EPISODE 307: PUNCHABLE DUDES

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

One of my all-time favorite iPhone apps was a magical world called Foursquare.

Do you know of the Foursquare? It was a check-in app, but on a ridiculous scale. You could check in at some fancy restaurant, but also at the gas station, or a specific theater in a cinema, or a random street corner.

(If the app were still around and kicking I would be checking in on Collins Street in Melbourne pretty much now and always. It’s just a pretty tree-lined city street, and also one of my favorite places in the universe.)

Foursquare had two elements to it that made it super-fantastic (and so so so much better than the “check-in” feature that Facebook added to its platform to destroy Foursquare because why should we be able to have good things). First, in addition to checking in you had the option to offer short comments. Think the kind of stuff you find on Yelp, but at a maximum of 200 characters and usually more like insider friendly tips.

Like if you were at Disneyland, and you checked in on Pirates of the Caribbean, you would read how you should always take the right hand lane.

(True story: the left hand side actually weaves back around the side of the building in a way the right does not. So when it’s crowded, it takes longer.)

Or you’d have hardcore Disney fans pointing out where the Hidden Mickeys on the ride were. (For those unfamiliar, Disney parks and hotels are filled with hidden and not-so-hidden outlines of Mickey’s head.

So for instance if you’ve ever been on Soarin’, where you float above the ground before a huge screen and are made to think you’re flying through orange fields and above cinnamon-scented ocean (Malibu really does smell like that, I swear), at the very end there are fireworks. And the circles from three of the bursts are arranged in the shape of Mickey’s head.

Once you start looking, you’ll see the three oval head pattern small and large all over the park. And in the movies, too:

"I was thinking we could put a Hidden Mickey in the workshop scene."

"No. Not one. THREE."

"Gary, bro, you need to get some sleep."

Everywhere in the world (for a short time) people used Foursquare. You could check-in at the Eiffel Tower and read about whether or not to walk or ride up; or leave directions to that comic book store in Perth Australia that was super hard to find, and whether they carry any local artists.

The other thing that was great about Foursquare was that it would give you badges for different kinds of check-ins. Like if you checked in at a school five times you got a Good Student badge. Or if you checked in at enough airports, you were a World Traveler. You could get a badge for going to Comic-Con, or for voting, or for eating out ten times, or for being at the same place where tons of others were also checking in. There seemed to be a never ending supply of fun new possibilities.

(Can you tell this app was developed in New York City?)

You could even become the Mayor of a place, if you checked in there more often than anyone else; you even got a crown (you were a very regal mayor).

Unbeknownst to our parents, my sister and I were always competing over who would become the Mayor of their house. She always won (and I will always hold it against her).

(We also used to post funny tips about our parents like “If you arrive after 8pm, knock hard, because the owners are asleep in front of the TV downstairs.” Or “Beware dog, he is very very bad.”)

(He is, too. That was a public service announcement, and it still is.)

Look at him, those scary dark elf ears. He's a monster.

I set up our Jesuit community at LMU as a Foursquare site as well; since pretty much none of the other Jesuits knew what Foursquare was, let alone used it, I was the long-standing mayor. Until some awful student started checking in there, which was a bad move for that kid, a very bad move indeed.

(Actually for a long time I thought it was a novice who had tried to seize control of what was mine and I was SERIOUSLY NOT HAVING IT.)

Basically, Foursquare was normal life turned into a game. And it was pretty great.

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Having written about video games the last couple weeks, I thought it was worth finishing up with a little bit about “gamification” – that is, the re-imagining of things like work, travel, entertainment or personal development in game concepts.

We might not think about it, but that’s pretty much all around us. If I use Open Table to go to a restaurant or Hotels.com to reserve a room, I earn (read: score) points which eventually I can use to get free meals or rooms or whatever. Same with miles accrued on an airline service or dollars “earned” from a credit card.

Hidden Mickeys are just an Easter Egg hunt (if a really grisly one, who knew Uncle Walt was haunted by the spectre of the head of his first creation). So are the secret menus at an In & Out or Starbucks. (If you’ve ever got a cold coming on and you don’t have any Airborne, get thee to a Starbucks Medicine Ball. It’s half steamed lemonade, half mint tea, and 100% health-filled goodness.)

As much as social media is about community and changing the world and other techtopian catchphrases please stop blocking our ads which are totally not the product of us tapping your phone or reading your email, most every social platform is also built on game. Each like or heart or retweet or new friend/follower/troll soulja is a point made; and showing how many of one or the other each of us has creates a scoreboard effect, a way to compare ourselves, an engine for competition.

(The irony is, given all the algorithms being used today to determine what you see and what you don’t, most social media is actually like playing a game where you’re not privy to the rules but judge yourself as a success or failure anyway. Yeah super good fun time!)

(Social media, man, what a mess right now. If it were a sound it would be an entire planet screaming, I think....I can barely spend ten minutes without feeling overwhelmed.)

All around us, things are being presented in the form or language of game. Even a lot of our entertainment is crafted that way. Sometimes it’s quite clear: we have reality shows where people get kicked off, or win a record contract, or get to marry a relative stranger who was willing to sleep with twenty other people while he was also sleeping with them. Real talk: Who wins The Bachelor, really? But a lot of other reality programs which are not game shows are nonetheless still build similarly. An episode or season will involve some sort of big event that the characters have to go to/run/deal with/get (or not get?) out of hand at. They spend the entire episode preparing/organizing/working themselves up like you would (not) prep for a big game. And then we get to see it all play out, usually with the event itself having multiple challenges they have to negotiate to “win”. (“Oh wait, SHE’S here?”, she says with absolutely no real shock.) Fashion-life-help show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was just rebooted on Netflix as Queer Eye, and you should definitely watch because episode 3 believe it or not offers the kind of honest and thoughtful conversation about race and policing in America that we all wish we were having about a lot of things. If you don’t know it, the premise is five gay men with talents in things like grooming, dress and emotional well-being (oh, Karamo) give a straight guy whose friends think he needs some help a top-to-bottom makeover. In the abstract the show seems lay out more like the end of a game than the process of one, with the “contestant” just getting “the prize”. The great part of the Queer Eye conceit, in fact, is that it’s not a show built on merit. People don’t “earn” or “win” help; they needed it, and so it was freely given. (And in the midst of accepting that help they discover that in fact they are worthy of help and also just plain love. Queer Eye...it’s a show with a very generous heart.)

But watching the new season I’ve been aware that in practice the show is still structured like a game. All the “rewards” are prep for the real challenge, the guy’s life; there’s almost always again some “important event” at the end of the episode that the subject has to run as a sort of “first step” into a new existence, complete with multiple challenges to be passed – Cook the meal! Dress like a person! Have an honest conversation!

Basically it’s American Gladiators but with bespoke mouthwash and homemade lobster bisque.

(One of the guys I live with has spent every episode of the new show shouting “This is fake” at the screen. Which first of all, I love just for the amount of rage he was venting. I don’t know what that was about, but God it was good.

Most reality TV is scripted pretty heavily, with “real people” not only being put in situations where certain (aka bad) things will happen, but sometimes (oftentimes) (watch the first season of Unreal...) being prompted to say or do certain things. But I don’t think that’s the situation on Queer Eye; there’s definitely a structure, Things We Will Do in every episode, but the actual content within different situations reads very of the moment and authentic. The subjects are definitely neither actors nor would-be actors.)

This week we’re going to renovate this house, We’re struggling to keep our business afloat, or We have to get our 18 wheeler across the state before the ice melts – all of those are built on game-concepts. A challenge, a plan, the obstacles, antagonists and/or competition, rewards.

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Random and totally irrelevant aside: Do you remember the celebrity game show? Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly... When did those go away? And why?

My childhood in nine boxes.

If I ran an American television network, I would bring back the prime time celebrity game show in a heartbeat. And not this ridiculous “Celebrities Can Lip Sync” nonsense, which went from being a fun bit on The Tonight Show to overproduced kind of gross men’s TV fare.

I am definitely down for $10,000 Pyramid 2.0. Take a moment to imagine teaming up with Paul Rudd to win $10,000. Then ask yourself, How is that not a thing that is in the world already?

And Billy Eichner was actually created in a lab to be a permanent fixture on Hollywood Squares.

But there’s also lots of great concepts in the U.K. that I’d love to bring over. Like Would I Lie to You?, in which two teams of three famous people (actors, journalists, politicians, DJs, public intellectuals, Sting) try to figure out whether one another’s stories are true or lies.

The show has a great middle sequence where a stranger is brought on stage and each member of one team says how they supposedly know the person. If you need a laugh right now, I highly recommend this clip from the December 4th ep, in which the stranger is a boy named Mick. So so good.

Or there’s Have I Got News For You, where two teams (with a heavier lean toward journalists and politicians) “compete” over their knowledge of and funny takes on the week’s political news. (Former Doctor David Tennant hosted the episode just before Christmas; he was extraordinary. Also he had clown/fire orange hair.)

And there’s QI, in which comedians “compete” for the best takes on science and history.

Comedy Central had a show for a while where comedians kind of sort of competed similarly to deliver the best punch lines to the day’s news. There’s definitely an audience for that kind of stuff. And the thing I like about the British shows is, they’re so relaxed. It’s not at all about winning, it’s about hanging out with these funny people and having a laugh.

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So what do you think, Life-game-ification: Good or bad for the humans?

I can definitely see areas in which it’s pretty unremittingly bad. Twitter having a live-rolling scorecard on every tweet is for me the stuff of childhood not being chosen for kickball nightmares.

Can you hear them screaming, Clarice?

But then I think of this interview Jerry Seinfeld did where someone asked him how do you get good at comedy. His response, as you might imagine, was put in the time, dork boy. Write every day. Get up on stage. Put in the hours.

But he also had this technique he suggested: Buy a calendar, after you finish doing your writing for the day, X it out, and see how long a streak you can get.

That sounds like a whole lot of nothing, hardly even a game. But I’ve tried it with exercising, and found for as basic as it is, “the streak” – call it the Cal Ripken – becomes a strangely strong motivator. The more days you finish, the more days you want to.

Then there’s this guy I live with who has done a lot of different things – created a spirituality center, taught in a seminary, worked for the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Conference. All pretty challenging jobs, with lots of politics and potential for drama.

And the longer I live with him the more I see why he was so right for all those situations. He takes everything that comes at him as a kind of play, like an athlete in a sporting match. I’m sure at times he wants to “win the day”, but fundamentally it seems like he just relishes the interaction, very much like an athlete loves the game.

If I were to look on the daily events of my life as less strum und drang and more game, I wonder how that would change my experience and behavior?

There’s another Jesuit I know, a real operator, always smiling and shaking your hand. He used to spend a lot of time raising money. I asked him how he dealt with the no’s. He just shrugged and smiled. “Every no is just a step on the way to a yes.”

That’s life seen as game.

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One last out-of-left-field take on all this, coming from the world of the Catholic Church.

Everybody likes to get their kid baptized – even if they don’t ever go to Church, this is a thing most Catholic families seem to want. Everyone wants to make sure their daughter or son does their first communion, too. But nobody really understands what the deal is with confirmation. Yeah, a lot of them have their children do it, but not as many, and a lot of times the kids have no idea what it’s for.

There’s a lot that you could unpack there, but what if we thought about it like a video game? Video games have levels; they might look a lot like, but there’s a unique boss at the end of each – the big bad of that level. And if and when you beat them, there’s some kind of cool prize.

You have a baby – talk about what a challenging journey that is. And at the end, you want your kid blessed, welcomed (maybe magically protected) – that’s the prize.

Years later, your child goes through religious ed, and you go through your child going through religious ed. And at the end they receive the Body and Blood of Christ. No prize bigger than that.

And that’s maybe the problem of confirmation. It’s definitely another level; within the Church it’s the rite of initiation into adulthood. And there is a prize of sorts that happens there, the anointing with the oil. If that’s done right – don’t be stingy, Bishop! – that experience can be really powerful.

But it’s all of a different character than the prior levels. There’s no prize I take home or new “power” that I have. It’s actually strange, when you think about it – if confirmation is the rite of passage into adulthood, shouldn’t the end result be the confirmants having some sort of new role or voice in the community? Why isn’t a newly confirmed person appointed to the parish council every year? Or the group of confirmants asked by the council to come and give them feedback and ideas for the parish? The way we’ve got it, it’s like getting to the end of the video game and nothing happens. You don’t get the prince and you didn’t learn to fly either. Actually it’s more like you go thrown back to the start of the level.

Um, excuse me, Bishop, but when do we get our swag?

On Ash Wednesday, our churches are mobbed with people who want ashes. I would bet it’s the second most populated Church service after Christmas. And it’s in the middle of the week and not during a holiday. And it’s not even a Holy Day of Obligation. And it involves having charcoal which depending on the priest may almost certainly get all over you smudged on your face.

I was asking a priest friend of mine what he thought that was about. Why do people come in such numbers?

His take: They want to be forgiven.

That’s not actually how we think about either Ash Wednesday or the ashes, but on an intuitive level it makes absolute sense. And it fits what we’ve been talking about: you go through something, including lots of obstacles and hardship, you face the Big Bad (aka yourself) – and in the end you receive a reward. A gift.

I don’t want to reduce the sacraments to a video game, but I don’t know, maybe there is something to learn from them. Maybe confirmation needs some kind of prize.

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Lots of pieces of life slowly seeming to coalesce in ways I wouldn't have expected. Some of it having to do with this newsletter, believe it or not. All that research into biopics and the 80s and it looks like I might now be working to write something that's a little bit of both. Knock on wood...

(God I love research.)

Last week I mentioned how much I was affected by ​The Florida Project. I don't think I mentioned that I had the chance to interview some people who work with families living on the streets and in motels around Disneyland. I learned a lot from them. If you're interested, here's the link.

Just started the novelization of The Last Jedi. So far, the biggest insight is that every machine in Star Wars has a personality, and that Poe Dameron's X-Wing was a huge diva.

What a shock.

Also, here's the first sentence of the book: "Luke Skywalker stood in the cooling sands of Tatooine, his wife by his side."

Uh-huh. You might want to check it out.

++ LINKS ++

If you’re wondering where the title of this week’s episode comes from, I highly recommend this podcast about how the Philadelphia 76ers tanked their team for a number of years in order to get the top draft pick. It is an outstanding, crazy story about the games within games. (Note: The story begins at the 15 minute mark.)

Don’t take this personally, but the Pudding has arranged this set of charts of the 10 Things Everyone Hates About You. (Be sure to check out the most contentious topics chart at the bottom. It is a gold mine.)

I mentioned that the brilliant David Tennant hosted that game show Have I Got News for You at Christmastime. The show ends each week with a series of fill in the blanks. I leave you with his response to a fill in the blank about grandmothers. Suffice to say, his own grandmother must have been very pleased.

I’m away next week, but I’ll be back the week after with something that I promise will have absolutely nothing to do with games.

Thanks for reading.

Take it gently. Look after yourself.