Mourning the Beta Fish

My girlfriend’s fish died this morning. That was the first thing she texted me today, so I can only assume she found him just after waking up. Our text exchange was as follows:

   “Clyde died :(“

               “Ohhh, baby I’m sorry.”

               “I’m surprisingly sad”

               “:( I got a hug for you okay?”

               “Ok, I need it”

               “I understand. It’s sad losing a pet you’ve had for years. Even if it is a fish. I love you lots”

               Looking back on text messages can be a real bummer, especially if there was legitimate feeling involved at the time of communication. There’s something demoralizing about seeing what you remember as a symphonic swell of sadness represented by a frowny face. What’s also difficult is trying to tell someone you love that you understand their pain or sadness, because really, how do you know that you do? How do you know the gut-sick feeling and surge of sour chemicals to the brain is the same biochemical reaction your loved one is experiencing? How can you guarantee their pain isn’t amplified compared to yours? That what you think is real pain is a light thud against a callous heart?

               Short answer to a long question. You can’t.

~

 

I have two cats, Toast and Scuba. This is a recent development in my life, one that sort of slinked up and sunk its claws in and took hold, which is appropriate, I guess. We (my girlfriend and I) picked up Scuba from the shelter. She was a kitten then, dark brown dappled with caramel, hiding behind a scratching post and small enough to lay flat in your cupped hands. Toast came along  because I felt guilty leaving Scuba at home all day while I was at work; he was my brother’s cat, and though he had been adored by their toddler, they had another kid on the way, and apparently cat litter can wreak biological havoc on a pregnant woman and her unborn child. So Toast, who was an absolute goliath of a Siamese (and a little brain-damaged by being toted around the house by my niece since kittenhood), joined our family. 

Toast, left, and Scuba, right.

               Our family, my cats. Distinctions you make when you love someone you don’t live with.

               My girlfriend hadn’t grown up with pets, and though she was excited at the prospect of bringing home a kitten (because who can’t be excited about that?), we both weren’t sure how well this would pan out in the long term. The general rule of thumb was that she didn’t really like pets, and didn’t understand why people thought of them as “members of the family.” She’d seen her brother attacked by a dog when they were both kids, and as for cats, well, unless you grew up with the feline variety of house pets, it’s kind of hard to understand the appeal.

               Cats, balanced creatures that they are, tend to walk the line of being more trouble than they’re worth. Since bringing home my cats, I’ve had countless electronic cables chewed through, several carpets perforated, houseplants uprooted, furniture dethreaded, allergies agitated, and every smooth surface of my house coated with cat hair and dander. On the other hand, if I sit on the couch, my cats will bound from whatever small catastrophe they’re causing just to be with me. They settle on my lap and hum like the fine-tuned motors of muscle cars. Toast, the Siamese, rattles with affection even if he’s sitting near to me. If I don’t want to pet him because my hands are otherwise occupied, he’ll simply place one paw on my arm, just to have some form of contact. And if I do pet him, he lapses into a sort of nirvana attainable to humans only through years of spiritual journey and meditation.

               In short, they’re a vessel to pour love into. It’s one of the simpler forms of love, I know. It’s a love of simple affection, and of duty. But it’s ultimately satisfying, and over the course of the past year, I’ve seen my girlfriend start to get this as well, not from me trying to explain any of it to her (though I’ve tried), but from watching her agitation slowly outweighed by affection. I can see it in her face when she smiles, Scuba on her lap purring at full volume and her eyes closed in sleepy bliss, when my girlfriend looks at me and says, “She is so cute.”

~

My girlfriend’s fish is (was) a beta named Clyde. There had been a Bonnie (they’d been gifts to her and her college roommate at the time), but Bonnie died a couple years ago, and Clyde has been swimming solo ever since. I didn’t see much of Clyde, but I heard about him, principally through complaints from my girlfriend. Having to feed him, clean his tank, stuff I’d tease her about because how can you not tease someone for griping about something so simple? It’s strange to think of him swooshing down the toilet drain now and into the cold, slimy expanse of sewers. Stranger still to think of my girlfriend of not having to feed him, or change his water.

               When the shackles come off, the sadness and the loneliness is always the most surprising feeling. This is true no matter how small or insignificant the shackles.

               The reptile brain usually carries the rep of being the lowest on the animal brain totem pole, and I have to assume that the beta fish brain probably isn’t too far off. So thinking about death for such a creature is difficult. It’s hard to think of that brain as having feelings or emotions as opposed to a relatively complex series of connections and electric impulses.

               But this sort of reasoning doesn’t do much to assuage the sadness, and here’s why:

               A pet is a package of feelings. As an animal it has its own attributes, surely, but a house pet is significant because it is the sum of all of the feelings and emotions we attach to it. As a vessel of love, it’s the combined weight of all of the love we ever poured into that pet. It’s the residual memories of the conversations we had while petting or feeding or even stressing out about that pet. It’s a photo album that you can look into and see not what you looked like or what you were wearing at one point in your life, but instead what and how you felt. A well-loved house pet is an extension of yourself, a cache of memories and feelings and a physical tribute to your capacity for caring and for affection.

               This is why it’s so difficult when a house pet dies. You’re losing an emotional slice of yourself.

               What’s difficult more so is that it feels so trivial – you can buy a beta fish at Petsmart for a few dollars – and this triviality embarrasses us. We’re embarrassed that we feel sad and we don’t really understand why. And that’s fine, that’s okay. But it’s also okay to mourn the beta fish. There’s no creature too small to love.

               And this is what I want to say to my girlfriend, this is what I want to communicate but can’t with so little time and so few words. Instead I rely on digital punctuation. I stamp a frowny face onto the end of my text and hope that she knows to unfold it, to look in that blank space between the colon and the parenthesis to find the acknowledgement of a tear, of a sudden, gaping void, of an emptiness that’s okay to mourn and weep over because it’s the sudden loss of years of love.  

Ad hoc ponderings

How much of writing is remorse? How many of the things you publish & post online are symbols of the things you didn't? How much of it is about who you are vs. who you really want to be? How many of the line breaks are arbitrary? How much is written between the lines? How bad for yourself can you feel before you realize that you have it pretty good? How good can you feel before things start turning sour? How much are you allowed to write before realizing that maybe you don't have all that much to say at all?

And that maybe, that's okay?

Why Tomb Raider is the best game you'll play this year

Two weeks ago, I was fairly certain I wasn't going to pick up Tomb Raider, Crystal Dynamics' latest in a series nearly two decades running. I wasn't particularly fond of what I could remember of the over-sexualized crypt crawler, whose greatest feat seemed to be squeezing her impossible somatotype through dark, cramped corridors. Plus, the game looked to be going the way of so many soulless big-budget titles  these days, featuring series after series of flashy real time events, as if all any of any of us are looking for in our games are prompts to hit the right button at the right time.

However, hearing a few good things from a few trusted friends, I decided to give the game a try, and goddamn am I glad I did. Tomb Raider has it's numerous real time events, and Lara is still rather, well, robust (though looking less like a pistol-wielding Barbie this time around and more like an actual human); however, Tomb Raider offers one of the better examples of smart gameplay and character development available in the market right now. 

The tagline for the series is "a survivor is born," but it might as well be, "a series is resurrected." Look out Lazarus - Lara Croft is providing some serious competition in the miraculous return department.

MASH THE 'E' KEY

Let's start with the real time events (RTEs). For anyone reading who isn't familiar with the current state of games, RTEs are a gameplay mechanic used to offer a more cinematic experience for certain game moments. Because games traditionally offer a suite of controls and skills that the player can utilize as they see fit, the game space hasn't always allowed directors to employ wildly varying camera angles, actions, or events - any of these things thrown into the mix without warning could compromise the experience for the player, especially if they're expected to complete a complex set of actions with the camera zoomed in a foot away from the protagonist's face, for example. RTEs solve that by prompting the player to complete just one or two things at a time, allowing developers to showcase stunning special effects without compromising the player experience.

At it's best, this mechanic can break up game pacing and offer a fresh and exciting moment in the narrative/combat/exploration for a given scene; at it's worst, this mechanic can make a game feel overly contrived, simplistic, and stale. Tomb Raider manages to land in the former camp by doing a couple of things  well.

For one, there are a very limited number of controls that can be used in RTEs in the game (I played on PC, so in most cases, RTEs were completed using the 'E' key). This allows Tomb Raider to spare the majority of the text prompts telling you to what keys to mash, instead using more subtle visual cues to indicate that you should probably react quickly (such as a brief slow-down in game speed, or Lara grappling for a handhold on a rock face). It's a slight change from the norm, but the payoff is considerable - instead of feeling spoon fed each action, you get to feel that you're instead capitalizing on each opportunity as it arises... or hanging on for dear life, as the case may be. 

Secondly, RTEs never stand out as being a core part of the game experience. There are rarely RTE 'sequences' (you know, press key 1, then key 2, then move left, right, up, up, and then hit key 3 to complete the sequence, etc. etc.); instead, RTEs are a single fiber woven in the fabric of the game experience, and they manage to never jar you out of the experience (instead, they're used largely to segue into a new scene or change of pace). 

Which brings us to pacing. 

One step at a time makes for one hell of a fine walk

Another concept I'll summarize for ye olde non-gamers is the idea of flow in game design. This is the general concept that the brain has a certain processing capacity, and that when that capacity is utilized completely (you're not over- or under-stimulated), you enter a state of flow. Think of a project you've worked on where you've lost sense of time, being hungry, etc.: this is flow. In short, it's an experience of optimal engagement, and it requires a constant increase in difficulty as well as a constant increase in mastery. It's a chugging of not only forward, but of upward as well. When done right, it's a 45-degree angle headed up and out. 

Tomb Raider is a shining example of nailing flow in a game. Lara is constantly learning new abilities, upgrading her gear, and selecting new skills, and all of this is left up to the player in terms of what to learn when (allowing the player to 'master' skills as he feels he needs them, giving him control over creating an optimal experience). In conjunction with this constant outward and upward mobility of Lara's skills, the environment is steadily increasing in terms of size and scope, meaning that as Lara learns her new abilities, opportunities to use those abilities blossom throughout the landscape. 

Unlike other games that bar progression based on equipment and skills (Metroid, for example), Tomb Raider never makes you feel as if you're missing out on an opportunity, nor does it force backtracking. In fact, any time you cross through an area you've previously visited, the game takes you through it on a path previously so unavailable, you didn't even know it was there (which beautifully, if you go back and look, it was). Another great touch is that Crystal Dynamics even changes environmental pieces (such as structure integrity, weather, and time of day), further giving you the feeling that old places are in fact new places. 

I mentioned above that RTEs are a single fiber of the game experience, and that's true for all elements that make this game, whether it's combat, exploring/resource collecting, or platforming (the game's three main staples of gameplay). At no point are you limited to any one of these experiences - there's a ton of blend between all three, and major game sections ease so effortlessly into one another that you're hard pressed to think of any one sequence a single gameplay element alone. The result is a game that's hard to put down - it's difficult to find a stopping point, which is incredible considering that the game saves almost every action you take and offers a myriad of camps, which are basically resting points (the beauty with camps is that they serve as upgrade stations, meaning that even though you're at an ideal stopping point, an eagerness to try your new abilities or gear motivates you back out into the wild).

In short, Tomb Raider instills in the player a sense of relentless determination, a drive to march steadily forward to see the adventure through to the end. Fittingly, that determination is matched by Crystal Dynamic's re-imagined Lara Croft. 

More than a pretty face

I mentioned earlier that Lara has returned  looking considerably more human, and the same is true for her character as well. It's obvious that Crystal Dynamics felt the need to reshape the steely exterior that Lara exhibited in previous depth-diving adventures. As a result, the character in this game is naive, afraid, and mortal. Rather than creating what might sound like a sniveling wimp of a kid, Lara seems instead tremendously brave. The fear exhibited in this game is genuine (thanks to both some great voice acting as superb motion capture), and as a result, the feats you accomplish feel greater because of it. There's one scene in particular where Lara is climbing a radio tower. Though I knew rationally that Lara would not fall, that the game wasn't going to end with her dashed on the rocks below, I found myself holding my breath because Lara's fear became my fear. And when I reached the top of that tower, I felt I had overcome something truly dangerous and a little terrifying as a result. The presentation of her character is that good. 

Crystal Dynamics has not only re-established Lara's character, but her raison d'etre through a series of, you guessed it, tomb raids. What seems at a glance to be a potentially heavy-handed and clunky device, the various tomb sections of the game are fantastic. Each is relatively brief but challenging in it's own right, blending into the overall flow of the game to make them yet another humble fiber in this extraordinary journey. Lara's character is markedly different in these sections - as opposed to the struggling, fearful girl we see by daylight, the Lara we navigate through the tombs is thoughtful, curious, and full of wonder. The sections again make Lara feel more human, but more importantly, they help bridge the gap between the girl we see in this game and the woman we know she'll eventually become. 

Humble beginnings

It's difficult to imagine how successful the game would have been if not presented as an origin story. Lara conquers her fears through the game, which unfortunately eradicates the most human, relateable thing about her (I for one can't pull off a series of a dozen bow and arrow kills while side-stepping lobbed sticks of dynamite). While I'm invested in her character and accomplishment now, I wonder if I'll manage to be when the obligatory follow-up comes around. Similarly, Lara finding a survival toolset that fit her needs on the island made for an engaging reason to push forward hour after hour, and it related directly to the story being told. In short, the game was a successful marriage of content and context, but I hope that Crystal Dynamics is thinking hard about how to reinvent the formula for their next go-around, as finding yourself makes for a great story, but a poor series. 

And while this pessimistic Polak is already grumbling about what may lay in store for Lara's future, the fact remains that Tomb Raider is likely the best game you'll play this year. I haven't even mentioned the stunning quality that's gone into every element of this game, from the breathtaking environments to the range of gameplay elements to the amount of polish obvious in numerous weapon upgrades and their meaty reliability in combat. 

A survivor has been born with Lara's latest, and she's held a torch to light the way for the series moving forward. There's no telling yet how this reboot will end, but the beginning of this journey is one hell of a ride, and one I guarantee you won't want to miss out on. 

Why I'm baffled at the outrage surrounding the SimCity 5 Launch

Going to take a quick departure today and talk about video games, specifically the much-reviled release of SimCity 5 this week. If you've been paying any attention to this at all, then you know that SimCity 5 has been mired with technical issues since it's launch, much of which folks are tracing back to it's requirement of a persistent online connection. And the mass opinion has been, by and large, that requiring players to be online at any time they're playing the game is an idiotic move by any and all corporate suits involved. It was the same story with Diablo 3's much anticipated and similarly-plagued launch.

If you're not so familiar with this realm of discourse, the idea behind an always-online connection is that it acts as a safeguard against piracy. Games, much like movies, are pretty juicy targets for digital piracy. Both Diablo 3 and SimCity 5 require gamers to be connected at all times because it helps them enforce anti-piracy practices. It also helps enforce and reduce cheating the game. Both games are fairly revolutionary in this practice (you may be thinking to yourself that MMO's have long-since required an always-online connection, but the main difference here is that SimCity 5 and Diablo 3 can both be enjoyed in a single-player setting).

So what's so bad about requiring always online? The rather robust community of online pirates have their grievances, obviously, but I'm not going to address them. Suffice it to say if you think charging for games (whether it's charging $60 or anything at all) is wrong, then I'm not going to change your mind in this post. However, if you're a working stiff like myself who doesn't mind paying for games and thinks it's fair for companies to charge for their work, then please consider the following:

The implementation of supporting a connection-required game on the scale of franchises like Diablo and SimCity isn't a matter of following the right steps and having your shit together for Day 1 - it's a bold thrust into all but brand new territory. Seriously - no other games have done this, with the exception of those few mentioned above that only support multiplayer, and even those have had years to refine their practices and build - none have had an initial launch that compares to the scope of D3 and SC5.

I work in the industry myself, and I'm fairly appalled at how many critics and developers both have been so quick to bash the game for it's attempt to support always-online. The group I work with consists of extremely dedicated and intelligent people, and we run into unforeseen issues in our launches (and the stuff I work on doesn't even compare to the scale of SC5). It honestly confounds me that SC5's peers can be so quick to forget how challenging and dynamic the work we're doing as a community is, and I bet that the folks wagging their fingers today wouldn't have near the balls to attempt to launch a project as ambitious as SC5.

I used the term territory earlier, and I think that's fitting, because SC5 and D3 are pioneering the future of digital distribution. Point and cluck your tongue all you want, but these two companies are working out the kinks of what will become common practice. These same people condeming innovation will be the ones to fall in line once the community at large starts seeing the benefit of an always-online player base: cheating will be cut down, people will play together more, and the community that you'll find yourself a part of will reflect more people like you - people who paid for the game because you support it's artists; people who want to play according to the rules and participate in something a little bit bigger then themselves.

So sure, feel free to jump on the bandwagon if it suits you. Judge the ambitious new trend that took a few attempts to hit it's stride. But soon enough, your kids will balk at the idea that people used to play games alone, cut off from their friends and peers.

I guarantee it.