Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

I never get insomnia. But last night I woke up at 2 AM, and three strains of anxious thoughts leapt into my head, like arguments I’m planning to have with people and stuff I’ve let myself down on and everything that I should be doing with this new year, with is 1/12 over, keeping me awake until I gave up on the bed and went downstairs at around 3:30. Nothing’s on TV – all my books were upstairs. But I broke out my laptop and for some reason, Googled up Desktop Tower Defence.

I’d heard of the game and hadn’t given it a chance yet. In minutes, I was hooked. If you’re not familiar with the game, the idea’s simple: you’re looking at a board, on your office desktop. A stream of squiggly bad guys marches from one side to the other, and you have to stop them, by playing automated turrets and defense systems in their way. The choice and placement and upgrading of these devices gets trickier the longer you play, and there are millions of ways to use the same few elements, which is a recipe for total addiction: it takes minutes to learn, a lifetime to master.

I assume the reason people play games about busywork – like Diner Dash, or Nanny Mania, or going back a ways, Tapper - is that the games feel like work, except you can beat them. You get the satisfaction of completing tasks that actually can be completed, unlike so many of the things we have to deal with at work, which are messy, complicated, and sometimes impossible to resolve. Until you lose, you get constant closure.

Desktop Tower Defence is a game about fending off anxieties. You’re under attack, but you can deal with it.When you fail, you try again. The satisfaction of watching these simple enemies kept at bay was the only thing that let me finally get to sleep at 5 AM. And oh yeah, total exhaustion.

Today, the AV Club ran my review of Endless Ocean. In the reader feedback, you can find this amazingly honest assessment of the game:

Oceans are fun…
by eh blanc
I have been under the weather for the last while, having sustained a head injury when on the ski hill recently. When I went in search of some recuperating entertainment in my video game collection, I found that I just didn’t have the energy to play my usual genres and titles. I found GTA too overwhelming, the Total War series too mentally draining, and any first person shooter (or even Oblivion) too much on my poor brain and strained occular nerves. I picked this up on the advice of PA / Tycho, and I have enjoyed it thoroughly. This is not a challenging or action packed game, but seems like it is just what the doctor ordered for times when you are under the weather or otherwise not up to the usual reflexive or higher brain requirements of most video games. I find it relaxing, enjoyable, and occasionally exciting. My first encounter with the Atlantic Right Whale gave me goosebumps.

Again, I have a concussion, and I imagine my ability to get back into more “brain requiring games” will probably (hopefully) improve in the coming weeks. However, I think Endless Ocean will find a permanent place in my games repertoire for those times when I need to relax or are otherwise not feeling 100%. This is an excellent game for when you’re under the weather.

Also,
1) you can poke fish, grab fish, and also feed fish to learn more about them (not just vigorous rubbing)
2) I have all intentions of playing this game while stoned once my brain is better
3) There are already a bunch of user posted videos on YouTube from the game. They can give you an idea of some of the game play.
4) In a pre-emptive strike – this game is obviously only entertaining to those who have brain injuries (oldies, retards, and republicans).

zing
12:12 PM Mon January 28, 2008

One-upped me for sure.

In other publication news, my review of Aquaria ran last week, and today I have a new column on GameSetWatch that compares Aquaria to Little Miss Sunshine.

My mind isn’t 100% made up about the Democratic primary – stories like George Packer’s in The New Yorker keep reminding me that Hillary Clinton is not, in fact, a steampunk android built purely for power – but last night felt good. Obama is still the underdog and will be ’til he wins in November. When he wins, it’s exciting that he pulled it off; when he loses, you feel the party tilt back to the status quo. When I switched on the TV last night to settle in for an evening of election returns, I was surprised to find that they called it the moment the polls closed. A 2-to-1 victory? Amazing. And seeing the Clintons’ race-baiting strategy thrown back in their face? Awesome.

The kid and I were in hysterics over this the other night.

The notion of “serious games” has proven that games suffer from the bigotry of low expectations. “Wow – they made a game about hunger?” “They made a game about Darfur?” “They made a game where people have sex?” Any time a game tackles a serious, grown-up subject, someone’s there to give them a medal.

Which is half the reason I was interested in Fatworld, a new game by Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games studio (and funded by the same public broadcaster behind World Without Oil). The subject matter itself doesn’t interest me at all. A game about bad diet and obesity sounds noble, but, zzzz. I checked it out because it was Bogost, and it seemed like an “important” title, plus maybe it’d be fun to write about.

But after playing it for about an hour last night, I decided I wouldn’t cover it – because it’s bad. Really bad. Again, I only gave it an hour. If I spent all night with it, I might have grokked it better and learned to work around its problems. But right now, Fatworld is overreaching, flawed and in many ways, almost unplayable.

The thing with Bogost is that we – meaning, the whole gaming community – love the guy. He’s a gifted critic, scholar, and lecturer. He repped for games on The Colbert Report. He’s a go-to guy for games journos and an articulate advocate for the art of gaming.

But he’s not quite as highly regarded as a game developer (fond though I am of the Howard Dean for Iowa game). And Fatworld makes so many mistakes that if it had come from anybody other than Bogost, we’d throw it in the budget bin next to Coffee Tycoon and Prison Tycoon 2. The basic idea is that you experiment with the diets of characters, and see how their economic situations, genetic predispositions, and other factors contribute to their weight and health. Yes, a teacher could lecture you on how these things relate – but by demonstrating these phenomena and giving you a chance to play with them, Fatworld can try to make the same arguments in a different and maybe more compelling way. Listening to a teacher explain why people get fat is one thing; watching it happen to your character is something else.

He could have stopped a simple diet simulation: click here to eat a cheeseburger, click there to go to the gym, watch yourself load up on Cheetos because you can’t afford organic vegetables. Instead, he tried to shoot the moon – by remaking Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

You control a character in a fully walkable, interdependent city, with a range of NPCs, neighborhoods and businesses. Just like in GTA, your character can eat – and crappy food makes you fatter, while healthy food makes you healthier. Just like in GTA, you can exercise to get in better shape.

So, the problems. Where to begin? First off, he made a world that’s bigger than he needs. And you have to walk around it. And you have to walk diagonally, even though you move with the arrow keys. (Holding down up and left at the same time, or right and down, is the preferred way to get around.) And if your character is fat, you have to stop and pant for a few seconds before you can trudge on to wherever the game wants you to go – and wait, where does the game want you, anyway?

You have two general missions in the game: to control your own health, which involves eating right and exercising; and to act as a kind of tycoon, buying and running restaurants and feeding your fellow citizens. It’s not immediately apparent (and there’s no manual) why you want to go around buying restaurants, and bribing the government to change regulations, and all this other macro-level stuff, when the micro-story – trying to turn a fat-ass into a healthy kid – could be complicated enough on its own.

A greater dysfunction is that the game veers from being boringly detailed and realistic, to fantastically silly and implausible. You can look up detailed medical records for a character, and study their BMI and weight and whatever. Yet you can also be an impoverished, obese 17-year old, and find yourself buying a house and a restaurant. I was making bribes before I was old enough to vote. Your goals make no intuitive sense, which makes the gameplay that much harder to decipher. (And by the way, it’s not “bribes” – it’s called “lobbying.”)

On a nuts and bolts level, the game’s ambitious scope and no doubt murderous schedule led to a deliverable that’s riddled with bugs, plus UI problems that even a couple rounds of playtesting could have uncovered. Here’s one of my favorites: can you see what’s wrong with this dialog box?

And I’m confused about who would play the game. It won’t work in a classroom, because like I said, an hour only gets you through the tutorial (barely). There’s also no manual on the site or classroom instruction guide. I guess you could play it with your kid at home, but I’m still gonna harp on not having a manual. This is a wild guess, but maybe the documentation was kept to a minimum so the game could make its arguments through the game, and not on paper. But without a well-paced, interactive tutorial or a much better user interface, the frustration level is too high. The joke here is that all video games are educational in some way: if nothing else, they’re supposed to teach you how to play the game at hand. Fatworld doesn’t even accomplish that.

Fatworld got some nice press before it came out, and understandably so: it’s a neat idea and a good cause. I haven’t seen many reviews of it yet, although this one - by a professor who got a lot farther with it than I did – shares some of my frustrations.

Like I said, I hate to knock Bogost. And I’m not going to bash this on The Onion. But if this had come from anyone else? And more importantly, if we weren’t so giddy every time a game tries to tackle something important, and if Fatworld hadn’t already gotten an “A” just for the idea? We wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Last night I was so fried and tired that I didn’t want to play games. I didn’t want to watch TV. I just read books. Well, okay – I read a comic book, Bill Willingham’s Fables. But that put me in the mood to look at Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, which has been living on my bedstand for a couple years now. I read “Travels With The Snow Queen,” and had a great moment of kizmit. Fables is Willingham’s story of a collection of well-known fairy tale characters – Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf – who get exiled from their homelands and wind up in modern New York City. He spins some great stories from this conceit, and Kelly Link has repurposed some fairy tales herself to great effect. “Travels With the Snow Queen” uses Kay and The Snow Queen, who also show up in Fables, in very different forms. (At least, I think it’s the same Kay – I don’t know the original, just the repurposed versions.)

It got me thinking about an interest of mine, transmedia storytelling – where in theory, you can take the same characters and same worlds and spin them into many new media and properties. Inspired by the recent CES, Leigh Alexander has written convincing essays for and against media convergence. This got me wondering why I was so fascinated by media convergence and transmedia storytelling last year. I tried to make that the focus of my Pitchfork column, to near-universal crickets – turns out the idea of an ARG about peak oil ain’t as exciting as I thought it would be – but at heart, I think I was dealing with something a little more basic: I like pop culture in all its forms; I like to mash ‘em all up in my head; transmedia storytelling seemed to offer a nice little formal structure where everything could hang out.

But transmedia storytelling has problems. First and foremost, it is massively hard to pull off. As Jessica Price recently reminded me, a transmedia story is one where the same narrative thread continues across many platforms. In the scrappy world of alternate reality gaming, this is no big deal: by definition, ARGs don’t have a single platform. They take place in graveyards, cocktail napkins, websites, your cell phone, and wherever else someone can think to stick them.

But let’s say you make a movie, and you want to add a game, a comic, a web comic, and whatever else – and you want them to contribute to your original story. The movie should stand on its own, but the other stuff should make lights flash in the fans’ eyes – “Okay, I get who that tertiary character is! I get why everyone looked upset when they heard so-and-so’s name!” You want to coordinate the creative teams behind all these properties, and you want someone to keep paying the bills so it all works out. You don’t want your toys or your novelizations to feel like cash-ins: you want them to add something. You want everything to share a common creative vision, with room for all the brilliant comics writers and game developers and who-the-hell-knows-what that you bring into the property to lend their own spark and drag along their own fan bases. You want an empire, and you want it to be coherent.

Well, what you’re really saying you want is pretty damn next to impossible.

A few properties tried it. You’ve got Heroes. You’ve got The Matrix - although I doubt much of that stuff holds up to critical scrutiny. You’ve got Star Wars – but even there, the vision of George Lucas has a unique power, and presides over an increasingly decentralized and silly empire, where new comic spin-offs and toys either rehash old templates or go off in silly directions. I mean, c’mon, three and a half of the six films that mark the core of the franchise aren’t even very good.

And you’ve got the problem of money. Money’s always a problem, right? In this case, it’s a problem because the teams behind transmedia efforts often sit in the marketing department, not creative; they’re often stymied by legal; and they’re asking for so much money that money considerations outweigh practically anything else. TV shows jump the shark because TV shows end when they stop making money, and not when they stop being good.

Money causes many other problems, but here’s another one: how you deal with the fans. The battle between the creators and the fans is well-trodden ground. Harry Potter fans saw their fan web sites shut down by Warner Bros. Corporations lash out at fan fic. Henry Jenkins and the crew at MIT have argued against this kind of stupidity. But at the same time, the people who study fan fiction inherently treat it as something that the “fans” make – and they often imply that the fans and the creators are practically living on different planets. Fan fic is treated as a cute kind of folklore, interesting and provocative in its own way, but not something you would pay for or put in front of a critic. The fans sometimes become the talent, but only by sneaking their way into the castle. The rest of the time, they’re the serfs. Hollywood makes something: they pay for it and choke it down.

The point is, transmedia storytelling on this scale demands a kind of centralized vision that’s nearly impossible to pull off, and that is highly likely to denigrate the fans, the creators, the works, and everything else that gets within spitting distance of it. If most movies are expensive and likely to fail, transmedia properties are a thousand times riskier. In fact, personally I can only think of one that really worked for me: the Buffy comic that picked up the television series. And half of that series has kind of sucked too.

When I was covering the transmedia beat last year, I don’t think that finding a way to pull off The Matrix or to get marketing and legal to work together was really what got me worked up. Instead, I’m interested in something decentralized. And when you look at that, you go from seeing a handful of successful case studies, to seeing millions of them.

Bill Willingham’s Fables has many advantages over The Matrix. He doesn’t owe anyone money for his characters: they’re all in the public domain, and he can do whatever he wants with them, using the associations or casting them aside as he wants. James Joyce got the same boost when he took the story of Ulysses. Kelly Link might’ve run a few more risks when she wrote “The Girl Detective” – isn’t Nancy Drew under copyright? – but she never said the name Nancy Drew, and that kept her in the clear. Also, she put her work under creative commons, so anyone else can repurpose and reinterpret and rework it as they wished.

Of course, I’ve gone from talking about a specific practice of transmedia storytelling to the ancient practice of taking past stories and retelling them. We all know how that works. We all know that it often works very well. And even when someone crosses the line into riffing on a copyrighted property, well – it’s easier to beg forgiveness (or work under the radar) than to ask permission. Remember those marketing and legal people I mentioned above.

This is an old practice – but we may not understand it well in the modern context. How do these archetypes and myths work in the era of media convergence? How are ideas infecting one another in the world outside the legally-enforced hierarchy of people asking permission to write fan fic? Instead of focusing on the rich empire-builders like George Lucas or J. K. Rowlings, and on the flip side, staring down at the losers who write dirty fan fic or paint pictures of video game characters masturbating, let’s look at the indie creators – the people like Bill Willingham, or Kelly Link, or the people who are smaller, making their work in many media and finding new fun house mirrors in which to distort old properties? Are people working any differently? Is it the same stuff on a new screen?

And it’s not just public domain stuff. Seeing Alien and Predator in the same film, or watching someone mess with Mickey Mouse, or watching Marvel superheroes team up with DC superheroes, is massively fun. And often, it’s massively possible. But these are one-off’s and fuck-you’s. Some of the best transmedia properties are the most transgressive ones – the ones where characters don’t belong together, or don’t behave the way they should, or never got permission to hang out in the first place. And to speak as a critic again? If you took all the subversive, free-thinking stuff that never got licensed, and compared it to all the stuff that made it through marketing and legal, and jumped through all the hoops, a la Matrix or Heroes - well, the unfettered stuff is obviously much better; I just don’t know by how many orders of magnitude.

I know that transmedia storytelling is a newer, hipper idea. And the practice of helping corporations figure out how to make it work seems challenging and lucrative. But I guess after everything I saw in the past year, it doesn’t interest me as much as the same old creative repurposing that people have been doing all along – and seeing how they’re doing it lately.

EDIT: Per Jessica’s comment, changed “The point is, transmedia storytelling” to read “The point is, transmedia storytelling on this scale … .”

And don’t miss Jessica’s expert opinion on what can make a transmedia project work.

I’m casually following the results of the Michigan Primary, in case they finally knock out Mitt Romney. In reading about the state, here’s what I learned about our neighbors out west:

- Michigan is poor.

- Really poor.

- Nobody has jobs.

- There are whole diners that have no customers, no staff, just one elderly waitress who says that not much is up. No food, either.

- Nobody buys American cars anymore. They suck, and nobody wants to do anything about it. They just keep making crappy cars, out of spite.

- If you thought the rest of Michigan doesn’t have jobs, well, Detroit – they don’t even have unemployment.

- Michigan is poorer than any other state in the union. You mighta thought that Flint, Michigan was poor – but in Michigan, they call Flint “Big Bucksville.”

- They have an Upper Peninsula in Michigan. It’s fucking huge.

- There may be some colleges, but who gives a damn, since Obama’s not competing and kids don’t vote Republican.

- After tonight, you will never hear about Michigan again. And thank God.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side of the fence, the debate in Vegas starts at nine o’clock eastern. I’m going to tune in, but mainly just to see if Hillary drops the n-bomb. Fire up the TiVO!

Marc Masters – noise and avant music coverer for Wire, Pitchfork, and his own blog Noiseweek - wrote a book last year on No Wave, the obscure strain of noise music that came and went in the late ’70s in New York City but is still being imitated by grungy little fuck-it-all indie rockers the world ’round. Today, Pitchfork ran an excerpt from the book, and it’s a terrific read. (And so is the rest of the book.)

Not familiar with No Wave music, No New York, Lydia Lunch, or Arto Lindsay, or any of rest of it? Don’t worry, because for one thing, not many people are; and for another, Marc did a stellar job of getting beyond the who-played-what to explain the music and its sources, and tell the story of pretentious but ferociously talented artsy-types migrating from the woods to settle in slummy NYC apartments and throw together some bands. Marc goes into even more obscure corners – like the no wave film scene – but also broadens the scope to connect these youngsters with the punk upstarts who warmed up the Lower East Side for them (Patti Smith, Television) and the friendlier, more dance-friendly strains that came after (Material, Liquid Liquid, and so on).

I also found his discussion of the primary document of the period – the Brian Eno-produced No New York - hilarious. Rather than a savant and guru, Eno’s painted as a cryptic figure who lurked in the soundbooth and got out of the way while the four bands who appeared on that record buzzed through, laid down some tracks and got lost. Of course, all the other documents of the time are impossible to find (though DNA on DNA is a great collection of one of the scene’s big bands, and would make a great gift for fans of anyone from Pere Ubu to early XTC).

Here are some fun quotes from the excerpt.

LYDIA LUNCH: There was a lack of light that New York had at that time, especially considering the condition of the Lower East Side, which was nothing like it is now. There were just blocks and blocks of abandoned buildings, set on fire nightly from peoplesleeping under tea lights.

CHINA BURG (Mars): It was like a Wild West type of town, and the whole Lower East Side was incredibly empty. There weren’t stores. You had to walk over to First Avenue to buy groceries.

SCOTT B (filmmaker): If you went below Houston Street, there were no cars at night. There was just nothing there. You could go to a building and take it over– steal electricity out of the lamp post and live in it for years.

JAMES CHANCE: My first apartment cost $125 per month. No one wanted to live there. If they saw a white person coming, they would practically give them the apartment. You didn’t have to have a day job. I had a few, but they only lasted a few weeks. I really don’t have any idea how all those people were making a living.

LYDIA LUNCH: Work? Are you nuts? Please. $75 per month– that was my rent when I got an apartment on 12th Street. You could eat for two or three dollars a day. You begged, borrowed, stole, sold drugs, worked a couple of days at a titty bar if you had to. I don’t know how I got by, but it didn’t take much.

And here’s the book site, with pics and prices.

Congrats Marc!

Music recommendation engines fascinate me. The idea that a piece of software could study what I listen to, do some math, and suggest some other music that I might like, is a perfect example of how cold hard logic can rub against ephemeral, impossible-to-quantify taste. I’ve seen die-hard music fans get incredibly upset at the idea that a computer could understand what they like about music. They tell you that a computer doesn’t know how the blues make you feel, a computer doesn’t care that Bruce Springsteen was on the radio the first time you got laid in a Corvette. They tell you all kinds of things. And I just sit there and smile and think, “Okay – but have you tried it?”

A couple years ago I wrote a lengthy feature on music recommender engines, highlighting some of the techniques and major companies that were exploring the space. Many more people have jumped in, and one of the folks I interviewed – Sun Microsystem’s Paul Lamere – works in this space and chronicles it on his blog. I bring it up to point out something he’s been writing about recently: making your musical preferences portable.

Most of the recommender engines out there – Pandora and Last.fm are still two of the leaders – study you and collect data on you, but keep it for their own purposes. Paul has been researching APML, a markup language that lets you store and share your personal interests. It stands for Attention Profile Markup Language, and as Paul explains it:

Lately there’s been quite a bit of attention being paid to making sure that the data that describes the things that we like, our attention data, is portable. With portable attention data, we could go to any music store and be directed to the music that we are most likely to want to listen to. We won’t have to spend any time rating tracks or artists, we’ll just show the music store our taste data. Of course, this taste data needs to be in some standard format so that everyone can understand it. One effort at standardizing our taste data is APML. APML is an XML based language that allows users to share their own personal taste data in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between blog readers. APML is new and not finished yet, but even in its infant state, it is garnering lots of support.

I am particularly interested in how APML could be used to represent an individual’s music taste. One possibility is to have the APML file for the individual list the artists that a person likes (or vehemently dislikes). Another approach is to have the preferences be more abstract – to list weighted affinities toward music genres or styles. The latter approach seemed much more interesting to me – it offers some bit of privacy (instead of seeing Paris Hilton in my APML file, you would just see Female Pop Singer).

One company’s already giving it a spin: the digital magazine Idiomag has an APML application, that would let you focus on the content that you’re most interested in. I’m trying to picture how something like this would play out at a magazine like Pitchforkmedia.com, which publishes thousands of words of content each week, covering a healthy range of musical genres. In a way, that wouldn’t be so different from organizing your RSS feeds to bring you only the blogs and article types that interest you; Idiomag’s trying to do basically the same thing, but from the other direction.

Overall, though, I like this idea. Putting your ten favorite movies and books on Facebook is for chumps. If I could have a copy of my online DNA and meticulously fill it with all of my likes and dislikes, both specific and abstract – likes jittery headache music; hates mid-tempo ballads; likes Bruce Campbell cameos; hates Larry the Cable Guy and all related performers – and then if I could publish the thing on my blog here, and take it to stores and hell, attach it to my writing samples or use it to bolster my pitches – well, hey, that would be pretty cool.

And yes, you skeptics – I think a computer can understand this stuff. I just need a way to teach it.

UPDATE: Here’s another good write-up explaining the in’s and out’s and risks and benefits of APML. As soon as I make some headway in setting up my own file, I’ll post an update.

When you have a kid and you’re a pop culture nut, one of the first things you realize is that someday, your kid will get into the attic and dig up something really inappropriate – the same way that we used to find old Playboys, comic books full of swear words, and gross, graphic horror stuff that haunted us night after night. There’s not much you can do, and it’s not like I’m going to throw away all my Preacher comics. (As for Playboy, I would gladly buy my kid a subscription if he would swear not to look at porn online. When I was a kid, the weirdest misconception I had about sex was that people regularly did it “wheelbarrow style.” Next to the stuff that’s on there now, that seems kinda cute.)

Of all the stuff I read that I shouldn’t, probably the sickest – and the one that’s stayed with me the longest – was Piers Anthony’s collection of short stories, Anthonology. This book was so sick that some of the stories are still burned into my mind. But before I get to the details, some context. Piers Anthony is a prolific sci-fi/fantasy writer who’s written several series of fiction, the most harmless being the Xanth novels. These are cute fantasy books, and that’s where I started with him when I was about 10-11. I remember enjoying Golem in the Gears, and reading a couple of his other books when I had my teeth yanked at age 12.

The farther you get into his ouevre, however, the more you learn about his sexual fetishes. You start to find whole worlds of peopel who walk around naked, and long fantasy sequences where people are almost naked but not naked, which makes them hot, and then they have sex with pigs, and some other stuff happens. Nothing too raunchy, until you get to some of the older stuff – and especially, those short stories.

I got Anthonology out of the library in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, when I was staying with my grandparents. I had read most of the guy’s other stuff, and even though I was hitting diminishing returns, I thought I’d give this a try. What I found were a series of fairly poorly written stories with bizarrely graphic scenarios that weren’t sexy so much as sad. A man goes to a farm where women are raised like cows, and he tries to have sex with one, and doesn’t enjoy it. A man who discovers a skin-tight, transparent suit walks around, seemingly naked, and then – in the surprise twist ending – he accidentally poops himself. Someone else has sex with a very, very tiny alien who sends his sperm into outer space. Classy stuff.

And then there’s the story about the aliens who torture people. I don’t remember the title, but I remember everything else about this story. And this is especially notable because most days, I can’t remember my own phone number.

Here’s the plot: an ambassador from earth lands on an alien world, looking to meet their leader and start diplomatic relations. A few other humans have come to this planet – but none ever came back. He’s greeted by two seemingly-normal aliens who take him to a special center, where he’s told he has to pass a test. The person administering the test is slightly mutilated – he’s missing an eye, some fingers. And that’s where we discover what’s special about these aliens: their entire society and its caste system is determined, not by class, heredity, or merit, but by how much torture you can take. Those first aliens we met, who were totally unharmed? They’re at the bottom of the barrel – total chickens. The torturer endured enough torture to become a torturer. The leader of the planet – well, he must have really meant business. And our human ambassador buddy has to prove that he’s worthy enough to speak to him.

So they strap the guy in and get to work. I remember the first ten things they did to him. Each set of procedures ran through five steps. Starting with his hand, they had knives (they sliced his finger down to the bone), fire (they burned one off), pulling (they yanked one off), squeezing (they squashed a finger in a vice), and finally, insects (they let scorpions or something sting his thumb). They gave him a chance to leave – but this guy was stubborn. So they went to work on his body.

The next cycle went: fire (they injected hot liquid in his eye), knives (they cut off half his nose), insects (they ran bugs into one of his lungs, eating it from the inside), yanking (I think his foot, or arm), and – get ready for it – squeezing: they squashed one of his testicles.

I seem to recall Anthony skipped over the rest of the details. It turned out that the human ambassador stayed stubborn – so stubborn that at the end, there was nothing left they could do to him. He was floating in a tank of water, and could barely talk, but he was the biggest man on the planet, and they appointed him the leader. Kind of like a Twilight Zone story – but totally, irredeemably sick.

Like I said, the most significant thing to me about this stylish little piece of literature is the fact that I remember so much of it. In a way, that gets to the heart of what young people learn from books and pop culture: they may learn style, and rebellion, and new and inspiring and subversive ideas. But they also learn gritty little things about how the world works, or how they’re scared it works. Boundaries are pushed. Secrets are revealed. The first time I put words to the concept of the “guilty boner” was after reading Stephen King mention one in passing, I think somewhere in Cujo. These little teachable moments, if you will, are what stay with you. I remember good stuff, too – like most of the jokes and tangents in Douglas Adams’ books. But I think I’ll remember that goddamn Piers Anthony story even longer.