"No Children"

I first listened to The Mountain Goats some time around 2005. The song was "No Children," which is a good place to start with the band. It's a savagely witty tune, and catchy, but it's also part of an extended song "cycle" that stretches across decades, featuring an alcoholic married couple with a tortured relationship.

Masters of the mindfuck

I love books and movies that undermine the confidence of the reader in her own reality. David Cronenberg is fabulous at this, as are David Lynch and Philip K. Dick. They all work in different ways, use different techniques, but the effect is the same: we begin from a place that seems real, but the ground crumbles underneath us.

Lynch
Sometimes, as in Mulholland Drive we can tell where things must really have begun—where the characters left terra firma—because we see it. Sometimes, as in Lost Highway, we can extrapolate. There are themes, characters, plot points that seem to echo a recognizable trauma. Lynch has bookended this gradient of mindfuckery with solid colors: real worlds (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) and ever-shifting desert mirages (Eraserhead, Inland Empire).

Cronenberg
Again, it's hard to tell at what point Cronenberg's characters spin off into nightmarish hallucination. Odd touches abound early on in Videodrome and eXistenZ, suggesting that Max Renner, Ted Pikul and Allegra Gellar already inhabit a world of madness.

Cronenberg's fantasias, which mold media into pathology (Brian O'blivion, anyone?) are ultimately rabbit holes. It's fun to chase the "truth" of the scenario, but you'll never find it. The fear and uncertainty are the entire point. Any intellectual games you can play with the plot are just distractions from the highway being opened up between your conscious mind and the most paranoid parts of your neanderthal, cave-painting shaman-brain. These aren't puzzle-box pictures, like some of Lynch's work.

Dick
The emperor of the world turned upside down, a metaphor that appears quite literally in Ubik, which may be his masterpiece along these lines (he did write in other modes, notably pulp sci-fi and literary fiction):

JUMP IN THE URINAL AND STAND ON YOUR HEAD.
I’M THE ONE THAT’S ALIVE.
YOU’RE ALL DEAD

Dick's characters frequently find themselves transported into worlds where the rules of life are inverted, and their place is lost. This is quite literally the plot of Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and of the middle parts of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Falsehoods abound, and authenticity—often equated with durability and value, either financial or moral—cannot be distinguished amid the noise, haze and quality of the knockoffs. Androids, of course, makes explicit the fundamental subtext of this theme for Dick, which is the impossible alchemy of divining humanity from its simulacra.

Dear Mr. Google

The recent announcement that Google will be discontinuing its "Google Labs" experiments is to be sincerely regretted. Among the more interesting projects that may be lost is Google Scribe, an unusual mashup between Google's search engine and online word processor. Scribe suggests words that might appropriately follow the ones you have already typed in. As a tool, it is next to useless; as an example of inadvertant humor, it is but the latest example of Google's great benevolence.

Having long meant to write more letters, I thought that Google Scribe might be of some assistance (as it would relieve me of the odious responsibility to think of things to say). Sadly, that proved not to be the case. My abortive attempts follow.

Attempt no. 1. 

Dear Mr. President,

I have a lot of people inside my head and I hope you will find them and remove them painlessly. 

No, no. That won't do. I really don't want to be on that list.

Attempt no. 2.

Darling Wife, 

Your eyes are nothing like the real thing, baby.

Shakespeare never did this.

Dear Mister Marston, part 3

Hey Max,

My second letter is below. I know the pony express took a long time to arrive. I don't plan to go on another two week hiatus!

Harrison

Dear Mister “Max” Marston,

It is always good to hear from you, sir. Remembering that your experience and mine oddly echo one another is always a relief, for I find myself so frequently alone. Be it on the high plains or in the desert, passing atop a bridge circumventing a great river or exiting a canyon littered with the dead, I am continually the only person present. The others I encounter move as if they are actors in a stage play, producing a program that proudly proclaims its own structured repetition. Only wild beasts and glimmering night skies are my companions. The seemingly random, motivated attacks of the former and the breadth of the latter remind me that not everything is predictable and that space exists outside of the physical boundaries I so frequently encounter, be these rivers, mountains, or bullets.

Dear Mister Marston, part 2

Hey Harrison,

Here's my second letter. I think my Marston might be losing it a bit—but he recovers at the end. We'll see what the future brings for him.

John Coffee Hays. Enchanté.

Apropos more of the West than of Red Dead specifically, I just finished reading a book about the Comanche people, called Empire of the Summer Moon. It seemed solidly researched, and it presented a nuanced portrait of the various white and Indian cultures in west Texas during the 19th century. Maybe it's a function of being a white Jewish liberal, or maybe of being a New Englander (our Indians were, on the whole, more docile), but the picture that emerged for me of the pre-reservation Comanche was far closer to that of the Apache in Stagecoach than to the Pequot or Wampanoag of my childhood textbooks. Morality is relative—I almost wrote "of course," but of course not everyone agrees with this—but even so, the dissonance between horrifically violent and noble and free is not so easily resolved.

The book also talks about the foundation of the Texas Rangers, and about the man who I assume was the model for Woodrow Call of Lonesome Dove. I suppose this is (in part) the sort of stuff that Texas school boards are talking about when they say they want students to learn more about their state's history?

Cheers,

Max

History, genre and conflicting narratives in Red Dead Redemption

The judicial system treated the Wild West bandits with an unusual degree of understanding. Those who surrendered and survived—Frank James, Cole Younger, Emmett Dalton—served a few years in prison and then went on with their lives...The West was closing up. The cattle drives ended in the early 1880s. Reconstruction ended in the South. Automobiles and movies and telephones and record players and electric lights and unions washed the continent. The world in which these men had murdered and robbed and plundered no longer existed, and no one felt much need to punish them here and now for the crimes they had committed long ago and not merely far away, but in a place that wasn't there any more.

Bill James, Popular Crime

As a Rockstar game, Red Dead Redemption draws heavily from previous entries in its genre, mostly in the medium of film. Ambient activities and quasi-linear missions surround a central narrative thread, and a vast map opens incrementally to player-directed exploration. Broad satire coexists with more serious themes. What is the balance between morality and expedience? What does it mean to be an American within the confines of a specific time, place and community? This earnestness is undercut by constant shifts in tone, uneven writing and pacing and structure that do not (and in fairness cannot) anticipate the precise path of the player through the game, either externally ("gameplay") or internally (the relationships and actions of my personal Marston).

As a Western, Red Dead Redemption references numerous genre touchstones:

"Hell, Will. We ain't bad men no more. Shit, we're farmers."

• the nature and expression of savagery and civility;
• the functions of solitude and society; 
• the disproportionate power of the determined individual in a sparsely populated and policed land; 
• the efficacy of violence; 
• the noble burden of stoicism and masculinity; 
• and the private tragedy but public good engendered by technological progress. 

These motifs recur in the Western genre because they address questions that we have about life. Questions about how to live with other people, and about what leads us to commit good acts or evil ones. The Wild West is a mythic landscape—it has been so since (and even while) it existed as a real place. It's a stage, a world with certain parameters, on which certain kinds of stories are told, and in which we are given possible answers to difficult questions. Is this character a stock type, and if so what does he or she represent? What conventions are being reinforced or subverted?

The Year of No Guns

Games I have played in the past year that feature shooting as a prominent mechanic:

• Red Dead Redemption
• Metro 2033
• Borderlands
• Perfect Dark Zero
• Gears of War
• Dead Space
• Resident Evil 5
• Alan Wake
• Vanquish
• Dark Sector
• Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
• Singularity
• Darksiders
• Far Cry 2
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Halo 3
• Halo 3 ODST
• Battlefield: Bad Company
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
• Modern Warfare 2
• Alpha Protocol
• Fallout 3
• BioShock
• BioShock 2
• Mass Effect
• Mass Effect 2
• Bayonetta
• Crackdown
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Episode 1
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• Portal

...as my old boss used to say, "'Dis too much, wey."

Once I'm done with Red Dead Redemption, I'm taking a year off from shooters—in fact, from games that ask me to shoot a gun at all. That means no Portal 2, no Deadly Premonition, no Mass Effect 3, and probably several other games that I was looking forward to. There's just too much of this shit, and it's depressing. I'm tired of apologizing for it when I try to make a case for games as a serious medium. I enjoy shooters, but I'm sick of them, and they tend to exemplify the things that I find most upsetting about the state of the market.

Obviously, Portal and Far Cry 2 are not "what's wrong with video games," but I need to cleanse my palate. Or detox, take your pick. That means nothing played in the first- or third-person in which centering a target and firing is a main mechanic. 

This is The Year of No Guns.