Tommi's Way - Chapter 1 of 30

Tommi's Way: The Video Game That Doesn't Exist - Chapter 1 of 30

The following is a series of chapters from the novel Tommi’s Way - The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist. Each chapter will be uploaded on pilleater.com until the novel comes out with everything in it (that also entails revisions and reformatting). You can catch up by reading the first or previous chapter. Otherwise, each chapter can be read as an isolated article with not context of the past and future. Reader criticism and influence plays a huge part in shaping this future novel. Just like Fantasy Flight’s “Living Card Game” model, this project is also a “living novel,” where the novel changes form as the reader base influences the author’s direction through comments and criticism until it is finished. This is what makes this work of art a true “novel,” where this innovative artistic device (i.e. the living novel) determines “the new” in the novel, akin to the reader’s gaze in Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose.

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Chapter 1: What is Tommi’s Way?

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I owe the discovery of Tommi’s Way to the conjunction of a faded memory and a wet dream.

I say this with great sincerity. The faded memory came to me when I was 12 shopping at a local FuncoLand. The wet dream was about ejaculated on the main character and waking up from it, becoming depressed that it wasn’t real.

These two events tie in together that Tommi’s Way is such a powerful video game, it has influenced my own psyche and artistic passion to create something like it. I’m not a C++ programmer or a pixel artist by any origin. I tried to ignore that this video game had any influence on me whatsoever. I even tried Google searching it to finally come to terms with the video game and understand why it has influenced my political tastes, my aesthetic interest, my arousal towards certain women, and my passionate love for games in general.

Poetry is one thing where the artist expresses the use of words and sounds together. But ultimately, this is a subjective phenomena, and creative writing falls for this same trap as well. For what is “new” is no longer “novel” at this point. Why bother writing another novel in an age of accelerating technology and dopamine hit illiteracy? The novelist has became a computer programmer and expression is as crass as mentioning toys and celebrities.

I realized Tommi’s Way is something like a mix of Kirby Super Star, Gunstar Heroes, and Metal Slader Glory wrapped up in one video game I missed out upon when I saw it at FuncoLand in the late 1990s. I don’t assume the reader has played any of these games. Nor should I even care that the reader was kind of enough to buy this book, read this very first chapter, and start psychoanalyzing why I even wrote this or who I am. If that is your pleasure, that’s always been in the novel since the time of Algernon Blackwood or the kind of surreal exacerbation found in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Doom That Came to Sarnath. I know very well this is an exercise in that kind of avant-garde Castle Faggot expression and dreamlike tasting. I know it is totally redundant to do a bullshit “vaporwave” nostalgia fest of soyboy consumerism. Those things don’t constitute a “novel” anymore, and that kind of commentary leads into questioning how smart the author really is.

What you are about to read is a 60,000 words account of Tommi’s Way, from how it works to why it matters. I tell you this now because people don’t have the time anymore to read 200 pages worth of sadist masturbation. A WebToon on ancient Korean pornography is more interesting than today’s bullshit produced by Sam Pink or Tao Lin. It’s why it’s much more interesting to read Alvin Plantinga or Albert Borgmann, because they are not “writers” by any ideological sense. Of course they have to write their books, but the semantics excuses them from creative writing and dubs them as “philosophers.” Why then should one ever inspire to be hacks like David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon if what one “writes” is nothing more than expressive exercise using the device of the narrative (and following the paradigm of the novel). I wouldn’t want to use a novel to tell you how gravity works or how a video game is made. I am very aware of that ontological error.

…But here I go, trying to use the novel to describe what is Tommi’s Way and why you should care. I, the author of this work, Joe Nally, realize that what I am producing is “metafiction,” a Roman à clef, where elements of my life are projected in the text and as well made up events to help you understand what to look at, why to look at it, and hopefully make you think about things you wouldn’t be thinking about.

I could just write more nonfictional political and philosophy essays like I always have. So why do I have to make it fictional now?

It’s because art is so expressive, it might as well be a dream. Art is judged on many levels, and art without reason is no longer art. Logic, beauty, and expression must all connect back to one another than appeal to ignorance, English, and worship of the status quo. I could of wrote this in Japanese, Spanish, or Russian, and yet would it still be a novel in the sense that all languages are the same? No. Much of the novel was written in English or French (and some Italian), and so it’s quite baffling the medium is ignoring what could be said, done, explained, and detailed using the English language. I take aim at English because Tommi’s Way was made by Japanese people and as well written in Japanese. So to make things more of a hassle, Tommi’s Way could never have any Eurocentric projections tied to it because it exist as a Japanese dream.

I remember masturbating to many girls on Gelbooru. I enjoy hentai the same way I enjoy the memory of Tommi’s Way. I been accused of being gay for dissecting and analyzing the female gaze and the place of men a possible anime-realist society. David Irving was accused of Holocaust denial even though he went to court on the grounds that was libel. They say “it’s not racist if it’s true.” A harsh attack on a personality is always rooted in bias and hatred, yet liberalism dresses it up on that same logic, “it’s true because he talks about Asian homosexuality!” When I write and talk about Tommi’s Way, I am also expressing the possibility of the novel. Most people can’t read the Marquis de Sade because it’s offensive. I see myself working in that same sadist tradition.

The old paradigm of writing a novel is over. Nobody is writing privately for an entire year, only then to give the manuscript to the publisher when it’s finished. The first typewriter came out around 1868, and from that creative instrument, just like a Moog Model D from 1970, the creation of the egalitarian novel is as well a finished medium after a century. The access to a synthesizer has been around half a century, while what could be said, written, explained, and done using the novel format, is reaching a climax too. However, there is also a new paradigm of writing a novel, and that is published each “chapter” online, 1000 words or more, for the the public to view. Given that if this continues until a certain word count is reached or when project is finished, that novel is done. It can be transferred as a .pdf file over to a physical print object and for “the meat world” to store on a shelf. The novel becomes software, no different from a Protracker .mod file that can be inspected to dissect it’s samples and music data. The internet and computer technology redefines the novel as hyperlink gamebooks, rule instructions to role-playing games, fictional accounts from Yelp reviews, Reddit horror stories by connected posting, or even gay fan-fiction about The King of Fighters.

This new kind of creative writing also follows the laws of software. Every novelist becomes a programmer and now must adhere to the laws of computer science and the internet culture of Something Awful. “Social media” has distorted the novelist into a porn star, that the novel he has is also a resume of his character, and this character has the same youth fetish found in Larry Clark’s Kids or within “New Journalism.” The novelist, or by default, the ambiguous “writer” has nothing to say but the action of just writing English stories on the computer. These stories or narratives is the greatest cliche of the novel because it is directly influenced by screenwriting, theater, and movies. The novel is constantly though of as a third person play and everything must be told “as a story” and nothing else. This cliche and normative notion of what could be said and expressed in the English language fails to comprehend what could be written outside of that wore-down paradigm. All novels act as social media pages for the author and the hypothetical follower count and Instagram whoring dismiss the entire art itself. In other words, there is no such thing as a book nor the novel that is conceived, because it only exists as a picture.

I write this now because I want the reader to know what this novel on Tommi’s Way is about. This is a criticism I am when trying to accomplish this project. What is a “novel” is the most important, because without that understanding, it has resorted to the fad of “alt-lit,” punk zines as the message, and bullshit art direction determining the content of the English. What exactly is “content” is also a philosophical error, because it’s not about the “insides,” but the value that it takes upon a society that is illiterate.

David Auerbach once wrote this about Martin Gardner:¹

“Gardner’s idiosyncratic literary tastes make a little more sense in light of such emotional austerity. He preferred Nabokov to Joyce, Perec to Proust, and Carl Sandburg to William Carlos Williams. Joyce’s wordplay was dismissed as second-rate (“Any clever writer can compose acrostics, toss in old riddles, blend two or more words into one, concoct puns, and hide meanings under thick layers of enigmatic persiflage”) and Williams’s poetry as graceless (“I always read his poems slowly, three or four times, hoping to find something of more value than undistinguished prose broken into lines”).”

Gardner's insight provides something which is "novel" than what is common among English in the arts. “Devices” (or tools at the artist’s disposal) become key to his preference in what Gardner likes in the novel. The novel is just a collection of devices. It's very expressive, but what that entails could might as well separate from the definition of the novel and back into philosophy or research or just plain critical commentary.

In short, the "novel" means new, and what is "new" is a device that the English language can construct creativity from. Third person narratives written like movies is no longer novel.

For example, Greg Egan takes the novel to an extreme length of math and science, and all new devices are extremely hardcore in comprehension. A "novelist" here is someone that writes a complex English prose and structure for a niche or elite artistic purpose, in that in his personal expression is not for normal people, and is meant for sincere and dedicated intellects willing to solve the riddle he proposes. And just like Martin Gardner doing “recreational math,” Egan works the same way as becoming the true and real “late novelist.” Egan’s work could have been written as a science paper or PhD research proposal, but instead he uses the third person narrative (or cliche device) to talk about these hard subjects, because it’s the easiest way to comprehend what is being understood. To digest something that's hard to understand, it's better off having two imaginary people in an imaginary setting talk about it.

I have written this account of Tommi’s Way in the first person because there are only two people in this conversion; you the reader, and me, the author. I will try to explain what this video game is all about, and I hope you can find interest in it the same way I have been obsessed over it for years. Perhaps you can actually find the video game for me and help me conclude my never-ending trauma.

The “living novel” is like getting a new TikTok video, an Instagram story, or a brand new tweet without any context but, “I can’t wait to go home and smash my penis with a hammer.” The novel no longer is released as one huge package and expected to be read in a week or two. The novel is now an evolving format where bits and parts of the book is released until it forms together as one symbiotic creature. Umberto Eco once said that “eventually all books speak of other books.” And what is a book anymore if the book is only created on demand by the click of a button? The new paradigm is that “all articles speak of other articles,” which thus becomes a book, if one so desires. And to get to the point, “all novels speak of other novels.”

Tommi’s Way was released for the Super Nintendo, and out of the 1700 plus video games ever released for the system, it does not exist. I am now doubting that the game is real. So I decided to write this account that just like when Marcel Proust drinks his coffee, Tommi’s Way may also give you that same arousal and vision Proust had for something greater than yourself.

…To be continued…

1. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-delville-of-a-tolkar-martin-gardners-undiluted-hocus-pocus/