If there’s a theme I’ve experienced with television and pop culture, ever since I was a kid, it’s the “I wish I hadn’t missed that phenomenon. I missed Highlander in the theatres because I never heard of it. Later, I missed the shows Nowhere Man and Threshhold, both of which I blame network tv. And yes, I’m one of those geeks that thought SportsNight was the best thing on TV.

Recently I hunted down the Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency pilot - don’t ask me how because then RIAA would have to sue me, effectively a dead-on-arrival TV show due to [insert favorite Hollywood rumor here]. What amazes me is that someone could watch the show and not carry it through, especially after spending the money and time to get something like this off the ground. The show is based on Ellis’ Global Frequncy comics - which is something I never got into.

For those that are not going to see it ever, the story is simple: It’s the end of the world [or humongous terrorist attack or very large natural disaster - you get the picture] and Michelle Forbes gets to play the cold hard bitch that going to save it, including recruiting you. Strike one: how can you deny Michelle Forbes a role she’s born for? Hollywood hates strong women, and has been particularly rude to Forbes, in my opinion.

You have the very cool Warren Ellis twist on it, in this case a psychic quantum bomb, but that’s not the important thing: the Global Frequency is potentially everyone - smart, skilled, or simply the best available person at the moment.

As big as Ellis’ internet ego-footprint is (here and here), I picked out an underlying idea that’s common with a lot of Ellis’ work: we’re all on this planet together and it’s a good thing. This is something we’ve seen on his run of the Authority. Strike two: Ellis’ viewpoint is perfectly represented on the show.

The characters include a hot repressed librarian er, physicist who has yet to let her hair down - her first exposure to the audience is effectively a very common character reaction to a corpse: the humorous barfing scene. It’s a great exposure to the character and humanizing moment.

Add to it Aimee Garcia’s sonorous voice (and body) as Aleph, the comptroller of the group. She humanizes much of the story and characterization bringing the three different characters together - a role that would’ve allowed Garcia to have some of the best lines in the show.

The end of the show forces an excellent character choice that would’ve killed most shows in the 80s and 90s, but is perfect for Post 9-11 television.

Plus - San Francisco! What better place to put a freaky storyline?

So what was the problem? I don’t know. The conspiracy theorist in me says the ideal is dangerously democratic. The cinematic fan tells me it was shot far too dark, whcih could’ve been my recording. Wikipedia has it’s own theory. Either way, while I’m a bit of a Warren Ellis freak, I regret finding good things out that have already been cancelled. Feels like I keep missing the important calls - the good news is that I’m planning on getting copies of the trade paperback today.

For those who like and follow internet light saber battles - the masters have returned. For those that don’t, I find your lack of faith disturbing.

There’s games and then there’s games. Valve’s Left4Dead has basically opened up and polished up a genre of games, and has done so in a way that other co-op, post-apocalyptic, four-on-four person teams will never be the same. Yep, the genre is “COPAFOFP w/ Zombies.” Ok, I kid.

This game was hard for me to write about not because everyone else has given it a great review, but because it is so. damned. good. Plus, I really wanted to say something important about it’s game play.

Reviewer credentials - never review a game you haven’t played extensively. Yes, I’m whining at YOU, Yatzee!
According to my Steam account, I’ve got:
34 hours of playtime
37 of 51 achievements
My biggest Hunter pounce was 10 points (out of a potential 25)
and I’ve yet to make it through any campaign on Expert.

But I keep trying. So why’s it taken me so long to write about this game? Hell, it’s been out for weeks - what’s defective with me? It’s because I’ve read and watched a ton of reviews and all of them have raved. Simply raved about this game, except the standard Yatzee Croshaw wingeing and nit-picking, telling me he phoned this one in.

I’m going to talk tangentially about this game: it’s a fucking masterpiece like most Valve games, and it’s got the polish that EA would’ve simply ignored to put into it. So raving more about it isn’t going to help.

A core of the L4D gameplay is cooperation, and helping each other. Everyone knows that the clock is ticking - you have to make it through the map. You have to kill zombies. Everyone, except the very newbie, knows that this game is bent on killing your character and simply will not allow a “respawn” - it’s do or die. In versus mode, it’s even more pronounced.

What is important is that I’ve added more Steam community “friends” in the last 2 weeks than I have since I’ve installed Steam. You can immediately tell good players from bad after one game of L4D… scratch that… not good players, but good PEOPLE. Bad people - like jerks and whiners - are almost completely cut out of the game play because… well, they’re jerks. Either through voting or a tit-for-tat Dawkins’ like grudging (from Dawkins’ Selfish Gene), where you help someone, but they don’t help you - no one else helps them either.

The good people work together as a team, who have low tolerance for whiners, who have a willingness to both teach and learn new strategies and tactics. Team Fortress, Halo and all the rest of the group vs. group games wish they had this level of excellent game play. And yes, there are some guilds that develop impenetrable cooperation, but it does congeal as part of the game play itself. It doesn’t evolve from the game play. We will get back to that evolution point in a bit.

The strategies used on the first week of game play have completely transformed in less than two weeks. As players get familiar with other players and maps, they enact different strategies - usually variations of fast/slow for survivors and bottleneck/harrying for infected (that’s zombies). The players have developed standards - one or two people end up becoming tactical leads and the others simply support them.

Also, players develop different tactics based on the situation - as we (the collective players) learned of weaknesses, we’ve also learned of strengths - in the characters of the infected or the maps, or the ability to teamwork. As the strategy is consensus based, all it takes is one ass-tard… sorry, player… who wants to Rambo the game and the entire game play is changed. And one person who whines about the speed of his computer simply gets booted because there’s a low tolerance - the game play is too fast and communication too important to tolerate whiners.

So, not only does L4D have evolving strategies, tactics, but culture as well. If communication is a precious commodity, tolerance for someone whining “Fuck fuck fuck they’re cheating that’s bullshit you fuckers” on a webmic will immediately get the boot. Thus, a meta game exists enforcing good standards of team play.

And this is where we’re seeing an incredible change in player behavior. If you act like a jerk, your three partners “darwin” you out of the gene pool. As a human being who wants to have a good time, you learn either because it’s in your nature, or because you’re force to cooperate. You learn to play - not “nice” but “good”.

In a world that celebrates evil-wins-out behavior prominently displayed in reality shows Left4Dead is a really “good” thing.

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P.S. It would be neat if, when playing solo, the bots need a command console such as “Protect [character]”, “Defend HERE” - just a few simple commands would help a lot. Plus, I hate it when the bots set off the car alarm… but.. ok, I can live with it. Stupid bots. Also, should be able to play solo as infected to learn the tactics.

I’m not lying to anyone anymore - there’s similarities between a prison and day job. Granted, I’ve only been in a jail cell and only for a day and a half, so I truly don’t know prison as some of my friends have experienced it. But the privilege of others was forefront on my mind this week.

So a bit about my work, effectively I’m a process and web architect working through the impacts of perceived improvements. And I work for a large multiple leader group and they sometimes are infected with groupthink. This week, this entire week was one long infection of groupthink after groupthink “great ideas.”

From improving the speed of the website, to let’s just call the backend through SQL, I felt it was the same conversations I’ve had for years. We’re not going to improve the speed of the website without adding extra processing of orders - the trade for automation (a one-time cost of development) is eyeballs (an ongoing cost for manual work). And, if someone is buying a large order, say 40 line items on it, it’s going to take some time to process that order correctly to save it.

In short, there’s a method to giving clients good feedback of order creation when you have a system that takes a long time: it’s called GRAPHICS. It’s the appearance the order is being created that is the most important. Appearance. I am telling my company to LIE to their CLIENT. And yet…

So, one part of privelege is the ability to participate in groupthink without punitive measures… much like everyone going along with the emperor has no clothes.

But, as I was talking technical stuff with co-workers, slightly bent down to point at some data on his screen, one leader (way above a manager position) came up behind me and put both of his hands on my shoulders. It was a friendly, man-on-man gesture of appreciation… I’m sure… but the privilege was there. I could never feel good about doing that to him… nor would he.

And this was when I thought… there’s a LOT of similarities between prison and where I work.