Don't Hate the [Single] Playa [Mode]

I've been playing console video games since the late 80's, and the most significant change to the  gaming landscape since then HAS TO BE the complexity of modern multi-player modes.  Multi-player today is, quite literally, a gaming landscape!  When I first started out, "multi-player" meant my friends and I taking turns between playing as Mario and Luigi; today, gamers across the country can race each other as Mario and Luigi in Mario Kart Wii.  In Madden, players can oppose each other as the Seahawks and the Buccaneers...in Seattle and Tampa, respectively.  And in MMORPGs (if you don't know the acronym, look it up, Noob) like World of Warcraft, thousands of players can simultaneously interact with each other and the world of the game.  Because online multi-player modes are based on ever-changing human skill level instead of ever-lasting (and at times, predictable) computer AI, the replay value in such video games has increased exponentially; there are a limitless number of challenges awaiting gamers every time they connect to the online community.  This is the trend towards which the industry has gravitated; a game cannot be considered "cool" unless it has an awesome multi-player mode.  Unfortunately, this trend has been unkind to what should be the foundation of any video game; the single player mode.

A couple of years ago, my brother purchased an Xbox 360.  Naturally, I asked my trusted gamer friends for a short list of can't-live-without games for the system, and there was one title on everyone's list: Gears of War.  I bought the game shortly thereafter, and while I was impressed with how fresh its approach to the "shoot 'em up" genre felt, I felt short-changed by how...short...the game was.  There are only 5 levels in the game, and though each one is stuffed with battles that might kill you 10 or 15 times before you finally break through, the game can be completed in 10 hours. 10 hours!  And that's being generous! That's 5 days if you're playing at 2 hours a day, and what serious gamer only plays for 2 hours a day?  What high school or college kid, who's on winter or summer break, is only playing a game that they're engrossed by for only 2 hours a day?  No serious gamer that I know!

That was the problem with Gears of War.  I loved it, but it was over so fast.  And although I have never played it myself, critics have complained that Call of Duty's single player mode suffers from the same brevity.  Halo 3, another game that's widely accepted as one of the marquee games of the Xbox 360, has been criticized by GameSpot for being too short.  This is a disturbing trend that is poisoning the quality of video gaming, and making people pay more money for less game.  Simply put, it is style over substance.

Game developers and companies know what they're doing, and it doesn't seem as if Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sales will suffer if it has a brief single-player mode.  But it worries me that the gamer who doesn't care about multi-player, who doesn't want to worry about anything else except the controller in his hand and the Doritos by his side, is being left with a one-dimensional afterthought which should be the meat of the game.  Multi-player is now the meat of the most popular games, and that strikes me as being unfair and almost lazy by the game developers.  Hell, the soon-to-be-released Super Mario Bros. Wii is being marketed by Nintendo as the first simultaneous multi-player experience by a Mario adventure game ever.  Well, that's cool, but did we Mario need or ask for that?

To be a serious gamer, a person has to be somewhat of a loner.  This person first started playing video games BECAUSE he fell in love with a game's single player mode.  Sure, they might have also fallen in love with the multi-player action in a game like Goldeneye for Nintendo 64, but what Goldeneye has that the aforementioned games are lacking is a richly rewarding, multi-faceted, and LENGTHY single-player quest.  This is a person who doesn't mind spending the occasional Saturday holed up in his room for a good, solid play-a-thon.  He doesn't know if he his friends will be available to take part in this play-a-thon, nor does he care.  He doesn't want to worry about his Internet connection failing, or if the competition in the gaming community is competent that day.  All he wants to do is to turn on his console and play.

Three Thoughts Of The Day

-What are the odds that the Verizon Fios guy and his portly, out-of-touch adversary star in their own ill-conceived sitcom on NBC?  I'm sure this discussion has happened in some network exec meeting.

-Excited for Super Mario Bros. Wii, although I hope that the game is substantial enough in its single player mode.  Knowing Nintendo, I'm confident it will be.

-My sketch group, Think Pound, is performing at Jackpot on November 24th in the East Village.  That's the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, so it'll be like a Thursday night for most of America.  You come!

The Worst Thing In The World Happened...

The Yankees won the World Series.  For a Yankee-hater such as myself, who was admittedly an obnoxious presence to both the Yankee fans in the bar where I watched the Bombers lose Game 1 and my Yankee fan friends and acquaintances throughout the playoffs, this is the worst thing that could have happened.  

I mention all of this not in attempt to gain your sympathy, but because it's important to note that the rest of this post my be coming from a biased perspective, and probably is.

But the idea that the Yankees are shoving down our throats--that their ailing boss, George Steinbrenner, "deserved" this championship--is utterly ridiculous.  It's news to me that George Steinbrenner deserves anything.  In his prime, he routinely terrorized and bullied his underlings, including successful Yankee managers like Billy Martin and Dick Howser.  It seems like a long time ago, but he ran the Yankees into the ground when he couldn't check his ego at the door, and he was SUSPENDED from baseball for trying to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield.  The fans would boo George, and there were empty seats at the Stadium.

That was his prime.  Now, the image that the Yankees are putting forth is that he's a sweet old grandfatherly type, and maybe that's what he's become as he's aged.  But shouldn't a person be judged during the prime of his or her life, as opposed to their later years when they need help going to the bathroom?

Many fans would respond by citing Steinbrenner's indefatigable efforts to satisfy their desire to win, as if he's some selfless sports philanthropist.  WHAT ELSE COULD HE DO?  That's the business of sports.  If the fans sense you don't care about winning, they are not going to come, especially when it's no secret that the Yankees are the wealthiest team in baseball.  I'm not saying that Steinbrenner doesn't have passion to win--clearly, he does--but the passion is part of an act to get people to buy into his product.

Derek Jeter made it clear that he wanted to "win it for George."  If someone was paying me a 9 figure salary, I'd probably want to make them happy, too.

In the end, the Yankees are his team, and Jeter, Cashman and the rest can dedicate the World Series to whomever they want.  But let's not change history; one of the most odious tyrants in sports history may be succumbing to old age, but he was still an odious tyrant.

Have you ever heard someone say, "I have no regrets?"  It sounds like the kind of phrase that should be uttered by a 14-year-old girl, only it's used by 34-year-olds.  Who was the first person to say this phrase?  Why did it catch on?  Most importantly, why is it so wrong to regret something?

After all, isn't a regret just a mistake you wish you didn't make?  It's funny how the phrases we've been programmed to say reveal how little we think about the words that come out of our mouths. The same people who say, "I have no regrets," also have probably said, "Everyone learns from their mistakes!"  How can you acknowledge that you've learned from your mistakes but you don't have any regrets?  If you made a mistake and you learned from it, I'm sorry, but that mistake was a regret.  A regret that fueled you in a positive way, I might add.

I suspect that people do not want to be associated with the word "regret" because it has a pronounced negative connotation.  For example, if a woman admitted that she regretted breaking up with her boyfriend, the image we might have of her is one of spending sleepless, tear-filled nights with her pillow.  "What a loser," we will think.  But we all have regrets; I have yet to meet the person who has never played back a particular event in their mind and wish they had resolved it differently.

All of this is to warn against the dangers of reflexively spouting out bullshit because you were programmed to do so.  Okay?  What up, bitches?

Why Feed The Pigeons?

This afternoon, I was trying to exit Marine Park on the paved road that leads back to the street, only to find that my path was obstructed by a blockade of pigeons.  A middle-aged woman was feeding them bread.  I didn't want to risk being shit on by the birds, or even touching them, and so I went around them, being forced to stomp on several blades of grass in the process.

Now, I don't like to get judgmental about how people spend their free time, but I will do so here.  If you have nothing better to do than to feed bread to birds, you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror.  We live in an age, I think, where it is impossible to be bored at home.  There's so much to do in the world, but for that subculture of people who like to disrupt the food chain, the world has passed them by.

This episode reminded me of the Avenue U train station in Brooklyn, where on most mornings, a person has placed a bag of bread on one of the stairway landings to which pigeons naturally flock.  Small wonder that the station is coated with bird shit.  It's not enough that people on the way to work or school have to deal with the stress of their daily routine; they have to worry about getting their clothes soiled because some old fart whose closest thing to a business meeting is watching The Price Is Right has nothing better to do than to feed the birds.

And somehow, I think that desire of certain people to feed birds is less rooted in concern for the winged creatures' hunger than it is the need to satisfy the hunger of the people's ego.  Birds were doing just fine before we showed up and gave them Wonder Bread.  Not that I'm an ecological expert, but I would argue that we are disrupting the balance of the food chain when we give birds bread.  Animals that birds would naturally eat (insects, worms, etc.) probably go untouched when we allow our feathered friends to fill up on bread, although I've never seen any animal reject food when presented with it.

All of this is to ask the question, Why must all of our actions prove or confirm our existence?  Why can't people just stay in and watch a good TV show rather than interfere with the natural lives of undomesticated birds?  

This may seem unrelated, but people shop, shop, and shop, but buy things that they really don't need.  I suspect that if you asked people individually, they would admit that a large percentage of the stuff they buy, they don't need or don't use.  So why do people do it?  I would argue that shopping is one of the few activities that proves that we exist to society at large.  We go to a store, we are seen by people.  We pay by credit and we get a receipt with our name on it.  Many stores have security cameras that watch us.  Commerce proves that we exist, even though it may be damaging to our wallets.   The act of staying at home and watching a good movie might be more satisfying personally and less strenuous on the wallet, but who is there to see you do it?

But I'll bet if we did more interesting, satisfying things than feed birds and shop for things we don't need, we'd lead more interesting, satisfying lives.

Who Is Running The Mets?

As a rule, I try to avoid the loudmouth sports talk television shows that make up most of the programming on local sports cable channels.  Recently, however, I happened upon SNY's Loudmouths, which pits Chris Carlin and Adam Schein, two former talk show hosts/producers on WFAN against each other in spirited, loud debate about current New York sports news.  On this day, they were responding to questions and comments from the fans, and one of them had this to say:

"Omar [Minaya] is going to do the same thing at the trading deadline that he has for the past 2 years; nothing."

Kudos to Loudmouths, an SNY program, for posting this comment, because I feel that this organization has not been criticized enough for its approach (or lack thereof) towards the last 2, even 3, trading deadlines.  In 2007 and 2008, when the Mets were right there in the mix, Omar did nothing at the deadline in both years--both years!--when they clearly had issues, especially ones in the bullpen.  Their complacency is difficult to understand, especially in 2008, when they had come off a terrible and terribly well-documented collapse at the end of the previous year, and they still had the arrogance to basically say, "Our team is good enough as is."

I am not saying it is easy to be a general manager.  But when I see virtually every contender add star veterans while only giving up 30 cents on the dollar (see whom the Pirates received for trading away Jason Bay last year), you have to wonder where Omar is.  Yes, he has brought many stars to this team.  But that's in the offseason.  During the season he just seems...lost.

But I don't mean to allocate all of the blame to Minaya.  As an organization, they have failed their fans.  I do not know if the Bernie Madoff incident has made the Wilpons cheap, but even before that, they didn't seem too keen on adding payroll midseason; it has been noted that they do not want to pay the luxury tax under any circumstances.  So the question I have is - Are the Wilpons handcuffing Omar, or is Omar incapable of making a deal for a veteran?

It's probably a mixture of both, but either way, this team has been bitterly disappointing since that very fun 2006 season.  They haven't added a significant offensive player (Delgado) to this team since the 2005 offseason.  They wasted the last 2 years when they were in contention, and now, they deserve the empty seats they will see at Citi Field in 2009.

If You Say Something Enough Times, It Comes True

We've been trained to think that whoever uses the phrase, "The Power of Positive Thinking" is an idiot or completely out of touch.  Those who practice optimism and blind faith are often characterized as being sappy, over-sentimental, intolerable sponges, and depending on the degree of optimism, that characterization may well be accurate.  

An example of such a person would be a passenger in a car that broke down at 3 AM on the New Jersey Turnpike in the dead of winter.  For argument's sake, we'll set this in a time when regular people did not have cell phones. This bubbly person would bounce out of the car and shout:

"Come on, let's walk to the nearest gas station!  Isn't this exciting?  It's New Jersey, it's 3 AM, and we're roughing it.  Let's go!"

Clearly, this is an annoying person; here, the power of positive thinking is making the others want to hit her.  But as with most things in life, there are two sides to everything, and there is a power of negative thinking as well.  Of negative speaking, in fact.  

Simply and crudely put, if you say something enough times, it becomes true; so if you constantly say you suck, well then, you're going to suck because everybody is going to think that you suck.  Shakespeare said it best in Hamlet: ..."There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."  Now, there are certain things in life you can objectively say are either good or bad.  Air conditioning - Good.  Slave labor - Bad.  But for the vast majority of areas in life about which there can be a variety of opinions, the words we use play a greater role in shaping those opinions than we think.  Sticking with the theatre track, a group of young actors might be putting on a play that has the potential to be quite good, but the actors insecurities are compelling them to bash it or minimize the guest list or subconsciously sabotage it, and so in the unofficial history of theatre, the play will go down as a failure even though there was nothing inherently wrong with the play.

In the world of sports, we see this too.  Sports talk radio (especially in New York) feeds on negativity, and forcing its listeners to believe that there are serious problems with their local teams.  Referring to the 2007 season in which the New York Mets suffered a terrible collapse but the New York Giants unexpectedly won the Super Bowl, sports radio talk superstar Mike Francesa has said, "For us (the sports media), the Giants winning the Super Bowl the way they did, that's a 9.  The Mets collapsing the way they did?  That's a 10."

Anyone who follows the Mets knows there is no sugar coating how badly they played at the end of 2007, but the sports media insisted that this was the WORST COLLAPSE IN THE HISTORY OF MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL.  Not one person, however, has sufficiently explained how blowing a 7 game lead with 17 games to play was worse than what the 1964 Phillies did, which was blow a 6.5 game lead with 12 games to play.  Both are choke jobs, no doubt, but because the media insisted that the recent Mets' collapse was more precipitous, it became truth, without any logic to support the assertion.

This kind of phenomenon is ubiquitous.  I was mildly amused but also troubled by a recent conversation I had with a person from Quebec.  I had mentioned that my mom had, for one reason or another, always insisted that the province's name was pronounced "Ke-Bec" instead of "Kwe-bec."  Somehow or other, this person characterized the pronunciation as an opinion, rather than a fact.  How can the pronunciation of a word be subject to opinion?  If you uttered the word "forest" and it sounded like "xylophone", I'm sorry, but you'd be wrong.  But because so many people say "Kwe-bec", even people from Quebec have resigned themselves to the fact that it can be pronounced either way!

This lowering of our standards is dangerous.  Anything that is said can become truth, as long as no one is brave enough to say "You're wrong," - two words that people have found it increasingly difficult to say.  But we must re-learn to say them.  Before I go, I will leave you with this link to a clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which illustrates this idea almost as well as I have.  Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_eSwq1ewsU