Just what is it that makes today's wives so ubiquitous, so dead? The wife in a wife game does not have to be strictly dead, though she is always locked in a state of subterranean regard of her own animate corpse.
This is a sort of death that has to be experienced over and over, unfortunately, and we feel properly maudlin about it even though the sentence "What should be a romantic evening with your wife turns into a nightmare when a police detective breaks into your home, accuses your wife of murder and beats you to death" is like a cross-breeding of the opening of a Kafka novel with the slapstick ultra-violence of deathmatch pro-wrestling. It takes a high level of sophistication to take seriously.
The most cutting edge research in experimental and artistic game design has by now comprehensively defined the possible fates of wives. If you are a wife, you can expect to see yourself as:
- Physical hurdle and/or barrier, who lies on the ground or stretches herself between previously passable gaps
- A spiny, vibrating spike-trap
- Wailing and hysterical, thrown into the spikes
- A faraway presence either eviscerated before the protagonists' eyes or implied to be getting slowly lowered into a giant in-sink erator somewhere
- A dishwasher that has, for some reason, been given arms and legs and the ability to walk around, serving as a suitable vehicle for recombinatory capabilities enabling increasingly complex rube goldberg cum time loop puzzles
The tragedy of Vertigo is not that big, dumb Scottie watches Judy fall from the bell tower, but that their social positions and neuroses have made repeating this terrible act inevitable. Videogames advance the narrative form with indefatigable affordances for choice, customization, and repetition, allowing solemn acknowledgement of this fact to develop to a completely new level, reaching new audiences in more affecting ways than ever. The proposed name for this innovative and unique quality of gaming is Farce 2.
The wholesome and pro-social alternative, a pushable block you can both apply elemental properties to and fuck, is the ideal horizon beyond even Farce 2 that will hopefully bring an end to this unfortunate mutual debasement.