drama, although I’m not sure it was necessary. Her father was an original crewmember of the Cygnus and so naturally she wants to find out what happened to him. Apart from the coincidence (her dad was on the ship? Really?) it adds a level of motivation we don’t need. The robot crew is creepy enough. The mystery of what happened to the real crew is certainly a good motivation for anyone to start poking around. The Black Hole and Dr. Reinhardt are threats enough. We didn’t need McCray’s character. She and Borgnine’s reporter could probably have been combined into one character. Though if they were better cast, given something better to do, who knows? There is a moment where the reporter becomes a coward while Kate tries to talk Tony Perkins into leaving, both with plot-critical results I’m not sure how you’d achieve otherwise. Though I’d be willing to accept that challenge.

The interior lighting and set direction are far too pedestrian for their era. 10 years earlier, it would have been fantastic. But here, it’s almost lit like a TV soap opera. Amazing that it was released the same year as Alien and only three years before Blade Runner.

One final thing that’s always bugged me is that virtually the entire movie is looped. It’s all ADR. I think this always lent the film a possibly subconscious layer of unreality. Falsehood. It damages verisimilitude.

The good bits do not outweigh the bad. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t good bits.

The Good Bits

First, the character of Doctor Reinhardt is fantastic, played to the hilt by Maximilian Schell. But the movie shoots him as though you know who Schell is. Like it’s a big deal to have this actor in this role, which it is. But given that the target audience, kids, almost certainly have not seen Judgement at Neuremberg, they probably should have shot it differently.

The Cygnus , both the ship and her crew, are a character unto themselves. The first third of the movie knows the Cygnus is impressive and shows it off. Unfortunately, the interior sets are nowhere as impressive as the exteriors and so the second and third acts forget that they’ve got something special here. Most of the robots are ridiculous, but Maximilian (yeah, a robot with the same name as the actor playing the character who created him. Weird.) is an awesome evil robot. Maybe it’s a little weird to have EVIL ROBOT walking around your ship, I accept that. Why would you, stranded and alone, make your robot look like Robot Devil? I dunno, don’t ask. It’s cool. Shut up.

Reinhardt is obsessed with the question “what lies at the center of a Black Hole?” Great concept for a character. When I was a kid, years before I took a cosmology course in college, I wanted to know what was inside a black hole!

Unfortunately, there’s no answer that can be as compelling as that question. Possibly that’s OK. Sometimes the question is the point and you know you’re in it for the anticipation and buildup. The journey is the destination. The actual ending isn’t bad, I didn’t think. Heaven and hell evoked both metaphorically and literally. But it is challenging. The scene with the much-older Reinhardt, apparently having drifted in a void for decades, merging with Maximilian into one creature presiding over an undead army made up of the crew of the Cygnus in hell-world is at least fucked-up and possibly also stupid. The fact that I can’t tell if it works exactly means, at least on some level, it does work.

Anthony Perkins is entirely believable as a scientist who is so hungry for knowledge, he’s seduced by Dr. Faustus, er, Reinhardt into staying on board. The Captain, played by Robert Forster is interesting to me, now, as an adult. As a kid, Starship Captains were supposed to destroy computer-gods, freeing the native humans from their stagnant existence while fending off attacks from alien women in thigh-boots. The idea of a straight-laced, by the book captain who’s tough as nails sounds good to me these days. As a contrast, you understand.

The music is fantastic and I strongly recommend the soundtrack by John Barry, one of the best composers in film. The Black Hole itself looks impressive. Of course, today it would all be CGI and almost certainly better for it. But they succeeded in creating something that looked massive and malevolent.

VINCENT is certainly inspired by the droids in Star Wars. He’s R2-D2 and C-3PO combined; small and cute with little whirring noises, and an effete British voice. But one thing C-3PO didn’t have was Roddy McDowell voicing him, and the characterization, the wise, cynical, cautionary robot who quotes Cicero is unique. It’s a good character. If he and Maximilian (holy shit what a robot!) were the only robots in this movie, we’d think a lot more charitably of it. But the needless addition of Slim Pickens-bot and S.T.A.R.R., about whom the less said the better, bring things way down. The scene with VINCENT and STARR is a feeble attempt on the part of the writers to add drama and keep things cute at the same time, a hallmark of many of Disney’s live-action storytelling failures of the era.

The film, especially the introduction of the Cygnus successfully sets a gothic tone in space. Something that’s not easy to do, I reckon. This movie comes so close to being really dark. Watching Dr. Reinhardt set Maximilian on frappé and send him to juice Tony Perkins deeply fucked with me as a kid and still does. The fact that Perkins tries to defend himself using a book full of scientific notes as a shield was lost on me as a wee one. Watching Reinhardt crushed under the weight of his own monstrosity (the ship itself, not his robot) and gasp out “more light!” is impressive as hell. Who at Disney thought it was a good idea to have Maximilian Schell quoting Goethe in the same movie as a Slim Pickens-bot? It’s managerial insanity of the highest order.

Finally, the central mystery of the Cygnus is pretty good. They probably didn’t have the budget to make the robot crew look like anything other than humans with robes on, and that seriously diminishes the impact of the final reveal. Indeed, as an 8 year-old, I’m not sure I ever understood they were supposed to be robots. But, like so much else here, on paper it’s a hell of an idea. Certainly ripe for exploiting as an adventure in a SF RPG. Or, dare I say it, a remake?

I hate to play the fan, but I can’t help think what a remake of this, with a better script, better effects, and Daniel Day-Lewis as Doctor Reinhardt, would be like. Of course, invoking Daniel Day-Lewis in this context is like saying “man I bet this wood would be worth a lot more if it was made of gold!”

It’s a fine line between clever and stupid.

In 1997 I started working at Last Unicorn Games, a tiny little game company long-since defunct, on the Dune CCG with Owen Seyler. We went on to make the Dune RPG, one of the prettiest and now rarest and most expensive RPG books ever made. in 2000 we were bought by Wizards of the Coast and for a brief time, we were working on a D20 version of the Dune RPG.

The D20 version of the game never saw print, alas, but I’m posting some of my work from it for posterity. A very tiny amount of writing was done, it’s just a curio. And it’s my writing from 15 years ago so it’s amusing (Adventurons! The elementary particles of adventures!) and somewhat primitive. But it’s free! Worth every penny.

Download The Dune RPG (D20) Outline
Download The Dune Adventure

When we started working on the d20 version of Dune, my boss and I sat down and laid out what we wanted from the line. Any time you make a licensed game with classes and levels, you get people saying that it’s totally inappropriate for classes and levels. That’s fine. But Owen and I always believed that Dune was perfect for classes and levels, we even talked about how this or that character was multi-classed and what those classes were before we’d ever started working on ANY Dune RPG. It was natural for us.

We wanted to let people create their own Great Houses, Houses Minor, have rules that scaled all the way up from the skirmish level, which is to say a normal RPG, all the way up to planetary battles played out like an RTS. And we knew we could do it. We knew how it would work. We had all the talent in place to do it.

We wanted to make a Lansdraad. A real, living Landsraad. The Landsraad would be our version of Living Greyhawk. People would make their own planets, their own houses, and join the Landsraad. We’d have a website set up for people up upload their info, art. We’d put issues before the Landsraad, just like they did in the L5R newsletter, let people vote.

We seriously thought “there has never been a property better suited for this kind of Organized Play.” And now we were at WotC! We could really do it! Some of that work got started, none of it got done. The d20 Dune was canceled. All we have is a tiny slice of on adventure. /sadface.

The Arrakis Adventure

WotC had this incredible mound of market data. They spent a lot of time and energy figuring out what people wanted to do in different universes. So they’d mention a property, like Dune and ask them to rate these statements:

“I would like to make an original character” rated 1 to 5.

“I would like to play one of the existing famous characters from this property.” 1 to 5.

“I would like to play through new adventures.”

“I would like to play through the classic storyline.”

They asked these questions about a wide range of potential gaming properties. Not only things you need a license for like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Dune, but stuff anyone could do, like King Arthur or Robin Hood. Amazingly, the same people answered differently for different properties. In other words, the desire to create a completely original character didn’t vary so much from person to person, as it did from property to property! Some properties, people overwhelmingly wanted to make their own stories. Some, people wanted to tell new stories. It was a revelation for us.

Well the data said that people wanted to play new, original characters in Dune, in the Main Storyline with the Kwisatz Haderach and everything you read in the novel, but they didn’t want to play the heroes in this story. They wanted the story of Dune to unfold as written, with their characters as sort of Rosencrantz & Guildensterning around. I believe the data indicated they wanted to have *some* influence on events, but not affect major changes.

It came to me to figure out how to make that adventure. Initially I thought “man this is going to be a pain in the ass, that’s some pretty fucking specific direction.” But I quickly realized I was completely wrong. As it turned out, it was easy. It was super easy. There’s a ton of amazing content happening right off-screen, in the novel, which they reference. Thufir says “We’ve sent an advance team to Arrakeen to clean out the palace,” YOU ARE that advance team. The first member of House Atreides on Arrakis! “We’re having the devil’s own time clearing out these sabotage devices, but we’re almost done,” because of YOUR work! Duncan mentions sending a continent to meet with Stilgar and how well that went, you play those characters, the first members of House Atreides to meet the Fremen.

Anyway, we got started on that, never finished it. Hasbro, the literal actual Hasbro, not the Hasbro gamers talk about when they mean WotC, handed down a directive “no more licensed games,” and that was that. There were some other issues, it’s more complex than that, but beyond the scope of this post.

Enjoy reading and wondering what might have been!

Bi-lal kaifa.

Well, post. Podcast. Or whatever.

Download the 2001 Podcast

I work with an amazing team of creative people across many disciplines and because it’s video games many of these people are younger than me and one of the things I’ve noticed about people in their 20s right now is that they don’t have all the bullshit cultural baggage that the Baby Boomers and their kids (my generation) carried around. 2001: A Space Odyssey is famous for being impenetrable and a lot of people my age have this “screw that movie” attitude. they resent being challenged, reset the respect the movie gets. Something to do with entitlement, I think.

But the guys I work with, younger guys, their attitude is “that movie was weird, what was going on?” They know something’s going on, they don’t mind saying “I didn’t get it” and they’re curious. I love that. No cultural baggage, no chip on their shoulder. Open curiosity. Intellectual curiosity, artistic curiosity.

One day someone asks me if I’ve seen 2001 and then, when I said I had, they didn’t say “did you like it?” They went straight to “what was that movie about? What was the Monolith? Why did HAL kill that guy?” and as I gave what I thought were my answers, this amazing dialog between me and a bunch of artists opened up and we all came away having noticed things and thought about things we hadn’t before.

So I figured, hey, why not write it all down. But that was boring. What was fun was talking about it. So I decided to do a podcast of sorts. I started by writing, I’m a writer, but after a couple of paragraphs I said “this is stupid.” It lacked the spontaneity of the original conversation so I just turned the mike on and started talking. That was surprisingly easy and this is the result.

Maybe someone will get a kick out of it, maybe someone will take it and do something interesting with it, put their own images to it, whatever. If there’s a positive response, maybe I’ll do more of these!

If you’ve got feedback, feel free to follow me on Facebook and post something.

WotC is working on a new edition of D&D. I spent the last couple of weeks, since the announce, thinking about what I like about D&D and why I play, or why I stop. I’m not currently as burned out with 4E as I was with 3E during the last edition change. But I am tired of it and ready to stop. I don’t consider this a problem. I played 3E for years until I got sick of it. I consider that time and money well spent. Ditto 4E. Even though in both cases, I got to a point where I was ready to stop.

There’s no reason to think 5E will be some kind of magic bullet where I love it and play it forever. Maybe I won’t play it at all. Maybe I’ll just stop playing D&D. Nothing wrong with that. If I get a few years of fun and enjoyment out of it, that’ll be great. If not, that’s ok.

But it does prompt me to think about what I like about D&D. What I want in a D&D. Absent the rules. I’m talking about the experience of play. My ideal D&D.

I like the idea that the wilderness is dangerous. Travelling through it, exploring it, is a life-or-death proposition for starting characters.

I like the idea of Random Encounters. This ties into the previous Like. If we go off the beaten track we may meet something dangerous. Something that threatens us, might kill us. Life & Death. I like the idea that resting in a dungeon is dangerous, because of what might come along while we sleep. I like the idea of taking watch, of building tension as we hope no one finds us.

I like the idea that time has meaning. Leaving the dungeon to rest, going back to town, has an impact on the dungeon. When we come back, the bad guys will be ready for us. Will be nastier. I like the idea that exploring the dungeon is a kind of race against time in a Stealth Actioner. Can we make it through before we run out of resources, can we avoid alerting the entire place?

I like magic items that are awesome, and weird, and random. I like the idea that you’re collecting a trove, souvenirs of all the awesome shit you’ve done. The items are memorable (sometimes because of how useless, weird, or quirky they are) and when you look at the list of items on your sheet, you remember all the crazy shit you did to get them. I like the idea that your 7th level fighter and my 7th level fighter will be really different…because we went on different adventures. I like the idea that you might look at someone else’s sheet and exclaim “where did you GET that!?”

I like magic items players covet. They read about them in the DMG and think “Holy crap I WANT that!” They hear rumors of various adventures and the treasure within and that is what motivates them to go adventuring.

I like the idea that money is important. It’s power. It lets you do things. Therefore players want it, and want to keep track of it.

I like the idea that there are things to do outside of combat. Outside the dungeon. Things to spend money on, things I *want* to spend money on. And I like the idea that these things have mechanics. They don’t have to be as robust as combat–combat is the star of the show–but I want more than just the GM making up a bunch of shit.

I like the idea that my character can have ambition. My fighter wants to build a Keep and attract Followers. My Wizard wants to build a Tower, or start a Wizard’s Order, research new spells, explore the wilderness clairvoyantly from his spire. There is a world to influence, and rules for doing so. My priest wants to start a church. My character can become a Count and raise an army. My character wants to influence the world. If yours doesn’t, that’s fine. It’s not a requirement, it’s an option.

I like the idea that everyone has cool shit they can do in combat. No one is stuck with the shit job. No one has only One Thing They Do. Maybe at first level, you have One Thing You Can Do, but as you level you get more options.

But I also like the idea that, at some point in the combat, if it goes long enough, if it’s nasty enough, if things go bad, you will run out of shit to do and be forced to IMPROVISE. Think outside the box. Consider the terrain, environment, surroundings. The enemy. Change the conditions of the test, stop looking at your character sheet and start thinking. Or, look at your character sheet, and think “how can I use this otherwise useless thing?”

I like tactical combat. Been playing with lead minis on a battlemat for 25 years. It’s good. Don’t mind if the game can be played without it, but that’s not for me.

I like a game that’s simple enough that once you’ve played a couple of times, you get it. I know that Slowed means you have 2 movement. Immobile means you can’t leave your square. Simple, straightforward, easy to remember. I don’t want 1,600 words for Grapple. I want lots of simple options and effects. I don’t want any rules that require a lot of looking shit up.

I like the idea that when you’re asked to make choices during character creation, the choices are all good ones. You never choose between Rope Trick and Magic Missile.

But I like the idea that spells do weird and highly specialized things and that there can be points where the Wizard player is thinking outside the box and using something he never thought he’d use.

I like the idea that if you show up with a new character, and tell us what it is, we have some idea what you can do…even if we’ve never read the rules. I have certain expectations about an Elf or a Wizard. I have no fucking idea what a Shardmind is, and I didn’t come to the table to find out. I don’t want to have to teach new players that a Wizard is really a Controller, and then teach them what a Controller is.

I like it when players worry about XP. I don’t really know why, but I’ve played in games where players judiciously tally XP, and games where they didn’t care because they knew they were all going to level up at a regular rate, and the former were always more fun. I like the idea that leveling up feels like something the players achieved through their actions, rather than being rewarded by the GM with because they spent enough time adventuring and it didn’t really matter what they did.

I like the idea that surviving is a big deal. That makes the XP rewards more meaningful. “Holy crap we made it!” should be a regular refrain. This means…often you don’t make it!

I like the idea that there are sites to explore and maybe bad guys to kill. But there aren’t ‘quests’ and you don’t get XP for ‘completing a quest.’ If you want to stop the Giants from attacking the Farmlands, the reward is…the Giants stop attacking the Farmlands. You got XP for killing the Giants. Maybe the farmers are now more Loyal toward you, you attract more Followers, you gain fame and influence. Those are mechanically valuable things.

I like the idea that being 1st level means worrying about things like your Gear. You’re not a Hero yet, you have to rely on mundane Gear. I don’t really give a shit about encumbrance, but maybe worrying about how much you can carry for the first couple of levels is fun. After that, I’m a Hero, I got bigger fish to fry.

I like the idea that surviving to, say, 5th level is a big deal and means you’re probably going to be OK. But until then, it’s a dicey proposition. I’ve played Bildungsroman games and game where you start competent and bad-ass and I think I prefer the former. I think you can go too far in either direction. I generally think that death should be the result of getting In Over Your Head and not knowing when to retreat, rather than some kobold got a lucky roll and your 1 hp wizard is dead. That’s just bad design.

I like the idea that the dungeon is a dangerous environment full of traps and secret doors and glowing, magical pools. Things to do besides fight monsters. Things to worry about.

I like the idea that your group and my group will go through the same adventure and have different experiences, maybe REALLY different experiences. You found a secret door, we discovered the secret to that magic mirror. We talk about these experiences, how different they were, and we both want to go through the adventure again!

I like the idea that there are only a handful of adventures. They’re famous and we tell stories about going through them and our difference experiences and we like going through them more than once. Not over and over, but more than once.

I like mechanically robust combat that’s easy to set up and run. Improvise. Running the game, on the fly, using the Monster Builder and Combat Manager is some of the most fun I’ve ever had in D&D. Monsters had tons of cool shit they could do, and it was fun running them.

I like mapping. I like having to map the dungeon. I like the players feeling like they have to map the dungeon and that the map is valuable.

I like bad guys who are smart and work together. This Goblin is going to run out of the room and go alert his Goblin Brethren in the other room and I didn’t just break the game by taking what was supposed to be 3 different encounters with rests between them and turn them into one big encounter, I just made the game more challenging.

I think that’s about it. There’s a lot of stuff not on this list because by and large it’s stuff I don’t give a shit about!

Every edition of D&D has had stuff in it I loved. No edition has had it all. Maybe none will. I don’t expect anyone to cater to me.

Piers Anthony is still alive. He wrote a lot of the fantasy and SF that I loved when I was coming up in the 1980s. These were breezy books, easy to read, lots of great characters and situations and tons of ideas. It was a fantasy of ideas. The Apprentice Adept series, the Incarnations of Immortality, and Xanth.

In the first Xanth novel, a Manticore asks the great wizard a question. “Do I have a soul?” The Manicore fears that, as a monster, he does not. The Wizard explains that only those who have a soul, wonder if they have a soul. It is, to me, a much more satisfying fairy tale ending than Dorothy having “always had the power” to get home.

Games can be fun for a lot of reasons. They can be rewarding, for different reasons. But I think they can also have soul. Humanity. I’m beginning to think the difference between traditional storytelling media and games is that the older media are revelatory while this new one we’re creating is expressive.

In other words, in a good movie–and I think film is the best at this–you can have an experience that sheds light on what it means to be a human being. You can learn something you didn’t know about being a person. You can see something you did know, expressed in a way that reinforces it, that validates it, that makes you think “YES! That’s how it is!” And which makes the experience of being a person more real.

Wereas in games we have the opportunity to express that humanity. To do things that capture the essential nature, the beauty, of being alive, of being human.

Some games, in other words, have soul. They are soul, they’re about it. They are spiritually nourishing.

Minecraft

When I started playing Minecraft a few weeks ago, I think I formed the wrong opinion about it. I was enjoying myself, but we can enjoy ourselves for a lot of reasons not all of which are fun. I had the distinct sensation, as I whiled away the hours, that I was wasting time. “This,” I thought, “is what Jonathon Blow is talking about.” I was playing Minecraft instead of doing something real. Instead of working on the sequel to my book.

But I think that’s a mistake. I wasn’t doing any of the things Blow talks about as soul-destroying. I wasn’t chasing after achievements, I wasn’t grinding levels…or grinding anything. I wasn’t humiliating other players. I wasn’t competing with anyone over anything. I was exploring and building. I was imagining things…and then making them. Working to make them, solving the problems of making them and then loving the result.

I made that initial mistake because Minecraft is ephemeral and I mistook that as being bad. It’s not. That these things we make, this world we explore isn’t real, isn’t real and can go away if the server is nuked, doesn’t make it less relevant to our experience as people, it makes it more relevant. Building sandcastles is not a waste of time. That life is ephemeral is what gives it value. It doesn’t matter how terrible or marvelous your experience is, how awful or wonderful today is for you…this too shall pass.

Minecraft isn’t just a game with soul, it’s nothing but soul. Its literally singular vision–one dude wrote the whole thing–is nothing except the wonder of exploration, and giving you the tools to be an artist, make what you want. Whatever you’re inspired to do. Because of this, because the game concentrates on these elements and nothing else, it is a joy to play. I mean that in the same sense St. Thomas Aquinas meant it. An expansion of the heart. You can easily lose yourself for hours planning, mining, building, exploring, experimenting. And on a multi-player server, you know, or hope, or imagine, that other players will find the things you make. And marvel at them. How wonderful is that? That your desire is to make something amazing, and then show it to people. How different from what our culture thinks of when it thinks of “video game.”

Minecraft looks like the kind of game you’d get if the dude who made Adventure for the Atari 2600 in 1979 had a 3D engine. It looks extremely primitive. And it’s sold something like 3 million units at $20 a pop. Think about what it means that a game that looks so bad, by modern standards, done by a single dude, has sold to many millions of people.

What are people responding except the soul evident in the game? People are hungry for it, and when it is put in front of them, they flock to it.

Osmos

Osmos is a brilliant little game for the iPad that is fundamentally beautiful. Beautiful in presentation, the music is beautiful, the gameplay is beautiful. Beautiful the way physics can be beautiful. Before anyone knew the structure of DNA, James Watson knew what it was not. He, rightly, rejected paths that led to inelegant, ugly, but workable solutions to the problem. “The truth is beautiful,” he said. He wasn’t the first. That was my experience playing Osmos. It’s a unique intersection, a marriage between gameplay, controls, and presentation. That marriage isn’t just clever, or well-designed, it was beautiful.

The music in Osmos is beautiful. You can control the flow of time in the game, speed it up and slow it down, and the music changes accordingly. Remaining engrossing, atmospheric, lush at any speed. You never have the experience of thinking “Oh this is the speed it was meant to be listened at.” Quite a feat.

The result is not merely a game that’s fun to play, it’s fun to watch. I lay in bed before sleep sometimes for fifteen minutes just watching the little motes spin in orbits, thinking, hoping, believing, that they would collide in advantageous ways. I do not consider that time wasted. It was spiritually nourishing. It was a meditation.

Portal, but not Portal 2

The triumph of Portal was a triumph of soul, I feel. There was a love of humanity, a quirky, poignant statement made in the relationship between you and GLaDOS. We felt it as we played, and we missed it in Portal 2. I don’t think you can do Portal, and then More Portal Again, without losing some of the soul of the first game. The act of saying “let’s just do more of this” seems a kind of intellectual decision, rather than a spiritual one.

There was a joy evident in Portal. Joy in playing the game, in experimenting, in not only solving the puzzles, but joy in trying to solve them, that I think was missing from the second game.

GLaDOS had a soulful humanity about her. I think that’s one of the big things people responded to. Jonathon Coulton’s song at the end fit so well, was so perfect, because it captured that humanity. The game’s soul. I do not feel I am being redundant when I repeat these things, I feel I am being emphatic.

Legend of Grimrock

You’ve probably never heard of this one, it’s not out yet, but I challenge you to watch that video and not understand what I’m talking about. A small team of industry vets decide to go it alone, and make the game they love. Their love for the game, nary a marketing or management decision in sight, is evident in everything you see. It looks gorgeous. It takes modern graphics and does something essentially primitive with them. It’s an old-school dungeon crawler from back when you were locked to a grid. You couldn’t even look around freely. You had to turn 90 degrees to see what was on your left and right.

I think that game’s going to be a hit. I don’t think it matters if you played any of those games in the 1980s or 1990s, I think the fact that these guys love it and have the skill and talent required to express that love in their production will mean we love it.

Love, humanity, spirit, soul. These are words I’m using a lot. If you need them defined…you’re missing the point. If you need a list, you can’t have one. These are human issues, as Aristotle said. There are not mathematical solutions.

If you want everything I’m talking about boiled down to its essence, here it is…

Sword & Sworcery

Sword & Sworcery is nothing but soul. Like Minecraft, the art is primitive…but beautiful. Like the paintings at Lascaux, they’re primitive only in the technology used to create them. But they are perfectly human, expressive, beautiful, artful, in what that technology expresses.

Just walking around in S&S is neat. Watching the animations, the way characters and trees and sunlight and lakes are represented. There is very little of what might be termed gameplay, and what gameplay there is feels…it’s not very satisfying. I was always eager to get back to the game when I was away from it, but not because I looked forward to swinging my sword or blocking with my shield.

One noted criticism when the game showed at an early convention was “It’s nothing but walking around!!” The designers, as described in the post-mortem, scratched their heads. Either they were on the wrong track, or the reviewer was missing the point.

They were not on the wrong track.

As there is soul, there is its opposite, I feel. There are games which are an attack on our humanity. Our experience of being human.

Anti-human

This is not a man. He doesn’t look like a man, he doesn’t talk like one. He looks like a funhouse mirror image of a man. Misshapen, out of proportion. When we see people in the real world who look like this, we freak out, we make fun of them. It’s not just his image that’s out of proportion, it’s his language, his actions. In fact, when we normally see him, he’s locked in a suit that’s literally impossible. There’s no place for his body in the suit, his head is microscopic, a tiny blip at the top of a tower of metal. Everything deliberately exaggerated to draw attention to his fundamental inhumanity.

Games in general, and not just games, superhero comics, but Blizzard games in particular, often come under fire for being anti-female. All the women in their games are strippers. But this, I feel, misses an essential point. The men in this game are also awful. Awful to look at, awful to inhabit. It’s a 13-year old’s aspirations, and not a very emotionally healthy 13 year old. It’s the folks who saw Heavy Metal when they were kids, and spend the rest of their lives thinking “this is normal for men and women.” The women, the men, the fantasies, are all awful statements.

There isn’t anyone in these games that looks an acts like a person. These strippers and roided-out muscle-men, the fantasies they present, feel to me now like attacks on humanity. On our capacity to be human. Our capacity to feel, to care. about other people. Ourselves. Blizzard’s games have a phenomenal amount of polish, and often excellent gameplay. But they are fundamentally anti-human. The people they present, the people they imagine, are, look, behave awful. Not badly drawn, but cruelly imagined.

I loved playing Starcraft 2, I spent hundreds of hours in the multiplayer. The folks who worked on that should be incredibly proud. It’s the single-player game that I found repulsive. I thought it was very badly designed, a colossal amount of time spent learning new units and game mechanics and even different perspectives which are never used, after you’ve learned them. No time spent playing with them, leveraging what you’ve learned. But that’s not the point I’m making here.

Fantasy & Taste

The fantasy of saving the world, of defending the Earth against aliens, is awesome. There’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t say anything about the nature of the experience within to say you run around shooting aliens. What you like, saving the Earth, airstrikes, rolling things into a ball, playing a plastic guitar, these are just down to taste. Your taste and mine do not align perfectly. So mote it be.

But within that spectrum of taste–you like Fantasy games, he likes modern warfare games, she likes space-fighter sims, whatever–within that spectrum are games that have soul, and games that are soulless. It takes some time spent inside the games with soul to realize that what you were doing before was toxic. Cancerous. You have have thought you liked that game…but you really didn’t. You didn’t know any better. This is what Mark Kermode is talking about in his book. When you lived in a slum, in poverty, you thought a water heater that only worked one day out of three was awesome, because before you had no hot water heater at all. But once you left the slum, you realized all the stuff you thought was awesome before was actually pretty shit. It was an awful way to live, but you didn’t have any other perspective.

DIY

It’s no coincidence that so many games with soul are–or started as–Indie games. We live in a new age. It’s not coming, it’s here. You and your friends can make a game. UDK, iOS SDK, Unity, LOVE, you can do it yourself. And the result is…people do. They use games and the medium of games to express themselves. That we now have so many games with soul should not be a surprise, it should be expected. This is what happens when small groups of people make the game they love. When they take joy in the creation of the game. The joy is expressed in the final product.

It’s because of this new revolution, because of the time spent in games like Minecraft and Osmos and Sword & Sworcery that we can look back on the games we’ve been playing for 15 years and say “Hang on, that’s crap.” It might have good gameplay, but it’s a toxic experience. It’s not just that we can do better…we ARE doing better! Those games are out there. Many more I’ve never even played. Some that are to your taste. Yes, yours. Your specific taste, you who think all the games I’ve mentioned sound crap. Don’t put up with the image of humanity sold to you in AAA games featuring men who started juicing in the womb and women who, even when naked and covered in chitinous armor, spontaneously evolve stiletto heels.

Art

It doesn’t matter to me if video games are art or not. Matters not one whit, wouldn’t bother me to discover they are not, or even cannot be, could never be. Because to me, Art is that which reminds us of what it means to be human. Art expands our understanding of our own humanity.

Whereas what I see in games like Minecraft and Sword & Sworcery is an expression of that humanity, not a confirmation of it. An experience of it. Joy.

Might not be art, but I like it.

A quote I’ve heard attributed to many people, but in this case I cite Alfred Hitchcock, is “If you want to be universal, be specific.”

Guillermo Del Toro places his fairy tale story of skepticism and fascism in Spain, 1944, just after the Spanish Civil War and, in doing so grounds his story in specifics, freeing his fantasy to be universal.

As with all fairy tales, there is a moral here. A subversive one. Whereas most fairy tales extol the virtues of honesty, obeying your elders, not straying from the path, Pan’s Labyrinth’s moral is about thinking for yourself, disobeying authority. No surprise, then, that the film is set in post-Civil War fascist Spain. The movie is about fascism. The fascism of totalitarian governments, and the fascism every child experiences at the hands of their parents. Parents who issue apparently arbitrary orders and expect them to be thoughtlessly carried out for one’s own good.

But, as the movie directly states, only a certain type of person can follow orders for the sake of following orders. And while adults in the film struggle with fear as they try to rebel, childhood is the natural antithesis of fascism.

12-year-old Ofelia, our main character, is therefore well-armed to oppose the murderous reign of her cruel stepfather, Captain Vidal. Both a tyrannical father and a literal fascist. When the local guerrilla revolutionaries move into the forest, Captain Vidal has moved his trooped into the forest and turned a farmer’s mill into a garrison. No coincidence that our fairy tale begins with our hero entering the forest.

Ofelia’s mother arrives, child in tow. Her husband is dead, and she is pregnant with Captain Vidal’s child. Was Captain Vidal involved in the husband’s death? Oh, probably. You know how these things go. But Ofelia’s mother seems genuinely happy that they are coming to live with the Captain, because it means security. She will be taken care of. She tells Ofelia; “The captain has been so good to us.… Please, Ofelia, call him father. It’s just a word, Ofelia, just a word.”

And here we have our first inkling of what this movie is going to be about. Ofelia simply refuses to do it. She never does it. She knows she’s never going to do it as soon as her mother asks, and we can tell! This young actress is astonishing in her ability to play wide-eyed wonder, and skepticism, and determination, often without resorting to dialog. We can tell what she’s thinking. Lots of movies never reach that level of writing and acting, with adult actors!

She’s not a perfectly moral hero, the movie does not argue that childhood means perfectly moral innocence, or that innocence is a virtue. Ofelia lies. She disobeys her mother. There are several points in the film where Ofelia forces herself to do some really unpleasant (as in, gross) things because she was promised she’d be made a princess if she did. And in those moments, she steels herself, reminds herself how badly she wants to be a princess, and soldiers on. It’s, frankly, adorable to watch precisely because of how selfish it is. “I am going to be a princess, even if I have to slog through all this mud and end up covered in beetles.”

But it does argue that childhood affords a purity of thought denied to us adults. We cannot want something so purely, or believe things as strongly as a child, and this is part of Ofelia’s defense against fascism.

It’s clear early on when Ofelia begins to experience some magical, possibly imaginary, things. When she encounters a fairly disgusting bug, remember this is the same guy who made Cronos, she says; “Hi! Are you a fairy?”

Is it a fairy. No! It’s a bug! But that Ofelia can see something so ugly and imagine that it’s a wondrous fairy is another one of her virtues and, possibly because of her belief, we see the bug become a fairy, and the adventure begins.

She meets a small cast of interesting and terrifying characters. The titular Faun at the center of the titular labyrinth informs her that she is the reincarnation of a princess and if she can pass three tests her father the king will take her away from it all and she’ll rule over fantasyland.

Of course, if we’ve been paying attention, we know Ofelia is going to disobey virtually every instruction the Faun gives her. She’s like the Fairy Tale version of John McClane from Die Hard. She gets her ass kicked at every turn, and wins all the way through.

She is not burdened with any adult baggage. When we see the Faun, he appears a diabolic and sinister character. I would have got the hell out of there, or looked for a shotgun. Ofelia may be afraid, but she remembers her manners, like a good girl. “My name is Ofelia. What’s yours?”

When confronted with the gigantic frog at the bottom of the world, she is disgusted, but articulate. “Aren’t you ashamed to live down here, in all the mud, eating nothing but bugs?”

This is not movie dialog, it’s fairy tale dialog, and it’s delightful. There’s more fairy tale plotting. When Ofelia (astonishingly played by Ivana Baquero,) has carefully and wisely chosen to remove the new and expensive dress her mother made for her, so it will not get dirty as she explores the Underworld, we know something bad is going to happen to the dress. It’s going to get ruined, and she’s going to get in trouble, in spite of the fact that she TRIED to keep it nice, and was thinking ahead and being responsible, and we know no one will believe her. Fairy tales used to teach children that the world was going to be an awful and capricious place. Unfair, and rarely unfair in our favor.

It should be no secret that Ofelia’s fantasy world, and the cruel reality of Captain Vidal, the Evil Stepfather, are going to collide. At most, only one can survive.

Ofelia is not the only character who struggles against Captain Vidal, and the plight of the Spanish peasants to deal with the autocrat is dark, and violent and not what we associate with a fairy tale. But in spite of its brutality and violence, I thought…if I had a six year old daughter…I might take her to see this. Because it works as an amazing fairy tale, with lessons about the world, one of which is; people can be horribly cruel to one another. That’s what fairy tales used to be about. Horrible lessons for children, wrapped in fantasy. Maybe I’d scar my daughter for life, or maybe she’d come out of the experience with a healthy and deep-seated distrust for authority, and people who obey orders for order’s sake.

Before the movie started, my friend Mark related the story of working in Los Angeles and getting passes to be in preview screenings of movies. This is a shared experience many of us have. I saw Back to the Future and Legend and a few other movies in test screenings when I was a kid.

He describes seeing a movie called Valentine having no earthly idea what kind of movie it was going to be, nothing except the title, and so when the first scarey moment happened, he almost shit himself. The movie, he explained, wasn’t very good and wasn’t that scary once he knew what he was in for. But not knowing, that first moment was among the scariest he ever experienced.

I think I probably would have liked District 9 more if I knew literally nothing about what I was going to see when I sat down. This is, however, not an experience we often have. TV is our only avenue for that kind of discovery, that kind of tabula rasa experience. I was reading a retro-article from the early 1980s about the advent of the “remote control” culture and “channel surfing” and how degenerate it seemed to the people who were adults at the time. Like their kids had some sort of disorder because they’d change the channel every second. But that experience has a lot to recommend it. You come across some amazing shit when you have 0 expectations and judge the work purely on your reaction to it with no marketing between you and the authors. Often showing up in the middle, without any backstory. The movie didn’t begin in media res but your version of it did.

Someone stumbling across District 9 as they channel surfed (a dying experience, I believe, with the advent of streaming) would probably have their mind blown. I, however, did not. I knew what the movie was about and so was a little disappointed.

It’s hard to criticize this movie if you know how it was made. The whole thing looks like a $120 million movie, but cost only $30 mil plus some Halo money. When you know that, you tend to give it some slack. It’s damned impressive for thirty million. What a cop out, huh? Damned by faint praise.

The main failing of the film is the completely lack of anyone to give a shit about, except maybe the aliens. Every single human character in the film is a worthless piece of shit. I’m not sure, maybe that’s the point of the film. When you know you’re in for a movie about a bunch of aliens in a ghetto in Johannesburg, you expect some subtext, some political allegory, but it’s hard to get any kind of meaning from a film that paints all its characters with such relentlessly bleak negativity. “Turns out, we’re all bastards!” Well, that’s a kind of dead-end, isn’t it?

Allow me to give an example. When the main character, obviously ill, disoriented, staggering around, vomits blue goop onto his own party cake, his friends and family just watch. For quite a while. And frown at him. Not a single person at the party, including his wife, suggests or even implies that maybe someone should call an ambulance. Imagine John Hurt writhing on the table in Alien, the chest-burster rupturing through his sternum in some twisted nightmarish version of birth, and everyone else just standing around watching, not helping, turning to each other and commenting “what an asshole.” That’s the kind of human we’re dealing with here.

There’s a moment when the Head Evil Mercenary Dude looks around in the middle of a firefight during which all sorts of crazy alien shit has happened,  points to an alien he’s captured and says: “that guy knows what’s going on.”

He’s right. He’s absolutely correct. It is literally the only time in the movie any human being displays even an ounce of sense or insight.

A lot of the movie, like The Matrix, seemed to think that storytelling wasn’t necessary since they’d already decided they were going to make people one dimensional and trot out some cliches. “Listen,” the movie says. “You know that bit where no one believes him and his girlfriend abandons him and he’s all alone, right? So we don’t have to mess around with that do we? Here’s a phone call from her, you know what she’s going to say, so we’re just going to kind of say it quick and move on. Just imagine there was a whole relationship there you belived in and which just fell apart, ok? We’ve got some robots to fire up.”

We don’t know enough about his wife and their relationship to give a shit either way, which is probably for the best because this movie has such a dim fucking opinion of the human race, if we learned any more about her we’d probably end up hating her too. You know the stereotype of Dick Cheney as the evil mastermind? Well, imagine if A: he really was that guy and B: he took his lesbian daughter whom his party’s platform demands he abjure and instead of coming out in support of her, put her in a blender, juiced her, and drank her. Then he’d be all of the main bad guys of this movie.

A man may smile and smile and be a villain. Yes. But apparently in the future he can just be a villain and bypass the smiling part.

We’ve come full circle somewhat. Peter Coyote’s character from E.T. didn’t want to cut the little alien open and feast on his floppily-doppilies. The only reason Eliot thinks he’s going to do that is because Eliot’s head is filled with old SF where the bad guys always want to dissect the local aliens. Coyote’s character has to explain that in fact they’re trying to save E.T. Indeed, if we look back at the movie, all Eliot did was keep the sick alien away from the only people who had a chance of making him well again.

In District 9, everyone is either A: an idiot, or B: exactly the people Eliot thought Peter Coyote’s character was. It’s the 1950s all over again. They want to juice the aliens, they want to steal what the aliens have, they want to profit from it, they want to exploit them and each other and will destroy anyone and anything, heedless of any consequence to do it. Shit, watch the original Day The Earth Stood Still, we’re way worse now in District 9 than any humans were back then.

If these were two dimensional characters, that would be great. I have a great fondness for 2 dimensional characters. These guys are barely 1 dimensional. The only thing they’re missing is mustaches to twirl and blonds to leave tied up on railroad tracks. It’s dangerous to generalize. Does this movie just happen, by co-incidence, to feature nothing but worthless humans? Or is it just South Africans? Or is it everyone? Fuck you, either way.

The main character is something of a cipher for every fucked-up dysfunctional character ever. He’s a groveling sycophant, an inept bureaucrat, a bloodless coward, and a sociopathic bully. He’s so irredeemable the only way he’s able to get even a little perspective on the horror of the reality he’s lived with for 20 years is by being literally turned into one of the aliens. Only then does he seem to entertain the notion that, hey, maybe these guys aren’t so bad. But then, the entire rest of the cast is trying to gun him down, run him over, and blow him up all at once so it may just be that he likes the aliens because they’re the only ones not trying to kill him.

The action sequences and special effects are top notch. It’s hard for me to get behind the acting because the actors are given such weird characters to play. There is a WHOLE LOT of Chekov’s Gun in this movie such that you almost need a score card to keep track of every critical plot element and coincidence they mention in the first act so that, upon trotting them out in the third act you’ll know what’s going on. Get ready, because I’m about to praise Die Hard again

You know, when John McClane learns about making fists with his toes, it’s in service to a scene that tells us he doesn’t like to fly. So if he doesn’t like to fly, what’s so important that would make him overcome that? Oh, his wife. And their relationship is on the rocks. All that from fists with your toes. That’s tight plotting. In District 9 it’s fists with your toes now, so that in an hour and fifteen minutes he can punch people with his toe-fists. That’s it. These data points we’re given aren’t in service to anything. The alien weapons can only be fired by the aliens. That’s it, no further exposition, no insight into why that might be or what it says about the aliens, because it doesn’t say anything about them. The Nigerians want the alien weapons even though they can’t use them, for no reason, no insight there into the Nigerians or anyone else. They’re only important because the plot needs them later.

I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t want to see the movie they were showing me. As the main character drives around District 9 alternatively being afraid of and brutalizing the aliens, I thought “Oh. It’s this then, is it? I want to learn some more about the aliens.” They just aired Alien Nation on SciFi and I had one of those moments where I felt certain they were deliberately trying to remind us of a current-movie’s roots, by showing the stuff that inspired it.

When Alien Nation came out, I was impressed, but only because I thought it was going to be crap. It’s actually pretty good. Better, I think, than this movie and at least part of that is the view into the alien’s culture and lives, almost none of which we get here. What were they doing on that ship? Why did it stop working? What the hell was going on?

I’m not saying the movie had to answer those questions, nothing could be further from the truth, I’m just saying that I’d rather have learned about that, than get the story I got. You know, I didn’t like the bit in Footfall where the journalists turn out to be so blinded by their quest for a story that they will betray the human race’s plans for a counter-attack to the alien invaders, I thought it was just the authors hating journalists and putting their hate into the book. But at least it was a point of view. It was a statement about something, even though I didn’t like the statement, it was well-done.

It sounds like I hated this movie and I usually don’t come in and say “I liked it” or “I hated it,” because I think that’s lazy. But I do want to say “it’s not as bad as I make it sound.” You don’t really think about a lot of these things while you’re watching the movie, because it moves so fast. And every time they use the POP gun on the humans, no matter how many times they do it, everyone in the audience goes “AAUGH!” So that’s fun.

Just try not to think about how awful everyone in the movie is.

As I suspect thousands of people did in the week after Gary’s death, my friends and I played OD&D to memorialize the man who invented our hobby.

My friend Jim was 19 in 1975. He played with Dave Arneson a couple of times when Arneson was out here at Conventions. He was in Lee Gold’s group (which he describes as being many large groups all amalgamated together) when Lee started Alarums & Excursions. Playing with Jim is, no shit, playing with part of gaming history.

So Jim shows up last night after I suggested we play OD&D in memory of Gary with his original D&D “books.” By books here, I mean pamphlets. This was before AD&D, this was before the boxed sets we all grew up with. This was the original.

Jim was running the game section (because no one else wanted to) of a military shop in SoCal when D&D came out in 1974. Jim was already a wargamer at that point, playing games like Panzer Blitz. He loved fantasy and when D&D arrived he quickly became part of the phenomenon. He was in his late teens, just out of high school.

These pamphlets were expensive. They were the most expensive games you could buy. $10. You could take your girlfriend to dinner and a movie for $10. Well, a movie and Taco Bell maybe.

This was the first roleplaying game. Before this, there were wargames and strategy boardgames, but no RPGs. The idea did not exist. Furthermore, the notion of fantasy gaming as opposed to historical gaming was brand new as well.

Roleplaying Roleplaying

Jim shows up and says; “Ok! It’s November, 1975. Blackmoor just came out,” he says, showing us the 32 year old book, “but I haven’t read it yet so we can’t use the rules in there. But we CAN use the Greyhawk supplement! That means you can be a Thief now! Or a Paladin!”

Of course the real Jim has read Blackmoor a dozen times, but this is Jim from 1975. Jim is literally roleplaying the act of roleplaying in 1975, and we play along. Some amusement comes from the fact that the rest of us hadn’t even started grade school yet, but quickly we’re talking about what video games, if any, existed. Pong, certainly. But not Space Invaders. Caress of Steel had come out, Dark Side of the Moon was already 2 years old. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is already a year old. All the classic Yes albums were already a few years old, ditto Jethro Tull. Minstrel In The Gallery was just released and had I the presence of mind, I’d have put that on the iPod stereo. That’s a good album to roll dice by. Star Wars was not out yet, obviously, but Jaws was out! First blockbuster movie.

We open up the books, yellowing with age and begin reading. We recognize many of these terms and concepts but a lot of it is new to us. The art is really astonishing. Bad, oh yes, but also very charming. We begin making characters. DaveM, the wizard, DaveJ the Cleric, Craig the Fighter and I, the Thief. Really, I should have played the Paladin. My first D&D character was a Paladin. Ah well.

My thief needs a name! Of course we know that many of the things in D&D are named after the people who created it. The Wizard “Drawmij” is Jim Ward’s character. Vecna is an anagram of Vance, i.e. Jack Vance who Gygax borrowed his magic system from. Gary was the WORST offender in this regard. As S. John Ross said:

When I’m far from Gryrax, wandering around Castle Zagyg, fighting Xag-Ya and Xeg-Yi with the powers of my Ring of Gaxx and my Talisman of Zagy, I wonder “Who made all this stuff? He shouldn’t be so shy about putting his mark on it in some way.”

Even though I know this I’m still astonished to find, in the credits, the name Tom Keogh. “Oh my god.” Everyone wants to know what I’m reacting to, and I show them. “Reverse the names and you get Keogh Tom. Keoghtom. From which the magic item Keoghtom’s Ointment comes from.” A magic item that’s been in every edition of the book for 30 years. This may seem stupid to you but to us sitting around this table it’s like digging up dinosaur fossils. We’re archaeologists, exploring the past and discovering where we come from.

I asked Jim; “Jim, you know me. If I’d been playing this game back when it first came out, what kind of name would I have made up? Would I have made a silly name? A serious one? Stolen a name from somewhere?” Jim makes it a point never to answer a straight question when a story will do and so he told me that most of his names were stolen from books. I suddenly remembered how I named all my characters in my friend Brad’s campaign, and I immediately wrote “Duncan” on my character sheet.

In Brad’s campaign, all my PCs incorporated Dune characters into their names. Antony De Vries, Annon Corrino. So Duncan the thief is from Duncan Idaho. My friend Dave similarly named all his characters after the Bloodguard in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Cail, Korik, etc… Understand that we weren’t playing characters anything like the characters whose names we stole, it was just a way of personalizing your character. Like putting a Rush sticker on your binder. It also became a tradition, something you did. Many of us saw nothing wrong with this, we didn’t think it harmed verisimilitude. Very quickly, the names, regardless of reference, stopped reminding us of anything other than “this character.”

The Thief

So, of course, Duncan the Thief. One thing I notice immediately. Thieves can do things. The other characters can’t. I don’t mean “there are things I can do no one else can” I mean the thief has a variety of options while the other characters each only have one. The fighter can only attack, the mage and cleric can only cast a spell, one spell. Whereas I can attack and gain bonuses from striking at someone if they don’t know I’m there. I can open locks, I can find traps, hide in shadows, move silently. Some kind of breakthrough happened between the original three books of D&D, and the Greyhawk supplement. Characters had special abilities. Anyone could attack, only the thief could do these things.

In point of fact, this would be the counter-revolution within D&D. The Thief marks the beginning of these battles, the ur-edition war. The first of it’s kind. Because there’s no reason the thief should have a “Move Silently” ability. Why can’t a wizard try and move silently?

The thief was the first character created for the dungeon. He’s not a thief, he’s a professional dungeoneer. The other characters, the Cleric, the Magic-user, the Fighting-man, had roles outside the dungeon, had roles on the battlefield. That’s where they first came from.

But the thief was adapted for the dungeon. In a sense, there should be no thief, because everyone should be able to do what he’s trying to do. If the game’s about Dungeons then all the characters should be trying to move silently, hide in shadows, etc….

Chainmail

As we’re making our mans, Jim is reading Chainmail. It becomes apparent why the thief has these abilities. Chainmail was a wargame from 1971 onto which Gary Gygax attached some fantasy rules. Possibly the first such rules for any wargame. There aremany sections of original 1975 D&D that say ‘refer to Chainmail’ and as Jim’s reading it, for the first time in 30 years, he says “holy shit we never played with any of this. No wonder we had to houserule everything.” Here are rules for parrying and weapon speeds. The fighter (actually, “fighting-man”), wizard (actually “magic-user”), and cleric (strangely just cleric, not actually “god-botherer”) used all these rules. The thief didn’t exist in Chainmail and therefore the designers…well, Gary and Dave, invented all this stuff for him.

Now it becomes evident why so many groups played so different from each other and spent most of their time making new rules to fill in the gaps. Many of them, maybe most of them, didn’t have Chainmail. Gary et al had all this connective tissue, the ligament and cartilage from Chainmail. Everyone else, lacking this, had to make stuff up. Certainly, being the first RPG, a LOT of stuff was going to get house-ruled no matter what, but many players were just using these books and didn’t know what Chainmail was.

In the absence of the Chainmail foundation, house rules were created. Lots of em, and now not only was each group playing different from every other group, they were all playing different than the guys atTSR who DID have Chainmail . This explains a lot of the attitude Gary had back then. He often wrote that people were playing his game weird and this seemed to vex him. Yes, he used house-rules, that’s obvious from reading his shit, but people like Jim were using more house-rules than actual rules!

I’ve often noticed a difference between RPG gamers and wargamers. RPG gamers tend to argue a lot at the table about the rules, holding up play. Wargamers will argue for a little while, and then roll dice to determine which interpretation of the rules to use and work out the right answer after the game. Certainly there are a lot of differences between the two types of games and the people who play them, but looking back and considering how much of gaming is tradition passed on from player to player rather than rulebook to player, I wonder if part of this might not arise from the fact that wargames are foundation and the players argue about the high-level stuff. Whereas the original RPG was only the high level stuff and players weren’t using Chainmail, the foundation.

Jim’s reading Chainmail and we’re making our mans. First thing I noticed; your entire character can fit on a 3×5 card. There were stats for things like Bending Bars (barred doors and windows presumably) and lifting gates, but Jim made these rolls for us. So we didn’t put them on our sheet. Making a dude only took a few minutes because apart from your stats, there wasn’t anything to do! No choice to make. We all had enough gold to buy all the armor and weapons we could possibly use.

This meant that apart from your stats, all first level fighters were essentially the same. Same on the character sheet, same options in combat. Of course they would be, this is literally only one step removed from a wargame in which all mans of a given type are literally identical. Magic-users and clerics could choose different spells, but each only one.

We’re also using the “new” rules for hit points in which the fighters get a d8 and the thief and wizard a d4.  Therefore Duncan the Thief is walking around with 3 hp. But so what? That’s how the game was played. Jim busts out his overland map, also over 30 years old, and shows us where we’re starting. A small town which he realized he named Banchory and mispronounced Bastenchury for 10 years. No thought is given to how we know each other. We agree to set out to the mountains in the northeast and kill the goblins who’ve taken over the old dwarven stronghold long-since ruined. There’s a bounty on goblin ears and we aim to collect!

We bust out the tact-tiles and Jim busts out the minis. These are real, actual minis from 1975. From Kreigspeil’s Middle-earth line. We’re playing with 32-year old painted lead.

From here on out, the process of playing is not entirely unlike the process of playing any other edition at 1st level. We all suck. None of us can fight worth a damn. Mark shows up about halfway through and now we have two fighters. Well, after we meet his character who’s been lashed to a pole and is being roasted by Orcs over an open flame. The new character introduced in the middle of the game is always in the next room, held captive by the bad guys. Thus it was handed down to us from olden times.

By the time Mark’s new character is ready, Dave’s magic user has been a slimy toad for half an hour, with another half an hour to go. He read a cursed scroll and there you are. “This is not fun” Dave reasonably states, but that’s the game. As Jim points out, “hey, if you don’t like it, I got another 10 guys waiting to play in this game.” It’s 1975 and the rules say “best for between 4 and 40 players.” Jim knew of many games that had dozens of players, though also many GMs.

It dawned on me at this point why Jim was always so surprised at the way we played D&D. Each player with one character. These days, one character is enough to manage. Back then, there were several factors pushing you toward running several characters at once. Each character could fit on a 3 x 5 card. No single character was worth a damn at low levels. If you wanted more than one thing to do in combat, you needed two dudes! Forget the fact that the magic-user got one spell for the whole combat, and the fighter gets to swing his sword as often as he wants, each had only that one option.

So your character was built on very little data, you had no options in combat, and you were very likely to die. 3 hit points! One hit took me down.

The rules themselves were barely there. You had to make it all up. This put so much responsibility on the GM. He had to be entertaining, imaginative, fair, rational. In many ways the steady march away from original D&D has been a sustained effort to remove the effects of a bad GM on the game. The more game elements are objectively determined, written down in books, the less you have to rely on the GM. The less you need a really good GM to run the game. And yes, the more of a science it becomes, and less of an art. Running this game was an art form and only a few people could do it really well. There’s something magical about that. Newer versions become more systematized and therefore more people can play. Mediocre GMs can run good games. But, if I’m being honest with myself, something of the magic is lost. That feeling that most of this game lived in your mind. Because of that, I think, it was more real. As more and more of the game lived in the rules and on character sheets, it became a game instead of a world in your head.

There were some rules I was surprised by. The rules for Parrying, for instance, which gave people an interesting choice in combat. Frankly, I thought these were the best parry rules I’d ever seen. Hell, they’re the ONLY parry rules I’ve ever seen that made sense! When designing the CODA system at Decipher to be used in the Star Trek and Lord of the Rings RPGs, my boss and I talked about a parry option and how we’d never seen a good one in an RPG and we decided such a thing was not possible (I was much younger then). “Either Parry is free, in which case you’d always do it regardless of how effective it was, or it’s a choice: Parry or Attack. And given such a choice, ‘damage or push’ why would you choose to push?”

Well here smaller weapons were faster. So fast that some rounds you get to attack twice. And on those rounds, you could parry your enemy AND attack! It was simple, and it worked. Simple to understand, simple in execution. I always understood the premise behind the weapon speed rules we never used in AD&D, but now I saw the OTHER rules they worked with to make them useful and meaningful. 32 year old game, still has something to teach.

By the end of that cold November night in 1975, I’d been dead for half an hour and was playing Patapon, a game from the future while the rest of the part was slowly killed. Total Party Kill. Turned out, we weren’t the only ones hunting the goblins. Orcs were also in on the hunt and we took a wrong turn and fought the Orcs first. Orc minis, also from 1975.

I would play this game again. Like Christopher Reeve in Somewhere In Time, I’d have to transport myself back 32 years. Consciously decide to put aside 32 years of gaming and put myself in that mindset. You have to put aside systems and character options and customization, but in exchange you get magic. The kind of magic that turns a hex-map and lead into a world you believe in and want to go back to.

Jim would run the game too and I’m not certain we won’t switch back and forth between 4E and…0E. But one thing I know, we’d have to meditate before each session. Return to that time, and put aside all desire to return to the future. The normal creep toward systems and objective rules, the very pressure that created AD&D and its children, would have to be disavowed. That’s not why we come to this. Each house rule would have to be examined to make sure it didn’t feel like a modern rule, a system. Because otherwise, why play this game? We have systems. But we want magic.

You can buy PDFs of these books online. Cheap. Absolutely worth it just to spend a hour reading the rules. You’re reading the blueprint for all of fantasy gaming right there. A direct and unbroken line leading from Dungeons & Dragons to Mass Effect and World of Warcraft. All one.

There’s a scene in the classic thriller The Day of the Jackal where cool, English, sophisticated Edward Fox is using his custom-made rifle to shoot at melons in a overgrown field in the middle of France. He’s doing this, wearing a very natty ascot, because he’s a paid assassin, practicing for his planned hit on French President Charles de Gaulle.

That’s a great juxtaposition. Debonair, efficient, not a care in the world, plugging away at watermelons and this works, there’s tension in this scene, because we know that he’s planning on killing the President of France, and we know he knows. That he can be so suave while he’s imagining de Gaulle’s head exploding makes an otherwise non-descript scene work.

George Clooney as the title character in The American has exactly that same scene. Wildflowers instead of melons, Italy instead of France, and an overgrown river instead of an overgrown field. But the gun is his, also self-built, for the same reason.

But even though it’s the same scene, it is in all ways the opposite of the scene from Day of the Jackal. He made the gun as a job for someone else. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know who they’re going to kill. It’s not even clear that he knows who he works for, beyond a name and a phone number.

Lacking any awareness of the past, and therefore no ability to understand the future, he acts in what must be considered an amoral way. For to act with morality, you must have some awareness, some context for your actions, and Clooney’s American has none of these things and if you’re wondering if this is somehow a comment on America, of course it fucking is.

It blows my mind that this movie opened at number one, though with a somewhat lower BO that you’d expect for a three-day weekend, because this is a bleak, spartan film. There’s not a lot of dialog. There’s not a lot of action. There’s a lot of George Clooney, alone, in his room. Alone on the streets of a small town in Italy. Alone in his car looking through a telephoto lens. People try to relate to him, with differing levels of success. It seems as though everyone he cares about ends up dead, and we never know why. We imagine maybe he knows why The Swedes are coming after him, but about halfway through the movie you realize that if his previous job was anything like his current job, he has no idea why they’re coming after him. Oh, because he killed someone, certainly. But who? And why? Why did they need to die? He doesn’t know.

So people end up dead around him and regardless of whether he or we know why, they certainly didn’t. The people he cares about who end up corpses, are as clueless as to who he is and why they are dead as anyone.

The American is very much aware of its place in moviedom. It would like you to have see Day of the Jackal first, then The Quiet American, then Ronin, then this movie. There’s no arc to Clooney’s character, but perhaps his character is the end of an arc that started with the idealistic Alden Pyle. Clooney’s character is very much Robert Deniro’s masterless CIA samurai, after Ronin. No more war to fight, no purpose except skill.

Even though he’s George Clooney, he does everything in his power as an actor to banish himself from the movie. When we see him in Italy, fit, in shades, we don’t see a dashing, debonair movie star. We see a random American with no identity, no past, no personality. Maybe he’s good-looking. Maybe people like him because he seems affable. But that’s something they’re projecting on to him. It’s got nothing to do with the man in the film.

There wouldn’t be much of a movie if it were just George Cloooney in Italy being paranoid, killing people, and making guns, so there’s a girl. A very pretty girl. She’s a prostitute. Which I feel like maybe you saw coming. Very popular role for women in movies.

He sees her because he can’t see anyone else, otherwise they’d end up dead. But of course he falls for her, and she falls for him. So there’s tension. Because he must suspect everyone, he suspects her. And maybe he has reason to.

Clooney manages to escape much peril through sheer instinct. He might guess someone he knows is going to try to kill him, but he can’t know why. There’s no greater purpose in anything he does, until he relates to a call girl. That has meaning for him. Will they live happily ever after?

What do you think?