Issue 4: Paul Anka's New Years Set / My Unhinged Video Game Concept

Where'd they dig this guy up from? / Like a cross between 'Stardew Valley' and 'Hearts of Iron IV,' but with more bullshit

New Year's Eve 2023/2024 was certainly a fun enough day. I took a nice walk, started a Kafka book, saw Okja (2017) with my family, and watched the CNN New York ball drop spectacle.

It immediately became apparent that this one was slightly worse organized than previous years. Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen stumbled over names in fan-submitted messages, then did a few seemingly unplanned calls into other cities' New Years celebrations. The ball drop itself was nothing special. But what really stood out to me was Paul Anka's set.

Anka was ancient even to my parents' generation - my dad joked the choice to bring him on was exactly as unhip as it would have been forty years ago. His last Top 40 hit was in 1983 (though that's a bit of an unfair metric to judge by - when have any of the oddball bands I like gotten a Top 40 hit?). His biggest claim to fame is writing the English-language translation for "My Way," popularized by Frank Sinatra, which has become his signature song. 

Musically, he's a pretty standard-issue crooner with a nice tenor range. This wouldn't have been anything special in the 60s, when everyone wanted to be Sinatra, but with that style so far out of the public consciousness, it makes him a fossil now - an artifact of a bygone era. An interesting, unusual choice. This was probably the first time a huge chunk of the audience, especially millennials and Gen Z, had ever heard his name, let alone his voice.

I absolutely love the concept of digging up old stars for New Year's celebrations. Usually the spot goes to a nepo baby or someone rich, but having someone old hammers in the theme of time passing. You know - an 'it'll happen to you, too' sort of thing. 

The music? Even though CNN's broadcast cut off the first two thirds of "My Way" with Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen's introduction to it, Anka gave a solid performance, singing a new version with inspirational lyrics about "our way" and triumphing over the sensibility of 'might makes right,' written during his residency at a Las Vegas luxury hotel. Certainly well-intentioned, and even though his vocal range and breath capacity were limited by his age, he's still got a really great, warm, smooth Sinatra-esque tone. In fact, having to fight his own voice only made the performance more passionate - plus, the body movements accompanying each line certainly made it a lot more engaging. 

The obligatory cover of "Imagine" was sweet too, with his short, detached phrases and the minimalistic background piano/strings locking in perfectly. Even the "oo-oo-hoo-oo"s were kind of nice. I could have done without the insane key change at the end, but I have to admit it gave the whole thing a certain amount of campiness.

He cut the whole thing off with a conductor's move, the 'finale' signal, as seen at the start of the article. A relic of another age indeed - so proper, so dignified. They even showed him kissing a supermodel after. An inspiration to us all.

My Unhinged Video Game Concept

This one has been brewing for a while, so I figured I might as well get my thoughts down on paper. Loosely, it's a fusion between Hearts of Iron IV and Stardew Valley, but with less micromanagement and way more fantasy easter-egg bullshit (the best part of both games, in my mind).

The main concept of the game: You play as a future-seeing teenager in the 1930s and rise to power, influencing increasing amounts of people (including other psychics) and changing history for the worse or better. The game spans all the way to the end of your character's life, whenever that may be, with material for historical social movements, political events, and characters lasting up to the turn of the millennium.

We start on January 1st, 1930, playing as a middle-class Greek-American teenager named Elena living in New Jersey who is directly descended from the Oracle of Delphi. (Not sure why, but this specific character outline originated alongside the game concept itself, to the point where it feels weird to change any of those details.) By game start, you've already amassed a small following of a few friends, neighbors, and family members for your uncannily accurate predictions of the near future. The Great Depression has just begun, but Elena's family has stayed out of it so far. 

In this world, magic is obscure and extremely rare. World history has gone the same up to this point, but that's going to change within the decade. Elena isn't the only psychic in the world- a few dozen people her age spread across the globe are about to make some waves. That's all further down the line, though- they're all gawky 15-year-olds in the 1930 start date, and you only start hearing about them by around the start of World War II, unless you can make such a name for yourself that they start flocking to you. More on this later.

A key mechanic is Oracle Points. You gain them at a rate that slowly but surely increases; in 1930, it's about 5 per week, but by, say, 1950, it will be 100 per week- or more, depending on how well you've played. You don't just naturally increase the rate at which you gain these- they increase as you get achievements. Achievements are per game, so you restart with none with each game you play, just like advancements in Minecraft. Maybe they'll be called milestones or something instead. The requirements go from basic (there's one you get for looking at some specific game menu for the first time, so the tutorial can hit two birds with one stone to teach you about the menu and how achievements work) to extremely esoteric (I'm thinking that rarer, more difficult ones have much better point rewards, but they require basically structuring your entire playthrough around getting them. Most of them will be about ensuring specific interpersonal events or alternate-history timelines happen.) Easy achievements can be steadily racked up over the course of any game for reaching basic numerical milestones like a certain number of followers or money. The more difficult milestones will also count as out-of-game achievements you can show off.

How do you use the Oracle Points? The main way to burn them is a regular weekly prophecy. I'm picturing an interface with a slider you can freely adjust- spending more points per week gets you clearer, safer predictions further into the future, but be careful you're not regularly spending more than you make, or you'll start feeling negative side effects. There's no need to implement a leveling-up or experience system for predictions - the more points you can make over time, the higher you can keep the slider.

If you save up enough spare points, you can use them on the spot in both combat and social/diplomatic situations. You learn more combat moves over time, starting out by predicting your opponent's fighting style for a slight edge, and ending up doing cool shit like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix. The social application is easier to take advantage of right at the start, already knowing things you're about to be told (I'm definitely picturing an interface where you can look further and further down specific 'branches' of a dialogue tree) and previewing the possibilities of what someone else is going to say so you can take control of the conversation, although this will take a lot of points to use as the brain is a complex thing. Doing this to another psychic is hard and may result in side effects, but you can force it if you really need to. 

You can build a following peacefully, like by making great feats of prediction, but you can also go the cult leader/gang direction, installing yourself as the head of a self-governing organization that always seems to be a step ahead of its enemies. 

Other psychics will start showing up by 1940 at the absolute latest, but you can seek them out if you make a name for yourself. They're all named, pre-written characters with specific backstories, and interacting with them uses a different interface than with normal people. Somewhere between Stardew Valley characters and Hearts of Iron IV nations, each known psychic has an opinion of you that can range from +100 to -100 hearts. The first few will be unlocked with a popup that says something like "[name] Seeks Our Support," detailing how they came to our domain from rumors that said there was a successful psychic in the area. Alternatively, you can meet them with a little luck at any international event that brings together people from tons of different nations - the Olympics (in L.A. in 1932 and Germany in 1936), world's fairs (Chicago in 1933 and Belgium in 1935), etc. This will be essential for speedrun strategies. 

The interpersonal drama between psychics is its own minigame. I'm definitely thinking there's an unlockable romance subplot, with difficult achievements for rizzing up the most stoic, hateful, or distrustful characters, and a dating simulator minigame. Alternatively, there's also a rivalry system, and you get rewards for one-upping and/or defeating a chosen rival. There will be roughly 1 to 4 psychics per country, or more for countries with especially big populations, like the US and China.

Speaking of Hearts of Iron IV, you noticed all these references to the timeframe, right? The Second World War is about to start, and the 1930 start date gives us plenty of opportunity to change the course of history during the conflict that shaped the 'modern' world. (After this, there will be fun Cold War material, too.) You can stay out of the war, building up your power in the US and biding your time, but psychics loyal to other countries will certainly be helping their war efforts. More likely, you can get involved and change the course of history - for the better, the worse, or the bizarre. Just off the top of my head, here are some alternate history scenarios that could make interesting achievements to base a campaign around:

• Rushing to gain political power early and seeing if you can stop FDR from being elected (a seriously difficult challenge, considering how important he already was and how big his margins were in 1932). The lack of a New Deal will seriously destabilize the country and plunge it further into the Great Depression, opening up a pathway for Elena to become some sort of regional warlord/leader providing stability to people in her territory (think that one part in Worm). But is she ready for that kind of responsibility as a teenager, so early in the game, especially with the amount you have to overextend to make such a big impact so early on? (You can also do this in future elections, but few of them have as big of an impact as this nightmarishly hard accomplishment.)

• Interfering with the Olympics without facing consequences. 

• Making your favorite side of the Spanish civil war win with extra military intelligence, gaining an unbreakable friendship with a psychic on your side (there's definitely exactly one per side). Fascists don't like magicians, though, so watch out!

• Visiting Greece and gaining some sort of wisdom from the original Oracle of Delphi's location - maybe you can sacrifice your US following to stay and build a power base there, but watch out before Italy invades like they did historically.

• If you can stop the war early enough or even prevent it from happening, you can gain access to more psychics who otherwise would have died in battle or in one of the many genocides and famines associated with this period of history - the Holocaust, the Bengal famine, Japanese atrocities in China, et cetera. I don’t want to go too far into the genocide part here, since the tone of the game is supposed to be a little playful and I'd really rather not disrespect the dead. At the same time, I can't just deny it happened.

No matter what happens in World War II, there will also always be a Cold War-type situation after, whether it's between the US and USSR, the West and Japan, or some other random country you manage to prop up into major power status. You've probably become pretty important by then, so good luck trying to prevent nuclear war!

For players who prefer to keep away from world politics content, there will be an extensive array of achievements and objectives surrounding your interactions with other psychics. All of them are named characters with their own personality. You can romance them, befriend them, become rivals with them in or out of politics, and/or try to have them assassinated. (How do you assassinate a psychic, who knows it's coming? Certainly a challenge.) All the psychics are the same age - I'm thinking an Umbrella Academy-type backstory where they were all born around the same time.

For instance, you know who else was born in 1915? Billie Holiday. Yes, I'm finding a way to force this to be about music! She lived in Philadelphia and New York, and was just at the start of her career with unusual, promising (supernatural?) abilities of improvisation in the 1930s. Surely she would want something to do with our little secret society - but we'd have to reconcile with her traumatic past eventually. 

Tying this back to the first half of the article, Frank Sinatra was also born in 1915 in New Jersey. Having two jazz singers from the same part of the world is a little redundant, but they came from very different walks of life, so he could be an interesting counterpoint to Holiday.

Looking outside the US, other interesting people born in 1915 include French singer-songwriter Edith Piaf. In terms of politics, 1915 also saw the birth of reviled Chilean dictator Pinochet, perhaps an interesting nemesis, as well as '80s CCP leader Hu Yaobang. Not a particularly exciting list, so there would have to be more of a focus on made-up or obscure characters. (I looked into other birth years, and the only other nearby year with any potentially interesting people was 1917, with JFK, Indira Gandhi, Jack Kirby, and Ella Fitzgerald, plus a few other promising figures. However, being born in 1917 would make the protagonist 12 years old in 1930, a bit young to be running around influencing geopolitics by the middle of the decade.)

You can also interact with non-psychics. There could be specific bonuses or achievements associated with having specific historical figures in your following… +1 computer proficiency if you bring in Alan Turing, sort of thing.

Overall, unfortunately, the huge scope of the project makes it basically impossible to create. The other psychics' dialogue alone would take months to conceptualize and write, and the depth of the politics system would probably take even longer, to say nothing of actually coding the thing, even with a team. This has been a good exercise in outlining, though.