Hello there, dear reader. I know it’s been too long since my last update, you must patiently forgive me, but a married man has a lot of responsibilities when the holidays roll around. Christmas is a funny time for the betrothed, it demonstrates how antiquated the institution of wedlock can be. We have no social mechanism, besides politeness, for turning fresh-faced spouses into proselyte members of the family; we tend to just throw ourselves against one another and hope something sticks. In other cultures, they have dances, chants, rituals, whatever, and we may chucklingly dismiss these as ridiculous, but they acknowledge a necessity for formal integration which we patently ignore, sticking our fingers in our ears and singing “lalalalala” until the problem goes away. Slipping quietly into a brand-new holiday celebration, filled with a lifetime of traditions and honed preferences which you know nothing of, is kind of like being sucked into a game of pick-up basketball with a team that speaks French.
I can only gripe so much about this problem, however, because my in-laws are all gracious, hospitable people who happily massage their traditions and behaviors until I find them comfortable. Corelyn’s mother, upon learning that I was used to some kind of hallowed moment of eggnog drinking instead of random consumption throughout the evening, convened the entire family and decreed a new tradition on the spot. Corelyn’s dad knows I will forget to “shake up the love” at the end of each pre-dinner prayer, so he patiently shakes a little harder than necessary so that I appear to be on the ball. This kind of humility and warmth allows me to skip gingerly around the problem, but I have heard many horror stories from other newlyweds which convince me the issue still exists. Allow me to laugh at their misfortune.
Truth be told, even in my situation, little goofs can arise. People in Cor’s family adopt a rhythm of interaction which an Allen finds simply exhausting, because even when they’re bored to death and not doing anything, they prefer to stay congregated in a single place. My background instructs me that once a lull in activity occurs, I can leave the room and no one will care, but when I put this habit into practice amongst my wife’s clan, confusion arises. Corelyn often finds herself Ambassador from the sovereign nation of Andrew, trying to downplay the absolutely bizarre vibe I gave off when I slipped away from the living room. “He’s just in his room?” they’ll ask, “Doing what? We’re all out here!” The real curse of my wife’s position is that, secretly, she’s on her family’s side here, but she can’t have her husband looking like some kind of absent-minded hermit, so she plays defense.
Moving on to something that has nothing to do with any of that…
“Left 4 Dead” is definitely my favorite game of this year, hands-down; it may even be one of my favorites from the last few. I love being in the firm grasp of a perfectly engineered game, one whose contours are so meticulously thought out that every possible behavior has an answer.
On the off-chance you’re not sure what game I’m talking about, let me enlighten you: it’s a cooperative first-person shooter…with zombies. Lots of zombies. Last time we played through one of the missions, we killed something like 2,000 of them total, and that’s just the ones we killed. The game’s gimmick is that each and every play-through is completely unique, thanks to a complex programming algorithm called “The Director” who watches every aspect of your game and fine tunes the experience on the fly. If you’re doing too well, the Director might make ammo harder to find, or drop fifty or sixty rabid undead on you from behind. If you’re on your last leg, a med-pack might appear in just the right spot, although the Director is just as likely to perform a coup de gras and put you down for good. The point is that “Left 4 Dead” does not, like most other games, erect a series of booby traps and watch helplessly as you traipse through them, it evolves the game around you. Every single person who plays this game, no matter what their experience level, will get a perfectly tuned experience, a breathtaking fight for survival that you just barely survive. When you leap into the safe room after saving your friend from an oncoming wave of zombies, a precious two bullets left in your gun and a meager slice left in your health bar, you come to appreciate how masterfully this thing was engineered.
The neat thing about L4D is that it forces teamwork. No single player, no matter how good, is going anywhere without his or her teammates, so even the biggest jerks on Xbox Live are forced to depend on their comrades for survival. Ammo and health must be rationed, friendly fire assiduously avoided, communication encouraged. The game is extremely, sometimes unbearably, difficult, so strategy and cooperation are the only things that will see you to the rescue vehicle. Personally, I get greater satisfaction from being part of a team than I do just shooting my friends over and over; it’s constructive instead of destructive. When all four survivors pile into the helicopter and fly away from the hundreds of angry undead screaming at them from below, the thrill of success is overwhelming, because the players did it together, depending on one another. That’s my kind of game.
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