Facebook Freaks Me Out

One time many years ago I took it upon myself to organize a bunch of old pictures that Mark had in shoeboxes (probably not literally shoeboxes, but you get the idea). Most of them were from Dad's childhood, or Mom's, but eventually I unearthed a strata of late-'70s-early-'80s photos of our family. I showed one to Mark: it was us and our cousins sitting around the dining table at Camp. Mark was sporting a Peter Frampton afro and grinning like the world was his oyster.

"I hate pictures," he said.

Now I get it. Or at least, sort of.

Fucking Facebook.

I want to use Facebook to stay in touch with those people whom I love but who I never talk to. My cousins, as a for instance. But then I log in and get hit with a friend invite from Eamon Lee, someone whose name is only very vaguely familiar. Was he that weird little kid from up the street, whose sister I kind of liked? When I was eight? Who the hell knows! It's the only Eamon I've ever had any contact with, so it seems pretty likely. So I click on his profile and get this photo of some world-weary chef -- goatee, crowsfeet, paunch. What the fuck?

Or follow the link for the Christian Brothers Academy Class of 1988 and find all these names attached to faces. The name -- Kirk Coyle? -- rings some faint bell and the face is like the image from a dream: the fatter, redder, hairier version of some kid I apparently spent four years with a long time ago. Nothing against Kirk Coyle or any of the others. I'm not exactly 16, either. It's not that we're middle-aged. Middle-aged is fine. It's that from my point of view, they aged from 16 to 40 in an instant, like a vampire dragged out of its coffin into the sun, withering and turning to blowing ash in the time it takes for the second hand to make its circuit around the watchface.

Perhaps this whole social networking thing is better left to the kids, who can grow up with it. If I had seen Kirk Coyle's profile picture change gradually over the years, as he sailed serenely into decrepitude, it would have softened the blow.

The World Ends With You... Finally!

A couple of weeks ago I finished The World Ends With You, the nonpareil DS role-playing game that I started playing in (wait for it) July 2008.

Yep, it took me 19 months to finish a 20 or 30 hour videogame. But, man, was it fun.

I'm not going to go plunging into the depths of videogame criticism here. I don't have the toolset. But in brief, this game is unprecedented (IMHO, as they say), because it tells a good story with interesting, sympathetic characters while being a very fun, deep, interesting, challenging game. Most games sacrifice story for gameplay; a handful do the opposite. TWEWY is the only game I've played where the story and the gameplay were a beautifully integrated whole. A shining, backlit oneness. And, yes, I've played Bioshock. Awesome game. No comparison.

The game aspect is very challenging indeed. For the first two or three months, I had really no idea how to play the game. But the fact that I could make progress, of a sort, while really not knowing what I was doing, is a testament to the monumental achievement of this game as an object of design. Someone (or, really, some number of people numbering maybe in the dozens or higher) went through an elaborate process to design a game with a ruleset that could do this: be very complex, very challenging, yet fun and forgiving.

It's really hard to communicate to non-gamers why and how games can be sublime. Frankly, most of the time they're not. But this game is so good that it makes me wish that everyone could experience it. Unfortunately, unlike movies, video games are a very active experience that require a certain level of skill and ability. Mom is never going to be able to play TWEWY. That's not really her loss -- books and movies and music already offer more than one human can intake in even a very long life -- it's the medium's loss.