A couple Saturdays ago a band from Pittsburgh called “Grain”:http://www.grain-music.com/ played at Common Grounds, and only a couple of people showed up. Far from being discouraged, they played a fantastic show in spite of the empty house. I wasn’t there, but the folks who work here are still talking about it. Apparently they completely rocked out. They’ve been playing the band’s self-entitled (and only) album at the Grounds today, and I was hooked even before I learned that this was That One Band from a couple weeks ago. It’s stripped down roots-rock in all its glory, with an agile guitarist and a stunning female lead vocalist. You can “buy their album”:http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/grain at the most excellent site “CD Baby”:http://www.cdbaby.com/home. While you’re there, snag yourself a copy of “Craic Wisely’s”:http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/craicwisely CD as well.

At T-minus 38 days, give or take, I find myself preternaturally attuned to babies and pregnant women, and prone to start conversations with perfect strangers. This usually manifests itself in extraordinarily awkward social situations:

ME: (accosting a mother with sleeping baby in Common Grounds) How old is your baby?
HER: Uh, six months . . .
ME: Do you like that stroller?
HER: It’s all right, I guess . . . (edges away)
ME: How long do you plan to breastfeed?
HER: WHAT?! (fumbles in her purse for mace)
ME: My wife is due in December.
HER: Ooooooh! (palpably relieved and even delighted)

Then we end up talking for fifteen minutes. Usually these sorts of conversations consist of a constant stream of concrete advice channeled my way. They’re sharing memes for the perpetuation of the species — very instinctive behavior. I’m amazed how much childbearing/rearing information still passes through word of mouth in the Information Age. I’m sure it mostly has to do with reliability, since we trust advice from our parents and friends far more than something we read on the Internet. But advice coming from someone you’re meeting face to face also registers as more reliable than what’s out there in a book or on a website. I’m less sure why that should be — maybe something to do with the fact that you can actually see the person and know (more or less) whether they’re a freak or not. Also, information that comes from someone you can see and hear inevitably seems more real than something you read on a screen.

Anyway, the title of this entry refers to the fact that news of progeny is flying loose and fast from my blogroll. “Lawrence Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001497.shtml has a one month old. “Belle”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/10/kill_bill.html just announced she was pregnant in the course of an entry on _Kill Bill_ — how creepily appropriate. And “Greg Costikyan”:http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_10_01_blogchive.html#106746597875347150 posted a note that “Karen’s water has broken,” though I don’t know enough about Greg to know if Karen is his wife, his significant other, his relative, or even his cat. Whatever the case: good luck!

A bunch of new comments on blogging have left me . . . well, puzzled, mostly. What Camille Paglia, Mickey Kaus, and Tyler Cowen have recently said about blogs bears little resemblance to my own (admittedly limited) experience.

Taking issue with Camille Paglia is too easy to be fun, but in a “recent Salon article”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/10/29/paglia/index5.html she voices some broadly-held notions about blogs (hat tip to “Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/001659.php ):

Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you’re condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There’s a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one’s mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there’s no editing — it’s free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn’t masturbation — you’ve got to self-edit . . .

As a writer, I’m inspired not just by other writing but by music and art and lines from movies. I think that’s what’s missing from a lot of blogs. Most bloggers aren’t culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric “gotcha” mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space — voices on it should have energy and vision.

Paglia describes _bad_ bloggers deftly enough, but only bad ones. The blogs I enjoy the most feature admirable prose, a clear voice, disciplined consideration of what’s worth writing about, good self-editing, and cultural as well as political commentary. They are full of energy and vision. “As I’ve noted before”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000063.html, good blogs form only a tiny fraction of the blogosphere, but the blogosphere is huge — that fraction contains far more worthwhile blogs than one person will ever have time to read. The worst you can say is that it takes a fair bit of time and effort to find them.

Paglia’s argument seems to be that because most or many blogs fit her description, this makes the whole enterprise suspect. But any medium where there are few or no barriers to participation must be judged on its best, not its average, efforts. In traditional publishing, the entire mechanism of editors and publishers stipulates that only the stuff that actually makes it to print is actually worth our consideration. When evaluating the state of the American novel, for example, we look at books that have been published in recent years, but not at the thousands of unpublished manuscripts cluttering closets across the country. Evaluating the state of the blogosphere is like gauging the state of the American novel if all of those unpublished tomes were up there on the bookshelves alongside Franzen, Smiley, and King. Surveying such a mass, one might easily say “Good gravy! American novelists can’t write!” But that would be an unfair assessment that misses the point.

On to Mickey Kaus, who has a “good piece in Slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2090405/ that defends the enterprise of blogging in the wake of the Easterbrook affair. I agree with what he has to say about the advantages of the medium, like speed and uncensorability. (He doesn’t mention one of the best things, which is the opportunity to become familiar with the idiosyncratic voice and personality of another person on a variety of subjects.) But I don’t agree with his assertion that blogging is more analagous to speech than to regular writing. This is just one instance of the “blogging is a different form of communication” meme that I’ve always had trouble with. Blogs are too diverse for that kind of generality. A blog is a medium for _writing_, and the words of any given blog can be just as varied in length, style, tone, and substance as writing anywhere else. But it’s still writing.

I suspect that when Mickey Kaus says “blog” he means “that particular kind of blog that people like me and Glenn Reynolds write,” i.e. a forum to link to other items (news and otherwise) on the Internet and provide witty, occasionally insightful, but always _short_ commentary. This describes all blogs some of the time, but only a few blogs all of the time, and those aren’t the ones I’m interested in. Plenty of blogs (and a greater share of the best ones) tend to write in longer-form essays, and contain plenty of original thought on subjects as varied as their authors. This sort of writing doesn’t have anything to do with speech; it is the same kind of writing you’ll find on editorial pages and Style sections and the Paris Review.

Which brings us to “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/10/the_future_of_b.html (hat tip to “Aaron Haspel”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000497.html ):

Blogs that offer too much of the author, and the author alone, are vulnerable to other blogs that cream-skim them, and other blogs, thereby offering the superior product. The question is not who can write the best stuff, but who can collect the best stuff, and comment on it most effectively.

A quick review of the trackback links to his entry, or of other comments like Aaron’s, make it clear that just about nobody agrees with Tyler on this point. So I’m only adding my voice to the throng when I say: I don’t understand the appeal of ‘portal’ or ‘linking’ blogs. I don’t read “Instapundit”:http://www.instapundit.com/. Heck, I don’t even read “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/ regularly, and he at least I agree with. I don’t think my tastes are all that peculiar, either, which is why it’s frustrating to see discussions of blogging that don’t jive with my experience as a reader of blogs. This peculiar medium for writing has far more diversity and vibrancy than a lot of people give it credit for. Thank goodness.

24 has always had its problems, but it’s been an innovative and interesting show, worth keeping an eye on if not always worth watching. The basic conceit is brilliant: each episode occupies one hour of real time, and each season tells a contained story (featuring Jack Bauer, counterterrorist operative) that takes place over the course of one action-packed day. It’s the closed nature of that structure that holds the greatest appeal for me, because it means that each season has a beginning and an end, not just a start and a finish. Intertwining multiple storylines in real time while still forwarding a plot isn’t easy, but the writers manage it for the most part. It’s in directing that the show really stands out, though—everything is tightly shot, with frequent but not overbearing use of multiple panes to show what’s happening simultaneously at different locations. The performances are also solid, and Kiefer Sutherland is often exceptional.

The show’s pace has always been more frenetic than it needs to be. It wants to have it both ways—to tell a continuous story over 24 episodes, but also to give each hour enough hooks, twists, and cliffhangers to keep people tuned in and attract viewers mid-season. We never get to see an in-depth half-hour conversation, or any scene, for that matter, that lasts longer than ten minutes, let alone an hour. The fact the show is constantly cutting back and forth between subplots makes this sort of thing quite feasible, but the show never takes up the opportunity to slow the pace down—this lessens the impact of all those tense moments, over time. And then there’s the Fox factor—everyone in the show is three times as attractive as real people in those situations would actually be, and Kim, Jack’s nubile daughter, has a remarkable tendency to fall into sexually charged situations with torn clothing.

The ending of the first season was exceptional because it was tragic, in a very literal sense. That story was about Jack desperately trying to avert an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate while simultaneously keeping his family safe. Ultimately, he fails. The candidate lives, and his wife dies—the last shot is of him holding her body in his arms. The second season started off strong, and with surprising willingness to address post-9/11 issues head on. Early on, CTU Headquarters gets bombed, and the plume of smoke that rises above the skyline looks so much like the one over the Pentagon that I can’t believe it was an accident. That sight hit deep, and I had a moment watching it where I tried to decide if I was being crassly manipulated or if it worked. I decided it worked. The season’s best moment comes when Jack puts a terrorist (who knows the location of the suitcase nuke) in front of a screen that’s showing his family back in the Middle East, about to be executed if he doesn’t cooperate. When he resists, his son is shot before his eyes, and he buckles. Later we learn that some clever video tricks had made the scene seem real, even though no one was actually killed. In a lesser show we’d assume that that was the case all along, because Jack is the Hero. But 24 has taken pains all along to present Jack as a protagonist on the line—effective because he’s willing to take risks and do questionable things, but always just shy of losing his humanity as a result. When we see the guy’s son get shot, it’s possible to believe that Jack really would do such a thing, and there’s palpable relief when we learn that he hasn’t gone that far yet.

Unfortunately, season two’s latter half doesn’t live up to the standards the show has set. The scheming to oust the President and Kim’s damsel-in-distress act both approach the farcical. Because of this, I tuned in to the premiere of season three last night with a certain amount of trepidation. And, for most of the hour, my concerns proved well-founded. Jack has a Spunky Young Sidekick, the dilemmas of the minor characters circle around office politics, the President has yet another person who he trusts that we’re not sure we can trust, and Kim is being given an even bigger role. I had just decided that I wasn’t going to bother with the show this season when the final scene kicked in. Jack’s been acting strange all episode, and as he yanks the syringe and rubber tube from a locker in his office, we suddenly realize that in the year he spent undercover bringing the drug dealer in, he’s become addicted to drugs. There’s a great moment where he prepares to shoot up and comes to a moment of crisis with the needle less than an inch from his arm. In the end he perseveres and tosses it across the room in disgust, but we can see now what the contours of his personal crisis this day are going to be. It’s a great scene, and it’s enough to bring me back one more time. But if the Spunky Sidekick (did I mention he’s dating Kim?) doesn’t get killed off in short order, I’m bailing.

There’s some good poetry talk over at “God of the Machine”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000494.html. It’s one of those response-to-a-response-to-something deals, but all the links are worth reading. The basic question: what good are poetry workshops when most of the people in them have no business being poets? Actually, there’s two implied questions in there: are the workshops good for people trying to get better at poetry, and are they good for the public at large by turning out poets that people want to read? Aaron addresses the former question:

Doing original mathematics requires inspiration, creativity, a “feel” for numbers, all the mysterious qualities that Erin posits for poets; yet no one would dream of saying that teaching calculus to a class of sub-Eulers and sub-Gausses is useless. Why, then, is there no point in teaching poetry to a class of sub-Jonsons and sub-Dickinsons? Poetry is every bit as technical as car repair, and poets, like car mechanics, need to know what they’re doing.

I’d extend the point further and say that, just as it behooves us all to know a modicum of math for getting by in daily life, knowing a modicum of poetry (both in terms of reading and trying to write it) is an arguably greater boon, because of its intrinsic worth as well as the handle it gives us on the use of language. “Ed Heil”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/ and I used to play with poetry using some ideas he read somewhere — I think it was a Peter Elbow essay. We’d come up with arbitrary poem structures and themes to challenge each other with. (For example: “rhyme scheme ABCD EBFD, anapestic hexameter, all about frogs.”) Then we’d write poems that fit the bill and pass them to the other guy for revision. The idea was that focusing on structure would keep the mind from fretting about whether or not it was being Inspired. It worked for us in large part because neither of us fancied ourselves actual poets — we just liked language enough to find the activity rather enjoyable.

Getting back to workshops — to the extent that they encourage the notion that “anybody can be a poet,” or, worse, “if you feel like a poet, you probably are one,” they’re providing a disservice. It’s one thing if you’re teaching a class or if the workshop’s explicit goal is to help everyone improve, not to get everyone published. In those cases, gentle feedback and positive reinforcement make sense. But when everybody sitting in the circle wants to Be a Poet, brutal honesty is the only way to go.

Speaking of poetry, check out the “blog poetry generator”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/02/18/blog_poetry. To use it, type in

http://diveintomark.org/magnetic/ **url of your favorite blog**

and drag on the magnets just like you would on the fridge at home. Whoever can come up with the best Polytropos-generated magnet poem will win a very special prize. Post yours in the comments.

Here’s “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2003_10_19.html#004555 commenting (finally) on the Gregg Easterbrook hooplah. (For those who’ve missed it, Easterbrook’s original essay is “here”:http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml?pid=844, his apology is “here”:http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml?pid=868, and if you close your eyes and throw a spear into the blogosphere, you’ll hit somebody with an opinion about it.) I say “finally” because the whole time I was reading other blogs on the issue, both those criticizing Easterbrook and those defending him, I found myself missing an incisive, succinct voice that gets it just right. Jim does not disappoint.

What the hell was Easterbrook trying to say? In outline: Movie violence causes terrorism. Jews disproportionately suffer from terrorism. Two Jewish executives responsible for a particular violent movie are acting against their (group) self-interest by releasing a violent movie for the sake of profit. I don’t want you to think I think they worship money because they are Jews — they are no worse than other Hollywood executives in that regard. BUT THEY SHOULD BE BETTER.

This is a really dumb argument, but it’s not written out of loathing for the Jews, and it does not ascribe loathsome qualities to Jews qua Jews. (It’s pretty hard on Muslim filmgoers, though.) It’s not hate speech, but it’s patronizing as hell, and as sloppily written as it has been sloppily read.

Polytropos HQ is situated in a most excellent section of Arlington. It’s one of those countless apartment buildings within a couple blocks of Wilson/Clarendon Boulevard, which runs from the high rises of Rosslyn up through Courthouse, Clarendon, and Ballston. The Courthouse/Clarendon zone was one of my favorite areas in Metro D.C. even before I ended up living here: you’ve got a decent movie theater, a great place to see local bands (Iota), two excellent coffee shops (“Common Grounds”:http://www.commongroundsarlington.com/ and Java Shack), and more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in the universe. Clarendon, especially, has zoning restrictions that keep it from turning into another Rosslyn or K Street.

But the neighborhood is changing. Old houses and garden-style apartments across the street from us are about to be replaced by classy expensive towers like the ones up the hill. As a renter and not an owner, housing prices are depressingly high. “Gentrification” isn’t the right word, because the area wasn’t low-income to begin with. “Dinkification” is also inadequate because it implies that the dinks weren’t here to begin with, which they were. So I don’t know what to call it, but the whole area is in a constant state of construction, with new apartment buildings and stores going up everywhere in spasms of Savvy Franchise Development (maybe “chainification”?). It all started with “The Market Common”:http://www.theresidencesatthemarketcommon.com/, a big courtyard lined by all sorts of hip stores (Crate and Barrel, Barnes & Noble, Apple Store, etc.) with ridiculously expensive luxury apartments above them. Now all the old buildings across the street from it have been torn down to build more of the same. The MC itself doesn’t bother me too much, since there wasn’t much there to begin with, and much as the Faux Town Square architecture annoys me, I’ve had occasion to be grateful for easy access to a big bookstore and a “Big Bowl”:http://www.bigbowl.com/.

Walking down the boulevard today, I saw that one of the new places going up is a Cheesecake Factory. Somehow, this is going too far. A certain amount of development is fine, it’s not like we’re getting stuck with Waldenbooks and T.G.I. Friday’s. But the Cheesecake Factory is jumping the shark. It’s the ultimate in middle class decadence without a shred of the shabby-but-cool diversity that made the neighborhood attractive to begin with. It’s the antithesis of a little shop like British Goodies, which sells cigars and assorted weird foodstuffs, or Cafe Dulat, an informal Vietnamese restaurant with a killer lunch buffet. Both of them are still around, but the tide of development is against them. They’ll be bought out and knocked down and replaced by bigger and slicker establishments with more luxury apartments on top, and it’ll be a godsend for the Arlington County tax base but something ineffable will be lost in the process.

Or maybe not — only time will tell. I’ve met old-timers who complain that the neighborhood lost its cool a decade ago, and are blind to all that’s wonderful about it now. I don’t want to be one of those people in another few years, oblivious to the fact that the place has somehow kept its edge or found a new edge. So I’m not giving up. But I ain’t eatin’ cheesecake, either.

Here in D.C., autumn arrived in an instant, like somebody flicked a switch. Just a couple days ago it was in the mid-70’s and the trees were mostly green; now everybody’s wearing their jackets and the leaves are dying gloriously, like they always do. Perfect time of year to pay a visit to the Pumpkin Patch.

If you live in the area, the best place to go is “Cox Farms”:http://www.coxfarms.com/index.htm. They have a whole fall festival thing going in a big field, with slides and free cider and lots of animals and the obligatory hay ride — but what a hay ride. The whole place has a certain vibe, if you cock your head and look at it the right way, as if maybe the people who built it did so right after Jerry Garcia died and there was no longer any point in following the Grateful Dead around the country.

“Dude, we can grow pumpkins.”

“Yeah, and like, raise goats. And stuff.”

“Dude.”

“Dude.”

So they hooked up with one of their relatives who had all this land out in Virginia, and somewhere along the way responsible people got involved and shaped the place into a sort of autumnal wonderland for kids and for the childish at heart. The Deadheads were given the task of designing the course for the hay ride — I’m pretty sure that one of them was the guy behind the wheel of the tractor, pulling along two big carts full of people. I don’t have enough hay ride experience to know what the norm is, but this one aimed to have something to see at every turn, whether it was a huge tiger statue poking its head out from behind a tree or crudely-drawn pictures of Disney characters in flagrant violation of copyright. Much of it was thoroughly macabre:

* A UFO, and two purple-skinned aliens who leap out of it as you go past. They dance around and fall over things to make the kids laugh.
* An old pink school bus that has weeds growing up over the wheel wells. Pictures of the Rugrats are in each of the windows. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but it looks just like the bus has run into a tree.
* The Cat in the Hat.
* Full size statues of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The bears all look like real bears, not cartoony ones. Goldilocks is standing off to one side, looking up at the sky, and holding her arms aloft in supplication. It’s clear that the bears mean to eat her. Well, clear to me.
* At an otherwise nondescript part of the course, a guy in a red cape and hood leaps out and starts beating on another guy with a stick. The two actors — local teens, no doubt — have great fun with their roles, trying to make the fight look brutally real, all the way down to the death twitches of the second guy as Big Red dives back into the underbrush.
* Care Bears, though I think they’re arranged to look like the “Grateful Dead Dancing Bears”:http://posters.seindal.dk/p391094_The_Grateful_Dead_Dancing_Bears.html.
* The Haunted Barn: big and empty, with ample room for the tractor and carts to pull in for the horror show. The place is dark and full of Halloween decorations, plus, for some reason, several bookshelves full of books. I guess the idea is to make the place seem like the study in some old manor house, but it comes off more like the Used Bookstore from Hell. Instead of the expected costumed ghouls leaping out, a dance tune starts playing, very chipper with maybe a dash of salsa. Then the tractor moves on.

This afternoon, when I was there, it was a cool crisp day with a cobalt sky and steady wind that never stopped blowing across the field. On the horizon, massive clouds lumbered above and the earth lay all red and yellow and brown below. Nothing else in the Pumpkin Patch was as exquisitely surreal as the hay ride, but it’s still well worth the drive out. It helped that I was there with a posse of other Common Groundsfolk, none of whom were above a bit of frolicking. My Singular Frolicksome Moment was only witnessed by one other person, so I feel the need to set it down clearly for posterity: At a dead run, I hopped onto a knee-high hay bale, jumped off it, then kept on running down a slight hill. Halfway down I realized that I did not have actual control of my legs any more and that I was going to fall. Rather than collapse haphazardly, I consciously pitched myself forward, tucked in one shoulder, and did a perfect stuntman dive-and-roll, coming up to my feet and then to a stop in the same fluid motion. The wind blew the dust I had kicked up into a billow behind me.

It felt great at the time, but now, hours later, my knees are paying for it. No spring chicken, me. If I were older this might be the proper occasion to ruminate about the autumn of one’s life, but that’s still a good ways off. If it ever starts feeling like it’s edging closer, I know now that the Pumpkin Patch is a worthy anodyne.

The original Max Payne was one of those computer games that rightly deserved to be called ‘groundbreaking’; the fact that it was still basically a first-person shooter says something about the overall scope of the industry, but it was (and is) a fine game. Its major gameplay innovation was “bullet time,” a technique lifted neatly from John Woo and the Wachowski brothers. Basically, when you right-click, everything around you goes into slow motion, and you can aim, shoot, and make graceful dives while your enemies move like molasses. Duration is limited, but you can pick up more bullet time by killing bad guys. The gimmick really worked; it made the game fun to play and gave it a different feel from all the other first-person shooters out there.

It was on that basis that I picked up Max Payne 2 last week. It was clear from looking at it in the store that Remedy Entertainment was pushing a different aspect of the first game in the sequel: its narrative. The full title is “Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne: A Love Story.” It’s packaged in a DVD box instead of the standard-size computer game box, and the blurbs on the back emphasize the continuing tale of Max Payne, not the gameplay features.

In both gameplay and its integration of narrative, MP2 is an incremental step up from its predecessor. My biggest complaint is that it’s far too short; I’ve already finished playing through it on the starting difficulty level, and while there are plenty of features built in for replayability, I have experienced the entire story, such as it is. And it ain’t much. Structurally, the game does a lot of interesting things with narrative, but the story itself and the dialogue leave so much to be desired that the ingenuity is essentially wasted.

The thorniest choice that a game designer has to make, story-wise, is to what extent the player will experience the narrative or create the narrative—in other words, how much will player choices affect either the ultimate outcome or the nature of the story along the way? Obviously, the only situation in which the player could realistically take the reins of the narrative would be in a multiplayer game like a MMORPG; within the world of single-player games the lion’s share of the storytelling burden will always fall on the designers. But a detailed, well-written, internally coherent setting with multiple avenues for success can make for a fine game with strong story elements, like Fallout, Deux Ex, or Morrowind. The other end of the spectrum has always been dominated by adventure games, where the ongoing story (whether related by text, cinematics, or in-game cutscenes) is interrupted by opportunities for the player to solve logic puzzles and occasionally participate in multiple-choice dialogue with computer-controlled personalities. For whatever reason—perhaps because the narratives are linear and thus more closely under the designers’ control—adventure games have tended to have stronger story elements than other computer games, all the way back to the days of Infocom. Grim Fandango is a perfect example—it’s the only game that I ever replayed solely so that I could experience the story a second time.

MP2 opts for the latter route—it has its own tale to tell and other than refusing to play, there is no way the player is going to muss it up or get it off track. The story unfolds in between the game’s ‘levels,’ and the goal of each level is largely the same: follow the path and kill all your enemies with panache. This turns out to be an excellent strategy, since the game clearly means to emulate a fusion of film noir and Hong Kong action cinema—it’s therefore appropriate that the flow of things is periodically interrupted by explosive action scenes that are little violent vignettes in their own right. When you’re actually playing the game you feel like you’re in the middle of an action scene in The Matrix. It also helps that information and clues are presented in-game as dialogue spoken by Max Payne, in past tense to go along with the rest of the story. The downside here is that the gameplay, like the narrative, is linear: enter a room with four doors, and most of the time three of them will be blocked or locked, and you’ll have only one way to go.

In the cutscenes before, between, and after the action sequences, the story unfolds as a graphic novel. This works well, and is very refreshing in a field cluttered with poorly-animated story material. The panels appear sequentially as actors speak the dialogue, gradually filling up the screen until it looks like a comics page. You can stop, rewind, or review them as you desire. Sound-effects and voice actors are very good; the actual art is no great shakes, but has an appropriately noir vibe. Sadly, instead of letting the burden rest entirely on this comics-style narration, MP2 also includes traditional-style scenes animated within the game’s 3D engine. 3D graphics have come along way, but the effort is all toward a realistic splay of limbs as your enemy falls down the stairs, not the depiction of nuanced emotion on someone’s face.

So what about the story itself? Remedy is ambitious here; they’re going for an entirely serious, tragic, psychologically complex noir fable. (Yes, this is the case despite the name of the protagonist. Mistake #1.) Most games get by by trying for less—they indulge in light humor, or testosterone-laden hookum with just enough self-parody to be, you know, all ironic and stuff. MP2, by contrast, goes for the heartstrings, trying to make us feel the self-loathing, the existential angst, and the tortured love of the doomed protagonist. But it does it with lines like these. I am not making them up.

There was a blind spot in my head—a bullet-shaped hole where the answers should be.

I was compelled to give Vlad his gun back—one bullet at a time.

It goes on and on like that. It’s as if the writers decided that all the existing noir cliches were OK but not quite cheesy or improbable enough, so they’d make up their own. None of the emotional moments ring true. They can’t even resist throwing in some coy self-reference, in the form of television programs you periodically encounter that themselves are telling the story Max Payne is experiencing, in different genres. How clever; how annoying. So the story doesn’t live up—in that sense it plays out like the stories in most computer games, except that this game is clearly trying to do more. It is because they set their sights so high that they fail so miserably.

It’s very sad to see, especially comparing the dialogue and storyline with the game’s visual elements, which are outstanding. The psychotic funhouse is genuinely disturbing; the burning building feels hot and dangerous. In the computer game industry as a whole, there’s a yawning gulf between the quality of graphic design and the quality of narrative—nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in MP2.

I hold out hope for better writing in computer games; this probably makes me a member of a cranky minority. It’s not like it’s a necessary thing—gameplay is paramount, because we’re talking about games, after all. I’d happily recommend MP2 to another computer gamer, because even as wince-worthy as the story was, it was great fun to actually play. Someday, though, I’d like to see a subset of computer games that take all their aesthetic elements a little more seriously, and manage to pull it off. I look forward to a world where game reviews are in the same section of the paper as the book and film reviews. It’s still a long way off.

Why do some brutal dictators retire to comfortable lives in exile after they are deposed? Liberia’s Charles Taylor, cooling his heels on the Nigerian coast in Calabar, is only the most recent example. Baby Doc Duvalier still lives in France. Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner is kicking back in Brasilia. Augusto Pinochet abides at home in Peru. Until his recent death, Idi Amin dwelt in quiet luxury in Saudi Arabia. This isn’t justice, so what is it? It’s the cold calculation of the lesser evil, occasionally mixed with a dose of political ass-covering.

Taylor’s case is a good illustration of exile proving the lesser evil. Earlier this year, peace negotiations in the Liberian civil war were underway in Ghana. Taylor pulled out of them when he got wind of a secret indictment against him for war crimes, and the bloodshed continued for several more months. A dictator without a way out has nothing to lose, and sometimes the cost in innocent lives to bring him down is deemed too great, even if the alternative is giving him a life he doesn’t deserve.

On the political side, consider figures like Pinochet and Stroessner: both of them bloodthirsty, corrupt, and happy to support U.S. interests during the Cold War. It’s embarrassing enough that we kept these guys in power, making a mockery of democracy in the process. The possibility of having them talk openly about all the sordid details is enough to make keeping them quiet an attractive option for the government. Of course, without knowing what exactly it is that they could say, it’s hard to measure just how big this factor is in any particular case.

Easy exile isn’t a given for a set-upon dictator, however, and prospects will likely be much worse for the dictators of the future. Slobodan Milosevic isn’t basking in some Mediterranean haven—he’s on trial in The Hague. Pinochet got arrested in London in 1998, even though he did manage to squirm free in the end. Taylor’s situation is a little more ambiguous—his exile was negotiated with a number of groups, including the UN, but the UN is also supporting Sierre Leone’s attempts to bring him to trial for war crimes against them. I’m not even going to try to figure that one out, but it does suggest that his exile remains somewhat fluid. Future dictators looking for an easy way out may have the International Criminal Court to contend with, if it ever develops teeth.

Dictators in exile eat at society, year after year. No one could dispute that if only Saddam had accepted exile, things would be much better in Iraq now—far fewer deaths on both sides, less chance of Baathist insurgency. Sticking him in a villa somewhere, out of sight, out of mind, would have been a small price to pay. The exile option often makes good sense at the time, but as the immediate crisis fades into history, we’re left with the unresolved memory of past wrongs, and images like Idi Amin at the grocery store. It seems like a terrible affront to justice—which it certainly is. It’s never an easy choice, and I haven’t been able to come up with any blanket policies. Maybe the best route is to have it both ways—give the bastard a house in the country for now, but in a few years, come for him.

Sometimes exile isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Valentine Strasser doesn’t really qualify as a dictator, though he did seize power in Sierre Leone in 1992, at age 25. Four years later a bloodless coup sent him packing, and, young bloke that he was, the UN actually ponied up tuition for him to go to law school in London (!). He only lasted a year before he dropped out and hit the club scene. Sierre Leone continued to call for his return to stand trial for murder and torture, but nothing happened until the London media noted his presence; after trying to lay low in Gambia, Strasser had to return home. While he was never tried, he faced what is perhaps a worse fate—he’s now poor and living at home with his mother, trying not to get stoned. Ignominy isn’t justice, but it’s a start.