I don’t just love games because they are fun to play though.  I love them because they are a way at looking at the universe, of understanding the fundamental nature of this thing we call reality.  All games are just systems of rules, of balances of risk versus reward, of goal setting,  And aren’t those all things that apply to this thing we call life?

And then there are dice.

For most people, dice are such a closely associated element of board games, they might be surprised at just how many game players hate them.  Really.  There’s an entire class of players who hate any form of randomness.  They want games that are safe, predictable.  Where every strategy is equally viable and every path to victory as simple as following steps one, two, three.  They hate the idea that their most carefully laid plans will be destroyed by one bad roll.

Maybe it’s because they’re control freaks.  Or maybe it’s because it sucks watching your army of little plastic soldiers get slaughtered by an unsympathetic die roll.  Or maybe they just hate the fact that the universe doesn’t give a damn how clever you are.  Sometimes, it’ll crush everything you’ve worked for, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop it.

Einstein was wrong.  God does play dice with the universe.

The dice has always represented the random, the chaotic, the entropic nature of reality itself.  We are never in full control of our lives.  We are always plotting and planning and pretending like we can bend the universe to our will if we just believe it enough, work hard enough, have enough drive.  But it really only takes one bad die roll to remind you how our best laid plans can fall apart in a moment.  Or one good one to remind us that sometimes we succeed despite ourselves.

I embrace dice.  I love the dice, even if they don’t always love me back.  But sometimes, they do.  Never consistently.  Their affections are fleeting, their wrath always constantly hanging over my head.  The dice remind me that I am not in charge of my own destiny.  At least, not fully.  And that life is full of random rewards and penalties.   You will lose through no fault of your own.  And win too.

Mostly though, I’m reminded that the dice don’t care either way, and that there’s neither malice or joy in their actions.  When everything is going my way and they turn against me, I curse their existence.  And when they turn defeat into victory, I praise them for their generosity.  And when they do exactly what they’re expected to do, I don’t even pay much attention to them.

It’s foolish to rely on the dice, but it’s just as foolish to ignore them.  Because at the end of the day, we all live with them.  Even when we’re not playing games at all.

While I’m not a big horror fan, I do believe though that monsters that are genuinely scary usually come in two types:  The Single-Minded and The Unknowable.

The Single-Minded monster is straightforward.  It exists for one simple purpose and lives to only fulfill that purpose.  It doesn’t generally care if you, specifically, live or die.  It just wants to do what it does and if you get in the way, you’re screwed.

The Blob is the best and most terrifying example.  It isn’t intelligent.  It doesn’t scheme.  It just stalks and eats.  And the more it eats, the bigger it gets.  It carries no particular malice toward individuals.  They’re only food.  And unchecked, it would eat everything in the world.  The Blob is a known quantity.  It might not be very mysterious, but it doesn’t need to be.  Because even knowing what it is and what it wants doesn’t give you much of an advantage when dealing with it.  Other than to run away from the damn thing and hope someone, somewhere, manages to stop it.

Jason Vorheese is another example.  He lives to kill.  He has no other purpose.  And while he’s appeared in so many films, it’s hard to take him seriously as a monster at this point, it doesn’t change the fact that he is one.  And that he’s a pretty darned effective one at that, considering he is just as difficult to kill as the Blob.  Maybe more difficult.  Jason certainly has more movies.

Whenever animals attack, they tend to fall into this category.  Whether it’s rabid dogs or crazed bears, birds or giant rabbits, they tend to be remarkably simple in their motivations.  And that single purpose is what makes them so scary.  Because if all the birds in the world just decided to attack us, it’d be pretty ugly.

The second monster type is The Unknowable monster.  The unknowable monster is trickier than the single-minded beast because the unknowable remains largely unfathomable.  It’s a much harder monster to create and it’s a virtually impossible monster to sustain.  The more often the unknowable monster appears, the less unknowable it is.  And the more we know about it, the more concrete its motivations and methods, the less terrifying it becomes.

Freddy Krueger started as an unknowable.  He was something that came in your dreams and killed you when you slept.  You couldn’t really fight him, and why he chose you was a mystery.  But then the film explains that he’s the ghost of a serial killer and he’s coming back for revenge.  It takes something away from him then.  Instead of being an indefinable thing come to slay you in your sleep, he’s an evil ghost out for vengeance.  While he’s still scary, he isn’t the same.

As the movies progressed, as Freddy became less of a nightmarish force and more of a serial killer with a gimmick, he became correspondingly less frightening.  By the time Freddy Vs. Jason rolled around, Freddy was more of an evil genius in ghost form than anything else.  Jason, though, remained a simple-minded killing machine who exists only to kill.  It’s true that he loses some of his teeth when we see him as a frightened little boy under it all, but considering that in the real world, he is still a monster who slaughters everything he comes across, he’s still fairly direct.

Cthulhu and most of the H.P. Lovecraft mythos suffers from this affect.  Does anyone really fear Cthulhu anymore?  While he once represented the inevitable doom hanging over our heads, he’s instead become something of a mascot for fear, rather than an agent of it.  The more written about Cthulhu and his gang, the less terrible they are.  Oh, sure, they’d kill us all in a heartbeat, but they still seem to have motivations that make sense.

Cthulhu is just the janitor for much more powerful forces.  He’s just a workin’ stiff with tentacles.  He’s the concept of abstract horror put in solid form and then made into stuffed animals.

In watching the trailer for the new Paranormal Activity 3, I couldn’t help but be struck by how unscary the monster is at this point.  The first film was all about a monster that we never saw, that might have been a demon, might have been something else, that was lurking invisibly in the house.  What it wanted was never clear.  Why it existed at all was never mentioned.  And where it came from . . . hell, it could’ve been outer space for all we knew.  What made Paranormal Activity frightening was NOT knowing these things.

I get that Hollywood can’t let go of a moneymaking idea, but I don’t see why horror fans find this stuff frightening.  Because, aside from a few shock scares, the monster has lost its most terrifying quality, its unknown nature.

This is what made Cloverfield interesting.  There’s a giant monster attacking the city, and because we view it from the perspective of just random citizens, we never learn much about it.  Just that it’s big and frightening and it’ll kill you by stepping on you and not even notice.  And those little things that drop off of it, what are they?  Is this an invasion?  Is it just a big misunderstanding?  Is the monster just as confused as we are?

Actually, all those questions have answers.  That was part of the marketing for the film.  If you looked, you could find the answers.  But why would a horror fan want them?  Why would I want to know more when, by knowing more, I rob myself of the mystery that makes the monster scary in the first place?

Maybe it’s because, even when we embrace our fears, we are always striving to defeat them.  We like to be terrified, but only on our own terms.  And we also can’t resist seeking answers.  We are terribly uncomfortable with the unknown.  The Blob might want to eat us, but at least we can comprehend that.  And Cthulhu might rise out of the depths to destroy civilization, but it’s some small comfort to understand why he’s doing it.  And if you give us a movie about a giant monster rampaging through New York, we can’t resist asking “why?” and seeking out those answers.

The horror of the unknown so terrifies us that we can’t allow it.  Not even in our fiction.  We need to know, and I think that’s where H.P. Lovecraft was wrong.  We aren’t frightened by answers, even answers that aren’t especially comforting.  We’re terrified by the prospect of not getting answers, of living without ever knowing.

That’s why the prequel will remain appealing.  Not because they ever really give us good answers.  They don’t.  But they give us answers, regardless, and answers are what we seek.  And even monsters aren’t allowed to get away without supplying those answers.

The one horror we will always reject is uncertainty, and that isn’t just why our monsters tend to lose their teeth.  It’s why we tend to reject the abstract, why we become beholden to flawed philosophies of all types, and why we are so easy to lie to.  Because we’ll take any answer, no matter how silly, over no answer.

The most horrific concept isn’t found in blobs from outer space, slashers, or torture flicks.  It’s found in three little words:

I don’t know.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

It’s time for our infrequent and irregular Ask A Smart Guy segment.  Let’s start with this comment someone recently posted on the site.

Still, I’m behind, and I really shouldn’t be wasting much time blogging when I have actual work to do.

So I bought Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on DVD and watched it again.  Perhaps I’m sounding like a broken record, but damn if that isn’t a great movie.  The spaghetti tornado alone is worth the price.  Highly recommended.  And I’ll try not to mention it again.

Even before I was a writer, I was a writer.  All that novelology entails is creating a story via imagination and conjecture.  I have this game I play sometimes.  When I see someone on a cell phone, I’ll imagine that through a quirk of fate, they picked up the wrong signal.  The voice on the other end of the line says a meteor is heading for Earth, and, long story short, you’ll be dead by the end of the hour.  Then I ask myself, what would this person do with that time?

Try it sometime.  It’s a great way to flex your novelologist’s talents.  Even if you aren’t a professional story maker-upper like me, you can still have fun with it.

Okay.  This was a short post.  Just checking in.  Now back to work.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

“Martinez and Thomas made some interesting points about the redundancy of the genre and how every zombie story is basically the same, but none of that really matters because zombies rule!”

Now this, I can respect.  No nonsense suggesting that zombies are something special.  No long-winded semi-intellectual dissertation about the relevancy of the zombie genre.  It’s just, hey, zombies are awesome, and that’s all he needs to know.

Let’s admit this.  We are not a rational species.  Oh, sure, sometimes we’re pretty bright.  We can build airplanes and computers and discover the nature of the universe from swirling galaxies to ricocheting atoms, and that’s just super.  But most of what motivates us comes from the squishy, illogical emotional center of our brains.  And there’s not a damn thing wrong with understanding this.

Yet we continue to believe that we are rational, and that everything we do is rational.  Even silly little decisions like whether or not we like zombies.

There is no rational reason to prefer zombies to ninjas.  Or ninjas to pirates.  Or Godzilla to King Kong.  These are just random things that get stuck in our heads, little preferences that get set at some point and rarely change.

As I’ve pointed out before, I love the Taurens of World of Warcraft.  Hulking minotaurs, they are not “pretty” in a conventional sense.  Yet there’s something tremendously appealing to me about the way these guys look, about the entire concept of such animal-like humanoids.  Hardly surprising.  I like monsters.  Have for as long as I remember.  Could I tell you why?  Oh, I could give you some bullshit reason.  I could tell you that I find elves and humans to be “boring”, that I enjoy pretending to be something I could never be in real life, or that I just like big, strong beasties.  And I even sort of believe these things.

But not really.

No, I like monsters because the “I like monsters” switch in my brain was flipped some time, somehow.  And that’s really that.

The entire concept of fiction and make-believe is built on human irrationality.  Withour our absolute willingness to surrender to our emotions, we’d have none of it.  I don’t care what genre you pick, it’s all the same.  Without emotion, it doesn’t work.  Because fiction, by definition, is make-believe.  It’s not real.  And we know it’s not real.

We know that there’s no such thing as zombies, and that a movie or book depicting the zombie apocalypse is ludicrous.  More importantly, even if it were realistic (or even remotely possible) it doesn’t change the fact that no zombie story ever actually happened.  Nobody “killed” by a zombie in a story was actually killed.  For that matter, I’m pretty sure that Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorheese have never claimed a single, real-life victim.  Just a slew of actors and actresses who screamed and pretended to die in terror then walked off the set after the director called cut.

Godzilla may have killed millions of imaginary citizens, but he hasn’t so much as stepped on the toe of a real person.  And when he battles King Ghidora for the fate of the Earth, I know that it really doesn’t matter if he wins or loses.  The story could end with the planet blowing up, and it would have no real effect on my life.

Every story could end with the planet blowing up, and it would have absolutely no real life consequences.

And what about the imaginary characters we adore and admire?  We know they aren’t real, but still find ourselves invested in their well-being.  There’s no rational reason for that.  Fictional characters are completely at the whim of their creators.  The fictional character’s motivations, thoughts, and actions are the designs of artists to manipulate us like puppets on strings. 

I really like Superman.  I don’t mean that just in a “Hey, he’s a cool character” kind of way.  I mean it sincerely.  I believe that Superman is a terrific role-model, that he embodies what is best about humanity, and that if we all endeavored to be more like Superman in our daily lives, the world would be a better place.  It’s also explains why I can get a little pissed when some writers decide to “humanize” Superman by robbing  him of these qualities I so love about the character.

And, yet, Superman isn’t real.  He exists, behaves, and functions only as an outlet of writers and editors.  This is why I don’t buy Superman comics because I love the character, but find the stories to be badly written or disappointing.  (Superman: The Animated Series is where I go for my Supes fix usually.)  But I’m not blind to the absurdity of the above statements.  I’m saying I like Superman, and I don’t like Superman at the same time.  I’m defining Superman by my own terms, as if he were a real person who I could know.  But he’s just an imaginary character.

But if tomorrow DC killed Superman, I’d mourn.  (And I mean really killed him, not just some publicity stunt.)

I loved Wall-E.  I think it’s a mesmerizing and beautiful love story, and emotionally, it resonates on a very deep level with me.  But it’s a frickin’ cartoon.  There is no Wall-E, no Eve.  Their pains and joys are illusion.  And it doesn’t matter.

I watched Kung Fu Panda the other day again.  Even knowing the story inside and out, knowing everything that will happen, I find myself enthralled by it.  Not only is it an illusion, a bald-faced lie intended to manipulate my emotional core, it’s an illusion that can no longer surprise me.

And I still fall for it.  Every.  Single.  Time.

So let’s just deal with this.  Let’s just say it, and stop convincing ourselves that our likes / dislikes / 90 percent of our opinions are anything more than random bits of mystery, no better or worse than a thousand other choices we could’ve made.

It’s cool to love zombies or ninjas or giant robots or human drama or lime-flavored Jell-O.  Just don’t tell me it’s because there’s something special about them.  Because any ”reason” you give me is most likely reverse engineered from your love of them, and not the other way around.

My love of Dinobots, on the other hand, is perfectly rationale.  But every rule has its exception.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee