One of my favorite news stories of the year had to do with the Large Hadron Collider’s history of bad luck, ranging from the kind of technical/machine errors you just expect when trying to operate your typical supercollider in peace to outright things exploding and possible terrorism.

Considering the LHC’s importance as a player on the stages of both the scientific community and those that fear its very existence is an affront to GOD or simply a hideous threat to the existence of existence, its easy to see how a “run of bad luck” could be blown up into something much more dramatic, depending on your point of view.

The thought of the LHC inadvertently generating a black hole that sucks first the screaming, suddenly-enlightened scientists in, followed by the rest of the furious planet, is as fun as anything Roland Emmerich can make a shitty fucking movie about, but that’s not the best of it. No, the real good stuff came later, when some physicist fellows, respected as usually not being part of the “God is angry that you’re playing with his train set” group, proposed something far more wonderful sounding.

They proposed that the Higgs boson particle, the very pot’o’gold that the LHC was created to detect, to discover really, the particle that is very handy at deleting phantoms that spring forth from your mind when you’re in orbit around Solaris, is so abhorrent to whatever mechanism keeps the universe in order that it has been sabotaging the success of the LHC, effectively slapping our hands as we reach for those elusive, steaming hot rolls on the dinner table. No Higgs boson for you, bitch! SLAP! Its very discovery would be the genesis of it triggering its undiscovery, keeping the universe nice and safe from those dirty, jam-smeared hands.

Much in the way that that theory proposes that God or the Universal Balance Machine simply cannot allow the the Higgs boson particle to be discovered by the LHC, I’ve a theory that that same entity finds the idea, the very thought of a reality in which I, your humble absurdist, have had a hand in the creation of a video game, to be against the very laws of nature.

To think that I could be an ingredient in a potential doomsday scenario is about as romantic a thought as I can conjure up, but at the end of the day, when tucked quietly into my bed, damp from the incessant sobbing, I cannot help but feel slighted somewhat, as I had no say in my participation in something that keeps me from doing something I’d love doing – Making awesome video games!

“How did you come up with this theory, Jhonen?” you ask me, your attire offending my eyes and your manner making it obvious you grew up on message boards instead of in front of actual human beings that can tell when you’re an unholy mistake of a presence, and I’d tell you it is a long story before hitting you with a bat and calling the police to get you out of my house.

I’d say the story started a few years back when I was approached by a group of guys working on a huge, soulless monster of a project over at Shiny Entertainment. I won’t name so many names here, but Shiny is no longer with us, sadly, so we can poop on them for the most part).

Shiny, to me, was one of those companies that stood for original, if not always successful, game ideas with a leaning towards the bizarre. In the case of Earthworm Jim, their most popular series, not only did you come away with a sense of having just experienced something that stood away from the crowd, you also got a sense of PERSON, that there was some identity to the game as a whole, and that the creation of that thing was perfectly in sync with a love for making that thing coupled with the skill to make it right.

Shiny in its final years, however, was not that shiny. They had become more known for licensed games than anything, with Enter the Matrix being what these guys were working on at the time when they showed up, a burning umbilical of unsatisfying grey/blue textures trailing them, characterless and leading back to their offices. The idea was to put a package together pitching a game that hearkened back to the Shiny of old, something original, fun, and not just a little fucked up. I was about as excited as I get (about 2.5 exciteds), and started running my brain on the matter of what sort of game would I love not only to play, but to help make.

We’d meet up, discuss gameplay character, I’d do some sketches of main characters like Boss of the character you controlled.  You can tell he’s the boss because he’s got a tie on, see?  My favorite bit about this guy’s design was that his head was actually being held up by a neck comprised of arms jutting up from his collar, working him like puppet.  Oh, the times we had, eating, laughing, throwing up and then laughing some more.  We were all very capable types, all having been quite successful at what we do in our own worlds, and now we were joining forces!

I believe it was at E3 shortly after this process had begun that the announcement was made – Shiny was being swallowed up by the piebald creature named Atari. The conference took place on an old wooden platform upon which many were shot to death, so ending whatever could become of that project of ours. I hope those guys are happy and successful wherever they landed!

I could sit here and detail more stories, but I realize they’d just be duplicates of what I just wrote: Developer approaches me, we have fun coming up with ideas, artwork starts happening, and then developers are eradicated by layoffs or are chopped in half by madmen in malls with samurai swords.

Even just writing for games, a thing I’ve been approached about on several occasions, goes that same direction. This sort of thing happens all the time in film and television, and with games it’s no different, only its slightly more off-putting.

If you’ve ever played a videogame with any semblance of a story in it, you know what I mean when I say most writing in games is about on par with what you’d get when your cat walks across your keyboard, only not nearly as awesome. Of course, you can have a fine time playing a game that has bad writing for the fact that what you’re doing is playing a game, not playing the writing, but being a writer sure as hell makes the experience of sitting through some of the worst dialogue around maybe a bit more hideous than for most.

Then there are those moments where the controller sags in your hands, the character on screen having just spewed something inspired by maybe someone’s latest MW2 team deathmatch experience, though perhaps lacking its raw poetry, and you realize…someone wrote this…and got PAID for it. Someone is making a living being a “writer” of this stuff. And as games get more and more expensive, you begin to see more promotion for the various aspects of the game creation process, including a celebration of its writing as being above and beyond the call of duty for what you’d expect in a game.

I love the writer getting attention and writing in general being celebrated, but the payoff is never as sweet as the setup, and playing the game with this so-called elevation of the games-writing art is usually proof. We’re still several hundred years away from bridging the gap between Full Metal Jacket and Gears of War 2, not that I don’t think Coltrain’s sassy mouthoffs aren’t worth getting tattooed all over my face so people know I’m a connoisseur of the literary arts.  That’s not to say I would sit through five minutes of that last Indiana Jones movie when I could get actual joy from just listening to the great writing read by great voice actors in just one cutscene from either Drake’s Fortune game.

Thing is, I don’t play Gears of War 2 for the writing, because I’m quite happy to blow the face off something big and toothy so long as it feels good, but when the lead-up to a game includes touting its epic storyline and movie-quality writing, SOME part of my brain starts to wonder just what the hell happened to the evidence of this while shooting faces off and listening to something even the cats are sneering at. No I don’t have cats, but I often borrow some for testing, and yes they can sneer (if yours don’t then yours are awful). My co-op experience with the game was spent having fun with the actual game, and taking turns groaning and bitching about the things the characters were saying, wishing it was done well or wishing it was so ridiculous it was funny.

So I’ve been in situations where I could have been that guy responsible for making players angry with dialogue they found to be hideous, but end up, for whatever reason (usually my face) not getting the job. I don’t really hold grudges where games are concerned and I end up playing the game anyhow when it comes out, only to be horrified by what was deemed more suitable for something that now sounds like it was written by things cats would eat. It is on those occasions that I wish the Universal Balance Machine would have kicked in and annihilated the person making the call on who writes and who does not.

This leads me to believe that the scenario feared by such a Machine involves me not just creating a game, but having anything to do with gaming at all.

There are a few technical exceptions, but in those cases I am only involved indirectly, and had no hand in the creation of the games at hand. Such examples would be those wonderfully forgettable party games that included ZIM characters in them. There’s no actual personal offense taken by the existence of those things, as, like solar rays or dust or kneecaps, they are a simple byproduct of the machinery of the cosmos, brought into being by no conscious decision whatsoever. That or they exist as a deal between corporate entities to perpetuate the the presence of the screaming abyss formed entirely by licensed games that nobody gives a god shit about, including the people making them.

Related, however, is a rumor I heard way back when, while ZIM was still twitching in its pool of blood, making people uncomfortable with its death spasms. Now, rumors being what they are, I take this one with a big ol hunk of rock salt, but my hindsight, wearing enormous, gadget heavy goggles powered by my awareness of the universe keeping me and games creation from being friends, lends a bit of credence to the validity of this one in particular.

The rumor, stated as fact at the time, came from somebody that worked at THQ. THQ, if you’re aware of the gaming world, is one of the Titans of old that was overwhelmed by the newer, slicker gods of Olympus and forced into servitude to shit out a procession of games based on children’s cartoons, movies, and garden utensils. If someone else dreamed it up, THQ had to make a video game based on it, usually for the gameboy or Wii. There, in the checkout aisle of your local department store, you’d find these games nestled there on clearance amongst the Slim Jims and Big League Chew. You can actually hear the screams of the programmers for miles around the THQ complex, and it’s as cool as it is heartbreaking.

So the story goes that back before the ZIM and his Amazing Friend show was axed, that some guys at THQ, much like the beleaguered group of developers at Shiny, wanted to work on something they actually WANTED to work on, and proposed working on an INVADER ZIM game and were actually repelled by Nickelodeon, a company that has done a video game based on even the janitors that clean up their offices (available for the Nintendo DS). Those developers were then thrown out of the airlock, along with some copies of the Avatar: The Last Airbender game. This seems likely enough to me, though it IS just a rumor as far as I know, and my heart goes out to those poor prisoners trapped on the licensed game colony for invoking the effects of my video game curse.

I have a friend that once told me about a story of theirs in which the quality of the world was leaking out through a hole in reality, leaving only terrible, uninspired things to remain. I’m not saying I’ve a midas touch if actually left to complete something in the world of games, but to be pitted against such a horrific law of nature while time and resources DO get spent on things that nobody gives a good goddamn about, well that’s just criminal when I’d at least be glad to contribute something that would at least be infamous in its horrificness instead of just forgettable.

Okay, so why don’t I take the initiative and get away from these huge companies that should surprise no one when things fall apart or simply go nowhere? Layoffs happen and all manner of terrible things go on in these faceless monstrosities! It’s just business as usual at places like that. Why not focus on something much smaller and more manageable than dealing with multibillion dollar games companies that are driven by the business a bit more than the passion?  Already way ahead of you there, you presumptuous bastards!

On various occasions have I teamed up with little garage band efforts, guys who maybe did or currently DO work at those places, members of the purgatorial crews that you find in any endeavor like games making or animation, these people working on the stuff shoveled into your faces but who are in hell doing so. If you’ll allow a brief but potentially relevant diversion here…

Based on much of the communication I get from fans on the subject of animation I think is very applicable to the world of games creation as well. I don’t actually expect most of the world to know much at all about the process of getting something like an animated series made, and it’s not important in the grand scheme of things. Most things, other THAN the grand scheme matter at all, I imagine, so something like how one gets their television or theater entertainment is about as relevant as life, death, candy and this scalding hot tea I just spilled on myself. The pain and suffering of creation or hot tea on red flesh is simply unimportant in most cases, UNLESS you’re the person whose lifetime is spent on the other side, making this stuff for the people or existing in a world where hot tea on your lap IS the point.

I imagine that these people that write to me, or talk about me on their fantastically relevant message boards and whatnot, on the subject of my Invader ZIMtime show pictured me huddled over a desk, creating cartoon. CREATING cartoon. All myself. There’s absolutely no doubt about it when they ask me why this or that was so cool or so awful. My perception of the show, when I think about it, is more along the lines of thought when watching an orchestra do their thing, channeling their collective powers to play someone’s piece of music. Starting with the flaws and or greatness of the initial piece of music, each person contributes their strengths and weakness towards a final product, the very thing that gets fired into the ears of the listeners. A cartoon, my cartoon being no exception, is this wonder/horrible frankenstein’s monster of a thing, a shambling beast of joy and disappointment that one sometimes regrets having created, until it looks you in the eye and utters some awkward, adorable phrase that melts your heart and stays your hand from finally stabbing it to death.

The important thing there is that I simply could not have made that show, let alone even a SHORT without the help of so many others involved in allowing that process to be at all feasible. I was the idea, and I was no slouch in helping them see what it was they were to be using their powers on, but, in keeping with the the musical analogy, I was a musician that had no experience actually playing the horns, or strings, but the music was in me enough that other people could hear it and make it real. And that’s where I really got the sense that most of these guys, the board artists and cleanup guys and background painters and the like, all these people had come from places and projects they either hated or simply ignored the soul-sucking implications of.

Think about it…SOMEONE had to design that goddawful character speaking to you in a commercial for nasal spray. Some poor, melting fuck with bills to pay and a girlfriend that hates him for not being happy enough had to design, or even worse, clean up the lines that someone ELSE designed, for that singing bee in the ads for that suppository you know doesn’t work. Some woman, crying, remember the fun days of art college before her life was all about in-betweening this sequence where the dog farts on the cat. When someone actually THANKS you for giving them something fun to do after years of servitude like that, it really means something, and was probably the coolest thing anyone could say to me.

Back to the games, so yeah, these guys were THOSE people, the ones who just wanted to do something cool, but controllable in terms of scale. These were people making sure boxes fell right in that Fairly Oddparents whack-a-mole game, or keeping characters from walking through one another in some games they would walk away from easily and murder themselves, if not for the fact that lunch was in just an hour. I run into people like this every now and again, we get excited about a mutual love of making something unusual or just plain cool, and then a flaming 18-wheeler with the head of the Green Goblin mounted on the grill smashes through the wall and obliterates them before my very eyes.

“You guys work for Pandemic and want stuff to do on the side that you actually LIKE? You say you’re okay so long as you have your dayjob to keep you healthy financially if not spiritually?! Then let’s DO IT!” Next day in the news: PANDEMIC STUDIO EATEN BY ELDER GOD RISEN FROM THE SEA.

Several attempts at an iPhone game along those lines have ended with that same elder god rising and deciding game developer blood is just what he needs to settle his lil stomach rumblins.

I’ve only given you the real broad strokes for what I believe is some greater equational proof of the universe keeping itself safe by deflecting any and all attempts on my part to make something, anything, to be something that combats this leakage of quality from our known world, from making an all out game or just helping write on one so that the villain doesn’t say shit like “KILL THEM ALL.” Try “Kill all but THAT one, because I like her shoes. Anything. Just stop fighting me, universe!

What I’m saying, kids, is that I’m well aware of what it just might mean for the universe should I discover this gaming particle, and that I just don’t give a shit if it means the end of everything you know and love. I obviously don’t care how many game developers and hopeful types I kill along the way. I’m already speaking to you from a podium of corpses, dig, and they’re just falling dead from the sky by this point.

I’m not giving up anytime soon, dammit.