I grew up on two things. Mythology and videogames. There's a lot of life lessons to both of these. Albiet mainly of the fruity, surreal logic that connects most powerpoint presentations to the tenuous reality of the corporate mentality.
Bits like... galaga. You are delivering hot plasma death... goods to waiting customers in exchange for points. What kills you in galaga is not that you have trouble doging... but if you see a bombing run coming, like any series of problems looming on the horizon, and you don't shoot them all down, you will have to dodge them and may not have any room left to maneuver to avoid being shot. Just like corporate america, if you have a steady hand and do your job perfectly, you get a bonus. If you chicken out and CYA... you don't get fired and exposed to the painful cloying vacuum of space. But if you try to do things right and only half succeed, you are boned. Maybe even sucked up into the analogy-breaking tractor beam.
I actually blame these early games with their "pick up and play" simplicity for helping to raise a whole generation who doesn't read manuals. But it also doesn't help when manuals are written that don't explain critical functionality. But then, manuals are always written by people who already know how to use a thing, for people who don't. You can't really bridge that gap because what you already know seems obvious. And your needs will not quite be the same as that of your audience.
Then again, some people don't quite understand the purpose of a manual. You will find, in every single "help" or "how to" of any manual, something that tells you something you shouldn't need to know. "Save: This button saves the document you are working on." I'm sorry, if you needed to be told this, you probably shouldn't be using the program. The odds of you writing anything anyone on this earth will find insightful are miniscule.
Other things don't get covered adequately. Try fiddling with either photoshop or GIMP, and you'll swiftly discover dozens of functions that either you cannot figure out what possible merit they would have... or you cannot figure out how to make them do what you want without making your image look like like a llama licked the printed copy before the ink dried. I would not be surprised in the least to find an option marked "Jackson Polluck".
In legends (remember, I started talking about 2 things), you typically have an underdog struggling against supernatural forces with the aid of... supernatural forces. The grandson of a god fighting a monster that, technically, is the spawn of a god he's related to. Hercules fights the hydra is good press. Hercules fights his third cousin once removed... I can't see Don King trying to bill that fight. Maybe Hercules fights Don King's hair.
Since those epic tales have had untold centuries to percolate through the collective unconscious, we've woven them into new stories... well, roleplaying games... well, less role-playing, more tactics with occasional levelups... and the tactics are "Attack!" "Attack with magic" "Don't attack" "Don't die, heal!" And occasionally "Wonder why you're bothering." If D&D and JRPG bestiaries were any indication of the ages of myth and legend, fighting a hydra would be less of an epic struggle against a regenerating beast and more of a brief chore before going back to fighting the other 30 or so now standing between you and the nearest Starbucks.
But the monster-fighting is really not the #1 occupation of the heroic figure of legends. Just the most commercial. There are also the ones who get help from gods and witches to survive dwarf kings or brave the lands of the dead or something. Rescuing their beloved, saving the kingdom... goals more esoteric than visceral (or coated with viscera). A lot of this class of tale actually involves reading the manual. Don't look at Medusa's face. Don't fly too close to the sun on wax wings. Stand back when unfolding the magic house, so you don't get squished.
But... there was a final category of tale. The "clever hero". Jack the giant-killer. You cannot write a manual for cleverness. For arcane methods of dispatching a foe... like talking a giant into letting you perform dentistry and replacing his teeth with cheap substitutes... and letting him starve, unable to gum the local cattle to death. This does exist in modern life. The first-person shooter where you can stand in a narrow doorway and slowly drain a monster's health in total safety. The 3D game with a physics engine... that somehow lets you jump on an object you are holding, giving you bizarre powers of flight. The edge cases where the AI for a character won't let it move until you are in sight... but you can not only see its foot, you can shoot that foot until it dies. Or where you can trick something into crossing a mine field by dangling your feet off a ledge so it thinks it has to go the long way around.
It is this third category of game and story that gives me hope. Because no matter how indifferent or involved the gods may become in the story of your life... you are capable of being a sneaky bastard for a good cause, and getting paid to do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment