Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

Something else I learned about Pirates of the Burning Sea this weekend: the developers take the story and the writing seriously. Branching dialogue, NPCs who remember your name. John Tynes mentioned Knights of the Old Republic as an inspiration, which rang the “RPG” bell in my head. But there’s something else: the characters will let you flirt with them and, if you get lucky, flirt back.

(Some NPCs will also get friendly with guys or girls. So be on the lookout for my notorious privateer, Sappho McGillicutty.)

The idea of flirting with fictional characters interests me for reasons both intellectual and not, and I’ve written about it for The Escapist, explaining how it works in single-player RPGs. (Short version: you have to write a ton of dialogue, and people still want more hugs than you’ve coded.) I don’t know if Pirates will offer the deep interactions of a Baldur’s Gate 2, or a Neverwinter Nights 2. Producer John Tynes tells me that much of it will be left to the imagination – maybe you’ll see an influence system at play, but no simulated cybersex will enter the picture. (Now that’s what I call instanced play! Booya.) Still, a little NPC-generated romance could add color and drive role-playing.

I’m also dying to see how they pull it off. If you’ve ever played an MMOG, you’ll recall the crowds of people that mob around key quest-givers and trainers, all having private chats with the NPC about whichever stage of the game they’re on. What if the same mob gathered around the prettiest pirate in the port? Would you see duels? Will you push your rivals aside? The role-play could get pretty hilarious.

And could some lucky lady become your First Mate? After all, NPCs who travel with you form the best bonds and add the most to your experience – it’s like a security blanket/inspiring voice for when the chips are down and the dice are rolling against you. I’d take a Doctor Who-style ambiguous relationship with a loyal companion. I know the point is to play with other people, but when your buddies are too busy to log on, it’s nice to have someone watching your back.

Especially if she’s a pirate.

A number of my friends have never seen this excellent, hilarious show. I avoided it at first ’cause hey, I write for Pitchfork – what do I need from New York indie hipsters? Turns out they’re hilarious, not dull, and their songs are fantastic. Check ‘em out before HBO (stupidly, counterproductively) yanks them from YouTube.

“If You’re Into It”

“The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room”

“She’s So Hot – Boom”

Here are some longer thoughts on BioShock, expanding on my review. There are BIG SPOILERS.

Most of the talk I’ve heard about BioShock revolves around the choices you get to make. People love to ask each other whether they saved the little sisters or harvested them; it’s even more fun when you ask somebody who hasn’t finished the game. But maybe because I played it before it shipped, and alone, and obsessively for three days, I’m more interested in another part of the game – a part where you don’t get a choice.

Early on in the story, it’s clear that you’re on a collision course with Andrew Ryan, the man who built, ran and ruined the underwater city of Rapture. He appears to be the “big boss,” and the biggest threat to whatever’s left of the place as it crumbles and springs leaks all around you. But when you finally get to him, the game’s mindfuck clicks in place.

Walk into his lair and look closely, and you’ll see a wall of clues – and I’ll admit I missed a couple – that explain who you are: Andrew Ryan’s your dad, that dead stripper you saw a couple chapters ago was your mom, and your growth has been fantastically accelerated by some kooky scientific process. Ryan’s also not pleased with how you turned out: “you are my biggest disappointment,” he tells you over the PA system.

But that’s not the weird part. When you finally come face to face, the game switches to a cut-scene – you can’t control your actions throughout the encounter. And that’s when Ryan tells you that you haven’t had any control since the moment you got here. The phrase “Would you kindly,” which Atlas – your only friend in this world, and the man who’s been leading you to Ryan – regularly deploys in his instructions to you, is actually a codephrase. You’re conditioned to obey anything you hear after those three words. You have no free will here at all.

There are two mindfucks here. First is for the player: yes, your character is mentally conditioned. But you’ve been sitting on your couch with your controller for hours, doing whatever you were told, and there’s nothing wrong with you! You just did it because you didn’t have any better ideas about how to play the game. How does it make you, the player, feel to be so pliable? Did you ever stop to wonder what Atlas was really getting at? And even if you did, did you consider stopping? This is a similar situation to the ethical transgressions in Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles, where you’ll often commit evil acts – torturing suspects, murdering other adventurers you’ve never even met – simply because the game tells you to. The only choice is to stop playing, which never crosses our minds. But at least BioShock calls you to the carpet for it.

If you’re feeling a little small right now, think how your character feels. Ryan has basically called you (I’m speaking of you “in character” now) a bug. He built a city; you’re just running around blowing stuff up. He led these people; you’re just killing them. You’ve created nothing, accomplished nothing. Taking him out wasn’t even your idea. You are a far lesser man than your father.

And that’s when you kill him. Except he’s really just using you as a tool to kill himself: he gives you the command, “Would you kindly,” and you murder him with a golf club. (This is still in the cut-scene, so the player has no control over how it unfolds.) There’s a lot you can read into his motives here. A couple scenes ago, in Arcadia, he explained how he once destroyed a whole forest rather than let the government take it from him. He almost does the same to Rapture, and now he’s doing it with his own life. You’ve backed him into a corner, and you forced him into his suicide. But the fact remains: he’s in control. He’s taking his own life. He never gives you the satisfaction of so much as pulling the trigger on him.

Nobody beats Andrew Ryan.

After this scene, you should be feeling like quite a shlub. You’re still under Atlas’s mental control, he’s betrayed you, and now what do you do? Well, you do the most logical thing in the world: switch allegiance to someone else – this time, Tenenbaum, an ex-Nazi doctor – and you start doing whatever she asks you to do!

Here’s where the game “fizzled out” for me from a story perspective. It’s a little bizarre, after the lesson we learned about trusting strangers in the first 2/3 of the game, that in the last third, you would just start following Tenenbaum’s orders. I mean, she is a Nazi, right? Yet that’s what you do. The game gives you many clues that this is a bad idea. In Point Prometheus, you have to turn yourself into a big daddy – and you’ll frequently hear that this is a bad idea, that “there’s no turning back,” and that the process is dreadful. (The voicebox modification tool is particularly gruesome, and could’ve used some gorier sound effects to go with the image of a swirling blade that fits down your throat.) As you assume the role of a big daddy and follow a little sister through a museum – where she draws ADAM from bodies that are marked, “TEST SUBJECT #1,” “TEST SUBJECT #2″ etc. – it’s fair to think that something is up, and that you’ve not only walked into a trap, but willingly given yourself up to it.

But then you kill Atlas, and you’re free again. The two endings make some sense in terms of the original choice in the game – how you decide to treat the little sisters. They’re over the top and a little too specific for my tastes (if I’m a good guy or a bad guy, is this really where I would go with it next?). But they make sense.

Yet that question of player agency – of why you trust these people – never comes back. You’re punished for following Atlas – and granted, it wasn’t your choice, in theory. But you’re apparently just right to trust Tenenbaum, and the air of foreboding that at least I felt near the end never pays off.

And more importantly, you never redeem yourself. I guess by taking out Atlas and resolving the situation with the little sisters, you bring some closure to the game. The job of most gamers in a game is to kill all the stuff the game gives you to kill: and yes, that’s a job you can get done. But Andrew Ryan has challenged you to do something more. To be even a tenth of the man he is, to create instead of destroy, and most of all, to set your own course – to be your own man, to make your own decisions, to embrace the freedom that’s the birthright of every man or woman on earth. The message of the game came straight from Ryan: “A man chooses; a slave obeys.” But within the game, you never become a man. The only choice you have is to stop playing.

UPDATE: By the way, I stole the image above from Kieron Gillan’s fantastic interview with Ken Levine on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Give it a read.

UPDATE 2: If you absolutely, positively have to hear how everything in the game works, check out – courtesy Rock Paper Shotgun – this interview by Chris Remo at ShackNews, where Ken Levine basically gives away the whole store.

My review of BioShock runs today in the AV Club. Usually I like the short format of game reviews in the AV Club, but this time I had way too much to say – both strongly positive, and kinda negative – and I wish I’d had more space. Later this week I’m going to post something about the game’s story, at length, and with tons of spoilers. Right now, I’m still recovering from PAX (and the red-eye from Seattle) …

So I’m killing three hours at the Seattle airport, right after PAX has closed, and I’ve gotta say, I’m sad. PAX was nice. It was really nice. If I had to name the one killer advantage PAX has over other conventions, it’s the vibe – the laid back, everyone’s welcome atmosphere. If you want to sit on a bean bag and play Nintendo DS, that’s great. If you’re a big ass nerd, that’s cool. If you are just socially inept and wear little kitten ears and have no life at all outside of gaming? That’s absolutely cool. The social hierarchy that naturally emerges in any group of people never came up here. It’s a very chill, idealistic atmosphere, for the three days it lasts.

It’s hard to explain what it’s like to spend three days in a place where nobody acts like a dick. If you want to know what it’s like, come to PAX next year.

Other people are covering PAX in more depth – I recommend Opposable Thumbs, nice guys – and I’m late to the blogging party anyway, so here’s a couple highlights:

BEST GAMES

Several first-person shooters were on display at the expo, but Far Cry 2 – which creative director Clint Hocking demo’d, in pre-alpha, for the first time in public – blew them out of the water. It looks fantastic: set in Africa, in both jungle and desert settings, it treats every tree, building fragment and swath of grass as an independent object with its own physics, which means that you can shoot each branch separately off a tree, or crush some wild grass under the wheels of your truck and come back later to see it’s still crushed, or watch the whole world react to a windstorm, or fire a missle all the way over to a mountain and see it drop out of the sky and take out some trees two or three kilometers away from you. To make it even more immersive, they added a few features that seem like forehead-slappers once you see them in action: when you need to check a map, you actually see your hands come onto the screen holding the map and a compass. To heal yourself, you have to actually watch yourself dig a bullet out of your arm or pat out a fire on your shirt. And speaking of fire, you can burn a hell of a lot of stuff in the game, and in fact, setting a wildfire in the grass and watching it spread towards an enemy camp is an important tactic that will keep your foes disorganized and give you a serious advantage. Also, even in pre-Alpha it looks like “woah.”

Hocking was also proud of a new buddy system, where various NPCs will befriend you, hang out with you and even save your life if you’re taken out. He made a big point about how games have to move from being a “distraction” or simple violence, and start to create true emotional experiences for the player. Peter Molyneux gave the same speech before he introduced Fable 2’s dog; here, you get a tattooed guy named Marty. When Hocking reached for an example of a work of art that still touched him years later, he pulled out Fight Club – which ain’t exactly Orson Welles, but if you think Fight Club is a deep, life-changing experience, then chances are you’ll find Far Cry 2 very moving. And you’ll also enjoy burning the shit out of everything in sight.

(By the way, the questions were a run of “So can you use a knife to like kill a jaguar and then, like, set it on fire?” I know that PAX is a judgment free pro-gamer free-for-all but seriously guys, stop getting worked up about what Roger Ebert says about games if all you want to do is blow the shit out of everything.)

The other game that stood out – and I’ll preface this by saying that I had my hands on the keyboard for maybe five minutes, and it ain’t gold, and I’ll need ten or more hours to have any real idea what I think, and what the hell do I know anyway – but I was knocked out by Pirates of the Burning Sea. Alone among the MMOGs at the Expo, it offered a range of new features and a far more dynamic world: branching dialogue, stronger writing, NPCs that can be influenced or flirted with – hell, NPCs that just remember who the hell you are, and of course, you get to play a ship’s captain in 1720, which means naval battles, wind conditions, and tons of upgrades to your ship. Also impressive was the fact that the world could be “conquered.” There are four factions in the game – England, Spain, France, and Pirates – and players in any faction can decide to invade each other’s cities, which entails a slow process of sowing unrest and skirmishing with the enemy until finally the city hits a tipping point, players run through the streets taking each other out, and finally the place changes hands (or not). Any of the three nations can take over all the others’ cities and “win” the server – which means that everyone in that faction gets some kind of a goody, and then the political situation is reset and you can try again.

This sounded really intriguing, and so did the game’s real-world setting. I spoke with producer John Tynes, who talked about some of the role-playing story arcs that players can pursue – including one that’ll involve a historical mystery involving real world figures who you can Google and research here in the real world. (Note to Jessica Price: it almost sounded like an ARG. Almost.) And the sea battles looked like fun.

But also, I could really imagine that my dad would’ve dug a game like this. Which is probably one of the reasons I’m a little bummed out thinking about it.

BREAKING INTO THE BIZ

Several panels gave people advice on how to get into the gamemaking business. The “Pitch your Video Game” panel was hilarious, and a lot of people had their hopes dashed very, very quickly – pitches could only last 45 seconds or less – but I think they also learned a lot about how to pitch games, namely, that you have to prepare. You have to get to the meat of the game in practically no time. The ideas that made it to the semi-finals could actually be explained in less than 10 seconds – “It’s a cooking game where you’re a witch doctor’s pot, and also, the pot can kill things too.” “It’s Sims, but you’re raising Mafia members.” “It’s a game about a potato – ” actually, I didn’t really understand the potato game, but that guy made it to the top three.

I also heard Tyler Bielman’s talk on how to make a collectible card game, which is something I know nothing about. I learned a hell of a lot in just one hour and I’d recommend that anyone who wants to try this seek him out and find that talk. Also, try to round up at least $50,000 in seed money before you get started. It’s not exactly the fastest way to make a buck.

TRON

I watched Tron last night. What a great flick! Actually it’s corny as hell, but it still looks awesome, and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than The Matrix.

INDUSTRY PARTIES

The ArenaNet party at Gameworks was packed, but I hit a couple other press and industry gigs. The worst was Vivendi’s World in Conflict party. They rented out the giant Pike Street Annex, filled it with sandbags, tanks, jeeps, and guys who were just paid to stand there in uniform and hold rifles. The main room had six or seven displays where you could try the game. But when I went to get a drink? It was a cash bar.

Fuck you, Vivendi. Fuck you and your sandbags. Ever wonder why you only got a couple dozen people to come to your party? Because you’re charging $7 for a beer. And oh yeah, one of the kids I talked to said the best game he’d seen all day was “Castle Crashers,” which looks like a cartoon and probably took a fraction what you spent making a derivative RTS. As a typical PAX attendee might say, “Go eat a bowl of dicks.”

Also went to a small Wizards of the Coast Party and met some really great, really fascinating people who work on the online and marketing departments. I wish I knew more about that business, but getting sucked into Magic the card game at this point in my life is not an option. Gleemax, however, is on my to-investigate list.

THE OMEGATHON FINALE

The Omegathon is the competition that narrows 20 amateur gaming champions down to one grand-prize winner (who leaves with $5,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to the Tokyo Game Show). I saw the first four people get knocked out playing Jenga in round one, and as the finale of the convention, the last two competitors go head-to-head in a game that isn’t announced ’til the minute they start playing it. In past years they used Pong and Tetris, but this year it was Halo 3. Yeah, they sold out – Microsoft gave them a custom map and a chance to introduce hott new weapons like the fuel rod gun and the flamethrower to a screaming crowd of 4,000 geeks, and Penny Arcade went for it. (They also switched out Karaoke Revolution last night for Rock Band.) But all told, it was probably the right call. Throwing two guys into a new version of Halo with weapons they’d never played before was a brilliant idea. For example, the flamethrower, which sprays metal-melting napalm all over the walls: one guy nailed the other with it, and then stumbled into the fire and managed to incinerate himself too, erasing his kill. The crowd went wild.

Anyway, one guy beat the other and won the prize, and then Gabe and Tycho did a round – slayer, five frag limit. The last two times they went head-to-head on-stage, Tycho won, so Gabe was the fan favorite – and he pulled it out. The highlight came when he scored two beat-downs-from-behind, in a row, in exactly the same spot (nice and humilitating). And with that, PAX ended, and I picked up my bags at the hotel and got in the cab and that was that. Thanks again guys. It was a really, really good weekend.

The first thing you notice about the crowd at PAX – aside from the black t-shirts and the fact that they’re nerds – is how nice they all are. People will start conversations with you in the middle of the concourse or at a panel. They’ll help each other with questions. And they’re on the lookout for jerks. When the expo opened at 2 PM, I naturally decided to take advantage of my media pass and cut the long line into the halls. But going down the hallway, the guy behind me said, “Hey, where’d you come from?” He figured out that I cut – and he didn’t seem angry about it, so much as hurt. I felt ashamed. I swore that media pass or no, I wouldn’t cut another line or look for favoritism of any sort the whole weekend – and I haven’t.

Of course, having a media pass mainly just saves me the price of admission, which is a mere $50. This is a convention for the fans, by the fans, and all that. It’s just one giant fucking chill nerd paradise.

Here are some highlights.

THE OMEGATHON

The Omegathon is a tournament that runs throughout the weekend. Twenty contestants – who are chosen from last year’s conference on the basis of interest and luck, more than anything – are whittled down to one grand prize winner after six rounds of games. The first one was Jenga. Have you ever seen people play Jenga? For an audience? Competitively? Four teams of five people each went at it, and it was intense - every time a tower wobbled or a player had trouble eeking a block from the bottom, the crowd would moan or gasp. At least, the crowd acted that way at first. After a while, Jenga gets dull: some players would take two to three minutes making their move, testing each block, waving their hands to stop them from shaking, and basically stalling for time.

I’m not sure who won, but I saw two teams lose, and it was painful. When you’re the one who knocks over the tower, the whole team is responsible – after all, at some point you’re painted in a corner. But you’re the one who feels like shit.

The next four rounds feature video games like Quake III and Calling All Cars. The sixth round is going to be a total surprise.

THE EXPO

All the major game developers and a few cool indie ones have booths in here. Here are some games I liked:

LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE: The new expansion comes with a “chicken mode,” where you turn into a chicken and run around the Shire. You play like a regular avatar, getting in fights or running away from them, but you’re a chicken. You can peck, bob and weave, and if you hit the Jump button, you get to flap a few feet in the air. This is absolutely the great thing I’ve seen out of LOTRO and beats the “Monster Play” by a country mile.

UPDATE: Warhammer has a chicken feature too. It’s exactly the same, down to the flapping. But LOTRO is still “first to market.”

METROID PRIME CORRUPTION: The first major FPS for the Wii looks really slick. The graphics for all the Wii games looked clunky next to the high-def XBox 360 and PC displays, but it doesn’t really matter; Metroid has a terrific visual style and a lot of subtle improvements – for example, once in a while you can see your own eyes reflected in your visor. Slick.

DE BLOB: Caught a glimpse of this rolling-around-and-painting-shit Wii game. Looks like fun.

NEVERWINTER NIGHTS 2 – MASK OF THE BETRAYER: I love the whole line of D & D games back to Baldur’s Gate II, but I had problems with Neverwinter Nights 2 – mainly with the control system, which forced you into an over-the-shoulder view that just didn’t work. As I said at the time, tracking your character’s movements through tight spaces felt like performing a colonoscopy on a doll house. The new expansion – and the upcoming patch for the original game – fix that by giving you a “Strategy Mode,” which is a top-down view just like the old Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games. Other improvements include a new race of demon people with funny heads. The guy doing the demo really liked them.

ROCK BAND – People were lined up to take a spin through Rock Band, which looks really good – the controls for all four players fit neatly onto one screen, and it gives you more ways to keep score (and earn rewards for, say, a good solo). The drum kit is a little chincy but aren’t toy drums all the rage, at least with the indie kids?

DEMENTIUM – Slick survival horror game for the DS that uses the stylus to control your view – meaning that as you walk around in the dark, you jerk the stylus around to jerk your head one way or another. Very atmospheric. Couldn’t tell how the game plays, though – I caught sight of one giant, bulbous monster dragging a body down the hallway, but hey, that could mean anything.

By the way, there were no booth babes except maybe one – a model for the SWORD OF THE NEW WORLD booth who was dressed in the romantic Spanish pirate/buccanneer garb of the game, which means a mini-skirt, thigh-high leather boots and flintlock pistols. I walked by three times to confirm all those details.

GABE & TYCHO’S Q & A

Gabe and Tycho – or Jerry and Mike, as they’re known on their driver’s licenses – gave a one-hour Q & A that was a real crowd-pleaser. They’ll do anything for their fans. One fan asked Jerry to sing some song – “The Twelven Day of Evenfore”? (EDIT: It’s “My Belruel” – thanks, Opposable Thumbs) – and he did – the whole thing – all five verses. People were lighting lighters and waving their cell phones.

Random notes:

Q: Here’s a question that’ll really tell us a lot about you: in BioShock, do you kill the little sisters or save them?

A: Mike saves them all; Jerry has killed 12.

Q: Jerry, will you ever write a book or any other longer work?

A: No, because “I’m super, super lazy.”

Q: Some guy from Canada, who had trouble getting through customs because he crossed the border with $800 of Nerf guns (?), asked if they were ever going to add Nerf guns to PAX.

A: No. Lawsuits. (They also told a story about a Nerf gun Mike invented where he took the suction cup off of a projectile and replaced it with the business end of a thumbtack. He’s not allowed to use it anymore.)

Q: Which games would you “shove up [Roger Ebert's] ass” to teach him that games can be art?

A: Ico, Shadows of the Colossus, and BioShock.

Q: Will there ever be a Fruit Fucker toy?

A: Maybe. Probably?

We also got to see the sign language interpreter deliver the sign for “cockthirsty.” I wish I could remember it.

THE T-SHIRTS

“There’s no place like 127.0.0.1″

“My compiler compiled your compiler”

“I like my women the way I like my coffee.” Reverse: “Ground up and in the freezer.” (okay, that’s a little disturbing)

“Joss Whedon is my New Master” (written in the Star Wars font)

So lots of notes from this afternoon, but I had to mention the highlight: after Mike and Jerry’s Q & A panel at 5, they invited onstage their “secret guest” for the show. They tried to get notorious anti-games lawyer Jack Thompson to show up, but he wouldn’t go for it. So instead, they invited the second-most-reviled man in gaming: film director Uwe Boll.

Boll came to defend his career, and to show clips from his upcoming adaptation of Postal. Here’s my preview: it’s unbelievably bad.

That’s a clip from YouTube, of the hijackers on one of the planes bound for the World Trade Center, arguing about how many virgins they’ll get in the afterlife. (“What if we have to split the virgins between us?” one hijacker asks the other. “Then that’s more virgins than you have now, right?”) It’s “satire.” Now, I’m definitely not offended that someone would satirize any element of 9/11 – and as one of the people at the Q & A pointed out, it’s been done a few times already in the last six years. Boll has committed only one crime: he’s really not funny. Unless somebody just invented a new level of irony, the humor is blunt and broad and he makes lots and lots of easy jokes.

Here’s another line, from a scene near the end where the protagonists looks at a bunch of gangster and Arabs and criminals and asks, can’t we all get along?: “You’re so busy trying to blow up the world in the name of God! Well, newsflash, fucktards! God doesn’t need your help!” I’m sorry, but “fucktard” is a special occasion word in my book.

Boll took some abuse from the questioners and the audience, including a woman who called him a racist and told him to get off the stage. (“Use your brain, and you’ll know what satire is,” Boll shot back.) He held his ground and a few people gave him respect for daring to show up in the first place. But he didn’t win many new admirers. We all know that gamers vote with their attention spans, and within minutes of Boll taking the stage, the capacity crowd in the main theater had winnowed down to about one-third full – which was unfortunate, ’cause the guy did show some balls to address this crowd.

I lasted about 25 minutes. What can I say? He was killing my second wind.

Postal comes out October 12 (not October 5, as previously announced). Oh, and you get to see Dave Foley’s penis.

This weekend I’m at the Penny Arcade Expo - in fact, I’m typing this from a Starbucks across from my hotel, where I can’t get in my room yet, trying to shake off the six hour flight from Boston pressed between a golf enthusiast and a big, big fisherman. Was I any more of a geek ’cause I was playing Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon on my DS? Well, sure – plus my head’s killing me from staring at that little screen and watering crops for three hours.

But that’s all part of the fun here. I haven’t gotten to the Expo yet – it opens in an hour – but lots of really young adults in black t-shirts are already milling around the block, and there’s nerdiness in the air. On the itinerary today is Wil Wheaton’s keynote, the start of the Omegathon – their all-platforms, no-holds-barred gaming tournament – and some industry stuff. I’m woefully unprepared for this weekend, I didn’t sign up for the Patient Zero convention game (which looks like a hoot), etc. etc. etc. – but the way I see it, this can’t help but be fun. Two girls dressed as manga heroines just walked by. Isn’t this why you come to the West Coast?

EDIT: Eddy points out I didn’t explain PAX. Basically, it’s a big gamer convention thrown by the guys who draw the Penny Arcade webcomic. It’s just their con, but it’s grown rapidly over the past couple years and is becoming something of a big deal. I came because “I’m covering it” and “it’s fodder for future articles” and “I need to keep my finger on the pulse,” but mainly ’cause it sounded like a lot of fun.

Not everything on the Internet was made by a real live human being. Some stuff comes from robots and spiders (like the ones who try to spam my comments section). And some stuff comes from people who pretend to be someone they’re not. We share the blogosphere with fictional characters. Alternate reality games spawn characters run wild over blogs, forums, and e-mail: if you play an ARG, you may spend hours communicating with a character played by a puppetmaster. And once you know this, it gets easier and easier to suspect that a “real” blog may in fact be some kind of a work of fiction, and you just haven’t caught on yet.

Which brings me to Penelope Trunk.

You may know Trunk as a freelance writer whose column is syndicated all over the place. She gives advice mainly to twentysomethings – er, “millenials” – who are superambitious, telecommute on their iPhones, and want marketing jobs at Google. She keeps a blog, where she regularly reveals way too much information about herself in the name of “transparency.” And if I didn’t know better, I’d think she’s a work of fiction.

For one thing, she has a fake-sounding name – and in fact, it isn’t her real name. (She tells the whole hilarious story about that right on her blog.) She tells us way too much about herself, without a hint of self-consciousness. You know how, when you read a novel written in the first-person, you sometimes wonder why this person is giving you so many private and embarrassing details? That’s Trunk’s blog. She talks about blackmailing her supervisor. On assignment for Time Magazine, she screams at a publicist and then accepts flowers from the handsome CEO she’s profiling. (Carrie Bradshaw, phone home!) She reveals her husband’s failed career, and blogs her first visit to a marriage counselor. Tantalizing hints of extra-marital affairs are littered across the blog – is this foreshadowing?

More than the exposition, I’m convinced by the dramatic arc of her blog. She’s clearly building up to something – a divorce? A murder? A nervous breakdown? There’s a strong LonelyGirl15 vibe behind her blog, minus maybe the Satanic overtones. Then there’s her voice. It’s infectiously readable, half train-wreck, half chummy best-friend. It’s the kind of writing you see in the “quaint little stories about my life” column that’s in every daily paper in the country, that everyone makes fun of but everyone reads. (In fact, she had just such a column at the Boston Globe.) Real people don’t write this way. Yet here she is.

In a way, Trunk is a character. Specifically, she’s constructed a persona, like so many creative-types – musicians, writers, artists, and really anyone who builds a brand around their name. And this is my real point: on the Internet, there’s no daylight between a real person playing a persona, and a person who’s enacting a fictional character. In the same way that we call zombies “the undead,” these people are “the unreal.” Whether you’re playing a part in an internet game, or playing the part of your own successful, self-promoting self, you wake up, log on, and become someone that you aren’t – except, over time, they can’t help but reflect you, because where else is all this stuff coming from? We in the audience are buying into a construct. We know we’re getting a fictional person – that whoever’s typing all this stuff looks a lot different first thing in the morning with a toothbrush hanging out of their mouth than they do when they put their blog-face on. But we go along with it. And we also buy into the real-life material that fuels this fiction. At the end of the day, fiction vs. nonfiction doesn’t really matter. It’s all entertainment – as long as we keep coming back for more.

Talking to Macca earlier this year was a big break for me, but I’m far more proud of this interview, which ran today at the ‘Fork. First off, as a member of the MTV generation, it was truly an honor to sit down with Daryl Hall and interview him in person. Second, he’s a bit of a loose cannon. This interview is all killer, no filler.

“Pitchfork: In the 70s, the albums you were doing– like Abandoned Luncheonette, and through X-Static and Voices, were very eclectic. You tried a lot of styles. Was that led by artistic interests, or was it also commercial?

DH: A tiny bit of the commercial side, but I’ve always been emotionally driven, and artistically driven. Anything I do is because I feel it. I am a real maverick. I don’t take no shit from nobody. And when somebody tries to put me in a bag, tries to dictate what music I should record, or what my sound should be, I rebel like you can’t believe. You know, it takes no courage when you’re starting out to be an indie, because that’s what you are, when you’re starting out as a kid. If you are a superstar, or whatever you want to call yourself, a person who’s had outrageous success, and you decide to go indie and tell the record companies to screw themselves? That takes a certain amount of courage. And bullheadedness, really. So that’s me. [laughs]“

It’s not like Pitchfork was looking for an interview with either Hall or Oates, but when I read that Hall had bought a house literally minutes from where I live, I knew I had to take the opportunity. I give Hall’s publicist credit: he never worried that I was some snarky punk coming to take the piss out of Hall. I don’t interview people unless I take them seriously, and Hall’s a serious talent. His Sacred Songs album with Robert Fripp – which we talk about in the interview – is really fantastic, and if you think H & O was cheesy synth-pop product, listen to Voices.

Was it strange to run this in Pitchfork? Probably – but that’s half the appeal. And anyway, when Pitchfork fans started taking Justin Timberlake seriously around “Cry Me A River,” the floodgates were basically opened. This generation’s taste in music ignores commercial distinctions and exhausts the notions of irony and kitsch. My Brightest Diamond is contributing to a Huey Lewis tribute record. Anything goes.