5 Stick Mans
Bulah Landaker
To write the technological history of modernity is to investigate how our predecessors have received the technologies handed to them, or used upon them, by the powerful; and also, perhaps, to investigate how countercultural tech has risen up from below to break up the one-way flow of power. These are things worth knowing for anyone who is uncomfortable with the dominant paradigm we live under now.
These are indeed fascinating insights for better understanding the material influence on cultural worldviews. From what I can see of the book online, it looks like Malafouris also takes into account Michael Polanyi's concept of "indwelling" in relation to tacit knowing, which is nice. A better understanding of the origins of modernity will have to grapple with the prevalent assumption today of there being 'objective' and 'subjective' ways of knowing, and reveal said dichotomy as being quite artificial.
This does sound like a natural extension of Polanyi's "indwelling". Taking this a step further, I submit that the mind gets back into the immaterial when you start dealing with computers. That is, if you consider a cursor as a fictitious tool, then you can think of it as something the mind indwells similarly to a material tool. This is basically a premise of my thesis, where I used Polanyi to help illuminate a player's relationship to a video game avatar (and evidently scout a lot of the same territory as Malafouris). Maybe there's helpful overlap with the more recent history of modernity.
My favorite example: when you do a bad job hitting a nail with a hammer, you feel the hammer's handle buzz in your hand. When you do it right, you feel the steel of the nail *with* the hammer. And when you do it just right, you feel the grain of the wood split, *with* the nail.
In other words, the stick is to the man just as the arm is to the man, but (modus tollens!) that just means that the soul is not in the arm any more than it is in the stick. (I think.) It would be interesting to know if MP was thinking of Aristotle with his example.
HockeyStickMan has partnered with Team LTD. to help get more kids into hockey. With any purchase of HSM Apparel we will donate $5 to helping provide hockey sticks for youth hockey players. With the rising costs of the game, HSM wants to continue to help do our part in bringing hockey to everyone.
Years and years later, when my daughter was 10yrs old, she made a complete set of Stickman Families.. it all started with sticks in the playground and she made a whole bunch of stickmen, stick people and stick babies for all of her friends. So cute! And love how an activity from years and years ago, still get her making!
For a lot of years, I worked too much and played too little. My kids were little, my marriage was fragile, my career was young, my financial resources were limited, and my vacation time amounted to less than ten days a year.
About eight years ago, the weight and pressure of working for The Man started making my knees buckle. With every additional grain of sand added, every increase in PSI (pounds per square inch) on my chest seemed to be foreplay for an inevitable implosion.
I started using the little joy bomb stove after a bike ride or a run. During lunchtime at work, I started going out to my car just to fire it up and brew up some coffee. I started Sticking The Man anytime I could find an excuse to light a match and boil some water.
I had this white 10-gallon Home Depot bucket that I bought to use for Triathlons. I would stuff my towel, helmet, goggles, etc. into the bucket and use it in the transition area when switching between race legs. I also had this file of stickers that I was saving for the future when I could figure out what to do with them.
To look at Zoink Games' Stick It to the Man is to see yet another quirky indie platformer, dominated by distinct art direction but likely lacking the substance that has seen the genre benchmark set so high. Like the game's open-mouthed hero Ray, though, there's a lot more to Stick It To The Man than it seems. You just have to dig a little deeper...
You see, despite looking like a platform game, Stick It to the Man is actually a witty, introspective and superbly-written take on the point-and-click adventure, spruced up and streamlined for modernity, but without ever losing the soul of Schaffer. And yes, it is sort of a platformer as well. Much like Ray again, it's a bit mixed up.
Our hero has a fairly boring life as a hard-hat tester in a local factory, until one day he's smashed in the skull by some sort of foreign object that falls mysteriously from the sky. After a dirt nap, Ray wakes up in the hospital with a crushing headache, bandages on his cranium, and a giant pink spaghetti hand sprouting from his forehead.
This newfound appendage of Ray's can perform two tasks. Firstly, with a dab of R1 and an accurate nudge of the right stick, it can attach itself to push-pins in Ray's papercraft world and haul him towards them. Secondly, and far more importantly, it can be used to literally reach its fluorescent fingers into the minds of Stick It to the Man's freakshow ensemble cast and read their every thought.
It's a beguiling and genuinely original system. After the introductory stages are out of the way, Ray finds himself in a long stretch of the city, looking for a taxi back home. In order to get that taxi, though, he'll have to work out how to stop its distraught driver from hanging himself from a nearby lamppost.
This is where Stick It to the Man settles into its rhythm and its point-and-click roots push themselves to the fore like a pink spaghetti hand growing out of your head. Every character in a level can have his or her mind read, and this often reveals their desires, their wants and their dreams. For example, our hanging taxi driver is distraught because the love of his life left him for a man with better teeth. Soon, you find said love dancing in a disco competition with an OAP with a shiny set of dentures. You can see where this one is going.
Stick It to the Man streamlines the whole process in an unusual manner. Key items appear as stickers in the world, and you can use your pink arm to nab them for your inventory. Any person or item that can be manipulated will have a little circle hovering over them. Find the right sticker for the job, and you slap it on with a satisfying wallop, and activate the next part of the machination of the scene.
Like any classic point-and-click, what at first seems like a disconnected series of people, items and queries slowly unravels itself and all falls into place, as if you're putting the final pieces into a Rube Goldberg machine before you drop the ball. When it works, it's glorious - the streamlined interaction cuts out much of the genre's typical busywork, while the script by Adventure Time's Ryan North blends sarcasm, absurdity and Psychonauts-esque introspection with crackling results.
Sadly, Stick It to the Man does often find itself as confused as its hero, never quite sure what it stands for or what it's trying to be. The papercraft aesthetic is wonderful, almost as tacky and grabbable as Tearaway's own art attack, but it doesn't exactly coincide with the action. It's a stylistic choice and nothing more; unlike Media Molecule's game, there is no reason for it to be.
That's not a problem, more a missed opportunity, but the game does suffer in another key area. To break up the incessant inventory-slapping and thought-noodling, Stick It to the Man throws in some irritating threat where it would maybe have been better without it.
Ray's being chased by 'The Man', a shadowy type who heads up an even shadowier corporation. This 'man' has deployed bumbling agents to snag Ray and zap him into submission. This amounts to multi-level platform chases, where you have to trick the agents into running over or under you while you desperately try to get to the next 'safe' zone.
What at first feels like an acceptable pace-breaker soon becomes a dreaded time-waster. Dying in Stick It To The Man only sends you back seconds to a nearby printing press, where a new 'copy' of Ray is spat out, but the exasperation in actually trying to get through these sections is antithetical to the joyous wit and surreal humour found in the rest of the game. It's all made especially annoying as Ray's hand, usually so useful, isn't the most accurate of things, and accidentally attaching to the wrong push pin when you're seconds from freedom is enough to make you want to tear the stupid thing out of Ray's head yourself.
You can understand Zoink's intentions - without some form of antagonism the game would descend into an enjoyable but unchallenging plod - but as these sections ramp up in difficulty, they only damage what's otherwise a game pumped full of charm and sparky one-liners.
It is worth persevering, though. A level set in a sanatorium is a true standout, rammed with hilariously askew in patients and a puzzle hierarchy that's tremendously satisfying to unfurl. Even characters that don't have an active role in gameplay spout brilliant lines when having their minds read; I won't forget the terrified ginger kid with the invisible killer rabbit friend in a long time.
The voice work, along with the script, is stellar, and a real credit to the bare-bones team that made the game. The credits reveal that every actor voices multiple members of the cast, and somehow Zoink even had enough budget left to use Kenny Rogers' Big Lebowski classic What Condition My Condition Was In over the menu screen.
With a touch more refinement in its platforming and less zeal in its agent-based aggression, Stick it to the Man could have staked a claim as one of the most essential games of the year. Still, it's a great example of how far 'indie' gaming has come; a point-and-click comeback that's as smart as its forebears and a real pink-handed slap in the face of a few contemporaries.
Enjoy this epic adventure as Stick Man, lost in the wilderness, navigates perilous seasons to get home in time for Christmas. From the best-loved creators of The Gruffalo and available in Scots for the very first time, Stick Man in Scots is a story of family, fearlessness and exploration!
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