JPod (27 page)

Sending mail was impossible because of the QWERTY-hostile Chinese keypads. Clicking on REPLY didn't work, and having an Internet connection was so precious that we didn't want to dick around with too many key commands. On the plus side, Steve's company account was still operative. He cruised through many months of cc's that guided him step by step through the gutting of BoardX and the rise of SpriteQuest. When he logged off, he said, "Ethan, hand me my rig."

Then we looked to the right, where we saw hundreds of car keys on a rack, each one numbered.

Under a setting sun, we sped off in what we hoped was the direction of Shanghai, in a top-of-the-line Feng Shui 3000 combination grain harvester/off-road vehicle. Fifteen minutes later we ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

With no food.

With no water.

Night had fallen, and we were out on the road, trying to decide what to do next, when a showroom-condition black GMC Yukon with high beams on approached us and slowed down. It had Washington State plates, and at the wheel was . . .
Douglas Coupland?

"Ethan Jarlewski? What the hell are you doing out here?"

"What the hell are
you
doing here?"

"I'm taking photographs of abandoned factories as an art project. Like I need to explain myself to you."

"Where'd you get that car?"

"I suspect it was probably a sweet-sixteen present for the daughter of the guy who runs the pesticide distillery three valleys away from here." Coupland looked at Steve. "Would that be
Steve?"

Steve said hi.

"Okay. I guess I'll be going, then." Coupland clicked his automatic window roll-up button.

"Doug!"

"What?"

"Get us out of here."

Coupland snorted. Steve asked, "How did you get into this zone? There's a quarantine."

"Haven't you guys learned yet that the global economy is fuelled almost exclusively by American hundred-dollar bills?"

"Doug.
Take us back to Shanghai.
Pleased

"Why should I do that? I've got my next two days all planned."

"We're trapped. We're fucked. We have no idea what to do."

Coupland rubbed his chin. "What will you give me if I drive you back?"

I looked at Steve and we shrugged. "A few hundred bucks."

"Grow up. Give me something real."

Steve and I were stumped.

Coupland said, "I knew you were a fuck-up, Ethan. Tell you what, if I get you guys back to Shanghai, then you have to give me your laptop computer, period. No erasing anything."

"What?"

"That's it, game boy. Give me your life."

"That's evil."

"Take it or leave it."

"But you've already gone through it."

"I barely scratched its surface. Do we have a deal?"

"Okay. Sure."

"Look me in the eyes and say it like you
mean
it."

I looked into Coupland's cold eyes; it was like looking into wells filled with drowned toddlers. "Okay. I promise."

"Hop in. And remember this, Ethan,
I own you now."

We drove away.

. . . pause

. . . waiting to respawn

Outside of videogames, how many games do you play by yourself? Here's a question: did people in the past masturbate more than they do now—or is self-pleasuring a biological constant? A wicked CPU can never replace the artificial intelligence provided by human beings—or can it? Just in case you were in doubt, other people can secretly tell everything about the way you feel. Hi. I'm a definitive gridiron videogame experience! Hi.I'm an expansion pack. Hi. Let me tell you, I would have never played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had I known that it harboured pornographic content or comely sluts who tempt you. What's this? Another year, another fifty dollars? Is it really worth it? You know, when you dream at night, your brain doesn't use your eyes to see. When you play videogames, your brain plays sports without using your body. Does this make you feel free, or does this make you feel like a prisoner of your meat? That buzz you're always hearing is everybody having sex. Dungeon master. Pimp. Prince. Crack ho. Why do games always want good to triumph over evil? Sometimes it's good training to fight for the dark side. If you're trying to quit drugs, who do you seek out, an ex-addict or Ned Flanders? You know what? When you read a book, you're totally lost in your own private world, and society says that's a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it's this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity. What sort of narrow-minded or on propagates this lie? When your grandfather plays solitaire, is he isolate in ghimself? Get a grip, people. Amateur. Anal. Asians. Babes. Big clits. Big cocks. Big tits. Blacks. Nothing I feel is real. Gaming isn't storytelling. Don't be so sentimental. Gaming is about killing your prey. It's about you killing me, or us killing them. All online activity is monitored. Attempts to bypass security are grounds for legal action. I look forward to a day when everybody who lives in sweatshop equatorial nations has the disposable income to choose from the fine array of games and gaming systems our society creates. Lock and load! The differences between you and the others are almost non-existent. The human body is one of the sickest and most foul things we can possibly view. I think that people who savour looking at nude bodies are pervs and molesters—we ought to lock them away and chuck the key. I love touching a game—you know what I mean? When your reptile brain and your CPU become one. Hey, if unplayable crap is such unplayable crap, why does it keep getting made? Last night I had this dream where Mario was a greeter at Wal-Mart and it really fucked me up. No matter what they say, to the gaming companies it all boils down to one dollar per hour of game play. It's a constant. Blondes. Bondage. Brunettes. Butts. Celebrities. Cumshots. If you crave tits, schlong, snatch orgetting it on, you're a godless, amoral monster who will burn in hell. Online gaming makes me feel empty and powerful. And online gaming also makes me feel that the worldis a conquerable place, not a globally warmed degraded shit hole. Kill the killers. Hi. I'mXbox and 360 negative. Other people are boring. Entering a game space and running like hell isn't my idea of a good time. Do you like anonymous sex? Sometimes the story wrecks the game. Instead of getting fun, you only get blather. Come on, just stop it. There's a lot to be said for ignoring the main quest line. Sometimes we all just want to drive a cab or get a blow job in GTA: SA. Life is good. Life sucks. Pen-and-paper RPGgamers are too into the story. They're escaping reality in a lazy way. Books are too non-interactive. Come on, just give us a cheat code . . . wait—it's called reading the last pageso you don't have to read the whole thing. I like flaunting my eighties geek credentials. Ihate guys who flaunt their eighties geek credentials. To me they just seem old. Thinking you're immortal is the same as being immortal. I eat sugary crap all day long, and at my pathetically young age I've stopped tucking in my shirt because my stomach sags out over my waistband. It makes me look like a bad source of genetic material. Dating. Dildo. Drunk girls. Escorts. Farm sex. Feet. It pisses me off that advertisers lump me in with extreme sports people, but at the same time it's okay because people will think I'm morefit than I really am. You may not post new threads. You may not post replies. You may not post attachments. You may not edit your posts. VB code is On. User Name. Remember Me? Password. I noticed this thing—no matter how smoothly you walk, your head always bobs side to side, just a little bit, whereas in games, the smooth, bob less
motion generates a strange and omniscient sensation that is more primal than we're willing to admit. This next one is the first song on our new album. It just came out this week, and the song is called "Pocky." In my neighborhood, all the teenage boys are dying because they're driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don't understand traction or centripetal force. And they're dropping like flies. Puzzles aren't stories. Games that incorporate sex skills as a payoff are embarrassing. Hey, you asked for it!It may beeasy for me, but it's hard as hell for Joe Gamer. Fuck machines. Gay. Glory hole. Group sex. Hairy. Hand jobs. Hardcore. Housewives. Indians. Ever since I got addicted to ElfQuest, I've stopped dreaming at night. It's scaring me. I'll choose God mode over Normal mode every time. Non-linear stories? Multiple endings? No loading times? It'scalled life on earth. I have yet to shoot my load too early. Thread. Tools. Search this thread. Show printable version. Email this page. All flaming, trolling and off-topic debate swill be removed from these threads. All childish banter will be closed or deleted from no won. A troll is a user who posts solely for the purpose of provoking arguments and flame-fests. Feeling unique isn't the same as being unique. Trolls typically offer little in terms of useful debate. Hey, girls. Hey, boys. Superstar deejays . . . here we go! A flame is an argument in which one user verbally attacks another using conflicting opinions. Once users begin arguing like children, insulting each other as they do, we have what can beconsidered a flame war. Individual girls. Interracial. Rate this thread! I'm too old to give a shit about what's hot under the Christmas tree this year. Just stop overpricing everything. Stop bundling your units. Stop being SKU-driven greed heads. Stop scroogeing me. And while we're at it, please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What—suddenly you've magically turned into Noam Chomsky? You think you're special, but you're still just an embryo. Latinas. Legs. Lesbians. Live sex cams. Mature. Midgets. They made you a moron. A potential H-bomb. Natural tits. I sometimes wonder who's really writing those reviews out there. I have this friend, Gail, whose job was to generate fake websites about nine months in advance of a big game or movie so that when media sloths went to "research" their articles, they simply regurgitated what the studio wanted them to. You know, everyone talks about games like they're oxygen or food, and we'll die without them. What a load of sludge. They didn't exist twenty years ago. They're blank. They add nothing to the world. It drives me nuts when people say, "Gamers are developing hand-eye coordination skills that will help them in future situations, like when flying a military jet."Stop defending gaming. It doesn't want it or need it. I never finish any of my games. There's a big pile of them beside the TV. I'm too stupid to throw them out, and too bored to play them. I deserve whatever life throws at me. I know what Castlevania is, and that sort of scares me. LMFAO. To pray for a killer is to be a killer. Hi. I'm selectively backwards compatible After playing Halo 2 for three hours, I went out and mowed down a Red Cross blood bank, raped anything with a pulse and trashed the local mall. Then Itoasted the gods of destruction with a goblet of blood stolen from a Girl Guide's body. Old men and teens. Panties. Pantyhose. Peeing. You know that psychiatric question where they ask you, "If you could push a secret button and kill someone you hated, and nobody else on earth would ever know, would you push it?" I would. Every single time. And to look at me, you'd never know it. Console makers have feelings, too. No they don't. They're monsters. There's always some asshole who brings back the latest thing from Tokyo, isn't there? Your urges are the dark side of God. Every console, every hand-helddevice is like a language or a dialect. The brain was designed to know only maybe fiveor six languages, tops. Even those linguistic freaks from Holland max out at five languages. So choose and love your game systems with care. Anything can be a weapon. After your teens, it's kind of loser-ish to be discussing corporate pricing strategies for games You are an individual with free will. Either buy it or don't buy it. Shaved. Small tits. Smoking. Squirting. Don't discuss Sony like it's a great big benevolent cartoon character who lives next door to Astro Boy. Like any company, Sony is comprised of individuals
who are fearful for their jobs on a daily basis, and who make lame decisions based pretty much on fear and conforming to social norms—but then, that's every corporation onearth, so don't single out one specific corporation as lovable and cute. They're all evil and greedy. They're all sort of in the moral middle ground, where good and bad cancel each other out, so there's nothing really there—which is, in it's own way, far darker than any paranoid or patriarchal theory of Sony. Time = torture. After playing Tony Hawk's ProSkater, I went outside and rode my board down the handrail outside the civic library. I'ma quad now. "Her name is Rio, and she dances on the sand." In the end, it's the Chinese gamer who'll dictate the business. Learn Mandarin. Look, it's just one more button to push to make something happen. All things considered, you're still an ass clown. Gamers aren't consumers. They're gamers, but they also enjoy looking up the stock price of Sony on Yahoo! Finance. Everybody saw you cheat. Trannies. Uniforms. Wrestling women. New Cheats! It doesn't matter how good games get, heaven will always be an arcade full of arcade games to me. MMOG 2K6 SFX PS2 MSRR God approves of the market-share battle between Coke and Pepsi. Hurry, you thick-fingered trolls! Two-Edge has captured Ekuar! Why didn't you stupid Wolfriders send Petalwing back to us? They have tasted troll blood . . . they smell fear, and the prey is old and easy! Runes. Wizard. Immortal. Fucktoy. Your inner sickness is visible to others. They're only flattering your consumer ego by telling you you're unique. The hotter the elves, the worse the game. You can't kill people who are already dead. Even on my Athlon XP 2600+ with age force4 Ti4800,1 stuttered a few times when zoomed all the way out and in a heated battle. Nature made more of you than is necessary. Game play: 2 of 5. Graphics: 4 of 5. People confuse children with angels: make it work for you. You asked for it.