Choices We Make

In life, choosing is an action, not choosing is also an action.

I was catching up on my podcast fodder during my morning Murph walks over the weekend and wanted to hear what VDH had to say at Megyn Kelly’s event in Bakersfield - VDH was excellent, as always, but she asked him how he turned out to be who he is and he said when he came to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he got a call from some guy named Tom Sowell, with whom he had lunch with twice a month for the past 15 years, the second person he met was Shelby Steele and the third one was Scott Atlas and he decided these three were smarter than the entire Stanford faculty.

If you are going to run into three people, these are not too shabby. It would be like just finding out you had superpowers and the first three people you meet are Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Speaking of superheroes—and hang with me here, this will make sense by the time we get to the end—I’m not a gamer, but I stumbled across an online game called “Dispatch” a few weeks ago and found it unique. Intrigued by its concept, I became hooked. It is a choice driven animated episodic office/action/comedy/drama involving the LA branch of a company called Superhero Dispatch Network where you can go to procure or subscribe to superhero protective services for your company, city or other entity.

The story arc revolves around Robert Robertson, a 30ish guy (voiced by Aaron Paul) who inherited a mechanical suit from his dad—who was killed by Shroud, the leader of the bad guys—and took up crime fighting under the moniker of MechaMan. The MechaMan suit gets destroyed by Shroud and his gang of villains and Blonde Blazer, the head of the LA branch of SDN tracks Robert down and offers him a deal to rebuild the suit if he will come work for SDN as a superhero dispatcher and take on a team of former villain misfits in Blonde Blazer’s, rehabilitation effort called the Phoenix Program.

When I say “choice” driven, it means how each episode plays out—and how the game concludes—depends on the choices each player makes as different decision points are presented, from who might become Robert’s love interest—will he wind up with Blonde Blazer (a brunette named Mandy in her human form) or InvisiGal (a former villain named Courtney with the power of invisibility who is now in the Phoenix program) to the outcomes of their protection activities, bar fights, skirmishes with bad guys and the choices they make in their individual interactions.

Theoretically, each player will wind up with a different outcome based on the choices they make throughout the game.

Each week for four weeks, two playable episodes were released and the next week people started posting recordings of their game play and the output was like a Netfilx or Prime series you can watch. The writing was fantastic, the choices the players had to make were interesting, the humor was sarcastic and sophisticated (R-rated), and most of all the characters were fully developed and believable. In all honesty, it is better than 95% of the junk on TV and in the streaming world.

I guess people agreed because it grew to two million players over those four weeks and people are clamoring for a Season Two.

The thought hit me that Dispatch was popular because it was life reduced to a game where, unlike life, the consequences of choices made play out in a matter of hours rather than a lifetime.

I thought about VDH’s first encounters with Sowell, Steele, and Atlas and what those interactions might have done to influence him to become who he is today.

Then I thought about choices I have made and how my life has changed – and that some choices may not have even impacted it—yet. I can pinpoint a few choices—or opportunities I missed—during my life (one from when I was 15 years old) that I regret making/not making. I’m not completely sure I understand how they changed my life’s trajectory, but I am convinced, like the character’s choices in the game, they changed my life.

At the end of the game, in some variants, Robert and Blonde Blazer wound up together and InvisiGal went back to being a baddie, others had Robert and InvisiGal together and Blazer as Robert’s BFF, and in one version, it was none of the above.

In my story (and in real life), I wound up with Blonde Blazer/Mandy the brunette.

Still a little disappointed I didn’t wind up as VDH or get the MechaMan suit—or VDH and the MechaMan suit.

That would have been awesome.