I see what you did there.

When I was a kid, my parents would complain that I talked about games “as if they were real”. At the time, I didn’t understand why they’d think that. Obviously Super Mario World was not real and I had never, to my knowledge, implied that it was. I think what it is though is that, in talking about one’s experience in a game, you refer to the things you do.

There’s always been this talk about immersion and how gamers can’t tell reality from imagination. That we get submerged in games and, somehow, cannot decipher where the narrative of the game ends and where our own interaction begins. That in playing Super Mario, I am him and he is me.
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In The Warriors (the movie) there is a scene where Swan and Fox try to tactfully negotiate safe passage for their gang through the turf of a tiny, no-rep outfit called the Orphans. And in this scene there is a line Fox says about their youth worker talking about the Orphans all the time, trying to make-a nice and act like they do, in fact, know just how heavy the Orphans are (they aren’t). In the game, this line is revised to say that all the other gangs talk about the Orphans all the time. (The part with the newspaper clipping is also cut, as the movie’s scene relies on that the Warriors have never met the Orphans in person, whereas in the game, they know each other all too well.) The movie’s scene goes on to have Sully, the warlord of the Orphans, state that they do not have a youth worker (implying how small fry they are) and Fox covers for his slip-up by saying that they must not have one because the youth board is afraid to send them one.

It’s a strange exchange, one I’ve always felt was out of place. There’s no reference to youth workers in the entire rest of the movie, nor do any ever figure into the plot.
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One thing I like about Rockstar’s expansion on The Warriors story is how civic-minded the gang is made to be. Like most gangs, they run a pretty petty protection racket with the local businesses. However, they actually seem to care about their credibility in it. It’s not just a matter of showing rival gangs that they can’t just march on through their turf. Cleon, at one point, literally says “That’s what they’re paying us for,” indicating that he at least gives a legitimate shit about the quality of the service they supply as opposed to just taxing the shop owners for the pleasure of not having their stores torn up by their own town’s gang. True, they nearly destroyed all the stores in the process of wresting them from The Destroyers’ control, but once The Warriors are your security team, they insist on doing the job right. Or as well as it can be done when you have 30 dudes brawling in the middle of your hardware store.

There are also missions in which you are tasked with finding and killing a sexual predator, collecting money for a homeless man to take a train to visit a dying friend after all his money was stolen, and buying food for all of Coney’s (picky as hell because apparently beggars can be choosers) homeless. Of course, you have to steal car radios and mug people to get up the money for a lot of these tasks, but this is a street gang, not a scout troop. But in the grand scheme of things, The Warriors do want to maintain a good relationship with their neighborhood.

You wouldn’t see this kind of caring in the community on the Rogues’ or Satan’s Mothers’ turf, no sir.

I think everyone has that one character whose ending pisses them off. A character whose plot conclusion is just fkn wat or else just completely unfair.

For me, Dallas 13 this character.
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So what do you do if you have a virus?

I work at a computer shop, you know. And it may surprise and delight you to know that everything we use to remove viruses at work is absolutely free for you to obtain and use too. Don’t worry. Virii removal is not our bread and butter, and if one were to Google it, they could very come upon these things themselves. What I’m giving here is the 90% tried and true procedure we use at my office.
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