Spontaneous Grace

At this moment I experience the desire for spontaneous grace. For the rain that
holds off till ten minutes after your hike, for the extra five minutes a friend
waits until your arrival, for the extra twenty miles your car somehow runs until
the gas station.

For the soft edges on the too-metallic recliner, for the last three rays of the
sunset, for the directions you look up at the one coffeehouse where the public
computer actually gets Wi-Fi.

For the reason why some businesspeople stop and give change to a strange
homeless person, for the reason why a receptionist smiles and lets you in too
near closing time, for the reason why people share words of support and a few
bucks to folks online without asking for proof first.

For the mirror kind enough to break and shift your image in all the right ways,
for the dandelion in the cracks that escapes the neighbor’s weed-whacker, for
the train that waits for you.

For the traffic cop who winks – just once – at the jaywalkers or the driver ten
or fifteen miles over the limit, for the single parent whose garage sale
customers tell him/her to keep the change, for the time your housemate who loves
angry talk radio actually switches on music.

For the gleam of a rainbow in the soap scum on your dishes, for the time when
your Mom actually doesn’t open her mouth when there are still dirty dishes in
your room, for the reason I still do favors for a friend everyone says could do
more for herself.

For home, for love and memories, for the grace notes at the end of the symphony.
For the extras which get and keep us up in the morning. For spontaneous grace.

— After the concept of ‘Spontaneous Prose’ and dedicated to Jack Kerouac, Neal
Cassady, Edie Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Diane Di Prima.

Sandwich Poem

Lettuce, olives, and hummus.
I glance over the list of requested ingredients before spreading the garbanzo
paste over the whole grain bread, perhaps too neatly for a customer in a hurry.

Mayonnaise, tomatoes, and pesto.
He orders the same every day. Perhaps as an effort to reduce life’s complexity,
a suffocating variety present even in our deli kitchen. Some say he should try
more experiences, branch out, but some regularity is needed to make experience
possible.

Peppers, mustard, and tuna.
The woman’s children gather anxiously around her, tugging at her pant legs and
whining to go outside. As the last rays of sunlight waft in from the sliding
glass doors, I can’t say I blame them.

Cheddar, mayo, and lettuce.
She watches me work and requests more of everything, more cheese, more mayo,
more vegetables, until it becomes difficult to hold her order together. Perhaps
this is like life – not even that too much happens, but that everything mixes
together at once.

Jon and Beauty

The harsh winter had hardened the earth, but sheer determination plunged the shovel into the soil. It hadn’t been long since Jon had returned from the vets. The need to get this over with trumped his trademark procrastination. He was expecting this to happen – but expectation and reality are two different things, as Jon was discovering.

He sunk lower into the ground as the pile of dirt next to the hole grew. Jon wanted to stop. He was tired. “This is the last thing you’ll ever do for her. Do it properly.” He thought to himself. He owed her – it was his turn to give.

“What is it?” Jon spoke with a mixture of innocence and excitement that only a child can access.

“Come in and find out,” Jon walked into his parents room. Jon’s dad had been ill for a while and in bed for most of that time. Jon was not sure what was wrong with him. Every so often – since Jon could remember – his dad would spend a few weeks in bed. He wasn’t worried. He was angry. His latest stint in bed had meant Jon’s mom had been collecting him from school. It wasn’t the same. It had become a ritual to race down the hill on the way home. Jon would begin smiling five minutes before home time and keep smiling until he inevitably won the race.

Jon’s eyes widened as his father – the second best runner in the house– produced a beige, anime-eyed puppy from under his quilt. “This is for you.” Jon’s jaw dropped – this was amazing. “And you get to name her.” Jon almost collapsed. Getting a puppy, and he would name her! Names raced through his young mind, at a speed that made them all incomprehensible. All but one. Looking at the face of the new family member – in between being licked – it was clear. “Beauty.” His father looked at him for an explanation. “She’s got a beauty spot.” Jon had learned what a beauty spot was the previous week and still got a thrill from proving he knew what it was.

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-Ryan J. Hodge

For someone who enjoys a great story, is there anything better than a narrative that engages you from the very start? Imagine a world so rich you can almost smell the scents in the air, a delivery so clever it forces you to think in a way you never thought you would. I’m Ryan J. Hodge, author, and I’d like to talk to you about…Video Games.

Yes, Video Games. Those series of ‘bloops’ and blinking lights that –at least a while ago- society had seemed to convince itself had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. In this article series, I’m going to discuss how Donkey Kong, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and even Candy Crush can change the way we tell stories forever.

What the arcade teaches us about changing the rules of a story

Now, I’m sure even those who would consider themselves ‘out-of-touch’ with the games industry can appreciate that the boxy, awkward ‘electronic babysitters’ of the 70s and 80s can’t hold a candle to the cutting edge graphics and Hollywood budgets of modern games. You’d probably think I’d gloss over the days when the industry was in its infancy, but those developing years were just as crucial as the current ‘console generation’. For it was in this chaotic time that the most critical aspect of game design was discovered and honed: paradigm shift.

If it’s so easy, why can’t you beat it?

What makes us care if Pac-Man escapes the ghosts or if Mario rescues the princess? If someone were to write these stories as is on paper, they’d probably be pretty dull; just an endless series of munching dots or stomping Goombas. Yet players would remain in front of their screens, transfixed for hours; dumping their (or their parents’) hard earned money into an experience that doesn’t matter, is not particularly complicated, and has no real application or parallel in the outside world. From a pure surface level, it makes little sense why the ‘Arcade Classics’ took off, and even less in terms of how it can be applied to contemporary narrative.

But there is actually something beneath the surface; a primal appeal to the human psyche that any good story teller would itch to exploit. In traditional sports or board games (as opposed to video games), there are certain rules or logical progressions that have to occur in order for the game to be ‘fair’. In narratives about such events, the focus generally is around the ‘players’ mastery of self and spirit in order to succeed within the confines of these rules. While sometimes the ‘rule’ dynamic is changed (due to an antagonist cheating to some degree), the narrative is very rarely centered on learning and mastering the ‘rules’ themselves.

While a static rule set is also technically true for video games (after all, they have to be ‘beatable’), what makes video games unique compared to other modes of play is that ‘the rules’ themselves are not always communicated to the player from the start and sometimes new rules are added on the fly. The player investment comes from learning these rules and how to apply this knowledge to beat the game. That is the paradigm shift.

To be clear: this isn’t relative to basic instruction (i.e. move the joystick in the direction you want to go to move in that direction), I mean that the recognition of patterns are not explicitly stated anywhere, but still exist all the same. Take Pac-Man, for instance. The only rules explicitly communicated to the player are that he has to move around the maze to collect all the dots while avoiding all the ghosts. What the player isn’t told is that each ghost has a different behavior pattern. The red one will always chase him, the blue one will try to get in front of him, and the orange one moves at random. Playing without this understanding will only get the player so far but mastery of this concept is crucial to long-term progress.

One could argue AI developed in 1980 could still put 2014’s to shame.

What does this have to do with narrative? Well, I’d like to direct your attention to John W. Campbell Jr.’s Who Goes There? (1938) which readers might better recognize from the 1951 and 1982 film adaptations The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s: The Thing respectively. Hailed in many circles as an exemplary specimen of SciFi Horror, the conceit of this story is that some type of alien ‘intruder’ has infiltrated an Antarctic research station. It accomplished this infiltration by mimicking the form of a sled dog and, later, members of the research team. Once the intruder has completely copied its target; it appears to be a perfect imitation with complete mastery of language and social nuances (as opposed to, say, a ‘pod person’). The entire story is the conflict surrounding how to discover and ‘deal with’ the intruder, which is accomplished by the research team slowly learning about its nature (i.e.: its ‘rules’). First they learn that the intruder exists, then, that it can copy people as well as dogs, then that every cell of the intruder organism is its own semi-independent life-form (meaning that if you chop its head off and burn the body, the head will grow legs and skitter away).

Aw, ain’t he cute!

What separates this story from a distressing amount of horror narratives is that the characters within it never do anything stupid. They never deliberately put themselves in danger (mental breakdowns notwithstanding); rather they develop a theory about how the organism works and apply protocols commensurate with that theory until a new fact (or ‘rule’) is revealed. Now, this may seem obvious; but consider how few stories even accomplish that much. Compare Who Goes There? to Prometheus (2012 Film) where so-called scientists must perpetrate nonsensical breaches in basic safety protocols (removing helmets in an alien atmosphere, making kissy faces at a beefy alien cobra analog, etc.) just for the plot to even happen. What was meant to be a thrilling story of danger and discovery becomes an unintentional comedy of errors.

How the hell do you get lost if you made the map!?

Sometimes the lack of effort is more blatant than that, wherein we see narratives that include some combination of chainsaws and hapless teenagers.

Humans thrive when we have an understanding of things, but all drama is lost when we, the audience, have solved the problem long before the characters in the story. What keeps a story fresh is either a changing of an established dynamic or a dynamic whose true nature remains elusive.

But far more can be learned about narrative from the supposedly ‘storyless’ early video games. For in addition to themes of obscuring rules, players were also forced to prove their mastery of core gameplay, but in different ways. For these examples, we will consider the Mega Man series and Donkey Kong series.

I’m cheating a bit here given that these were console releases and not arcade classics…and you’re just going to have to deal with it.

In these games, players are given a core set of actions with which they must traverse an expansive and diverse level set, however the two go about this in different fashions. Mega Man demands a mastery of player tools…

Every defeated boss will give you a weapon useful for defeating another.

…where Donkey Kong demands a mastery of environment.

In both games, techniques that were linchpins of previous levels will not always be useful in the next. Further, in these games it’s literally ‘adapt or die’, as failing to master the techniques required to pass a level with result in the player character’s untimely end. The hook is learning when what approach is most useful. As such, the player’s mind and reflexes are sharpened and the game itself retains its difficulty, no matter how masterful the player is at the controls.

So how do we tie this back to narrative? Well, a sure way to raise dramatic stakes is to place your characters in a situation where everything they’ve learned or applied previously is absolutely no help. One of my personal favorite examples of this is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1951-’53). In these stories, Asimov plays with numerous psychological themes as its protagonists are challenged by the fear of the inevitable and the fear of the unknown. In all cases, it is not pure physical superiority that wins the day (in fact, brute strength is the downfall of many of the antagonists) but the mental agility required to solve each unique problem in its own unique way.

It is so easy for writers in any medium to rely on a protagonist’s (or antagonist’s) previously defined attribute to carry a story (not to mention a sorry recipe for gaming). By challenging a protagonist, or player, to deal with change or to do without; the dynamic of the story itself becomes more interesting.

A swordsman may lose his hand.

Game of Thrones ‘Walk of Punishment’ S3, E3

Or a special power can be taken away from the hero.

Legend of Korra ‘Endgame’ S1, E12

There are plenty of stories that already do this, and if you’d like to sort them from the bevy that don’t; be my guest and happy hunting. However, beyond the dialogue and characters, there exists a core experience that can be distilled not through words, but through action –through play. In order to feel as your protagonists would, to think as they must to overcome new obstacles; loading a catalog of Arcade Classics on your phone or tablet, picking up a DS, or dusting off your kids’ old Nintendo just might provide some valuable insight. And who knows? It just might make you a better writer.

Ryan J. Hodge is a Science Fiction author and Lead Writer & QA Manager for Konami Digital Entertainment US (SF Office). His latest book is Wounded Worlds: Nihil Novum, is available now for eBook & Paperback.

Media

The Last Airbender: The Legend of Korra (2012) Nickelodeon –TV

Donkey Kong (1981) d.p.Nintendo -Arcade

Donkey Kong Country (1994) d.Rare. p.Nintendo –Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Foundation (1951) Isaac Asimov, Gnome Press

Game of Thrones (2011) HBO -TV

Mega Man (1987) d.p.Capcom –Nintendo Entertainment System

Pac-Man (1980) d.Namco p.Midway -Arcade

The Thing from Another World (1951) RKO Radio Pictures

John Carpenter’s: The Thing (1982) Universal Pictures

Who Goes There? (1938) Joseph W. Campbell Jr., Astounding Stories

‘The Trouble with Gumballs’ shows sticky side of going into business

Reviewed by Susan K. Maciak

The Trouble with Gumballs by James Nelson is a tongue-in-cheek tale of two people struggling to start their own business. Once upon a time . . . a time when you could buy a palm full of peanuts for a penny and a cup of coffee for a dime, the native New Yorkers moved to California to escape the hustle and bustle of the city for the good life. In the quest for year-round sunshine, along with careers that required minimal work (or so they thought), Jim Nelson and his wife Mary-Armour bought a vending machine route in Sonoma County.

After investing a chunk of their savings in 100 glass globes, the pair managed gumball machines in rural establishments with storefront signs like Doodle Diner, Gobble Grocery Store and Rosie’s Restaurant. Their new venture turned out to be more challenging than profitable. For anyone who’s ever dreamed of going into business for themselves, TheTrouble with Gumballs becomes a reality check. Hardly anything transpired the way the Nelsons thought it would.

The family’s first roadblock was finding merchants willing to welcome their gum vending machines for 15 percent of each penny plugged into one. After they successfully located all their profit makers in mom-and-pop shops though, the eager entrepreneurs faced a daily diet of melting gumballs, jammed coin dispensers, and kids who figured out how to wiggle out large quantities of merchandise without putting a penny into their gumball enterprise.

Despite a series of do-it-yourself marketing efforts and seven-day-a-week work, the Nelsons noticed that their savings account depleted faster than their business grew. At the end of their wits, they decided to sell the business – for much less than they had paid for it. What they turned to next to earn a living, surprised them and will astonish readers. All in all, the story about gumballs leaves a good takeaway message and restores faith in American entrepreneurism.