So I pulled the Massmonger 31 out of the closet. It's about the dimensions of an oil drum, though it weighs practically nothing because I've got a Constellation cerametal replica instead of whatever you make computers out of so they work in liquid methane. I set it on the kitchen table and popped some big clasps, and three feet of chain-link peeled off and dangled over the edge of the table like Satan's toilet paper.
Now I could see some controls, maybe. Small metal flowers, lifting themselves on springs out of the dangling chain-link, bouncing around frictionless. I rolled out eight feet of the chain-link onto the floor and the whole thing was covered with the little probes, waving around like bonito flakes on okonomiyaki.
I did what I should have done in the first place and went to Wikipedia.
Language
Inostrantsi languages convey meaning through structured direct manipulation of the sense appendages. Two Inostrantsi communicate by grasping each other and synchronizing one set of sense appendages. A single individual may take part in several conversations simultaneously. One-to-many communication is also common, with listeners receiving linguistic symbols and passing them on through a circular or treelike network.
Okay, whatever. I sent Jenny an IM:
ABlum: if you come over tonight and i'm dead, tell them to classify it as an accident
I set down the phone and lay on the chain-link fence. I pressed my sense appendages against some of the probes, squishing them. Other probes sat silent against my arms. "All right, do your stuff."
The probes didn't move. I didn't get tentacle-raped. But my phone went beep.
OMJennyG: Whatever you're doing, STOP!!
Fuck! Girls ruin everything.
Long story short, I have figured out why nobody talks about the collapse of Inostrantsi civilization. We have no fucking clue what it's like to be an immortal asexual deaf-mute kelp plant. And no way of finding out except by talking to Inostrantsi, which isn't happening because we've kinda stopped talking to the Constellation altogether. So we're screwed. See you at the cultural reboot.
I've stuffed the Massmonger 31 under the kitchen table—I can't get it to roll back up all the way.
Update, 1 hour later:
OMJennyG: After the apocalypse you won't be playings sonic games
You'll be programming remakes of sonic for other people to play
IOW, get back to work!
* * *
Chapter 20: Feature Creep
Blog post, August 26
Knock knock. Who's there? It's the third employee of Crispy Duck Games! And her boyfriend.
"Hey, bro," said Bai, standing on my porch.
"Big day!" I said. "Your lady's a breadwinner."
"Yeah," said Bai, who wasn't sure what emotion to have.
"Hi, Ariel!" said Svetlana Sveta. Svetlana is our new part-time translator and localizer, resident expert on Farang culture, and mistress of our smart-paper Edink translation software.
"Hi, Svetlana," I said. "You're looking great. Can you take off your sunglasses, please? I want to be able to see your eyes."
"Sure thing, Mister B.," said Svetlana, and folded up her huge tortoise-shell sunglasses.
"I asked her to wear a normal outfit," Bai whispered to me. Instead, Svetlana was dressed to impress in a green business suit with huge shoulderpads, the blazer of which she'd covered in garish collectible pins. I was outclassed. I had to look down at my feet to make sure I was even wearing socks.
"We'll meet at the Dog Pound at six and I'll drop her off," I told Bai. Bai and Svetlana kissed goodbye in a way some might consider unseemly, and Bai went off to work at the wind turbine company.
"Poor Bai," said Svetlana. "He's going to be jealous. Me spending all day at your house."
"Well, I can't afford a fucking office," I said showing her inside. "Maybe we could work at Jenny's place. Or a cheap motel room."
"Did you know he still has that silly virtual girlfriend program? He takes it to work with him. Only now...now he's made the girl look like me." Svetlana considered this a personal triumph, not without reason.
"So here's the localization department," I said, "also known as the living room. We have the couch, and the TV, and the Brain Embryo."
Svetlana held her smart paper against the TV screen. "For a light-emitting source like a television, we'll do passthrough translation. Can you scale the image down so that it fits on the paper?"
"No," I said, "but I can get a smaller TV." In this blog post, the role of my television will be played by my computer monitor.
I turned on the Brain Embryo and set the all-in-one pirate cart to...
GAME REVIEWS OF LIES LIES LIES 2.0 PRESENTS
Sayable Spice (c. 40 million years ago)
A game by Clan Interference
Reviewed by Ariel Blum
Publisher: Clan Interference
Platform: Brain Embryo
ESRB Rating: M, just in case
"What about the RF emitters?" I said, propping them up. "Can you visualize that for me?"
"That would be pretty, but useless," said Svetlana. "You would prefer for me to describe what's happening in Farang terms."
The smart paper went 'transparent,' passing through the video signal from the TV behind it. "Here we go," I said. "The 'taboo' had better not be any weird sex shit."
"File that under 'unlikely,'" said Svetlana. "Farang have the sex lives of oysters." A Edink symbol-graph scrolled onto the screen, and her software drew an English translation on top of it:
When you were a child, was there a taste
perhaps a child-food you ate often
that didn't seem important at the time,
perhaps a {{{shellfish}}} or other animal
whose taste changed as you grew up?
Some people spend their entire lives
craving a taste that has dissolved in the ocean of time.
You will not recapture the past through your {{{taste membranes}}}.
It needs to be squeezed from your memories.
Clan Interference will show you the
SAYABLE SPICE
Begin this game in the usual way
"That's downright melancholy," I said. "What's happening with the radio emitter?"
"Snap crackle pop," said Svetlana. "It sounds like a fish."
"How does a fish sound?"
"Sea animals," said Svetlana, "communicate with each other in the RF. That's how Farang catch them and eat them. The game is saying there's a fish nearby."
"To make you hungry?"
"Make you think of food. It's not related to Earth fish. That's just an analogy."
"Yeah, I got it."
I started the game. In the Alien remake of Sayable Spice, the player character is a person (ie. an Alien), but here I'm a blob. "Okay," I said, "Supposedly this blob is part of somebody's brain."
"A memory tomia," said Svetlana. "It's how Farang back then thought the brain worked. Your job is to coordinate memories between the male and female halves of the brain."
"And is this a real thing, or is it some made-up bullshit, like the superego?"
"I have no idea," said Svetlana. "I'm not a Farang. Bai wouldn't like it if I spent half my time as a man."
Your job as the memory tomia is to create an association interesting enough to catch the attention of the conscious mind. I went through the first hour of the game, collecting chemical compounds. Svetlana translated the name of each one as I picked it up and slid into a slot of the memory tomia.
"Are these real chemicals?" I asked her.
"Let's find out," said Svetlana. She instructed me how to combine the chemicals. I clicked and thwapped and slid the keys of the abacus controller in big batches as she read off the names of the compounds.
"I don't know if they're real chemicals," she said after a few minutes. "but they make real foods. Kewe si, stewed recency vine, mejh... oh. This is probably it. The one you just formed. Saturated infant comb."
"Is that a food, or a Farang indie roc
k band?"
"It's food," said Svetlana. "This should be interesting. Go ahead and trigger the flashback."
I'd never had the ingredients to trigger a Sayable Spice flashback before, but Tetsuo Milk and I explored a lot of the ones in Recapture That Remarkable Taste, using his knowledge of the Ip Shkoy Aliens. Here's my cleaned-up translation of the "pakpapur pod" flashback from the Alien remake. The player character is thinking back to her first lover, and the player controls an imaginary post-coital conversation between the two. It can go different ways, but this is the most interesting way I got it to come out:
PC (Female): Why am I even thinking about you? Am I supposed to blame you for a lifetime of unsatisfying sex?
NPC (Male): I'm easy to remember because of the pakpapur pod that exploded on your family's cooker.
Female: We thought it would set the mood.
Male: You're not supposed to set it directly on the heating element. It's there in the small print.
Female: You had such gentle hindarms. A man is supposed to have nice hindarms.
Male: They tell you that?
Female: Yeah, in sex ed. And then you grow up and find nice hindarms don't count for shit.
Male: You don't need to tell me. Where did I end up with my sweet-ass hindarms? I'm probably eating meat-flavored leaves from a cup right now.
Female: Wanna fuck again?
Male: I'm not really here. I'm the smell of pakpapur in your shopping backpack. You're climbing down to your home level and you're about to lose your grip on the ladder.
Female: Crap!
[Gameplay resumes.]
Pretty harmless—I'm trying to get that scene optioned for a romantic comedy, actually—but the Ip Shkoy, for all their faults, were a lot more comprehensible to humans than the Dhihe Coastal Coalition. I steeled myself and triggered the flashback. Honestly, with a name like "saturated infant comb," I was expecting cannibalism from this fucker.
"Big burst of static in the RF," said Svetlana. "Various sounds suggesting indistinct chatter."
The on-screen scene changes to what passes for realism on the Brain Embryo hardware. It's the traditional bottom-up view. The blob is gone and instead the screen shows about twenty Farang, all of them crowding around a large round box near the top of the screen.
Wait, twenty? No other Farang game has NPCs, unless you count the zombies in Gatekeeper. Haven't seen a single Farang in Sayable Spice so far, and now there are twenty?
I slapped some controller beads around; one of the Farang moved a little and the TV did its best to reproduce "indistinct chatter" in a human range.
"Is this the taboo part?" I said. "Are non-player characters taboo?"
"Have you ever seen two Farang in the same place?" asked Svetlana.
"I've never seen two Farang, period," I said. "Are they hermits?"
"Have you been to Curic's house?"
"Yeah, she's got a private island. But, I mean, I'd like a private island."
"Aliens are social carnivores," said Svetlana. "Humans are pack animals. Farang are alpha predators, the most dangerous things in the ocean. They're very territorial; they don't even meet to breed." I remembered Curic in the passenger seat of Bai's SUV, telling us about leaving genetic material in tide pools.
"You'll never get more than seven Farang in one place," Svetlana continued. "That's why the clans are so small. That's why their technology advanced so slowly. That's why they didn't wipe themselves out before the Constellation found them."
"And here's Sayable Spice shoving fifteen, twenty dude/chicks in your face," I said.
"These are children," said Svetlana. "Children are scooped out of birth pools and raised collectively. They eat infant comb that's been soaked in food regurgitated by adults. Once you start catching your own food, you're supposed to stop eating the infant comb. You're supposed to form a clan and leave school."
"And then you don't talk about this. The other people."
"But maybe you get nostalgic for it," said Svetlana. "If you're the kind of clan who makes video games. You think about what you could accomplish if your clan were larger. You might even start to miss the infant comb."
"Okay, this we can put in the remake," I said. "It's just like the school cafeteria, everyone lining up for their sloppy joe and their box of milk. But nobody's going to feel nostalgia for that shit. Nobody misses elementary school. We won't be breaking any taboos."
"I guess you have to decide how much of Sayable Spice you want to remake," said Svetlana, "Do you want a game that says something, or do you just want the cute flavor-matching mechanic?"
Blog post, August 28
"Game night" begins at four in the afternoon when the game is Limited Nuclear Exchange. It's a game for the unemployed and the self-employed. Setup is a fun time all by itself: not only the physical/espionage map with the dispositions of the missile silos and laboratories spread out across three card tables, but the propaganda/ideology boards on which the competing worldviews of East and West duke it out. Because if you only play with the physical map, you're a douchebag who just likes to blow things up. Yeah, I said that, and you can take it to the bank.
Around four-thirty wall time, Jenny and I will set the Doomsday Clock to 11:55 and begin play. But now I'm laying nuke chits face-down across the Kazakh SSR, secrets that Jenny will gradually reveal with satellite flyovers.
"I'm going to put a man on Mars this time," I said.
"Not in this expansion," said Jenny. "We can't even do that in real life. Not without space aliens helping us."
"We had probes on Mars in the Seventies," I said. "I could do it if I had more science chits and fewer nuke chits."
"Keep talking, you pinko," said Jenny. "You keep your eye on Mars, and Mr. Universe will sneak into your silos and punch your fissile material until it decays into americium." (We are playing with the superhero expansion.) "And that's America's element, so you can't use it."
"Jenny, I think we should change the direction of the Sayable Spice remake," I said. All at once, out of nowhere, because if you try to warm Jenny up with an opening act like "I want to tell you something," she'll look at you like the thing you want to tell her is too horrible to come out and say.
Well, it didn't work. Jenny looked up from setting ideological traps for me in Central America and gave me the other look. The look she'd give "I'm going to put a man on Mars" if there were actually some rule in Limited Nuclear Exchange where one player could ruin the game for everyone else by ignoring the balance of terror to pursue some hippy-dippy dream of space exploration. The "oh shit, not only does Ariel have a crazy idea, but there's no way to stop him" look.
"Do you see this? What's happening here?" she said. "You can now witness in real time the process of you not finishing something."
"We're going to finish it," I said. "This is business. I finished Recoil and Give 'em Hell, and I finished the pony games, and we'll finish this one. I just want to do it properly."
Jenny had a big hand of responses she wanted to give to that, but from that hand she played a conciliatory: "What's 'properly?'."
"The Ip Shkoy thought Sayable Spice was a game about food. That's why their remake was lousy. Sayable Spice is actually a game about growing up a geek. Constructing your life around fantasies and bits of the past, because the normal adult world doesn't do it for you. Keeping things bottled up until you can release them in a big spectacular display."
Jenny neatly stacked a big pile of chits and plunked them all down on Austin, Texas, her personal capital of the United States. "My problem is that I've spent over a hundred hours drawing pixel art of food," she said. "And the chemicals that make up the food. Because the mechanics of Sayable Spice are about food."
"And it's good art," I said. "You're really improving. We just need to figure out how to reuse those assets in a game about video games."
"This is not happening," said Jenny. "No, actually, I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier. We have a nice, fun, salable game. A game that might actu
ally be released. So of course you have to self-sabotage. Throw up a roadblock for yourself and take it in some meta direction."
"No, c'mon," I said. "This is important. Games, and comics and shit, are the American equivalent of saturated infant comb. We all play video games when we're kids. But people like Agent Krakowski stop playing them, and then they end up...like Krakowski. Or they only play games that let them be psychopaths, and then they end up like Agent Fowler."
I slapped down a set of five-year-plan cards and Jenny shuffled them so that my plan wouldn't work as planned. "So instead of Sayable Spice," I said, "we'll make Playable Spice. Instead of collecting chemical compounds, you'll collect game mechanics. And when you have the right combination, instead of a flashback, you'll be able to play through an old-style game. We'll make parodies of all the classic games. It'll be like all those games were twisted in your mind by the horrible process of growing up."
"Do you remember my freshman sculpture project?" asked Jenny.
"You showed me at the time," I said. "I don't really remember it."
"Because it was awful," said Jenny. She gave me back my five-year-plan cards. "Crap, as it were. I had no artistic discipline. I tried to say three different things in one piece. Do you see where I'm going with this?"
"I've been making games for ten years," I said.
"You filled in the backgrounds of Michelangelo's paintings for ten years. You're really good, okay? Or Michelangelo wouldn't have hired you. But if you'd been in charge of Give 'em Hell, or any of those games, they'd never have seen daylight."
"I don't want this to be the kind of company where someone's in charge."
"Then it's a good thing our business plan is really obvious," said Jenny. "We just have to stick to it. Release a solid game that sells well and introduces people to the Constellation. And then I can use my share of the money to buy love slaves and build Protector of Earth, and you can use your share to make an anthology of sad emo games about growing up."
Constellation Games Page 20