I learned recently about a video-game term that teenagers these

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78KB, 625x500px

I learned recently about a video-game term that teenagers these days throw around: "overpowered," or "OP" for short. If a character type in a competitive video game is inordinately more powerful than the others, then it is "overpowered"; the game as a result is deemed "unbalanced," and fans will complain on forums that the developers have delivered to them a swift "slap in the face." It's an interesting metaphor. Life, of course, is no game, and it's a truism that it isn't fair. But every once in a while we get a striking reminder of how unevenly Mother Nature distributes her gifts. Take the literary world for instance. By any measure, David Foster Wallace, the author of the acclaimed novel Infinite Jest, was overpowered. If he were a class in a role-playing game, then you wouldn't hear the end of the complaining. When it came to the writing of fiction, Wallace blew his competitors—historical and contemporary both—out of the water. To borrow another term from video gaming, it's fair to say that he "owned" them. When Infinite Jest hit book stores in February 1996, the title's two words were in the mouth of every serious reader in America; every living writer, however, was faced with a different pair of words: "Game Over."