Author Archives: Andy

Batman Meets Rainbow Brite: the beauty and horror of internet fan fiction

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I spent a few hours the other day reading Transformers fan fiction.
I know some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, “I always knew he would come to this point… but I hoped he wouldn’t.” And for the rest of you, yes: I am talking about fan-written fiction based on the world of the Reagan-era transforming Robots In Disguise–Optimus Prime, Megatron, and the whole crew. But I’d like to think aloud a bit about this topic, because I have a dark confession to make: fan fiction, whether it’s about Voltron or G.I. Joe or the X-Files, fascinates me.

It doesn’t fascinate me in the sense that I particularly love reading it, although I’ve read some pieces of fan fiction that were enjoyable. Some fan fiction is, of course, quite wretched, for various reasons; much of it is badly written, and some of it exposes you to sanity-shattering ideas and images that will remain seared into your psyche until the merciful hand of Death finally ends the horror. (You know what I’m talking about; and if you don’t… cherish your innocence while it lasts. It is, alas, too late for me.)

But I don’t want to talk about the really bad stuff. The sort of fan fiction that interests me is the serious kind: the reasonably well-written, often lengthy, often surprisingly entertaining stories that people write in an earnest effort to explore and add depth to the characters and places of imaginary worlds not their own.
The question that always springs to my mind upon coming across fan art–whether it’s a story, a piece of artwork, or a song–is: Why didn’t this obviously talented person put their skills to use creating art that is their own?

Why are they pouring time and energy into writing stories set in, say, the Star Wars universe, when they have no real ownership of (and certainly no legal right to) that universe? Why spend hours sketching elaborate pictures of He-Man characters, when you could be drawing up fantastic images of your own creation? Why write long, introspective essays about the effects of war on the Decepticon Soundwave’s relationship with his family, when the same story with the names changed would be a perfectly respectable novella that isn’t tied to a cheesy (and copyrighted) ’80s cartoon universe? (Wait—Transformers can have children? But how do they *EMERGENCY BRAIN SHUTDOWN*)

My usual reaction–and I think the standard reaction–to fan fiction (and art, and music, etc.) is to see it as the result of stunted or broken creativity. These fans have trapped their own considerable creative potential in a box built by somebody else. They lack “true” creativity that would inspire them to create their own characters and worlds, and so they squander what artistic vision they have on other people’s work. This is an especially frustrating observation because some of the fan fiction/art out there is really, genuinely, good. A lot of it is written or drawn by people who, judging by the quality of their fan art, really could make a go of it in “real” art or literature, if they would only try. (Somehow, I don’t picture most fan fiction authors also writing a lot of original material at the same time, although this could be a false impression.)

But I find this reaction unsatisfying (and unduly harsh). For one thing, it’s fairly strict and demanding in its definition of “true creativity.” Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that there are different kinds of creativity out there, and that some people are extremely creative but would simply rather put that creativity to use refining others’ works, rather than “reinventing the wheel.” This creative eye spots (or invents) depth and nuance in characters and places that the rest of us casually dismiss. I don’t know why somebody would look at Soundwave (the Decepticon who transforms into a cassette player–admit it, you remember it well) and think “I’d really love to explore the emotional havoc the Transformers war is wreaking on his family life.” But hey, the end result is a story that’s strangely interesting and certainly adds depth to a cartoon character otherwise saddled with a completely one-dimensional personality. That might be a bit weird, but it’s not a bad thing, and if it’s either Soundwave fan fiction or no creative output at all from this amateur writer, I’ll take the fan fiction.

One of the reasons I’ve come to appreciate the odd creative value of fan fiction is that I see a lot of this type of creativity in myself, specifically as it’s evidenced in the way I play roleplaying games. I love to run roleplaying games, and as any gamer will tell you, it takes at least a modicum of creativity and storytelling ability to run a successful roleplaying game. But I have the hardest time in the world coming up with my own game and adventure ideas from scratch–I almost just can’t do it. After 15ish years of gaming, if I were given a blank notebook and instructions to write a cool game adventure, I would probably just stare blankly at the pages for a while before finally producing a stale and unoriginal variation of something I’d seen or read before.

But give me a pre-written adventure–where somebody else has sketched out an outline of the adventure and its characters–and I’m golden. I love taking adventures others have written and reworking them to fit my preferences and the interests of the friends with whom I’ll be gaming. I’ll often wind up practically rewriting the entire adventure–changing characters, locations, plotlines, dialogue, and everything else to fit my interests. Why, if I can competently rewrite and run somebody else’s adventure, don’t I just write my own from scratch? Because for some reason, I need a creative groundwork laid out for me before I can unleash my own creativity.

That’s why I’m hesitant to look down on fan art of any sort: it’s genuine creativity at work, and just because it’s using non-original ideas as a launching pad doesn’t lessen the value of the work put into it. It may be that this is an incomplete or underdeveloped creativity, but I suspect it’s more likely just a different creativity. It’s creativity that works best when the initial groundwork has been done, leaving the artist free to sketch out their own vision atop that foundation.

Let’s face it: your meticulously-written epic about the romantic tension between Storm Shadow and the Baroness isn’t going to launch you into the halls of literary fame, but if it’s the story your Muse demands of you… well, get out there and get writing.

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Don't take away my turn!

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Over the holidays I played a number of different boardgames with friends and relatives, and in the course of doing so I had a personal revelation of sorts:

I really don’t like it when a game makes you “lose a turn” as a gameplay penalty or obstacle.

This realization came to me after I played in several games where being forced to lose a turn was a routine penalty for unlucky dice rolls or falling afoul of other players. Used sparingly, it’s not a big deal to skip a turn every now and then (and in some games it is a logical gameplay element), but in one game I lost four turns in a row due entirely to bad luck–that’s about twenty minutes of sitting and watching other people play the game you showed up to participate in.

So yes, I’m bitter about that experience, but I would prefer that games try to find some other way of penalizing you than basically making you sit in the corner for a turn. An in-game penalty should make winning more difficult; it doesn’t need to take away the fun of actually playing the game. Take away my game tokens, make me go back to Start, lower my score, make me lose a few cards… but please, don’t make me stop playing!

(On a similar note, I’m a big fan of games that make sure that every player gets to “do something,” however minor, during every other player’s turn; even if all you’re doing is drawing a card or rolling a die while the other player takes their turn, it’s more fun than waiting for five minutes for your turn to roll around again. But I’ll save that rant for another day.)

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Happy New Year; or, a watched Battletech miniature never dries

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Happy New Year! Now that the holiday craziness is over, it’s back to Real Life (and, hopefully, regular posting).

So what did you do to celebrate New Year’s Eve? A night on the town, perhaps, waiting for the ball to drop at midnight? Or maybe you got together for an evening of bacchanalian festivities with friends and loved ones? This being a blog about games, you can probably guess that my New Year’s Eve was spent doing something game-related. Truly, what can match the excitement of a holiday evening spent painting Battletech miniatures? Yes, my friends, that is what I was doing while you were out drinking too much and kissing your significant other at the stroke of midnight. Here’s the result:

It’s the first Battletech mini I’ve painted in well over a decade, and I’m sure it shows. Nevertheless, I’m pleased with how it turned out. The mech is a Kurita Dragon, an unremarkable but solid workhorse, chosen for my first paint attempt because it was simple to assemble. The color scheme is for deployment in a forest-type environment. As you may note, I used a very diluted black wash to give it a battle-worn appearance–what’s supposed to look like carbon scoring, smokestains, and rust marks. That effect didn’t turn out quite as I had hoped (remember, it’s my first time!), but I learned a few lessons for use on the next mech (an Exterminator, already primed and ready to be painted).

I didn’t spend my mini-painting holiday evening alone, of course. While my wife happily played The Sims in the computer room, I was sharing my painting workbench (aka the dining room table) with my friend Chad, who painted several incredibly cool Star Fleet Battles miniatures in the time it took me to paint the engine housing on the Dragon. Chad’s masterpiece of the evening was a very nice-looking Gorn cruiser–it was really fun to watch it come to life as he painted. (Check out pictures of Chad’s work at the above links.)

All in all, a fitting way to greet the new year. I hope 2007 is already shaping up to be a good year for you, and I hope that your list of New Year’s resolutions includes at least one pledge to do more gaming this year!

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Oh, thou! in Hellas deem’d of heavenly birth

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How can you not love a book that presents, with a perfectly straight face, the following two lines

The man gaped at her. “Are the apes after Kenny? I knew something like this would happen.” — p. 134

Doyle kept his face impassive, but his mind was racing. God help us, it’s Romany again, he realized. What in hell is the man up to here? What can he hope to gain by brainwashing Lord Byron and turning him loose to make semi-treasonous speeches? — p. 203

Both quotes are from Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, a time-travel novel that was definitely one of the best books I read this year. A very fun read, if you’re looking for something entertaining and a bit light-hearted. Really, I can’t recommend it enough.

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Not with a bang, but a whimper: thoughts on Swan Song

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I thoroughly enjoy stories set in the post-apocalyptic genre. Whether it’s nuclear MAD, alien invasion, killer plagues, or any one of the many other likely triggers of the End of the World, I enjoy watching the End unfold. Plucky bands of survivalists, roving mutant beasts, radiation-blanketed wastelands–it’s all good.

And so it was that I was pleased recently to stumble across a behemoth 1980s post-apocalyptic epic that I’d somehow managed to miss–Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, a nearly 1000-page beast of a novel charting a classic Good vs. Evil struggle in the radioactive wastelands of post-WWIII America. McCammon is one of those authors who is done a severe injustice by the propensity of his publisher to adorn his novels with the sorts of cheesy-horror cover illustrations that you roll your eyes at in passing on your way through the Horror section of the bookstore. I’d previously read one novel of his–Boy’s Life, which I enjoyed and have mentioned here before.

I plunked down a few bucks for a charmingly-tattered used copy of Swan Song. I started reading it on the car ride home from the bookstore, and I finished at 2:30 am this morning.

I enjoyed it greatly, and so I’ll talk about it a bit. Swan Song came out a couple years after Stephen King’s The Stand (another 1000-page post-apocalyptic epic from the 80s) and bears quite a few similarities to King’s book; McCammon acknowledges the clear influence, but maintains that his story is a unique one. (I think he’s right.)

The setup is a classic post-apocalyptic scenario: Cold War tension culminates in a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. The first 100 or so pages of Swan Song introduce us to the assorted characters who will survive (through luck or providence), and who will soon become the heroes and villains of the post-apocalyptic world. In “the first shall be last” fashion, McCammon chooses some unlikely Heroes to survive the nukes and save the world from evil: an insane homeless woman, a washed-out show wrestler, and the young daughter of a “trailer trash” stripper. Those destined to become Villains hail from the opposite end of society: a respected retired military officer and a middle-class teenage boy who’s creepily obsessed with a video game he’s creating.

McCammon really hits his stride once the nukes hit and the various characters of the story begin their wanderings across blasted North America. There’s a really tense and brutal fight for survival in the depths of a Moria-style wrecked survivalist bunker where the colonel and teenage kid (Colonel Macklin and Roland, respectively) found refuge when the bombs hit; McCammon charts their degeneration from civilized humans to survival-obsessed monsters well. The heroes, meanwhile, begin to slowly converge on each other, running into a slew of inspired post-apocalyptic dangers along the way–mutated animals, a band of insane-asylum refugees roving across the Midwest, nuclear winter, the ruins of New York, and many others. And as they wander, they become aware that Something Else is roaming the wasteland as well–a clearly supernatural and thoroughly evil shapechanger who preys on the survivors, sowing death and despair wherever he travels. The Man with the Scarlet Eye (as he’s known) bears obvious similarities to The Stand‘s Randall Flagg–a demonic being of unclear origins who’s up to no good. His counter is a girl named Swan (the trailer-trash daughter), who has the supernatural ability to heal and restore the land. Macklin and Roland assemble a Mad Max-style army of armored vehicles and begin rampaging across the Midwest; the Good Guys eventually meet up and begin to organize the survivors; and the Man with the Scarlet Eye sets out to kill Swan through human agents.

The stage is set for a Good vs. Evil showdown, and that’s exactly what happens. For all the horror of its setting, Swan Song plays out like a classic fantasy or fairy tale–the Good are really good, the Bad Guys are really bad, and you just know that the heroes will pull through against impossible odds in the end. (If you’re having trouble figuring out who the Bad Guys are, McCammon helps you out a few hundreds pages in by having one of the villains don an actual WW2 Nazi uniform, if that gives you an idea of the sort of moral drama we’re dealing with.)

So yeah, it’s a very fun story. Some parts were more interesting than others–the pace bogs down a bit in the third quarter of the novel as McCammon sets the stage for the final showdown–but overall it kept me turning the pages. By using nukes to destroy the world (instead of a plague, as King did), McCammon is able to play with a lot of vintage post-apocalyptic tropes; everything from full-scale battles between heavily-armed factions to two-headed mutant beasts to a band of feral gone-native teenage boys crops up at some point. And the final confrontation is pretty good, although at least one Big Plot Revelation is clear to the reader several hundred pages before it actually happens. The book’s main weakness, in my mind, is McCammon’s tendency to get melodramatic and overly sentimental at points, especially once all the Good Guys meet up and start building their Happy Friendly Community of Goodness. Some scenes are so transparently and artificially set up for maximum emotional punch that they lose their impact. And an awful lot of the friendly people (NPCs, if you will) encountered by the Good Guys seem to be repetitive and annoying variations of the same Gruff But Lovable Down-Home Country Folk template.

But who can complain too much about the minor weaknesses of a novel that gets so much right? Swan Song won’t be displacing Tolstoy anytime soon, but it’s a fun and fast-moving story that’s worth reading if you’re a fan of the genre. It’s put me in the mood to dig out a few other good post-apocalyptic tales and give them a re-read. If you’ve got any recommendations on that front, let me know; otherwise, just keep watching the skies and keep your powder dry.

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Thanksgiving, King's Quest, and more rambling about my obsession with revisiting classic game franchises

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It’s the week after Thanksgiving, which means a couple of things. Firstly, it means it’s time to re-adjust to actually working every day after a long and relaxed holiday weekend that involved… well, not a lot of work of any sort. And it means that we’re forced to come up with increasingly creative ways to incorporate large quantities of leftover turkey and cranberry sauce into meals. All this to say: welcome back, those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving last week; and I hope you had as enjoyable and reflective a holiday as I did.

My wife and I aren’t really “born shoppers” at heart; neither of us minds running out for groceries or occasionally swinging by the mall to pick up a few items, but we derive no special enjoyment from the act of shopping. And so we were a bit surprised to find ourselves suiting up last week Friday–the day after Thanksgiving, an infamous celebration of capitalism and the free market–to brave the holiday crowds and do some Christmas shopping. Off to the mall we went, bracing ourselves for the post-holiday shopping mayhem.

The mall was indeed crowded. And as usual, I reasoned with my wife that While we’re in the mall, I really ought to stop by EB Games, you know, just to see what all the kids are playing these days. Fair enough, she said, eager to be free to wander the Bath and Body Shop (or something like that) without a dour-looking husband trailing her silently through the aisles holding a scarf over his face so as not to be knocked unconscious by the choking, overwhelming potpourri fumes.

So I went to EB Games, and that, in case you’re wondering, is what this rambling post is really about. While at EB Games I picked up a Sims 2 expansion for my wife (she’s an addict), and while walking to the register my gaze fell upon something interesting: a King’s Quest anthology.

Could it be true? Indeed it was–the whole KQ series, updated to run on modern Windows versions and bundled for $20. Next to the KQ anthology were Space Quest and Police Quest collections as well.

This is exciting stuff. The King’s Quest games were second only to the Zork series as far as my childhood game influences went. The early KQ games, like a lot of Sierra titles from that era, were really well-written and clever. I played King’s Quest 2 almost incessantly on my parents’ old-school Macintosh in junior high. I remember wandering all over the game world, mapping my progress with good old-fashioned pen and paper, saving the mermaid, outwitting the witch, and escaping the vampire. And I’d spent countless hours discussing the more difficult puzzles and challenges with my friend Raymond, whose love for the Sierra adventure titles exceeded even my own.

I can’t believe it’s taken so long to get here, but it’s just a terribly good idea to bundle up the old Sierra adventure game series and sell them. Some have aged better than others, but the basic puzzle-based gameplay works well even today, and as I’ve said before, I think it’s really important and inspiring to look back at the great moments of gaming history and remind ourselves that good gameplay can make you overlook even the crudest graphics.

There are so many excellent games that deserve to be revived in this fashion–dug out of the archives, tweaked so that they’ll run on modern operating systems, and bundled up with their sequels. It’s a real shame that the Ultima series, Infocom titles, LucasArts classics, and countless excellent Interplay games are so difficult to find; even those that were released in anthology form back in the 1990s often require massive hacking to run well on modern computers. You’d think that the companies that own these franchises could earn themselves a bit of extra cash by hiring somebody to update their classic DOS titles and make them available for online purchase through their websites. Maybe the re-issue of the KQ and other Sierra series is a step in that direction, although I’m afraid they won’t stick around on store shelves for more than a few months before disappearing into whatever abyss awaits Games That Are More Than Six Months Old.

I should note that one company which is doing this very thing–taking old titles, updating them, and re-releasing them–is Matrix Games, which is renovating an impressive number of aging computer wargames in this fashion. They’re helped by the fact that unlike other genres, good wargames tend to age relatively well since graphics have never been their main selling point. But here’s hoping that other companies with the rights to classic game titles consider investing a bit of money into renovating the classics.

And back to the topic of King’s Quest, I would be remiss if I did not mention the fan remakes of several KQ and other Sierra titles over at AGD Interactive. That sort of project can at least tide us over until game companies get serious about making their classic titles available again.

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In which I lament my failure to read a scary book on Halloween

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I happen to be quite fond of Halloween, and each year as October 31 approaches I try to single out a few appropriately spooky books, games, and movies to enjoy. This year I sort of missed the seasonal opportunity and didn’t settle on any truly good scary movies. No good terrifying game surfaced, despite my initial plans to revisit the very creepy Undying; and when Michele and I ventured out to rent a scary Halloween movie, even that went awry–the movie we chose was the unfortunate Dragonfly, which was about as scary as… uh… something that isn’t scary at all.

But I figure it’s never too late to try to get into the spirit of Halloween, even if the dread night of terror has technically passed me by. So I’ve started re-reading Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, which stands out as one of the few horror novels that has actually managed to creep me out fairly badly. I remember very few of the details from my initial reading of it years ago in college, but I vividly recall getting quite spooked reading it alone in the apartment late one night while my roommates were out on dates with girls or something.

The decision of which Halloween Book to read this year wasn’t easy. My initial instinct was to read some classic scary short stories (such beasts ranking among my favorite type of literature) but I was in the mood for something a bit more involved this time around. The choice boiled down to two books: Stephen King’s It or Straub’s Ghost Story. Both books are considered Andy Bookshelf Classics. But I opted to go with Straub, since his work gives off a somewhat classier Hawthorne-esque vibe that fits my mood at the moment. If I’m feeling ambitious after Ghost Story, I’ll take Mr. King up on those 1,000+ pages of It. We shall see.

I’m still a bit disappointed that I missed Halloween; reading an epic tale of terror and damnation as Thanksgiving and Christmas approach seems a little wrong somehow. At least Walpurgisnacht is only about a half-year away. I’ll be better prepared when it rolls around.

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Insta-dungeon

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Here’s a fun one: an automatic dungeon generator that creates not just a map, but also a complete list of encounters for a dungeon based on the parameters you set. The results are surprisingly game-able, in an old-school sort of way! File this one away for the next time you find yourself at the game table woefully unprepared.

No insta-generated dungeon could possibly be worse than a few of the completely-made-up-on-the-spot dungeons I’ve foisted on my players in the past. Of course, cobbling together random monsters and dungeon layouts is a time-honored D&D tradition, and is made easier by the fact that typical D&D dungeons tend not to be marvels of architectural logic. As long as the players think you know what you’re doing, it’s all good.

It would be a fun gaming challenge to auto-generate a half-dozen of these random dungeon maps and then play straight through them as one mega-dungeon, using the listed encounters as written and not worrying about internal consistency. I’d say that has about an equal chance of either being the most entertaining gaming experience of my life, or the experience that finally makes me consign my Dungeon Masters Guide to the flames and take up a normal hobby, like golf or LARPing.

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