Why Bioshock Infinite Probably Isn’t As Good As We Think It Is

by Stepto
4 Comments

My mind’s bouncing a bit around the Buddy shaped hole in our lives. But I wanted to say this about Bioshock Infinite since I finished it last week.

Let me state right off the bat, Bioshock Infinite is a must play game. It’s worth your money and you should play it. No, really I’m dead serious. Stop reading this and go play it then come back so we can talk about it. I’ll wait.

Second point, this post is going to be more spoilery than that sandwich the creepy eye transplant doctor fooled Tom Cruise into eating in Minority Report.

I mean it, I am going to spoil the living hell out of Bioshock Infinite if you keep reading.

Ok?

Ok.

I’m serious though.

Ok.

Endings are tough. As a writer they are incredibly daunting. Sometimes you get lucky and you come up with an ending before you even have a story. That’s the best scenario from a work perspective because you already understand how things turn out. Working backwards is just a matter of giving your ending some justice.

Then sometimes you come up with an ending in the middle of the story, which is harder but also a bit of a relief.

The absolute worst is starting off without an ending. Because holy shit, where is this all going?

And yet the best stories, at least in my mind, are the latter ones. Sometimes when you start off with an ending, you often can’t do it justice because in the working backwards you concentrate too much on that wonderful ending.

Bioshock Infinite has, in my opinion, a bad ending. One that it feels like someone thought was a wonderful ending.

Now, I don’t mean that the ending is cheap, or that it didn’t involve a lot of thought, or that it’s a cop out or anything.

If anything, it’s just a bridge too far. The story builds up to it backwards in a way.

Let me explain, and here is where I will TOTALLY GO INTO SPOILERS.

During the third act of the game it’s beating you over the head that all this time you are Father Comstock. They even mix Dewitt’s voice into Comstock’s voice at a couple of intervals. The Voxaphone extras are equally blunt. As I was playing, I actually said out loud once “Ok I get it I’m Comstock. Jesus, stop already.”

Then at the end, Elizabeth takes your hand and shows you the lighthouses. I was a bit annoyed because at this point I was waiting for her to just go “SURPRISE YOU’RE COMSTOCK!”

But that didn’t happen. That didn’t happen at all. Instead I spent the next few minutes gobsmacked as the game walked me through the alternate worlds and the fact that Elizabeth was my daughter, a daughter I had sold to Comstock years ago to erase my debt. What debt? Well it could have been my debt of guilt over Dewitt’s participation at Wounded Knee, or a financial debt, or perhaps even a dimensional debt required to balance the alternate universes.

I was floored, here I thought it was just going to be this cheap twist ending that I was the bad guy the whole time (which didn’t make sense that Dewitt was Comstock given his guilt over Wounded Knee but ok whatever) and instead I was offered this amazing tantalizing ending that would leave me with philosophical questions and something to ponder. What debt was I paying? The emotional payoff of Elizabeth losing her finger was deep and satisfying. The idea of the amorphous debt, the twins’ manipulations, the baptism metaphor, Dewitt killing Comstock in a rage, and the thrilling final battle sequence before the game’s end reveal left me reeling and thinking I had just played one of the best games ever written.

They had head faked me into thinking I was Comstock with the obvious voice tricks and dialogue and the baptism metaphor etc etc. I mentally congratulated the writers in their ingenuity at giving me a much more satisfying ending than just making me the villain all along and fooling me into thinking they were taking the easy way out.

Then the game continued and NOPE! SUPER DOUBLE TWIST YOU WERE COMSTOCK ALL ALONG!

I don’t think I’ve ever been more let down in a game in a long time in just a few minutes, which is a testament by the way to how good the vast vast majority of the game is.

It just makes no sense that Dewitt is Comstock, even in the multi-universe sense. It’s deeply unsatisfying. Guilt ridden Dewitt over his massacre of innocent Indians at Wounded Knee is, in an alternate universe (or maybe even the same one), racist Hitler-esque Comstock? Comstock who in at least one universe is sterile yet still Elizabeth’s father? Or bounces around dimensions made him sterile but Dewitt isn’t, so what’s the point of that except to make you think you’re not Comstock? I….there’s so much…what? Yes the baptism created a different person yet the drowning at the end…makes Comstock? Or not?

I’ve now played the ending two or three times over again and tried to make sense of it and sorry, it doesn’t work. And what’s worse is that it’s constructed in such a way that it’s somehow proud of its insights. And what are we to make of the coda at the end of the game’s credits? Dewitt is alive? Elizabeth is in the crib? I…what?

Dewitt being Comstock robs the game of some emotion and, I think, is a bridge too far. The coda at the end of the game’s credits compounds the issue.

I hate the ending of the movie Wall-E. It’s one of the best films I think I have ever seen but its ending is a cop out. When Wall-E suddenly for no reason regains his memory it negates the emotional impact of his previous sacrifice for Eve. What would have been a better ending? He loses his memory and then during the credits sequence (which features the story of humanity reclaiming the Earth), we see Wall-E slowly becoming who he was again over time and with Eve’s help. Wall-E is probably the best example I have of a movie that faltered fatally in its ending, for the payoff of not wanting to make the audience work too much. It’s almost like Bioshock Infinite failed in the same way, because the writers felt like the dimensions, the lighthouses, and how Elizabeth lost her finger just wasn’t enough twist.

I’m no expert on ending stories. I have taken that tone here I know. But at the end sequence of Bioshock Infinite when the multiple versions of Elizabeth kill Dewitt through the baptism metaphor I rolled my eyes and put my controller down.

So let me stop and remind you that if you made it this far and yet have not played the game GO PLAY IT. I might hate the ending, but I love the care that went into the game and it is, above all else, fun and beautiful and a piece of art that deserves support.

But having talked to a number of friends who have played it and were blown away by the ending I just wanted to express I think it would have been cleaner and more satisfying to stick solely with the Elizabeth emotional payoff. It feels very much that since Bioshock had a wonderful twist, they needed to one up themselves. Like a third movie from M. Night Shyamalan.

I’m saying all this only because I care about it. For sure if you hate the endings of my own stories please feel free to tell me how I don’t actually get endings at all.  Open-mouthed smile

Oh and one more time, yeah buy this game. I do want to see more like it.

Then, One By One, We So Quickly Undo The Slow Adjustments.

by Stepto
2 Comments

The rugs on the hardwood to provide traction and prevent injury get pulled up and stored away. The baby gates that have turned our house into a zoned area for who can be where or with whom are retired. Each thing a tweak to our lives made over a long time.

I heard Buddy panting this morning, then realized what I was hearing was silence and my mind was inserting his ever present breathing. We never did know why, but his entire life he panted loudly almost all the time, smiling that Golden grin. Just a thing he did, just a weird part of who he was.

You make slow adjustments towards the end then suddenly after the end there’s no reason for them anymore all at once. Rochelle is taking a nap upstairs in our bed, something she’s not done in more than a month. She had to nap next to him on the couch downstairs. Adia is curled up next to her right now. We slept together last night for the first time in weeks, because before at all times someone had to be downstairs. I was too used to sleeping with one ear open, and was startled awake a couple of times last night to nothing at all, and Rochelle calmed me down.

There’s a pile of medication to return Monday to the vet. Treats specifically designed for taking pills will be put away. No longer will feeding time also involve an ancillary call out to all the dogs for “Medicine time!” because some dogs got jealous that one was getting “extra food.” and everyone had to have treats.

Things wind back a bit, the new normal we had adjusted to becomes the old normal.

It’s quiet. And please allow me this trope: it’s too quiet.

Children outside start shouting and playing, Eowyn stirs and growls and jumps into the front window saying the dog version of “YOU DAMN KIDS, GET OFF OF MY LAWN.” She’s two. And I remember how he used to bark in protection all the time. After he stopped doing that, I suddenly remember, is when we started to refer to him as “old man.”

If I hold Eowyn close, and breath in deeply I noticed something today for the first time.

Her fur smells like stale popcorn. Like him.

Thus life moves on. This crazy Internet thing keeps sending us messages of love and support. Neither myself or Rochelle can make sense of a world where that wasn’t possible because it now means so much to us.  I make some mental plans to take Eowyn and Adia walking or to the park, something we couldn’t do recently. There was a hockey game on today, I didn’t watch it. My team won. That was nice.

It was raining this morning, in a stormy sort of way. Lots of wind and noise. Now it’s calm and the sun struggles to peek through but it was friend zoned by Seattle long ago and won’t break out of there until July with promises of warmth and happiness. I need to find work, there’s bills to pay.

That, as they say, is that. And I suppose I could have it another way. I suppose I could.

But nope, as Eowyn starts barking again, this is fine.

You are my Buddy, my handsome Buddy. You make me happy when skies are grey…

by Stepto
6 Comments

Dead pet posts suck. Think of this one more as a celebration of a life well lived.

I was walking in the Snoqualmie river valley, by myself with Buddy. The day was a bit dreary, overcast but at least it wasn’t raining. Buddy was wearing his "Help ’em up!" harness which he actually looked quite high tech in. It would be one of the last times we would actually need the harness for a long while, because he had completely recovered from the stroke that had paralyzed his entire left side two months prior. He was just shy of twelve years old.

The park we visit is a private one called Camp Charlie, and besides Port Townsend is Buddy’s favorite place on earth. It was just me and him, the exercise part of his recovery regimen. In the distance was another dog owner, a man walking with a cane. If Buddy ever saw another person, he had to go investigate and say hello, and to my surprise given his recent problems that day was no different. His gait had changed somewhat after the stroke and although he could run fine, it was more a rocking horse type of motion than his normal full gallop. When I reached the man he was petting a happy Buddy and remarked on his yellow harness, saying he looked handsome in it.

"He had a stroke two months ago. His entire left side was paralyzed so we have the harness just in case while he recovers." I explained.

"You’re kidding," the man said looking after Buddy romping away into the field with his own dog, "I would have never believed it."

That was Buddy. He was a rescue, from a family who simply had no idea what they were getting into when they brought him into their lives.

I was standing outside a steakhouse in Whistler when Rochelle called me from Dallas. She’d seen a flyer of a beautiful Golden Retriever at the laundry mat with the notation "Buddy needs a home." She took it off the wall. "I think he’d be great for your Mom and Ted!" I’ll never know if, secretly, she really wanted him for us all along. At the time we had a cocker mix named Illusion, a cat named Isabeau, and our first dog together: a golden named Hennessey. We were in love with the breed and have only owned goldens ever since. So we took him in with the intent to give him to my parents who at the time were, as they say, in between dogs. They didn’t want the responsibility at the moment and we knew our fallback position was simply to adopt him.

He was a bit chubby when we got him, over 80 pounds, and we took him and his favorite chew rope to the car. Oh he was a rambunctious boy. From the moment he joined our family he asserted himself. He surprised us with his ingenuity, Isabeau would climb up the stairs and taunt him. Buddy had never known stairs, he had no idea what to do with them but he was smart enough to figure out they ended, somehow, above the ceiling of our kitchen. Isabeau would run up to the top of the stairs and hiss, and he would run around the corner into the kitchen one floor below her, stare at the ceiling, and bark. The expression on his face was always "What the…I should be looking at the cat’s ass from down here!"

He was a master of counter surfing, until we attached a cooked chicken breast to a coffee can full of pennies. He never jumped up on the counter again.

We learned early on not to name a dog a common name. Call out "Sport" or "Buddy" at a dog park and see how many dogs you get. But he was our Buddy. And there was no way we were going to change his name.

He flew on an airplane. He swam in the pacific ocean. He loved the Pacific Northwest climate. Except the rain. When it was raining he hated the feeling of the drops hitting his head and he would stand outside, miserably flinching with each drop that hit his head. Oh and while he liked to run around in it, he hated going to the bathroom in the snow. I once had to shovel out a "poop spot" for him because every time he squatted in more than an inch of snow it would touch his butt and he would run away startled.

He scouted the bluffs of discovery bay and the Snoqualmie river valley. He chased an otter once a quarter mile out to sea. I loved everything about him so much I wrote a story about a version of him that lived on forever.

He loved his long gone companions Illusion, Isabeau and Hennessy and Remington Martin. He was our last tie to our life before we moved to Washington state from Texas. He survived a major stroke and recovered to give us another year and a half with him being happy and the king of the house.

He was a good dog. He was our Buddy.

Today I am heartbroken and crushed and all the things you feel when you have to say goodbye to your companion.

And yet I have that most wonderful of sad feelings that when he needed us we were there for him with as much selfless love as he had for us. We guarded against suffering. We ensured his happiness. We gave him brothers and sisters to play with when we were not home. Buddy was not taken from us too early. Just shy of 13 years is great for a Golden Retriever, especially one who had a major stroke a year and a half ago and couldn’t even stand on his own!

In the end, we are our animal’s stewards. They are our companions and we owe them a debt far greater than what they give us. It is our job to give them a life free from pain, full of food, love and happiness.

His eyes were bright. His fur smelled like stale popcorn and warm life.

I will be thankful for him forever, and miss him the rest of my days. Here he is, just after recovering from that stroke, enjoying the beach.

Like a boss.

buddy1

[EDIT: Rochelle and I are ok, and thank everyone so much for their thoughts and well wishes. We were prepared for this for a while, and we have Adia and her niece Eowyn to comfort us. If you’d like to help us out, please consider buying my work like my comedy album A Geekster’s Paradise, or perhaps buying the science fiction short story in part inspired by Buddy called Buddy’s Eye.]

Generations

by Stepto
4 Comments

My paternal grandmother, my Mee Maw, died around 9:15 AM Dallas time. I’m roiling a bit in mortality, starting to realize that yes indeed, I’m across the line where life stops giving you things and it starts taking them away.

Iain Banks has terminal cancer and has less than a year to live. Roger Ebert posted about how he wanted to take a step back to deal with his health then died two days later. My beloved male golden Buddy is sick and we might have to put him down soon.

I am so fortunate to have known my grandparents, members of the greatest generation. All my grandfathers were involved in WW2. All my grandmothers too in their own way both official and not. All the males have died. Mee Maw was the first of the mothers.

Mee Maw, such a silly name for a matron of a large and wondrous family. A name filled with love but somehow diminishing of the scope of her contribution and influence. A child’s name that somehow over time can’t be replaced. I can’t think of her as Joan Toulouse.

She was my Mee Maw.

She made an astounding oyster stuffing that to this day remains a secret from me, and divinity that I would look forward to the entire year as a child. Fluffy white, nutty tan, and a chocolate that was rich and deeply satisfying. I remember the toy drawer in their house, hot wheels cars and puzzle games. Their dog Molly. Family arguments. The sound of her voice above it all. Mee Maw.

Like all humans she wasn’t flawless. No one is. If I be speaker of the dead in this case I can name plenty some grievances I had against her treatment of my mother when my father left us.

And yet I remember her cradling the head of my Paw Paw, her husband, in her hands after he died during a heart surgery.

“He was good.” she said in that moment as her tears spilled onto his face, and I was beside myself at seeing my first dead body and it being my grandfather.

“He was ornery. But good.”

He was ornery. And he was good. She had feared the worst during that terrible moment and it had come true and she simply held his lifeless cheek, yellowed by a death only minutes passed, and spoke the truth. Can I say now grievances are important? They are not.

And so mortality roils, as it does for everyone at some point. We’re here, then not. Those we love and cherish, flaws and all, are here. Then not. Sometimes we know when it can happen and have some time, sometimes not.

I hugged Buddy tonight, and searched for affordable flights to Dallas for the funeral.

I got to see her this October at my brother’s wedding and she was alert and we had a good talk.

I wish, I dearly wish, I had gotten that astoundingly good oyster dressing recipe. I would have liked to have made it for her.

The TellTale Tale

by Stepto
3 Comments

So a month ago I applied for a game writer position at TellTale games.

I would KILL to write for Telltale. I’ve already written about why I think their take on The Walking Dead was game of the year for 2012 and the writing talent they have already is incredible. I can maybe think of only one or two other places (Bungie or 343 etc) where I would want to be a part of creating stories.

They wanted screenwriting samples which is perfectly reasonable. However their disclaimer (which I’m sure is industry standard) indemnified them should they ever create something completely identical to my writing samples. Meaning if I gave them something original but unpublished, it was essentially theirs in perpetuity.

Again, this is in a lot of ways a completely industry standard thing for writers. The companies you want to write for have to know you can write. In return should they ever in the history of ever make something slightly similar to what you provide them as a sample, if they don’t hire you they certainly don’t want to get sued. That’s not unreasonable. But it does represent a dilemma for writers who have a published body of work but not in the specific format they are demanding.

My problem, as a writer, was with their particular use of the word “Identical” in their writing sample agreement. To wit from the actual public job application site:

“By applying for the position and submitting any writing sample (the “Sample”) to Telltale, Inc. (“Telltale”), you understand and acknowledge that Telltale is constantly developing in-house ideas, formats, stories, concepts, artwork and the like (collectively, “Creative Elements”), and that many such Creative Elements developed by Telltale now or in the future may be similar to or identical to those contained in your Sample.  You agree that Telltale will not be held liable for any such similarities and that Telltale’s use or development of Creative Elements similar to or identical with any material or elements (including Creative Elements) contained in the Sample shall not obligate Telltale to you in any manner.  In connection with your agreement to these terms, you expressly waive any claims you may have against Telltale arising from or relating to your submission of the Sample.”

Emphasis mine.  Again perfectly standard disclaimer. But I have several unpublished scripts and things in development that I would not want to have put under this disclaimer, but that represent my best work. What to do?

Well it’s been a month, and I’ve not heard a peep from them so I assume it didn’t work out. So I thought I would share with you how I handled the situation. I created two short screenplays that both addressed what I thought was a good representation of my abilities, without the content being something that would ever be a thing that they would make a game out of. Perhaps it was too clever by half, but I sure had fun writing it. I thought readers and other writers might want to see my solution to the “identical” problem. Please to enjoy, The TellTale Tales.

 

Part 1 (PDF)

 

Part 2 (PDF)