Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned to Embrace My Inner Cartoon Character

I’ve played a lot of video games in my time, and I’m fascinated by how they’re made. When they work, they’re incredible feats of artistry supported by amazing feats of engineering – “operas out of bridges”, as a very smart person once put it. 

Sometimes, they’re also magic tricks.

Video games are usually empowerment fantasies, but making those fantasies come true often takes a lot of smoke and mirrors behind the scenes; little tricks that game developers use to gloss over the fact that the vast majority of players are actually pretty hopeless. One of my favourite tricks is one of the oldest, and it’s called ‘coyote time’.

‘Coyote time’ comes from the halcyon days of Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog; games that require the player to make precise jumps between precariously floating platforms. To make things easier for those players who don’t have lightning-fast reflexes, the makers of these games allow the player to essentially defy gravity for a split second – just like a certain coyote from the classic Looney Tunes cartoons.

Why am I telling you this? Well, because apparently I can only make sense of the world by explaining it through references to popular culture. And this week, I feel like my own ‘coyote time’ is running out. 

I’ve written before about my plan to make it through everything that’s happening right now by breaking it down into one-week bursts, and it’s been mightily effective so far. It’s gotten me through working from home when my productivity has been low; it’s helped me to stay in contact with close friends more than I probably would otherwise; it’s even motivated me to write an entire short story, which I’m now in the process of re-drafting and (hopefully) getting published.

The problem with this ‘one week at a time’ approach is that I never considered what might happen when it’s over. Now, after weeks and weeks of running from one week to the next, I’ve got a fortnight off for the festive period, such as it is. I’ve looked down to find there’s nothing under my feet but air, and the floor is a long way away.

I’ve been off work for three days, and already I find myself dreading the growing pile of emails that are starting to clog up my inbox. They’ll be in triple figures come January. I’m about to start re-reading my first draft (with the help of some lovely friends and family members) and make the first round of edits, but what am I going to write next? It took me years to actually start getting this one idea down on paper, and it was really the only good one I had.

Please don’t interpret this as some sort of cry for help or anything maudlin like that. Just like Wile E. Coyote, I know that this fall isn’t going to stop me. I’ll dust myself off, pull the Acme catalogue from thin air, and start running again. Plus, it must be said that there’s something quite relaxing about the fall, too; it’s good to rest my tired legs, the wind feels good on my face, and I might even make a comedy whistle as I plummet.

But for now, I’m standing in mid-air, waiting for gravity to do its thing. In some of those old cartoons, the coyote held up a little sign before he fell. This one’s quite lengthy, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be hanging here, but I think I can sum it up in three words:

That’s all, folks.