The Ballad of Vodka Laine · 4:06pm Jun 1st, 2016
The funniest thing is that I don't even remember her original name.
I had played and loved XCOM: Enemy Unknown and decided to return and play with the Long War mod. Long War, if you're unfamiliar, turns an already challenging squad based tactical game into an absolute nightmare.
The campaigns are longer. The enemy grows and adapts. Your interceptor aircraft are made of cardboard and wishful thinking and rookies die so fast you don't even bother to remember them. Long War is brutal. You will lose soldiers. In fact, if you aren't messing around with the config file or some of the options included that make certain aspects easier, you're going to lose a hell of a lot of soldiers. You're going to wipe. You're going to lose countries to aliens or to growing panic. The world is going to suck and you won't feel on top of anything.
In short it's almost like actually fighting off an alien invasion.
"Vodka" was her nickname and she was earth's mightiest warrior in my first Long War campaign that was also my worst one. I was way behind in research and was really struggling. And yet above all things and on all battlefields, Vodka the Infantrywoman reigned supreme. Her aim was impeccable. Singlehandedly she turned the tide of battle. Rarely did she miss and rarely did she fail to kill her mark with the heavy battle rifle she carried.
And then, still using conventional ballistic weapons, I encountered my first Muton. I alerted two pods of aliens at once. They poured into the field, and a hulking muton lobbed a plasma grenade that annihilated Vodka in a single act. My squad died quickly. I rage quit and started over.
But for some reason, Vodka stayed with me just like ultra quick "Chopsticks" the Chinese Support from my vanilla campaign, or Lyra Wulfstan from my first XCOM 2 campaign with her endless smile, flashing sword, and insane body count.
I recreated Vodka in XCOM 2 but realized I had forgotten her name. So she ended up with the last name Laine because that was the last name of the original character I modified. The original Vodka was Russian but this one was Finnish. She died after three missions. Oh well, gimmick soldiers are unlucky.
Except for some reason I couldn't let it rest. I made a new character--Ionna "LilVodka" Laine. I even wrote in her little biography thing that she was Vodka's sister who joined the resistance to carry on her sister's spirit. And LilVodka was very, very effective. Almost as if she really was avenging her sister and not just a little joke for myself.
What's curious to me is the emotional connection one has with pixels. My emotional attachment to XCOM cannon fodder/operatives is nothing new. I felt the same way about my soldiers in Final Fantasy Tactics. In the Total War games my strategy revolved around minimizing casualties. I spared local populations even when it was very very unwise to do so. I remembered the names of my generals, even.
Hell, in Rome 2 where you could name armies I had a whole system of it. New legions began as Crusades--the Scythian Crusade would fight until Scythia was conquered and then become a true Legion, and so on. (Army of the North if you're curious) and their generals developed stories in my head without me meaning to.
I remember one. Legion of the Dead, fighting on the Arabian Peninsula. I remember him because his wife character was the slightly kooky mystical kind. The little flavor text was something along the lines of "I've done the oracles for you today, my love." And that guy, a collection of stats attached to a picture, became real to me. He had a mystical dewy eyed wife and a grim legion. I saw them part before her as she walked their solemn sandy camp in the evening, humming to herself with the censor swinging in time to a beat only she heard as they began to see her when they prayed to Athena for strength and skill, until they replaced Athena altogether with this matron of armies.
When that legion was almost wiped out in battle against the the men of Yathrib I felt a peculiar sadness. I found myself wondering, before I stopped and questioned that wonder, if the Matron would walk among the survivors with her little song or if it would be too much for her.
Lyra, my little Catgirl bard from FFXIV, always made me smile. Without any reason to, I began to attach personality to her and her cheeky arrow slinging. And don't get me started on how attached I was as a child to the cast of Final Fantasy 7 or Legend of the Dragoon. When I lost all my Mass Effect save files and realized that Lyra Shepherd, savior of the Galaxy, was gone forever, I felt real loss.
What does this? Is it a knee jerk reaction to the human likeness that arouses sympathy? Is it simply a reflection of our investment of time that pulls on emotion?
More and more I think that humanity is inseparable from narrative. From Story. Story is how we grapple with the world. When we explain science, we use metaphor and a kind of sideways narrative to make sense of raw numbers. History is told as a story. We examine financial records to "get the whole story".
Confronted with a void, I think humans will fill it with story almost without meaning to. Story will just happen. Time becomes a story. Place and Sensation become Story.
If we sail among the stars, what stories will we weave out of those austere regions? If we land upon alien worlds and bask in the light of alien Suns, what stories there will be then! What terrible tales. What beautiful recollections! What myths shall wake and ponder back towards earth from the remote corners of our reach!
But for now, I'll keep giving XCOM characters names and back stories and personalities. Kinda-sorta like Adam, naming the beasts in the world's first morning: to love and guard and be a steward of the good earth was to name it and fill it with stories. To name is to bestow character, and from there story must flow.
And Stories are dreams. I wonder, what does that say of us?
As always, a story or revelation you experienced this week. In addition, any experience with gaming that left you emotional in any way that surprised you.
And, finally, thank ALL of you for your kindness to me in a sad time in my life. I am doing well, considering, and I want you all to know that your words and your stories have encouraged me more than you can have imagined.
My revelation for the week is that books cost money, and having neither books nor money sucks. Neil Gaiman has a new collection of nonfiction work out and I want it. But I'm broke. My budget fizzled last month after buying Daetrin's book. Thank goodness for family-based Amazon Prime and free shipping.
More seriously, I realize more and more that unfinished projects suck. More than suck, they nag. They bite at the edges of my attention like pissy little mosquitoes. I have this piece I started on
withfor Luna. My intent is a counterpoint to The Descendant's awesome work on Celestia being a total badass, framed as an alternate ending to Cadance's wedding. But, as I've learned, action is kind of hard to write. And so I put it off, then it nags, then I work until I'm frustrated, then I put it off, and so on.Gaiman says it's very important to finish things. I agree. But it's an uphill battle sometimes. How you cranked out 50k words in a month (?) is beyond me.
I've played a lot of games. I've read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and my fair share of TV shows. Maybe it was my youthful naivete, or the circumstances of the time, but nothing in all my trudging through fiction has stuck with my quite like Aeris's death. It's been, like, 20 years, but I still think spoiler tags are a good idea.
Maybe it was the suddenness of it. The immediate shock of dodging one catastrophe, nearly brought about by my own hands, in and out of game, only to have fate beat me with it anyway. And sweet heaven, the music right after coupled with the boss fight not running the usual theme. Killer use of audio for emotional impact. Final Fantasy, and SquareSoft in general, has (or had, depending on my mood) always been great with their music.
Off in literature land, John Green has written a couple of pretty nice books. Some of them end in tragedy—or rather, tragedy happens and they end with hope, when possible. I know he's not particularly high brow and I'm dipping into the "young adult" genre (and I'm not sure I qualify for either), but if I let little things like "intended audience" determine my fun I wouldn't be here. All the same, he delivers quite the emotional impact when he sets his mind to it. I do, as always, recommend reading the books before seeing the movies if at all possible.
Rereading the call to action up there I realize you didn't ask for moving literature, so I guess that last paragraph counts as bonus content. Go me. /rant
I'm not a good writer, so I'm not going to try and write much here. I do the same thing, but to a lesser extent than you I believe. As in, attaching names and stories to my characters/generals/everything else. My mage Astor on FF14 is the same way, except instead of cheeky like your bard, a dour introvert, who is very tired of this world saving business.
I did say I wouldn't write much, so I'll just end this quick. This was beautiful in a nearly nostalgic way to me. Thank you.
I once named one of my rookies "Penisface Poopypants". He later became one of my most powerful soldiers.
3989732 I regularly give terrible names. My first MEC was nicknamed BleepBloop. The second was Bubbles.
My first Long War MEC will probably be Target.
One of my favorite guys is actually based on a follower--Doom Manta gave me the awesome idea of making like w disgruntled ex-Exalt for XCOM 2 so EXALT "DoomManta" EXALTING is XCOM's angriest German. He has like 9 bones to pick with his new overlords. And by pick I mean shoot a lot of times. Neece "IShipIt" Mcbooms was pretty fun. Always took the multi grenade kills. Nothing says shopping like dying together <3 she had hearts all over
3989708 I have so many books. I'll lend you mine. Dragons hoard gold and I hoard books. I should make a fort.
That death destroyed me man. Young me was so devestated. It was really shocking. So was Lavitz in Legend of Dragoon. She was so good but like Lavitz was all of the good parts of Galahad and Lancelot. You just admired how unabashedly great he was and then... Death in a single blow.
I've been a long-time player of the original X-COM. Less so for Soren's retake; not at all for its sequel (despite Julian calling it the best strategy game ever). I fire it up once every year or two and play for about a week and it's good.
Ah, so many ways to play! So much choice! So much kludge and so many bugs. In a way, playing the modern remake, I missed having to micromanage time units and appending a couple important stats to my soldiers' names so I knew what they were like at a glance. There was something oddly charming about that. You know some people will tell you to remove the names so you can fit more stats?
I say they're monsters.
How sad is that, stealing someone's name and making them inmates to some inevitable slaughter? That's what Yubaba did in Spirited Away and she was the villain. We're not the villains.
The names, even the random ones, are important because they're something like an anchor to the meaning these arrangements of pixels have in context. Is it strange? That we can bond so well with fictional characters and figments? Maybe. But I think it also shows our capability for empathy. I still remember some of them years later because that little handle lets us carry the emergent story with us.
So, a toast to "L Andianov 92 78"! You were a hellion, and were it not for your abysmal psi scores, you would have been with us to the end! Best damn rocket man we ever did have. And that shot through the window from the Skyranger ramp? Hoo boy, I remember the chewing out you got later for not watching the blowback. Even the sap who caught the brunt of it thought it was worth the three alien bodies in that abandoned house, though. Poor kid. You had a good arm on ya, too; that Cyberdisk never saw the HiEx coming! You're the one that made those part of the standard loadout, you know.
Or that time we were invaded in the main base and 80-item crunch meant we had no conventional guns and a whole lot of missiles! We ended up bucket-brigading all the ammo to a fortified position with the two rocket launchers, and a green rookie with a stun baton ended up catching a sectoid commander with its pants down in the hangar. Right about destroyed the main shaft in that fiasco, we did!
3990396 I've been playing the original UFO Defense and I'm so bad at it. I have no idea what I'm doing and apparently XCOM only hires the blind and the anime-haired.
There's something very satisfying about that cannon tho.
Erasing the name for just stays?? That sounds terrible. But how will you mourn a series of numbers when he is zapped unceremoniously by alien bastards???
Playing Long War and then playing the original I felt like LW was a LOT closer to the frailty of unarmored soldiers and the variety of choice available from the beginning. I ended up standardizing starting stats just for sanity tho. If I could just figure out the damn UI I would love the original a lot more.
When I was 8, my parents thought it'd be a good idea to buy me Terror from the Deep for our 386 desktop.
An 8 year old trying to play default super human XCOM is utterly sadistic. I remember that I lost my whole squad on my first encounter, not really knowing the mechanics and bringing all the wrong gear. We got wiped easily as I tried to return to the Trident, one soldier was too far. Couldn't make the transport. He was left behind.
That mission left me so distraught that I was emotionally numb for a long time. Ultimately it was my ill preparedness that cost men and women their lives. I felt the weight of their loss on me, and knew very early what the weight of command was. Honestly it shaped my outlook on command decision and leadership. Always have a plan, a back up plan, an emergency bug out contingency, and never leave a man behind. If you work in a unit, be it military, medical, or corporate, those others are family and the most important thing at that moment.
3990958 I remember having a guy knocked out on a mission in XCOM 2 first time around. He was one of my tech guys with his little drone, and we were high tailing it out of there. He got hit with a stun baton and was out, and I realized I couldn't send anyone back for him. There simply wasn't enough time.
I was pretty sad about it. Captured by ADVENT. Only time it happened, too. Everyone else I brought back no matter what.