What Would You Do?

Watch this.

I'll explain: this woman tried to kill herself by jumping from a pole into the Tagus river. Apparently the pole wasn't high enough and she just succeeded in getting horribly bruised, humilliated and wet.

The comments section for this video is full of condescending people wondering why the people who were filming this didn't try to stop her or didn't rush over to help. Others frown upon the dude that was casually stretching his hand out from time to time in the eventuality the woman got her shit together and finally reached the small pier.

I myself enjoyed the this-did-not-just-happen-kind of 'No...' that the guy with the camera uttered and the not-so-encouraging 'you're almost there...' from a girl watching the struggling suicidee.

What would you do? Would you jump in and help her? (The water is as healthy as it looks; meaning it's not.) Would you not? Would you panic? Would you blame all those people that didn't actually help her in a significative way? My reaction upon first hearing the story was 'if she wanted to die so much that she actuallly jumped, why didn't she just resign and drown?' Does that make me cruel?

Does it make me a bad person that I don't care if I sound cruel? Does it make you a good person if you think I sound cruel? Who ultimately cares? I guess that if I thought about it enough to actually post about it, I can't be that bad. Look at me! I'm a nice girl afterall! I don't have it coming at all! XD

I am Legion. We are Many.

Nothing biblical here. Move along. Title refers simply to gamers as a community.

When I was a young girl, adults would look down on consoles and gaming with a patronizing grin. Like they would a really expensive jump rope or... those things you spun around your ankle and then lept over again and again. Lemon Twist, that's it (not to be confused with Lemon Party). My point being, games were not considered, for the most part, a very grown up thing to occupy your time with. Unless, of course, we're talking about some kind of sports game. Whole different... ball park.

My boss here at the internship was asking me how I'd spend my long weekend (Friday and Monday are both holidays) and I said I'd probably stay home and play. I didn't get into any details because he wouldn't get it. He's a "have bbq with folks, play with dog, catch the game on tv" kind of guy. He looked at me and asked 'you're staying in?!' I felt a pang of embarrassment which was quickly subdued by an overwhelming sense of pride. Here I am, part of, what seems to me to be, a massive minority that occupies their time with digital interactive entertainment, AKA, videogames.

Outdated views about what grown-up life should be like are just that: outdated. It says a lot that many of the peolpe I play with are pushing 40. In the olden days, people were lucky if they lived past 25 but things change. Way back when, women couldn't vote or show their ankles but things change. You catch my drift. The things we entertain ourselves with change as well and some people seem a bit slow on the uptake.

But others caught on early and made a pretty penny by starting to mature the games as their target audience matured as well. It's my genuine hope that when I'm 80 and sporting a spiffy robotic hip I'll be playing full 3D mystery games set in nursing homes where you have to figure out who pulled the plug on your best friend down the hall. *sigh* I wish I was retired already...

Anyways. It got me thinking that the share of the active population that actually invests in videogames has grown considerably in the last few years and as those people start having babies of their own, a new generation of gamers is born and raised and the prospect of growing sales in the long run must be something very real to developpers everywhere. But in their greed, their lust for quick and fast profit, they adapt their products to fit and please a wider range of potential costumers, dumbing down games with simplified gameplay and long-winding tutorials. We don't need that. Honest.

Take Minecraft. Do you have to play a tutorial to be able to enjoy it? Do you feel like you can't handle the conrols or gameplay because you didn't play through a few test missions? No. And the game was as successful as we all know it was. Minecraft filled a void in our gaming needs. We needed the freedom and the respect the game showed us. We needed to feel that we were given a free world to do things in and that they trusted us to accomplish whatever it was we set out to do without an omni-present father figure putting up invisible walls lest we hurt ourselves.

What bugs me is that games weren't always so. You had the option of going through a tutorial or you could read the freaking manual. Manuals, they still make them, you know. Just in case you slept through the tutorials all of that useful information is still there, in written form. Games had a learning curve. Wether it was steep or a very slow crawl, they trusted you to get the hang of it on your own without flashy neon signs over most of your playing field advising you on the right order of buttons to press. Makes me feel like they think I'm an idiot. Yeah, they think I'm "special" alright.

Stop making things simple. We don't want that. If games are supposed to be a complex work of craftmanship then I wanna feel the burn. Did you see the reviews Dragon Age 2 got? This is not the way. We don't want simple. We pride ourselves in our game-forged brains. And instead of lowering gaming standards to please a wider audience of mouth-breathers how about stimulating the minds of potential gamers with flashy and addictive games that also provide some kind of challenge?

Ok now the rest of the office is reminiscing how they used to play soccer with their neighbours at 8 am on the weekend when they were kids because there were none of these new fangled computer thingies. I gotta leave now.

Why Silent Hill Almost Ruined Men For Me

I've always had this doubt. Are men and women really all that different?

There are the obvious answers: women are more prone to having boobies and warming up toilet seats, men are more likely to wake up with an erection.

But there was one game that showed me that men and women aren't really all that different. That game was Silent Hill.

Why, thank you.

For me, Silent Hill was and still is the king of all survival horror games. It was beatutiful without being pretentious. And it scared you shitless without even trying. You could just be standing there and you got scared because nothing was happening. The less there was, the more frightened you got. The feeling of complete loneliness and helplessness was overwhelming at times. Most of the time.

My boyfriend at the time had acquired it (legally even) and explained to me what it was about. He didn't have to though, the cover of the box was self-explanatory. According to Wikipedia:

"Played from a third-person perspective, Silent Hill uses real-time 3D environments and, as a result, the developers incorporated fog and darkness in the game as a method of hiding the limitations of the hardware."

What this means, in practice, is that you could, at any given time, see fuck all. You got out of that car and you could see probably two steps in front of you. It was terrifying. The first thing we all knew we had to do was get a pipe/crowbar. We call this "The Law of Pipe" and Silent Hill loved this law. If you wanted to get through the game, you had to rely on that trusty, rusty pipe. "No matter how big the weapon, it will run out of ammo. The pipe will not. No matter how big the enemy, the pipe will eventually down it" is the definition of this law that Mike imparted on me just now. It gets the point across.



Pylon Head, Pyramid Head's poor cousin

I once experienced a Silent Hill-like fog in real life. Mike and I were walking down from my mother's house and a thick fog had settled in earlier in the cold afternoon. It was a bit late and there was no one else outside but us. Not even cars or buses dared roam that wide street that wound down from a zone of derelict buildings and a private school. A bit further down the road we could see the lights of what we knew was a butcher shop. As we got closer we started to discern a shape inside the shop. I held onto his arm tighter and he did the same. Soon we could tell it had a humanoid shape, a fat man holding something above his hand. The yellow light behind him wouldn't let us see his face or what he was holding. A few steps later we realised what it was. It was a knife. I'm pretty sure I yelped as I felt him stiffen up. We both almost bolted. Instead, we froze. Upon closer inspection (and I don't know how we mustered the courage) we realized what we were looking at. It was the dummy they kept outside during the day that held the sign for the day's specials. They just moved it inside to stand near the window when they closed the shop. Oh, how we laughed.



But getting back to my first impression of the game. Boyfriend at the time liked to play games and have me watch. It sounds more kinky than it really was. So to set the mood I decided to close the shutters of his window and turn off the lights. He warned me not to do that but I didn't care. I was old enough not to be scared by horror movies or games. I could handle whatever Silent Hill had to throw at me. I was wrong.



Not anymore...

I started off apprehensive, cowering on his bed against the wall. He braved the fog, he picked up a pipe, he bashed the dogs, he even went past the fucking wheelchair. Something always goes bad in Silent Hill when you see a wheelchair. This is fact. But when he reached the locker cat he put down the controller, turned off the Playstation, turned to me and said "I can't play this anymore today". I couldn't blame him. I was hugging his pillow for dear life at this point.

Silent Hill had turned him into a big girl. But he wasn't the only one. A movie adaptation was eventually made of the game. I know of people that can't watch it withouth being completely wrapped up in something comforting like a blanket or their own shirt. I, myself, still cringe when my playlist throws anything from Akira Yamaoka at me when I'm in the subway.

Speaking of which, the soundtrack was one of the strongest points of this game. So good, in fact, that Yamaoka (composer) went on to become the producer for Silent Hill 3, the direct sequel for the first one, and the movie. It's moving when it needs to be and it's nothing more than pipe banging when you need to GTFO.



Don't worry, boys.
In the end, everything will be ok.



Silent Hill was what made me realize that men, behind all their gung-hoing and testosterone sweating, are as squeamish as women when faced with impossible odds against things with big knives. I could tell you stories of how they flee with broom in hand from cockroaches riding Batman bikes or how they squeal in horror at the sight of a grasshopper. But society demands they be the stronger sex, the gallant knights, the saviors of the day. So they put on a straight face and brave through the muck. This game let me see their softer side, their sweaty fingers fumbling with the controllers and their frowns at faceless nurses.

It could've ruined men for me but it only made me appreciate them more.