Comic 637: Scribbles

shiiiiiiiit i am like 5 hours late with this. I got so caught up in the xkcd book / xkcdsucks book drama that I forgot there were comics to critique. On that: I've come around to the idea that the best idea would be to write the book, of course, but it would be more fun to not give it to him. Surely if Randall hasn't been tipped off by now to our plan, some xkcd fan in attendance will have, and we can just pull a wacky non-rickroll type thing and just let him anticipate something that doesn't happen. THAT IS MY OFFICIAL STANCE even though it goes directly against what i wrote in my introduction to the book. i changed my mind. THE END.

ANYWAY comic 637, scribblewhatever. Obviously, I had no idea what was going on. Neither did you. That's because the nintendo DS game "scribblenauts" only came out the day this comic did. So I don't know who was supposed to get this joke. So I was confused and was like, "well i guess I will have to go to the forums on this one, better take some anti-douchebag spray so i don't get an allergic reaction like last time."

But anyway, then I actually, against all odds, played the game Scribblenauts in between then and now, so now I know exactly what is happening in this comic.

And it sucks. Surprise!

The idea, if you haven't learned it by now, is that the game is based off of this magic notepad, and you can type in most any common noun and then that object will appear there, and you can use it to solve the various puzzles the game presents. Most of the joy of the game - which I had a lot of fun with - is in coming up with crazy nouns and seeing if they are in the game's programming. Cthulu is there, for example, and Godzilla, though lolcat was not. "lol wut" apparently makes your character's head really big. Anyway, that's the point of the game.

So what's happening in this comic is that the girl is playing, she's being amused by what's in the game (as one would be in real life) and then the other guy is like "whatever" and then apparently the game already has "asshole" in there and it looks like him! ha ha. Except, we don't know that the "pretentious asshole" looks like him because we don't actually see what pops up, we are just assured that it must be him. We also get the awkwardness of seeing the girl twice in one panel. There's really no good reason for that. I know that a comic doesn't have to have one panel correspond to one image, one moment in time in a story, but that's at least how xkcd does it basically all the time. So that's weird.

Also is it really that pretentious to say the game is OK for a kid's game? I mean, there's a hell of a lot more pretentious thing you can say about a game. Maybe he just didn't like it. There isn't much in the way of tone that we can figure out from this guy - some comics might feature facial expressions for such a thing, but not xkcd. So that's a little jarring, I guess, to suddenly be told that finding something nice to say about a game - which is a kid's game, ok, just cause it's fun doesn't make that not the case, I mean Toy Story was a kid's movie but we all like it anyway - is assholeish.

Anyway. Making a comic about a game like that, one that just came out and who knows how popular it will get, if at all, or when, if ever, is just like the Ender's Game comic the other day - way too much of a niche, even for a comic that's already in the "nerd" niche.

OK - now, back to the drama over the book!