A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

There’s a long-standing marketing technique in games. I think it’s in other, it’s in games, and it goes like this. Fool me once…no, wait. It’s the idea of marketing a game as putting you in the place of your favorite character. “Become the Bat!” “You are Daredevil!” (Once I get to the thesis, this would be the cheapest game in the world to make…) “Wowie Zowie, you cal almost FEEL Wolvie’s claws come out!” WRONG.

No game you have ever enjoyed has made you feel like the character. They’ve made YOU feel like what YOU think YOU’D feel like if you suddenly had all of that character’s abilities and were thrown into a world made of bowling bumpers. Feeling like the character is horrible. Tedious. Not fun in any way. The opposite of ‘free.’ And you know it. Search your whatever you et cetera. You probably kissed your sister. Gross.

And that’s a GOOD thing. If you’re a comic fan, you’ve caught on and are now nodding and probably making a little side smirk about how heavy handed this allegory is becoming. If you’re scratching your head at what I’m getting at, read on.

Being a super hero sucks in almost any interesting situation

The common marketing trope of promising ‘putting you inside the mind of your favorite character’ is inherently flawed and is the core of why we never get Superman outside of Mortal Kombat reskins. Let’s lay out how a Superman game that made you really feel what it was like to be Superman would play out. Not a game made to be a game; a game to simulate feeling like Superman. First, 1/3rd of 5 days a week would be spent doing absolutely tedious office work. Keeping up your secret identity is non-negotiable. You’re a mid-level reporter at a big newspaper who won’t work overtime. You’re ALWAYS on thin ice. You’re also in an office romance and there are like 50 HR guidelines you need to dodge. It’s not fun, like Papers Please. You have to deep dive into microfiche to fact check stories. You have to get legal to sign off on verbiage. You’re basically God and you have to do your election paperwork for benefits enrollment because turning down health insurance would be a red flag. You, Superman, have to find ways to come up with leaving the office to save people or straight up listen to them die.

You punch out and head out to job 2. Saving the world. Oh, look! A filthy poor stealing food at a MegaMart! Better apprehend him! I hope you are able to squeeze the right trigger at exactly 0.01% of its travel path. Any more and you crush him into a fine paste. In front of kids, no less! You used your X-Ray vision to see if he was armed. The lady an aisle over lost her baby! Best of luck pushing that thumbstick within a range that doesn’t spin the world backwards and cause a car to rise out of the ground, but somehow not cause Lois to not have dirt in her lungs. It’s a good movie, but don’t fuck with time. It never works out.

OK, well, how about a Flash game? No, not NewGrounds. Wally and Barry and all their bullshit. We’ll stick to comic physics, otherwise he basically couldn’t see and would anhillate anything he touched with the energy of a trillion suns, igniting our atmosphere and killing us all by taking a step. What are you left with? The slowest point and click adventure you’ve ever played. It would take days to get to your front door, just to leave. You’d have to spend a year every 16 years eating. Your great-great-great-grandchildren will finally turn in the first quest, knowing nothing of how the game began or why the family insisted they take up this ancient suffering. You do not want to play a game that makes you feel like the Flash.

I can hear the batarangs being sharpened and the smear campaign payoff envelope being mailed by Alfred now. Surely, the Arkham games - which place you in a character that’s human and not beholden to all that pseudo-magic nonsense - does succeed in making you feel like The Bat. Haha! I’ve been got! Except not even a little bit. If this were character accurate, you wouldn’t be out there very much murdering people (And real talk, you ARE murdering people. Lucius told BatGPT to show you dead bodies as ‘unconscious’ but they haven’t moved for 6 hours and aren’t breathing, Bruce. Bruce…you know what you did, Bruce), you’d be PLANNING. The game would be a goddamned RTS if it were accurate. Hours and hours of pouring over databases and looking through schematics, all while a little video of pearls dropping on the cold ground plays in the corner of your screen. The last level would be one fight with one big-bad who you hand over to the cops, knowing full well that there’s no legal system in this country even now that wouldn’t immediately release them. A job well … well. A job anyway. At best, the Arkham games are an exercise, but BatFans know, feeling like Batman would require therapy.

Spider-Man, or Spiders-Men…s, comes the closest to making you feel like the superhero simply by taking $150-$300 bucks out of your pocket in total. That’s the most on-brand a single one of these games has been. The fact you have to jump back and forth between your work and the work adds a lot to the realism. But it’s still mostly the good with nearly none of the bad. It makes you feel like Spider-Man feels in a moment, and that’s saying something. The first game, in particular. It FEELS lonely a lot of the time. Getting the Iron-Spider gadgetry diminishes it and I’d love to see a mode where you don’t get tracking and all the bells and whistles, but even letting that slide, the thing you DO get that immediately makes it an escapist fantasy for Peter, were it offered to him, is time. You literally don’t start the clock until you want to. Peter’s character is built on not being able to stop everything. His character growth comes from realizing that while it destroys him that he knows he couldn’t be two places at once, being in one place mattered to someone. And that’s something. But in the games, you are free to leisurely take photos, high-five fans, solve silly NPC mysteries, visit your uncle’s grave, or see a marriage proposal that didn’t go so well. And it’s another game where you’d have to La Croix-touch the button to do a punch that doesn’t turn Otto’s brain to a thin soup the second it contacts. This is NOT an authentic Peter Parker Perspective.

None of this is to say this is a bad thing. Not at all! Every one of these games has been played and utterly enjoyed by me, your humble, totally reliable narrator. Spider-Man has a feeling of freedom that is unmatched by anything but maybe Forza Horizon, and you can’t web swing in that (Get the fuck ON this, Playground Games!). The Arkhams created an entire subgenre to brawlers because their flow was almost a dance and they were absolutely genre defining. Before the franchise became a weird bumpercar game. Even (one of) the old Hulk games had merits, mostly directly related to NOT making you feel like The Hulk. That would suck. The control would be taken away from you and you’d just be watching Hardcore Henry but way uglier? No thanks. See where I was going with the Daredevil thing in the opener? Or, rather, don’t see?

Insomniac has, however, gotten closer to putting you into the actual experience of a superhero with Wolverine. It’s still a long way off. You don’t feel the sting when your claws come out. Your camera isn’t three apples above the ground. Smell-o-vision hasn’t been invented yet, so you don’t smell all of the piss and feces and bile from the people you’ve shredded. And pennies. Don’t forget pennies. But you are constantly bombarded with sensory information. It tells you where to go in a way that’s very realistic to what Wolverine’s experience would be like. Too intense to ignore. Getting in the way of his rationality. Always on. From that perspective, it’s one of the very few games to actually succeed in the marketing promise to make you feel like you ARE a character. And it sucks. You can’t connect with Logan the way you can connect with Spider-Man simply because, in making the experience accurate in one vector, they’ve removed the negative feedback loop that acts as an analog for some of the impossible-to-translate negatives the character has to deal with. That’s a very long-winded way to say this very long-winded thing: “Taking away confusion and discovery, while accurate to what the hero would experience, takes it away in absence of the accurate negative experiences the character is having.” You need the negatives to appreciate the positives in praxis. Taking away the smell trails, or even just making them optional like Detective Mode, would have better served the game than accuracy to the experience of the character. You can make Wolverine invulnerable but still have a decent story reason that you ‘die’ in a fight. Insomniac’s ludonarrative dissonance-omancy is legendary, so surely weaving a small series of game-over cut scenes with non-death reasons you’re out of the action would have not been out of their wheelhouse. And it would have been more interesting than having three Phoenix Downs on auto in your inventory. QTEs having consequences validates them. But it would have been less accurate to the character. So all they do is waste a tiny bit less of your time if you engage. And that feels hollow. What’s making it hard for Wolverine is the constant, screaming voice in his head, the constant pain he’s in as his body never stops healing and feeling, every bone still screaming like the day it was infused with a metal that is eating him alive. Capturing super powered characters’ actual struggles is not what anyone is signing up for when they play a game. And I’m tired of pretending like it is.

What most people enjoy when they say that a game made them feel like a superhero is a feeling like you have all of the tools to solve a problem in a style that matches the character you know and love, while still having some stakes and failure conditions to keep it interesting for your normal, mortal self. Classically, that has been what marketing meant when it boasted a game “put you into” a character. But it seems Insomniac has done just that, and what could have been a fun experience (and likely will be if someone with sense gets approval to let us shut off a few of the forced tracking options in a future update) feels like an insult and plays worse for its accuracy. This isn’t touching on some of the other mechanics choices that are questionable - I feel like those were all made with intent and probably solved a problem we don’t know about. But the constant sensory bombardment? Sure, our Canadian Danzig Impersonator is acccurately represented here. But it makes the final product worse.

One more datapoint on this thesis. One other game has done this, in my experience. There are probably a few more, but one stands out to me as the most relevant expression of this phenomenon. The Animated Adventures of Superman/Superman 64. The controls were twitchy but the puzzles were precise. The time limit was always your biggest enemy. And apart from Lex? You were alone. Solitary, in a world of flat, cardboard people. In a world of cars that explode if you grab them wrong. A world where if you don’t precisely navigate the obstacles, the city is lost. Superman 64 is, in my opinion, the most accurate branded Superhero simulator ever made. And it’s as fun as eating salted sand. Lex Wins.

Let’s go ahead and set the temperature by stating a couple things. First is that this applies to a group that is, by and large, very privileged in society - but don’t confuse that privilege with being an elite, because, as the saying goes, you are far closer to being homeless than you are to being a billionaire. And second, the undeniable fact is, your labor bought that pizza to begin with. Your value to any company that’s at the “Throwing a Morale Pizza Party” stage of moral decay is a well calculated formula in an Excel cell in someone’s network share. Calling it a reward when you are a net profit for the company is disingenuous at best and an outright picking of your pocket in most cases.

White collar work has long been propagandized away from unions, on the whole. A few pop up here and there and they are not to be discounted. They are a triumph and, in fact, should be well celebrated! But let out a box of wild bats into a room full of cubicle jockeys and most of your rabies vaccines are going into non-union arms. But hey, at least you got to let out a box of bats!

Most jobs that fall into this slowly-diminishing category are not represented by unions and are often actively discouraged from forming one. Office cheerleaders will offer, unsolicited, that a union would result in a pay cut for everyone because of dues and bonuses would disappear in favor of lower-yield yearly cost of living increases. They will say they love having the freedom to negotiate on their own, but you know that worm said yes to the first offer and has been licking boot ever since. HR will play the ‘family’ gambit and, you don’t ask your family for contracts (you absolutely should, by the way - in any business dealings). Don’t rock the boat! Nobody else is thinking about this. You’re ALL ALONE. You know, the same shit cults and abusive partners say. One of the things they will bring up is the disappearance of perks. Perk. PERK! Wow. I bet they have lovely plumage. Do tell if you ever spot one in the wild!

A perk, again, falls into compensation. Whether expected or unexpected, a perk will not tip the company into the red on your output at any level that doesn’t have a VP in the title. And at that point, you don’t get pizza parties. You get coked up and regret saying ‘yes’ to that island vacation. Well, you would if you had a soul. But since that’s not on the table inside most of modern capitalism’s extraction probes’ boardrooms, it’s very unlikely. You don’t get to sit with us.

So, you’ve made it. You’ve graduated from college a few times and have 50+ years of high-level experience at 24. What’s this enscribbled down here….or equivalent. What’s equivalent? RIGHT! Your dad knows a guy! Sweet! Or maybe you’ve legitimately worked your way to a desk job at what you think is a stable company. However you were able to enter this brutal work-scape, you’re here. And once you get your bearings on that, that’s when a company generally starts trying to make sure you know you’re here on their terms. All of that unlimited PTO you were told about? Nobody is brave enough to take it. The stack-rank they swore they no longer used when you asked about it in a 3-day, 16 hour interview you had to do on 2 hours of sleep? Well, there are 25 heads and 10 heads worth of bonus budget…how does that get distributed? Not evenly, that’s for sure. A rose by any other name is still a competitive incentivization strategy built on outdated psychological theory that discourages teamwork and introduces stressors to a work environment which reduce productivity and cause attrition of the smartest people since jumping jobs once you’re IN the system is often more lucrative and less stressful than trying to maintain a hostage/captor relationship with the people who get to say whether you have a home or not.

You strive to become salaried, which now ties your performance to output but no longer pays you for hours worked beyond your standard forty. You are pushed to complete menial tasks that have nothing to do with your job, eating up countless hours of productivity. Concentration and cognition have limits and you can’t squeeze more work out of less time without breaking something. So you stay longer. And you get more responsibility. And that takes more time. So you stay longer. You start getting calls on your time off. You start taking half-weekends. You are part of the hustle! Not BEING hustled! Right? Right? Hey, anyone…right?

You give up a little more of you every day. At a rate that far exceeds your compensation, even if you are a money weirdo who obsesses over your net worth. People are let go, but the workload doesn’t change. You sink that cost for free, as far as your employer is concerned. New merger? Gotta trim the fat! Oh, you survived the culling! Congratulations, you’re so very lucky and would be wise to remember that. Look at all those sad goodbye e-mails from people you called ‘my buddy at work’ or ‘work fam’ or if you’re a trash person with lifetime middle-manager written all over you, your ‘work spouse.’ That’s if they’re lucky enough to get to say goodbye. Sometimes you’ll just see them marched out with a box of shit they didn’t care enough about to leave at home anyway. Or in the Work From Home days, they’ll just not appear in a call one day. Like some guy you used to raid with who died IRL but nobody told the guild. They said “have a great weekend!” on Friday and today their profile picture is just their initials and you have all of their tickets in your inbox.

So instead of getting fair market value for your labor (you’re not getting the fruits of it…not in THIS economy), you’re getting some fraction of a savory pastry that, ironically, requires pi to calculate. What toppings would you like on your wage theft? Just kidding, shut the fuck up. We’re getting whatever the “office VP of FUN!” has in their quick-reorder cart at the middlest rated floppy-slice joint in town. It’s probably going to be a single pepperoni, one plain cheese, something with broccoli and red onion bullshit going on, a supreme that has so much vegetable matter on it that it’s four times thicker than any of the other pies and feels like eating a pineapple upside-down cake made from the Veggie Tales after they finally drink the Kool-Aid, and the wiltiest Caesar salad you’ve ever drank, complete with chicken that has sharpied-on grill marks. I’m just playing the odds here.

What would have been time and a half is now two greasy triangles of your third choice and Carl definitely pawed at one of them and he definitely didn’t stop at the sink on his way out of the restroom. But by this point, the fight has left you like a 1940s cartoon ghost, so you pretend to consider getting a salad bowl for half a second, grab a third slice - the broccoli bullshit, god dammit - and go eat at your desk because even chewing should have some guilt for not toiling. You then have to spend 15 minutes looking for paper towels because Carl - christ man, please just stop being…all this for half a second man! - dropped them all in the pepperoni oil when he took his four slices after pushing to the front of the line. Pizza…the perfect food for people whose primary job is pushing buttons on a keyboard. It’s 8:45pm, you have heartburn already and you’re pretty sure it’s sticking around for the rest of the evening. You’ve shaved another crescent of flesh onto the flesh heap and you get an e-mail that says ‘Thank you, team! You really came through. This is a big deal and people will notice! - Your Boss, Probumbus Morklefleeb.’ And you’ll say to your SO, “oh, I really think this is going to look good for me! I really think this might be my ticket up!” And you’ll bang like you used to before you started spending 10 minutes in the bathroom crying into a wad of one-ply that looks like it fell off of a truck in the bad part of the Exclusion Zone every day. And at the next All-Hands, Prombumbus Morklefleeb will get a little golden whozit on a chunk of fake wood with a little bronze sticker that was laser-printed to read “For Solving A Problem By Throwing Bodies At It, And He Did It All Himself.” And he’ll say he couldn’t have done it without his team and he’ll point to someone who isn’t even in your department and smile then wave to the whole crowd like he was about to be played off stage. He’ll get twice his salary in stock that will probably bust before it vests and a trip to Sheboygan for a conference where he’ll try to make a pass at a mascot for one of seven startup AI companies with an anus logo, knowing full well it was a robot. You’ll get a T-shirt with the company’s logo on it to be a billboard for them when you’re looking for a TV at Best Buy to put in one of the only two rooms left in your condo with no screen - you just really hope the shower won’t steam it up too badly. You get a room-temperature La Croix and a bunch of fake numbers that make it look like your company that makes fax software for minidisc distributors’ customer database ingestion look like it’s about to be purchased for a majillabillion dollars and NOT audited even a little bit! Your CEO is Zoomed in from somewhere that looks like Thailand. When your review comes around, you get stacked dead center and two of the people who pulled all-nighters were let go. One right after she got back from parental leave and another just before they started chemo. “Poor team fit. Remember, you are never safe! Thin ice breaks under many feet…CYA, IYKWIM!” It’s not said, of course. But it’s implied.

Once or twice a month, the janitor gets to risk getting fired for stealing the last piece left instead of throwing it out (it was the supreme, but Carl took all of the meat off of the slice and this time he had toilet paper stuck to his shoe, so god only knows….). A few hundred bucks that’s likely got some tax-deductable classification to replace thousands of dollars - again, just the market cost for your labor, not the value of the product of it. Getting forced to go curling or play whirlyball or get tick bites on your buttcrack or get shot in the throat with a paintball isn’t a reward. Some luke-warm spaghetti and de-breaded chicken nuggets with a little oyster sauce dabbed on them and a handwritten label reading “pod tie” isn’t a bonus. If it was, they’d have already stopped doing it.

There are a lot of useless comments on Internet support communities. They have been around since Usenet first allowed semi-anonymous threads to ooze over audio couplers at 300 bits per second. I’m sure you know some of the hall-of-fame bangers.
“RTFM”
“You’re using it wrong.”
“Why would you want to do that?”

Apart from being cursed with the inability to see anything from any angle but their own, the Useless Commentor™is also, generally speaking, extremely volatile toward any reasoning that challenges their monolithic view of any topic. While it is genderless, classless, and raceless - able to survive in any habitat - our dear UC does trend toward the white, the male, and the conservative. As is, likely as anything, a shock to no one.

Lying in wait, ready to pounce upon anyone trying to learn or, worse still, trying to get help with a legitimate problem, the UC will attempt a dominance display at the first opportunity. Usually arriving shortly after the ‘First!’ers, perhaps the only group of posters who can lay even less claim to enriching discourse. They are a generally harmless species, mind. Just pissing on every tree stump they can like a dog with a tiny body and a titanic ego. They are all bark, and the bark itself is just a nuisance more than it is a confrontation. The UC, as is often the case with the second carrion scavenger at the carcass, is bigger and uglier.

Rushing in to dismiss another person’s experience is a passtime for a certain personality type. On the extreme end, you have the people making policies strictly to bolster their narrow views, with harm as an intended side effect. An extra kick in the ribs as the people they’ve ‘othered’ fall in the mud. Adding insult to injury is not a bug. It’s a feature. The UC gets a similar hit of neurotransmitters when griefing prey. Make no mistake, that’s what it is. These mallets lie in wait, jumping on new posts like Richard Branson jumps on any woman younger than 27. Awkwardly, uncomfortably, and ‘only as a joke’ if called out.

The UC delights in scuttling the ship of curiosity in novice hobbyists. Kicking the chair out from under already frustrated people hoping to find an answer to a blocking problem. Setting fire to the joy of anyone who, in an age of access to information so unfathomably vast compared to only 45 years ago one from that age would think you an utter lunatic in its description, simply wants an answer to a simple problem and hopefully throws their bottled message into an unforgiving sea.

Of all their hunting methods, none of which provides any hint of usefulness to discourse, the one I despise the most is ‘It works for me.’

‘It works for me’ is infuriating on a level that exceeds the other sufferings put forth by UCs simply by the wastefulness of it. Reading the fucking manual, apart from not being immediately helpful, is - at some level anyway - advice. Alternate use cases are often the workaround a person was looking for, but presented as a rotten herring drawn across the face as an insult. The lack of empathy required to blind oneself to other possibilities is somewhat tragic; not deserving of pity, but also the kind of self-immolation of respect that anyone with a modicum of introspection immediately clocks as a personal lacking in someone crowing on about it.

No, ‘it works for me’ is a special brand of disrespect and smugness that the UC wears proudly. Like TapOut! graphic tees or Berkleys on the back of the head. It’s a dogwhistle to their ilk and is often met with similar howls in response from other UCs who share in missing whatever key piece of nurturing keeps a person from turning into an asshole whenever the moon is the moon.

‘It works for me’ serves no purpose other than to tell an uncaring universe that you are alive and you are better than some random person on the internet. It is, at best, a brag and at worst a shut down. It adds literally nothing to discourse, acting only to hinder or derail it. It’s the call of the incompetent developer. The cry of someone with no idea of how to help, but with an ego that refuses to not be seen. It’s an attempt to be part of a conversation from across a crowded room that bulldozes the entire buffet table.

Sure, the phrase itself can be uttered and followed by suggestions or help, but at that point it becomes useful and stops being the thing it was. When uttered in isolation it’s nothing more than a prayer to an indifferent cosmos - a 5 year old throwing a toy at someone because they aren’t paying them the attention they think they deserve - and a pheromone trail for other emotional leeches to follow.

In fairness, it’s not always about individual superiority. It’s often used as an aegis to a brand identity grown as a replacement for a personality the UC never cared to cultivate. Xbox can do no wrong. Apple is infallible. Anyone having a problem is obviously a shill or a troll or a naysayer out to do harm to an omnipotent, yet unimaginably fragile god. Any question is an attack. Any problem is an affront. Because if the things they buy and watch and believe in aren’t perfect, what does that say about them?

That’s when the tribalism kicks in. The pack mentality of the kind of person who brands themselves a ‘lone wolf’ is shockingly cohesive. Point out that the reply helps nothing and prepare to be stoned at the city gates. The gnashing of teeth and ripping of flesh will continue until obedience is restored. Threads will get locked and answers will go on being ‘un’d and nobody is the better for any of it. The people who could help will never see the post because it was shut down before it could get their attention. The other people who might have a legitimate answer will be unable to respond or the person who originally asked will never return to see the words that could have helped them get out of their pickle. For no other reason than a small person in a vast eternity had nothing more to offer than, ‘well, it works for me.’