Merzbow (Bigfoot, Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure, Bill Elliott's NASCAR Challenge)

It is an ironic fact that memory is a collective act, while the actual relics of historical experience are personal. Case in point - I am a nerd. Accordingly, of the following three cultural touchstones, only one is distinctly part of my memory: monster truck rallies, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and NASCAR. Thus it is unusual that these three games - Bigfoot, Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure, and Bill Elliott's NASCAR Challenge - should be presented sequentially.

Playing these games, absolutely none of which are even remotely good, I came to realize something, though. Although monster truck rallies are in no way part of my memory, they were distinctly a part of my past. I can't put my finger on exactly when monster trucks crossed the thin line from awesome to redneck, but it is clear that at some point they did. I remember growing up, however, that monster trucks were simply a part of my cultural landscape, and they were awesome. Reconstructing this signifying chain is a challenge - they were inexorably linked to Hulk Hogan, and thus to professional wrestling, which accompanied them across the line to redneck. (In the 80s, professional wrestling was not redneck. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that, in the 80s, professional wrestling was gayer than Justin Bieber.) Past that, I'm not sure. I suspect these things existed as part of the general cultural mishmash that was Saturday morning cartoons. (There is an entry to be written about the role of Saturday morning cartoons in creating cultural hegemony and collectivism, in which I argue that the preposterously large margin of victory Obama enjoyed among 18-29 year olds is primarily due to Saturday morning cartoons. This is not that entry.)

Somewhere on the road from the 1980s to today, however, monster trucks passed out of my cultural background. This is in many ways a pity, because the fundamental idea of gigantic machines crushing other machines is not redneck at all, a fact that Battlebots, Mythbusters, Transformers, and the bulk of giant robots will readily attest to. Bigfoot, then, represents this earlier, naive time period in which a man could drive a giant truck over cars without shame or cultural judgment. Regardless of whether this act is fun (and in Bigfoot it amounts to little more than a generic car stunt game of the most disposable rent-only kind), it is something that ought to be part of our culture.

I can readily imagine, on the other side of this seemingly insurmountable cultural divide, someone sitting at a monster truck rally. A sense of sorrow creeps over them. They are past the point where their childhood imagination ever took them, past having grown up and into some strange twilight state their childhood never made room for. For no reason, a pang of memory strikes, and they remember an afternoon watching a scratchy VHS tape of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Their intake of science fiction is limited now to the culturally prescribed mass appeal movies. They have no concept that Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is, among other things, an elaborate send-up of Doctor Who, the longest-running science fiction show of all time. They are unaware that most of the best jokes in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey come from parodies of The Seventh Seal. All they know, and even this they know in a way that is beyond words, is that there is some secret history, some alternate mode of being contained in this thing that is not a memory, that is an uncanny other to their entire cultural apparatus. Before a tear can form, a gigantic truck crushes a mobile home, and all is forgiven.

If memory is the personal treason that rewrites history into a cultural milieu, nostalgia is the drive to connect impossibly with lived experience. It is nostalgia that sends one to the dust-ridden gray rectangles of NES games, where these strands of lost history coexist. That Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure is a tedious piece of drek involving a lot of awkward isometric dodge-sprite, just as Bigfoot is an unmemorable entry into a basically uninteresting genre is, perhaps simply an idiotic historical accident of poor design. Or perhaps it is a crowning arch-metaphor for the impossibility of reconciling memory to actual lived experience - of the impossibility of carving a cultural position where the individual love of giant cars and sci-fi can co-exist.

The fantasy that this cultural hegemony that separates giant robots and giant trucks forevermore is in some way permeable underlies the film Billy Elliot, in which we learn that the harsh realities of fading Welsh mining towns and the cultural elitism of ballet dancing exist on opposite sides of a gauzy piece of tulle. Is it mere coincidence that this British film appropriates the name of a NASCAR driver whose name was in turn given to the first licensed NASCAR video game? Is the film itself a fugue on cultural permeability, suggesting the bleed from male ballet dancing to the ultimate in masculinity? One is adapted by Elton John into a musical. The other is appropriated by Rush Limbaugh to define an agrarian fantasy of America. One plays at the other's wedding. This is surely a false history, constructed from coincidence and culturally determined memory.

But the Other plays at all weddings. The line between memory and experience is a haze of noise that we endlessly ascribe signal to. In that din, who can tell the difference between a Wyld Stallyns concert and the roar of a monster truck engine?

The Daisies Break Their Fetters (Big Bird's Hide and Speak)

An oft unremarked upon aspect of the famed RCA Dog is that its fundamental concept of the image is that the dog is entranced specifically by the sound of his dead master's voice coming through the gramophone. The game today is Big Bird's Hide and Speak, and as you can see, we're setting up for a cheery little number.

Caroll Spinney, the voice of Big Bird, is well past the life expectancy for an American male. Despite this, he still both wears the quite large Big Bird suit and provides the voice for Oscar the Grouch, which, he claims, is actually the harder character to perform. Nevertheless, and I am not the first to note this, the very real fact is that Caroll Spinney is going to die, and this event will most likely occur in the relatively near future.

Big Bird's Hide and Speak contains what is a surprisingly good rendition of Big Bird's voice for an 8-bit video game. The rendition is skillful enough to form a major part of the game's presentation, as it explicitly credits Spinney as providing the voice of Big Bird in the game. I am not privy to the technical details - I do not know how much the voice is in fact based on actual recordings of Spinney. Let us, however, assume that the game is as presented, and in fact it is one of the earliest games to use actual sound recordings of people. (Is it perhaps the first? I assume not, but I've no particular proof for this assertion)

The core concept of the RCA Dog is that the phonograph is a physical remnant of his master's life. That is, ther eis a specific uncanny artifact that the dog peers puzzledly at. But Big Bird's Hide and Speak differs in two regards. First, it is functionally infinitely copied. Because NES games have been reduced to transmissible ROM files of relatively small size, they have been decoupled from physical media and physical devices upon which they can be played. A reasonably large number of people have downloaded or copied the ROM file, and it can be played on dozens of different systems. For my part, I have no fewer than four devices capable of playing Big Bird's Hide and Seek right now, and I'm pretty sure I've got about eight more on which it could be installed with a touch of jiggery pokery.

This is distinct from fetters. For me, there are two fetters of Caroll Spinney worth remarking upon. The first is Big Bird’s Red Book, a Little Golden Book in which Big Bird fretted about where he put the red thing he was going to show the reader, as various other red things whiz about. Eventually, he sits down on a paper bag and crushes the tomatoes he was going to show the reader. I liked tomatoes. (See also Attack of the Killer Tomatoes)

The other is the Electronic Talk ‘n Play, which I affectionately remember as the Big Bird Computer. It was a tape player with four colored buttons and specially made four-track tapes that would change tracks depending on which button you pressed, allowing the tapes to pose interactive puzzles and games. The best of the set was Grover’s Don’t Push the Red Button, in which Grover implores you not to push the red button, and you, no doubt, push it anyway, you bastard.

I have neither of these fetters anymore. I looked, yesterday, for Big Bird's Red Book at the town book sale. It was not there. Nor was the best of the Sesame Street Little Golden Books, The Monster at the End of this Book, a book notable for many things, including having one of the best examples of Wikipedia prose as art in its article, which describes it drolly as "a post-modern children's book." They did have the pointless sequel, Another Monster at the End of this Book, which Wikipedia notes features the "ubiquitous Elmo." The Big Bird Computer is as abandoned as the cassette medium it depended on. These things pass not into history but into the awkwardness of memory - the fetters are irretrievable.

Big Bird's Hide and Speak is different. As opposed to being bound up in a fetter, this element of childhood is spread vastly, transmitted throughout the Internet, perfectly iterated, undistorted by the vagaries of memory. Big Bird's Hide and Speak perfectly preserves this voice, ironically squawking the now impossible commands - find Grover. Find Elmo. And perhaps most tragically, find Ernie. Poor Ernie, the Muppet most marked by death following death of Jim Henson. There are, in my childhood, few celebrity deaths I have any sense of. Jim Henson and Roald Dahl are the only two that spring to mind. Jim Henson's death was, of course, marked with one of the greatest Muppet specials of all time, with the heartbreaking moment of the Muppets looking down and realizing that there are people down there... but one of them is missing.

As all of these things, Spinney included, pass to history and memory, Spinney's voice is perfectly preserved, compelling us to find what is lost. With the rise of wireless transmission and networking, packets of Caroll Spinney's voice whiz around, past, and through us. A waste transmission, mis-aimed, spreads upwards, outwards into space, a whisp of noise floating out towrds the edges of creation. Right now, my body may be permeated, run straight through with the voice of Caroll Spinney.

Our childhood, then, is well preserved. But this preservation is contingent on our continual storage and transmission of the data. A fetter is mildly self-preserving - indeed, through something approximating random chance, we have what we now call the history of the Western world. But this ghost is preserved only by our own transmissions and receptions of it. Perhaps Spinney lives forever, transmitted in wave form out into space, but this wave is always ahead of us - the signal cannot be caught up with. Spinney is immortal for everybody but us - we depend on the continual transmission of the signal.

The tragedy here is that the moment of this ghost has already passed. The game is a preposterously simple game consisting of selecting among four windows to spell words, identify characters, et cetera. All four directional buttons simply move clockwise around the windows. A and B do the exact same thing - select the current window. Start and Select also do the same thing - exit and let you pick a new minigame to play. It is a game that one grows out of exceedingly quickly. On top of that, it is, like all Nintendo games, a matter of archeology - an experience that belongs distinctly to another time.

Caroll Spinney has outlived his own ghost. Were it that he could outlive childhood.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for 8 Bit Representations of Michael Keaton (Beetlejuce and Best of the Best Championship Karate)

I was getting ice cream yesterday, and behind me in line was a very upset child. I am usually one of those people with a certain minimalist tolerance for the reproductive errors of others. Not childfree by any measure - I desperately want kids. But my attitude towards them is much like my attitudes towards dogs - I intend to like my children. Other people's can bugger off. But I digress.

This kid, I found tolerable, indeed endearing. His initial objection, indeed his objection through most of the line, was that because he could not read, he could not know that he was ordering the ice cream that he wanted. Accordingly, he was insistent that his father read to him the entire menu board. This struck me as a fundamentally rational request. His problem was not so much that he was not getting what he wanted as that he understood enough to have a clear and cogent vision of how the world ought to be, and he was deeply upset that it was failing to adhere to this understanding.

Which brings us to the unplayably bad Beetlejuice. Somewhat astonishingly, and I say this primarily out of a sense of fear, Beetlejuice is not a regular on worst-NES-games-ever lists. One of the things I have not done a lot of in this blog is discuss what makes a game bad. This is surprising, because it's actually a fairly straightforward answer - most games are bad because they behave unexpectedly. That is, the game sets the player up to fail. Some examples from Bettlejuice.

1. Enemy knockback (i.e. when you hit you fly backwards) that is about a quarter of a screen, making it incredibly easy to get knocked down pits.
2. Enemy knockback that occurs from things that are not actually enemies.
3. Deeply unpredictable rules on whether backtracking downwards will kill you or not.
4. Enemies that appear to follow a pattern right up until you try to jump past them, at which point they break the pattern and murder you.
5. The thing that appears to be Beetlejuice's attack... isn't. Or at least, it is wholly ineffective in hitting bad guys.

What is depressing is that Beetlejuice has so many of these, not that it has them at all. And our other game of the day, Best of the Best Championship Karate, is similarly frustrating, as I found out after a lengthy battle that despite the fact that I knocked my opponent to the floor roughly 50 times, the "knock my opponent to the floor" attack does not actually do "damage" as such, and so I was basically being totally useless.

Which brings us to the kid, and my suspicion that the ice cream place would be much less traumatic for him if only he'd been playing video games his entire life. Or, at least, if he'd been playing shitty old video games his entire life. Because seriously, those prepare you really well for the horrifying realization that you are completely impotent in the face of a callous reality that in no way conforms to your will or expectations.

And then you can shut up and enjoy your ice cream without pissing me off.

The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture: Battletoads and Battletoads & Double Dragon

Sorry for the lengthy absence - moving left my access to the games themselves out of commission for several weeks longer than I expected. We now return to your irregularly scheduled programming.

So, Battletoads. This game is, somewhat perversely, a classic. No. Not somewhat perversely. Really perversely. This is possibly the least likely game to be tagged as a classic of the system ever, for one basic reason - it is basically completely impossible.

Let me stress this, because it really bears mentioning. I cheated to play this game. I cheated heavily. And I could not beat it. The third to last level has a racing section that is as close to impossible as I have experienced in a video game. It is a festival of ruthless brutality.

Now, I am all in favor of hard games, so long as they are fair. And Battletoads, to its credit, remains on the good side of that line. Mind you, it toes up against it, and holds its finger to the line and says in a nauseatingly mocking voice "I'm not touching you." But it doesn't cross the line. You always know basically what's happening and what you're supposed to do. It's just generally not quite possible to do it. But that's fine. The world of video games is broad enough to encompass games that are for hardcore maniac players.

The problem is, Battletoads isn't that. It's a game that is widely recognized and even fondly remembered. And that is bizarre. Part of that is no doubt down to an unusually extensive promotional push in Nintendo Power that built the game into one of the earlier anticipated Video Game Events. But events flame out all the time. And Battletoads should have been prime fodder for a flameout - hardly anybody could actually get past level three in the game. Doubly so if they were stupid enough to play multiplayer, which, in that level, required both players to beat a very fast, very hard racing sequence perfectly or both would get sent back to the start.

And if they were lucky enough to clear level 3, their reward was for the game to get harder. Sure, the later levels are great. The snake riding level is absolutely brilliant. Each level has palpably different challenges and different control schemes, each remaining intuitive and fun. But nobody loves the game for these levels, because there are about five people in the world who ever saw them without cheating. So, you know. Not a selling point.

Nor is the game remembered for its innovative premise, which was roughly "directly rip off Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but make them frogs."

And yet the game endures as a strange sort of classic. What, for me, Battletoads is an interesting reminder of is the room for idiosyncracy within the largely homogenous experience of playing video games. And make no mistake, playing video games is an exercise far more in structures of social control than it is in any sort of freedom or interactivity. This is why there are few more iconic images to be had in my generation than the first four question marks of Super Mario Bros. Battletoads has only slightly less iconic status than this, but the experience of playing it is, to my mind, deeply personal in a way few other video games are.

Simply put, to play Battletoads as a child is to confront death. I try, mostly, not to overanalyze games, but that's simply the case here. And not merely in the dully straightforward sense of losing lives. Rather, Battletoads is an encounter with impossibility - an impossibility that is unlike most of those confronted in childhood inasmuch as it is not one that seems likely to be overcome by aging. Video game skill is like this - when I grow up, I may be President, but one's sense of skill at video games is a peculiarly youthful property. (Reinforced, no doubt, by the fact that one is always better than one's parents at video games)

The result is a hard limit. Battletoads was harder than we were capable of grappling with at our prime. Ruthlessly, brutally, uncompromisingly so. And yet it was presented to us as a major video game event. As part of the basic landscape of our mass entertainment. As a child, this landscape mattered to me, as did my ability to navigate it. I doubt I was alone. To be so utterly overcome by it was significant. Because, and this is worth stressing again, unlike 90% of really hard Nintendo games, Battletoads was not hard because the control scheme sucked. It was hard because it was really bloody hard.

It helps also that Battletoads saw release a mere two months before the Super Nintendo, staking out a position at a transitory moment. It is the video game that beat the players right before a seismic shift in which the entire video game apparatus slid away from the known towards something else. What was key about the transition to the Super Nintendo was that there was no backward compatibility. To move forward was to leave an entire generation of games behind. Battletoads, though it was far from the last NES game to come out, marked the end of the era. To end that era with a game that reminded players of their own mortality and of the vagaries of human frailty was a powerful statement that explains, for me at least, why the NES embeds itself mythically in the history of video games in a way no other system can.

Battletoads also had its finger in the wave of games that came after the SNES was released - the sort of epitaph to the NES, with its fantastically ill-advised sequel, which crossed it over with the Double Dragon franchise. By this time the medium had jumped to the 16-bit era, and the NES was a dead system walking - indeed, Battletoads & Double Dragon got a Super Nintendo port a few months after it came out. The game by and large plays like the zombie it is - lifeless, a hair too easy, and somehow lacking all of the perversely brutal charm of the original. The less said about it, the better, really. I think I'll even pass on including a screenshot.

Mercury Shooting Through Every Degree (Battle of Olympus and Battleship)

Exploration is a paradoxical goal for a video game. Indeed, it is a paradoxical goal in general - after all, it's not so much a thin line as no line whatsoever between exploration and being lost.

I spent the evening having dinner with a dear friend I shall not see again before I move. It was to be a longer hanging out, but packing has me exhausted, and I simply was not up for more than a bite to eat. I was about to drive home, but my wrists took me elsewhere, and I found myself in a Starbucks reading Julie Powell's latest, Cleaving, about which I doubt we will see a movie. Julie and Julia was the inspiration for this project, not because it was a great book, but because it was a good book, a solid book, and a foundation for my own mad ideas.

Cleaving is a good book. You can tell by the fact that nobody likes it on Amazon. No, I'm serious. Where Julie and Julia was a fun life-affirming romp about cooking French food, Cleaving is as dark as you'd expect a book about butchery to be. It is a book about adultery, possibly about the dissolution of a marriage (I've not finished it yet), about borderline alcoholism, certainly about obsession, and about a woman who finds a strange solace from it all in dismembering dead animals. It's dark, strange, idiosyncratic, and personal in a way the cheery performativity of Julie and Julia can only hope to be. I love it far, far more.

Sitting in Starbucks, a place that served as a happy treat for a year or so of marriage, then as a refuge for half a year of splitsville, then as an indulgence/convenience for half a year of owning a super-automatic espresso maker, reading a book that falls firmly and cheerily into one of my vice genres (Clever semi-chick-lit confessional non-fiction. The other is procedural thrillers), I felt something approaching contentment.

All moves are into the unknown. I'll be living across the street from the house I grew up in. Third grade through my third and final year of high school. Eight years, plus a decade and one of where I returned to on summers and Christmases. Home, as they say. Yes, my own place, but it will be trivial for my parents to bother me, and only my mother's deep vampiric tendencies with regards to the outdoors are likely to prevent drop-ins.

But I'm surging forth into unemployment, not having local friends, and the future in general. It's a blind stab. In an alternate universe, where I write the Packaging Project, today's post is about the austere unknowability of masses of brown cardboard boxes containing one's worldly possessions. But this is the video gaming blog, so instead we have The Battle of Olympus, a game in the classic NES "wander around trying to figure out what the fuck you're doing" tradition. Which, actually, is just as good a metaphor as boxes.

What distinguishes the NES era of these exploration-style games from their modern counterparts is that in contemporary games, people have basically learned the virtues of actually leading the player around so they have some idea of where to go next and what they're trying to do. In the NES era, you tended to get a sword and and a starting village with no useful equipment and be expected to figure things out for yourself. This is, by and large, considerably less fun than the alternative "have a clue what you're doing" approach, but it does make it a perfectly good metaphor for plowing into the future.

It is difficult to stress the degree to which failing to find a job after 11 years of higher education is just a depressing outcome. Because it really is. And so I don't know if what I'm doing now is returning home, moving forward, going back, or standing still. I've no idea. There's no map. It's actually worse than Battle for Olympus, which at least places helpful NPCs here and there to tell you that you're not strong enough to go a given direction yet. Such NPCs are rarely found in reality.

Battleship provides a different metaphor for exploration. For one thing, the exploration is heavily directed. For another thing, there are explosions. For a third, and this is perhaps the most significant change, a system of mutual interpolation is added to the mix. As you explore, you are also explored. There is a metaphor for sex here. I am not taking it. (Except inasmuch as I just did). But here, the act of exploration turns dark and destructive - a destruction that is turned inward and outward at the same time. Make no mistake - Battleship is self-destructive, because to sustain the game through your own explorations is to submit to attack. As long as one plays, one is in danger. To learn the terrain of the other one must risk being unmade.

This is perhaps the best metaphor yet for moving. To find the future, we must unmake ourselves, split all that we own into boxes. To know the future, we must sift through the past, throw things out, seal things up. There is no moving on without sinking our battleship.

A Slower Sort of Lightspeed: Battle Chess and Battle Tank

Electronics are inexorably linked to the speed of light, and with it the notion of high speed. It is implicit in the design of video games, where a flick of a controller button is expected to show up in real time on the screen. It is thus a surprise, sometimes, to go back and remember how slow video games used to be. The most memorable case is, of course, sprite slowdown - the tendency of the NES to grind to a painful halt if there were too many enemies for it to process efficiently. This tendency - a bug by any measure - is in fact one of the iconic experiences of that generation of video gaming - sufficiently so that pseudo-retrogames such as Mega Man 9 deliberately add in code for flicker and sprite slowdown for the purpose of authenticity to the gaming experience emulated.

But the idea of slowness in this era of video games extends well beyond that. Exhibit A - the tedious stretch of time that is Battle Chess - a game that exists for the sole purpose of tedious slowness. The sole hook of Battle Chess is that instead of just capturing pieces, you see the pieces battle each other. I should stress the verb here - see. This is not Archon, where the battles are controllable, rather, these are several second animations that play every time you capture a piece. Sometimes they are mildly amusing. For the first time. Add to this, however, the fact that all of the pieces walk across the board with a slow methodical plod, and, in a few lucky cases (namely when the knight moves) spend time getting out of each other's way, and you get a game of chess that is tediously slow.

I am aware of the irony implicit in complaining about the slow pace of a game of chess. Chess is not, after all, where one goes for white-knuckled thrills. But seriously, this is fucking painful.

What is strange about Battle Chess, however, is that the ostensible money shots - the animations - are in fact the most tedious portion of the game. Battle Chess is in many ways a sexed down version of Peek-A-Boo Poker, in which the ostensible game is primarily understood as a hassle distracting you from the ostensible content, namely, in Peek-A-Boo Poker, lo-fi porn, and in Battle Chess, lo-fi combat animations. The content, in all cases, is non-interactive. Effectively these games are poor quality VCRs that one has to struggle to make play the desired content.

This pattern is notable in two regards. First, it makes for absolutely awful game design - a realization that culminated in the ill-fated "interactive movies" fad of mid-90s. (An entirely parallel track exists with the equally ill-fated laser disc games of the 1980s, of which Dragon's Lair, which will make an appearance in time, is the most known). Second, and more interestingly for the purposes of a blog rambling about video games as cultural memory work, this structure is the exact opposite of actual tedium.

Actual tedium is the impatience between events. For instance, I defended my dissertation on April 30th. I leave Florida on May 26th. These intervening days are boredom. They are the very definition of boredom. Now, mind you, that is not to say I am unhappy. Merely that I am in a period between two major events. And in that in-between period, there is not a lot to do. Whereas this video game tedium is the events between waits. Of course, with Battle Chess you get the worst of both worlds.

Battle Tank, on the other hand, is a game of the sort I've discussed before - a game that is without question interesting, but not one that I am necessarily interested in. It is also a very slow game, but it is a slowness recognizable as the slowness of life. Or even, perhaps, the slowness of suspense. Battle Tank is a tank combat game. One of the things you quickly learn about tanks playing Battle Tank is that they are slow and cumbersome, and that combat between them is a long process of maneuvering to try to create a line of sight to attack with. The game thus involves much circling around, waiting for an attack.

It is a much closer simulation of my life - chasing encounters that never quite happen, despite my best efforts.

Perhaps that's why I don't want to play again.

Holy Ontological Narrative Concepts, Batman (Batman, Batman: Return of the Joker, and Batman Returns)

It is a mistake to treat Batman as if he is a character. Batman, along with Superman, is the apotheosis of the Modernist "machine made out of words" image of writing. Batman is a set of narrative functions - a set of capabilities. He is defined not as Bruce Wayne but as a particular mode of narrative. Ontologically speaking, Batman always wins.

Grant Morrison gets this. That is why his Batman stories strain all limits of credulity in favor of sheer awesomeness. Batman vs. the Devil. Batman reincarnating through history as Cave Man Batman, Witch Hunter Batman, and Pirate Batman. Batman vs. gods. Batman is axiomatically defined as that which wins. And so telling a good Batman story amounts to making that victory something interesting - not something unlikely.

This is also where the whole illusion of virtual reality breaks down. Because seriously, nobody wants to be Batman. Neal Stephenson observes the crux of the problem: "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad." The joke, of course, is that nobody does. Why? Because nobody wants a fatal disease, to move to a monastery in China, or, as is perhaps most applicable to Batman, to have their entire families wiped out. The price of ontological supremacy is just too high.

Or so one thinks. One can, I suppose, methodically learn a certain measure of superheroing. There is a story I remember from This American Life some time ago of a woman who systematically learned all the skills you would need, basically, to be Batman. Because she was guided by her dreams of being a superhero. The story ends with her failing to get a job at the CIA for unknown reasons. Or perhaps more accurately, the story does not end that way. Ontological supremacy is a treacherous road. Even when you lose out at it, the story stubbornly continues. By the end, we learn she is paralyzingly afraid of nobody liking her. It's a beautiful story.

A lifetime of playing video games and reading comics prepares one somewhat differently for one's ontological fragility. For one thing, it makes you not so ambitious. Fat geek is a very manageable lifestyle. One does not expect triumph. This is the crucial thing about video games - one is prepared for a life of perpetual failure by them.

But a Batman video game remains odd there. Three of them also remain odd. None of them capture Batman in a meaningful sense. The first, a movie adaptation from the basically worthless Sunsoft, a company that basically only made licensed games, is a droll side scroller with generic enemies. It has little to recommend it beyond a reasonably entertaining wall jump, but it's actually reasonably playable, and in a world where I had to buy my video games were I to own it I might actually put the thumb grease into beating it. But as a Batman game, it is fundamentally inadequate. Batman punches people and they burst into flames. OK - that part is actually pretty good. But Batman misses jumps. Batman spends a while trying to figure out how to get to the ledge above him. Batman mistimes a punch and gets run into by an enemy who runs cheerily on and is never caught. Batman falls in combat.

No. Just no.

Batman: Return of the Joker is an essentially unplayable piece of dogshit released for the sole purpose of cashing in one last time for Sunsoft before the Batman license went to Konami. In it, you get Contra style powerups that allow you to machine gun fire Batterangs in increasingly complicated swirly patterns.

But it is Konami's Batman Returns that captures the problem most perfectly. Batman Returns is a perfectly serviceable beat-em-up. But Batman is not a beat-em-up. Batman does not walk calmly through the streets of Gotham in a linear fashion in the hopes that if he takes out enough yard trash he'll eventually fight a super-villain. Batman does not fight crime in levels. He does not restrict his combat to that which can be done with two buttons of a controller. He does not walk the streets. That just isn't what a Batman story is. You can make a blue and... well... blue sprite that has bat ears. But you can't tell a Batman story where Batman's capabilities are finitely definable.

There is no being Batman, because being is itself a circumscription of the essence of the character. To conceive of Batman is to conceive of victory. Over anything. Definition itself, if need be. Batman is not a character in a video game. Nor is he the structure surrounding said character. Batman is the off button. The final teleology. The trump card that can not only win the game, but dismantle it.

And when he punches people, they catch fire.