Mirror’s Edge

(2009, metacritic 81, user score 8.2, 1+ million copies sold)

Grand Theft Auto IV

(2008, metacritic 90, user score 4.5, 6+ million copies sold)

Bioshock

(2007, metacritic 96, user score 8.1, 1+ million copies sold)

Empire: Total War

(2009, metacritic 90, user score 6.7, unknown number of copies sold)

Civilization IV

(2005, metacritic 94, user score 7.6, 3+ million copies sold)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

(2009, metacritic 86, user score 2.3, 4.7 million copies sold on first day)

Doom 3

(2004, metacritic 87, user score 70, 3.5+ million copies sold)

The Lennon Sisters – Dry Bones

The Ink Spots – Do I Worry?

Tiny Tim – The Other Side

Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel

Les Baroques – Such A Cad

photo credit: nblumhardt

The rabbit magistrates conferred.

At the conclusion of the meeting, they resolved to write a law so convoluted and prolix, that no bunny or fox or human could ever hope to read or comprehend it in their lifetime. The rabbit magistrates would thus be able to make any judgment they wanted in whatever situation and have no-one to answer to. Two thousand bucks were put to work devising the Great Law. Not one of them was allowed to take a break or get fresh air, because that could increase the clarity of the document, something to be avoided at all costs. The bucks survived on sandwiches with lettuce and twigs, and only keystrokes were heard, incessantly.

It wasn’t long, though, until a not even educated young buck called Zirkem started to paw through the Law in his free time. He went through it very slowly and meticulously, concentrating on just one subparagraph spanning 215 pages. It took him two months, and after those two months he dug his way out of his mountain of notes and made an announcement to his doe-eyed compatriots: each bunny, by law, is entitled to a ration of 3300 balloons.

For almost a week, life was perfect. Every morning saw the arrival of truck convoys bringing thousands upon thousands of balloons in every colour imaginable. The world became balloons and there were many surprise encounters whilst playing and living life amongst them, often leading to new families, because that’s the rabbit way. A lively trade started in rare balloons, and all rabbits regardless of responsibilities felt they were living a life of leisure in the comfortable embrace of countless balloons.

Clearly it couldn’t last. It was no fun for the magistrates. They no longer had sway over the populace with all those balloons obscuring the bunnies’ whereabouts and activities. They called upon exception f to the subparagraph covering the ration of balloons, which was not included in or referred to from the subparagraph, but included in a different chapter and referring back to it. The exception supposedly stated that only bunnies who were diagnosed with balloon deficiency could own balloons. The bunnies, tearful about losing their precious balloons, called upon Zirkem to confirm the tenor of the exception.

Zirkem started to study the Law once more, but gave up after just one page. Instead he paid a visit to his doctor and found him willing to diagnose every single bunny with balloon deficiency who visited his office. And so the Great Queue started.

A day later the magistrates announced a 26 layers deep subparagraph of the initial subparagraph which states that balloon deficiency, being contagious, is to be eradicated by extracting the brains from every affected bunny and anyone who has ever come in contact with them. The bunny doctors refused to abide by this law. The magistrates announced all doctors were to be forced. The bunny police refused. The magistrates announced police were to do their duty or receive no lettuce whatsoever. The bunny farmers snuck them lettuce. The magistrates announced that a footnote of the penultimate paragraph states that rabbit magistrates, in case of anarchy, are allowed to live a life of outrageous excess on an island of their choosing.

And so they did. The rabbit magistrates lived happily ever after.

The bunny populace, on the other hand, lived a life of simple pleasures in their balloon world. It lasted almost a week. Then a particular kindle of rabbits mischievously popped a few balloons and it became all the rage to be a Popper. When all the ground was covered in the deflated remains of once beautiful balloons, it was impossible to grow or find food. Gradually all bunnies died unspeakably horrific deaths, with only the most wicked cannibals surviving for any significant amount of time. Blood and entrails and balls of fluff and torn plastic littered the landscape.

The original Half Life sold 8 million copies, which means that at least 8 million people have been employed at Black Mesa Research Facility as a theoretical physicist. None of the millions of players ever saw each other, or talked to each other, but they were all asked to assist in a not so theoretical experiment and for all players that experiment was a disaster. Each one of us followed the same route out of the building. Each one of us was startled by a headcrab jumping at us out of nowhere. Each one of us took in the sights of the Planet Xen on our hostile little trip there. With some people it’s perhaps the only memories you share.

In real life I’ve visited Rome as a tourist and at some point took a picture of the Colosseum from the same angle as thousands of others have undoubtedly done, but I’ve also besieged virtual Rome like millions of others. I’ve taken its walls with massive siege towers hoping for them not to catch fire, unloading early legionary cohorts on defenders belonging to a different Roman family until they routed to the city centre where they made a final stand alongside their general.

Obviously the more linear a game is, the more similar the experience. Every player has to complete the same succession of steps in the right order to progress in most graphic adventure games. Some other games, however, have different endings based on the decisions you make.

The most unique experience, I think, would be accomplished by a game that is both massively multi-player and very sandbox. But at that point it stops being a game and starts being a Second Life. In any case, there is no reason why the shared experience should be an issue. Books are too, as well as films and tv series. Games are just more of an experience in the sense that you’re an active actor in the story. That is why the aspect of determination is relevant. Let me create some more shared memories by following in your footsteps in SW:KOTOR or perhaps S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

photo credit: trec_lit

I was born inside a giant egg.

It had no yolk or albumen, just an inflatable swimming pool and plastic books.

I learned to stack a plastic book on another plastic book. This made a tower, and it was more useful than plastic books.
I learned to deflate the swimming pool. This made a moist parachute, and it was more useful than a swimming pool.
Then I climbed up the tower and jumped off wearing a moist parachute. This made me cry. It wasn’t pleasant.

Then an egg appeared in my egg.

I told the new egg to disappear.
It refused.
I told it again.
It refused again.
I told it to stop refusing.
It refused.

I put the new egg in the tower.
I made a balloon out of the parachute.
I blew up the balloon until it blew up.

With the tower and the egg and the balloon blown up, there was nothing left but me. I felt considerably worse off.

Eventually, 8 years later, a bounty hunter broke me out of my egg. He was disappointed to see me.
“Sorry”, he said, “Wrong egg.”

In exchange for orange juice, I helped him look for the right egg. It was the best orange juice I’ve ever tasted. I don’t think I’ll ever taste orange juice as good as that orange juice was. It was really, really good orange juice. It really was.

Henry M. loves dnL. He loves it so very much that when he learned the product was going to be discontinued, he bought all the remaining stock in his town’s supermarkets and stored it in a cupboard, where his camping equipment used to be (and a dead bird, which upset Henry M., as it was still alive when he last took out his camping gear a year or two previous).

The bird in question:

As an aside, did you know dead birds don’t really smell?

Dead birds dry up quickly, and stay remarkably intact when kept in a cool and dry cupboard in a house kept aggressively free from flies (Henry M. told passionate stories about his legal war against insects).

Every month, Henry M. would treat himself to one of the bottles of dnL.

This is not our Henry M:

It’s a different Henry M. instead. To get back on the subject of cupboards, Henry M. once hid inside his dnL storage cupboard. It was a retreat for him, a place of escape and control and feeling at home. Much like so:

Henry M. had depleted 2 crates of dnL by the time he hid in the cupboard, according to his rule of one bottle per month plus a fair share of them due to a losing streak of self-discipline vs. addiction. With those 2 crates gone, he could fold himself into the space now available to him in the cupboard, and hid there for what he described as “half the freakin’ day”, in near complete darkness. In the cupboard Henry considered his wealth of dnL. He considered the comfort of the cupboard, and he considered that he should really learn to control himself (but wasn’t it made alright, he asked me, because of the expiration dates and the danger of the flavour changing afterwards? He better deplete them before that happens, right? I didn’t know what to tell him.)

Henry M. really enjoyed that sojourn into cupboardness. He talked about it at length with me, the only person he seemed to consider a friend. And apparently he did go back into the cupboard, and apparently when he wanted to get out again… he couldn’t. He had been able to fold himself into the cupboard, but seems to have found great difficulty in unfolding himself. This is where I come in. I received a text message:

A fair enough request, except that Henry lives in the United States whereas I live in England. We do now and we did then. This I considered a reasonable obstacle to helping Henry out, so I declined, implicitely, by never showing up.

This is his house in Vancouver, WA (not to be confused with Vancouver, BC in Canada):

He’s in the house with the basketball court out back. Might actually still be in the cupboard. Would that be possible? I never did hear of him again. Let me give Henry a call. Or actually, international rates are pretty steep.

“Rest assured there is no deeper than rock bottom”, said Professor Arkengaard. And Professor Arkengaard is at all times mistaken, which is a fine gauge as to the veracity of statements about the world. Whatever Professor Arkengaard says, the opposite is probably true.

To illustrate his mistake, rock bottom is the sub-stratum of the sea bottom, the layer below the sand. And you can in fact go deeper than that layer. Lower yet you will find the Earth’s crust, the upper mantle, the mantle, outer core, and inner core. So one can in fact go deeper than rock bottom. An alcoholic mistreating his wife is still able to drop their child from the fourth floor. This is a very real possibility. A politician dumping his country in an abyss can still be re-elected. You can always go deeper still.

Under the Earth’s crust we find nigh unfathomably thick layers of rock with the taste of magnesium. An uncomfortable location in which an invulnerable person could dig deeper and deeper, towards the core of the Earth, and the core of that core, until the perfect middle has been found where deeper can only mean one thing: back to the surface. In that sense, to sink deeper is to lift oneself up, though in the meantime experiencing a hellish uninhabitability. Perhaps it would be better to make a standing rotation when things get heated. Rock bottom is not a place you want to pass.

“Professor Arkengaard, how can one know the world? How can we step outside our worldly bondage to see with true objectivity what it is we are part of?”
“Vandal! The world is round and that is all your very small heart needs to know.”
“But the world is oblate and I need to know more.”
“Then go and find out what it is you need to find out. Enter the world, enter the books. Gather experiences. Talk to people, seek the revelation, study and reason and imagine. Waste all that time, to return in 30 years as a pitiful man made modest, knowledge having brought you no further to certainty of anything, which is to say, you’d be back at square one.

And I did go in search for thirty years. And I did find everything and I did return with nothing. But Professor Arkengaard, who is never right (which is a fine gauge as to the veracity of statements about the world), was wrong. Because the nothing with which I had started was an entirely different nothing from that with which I returned.

England has its own special superheroes. Today we’re going to talk about a dear friend of Mr. Mackerel: Broccoli Man. Broccoli Man is a superhero with the power of broccoli (being generally nutritious) and can always be counted on in a pickle.

Unfortunately Broccoli Man was made redundant recently and is now on the dole. This animation shows how this happened:

We will follow Broccoli Man in his adventures now that he is a self-employed superhero.