Angry? Upset? Press X to axe your ex.

Here’s a topic I probably wouldn’t have thought about until reading this excellent Vice article. Apparently, there is a cohort of video game players who like to digitally recreate the ex- or current girlfriends or boyfriends in the video games they play. As you can imagine, this can be for both good and bad reasons…

It would seem designing and controlling avatars that resemble significant others past and present can add a special twist to the gaming experience. For some, using an avatar of their lover, or at least interacting with their digital incarnation, is a benign way to get more into a game, or even add a fun dynamic to their real-life romance. Others, it turns out—the majority of whom are men—enjoy the thrill of subduing and controlling avatars of lovers past.

And the article deals only with how people are doing this in today’s video games, using existing technology. One can only imagine how this ethical dilemma gets more complicated in a more photo-realistic, VR-enabled future… So:

Is it morally wrong to recreate real people in your virtual world? Where’s the line of what’s ok and what isn’t?

How does this change once it’s more than just a character you play in an RPG? What if it’s creating a virtual simulation of someone without their permission?

How does the same question extend to celebrities, for example? Once we have the technology to go on virtual dates with digital copies of famous people, what are the ramifications?

Because the desert island question is too easy.

If you asked most people to name their top 5 albums, they probably have a rough list in their head ready to go. But why? My theory is that the albums you will love the most for your whole life only come at important times in your life that allow you to 1) relate to them deeply, as well as 2) spend a lot of time listening and re-listening to them.

But what about your top 5 bands? If you settle on a few of those after a lifetime of listening to music, how do you choose which album by those bands is your favorite? Again, a theory: it is very, very hard for any album, even by your favorite band, to surpass the connection you have with the one specific album that cemented them as one of your favorites.

This means that rarely is it the first album you hear (though sometimes it is, if that one speaks most to you and is a fully realized version of that artist). More often, you will be introduced to a band with an album and start to love them. But a later album will be the one that seals the deal. And once that happens, no other album will ever quite live up to that mark.

However, that is more a function of your relationship to the band than the actual album’s quality. The album you love the most is not necessarily their best work, objectively.

For example, I am a huge fan of The Mountain Goats, a band with a huge catalog and literally dozens of albums. I discovered them in college, well into their career, and heard enough of their early tracks to grow interested. But with the release of Tallahassee, the first full album I owned, I had a musical step forward from a band I already liked, a tight thematic package about a crumbling relationship, that I could play over and over as I read, wrote, or studied — as well as sulked, as I went through various relationship troubles of my own.

If you polled all Mountain Goats fans, the majority opinion might be that an earlier album like All Hail West Texas may have some of the most poignant and memorable songs in their whole catalog, and capture them at the peak of their lo-fi period. Or they might say that The Sunset Tree was the most personal, intimate, and moving while capturing both a totally coherent sound and emotional narrative. It may be their real masterpiece. But for me, it will always be Tallahassee. It’s the work that cemented their place in my heart, and so my relationship with that album supersedes any discussion of objective merit.

So instead of just sharing favorite albums — which doesn’t lead to a very long or interesting conversation, really — ask yourself:

What is your favorite band’s best album? Why do you think so?

What personal connection do you have to that album that might make it your favorite and not the consensus pick? What’s the story behind your choice?

There is no fire-fighting in this game. Only fire-watching. Respect the restraint.

As an adult male that begrudgingly accepts the label “gamer” — I play them regularly, I follow the latest releases — my favorite movement in games right now is toward shorter, more focused narrative games. Games that steer away from grand adventure and intense action and tell intimate interactive stories. Games that feel like they’re made by adults, and for an adult sensibility; games that don’t require lightning reflexes or hours of dedication to enjoy or excel in. Gone Home, Her Story, SOMA, and The Beginner’s Guide are some of my favorite recent examples, and now currently, Firewatch.

The setup: main character Henry flees a difficult relationship situation to work in a fire lookout tower for the park service in Wyoming. It’s beautiful, isolated, and lonely, but for his boss and eventual friend Delilah on the other end of the handheld radio.

Playing the game consists of exploring your patch of forest, dealing with minor problems (some which later become major ones), and getting to know the woman on the other end of the radio as you do your jobs. There’s some excitement, definitely some mystery and tension, but no fighting, racing, collecting, or puzzle-solving like other games you might play. You can’t die or lose. You can’t even jump.

But it’s moving, it’s human, it’s beautiful both visually (the scenery, lighting and color palettes are spectacular) and emotionally. It feels grown-up, which so few video games manage to do. And at least for me, it made me think about my life and my relationships, which almost no games do. So, based on the big-boy ideas dealt with in Firewatch, two topics for discussion*:

(*saving the others that might spoil surprises in the game)

Henry takes the job as a fire lookout to get away from a tough relationship, needing time to think and sort out his life.

Why do we associate going out into nature with figuring out our lives?
Aside from quiet and lack of distraction, what are we looking for when we “get away from it all”?
Aside from nice landscapes that make good photos, what is the emotional benefit of “natural beauty”?

Henry “meets” Delilah over the radio, and for the rest of the game she’s really your only other point of human contact.

Have you ever become friends with someone you’d never met in person?
How did they become your friend?
How was your friendship with them different than with people you have met?

Hotel hallways: the loneliest places in the universe.

We’re not supposed to like Michael Stone in Anomalisa. This beautiful stop-motion film, from the byzantine mind of Charlie Kaufman, might impress us with its craft, might make us laugh at its absurdity, but it doesn’t want us to root for its main character Michael. Michael may be at the center of the film, but he is also its villain. It’s a cautionary tale.

The film deals with loneliness, that feeling that sometimes creeps in that we’re somehow apart from and different than everyone else, that we’re tortured and misunderstood and experiencing some special sort of malaise that’s specific to us while everyone else goes on happily living.

Anomalisa confronts us with this phenomenon of both self-absorbtion and self-doubt at once, captures the emptiness it leaves in our hearts by creating a beautiful visual metaphor of Michael’s worldview in which everyone looks and sounds like the same bland person. His perspective shows us at our worst. And yet he gives a lovely speech (as a renowned expert in customer service) about striving to see each person’s individuality, their complexity, their personal pains and failings, that maybe Michael can’t quite live up to himself but must in his heart believe to be true. His speech, even if he can’t practice what he preaches, represents us at our best. Kaufman knows this, and shows us his anxiety of falling on the wrong side of the divide.

When do you feel loneliest or most disconnected from the world and the people around you, not so much physically, but emotionally?

Has anything ever made you feel at a distance from the rest of the world, as if removed from or different than everyone else?

How do you combat that feeling and try to see others as people, not a sea of “everyone else”? Does it work? Does it make life better?

Featuring Steve Carrell as Angry Guy and Ryan Gosling as Slick Dude.

The Big Short probably shouldn’t exist as a movie. As an explanation of exactly how and why the financial meltdown of 2008 happened, it’s fascinating, and does a reasonable job laying out the series of events. But if you’ve read enough news articles, or listened to some of the great podcasts from This American Life or Planet Money since these events unfolded, it’s not really offering a lot of new info. As a story about a few specific finance guys who saw it coming and took action, it’s compelling, but also packed to the gills with journalism and outright explaining disguised as drama, just to allow the audience to follow along.

What results feels like a mix between a Michael Moore movie (specific agenda and point of view, humorous fourth-wall-breaking style) and the most star-studded, entertaining dramatization to escape the confines of what could have otherwise been a talking-head documentary. Its script makes it fun while its facts make it depressing; it has a stylish tone and voice I enjoyed, but comes off as schizophrenic in what type of movie it wants to be.

But that’s the film as an experience. Strangely, the movie seems only glancingly concerned with the moral questions involved. It clearly takes the stance of “The Big Banks are Evil,” which pretty much every non-rich person agrees with going in. The handful of traders and fund managers who saw the signs early enough to profit from it serve as our gateway into the story, a useful device for all the explaining the film has to do as they figure it all out. But while the movie also paints these people as our “heroes” — we follow their actions, we root for them to succeed — it pays only lip service to the fact that their success comes on the backs of millions of people losing their homes or jobs, and the entire globe suffering a huge financial disaster. There’s a lot of glee at them pulling it all off, only a couple quiet moments of realization at the implications. It’s so interested in using these characters to make a bigger point about “the system”, it brushes the possibly-more-nuanced character question under the rug in the process.

So.

If you know something terrible is going to happen, affecting millions of people, but stopping it is out of your control, is it wrong to take action to personally profit from that tragedy?

How would you feel about doing it?
Should it be legal or should the system be changed to prevent it?
Is it better that someone benefit than no one?
Would you feel obligated to use that profit for good?