Teknoarcanist’s Blog

There is a certain quality to the air of a man’s house.  He may ask you to take off your coat, and apologize for his home’s warmth.  ‘I must have warmth,’ he explains earnestly, ‘it is rather cozy in here, isn’t it?’
Of course it’s not the warmth or the coziness that bothers you, it’s the stuffiness of the air.  It’s that it seems as though it hasn’t been changed; hasn’t been let out, and let new in, in turn.
And of course the man, a sculptor, has done this intentionally.  He wants his studio dark (for such rooms are always kept dark) and the stuffiness of the air is simply his way.  He likes it here.  He shuts himself in for days on end.  He locks the doors.  The air is the atmosphere of his life, and he has done his best to keep it in all its potency.
He is so content with himself it disgusts you.
You, whose high house on a high street towers at three tall floors.  But of course the first floor is just for seating guests.  That’s why you keep the windows open; the old lady down the street, and the maid, and banker when he comes by, they MUST all have fresh air.  So the first floor is not really your own.
And then the second floor, of course, is for bedding guests.  But of course your cousin when he comes to stay, and your brother when he’s passing through, and your parents when they’ve come to call, they all sleep atop the sheets, and need a good fresh chill about the air above them.  So the second floor is not really your own either.
And the third floor, of course, is neither yours as well.  You are chased there at the end of every day.  You retreat there, in fright and in exhaustion.  You sleep only when sleep is the farthest and most final recourse–when there is nothing else to be done.  And so the third floor is not your own either–any more than the trenches, or the fortress under siege.
And so it seems, floating above it all in the airy horror that is your mind, that you have no house at all; that there is a gallery of corpses there beneath you, with its windows flung wide, with the snow whipping in at every odd angle, raping every weird corner.
There is no dust in your house, for it has nowhere to lay.
The sculptor, for his part, seems to leave between the dust.  He treats objects by their spartan utility unto his person.  He picks his cup up, sips, puts it down.  Three minutes later, he will do the same.  He picks his tape measure up, sets it down, repeats.  He will do the same three months later.  These tools exist, for him, in a kind of un-time, subjective only to their immediacy.  But you, poor chilled corpse trapped outside, can only see an old man tottering back and forth from furnace to kiln; setting down his tools and losing them for three months at a time, while the warmth raises up and the dust folds in, and time trudges slowly on.
Yours is a house of ice and glass.
His is one of wood, and the color orange.

It really is interminable.
You shrug on your coat, politely bid him a good day, and leave.  People like he really are the most terrible sort of people.
You go home to your corpses, in the cold and open air.
The scultpor goes on to die, and in death to have his atmosphere taken with him, kept close, made ten times more pungeant as the walls fold in to condense it.  He is in a coffin.  He is in the ground.  He is still warm.
And you, in all your life and livelihood, freeze from your soles to the floor.

When you are young, your head is closer to the ground. As you age, your height increases, and the proximity of your head is father from the ground than it would be otherwise. Your head is rotating faster through space than the spot of ground on which you are standing; it approaches(infinitesimally) closer to the speed of light.

Therefore, Einstein’s theory of relativity offers an explanation for why the years seem to go by faster as you get older: because they literally do.

Although by this logic Himalayan Sherpas are thirty by the time they’re born, sixty by the time they’re ten, and pushing ninety by the time they’re thirty.

Give or take.

On my generation:

We are lonely, sexless, and sleep-deprived.

If we were not sexless, we would not be so lonely,

if we were not so lonely, we would not be sleep-deprived,

and if we weren’t such jittery, over-caffeinated freaks, we might actually be able to get some action.

Also, we’re all secretly gay and self-loathing. And none of us really likes drinking.

And yet, paradoxically, we are not unhappy,

until we start telling ourselves that we should be.

——————————————————————-

Point of Departure

——————————————————————-

Citizen Kane fell the fuck apart in a field outside mile-marker thirty-three; W3 hve Samr0ck Shakz!Ampersand Batman Toys was in love with him, and so she stayed there to die.

It seemed a bit bizarre to me at the time. She had some juice left. A good hundred to go on those nice feet of hers, at least. But she said she was tired of walking. Wanted to wind down somewhere it could snow on her body. She said he would have liked that, and far be it from me.

So we left her there with a wave and a cold goodbye, and along our way we went.

———-

That was before Intercourse, when we were still wandering somewhere around Middletown. That was before we picked up 34 in that Denny’s.

Restaurants are always a good place to look. There’s usually an oven somebody’s missed, or something jammed under a stove. There’s never any hope with the fridge, though. Those are almost always gutted to hell, no matter where you find them. And you find them everywhere; I assume our forefathers had some good reason for wanting to keep shit cold all the time.

When we went into the Denny’s, 34 was going full-hard at the TV. He’d been careful with the plate glass of the monitor: less so with the connecting cables and projection cameras. He’d gone all crazy pygmy on the RGB coaxial connections, and the AC/DC bits were hardly recognizable.

He threw a screw-driver at us. Not on purpose, I think. Anyway, when he realized what he’d done, he seemed to sort of feel bad. Maybe it was just because he lost his screw-driver and couldn’t find it the whole rest of the time we were there.

The initial introductions didn’t take long, since we were down to three now.

He was 34. After what, he wouldn’t say.

For my part, I tell him, I’m Red Lobster, but you can call me Red. Behind me, this is Possum Xing, pulling panels off the ceiling. Elephant Graveyard is the one helping him to see if there’s any copper wiring inside.

And the one going through the spices in the kitchen—I don’t know why, but he always does things like that—I tell 34 that that’s Flock Of Birds Passing Overhead At Night, our resident sensitive wacko. 34 nods serenely. Though-out the rest of our conversation, I will notice him gravitating towards the kitchen. Their first loves couldn’t be more different…but I have a feeling 34 and Flock Of Birds Passing Overhead At Night will have very similar points of departure. Maybe they’ll go like Citizen Kane and Shakz—dying in one another’s arms, in a field in the snow, in the middle of bumfuck Pennsylvania.

Or maybe not.

Anyway, there was some decent stuff to be scavenged from inside the walls (because everybody always forgets about the plumbing) and I gave 34 a hand with the TV, but we had to drift out after a few days. Some big War-Bot wannabe mother-fuckers drifted in from out Philadelphia way. They were harmless, of course (who had ammo anymore?) but they were also total dicks, and stole like you wouldn’t believe. Probably would have taken a finger off Flock of Birds Passing Overhead At Night, if we’d stayed there much longer. I wonder how 34 would have reacted.

But 34, on the whole, seems to be a quiet kind of fellow, which I think is why Flock of Birds Passing Overhead At Night likes him (as much as he’s capable of liking anything outside himself and flocks of birds). When I ask 34 what his first love was, he just shakes his head. When I ask how he lost his arm—which has this totally obvious statistical trend towards charred and fucked up, in the back—he just walks faster. I’ve noticed, through the course of conversation, that he has a hard time with calculations. That isn’t to say that he’s not intelligent: just can’t work, out loud, with raw numbers. But I won’t fault him for it.

He says he’s been in and out of this area going on sixty years now. Said he came here towards the beginning, wandered out. Said he got bored and confused and come on back. Intercourse, he tells us, now there’s a good point of departure. That’s where he’s headed, though he says he’ll probably leap-frog all around it for a few more decades. We’re welcome to join him, he says. So we join him.

———-

As we walk, Flock Of Birds Passing Overhead At Night points out how three-penny scrub and broken brush from a thousand dessicated corpses winds its way through the cracks and narrows, emerging into the sunlight via varicose veins of broken asphalt. 34 nods and Possum Xing laughs. Elephant Graveyard contemplates. Mostly I think the roads in Pennsylvania are just fucking terrible, but Flock Of Birds Passing Overhead At Night has this tendency to say shit like that, and so I let it be.

Even when he’s being tedious, Flock Of Birds Passing Overhead At Night is probably the most interesting of all the tedious bastards I’ve traveled with. He doesn’t accept nicknames; it’s always Flock of Birds Passing Overhead At Night; never Flock or Night-bird or Passerino Bird-head McGee. That’s how he likes it, and we all respect him. But I still don’t mind being called Red.

Flock of Birds Passing Overhead At Night, though, he’s got this weird flow about aesthetics and visual beauty. He’s missing four fingers because he’s got Ethical Reasons for not replacing them. Most of the rest of his hand is done up in brass and bronze. But that’s his entirety: he’s all out of matching metals, striding across the broken landscape like some fucking glittery Egyptian Goddess. I wonder if that’s how he was built, or how he’s made himself since. One time I offered him one of my best lug-nuts: polished iron, no rust, saving it for my last few days. Thought it was a nice gesture. He didn’t talk to me for three days.

So I used the lugnut to fix a kink my foot had been having in the rotator joint. It took. Twenty-six years and eight seconds later, it separated from my leg, leaking cooling fluid and hydraulic shit across the floor of a warehouse in Yakima. Now I walk with a little bit of a limp. Sort of stagger to the left, everywhere I go–and I go everywhere.

———-

Outside Intercourse, we stop for a couple days in a trucking depot. Possum Xing and Elephant Graveyard go ape-shit on some diesel engines. Maybe that’s why I keep them around, so I don’t have to do anything for myself. Maybe that’s why they stay around: if you’re good at something, never do it for free. And in this case, the payment comes in the form of the pleasure of mine and 34’s and Flock of Birds Passing Overhead At Night’s company.

Now Possum Xing is a long-time friend of mine, or maybe hanger-on if you like (though who’s the hanger in this case, I’d be hard-pressed to say). He’s fast and he’s funny, and he plays a nice contrast to all the morose bullshit you find yourself surrounded by, this past century or so. He likes headphones, with their rubber-encased wires. He wears them all around his neck, like a scarf, and the rusty earbuds clack and clatter against his side, even when he’s standing still.

Elephant Graveyard is a long walker, not unlike me. But he’s been everywhere. He walked the wall in China. He claims he’s been up and down Everest, though the last time I went around there the wind was getting kind of rough. From his name, I guess he’s been to Africa, though (like 34) every time I ask, he turns his head away.

But then, that’s not unusual. First loves are a sensitive spot for most wanderers. Quiet moments they took alone, two-hundred years ago, that they haven’t thought about since, but are reminded of every time you say their name.

I’m not so bashful about mine. Maybe it’s because I know it’s pathetic. It certainly doesn’t have any of the quiet sophistication of ‘34′, or the self-professed angst of ‘Flock Of Birds Doing Artsy BullShit’. But I like ‘Red Lobster’, and that’s why it was my first love.

I’d been wandering around Arizona at the time. Lost, actually. Dying, actually, with nothing but toasted sand and dead sky to keep me company. I was pretty close, really, with no point of departure to settle down at. I thought I was gonna go, alone in that desert, unloved and forgotten.

And then in the middle of the night, walking on sheer autonomy and willpower, I wandered into some little piss-poor suburban Oasis. And the first thing I saw in the night, the first thing that loomed in view—the only thing calling attention to itself, because some fucker had thought it would be funny to hook up the big claw light insignia before he left—was a Red Lobster. It was glowing like a super-nova, on that Arizona desert floor. It reminded me of stories where a man in a storm follows a beacon of light in the darkness, sails straight into an angel.

So I fell in love with it. And now I instruct new friends to call me Red.

But then I guess everybody’s got a story like that.

———-

We get to Intercourse by taking the overpass from Blue Balls, and then we take to the woods and streams. Flock Of Birds Passing Overhead At Night is in full favor of that. He keeps an ear to the wind. He keeps his hands pressed to the cold, wet stones of a creek-bed we cross one morning.

He makes us all stop and watch a sunrise.

For some reason, I think of cigarettes, and reflect that I understand (in this moment and no other) why the forefathers enjoyed them, and that I might not absolutely hate having one right now. And then we keep walking, and the moment passes, and mostly I think they’re just stupid fuckers again, for ruining shit like this for themselves.

———-

We’re in a bar in Intercourse now. Possum Xing and Elephant Graveyard are snuggling on the tin roof under the frost-metal stars; every time they shuffle I can hear their love vibrating down through the floor, and into my metal feet, where I sit at a desk and write this out. Flock of Birds Passing Overhead At Night was drawing on the walls, but he stopped about an hour ago.

Then, he stopped. It was sad.

34 says this is his point of departure. Says we can leave him here. He tells us about his first love, but says he didn’t really love it much at all. He was the thirty-fourth of a pack of sixty-three, out of a manufacturing plant in Montauk. They all killed each other for parts. That was in the early days, just after the forefathers left, when shit like that was common. Before people started winding down, and the numbers started wearing thin. Before we started taking first loves for names, and wandering in search of the elusive Something Beautiful. 34, he says there was nothing beautiful in what he saw that day. But he needs to remember it. It needs to be remembered.

That’s what prompted me to sit down and write this out, I suppose. I think we’re all going to stay here; we like one another too much to break apart. It makes me understand why Samr0ck Shakz stayed with Citizen Kane. Points of departure, I suppose, can be people as much as places. People you want to wind down with. People you say goodbye to. And now I regret not taking a longer moment to say goodbye to her, there in the snow. But I know she went happy, and so I can’t be anything but.

I’m leaving this for the same reason 34 took his name. We’re a good bunch, and we’ll be going soon. I know for my part, the heart’s gonna run out of juice soon. 34’s just getting tired. Elephant Graveyard and Possum Xing are both missing key components—one of those drop mid-step scenarios, so I think they’d prefer if they were laying still on a tin roof and holding each other when it happened.

We’ll all be gone soon, is my point, and I’d like to be remembered. I need to be remembered. So I’m leaving this here for you, whoever ‘you’ are. Another wanderer, maybe, or our forefathers coming back. Anybody else named after a seafood restaurant. Lemurs and toads, who evolve and start looking for God.

I hope you remember us, and I hope you find something lovely to name yourself after, and somewhere brilliant to die. Mostly I hope there’s as much beauty in the next world as this.

I have to go now. Time’s come and gone, and now it’s mine to go with it.

Goodbye, goodnight, and Have a Nice Day.

—Red Lobster

http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/#0309

“Taking Games Seriously, Making Game Seriously: This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you. The recent months have seen controversy sweep through the video game industry. Whether people are objecting to the use of imagery widely considered to evoke racial stereotypes, or to the gameplay based on violent sexual crimes, or to the fact that anyone would complain about either topic–the discussion has been fierce. This month, contributors to the Round Table are invited to design a game that focuses on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.”

So I’ve been reading Corvus’s ‘Man Bytes Blog’ for a while now, and I’ve been itching to respond to the monthly gaming roundtable in places I can’t even mention.

In light of the release of those page-turning CIA memos, I thought it might be interesting to see if I couldn’t take a crack at this, and try to outline a way to make being on the receiving end of torture a little more immersive (than, say,  alternating between A and B really fast)–and in doing so, hopefully at least make some dim approximation of the state of mind such practices would bring about, in order to illustrate their monstrosity.

Although the content described here is pretty necessarily not pleasant, I’ve tried to keep the imagery and wording fairly vague.  ESRB “T” is probably where I’d settle reading this at, although the game itself would undoubtedly be considered an “M”.

And away we go!
——————————-

BAM!  A light slams on with a sound like a gunshot.  You’re staring into a halogen bulb so bright it’s obnoxious.  You hear your character’s own breathing, and nothing else, for an obscene amount of time–long enough that you’ve begun pressing buttons, and started to wonder: ‘what am I supposed to do’?

Looking around, you get a basic understanding of your position: you’re strapped to a chair, in front of a flood light, in the middle of a black room.

As you mash buttons, the screen begins to move faster and faster; screeching noises ensue.  You’re moving your chair.  Scooting to freedom!

The chair flips and dumps you sideways onto the ground–the shock of impact crushes the right side of the screen into a blurry pulp.  You lay there, again for an obscene amount of time, madly trying to figure out ‘what am I supposed to do’.  Like being stuck in an old point-n-click adventure, you get the feeling that the game hasn’t been explained properly, that you’re not ‘doing it right’; it’s palpably frustrating, and it is a theme which runs constantly throughout the play experience.

Suddenly your chair stands itself up, and the flood light dims slightly.  A silhouette lurches into view.

He begins asking you questions about an event that you, the player, have no knowledge of.  You’re being interrogated for information.  You’re being accused of being party to some atrocity.  They want answers.

After each question, a small dialogue tree appears, shoved off to one side of the screen, and you’re almost never given enough time to read all of your choices before the game wrenches control away again.

You are lain onto a table, and a cloth folded over your face.  A question is asked of you; before you have time to pick a response, water cascades onto the screen.  Your character’s thumping heart gets louder and louder, and begins to increase in speed; it becomes clear that this will serve as your life indicator.  When it becomes too fast, you lose consciousness (see later).  There is no mini-game to try to breathe properly–your ability to stay conscious rides entirely on your ability to give them what they want.

The dialogue choices don’t change after each mini-drowning.  The questions, and even the sound bytes, appear to be looping–asking the same things, over, and over, and over, and giving you the sense (again) that you’re supposed to be doing something different; that you’re supposed to escape this or solve something somehow, but you don’t know what to do.

Every so often, one of the choices will change; maybe the opportunity to lie presents itself.  The first time you choose this new option, the veil comes off, and you’re treated to your captor’s face, and some expository dialogue.  After an impossible question-and-answer, they figure out you’re bullshitting them, and the veil goes back over.

Once again the gameplay loops: you’re asked a question, you’re given choices you don’t have time to read, you’re half-drowned, etc etc.  The next time one of the choices changes and you pick it, you’re treated to another small cutscene, that goes much the same way.  You feel as though you’re beginning to get a hold on the situation.

The third time, your pavlovian response is punished, rather than rewarded; the drownings become more difficult to sustain, and the same loops are undergone over and over and over until the player finally gives up, and succumbs; the player falls unconscious.

BAM.  The lights slam on.

You wake up chained to a wall, staring into a floodlight.

There is a car battery at your feet, with wires running up . . .

The game progresses in this manner, moving you from one horror to the next; as dialogue reveals bits and pieces and you begin to piece together the narrative scenario, the gameplay mirrors it: you feel, almost, as though you’re starting to understand what it is you’re supposed to do.  ‘Positive’ behavior (what the player is supposed to think they’re supposed to do) is rewarded with story information.  Negative behavior is rewarded with repetition.

Eventually, the player has seen all the methods of torture.  They begin to repeat–new interrogators are brought in, asking the same questions from the beginning of the game, as though the player has made no progress at all (you might as well have started a new game, with a different voice actor).

The switches between torture methods get faster and faster, as the player grows more and more agitated and confused.  Eventually, a shift begins to emerge.  Now, rather than trying to get information, they’re trying to coax you into specific responses: admissions of guilt.  These are made to feel as though they will be absolutely climactic; when the player first chooses ‘I did it’, a prompt comes up asking ‘Are you sure?’.   The second time, that, and then another: ‘Are you really sure?’

Throughout this portion of the game, information about the player character is gradually revealed.  You were raised here.  You went to school here.  Such and such relative was killed for such and such a reason.  Didn’t that make you angry?  Didn’t that make you want to do something?

The dialogue, and particularly its intonation, is increasingly cued in such a way that it resonates with the player’s previous experience with ‘amnesiac murderer’ movies and games; you, the player, begin to wonder whether or not you, the character, may have actually done what it is they’re accusing you of.  Could it be?  It would certainly make more sense than what’s happening now, wouldn’t it?  And you want to confess–because it seems, so clearly, that if you do something amazing is going to happen . . .

If, at any time, you choose to exit the game, you are killed.

If you do not confess, after a time, the tortures resume.  They grow faster and harder to sustain, until finally, you are killed.

If you confess, you are made to spell out the entire story of what you did, how you did it, and why, with coaxing and suggestion until you can recite it exactly, word for word, line for line, dialogue choice by dialogue choice.

The light is turned off, and you are unstrapped.  You are dragged across the room by both arms, out the doors, and into the anonymous night.  You are shoved off into the darkness, and begin to walk.  After a time, you gain the strength to run.  There is no one around you.  There is nothing in sight.  You’re free!

As you go, the camera slowly pulls out of first person and into third, to reveal a stumbling, dirty, emaciated figure.

The camera stops pulling back, and you are free to march your character off towards the horizon, and the rising sun.

Then, cross-hairs rise into view.  And you are killed.

——————————–