The time my dad let me play a violent video game

I remember the first time I played Wolfenstein 3-D.

I was seven years old, and my bedroom was across from my dad’s office in our condo in North Carolina. One day I walked in and saw him playing what looked like a video game on his work laptop (an ugly, chunky thing with a black-and-white screen that was nevertheless state-of-the-art for the time). Before I had even managed a close look at the actual game, I was floored. It looked great and, even more astoundingly, the graphics were moving fast. That just didn’t happen at the time; the computer games I’d played on our Macintosh SE, while fun, were chunky, slow-moving ordeals that were good for a moment of amusement but not hours of play. If I wanted my mind blown, that was our Nintendo’s department.

“Whoa,” I said, slack-jawed.

“Cool, huh?”

I nodded.

“Come on,” my dad said, getting up from his seat. “Give it a try. Just, er…don’t tell your mom. This game is kind of violent.”

That intrigued me. I sat down.

My dad pressed a button that brought up the title screen, and I immediately understood what he had meant. A man in a prison uniform held a pistol as he leaned against the wall. Around the corner, a Nazi walked in his direction. The prisoner’s face was full of rage and—I thought—just a touch of glee.

My dad pressed “New Game,” and selected the difficulty setting. The screen melted away, bringing my mind with it.

“Why does it look this way?”

“It’s first person,” my dad responded. “That means you’re seeing what the character sees.”

“Whoa.”

I was in a jail cell. A hand holding a gun hovered on screen. A man lay dead on the ground ahead. Pressing the up arrow on the keyboard, I passed over the body and through the cell door. I turned a corner. A Nazi soldier stood ahead.

“Press the enter button,” my dad urged.

I did, three times. The gun fired, three times. The Nazi screamed and bent backward, a spritz of blood gushing up before he fell down dead.

My experience with video games up to that point had been Mario and the Legend of Zelda. Enemies were stomped. They flickered inoffensively after being bopped with pixelated swords. They were never shot.

I was panicked. I was horrified.

I was hooked.

In the end, my dad had to tell me it was time to turn the game off. He had work to do. I don’t think I played a violent game again for three years. But the experience left an indelible mark; for the violence, true, but mostly for a perspective on what games could be that hasn’t been matched since. My appreciation for the game’s technical achievements would only deepen years later, when as an adult I read about the early history of ID Software in the book Masters of DOOM, by David Kushner.

Maybe two or three times in my life I’ve revisited Wolfenstein 3-D. I never play past the first episode. As much as I appreciate the game’s technical achievement for the time (it managed to run blazing fast graphics on machines designed to show static spreadsheets), it gets pretty repetitive. DOOM holds up better.

But I’ll never forget that moment I shared with my dad, when he gave me a brief glimpse into the future.

‘Mythic Quest’s’ C.W. Longbottom two-parter perfectly represents the best and worst of the creative life

Josh Brener as a young C.W. Longbottom in S2E6 of “Mythic Quest.”

“Mythic Quest,” the video game company workplace comedy created by the minds behind “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” continues to draw me into the web of Apple TV+.

“Sunny” occasionally granted its cartoonish cast of alcoholic narcissists moments of empathy—such as Mac’s episodes coming out as gay, or Charlie’s unrequited love for the waitress—Mythic Quest” elevates asshole pathos to an art form. Its characters are cartoonish narcissists, true, but only just long enough to lull you into a false sense of security before their humanity comes flooding through the screen. This switcheroo is largely the point of the show, according to star and co-creator Rob McElhenney. 

Nowhere is this thesis more apparent than in the show’s recent two-parter on C.W. Longbottom, the writer of “Mythic Quest’s” titular game, played by F. Murray Abraham. For one-and-a-half seasons, Abraham’s hammy role has been little more than a caricature of the has-been science fiction writer—drinking, cradling his Nebula Award, and reminiscing about his days as a globe-trotting, STD-riddled womanizer. The most pathos he had received prior to last week was a surprisingly heartfelt episode B-story in which he and tester Rachel (Ashly Burch) debate whether story-heavy cutscenes or gameplay are superior, and come to respect one another’s perspectives. Even that arc ends on a gag, with Longbottom telling a group of children touring the office that “She showed me hers and then I showed her mine.”

But last week’s “Backstory!” and Friday’s “Peter” gave viewers the full Longbottom experience: the character at his best and his worst, his most empathetic and most execrable. The episodes differ greatly production-wise—the former being a lush “Mad Men”-esque period piece and the latter being more or less a bottle episode—but they follow similar arcs that begin C.W. on a high before putting him through an emotional gauntlet that ends on a redemptive high note.

“Backstory!,” introduced us to the artist as a young man, when he was still just “Carl,” a bright-eyed novice writer who’s just been hired by his favorite science fiction magazine as a junior copyeditor. (In a bit of inspired casting, he’s played by Josh Brener, the best friend on “Silicon Valley” who can’t stop failing his way to riches and recognition) He quickly meets fellow new hires and aspiring authors A.E. and Peter (Shelley Hennig and Michael Cassidy), and the three agree to become a “tripod” supporting each other on the path to literary success.

But Carl’s talent lags behind that of Peter and A.E., for whom he harbors a crush. They (gently) criticize his work for lacking vision, plot cohesion, or even sensible pronunciation (he insists the Tears in the title is pronounced “tAYrs” not “tEErs”—even though his friends note that he included a prominent crying scene). 

Carl edits and rewrites and expands his story countless times without success, becoming increasingly embittered as A.E. sells a story into the magazine and falls in love with Peter. He reaches his lowest point when, drunk, he sees “Pong” on display in a store window and has an epiphany about the future of games and storytelling, which is promptly dismissed by his employer and his friends.

Young C.W.’s vision of the future.

Carl eventually publishes “Tears of Anaren” (now pronounced “tEErs”) to accolades, earning his beloved Nebula, but we discover he succeeded by plagiarizing Isaac Asimov. The episode flashes forward to C.W. as an old man selling chickens at a Renaissance Fair. He looks like a man broken by his unrealized potential, until he’s approached by Ian and programmer Poppy (McElhenney and Charlotte Nicdao) with an offer to write the backstory for their video game. The episode ends with a brief cut to young Carl in front of the Pong display, followed by the elder C.W. smiling in a moment of pure vindication.

It’s a heartwarming moment, but “Peter” immediately reminds us that C.W. is a vain and petty mess of a person. The episode reunites C.W. and Rachel, the latter having agreed to drive him on an errand under the expectation that she’ll learn something from the elder writer. But C.W. dashes her high hopes when he reveals they’re headed to the home of Peter, and that he plans to “f*ck his wife”—metaphorically, as A.E. died years ago. He plans to rub his former friend’s nose in “Tears of Anaren’s” success, even bringing his Nebula with him in a duffel bag. (Interestingly, he refuses to mention “Mythic Quest,” his most recent and ongoing success, because it’s a video game and not a book)

Although C.W. believes Peter (now played by William Hurt) has invited him over to apologize for “stealing” A.E., he quickly discovers that Peter expects him to apologize for abandoning their friendship. C.W. spends the second act of the episode becoming increasingly drunk, mocking his old friend’s lack of success compared to his brilliant wife, and generally showing his whole ass (at one point literally, when he defecates inside a desk drawer). When he discovers Peter is dying, he’s only momentarily taken aback before doubling down on his cruelty.

He passes out and wakes up in the guest bedroom, where he’s greeted by Peter and A.E.’s daughter (Shelley Hennig, again). She reveals that she tricked C.W. into a meeting under the hope that two old men “who share an incredibly specific set of interests” could mend their friendship in her father’s final days. Handing him a copy of “Mythic Quest,” she says that her mother admired C.W. for predicting the rise of video games and finally finding his niche.

C.W. apologizes to Peter for his behavior, and reveals that he’s read every book in his old friend’s obscure “Hammerfall” series. The episode ends with the two men sitting side-by-side, Peter reading the unpublished final volume of his saga while C.W. listens, enraptured. 

Peter and C.W. reconnect.

What makes the two episodes such a resounding success, and C.W. so empathetic, is the way they use him to display the best and worst characteristics of the creative life. Consistently, C.W. is shown at his happiest when he’s writing and connecting with others; and at his unhappiest when he’s obsessed with being a writer and comparing his success against others. 

Both episodes drip with overt and implied evidence of C.W.’s insecurity. The revelation in “Backstory!” that C.W.’s greatest success was plagiarized allows us to understand that he’s racked by (arguably deserved) impostor syndrome. In “Peter,” the fact that the location of the episode is a mansion paid for by his A.E.’s successful writing career adds a delicious layer of class anxiety. C.W.’s embarrassment over “Mythic Quest” combines both of these fears—the author can’t shake his belief that success in video games is nothing compared to success in books. 

C.W. only finds redemption when he finds a suitable medium for his talent and later accepts that his successes don’t match the rigid standard of success he adopted 50 years ago. More importantly, he learns to put his ego aside and celebrate his friend’s creative work. 

The episodes succeed because anyone who’s dabbled in writing and art can see themselves in C.W. Longbottom. The creative life is an obsessive one, and there’s an almost invisible line between obsession with art and obsession with being an artist. But it’s important to know where that line is, because it divides heaven and hell.

Why getting better doesn't mean feeling better

Image by Mohamed Hassan, via Pixabay

In the past few months, I’ve gotten back to the gym. Partially to counter-balance all the lazing about I did (and, honestly, still do) mid-quarantine, and partially to counter-balance all the moping about I did mid-quarantine. 

It helps. It really does. 

But it’s amazing to me how much my expectations of the benefits of exercise differ from the reality. My (still substantial) gut tells me that after a few months of regular exercise, I should feel great—supple, limber, full of energy. And, most of fall, hungry to get to the gym as often as possible.

Ha. 

The reality is that I’m tired, cranky, and constantly surprising myself with muscle cramps in new and exotic locations of my body. Sure, I enjoy a post-exercise endorphin rush. But my greatest motivator to exercise is that, when it’s over, I can do pretty much whatever the hell I want guilt-free. (By which I mean drinking one beer and playing video games on the couch; If my thing were strippers and blow, that might be a different story)

This isn’t just a matter of growing old. I wrestled four seasons in high school—two varsity—and felt the same way every damn year. I would begin the pre-season full of pep and vigor; but by post-season I would be convinced that my muscles were deteriorating and I would soon be in a hospital bed, begging my parents not to look at my browser history after I was gone. I compared notes with teammates, several of whom agreed the end was around the corner. At these times, we would begin looking at our coach Mr. W with a certain amount of suspicion, as if he were lacing our egg whites and whey isolate shakes with arsenic.

This attitude buried the truth: that in February we were consistently putting up weights and running sprints that would have seemed impossible in September, or even November. Asthma attacks always plagued me during the first workouts of the school year, but would disappear entirely to the point that I would forget they were a possibility. There were certainly things to criticize about the wrestling team experience—so many “character building” activities for young men are just the blind leading the inexperienced—but Mr. W poisoning us for our inheritance money was not one of them.

The lesson that I appreciate now, that I didn’t appreciate at the time, is this: Being better almost never means being comfortable. Progress is not pleasant in any immediate way, and often the only way to get any satisfaction out of it is to keep your eyes on the horizon, looking to the long-term.

I’d be lying if I said there weren’t days that I choose to zone out to a podcast on the elliptical. But for the most part, my go-to is the rowing machine. Rowing is a good aerobic exercise that also offers some full-body resistance, so I feel like I get all my working out done in a compact 30 minutes. I also like it because it’s a slog. It’s hard to do, and mostly unpleasant. So at the end of a session, I feel accomplished—a little bit tougher, mentally.

Even if there were no other benefits to rowing, I wonder if this toughening is enough all on its own. Life has a way of hitting us with hard times. It doesn’t pay to crumble when they arrive.

The Knife: New release available June 2

It's been a long time since I last wrote. The response to the coronavirus has changed everyday life dramatically. Here in Washington state, the stay-at-home order has kept us indoors for more than two months, even as spring has transformed the outside world into a vivacious temptress. There are a lot of things I miss. Visiting family. Seeing movies in the theater. Stepping past the doorway of a bookstore and conversing with the staff; not just exchanging curt hellos from a curbside pickup checkpoint.

Is it perverse to say there have been upsides as well? I don't think so. My fiancee and I may have more time to spend with each other. Without the obligations of a traditional workday, I can prioritize the most important tasks and knock off when they're complete. I exercise regularly. The conversations had with cashiers and homebound neighbors, even muffled behind our masks, are sweeter. Life has marched on.

The normalcy we knew receded into a pinprick in our rearview mirrors long ago, but we'll drive up to a new normal--maybe even a better normal. Human beings, on the whole, are resilient creatures.

I'd like to let you know that I have a new book coming out next week. It's called "The Knife," and it's a novella about love, family, and violence told from the perspective of a common kitchen knife. The book will release on June 2, and it's available for preorder now at this link.

Here's the description:

Born in the womb of the Earth and reborn in the flames of the factory, the knife was told it would be given purpose. That purpose was clear: help humans prepare food, nourish themselves, and nourish their families. So when the knife was purchased by homemaker Gina, it thought it was set for life.

But when Gina's son decides the knife would be better suited to darker deeds, the knife's entire reason for being is called into question.

Equal parts comedy and tale of existential dread, "The Knife" is a philosophical novel about best intentions and what happens when others decide our purpose for us.

Because everyone gets used sometimes.

This is a different story from my usual fantasy fare—far stranger, for one thing, but also more personal. At its core, “The Knife” is a parable about what happens when we seek validation from our jobs above all else.

More fantasy is on the way, though. I'm currently in the final stretch of a new Kurik'har the Orc story I'm calling "The Scavenger and the Parasite." It's a fantasy-horror set in the jungle, where Kurik'har—a young military recruit in this story—is stranded and reliant on the help of a strange and malevolent hermit.

When we last saw Kurik'har, he was older and captaining a pirate ship in "The Rag Kings of Vanais." The anthology that housed that story, "Fantastic Realms," ended its publication run recently, and the story will be available as a standalone as soon as I can arrange for a cover.

Cheers,

Mark

Happy Birthday, Robert. E. Howard

Robert E. Howard playing pirate in his land-locked yard in Cross Plains, Texas.

I write you again today not to promote Fantastic Realms, but to honor the memory of a fantasy legend.

Today, Jan. 22, marks the 114th birthday of American author Robert E. Howard.

Howard invented many characters over the course of his career in the "pulps," including puritan crusader Solomon Kane and hot-tempered boxer Sailor Steve Costigan. But he's certainly best known for Conan the Cimmerian--better known today as Conan the Barbarian, thanks to a 1970s Marvel Comics series and the 1982 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

My first exposure to Conan was in my grandfather's library, where books on military history and engineering sat next to tattered paperbacks featuring aliens, robots, rippling strong men with swords, and buxom women dressed in tattered dishcloths. That library reflected his personality perfectly--an overpowering (often intimidating) seriousness of character coupled with an enduring, almost boyish, love of the weird and the adventurous. When he described the premises of these early 20th Century Burroughs and Howard novels to me, he spoke with a special tone of respect. But my adolescent tastes leaned towards computers and spaceships, so I always passed over those quaint-seeming fantasy tales to leaf through old copies of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. 

Strangely, I became fascinated by Robert Howard the Man a full decade before I read a single word of Conan the Cimmerian. When I was 21, I picked up a book titled "Genius and Heroin," an encyclopedia of artists and their self-destructive habits. Howard was barely a footnote, but only his entry has remained burned into my memory.

Born in Texas in 1906, Howard spent the first third of his life traveling from rural town to rural town (his father was a country doctor), and the latter two-thirds in the small town of Cross Plains. Though he loved boxing and wrestling, he was a sickly boy with a heart condition, and his mother kept him close to home. She herself lived with tuberculosis, and Howard became her nurse whenever she fell ill. Hester Howard was well-educated, and she instilled her son with a love of poetry and literature. His habit of bringing books everywhere he went was considered eccentric in a town where men made their living from the plow or the oil field. 

His neighbors only found it more strange when he made his career as a writer (not least because he had a habit of shouting his stories out loud as he typed them). But his subject matter was in perfect harmony with his surroundings, insofar as his subject matter was violence. Early 20th Century Texas was America's last frontier, and the oil boom in Cross Plains attracted rough men looking for fast money (not unlike Conan). Gunshot and knife wounds were frequently among the ailments that helped young Robert's father put food on the table. The corruption of local oil barons and politicians prejudiced the author against the excesses of civilization, a theme that frequently recurred in his stories.

In many ways, Howard aspired to the rough life that surrounded him, and in this we see how contradictory he was. He was brilliant and bookish, but took photos of himself boxing with friends or posing menacingly with weapons. He lived his entire life in his parents' home, but wrote about globetrotting adventure. His characters caroused with every woman in sight, but he only had one girlfriend and spent much of his time nursing his tuberculosis-stricken mother through bouts of illness. When his mother fell into a coma from which he was told she would never wake, he was so shattered that he immediately went home and took his own life at the age of 30.

Howard's life was far too short. But his literary output would have been incredible even for a writer twice his age. He penned more than 400 stories and several of novels--spanning Westens, horror, fantasy, sports, comedy--in a career that lasted barely more than a decade.

Conan is his most enduring creation of all. Though Howard birthed the sword-and-sorcery genre through his Kull of Atlantis stories, it was Conan--the iron-thewed barbarian with volcanic blue eyes--who inspired countless other authors to send characters off into strange lands in search of gold and glory. My character Kurik'har the Orc certainly has Conan DNA--the pirate tale "Queens of the Black Coast" provided ample swashbuckling inspiration for the Kurik'har story "The Rag Kings of Vanais."

Happy Birthday, Robert. You're an American titan.

Cheers,
Mark

Sadly, though Robert E. Howard was prolific, scholarly information on his life is scarce. I'm currently enjoying the biography "Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard," written by Mark Finn and published by the Robert E. Howard Foundation in Cross Plains, which maintains a museum in his former home. Howard's stories are easy to find in reprinted collections of his works. Indeed, e-book collections of his entire bibliography can be picked for the princely sum of $2-$3.

Fantastic Realms available for pre-order

Welcome to my blog, and a belated Happy New Year to you!

It’s hard to predict where a blog will go from the first post, but I figure this will be the place where I hem, haw and wax poetic about my current projects, world lore, the fantasy genre in general, and whatever books happen to be on my nightstand.

My first post falls under the category of “sales pitch” and, while I admit this is a bit tacky, it’s a project I’m quite proud of.

I'm excited to announce that Fantastic Realms will be available in one week. The anthology comes out on Jan. 27, 2020, and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Fantastic Realms was edited by science fiction and fantasy author Craig Martelle and collects 25 stories spanning several sub-genres of fantasy, including my sword-and-sorcery pirate tale, "The Rag Kings of Vanais." (It appears on page 357, in case you're wondering😉)

Here's the official back cover blurb:

Forested worlds with mountains and magic. From swords to serpents to spells, with characters you cheer for, mourn for, and most of all, follow on their quests. Journey to Fantastic Realms with 25 stories written by fantasy scribes, both old and new.

Dragons fly when the wind turns warm. Heroes unsheathe their swords when shadows darken doorways. A scrap of a girl enters the gladiator’s ring. A hero’s quest, or is it revenge? Fight to win. Fight to survive.

After reading the galley proof from the publisher earlier this month, I'm humbled to be included among the other stories in this collection. Shayda Leigh Baskhshi's "The Legend of Jehanne Twinblades" was a particular favorite of mine, but every story is a rollicking good time.

The e-book is available at a pre-order price of $3.99, and will be sold at $4.99 after release (it will also be borrow-able through Kindle Unlimited). Print copies will be priced at $19.99.

Cheers,
Mark