Steven the Great

Every business has its luminaries. In the business of roleplaying games, those luminaries are people like Monte Cook, Steve Jackson, and Robin Laws. I don't personally know any of those people. But I do know one guy who is, without question, a gaming luminary, and that guy is Steve Long.

Steve rejuvenated Hero Games and the Champions RPG with his book Dark Champions, which became an instant classic and the cornerstone of a whole series of books that kept Hero Games more or less in the black for years. Marked by exhaustive research and filled with enough story for many campaigns, the Dark Champions line perfectly captured the zeitgeist of 1980s 'dark and gritty' comics, what many people now call the Iron Age. Champions was my game throughout high school and my undergraduate years, and I went back to Steve's books constantly. They were a well that never ran dry.

You'd think that would be enough for one guy. But it was not. Steve re-invented himself, joining the design and writing team for both the Lord of the Rings RPG and the Star Trek RPG, two of the biggest intellectual properties in the world. These are projects millions of fans would give anything to participate in.

As Brandon Blackmoor instructed me once, the only way to make a small fortune in the gaming industry is to start with a large fortune, and Hero fell victim to economic pressures and collapsed. And this is when Steve started what, to me, seemed like the third great phase of his career in gaming, because he got together with a couple of other gentlemen and they bought Hero Games. Famously prolific, Steve proceeded to rewrite the product line from the ground up, in the process creating a single "Heroic Universe" in which all of the games of the Hero System fit. So, for example, Fantasy Hero's "Turakian Age," a sword-and-sorcery setting dominated by an evil lich, was actually the same world as the pulp adventures of Justice, Incorporated, the modern-day superheroics of the Champions, and the far-flung adventures in Star Hero. Film audiences are used to the idea of a shared universe now, thanks to Marvel's success, but this was ground-breaking stuff in the '90s. I myself wasn't entirely sure it was the right way to go. But it had vision, and I don't think anyone other than Steve could have pulled off a project so damn big so damn well.

Somewhere in all this, Steve allowed me to join Rogues Gallery, which was the Hero System fanzine, and I humbly contributed my occasional pieces, surrounded by people like Steve and Aaron Allston and so many other amazing talents who graciously gave me helpful advice. When I applied to grad school, I applied to the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, and was accepted. Steve lobbied hard to get me to move there, where I could join his gaming table and, potentially, help write on the sprawling new line of Hero Games products. I didn't take him up on his offer. Maybe I should have.

This week I learned that Steve has developed colon cancer. As I think you can tell by now, this is a guy for whom I have nothing but admiration. If there is anyone in the world who can kick the shit out of colon cancer (you have to laugh, people. You have to laugh) it's Steve.

He could probably use some help paying medical bills, but no one's asking you to throw money away. Steve has written and edited more game books than most of us will ever own. Whether your interest is in organized criminal networks or Mesoamerican mythology, Steve has written something that you are interested in, even if you don't know it yet.

Take a look at his books on Amazon.
And here's the Hero Games store, where you can browse tons of other books he has written.

Birdman

Birdman is a complicated film. There's a lot going on in it, and it is saying a lot about a lot of different things. In all this, it is strengthened by technical virtuosity and truly remarkable performances by pretty much everyone involved, but especially Keaton who, to be fair, is certainly given more opportunity than anyone else.

Alejandro Inarritu has called the superhero genre "cultural genocide" and "very right wing." This second accusation is pretty old and has been maintained by a large number of comics critics and creators since at least the 1950s. When Frederic Wertham and Gary Groth both agree on something, I'm not certain they're right. I've spent some time arguing against this idea that there is something inherently fascist about superheroes, so I'm going to pass on it here, partly because -- among all the things Birdman is saying -- this is actually not even close to the most interesting.

Even the accusation that superhero films are "poison" and "cultural genocide" is not really the focus of this film; the criticisms directed at superhero films are really more about action films in general, and America's obsession with the big box office weekend, the entertaining "popcorn film," the blockbuster. Birdman has a very clear argument about these movies, and that is that these movies are illusions. They are distracting phantasms which indulge our desire for psychological numbness. There's a very good reason why we all want to be numb: because we are all basically alone and our existence has no larger meaning. We all know this, but we don't want to confront it, and so we go into narcissistic denial over this simple cosmic truth. We fantasize about incredible power (and here's where the superhero genre is the best example) because, ultimately, we lack all power. Much of this is explained in a key moment in the film by Emma Stone's character Sam, when she, fresh from rehab and so at least briefly inoculated against psychological numbess, shouts to her father, in a rage, that he has no value, that the universe does not care about him, and it never will. The dread which haunts Keaton's character Riggan Thomson is basically existential, and his various hallucinations (and despite what some critics like to say about reality being inseparable from illusion in this picture, Inarritu actually makes everything pretty clear, at least until the very end) are his mind's attempt to impose order and some measure of control on a chaotic and oblivious world.

There's a second point being made in this film, one much more intimate and not existential at all, and that is about confusing love with admiration. This, too, is spelled out in the film, a film which is filled with people who want love but accept admiration instead, who want to love but instead offer praise, who want admiration and end up accepting love, and who admire but, in giving voice to that, instead offer love. In all these cases, the people involved can't tell the difference. To be popular is to be wanted, to be desired is to be looked-at, and everyone is confusing respect with intimacy. Which isn't to say we don't want both; we do. But they scratch different itches and love and admiration work differently. The first is basically private. The second is basically public. And as our 21st century social society becomes increasingly public, intimacy becomes increasingly hard to find and preserve ... or even recognize. We all want love, but it's so hard to make and keep a one-to-one personal relationship. Instead, we embrace circles of a thousand facebook friends or twitter followers. And the craziest part is that those social networks are actually easier to create and maintain in our new world than an honest personal relationship based on intimacy and, yes, respect. Who has the time for THAT anymore?

As a film, Birdman is very "meta." Keaton, who resurrected the role of Batman for American cinema back in '89, is playing a former Hollywood superstar who was famous for a superhero trilogy twenty years ago. Ed Norton, whose public reputation as a prima donna is based on his dedication to the art of acting, plays an incredibly talented egotist who can't get it up unless he's on stage, because that's when he is at his most "real." And although the movie is called "Birdman," it's really based around a production of Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," a story I teach every semester in my freshman English class. In a movie which is always showing us multiple versions of itself, Carver's story is also one with multiple versions, one which was famously altered by its editor before being published, and one which Keaton's character Riggin has obviously altered yet again for his stage performance. All of this is very intricate and will no doubt give critics, scholars, and readers much to talk about in the year to come. About ten minutes into this film, I realized it was, like the Watchmen graphic novel, basically made to be the subject of a dissertation.

But, amidst all the black comedy and the suffering, there's also some pretty simple, pretty straight forward messages in this film. First, good art, Inarritu maintains, is about reality, depicting the human condition in a way so sincere that it is painful and, in this way, helping us to learn something about that human condition. Second, what we learn is that human beings are desperate for affection. And that, in turn, is because we sense our oncoming mortality. We understand, deep in our bones, that we are a quintessence of dust. Our life -- and these lines are quoted in the film -- is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Is it so surprising that we seek shelter in larger-than-life heroes? And is it so terrible? Inarritu may find any suggestion that superhero stories might be meaningful to be pretentious posing. But I can respectfully disagree with him on that score while still finding much in Birdman to admire.