Stephen’s Sausage Roll: Power Dynamics in Video Games

In most puzzle games, the narrative purpose of solving puzzle is far grander than the puzzle itself. You need to draw lines through the mazes in The Witness in order to unlock the secrets inside the mountain, in Portal you are trying to escape a dilapidated testing center, and in The Talos Principle the protagonist is proving themselves to be worthy of replacing humanity. In Stephen’s Sausage Roll, you are Stephen (presumably) and you cook sausages. You aren’t saving the world through your intelligent heroics, you are purely cooking a copious amount of sausages that are each twice as large as you are.

The inherent silliness of Stephen’s Sausage Roll’s premise is hilariously juxtaposed with the player’s experience of the game, which is decidedly demanding. I have occasionally found it difficult in my life to cook a sausage – because no matter what you put the heat at on the stove, the damn thing never wants to cook all the way through – but I have never been so perplexed about how best to cook a sausage before playing Sausage Roll. In the game, you don’t fail by undercooking the center, but you fail in every other conceivable way: you can overcook the sausage, knock it into the ocean, have the sausages block your escape from the level, have one sausage block another’s passage, move it to a corner where it’s out of your reach, get it stuck on your fork…the list goes on. All of these ways to fail are from deceptively simple levels.

Look at this shit, there is only 1 sausage, 2 grills, and 7 tiles for the player to step on. This should be easy! So why do I keep overcooking one side of it or pushing it out of reach? As I’ve learned, it’s because the game’s power over the player is its simplicity.

French social theorist Michel Foucault described a modern type of power, which he called disciplinary power. Instead of old world forms of power, where you torture criminals on the streets as an example for all to see, disciplinary power regulates the behavior and movement of the individual to control them. You can see this playing out in schools where children are told where to sit, how to stand in line, where they can play tag, etc. This type of power restricts the individual’s ability to make choices of how to behave, when they can act on their own, and where they can go.

This philosophy is evident in video games as well, but many games are enjoyable because they give players the control. Games that want to empower their players give them a myriad of ways to control their character’s behavior and movement, thus relinquishing the game’s disciplinary power over them. In Grand Theft Auto V, players can run, shoot, swim, drive any car, pilot boats and jet skis, fly fighter jets and helicopters, call gang members to assist them, buy clothes, perform heists, have sex…the list goes on. Many of these actions are unavailable, restricted, or illegal (for good reason) in actual society and that’s why it’s so empowering to live out those fantasies virtually. The simple act of running red lights in GTA is satisfying because it allows the player to fictitiously conquer the disciplinary powers that they constantly encounter in everyday life.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is the antithesis of GTA in this way. Where many games make superhuman tasks easy to accomplish, Sausage Roll makes the quotidian task of cooking sausages nearly impossible. It seeks to disempower the player by heightening Foucault’s idea of disciplinary power. The power the game has over you comes from hyper restricting the player’s behavior and from the limited organization of the play space. The only direct interaction the player has control over is to walk in four directions. The already restricted behavior is further limited by the big grill fork that you have in front of you at all times. At the beginning stages of this game, learning to deal with the fork made me relive memories of being a gangly 15 year old stumbling around with my newly sprouted long legs. I could never get anything quite right, always turning towards a sausage that I wanted to push, but the swing of my fork accidently bats the sausage into the unanticipated direction of the ocean below, causing me to fail the level.

The difficulty of navigating the world with a protruding unwieldy fork is amplified by how little room there is to navigate. What appears to be simplicity of the level is, in actuality, restrictive. The interplay between limited movement and limited space for movement amplifies disciplinary power, making the seemingly simple task of cooking a sausage into a source of consistent failure.

You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, and you have to burn a few Stephens to cook a sausage. Such is the nature of life according to Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

Written by Taylor Kalsey, who was bored and home for the holidays

Podcast Prescriptions: I only Listen to the Mountain Goats Ep 1+2

John Darnielle’s 3  decade spanning folk music project, The Mountain Goats, has mined nearly every emotion and subject for their song topics. He wrote a song about off-camera side characters from the movie scarface, A high school death metal band and most recently a whole album about the 80’s goth music scene. The Mountain Goats catalog has so thoroughly covered many aspects of humanity and its emotions that one fan made a flowchart directing you to a mountain goats song for whatever your mood. “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats”.  Is not only the name of that chart, but also a common phrase used by fans. In essence, if someone says, “I only listen to the Mountain Goats”, they are saying “Why would I need other music? This does everything I need.” While I don’t really only listen to the Mountain Goats, John’s music is among the most influential art to my personality and has consistently been my most reliable friend in times of despair.

My obsession with his personal music led me to want to understand him as a person too Tho do this I exhaustively watched every interview, live performance, and podcast with him on Youtube. I learned that the child abuse and drug abuse described in his music were directly inspired by his personal hardships. I also learned that he is as much of an endless fountain of wisdom, intelligence, and empathy off stage as he is on-stage. Through my diligent research, I’ve fallen in-love with the artists as much as i have with his art.

This long-winded explanation is the only way I know how to comprehensively describe my excitement for the concept of the I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats podcast. Each episode, fiction podcaster extraordinaire, Joseph Fink, sits down with John Darnielle himself to discuss each subsequent song on the Mountain Goats album, “All Hail West Texas”. Approximately half-way through each episode, Joseph and John invite a guest on to add another angle to the conversation. To cap off the show, a different musical artist covers the song in question.

On paper, putting a microphone in front of John and letting him ramble about his art for 40 minutes a week is exactly what I’ve longed for. The problem in practice is that the show’s conversations are too surface level. Good conversations require room to breathe and time to let it meander to unexpected destinations. Instead of this, the conversation swings from vine to vine so fast that I had difficulty remembering certain segments, even directly after listening to the episodes. The breakneck pace of topic shifting also masks the fact that the hosts barely talk about the music that they are supposed to.

When I was trying to rack my brain about what happened on episode 2, “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”, I became suspicious of how little of the episode was actually Mountain Goats related. To test my theory, I devised four categories of topics and noted the timestamps of the category’s airtime. The four categories are 1) Announcements/Bookkeeping (which is essentially the intro and outro), 2) Mountain Goats/Episode’s song related discussion, 3) airtime of the original and cover of the song, and 4) discussion unrelated to the Mountain Goats.

My results confirmed my suspicion. In a 39 minute episode, 4 minutes and 15 seconds were of memo/bookkeeping, 7 minutes and 8 seconds featured music, 14 minutes and 25 minutes were unrelated to  the Mountain Goats 9 (In this episode the guest and John found it pertinent to lightly comment on gentrification in Durham, North Carolina), and only 13 minutes and 12 seconds of the 39 minute podcast featured a discussion of the Mountain Goats and the song. That means that only 34% of the shows airtime is what the show reports to be about.

To be fair, I like the musical component of the show; weekly covers are a truly unique hook to keep Mountain Goats fans coming back for every episode. The flaw in this segment is that the concept only works as a supplement the host’s discussion of the song. If only 34% of the episode is about the music, then the music itself feels out of place. Also the housekeeping elements of the show are necessary, so I’m not suggesting those be removed. But I am saying that 37% of a podcast about the Mountain Goats not being about the Mountain Goats is not what the podcast promised. In another format, I love the idea of John Darnielle talking about gentrification, religion, or anything else non-Mountain Goats related, but the show’s shallow fast paced editing style doesn’t allow for any of these topics to be fully explored, and it not what the show advertises itself to be. The podcast’s title indicates that the show is by a super-fan, for super-fans, but the content shows that I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats doesn’t know who it’s for.

Written in Sociology Research Methods by Taylor Kalsey

Listened to during work 

Podcast Prescriptions: Do By Friday

There is a goddamned lot of podcasts. As a fan, it seems that while the demand for podcasts is increasing, the supply of shows available is growing exponentially faster. To become a competitor in the deeply saturated market, new podcasts have to market themselves well, but podcasts have less tools to advertise themselves than most other products. Few media journalists are reporting on podcasts, and you’re not going to find an advertisement for Serial on a bus stop. There is ultimately a dearth of tools to help increase a podcast’s popularity; most podcasters rely entirely on word of mouth recommendations or a unique show concept gimmick. A podcasts structural gimmick helps to differentiate it from the dozens of others on the cluttered screen of any podcast app, not unlike Colgate’s bright packaging attempting to draw your attention away from other toothpaste brands on a grocery store shelf. For a lot of podcasts, this flashy packaging masks each episode’s lack of worthwhile conversation.

Max Temkin, Merlin Mann’s, and Alex Cox’s Do By Friday podcast could have fallen into this trap, because their podcast initially relied heavily on their gimmick concept. The podcast was founded on the concept of the hosts challenging themselves to do a certain task by friday each week. Fortunately, the show avoided becoming clickbait by expanding the show into a mostly free formed discussion with only a dash of weekly challenge talk to be the cherry on top of each episode. While the weekly challenge structure is the podcast’s raison d’etre, what really makes Do By Friday infectiously hilarious and thought provoking is simply how much the hosts love to entertain and charm one another.

Recently, the word “challenge” has been co-opted by viral Youtube videos that usually result in schadenfreude inducing bodily harm, but luckily Do By Friday’s challenges do not include consuming milk, cinnamon, or ghost peppers until the point of torrential vomiting. Instead their challenges are more along the lines of reading The Art of the Deal, throwing something away to declutter, or sous-vide-ing their shoes. The wide range of challenges performed on the podcasts result in a fascinating variety of conversations: throwing something away led the hosts to discuss their own blind consumerism, reading The Art of the Deal allowed them to meditate on why Donald Trump’s competition based world view attracts his political supporters, and sous-vide-ing induced a whole lot of giggling about Alex’s melted bra.

Do By Friday has always had a strong concept backing it up, but as they evolved they stopped feeling the need to cater to window shoppers. Recently, Alex, Max, and Merlin have loosened up and began flexing their witty-conversational muscles in a more casual conversational format. In the less challenge focused episodes, all of their personalities bloom. Merlin is a weird dad, a professional podcaster and writer who is endlessly quick witted, theatrical, and culturally well versed. Max Temkin, a co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, is intelligent, politically charged, cynical, and probably a little too young to be as curmudgeonly as he is. Alex Cox also works at Cards Against Humanity and ironically plays the straight man. She is an expert at winding up her co-hosts, letting them go, and then laughing contagiously in the background as Max and Merlin spiral into insanity. With all their personalities combined, the trio creates an endless buffet of energetic and playful conversations for our listening pleasure.

While their chemistry has been their since the beginning, the original challenge focussed format occasionally dampened the group’s conversational potential. In the original format, some of the challenges favored one host’s interests, leaving the others in the dust. This issue came up when their challenge was to play a videogame called “Really Bad Chess”. On this episode, Merlin admitted that he doesn’t really like games and he noticeably struggled to add anything of value to Max and Alex’s conversation, which kind of left the podcast running on only 66% of it’s potential. Broadening the conversation has allowed the hosts to create more dynamic conversations about anything that matters to them. Their day jobs and hobbies aren’t the sole focus of the podcast (they aren’t reviewing new board games every week), but their passion for technology, comedy, art, culture, politics, games, and mocking American society melts together to become the lense through which they see and discuss the world around them.

The basic DNA of any immersive, entertaining, and fascinating conversation is its ability to progress in directions that you were unable to be predict at the beginning. We’ve all had that  kind of  wonderful conversation where you don’t know how the hell you went from talking about KFC to the theory of ego depletion.

The more I analyse podcasts, the more I realize that the building blocks of any good podcast is simply a good conversation. What makes a podcast great isn’t the concept behind it, but the conversations within each episode. Where the hosts explore the topic at hand end up in a completely unpredictable destination. We’ve all had these wonderful kinds of conversations, where you don’t know how the hell you went from talking about the KFC menu to the theory of ego depletion. Do By Friday isn’t doing anything groundbreaking, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s insightful tangents, winding rants, and endless riffing are why I keep listening to the show week after week. All they do is have a great conversation, and where the hosts consistently arrive at a surprising conclusion that couldn’t of been discovered without the improvisational journey there.

Review By Taylor Kalsey, written in sociology methods and french social theory classes. Podcast listened to during data entry at work.

Podcast Prescriptions: Important If True

Media often presents the future as bleak, and often because of some catastrophic societal misstep spiralling into a dystopia. For an example, look no further than Black Mirror thoroughly explaining the many ways that our phones are going to dehumanize and maybe kill us. As video games developers and generally well versed media enthusiasts: Nick Breckon, Jake Rodkin and Chris Remo are well aware of this. Seemingly these messages have sank into their subconscious’ and fueled their anxious minds. These fears bubbled up from time to time on their video game podcast, Idle Thumbs, where they developed a semi-regular segment called “robot news” where they talked about the many ways the newly designed robots will kill you. Their newest podcast, Important If True is in many ways an expansion on the “Robot News” concept.

On Important if True, Nick, Jake and Chris present many burgeoning technologies that could easily inspire fear mongering. But instead of acquiescing to their technophobia, the hosts downplay the potentially disastrous effects and generally trivialize the new technologies as wacky historical footnotes in some engineer’s misguided view of the future.  To further illustrate that our technological fears are probably baseless, the trio highlights unimportant oddities in modern society that were once the symbols of yesteryear’s technophobia. For example, there is a mysterious driverless car that has been spotted exploring Arlington, Virginia that has reported connections to a clandestine Virginia Tech study. It’s easy to see how your imagination can run, not trusting the benevolence of the researchers behind it. A paranoid narrative is an easy one to write when lacking information, but the reality is basically never as bad as you’d imagined. In this example, the reality of the situation is purely goofy; the car was not actually driverless, but in fact being driven by a man dressed as a carseat to make the car appear driverless. Important if True constantly undercuts these paranoid narratives to reveal that the world is often not as malevolent as we believe it to be.

This is best exemplified by one the trio’s most prevalent anxieties, mechanization and automation. The hosts often recount a news story about how jobs are being replaced by robotic workers, such as a robot chicken replacing an entire Swedish labor union’s public relations department. In an insane attempt to keep the union in tune with it’s members, this chicken was taken home each day by an employee and clucked to indicate if the union members were unhappy. While the robo-rooster is obviously ludicrously silly, the attempt to mechanically automate every PR department could have major impacts on our society through unemployment. This innate fear of losing our jobs to machines did not begin with this Swedish monstrosity; it has actually been a pervasive societal fear since the beginning of the industrial age allowed for machines to replace humans in factories. While the hosts definitely possess this same worry about automation, they don’t fearmonger about society collapsing like everyone else. Instead they relieve their anxiety by hypothesizing about the myriad of wacky ways that our foreboding future can go askew. Automation hasn’t turned humans into robots’ slaves, instead it creates a chicken that clucks at a Swedish labor union executive.

To illustrate the idea that the fear mongered technologically driven dystopian future is essentially fictitious, the hosts of Important if True also read emails of silly hypothetical questions for them to postulate about. Ribbing intentional fiction and speculative news stories with the same irreverence puts the two on the same playing field, which subtly trains the listener to treat them as equals.  When the two are viewed as equals, the news stories speculating about our dystopian future also seem like fiction. This fictionalization helps the listener cope with technophobic anxieties about the future by making them feel farfetched rather than inevitable. The story’s are Important if True, but who knows what’s going to happen. The world could be taken over by machines, or KFC can make a virtual reality game to train their new employees how to fry chicken.

Review: Goths By The Mountain Goats

In regards to his song topics, The Mountain Goats’ frontman and songwriter, John Darnielle, has always felt like a magician, who can conjure emotionally resonating lyrics from seemingly depth-less topics. He accomplished this on his last album, Beat The Champ, where every song was about professional wrestling. But however trivial the inspiration is, the outcome certainly is not. At it’s best, The Mountain Goats uses uses a microscope, focusing on the trivial parts of life to find grander truths. John Darnielle focuses small, but finds profound truths about the human experience through this highly specific lens. Darnielle continues his recent tradition on Goths, were he reflects on his teen years as a goth kid and the goth music scene around him.

Specifically, Darnielle uses his personal stories and goth scene references as an exploration of self identity and maturity. Throughout the album, John tells of personal experiences where he shows signs of doubting if he fits into the specific subculture that he had chosen for himself. On the song, “The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement” the titular Grey King performs the homebrewed cosmetic dentistry of filing his teeth down to fine spikes and Darnielle decides “I’m pretty hardcore, but I’m not that hardcore.” Darnielle questions his goth identity once again on the song “Unicorn Tolerance” in which he describes several of the “hardcore” activities of his youth, including rubbing bones across his face, hanging out in graveyards, and expressing his appreciation of ghosts. Despite all of his actions, on the chorus he still admits that he has “high unicorn tolerance”. Doesn’t sound too hardcore to me.

Eventually, Darnielle matured out of his goth phase and began to eulogize that moment in history with songs like “Abandoned Flesh” and “Shelved”. On these tracks and many others from the last half of the album, The Mountain Goats mourn the end of an era, with lyrics like “You and me and all of us are gonna have to find a job” and “the rides over, but I’m not ready to go”. Darnielle’s love of the era is abundantly clear because of his ungodly amount of references to goth bands that are beyond me. The finale, “Abandoned Flesh” hypothesizes what his favorite bands are up to nowadays, and he concludes that the world forgot about the band “Gene Loves Jezebel”.

As varied and intriguing as the lyricism is, I can’t say the same for the instrumentation. Goths was proudly flaunted as the first Mountain Goats album without any guitars, but the guitars were barely replace by anything. There is bass and drums almost always plucking away in the background like many other Mountain Goats records, but there is nothing on the forefront to grab the listener’s attention. This is especially true because Darnielle chooses to sing in a gentle, measured, and fragile voice. There are sporadically spurts of beautiful warm horns that grab my attention in the way I’m looking for, but they were used so sparingly that I desperately wanted more. The passivity of the music is amplified by the fact that several songs last upwards of 5 minutes with little variation throughout the song. The length and lack of dynamic songwriting often spoil songs that I start off grooving to. There are no specific songs for me to point fingers to, but when listening to Goths, I constantly felt that the musical ideas had overstayed their welcome. The best song on the album, “Rain in Soho” is the only song with any significant musical progression, with it’s beautiful build-up to an apocalyptic finish brought to life by Darnielle’s classic warbling vocals and an accompanying choir.

I still stand by my statement that John Darnielle has never written a bad song. The problem with Goths is that it would be a much more enjoyable listen at 45 minutes rather than 55. Much like the present day singers of many 80’s goth bands, the album is a little bloated.

Best Songs: “Rain in Soho”, “Stench of the Unburied”, “Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds”, and “We Do it Different on the West Coast”.

Written By Taylor Kalsey Two Days After Seeing Them Live at The Mayan Theater in Los Angeles

Mini Metro: Minimalist Mayhem

Mini metro will make sure you never complain about your local public transit again. Through your constant In game failures, you will truly appreciate the many difficulties of being a transit designer. Everything starts simple, a small town with only a few districts. All you have to do is connect each one together. The town’s growth unpredictably outpaces you little by little until through pure necessity you’ve designed a map that looks like a Pollock painting.The minimalist art style begs the player to attempt making the prettiest looking map, but as I’ve learned from my hours of playtime, style and function have a nearly impossible time of coexisting in the world of public transit.

Like a reverse game of jenga, the more lines and stations you put together, the less stable it all seems, until finally…everyone in the game-endingly overcrowded station yells “JENGA” as your tower finally topples to the ground, crumbling from its own weight.
Mini Metro isn’t simulating real life metro design, but it really makes you understand why those real life metro maps look so fucked up.(show metro map picture here)Transit designers have to account for the unpredictable, anyone must be able to go anywhere, including places that don’t exist yet. As the designer in Mini Metro, you must keep all train-lines impossibly flexible, so no matter where and how your city grows, your design can always adjust maintain balancing a thousand plates at once. Well, at least that’s how I’ve been playing it.

Article written by Taylor Kalsey, too late at night, after playing you know what.

The True Progression in Darkest Dungeon

 

In Role Playing Games, leveling up is meant to simulate your characters improvement through experience (hence the term “XP”). It makes sense that if your character kills a lot of dragons, they become better at killing dragons. To simulate your hero getting better at killing dragons, RPGs increase every stat every level making the characters better in every way. This system feels like a natural progression for the first few levels, but by the end of the game the constant incremental stat bonuses culminate in your lowly farm boy possessing godlike strength, health, resistances, etc. If I play tennis for the same amount of time that your average RPG hero slays monsters, I do not transform into Serena Williams.

In games like XCOM, your characters do not become the alien-murdering equivalent of Serena Williams either, but they still become unnaturally better at fighting when leveling up a few times. XCOM wants you to get attached to your squad, because you’ve seen them transform from a weak, generic recruit to a blue haired badass who can snipe alien’s heads off without breaking a sweat.

Darkest Dungeon uses RPG expectations to its advantage. It knows you want your characters to become badasses, but does not allow that to take place. Partly, this is because the game is punishingly difficult and it took me more than 8 hours to keep one crusader alive long enough to level up. I then took him into a level 1 dungeon, thinking I had a level 2 badass on my hands who could easily carry the party to the quest’s completion. He died. He didn’t cut every enemy down in one slice like I’d expected and I was angry at him for his lack of improvement.

I checked the Darkest Dungeon wikipedia page to help explain my failure and I found out that leveling up doesn’t improve every stat like I’d expected. Instead, characters in Darkest Dungeon only increase their resistances when they level up. This realization made me think more about my characters; if their traits weren’t going to improve through experience, then I have be more selective about choosing which ones I recruit. Some characters are naturally better than others, and to ensure success, you must throw out the lesser ones. In Darkest Dungeon, not everyone is born a hero, and they may be destined to fail if they don’t innately possess the right set of abilities and capabilities. The characters themselves don’t matter. They are only able to handle the higher level dungeons is through having a higher tolerance for what comes their way. They do not become ultimate fighting machines by killing monsters, instead they just gain the experience to be able to withstand the forces oppressing them. Experience doesn’t create talent, it only improves your ability to manage the problems that life throws at you.

Since your characters start weak and don’t gain talent, you tend to dislike your characters, who are useless when put to their own devices. All they do is slowly go insane from stress and/or hinder the quest because the tapeworm they have makes them eat double the food that anyone else does and now you’re out of rations. The characters will always suck, so the true progression of Darkest Dungeon is money. To support your adventurers, you throw money and valuables at the town’s various support systems, which provide the adventurers with stress relief, items, and new weapons and armor. The jester doesn’t do enough damage, so I’ll buy him a new and improved sickle, or the highwayman has become zoophobic so now I’ll pay for his treatment in the sanitarium. It costs money to allow your adventures to partake in these various activities and it costs valuable items in order to upgrade these buildings. It takes a dozen character deaths to amass enough funds to even get far enough to significantly upgrade a building. The people themselves aren’t important.

In Darkest Dungeon, neither your actions nor your talent make you a hero, only money does.

Black Mirror, “Playtest” Analysis (Full Spoilers)

In Black Mirror, technology is always the tool used by the characters to perform one nefarious deed or the other. The show generally portrays a plausibly realistic future in which technology has some very harmful effects on society or at least one person. In the episode “Playtest”, this formula is slightly twisted.

Our protagonist Cooper consistently avoids phone conversations with his mom because he doesn’t know how to connect with her after his father’s passing. He traveled around the world in an effort waste time before he has to confront his fear of communicating with his mom. On the last leg of his trip, he performs an odd job where he playtests virtual reality software. The developers describe the appeal of the game as somewhere where you are safe and can confront your problems from a distance, so once you are back in the physical world, they seem more benign. The moment that he engages in virtual escapism, his mother calls on his phone, which interferes with the signal and causes him to have a fatal seizure. Unlike most Black Mirror episodes, the creators aren’t directly pointing the blame at technology and the humans who wield it. Instead, escapism and running away from his maternal relationship problems is what actually killed Cooper.

In TV shows and movies, the horror is simulated only for the audience, but is the real world for the characters within it.  In “Playtest” the horror is simulated for both parties, the audience’s being a TV show, and Cooper’s simulation being a virtual reality video game. Cooper and the audience experiencing the story with the same distant-from-reality mindset causes our expectations to be exactly the same, like expecting a monster to be behind the now opened and zoomed in on cabinet door. We both have horror tropes and cliches ingrained in us, so we both react the same to a horror movie scenario. This shared mindset allows the audience to very directly connect and empathize with Cooper’s character. Another example is when Cooper is instructed to go into a bedroom upstairs. Based on the knowledge that being horrifying is the simulation’s goal, he and the audience both know that giant wooden doors in old mansions never yield anything beneficial for the one who opens the door. People always say characters would act different if they knew they were in a horror movie, and finally with “Playtest” the character does.

Once the first of many twists reveal that Cooper can feel real pain while only being virtually stabbed, the scenario widens the previously established possibility space of the simulation. This realization destabilizes Cooper and the audience’s comfortable relationship with tropes and reframes the story. Cooper no longer has the previously promised comfort of safely and distantly confronting his problems, because he now exists in an environment with no basis in reality.

One the other hand, the audience watching at home still has their safety net of knowing everything is fake, which separates the audience connection with Cooper as a participant in the story. The audience then plays the traditional role of distant spectator, feeling sorry for him as he quickly loses his mind. That previous connection strengthens the horror for the audience, because put in his shoes of this extremely plausible science fiction scenario, you would act in the exact same way and suffer the same fate.

AJJ’s The Bible 2, A Review

AJJ’s first 4 albums felt like cynically twisted communal folk songs driven by the singer’s (Sean Bonnette) sobering worldview and personal stories. The band’s musical arrangements and chord progressions have never been inventive (in fact they knowingly rip off both Woody Guthrie as well as Simon and Garfunkel), but Sean’s distinctive weak nasally voice and manic depressive lyrics defined AJJ as the stand out amongst the ever growing crowd of folk punk bands.

With their 2014 album, Christmas Island, the band started their unfortunate trend of writing lo-fi rock music played over a series of incoherent and grotesque one liners. Because Sean’s vocals and lyrics failed to grab my attention like their older material still does, the listener’s attention drifts towards the incredibly standard and particularly uninteresting rock instrumentation.

Their new album, The Bible 2, continues most of their regrettable trends, but it is a step above Christmas Island. Rock dominates this album, sprinkled in are a few acoustic pieces to balance the pace as well as appeal to their roots. At best, this back and forth between high energy lo-fi rock tunes and sappier folk ballads reminds me of their incredible 2011 album, Knife Man. Quite often though, when the individual songs aren’t up to par (particularly the last quarter of the album) the two styles feel disjointed. The best songs on The Bible 2, like “Cody’s theme”, and “Goodbye, oh Goodbye” are simple, fast paced lo-fi pop rock music, but they still lack the classic AJJ personality that comes from the lead singer Sean Bonnette.

The lyrics continue to be so seemingly random and #edgy on The Bible 2 that there is very little to grab onto and provide substance for repeated listens. Sean’s vocals now have some modulation, adding some weight to his previously weak vocals, which is necessary when writing a rock album, but it hides his quirks that made him interesting. Ultimately, Sean Bonnette is still manic and depressive but has lost his relatability due to increasingly abstract lyrics and vocal treatments.

Just before the release of this new album The Bible 2, AJJ changed their name from Andrew Jackson Jihad, a name they now find needlessly offensive. They say they have matured past the band name that they came up with as teenagers, but at the same time they are selling their album titled The Bible 2 for $6.66 on Bandcamp. WIth this album, the band is at a crossroads in their career, unable to fully commit to their new identity after transitioning from acoustic to electric guitars.

With their earlier works, AJJ had a cohesive viewpoint and ethos, but with The Bible 2. The band’s aggression and energy are aimless, in Sean Bonnette’s lyrics as well as the fuzzy lo-fi production. The album redemptively provides a handful of  great singles in both of AJJ’s styles, serving as reminders that the band does still have musical potential, once they solidify their new identity and regain their personality.

Article By Taylor Kalsey

We Happy Few (Alpha): Conflicting Influences

The PC open world survival with crafting mechanics market is fully saturated. To be a successful newcomer to the genre, you have to stand out, which is what We Happy Few did with the game’s E3 reveal trailer. The trailer depicts a dystopian 1960’s Britain where everyone willfully forgets their dark present and past with the help of a hallucinogenic drug called Joy. There was no mention of the true nature of the gameplay, where you have to manage your health, thirst, hunger, blah blah blah blah etc. etc. We Happy Few’s trailer succeeded in being distinctive, and attracted people, like me, who aren’t the type to enjoy one of those types of games, up until the point that I actually had to play the game.

We Happy Few’s blending of classic dystopian literature, from the happy pills of “Brave New World” to erasing the unpleasant past of “Fahrenheit 451”, is an intriguing idea for a video game. What We Happy Few lacks (so far) is what makes those books so interesting to read, the process of learning the minutiae of how the society functions. Instead, the player’s time and energy is focussed on managing stat bars and inventory screens, at which point the surrounding world is irrelevant. The background dressing serves no purpose when the gameplay still consists of stabbing strangers with a sharpened stick and then crafting a bandage with the materials you looted from their corpse. This game is just one step away from having you punch a tree to get wood like every other fucking game on Steam.

The intriguing concept and art style immediately garnered attention from survival genre outsiders, but the boilerplate moment to moment survival gameplay, pushed us farther away and made us feel swindled with what we were originally shown with the game. The concept and gameplay of We Happy Few feels like they were created by separate teams and then shoved together to construct a jarringly disjointed experience.

I am interested to hear from fans of the genre to see if the setting and story is enough to make it stand out amongst the crowd, or if they only really care about the mechanics and player driven stories of the game. Because after failing to convert genre outsiders, We Happy Few needs to at least attract the genres core fans in order to survive.

Article By Taylor Kalsey