Undisciplined

Like a Trash Can Fire in a Prison Cell: Twilight Continued

2011-12-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

Finished Twilight? Good. Now, get on with your life.

If you insist on continuing to read, I suggest you put on your theory glasses. Because Twilightas series is a much darker and funnier story. Not for the writing, or the plot, but because of the ideas of a woman named Andrea Dworkin, who made it all clear to me.

Dworkin is not a popular name in feminist circles these days. Truthfully, she wasn't a terribly popular name even during the wave for which she's often cited as an icon. Which is the first thing to notice about Dworkin these days: she's hugely popular with people trying to discredit things. Right-wing authors cite her to discredit feminism, third-wave-or-better feminists cite her to discredit second-wavers/white women/the 80s. I, personally, have once cited her to discredit the writing on True Blood. Dworkin is versatile that way.

But the defining moment in my travels with Dworkin came in the post-script to Woman-Hating, in which she railed against the tyranny of punctuation, and claimed that punctuation was the difference between an essay read in a book, and a conversation had between people. I so rarely get to use my media studies cred to pull rank, but this was one such opportunity: paper and ink is the difference between an essay read in a book and a conversation. And if it's not good enough for you, I've got bad news for you, because Andrea Dworkin is fucking dead and not conversing with anybody.

But, like mt feelings on Twilight, this should not be read as a condemnation of Dworkin. I'm a fan. I just feel she needs to be approached as something of a mad hierophant. Living writers can do a fine job writing about what patriarchy is, how it works, and even how it feels. Dworkin writes the way patriarchy smells, the way it tastes. Because our present is only an ongoing escape from our past, and our past is darker, sicker, and scarier than most of us can imagine. We can never be so far from it that its horror won't leak through when we aren't watching.

Lunatics, like Fools, are useful to have around now and then.

In Woman-Hating, Dworkin looks at fairy tales and pornography, two rather disparate ends of the media spectrum, and essentially comes to the same conclusion about them. For the patriarchy's purposes, man exists, and is good, in a pleasantly Augustinian sort of way. Woman is the opposite of that. So, since it is good for man to be active, it is good for a woman to be passive; since it is good for a man to be bold, it is good for a woman to be timid; since it is good for a man to be awake, it is good for a woman to be unconscious. And, of course, since it's good for a man to be alive, it's good for a woman to be dead.

There are, of course, active women, who seek to gain and wield power, and go about their value-defining way. The evil queens, the evil stepmothers, witches and paganae galore. Their counterparts, to be heralded as right and true and noble, are the sleeping ones, the poisoned ones, and the dead. Men exist to fuck, kill, and eat; women exist to be raped, killed, and eaten.

Which brings us to Bella Swann.

Aside from being a whiny little shit, as is to be expected from an early-21st-century American teen, Bella seems to have quite a bit going for her when we meet her. We are told that she is, diegetically, quite smart. She is well-read, although it doesn't seem to affect her conversations very much, and we never see much of her writing. Her parents appear to be semi-literate morons, and her success is even more impressive in that light.

At school, she is presented with an established clique of people dying to be her friend. She plays it down, preferring to complain to us about her physical awkwardness. In fact, the only thing that interrupts her internal monologue of complaint is that there's a boy who doesn't seem to like her. She obsesses about this for weeks.

And we've covered that one, and it's past, and past is prologue. So let's jump ahead to the payoff: he dumps her, and she goes into a depression of horrifying mopiness, too bleak even for an emo montage. Out on the town, in an attempt to look normal again, she encounters a shady group of men she believes to be the ones who assaulted her the previous year, and, operating on instinct, walks toward them. It isn't clear why, at first; she's not trying to reclaim her violated sense of autonomy, she's not daring them to offer a repeat performance in front of witnesses. What stops her--and what inspires her to continue--is discovering that, as she intentionally walks forward into the vital prospect of pain, humiliation, and possibly death, Edward's voice pops into her head.

Clearer than in her memories.

Because the feeling of imminent destruction, especially self-destruction, reminds her of her ex-boyfriend more than all the My Morning Jacket songs in the world. She follows up this performance by buying a motorbike, which are diegetically considered to be dangerous even for people with nominal control of their arms and legs, a group that excludes Bella. Finally, Bella inaugurates New Moon's third act by throwing herself off a goddamn cliff. Alice, our friendly neighborhood psychic with pretty hair, thinks it's a suicide attempt, and is in all likelihood half-right.

New Moon opens with a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, so it's appropriate that the interaction between Bella and Edward consists of a kind of competitive suicidal ideation. Following Meyer's tradition of having about one chapter of better-than-mediocre material, there's an iteresting mediation about settling for Paris, and what that means for love, death, and superficial readings of canonical literature. Jacob, whose abs are certainly not described with the breathtaking narrative force Taylor Lautner would later give them, is basically just a trailer for Eclipse, in terms of Bella's world, but it's nice to acknowledge that it wouldn't have been impossible for him to have been a meaningful player in the present.

We move on. Edward and the Cullens are, predictably, horrified that Bella has been hanging out with werewolves. The Quileuttes are predictably horrified that Bella has been hanging out with vampires. It's too dangerous, they remind her in unison.

And the hell of it is, they're right. Even in this friendly diegetic world, vampires and werewolves are both incredibly dangerous. When Bella cuts herself at her birthday party, Jasper loses control and tries to eat her. Sam, Jacob's pack leader, is married to a woman who is missing half of her face, because he lost his temper with her once. One of Jacob's bros accidentally transforms in her presence, and only Jacob following suit seems to keep her safe.

I think all of us, at some time or another, have done things we aren't proud of in the heat of the moment. All of us have found ourselves staying a little too late at that party, having a bit too many rum-and-cokes, and saying things we don't really mean, like "I love you," or "I never want to see you again," or "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." But I don't know anyone who has ever torn anyone's face off in a fit of pique. Everyone I know who's torn someone's face off has done so with careful, sober deliberation.

Even with all the self-control that only twue wuv can bring, Bella stays physically intact--literature majors, please hold your comments until the end of the post--only be ensuring that the barely controlled supernatural forces around her are consistently in even numbers.

Bella just isn't interested unless she's got a reasonable chance of dying. And it seems she has standards as to what constitutes a good death. She's not going for some weak-ass chick-suicide like an overdose, and she's not going to butch up and borrow her father's handgun, either. No, the kind of death Bella wants, the kind of death she draws hearts around in her diary, is one in which she is beaten and broken, her soft, soft will spent against an unstoppable, relentless force of power and will and hardness. One that's both brutally fast and agonizingly slow. Bent limbs akimbo, her innermost fluids flowing out into the open air, under the watchful eyes of an impenetrable, invulnerable predator.

Conclusion to follow, in which, over a thousand pages into the series, something wet finally happens. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I think I need a cigarette.

The Weak Last Gasp of the Evening's Dying Light: the fucking Twilight Post Begins

2011-12-01T18:29:00.000-08:00

As I have probably written here before, I like bad things. So it should probably surprise nobody that I've read the entire Twilight series, and enjoyed it very much. The most difficult part, in fact, was the terror that somebody would see me reading it. To that end, I prepared a short speech explaining that, after having spent the past month immersed in Andrea Dworkin, Ayn Rand, and Graham Greene, I was entitled to read whatever silly thing I wanted, to celebrate the fact that I hadn't yet blinded myself from the sheer horror of it all.

I shall acknowledge and move past what all Twipologists claim: they're light, they're fun, they're guilty pleasures. "Guilty pleasure" is a particularly useful phrase, because at times our beloved narrators manage to evoke authentic feelings of guilt and shame. Usually these are phantom travellers carried by nostalgia. I shall 'splain.

Think, for a moment, about your adolescence. Think about the very dumbest thing you ever did. The thing you are most embarrassed about, that you can laugh at when it comes up in conversation, but that you know better than to spend a lot of time thinking about. Remember how sensible you thought you were being? Remember how noble, how strong, how brave you were? Remember how utterly apocalyptic every (saner) alternative seemed to be? Think about that frame of mind, your brain pan filling up with water, an odd yellow-filter placed over your third-person memories. Think about what a stupid, self-indulgent little shit you were.

The people in Twilight live in that place all the time.

(I assume that anyone reading this is an alien researching human civilization. If that is, in fact, the case...man, did you ever go to the wrong place. Seriously. Go ask your thesis advisor if there's still time to pick a new topic. If you are a human who doesn't have this kind of memory of their adolescence, I wish you congratulations, and ask to subscribe to your newsletter. Finally, if you are currently an adolescent...shit, just try not to commit and violent crimes or die, ok? Good fucking luck.)

I didn't go to high school, so the dominant narratives presented to me by American popular culture are enacted by actors in their late 20s pretending to be teenagers having an experience I missed. Nonetheless, these high school narratives reliably provide some of that guilty nostalgia. Twilight is a concentrated form. If Buffy is weed and My So-Called Life is alcohol, Twilight is black tar heroin.

So, the shittier it is, the more embarrassed you are to be reading it as a more-or-less literate adult, the more fun it becomes. I don't think this qualifies as reading it ironically. I had a blast reading these books. It's just that it's the kind of blast I had watching James MacAvoy pushing a gun barrel through a man's face in Wanted.

And most of the time, the writing is sufficient to take you where you need to go. Generally, it ranges from competent to slightly-less-than, with one notable exception: the authentically interesting chase scenario that comprises the first book's third act. The trouble is, well, it's a chase. And you know what medium does chases really, really well? Film. A 2-hour film of the last third of Twilight would be one of the more interesting and ambitious vampire stories we've seen in a while. But in prose, it blurs in with the rest of the story, saddled as it is by a narrator who can't see most of the action and spends the climax unconscious. And in the film--yes, I have seen the first three, and in my defense I cite the existence of Rifftrax--it's completely wasted.

That said, Twilight could have been a lovely sprite of a novel had it ended with Edward losing control and tearing apart his one true love in a shower of blood, bone, and sinew. There's some humor in that ending, and some justice, and a sick kind of romance. Because vampires can certainly be effective stand-ins for superheroes, but their defining characteristic is that they will fucking kill you.

So ends the first post, because I'm pretty sure I should make some dinner. Stay tuned, imaginary readers, because if you share my disappointment that Edward jerked his story off its moral rails, the sequels will make your eyes bleed.

Not a game you can win.

2011-11-14T19:29:00.000-08:00

When you write almost nothing, knowing what to write about can be a tricky biscuit. Most of my daily, procrastination-assisting reading these days arrives via political blogs by liberals, feminists, and the odd liberal feminist. Media and ethics come up frequently on these blogs, because it turns out that liberals and feminists have a thing about media and ethics. Who knew?

Yet, very often, I have little of substance to say about any of these posts, beyond the occasional comment. Occasionally, the blogosphere will go into a tizzy over an issue which, on paper, seems to be exactly my area of interest, and in these cases it's usually something rather dull and obvious that inspires me to write out of a kind of spiritual vindictiveness. I generally don't get far on those topics, and try not to make the attempt.

I have worked hard, very hard, to avoid blogging about Penny Arcade. For serious.

So now I'm feeling compelled to write about the Pick-Up Artist...thing? What is it, anyway? Motivational lecture series? LARP scenario? The ads I see on filesharing sites suggest it's a practical, monetized application of CIA's MKULTRA project, but I assume this to be bullshit. Not only because, to paraphrase Morbo, HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, but because if it were true, I'd be reading about guys raising zombie armies of girlfriend-samurai.

For some reason--by which I mean apparently offensive and poorly thought-out comments on Penny Arcade--whenever videogames come up on my daily blog roundup, PUAs usually follow; certainly, whenever PUAs come up, videogames make a quick appearance. It's part of the bouquet of the New Male thing we're working out, somewhere on the spectrum alongside Asperger's and Nice Guys. (I am too lazy to post the appropriate trademark symbol. If you want it there, get a permanent marker and apply it directly to your screen. If you're using a screen-reader, you can save time by just marking up your fingers.) Nice Guys, affable ensigns of the rape apology Federation, are a topic dear to my heart, in a "there but for the grace of God go I" sort of way, and deserve a prose exploration significantly longer than I intend this one to be. Suffice to say there a lot of young dudes out there who don't seem to be very good at dealing with people, and since mandatory military conscription is no longer in vogue, they find themselves ignoring the problem until it interferes with what we are collectively told is a God-given right to get laid.

Yes, flirting is tricky. I, personally, am utterly insensate to it: even in my seven annual minutes of being friendly and communicative, if a woman attempts to flirt or flirt back, the romantic intentions bend around me, like light around the Predator, and quietly raise the self-esteem of the guy standing behind me.

What pricks my academic ears up--my academic ears, incidentally, are smaller, more muscular appendages located near the base of my neck--is the persistent use of "game."

We have lots of games. We have the spy game, the fame game, the political game. Anything in which multiple parties with differing, potentially mutually exclusive interests has likely been likened to a game in some dusty corner of the common parlance.

(Note to self: write book of poetry, title it "some dusty corner of the common parlance.")

And let's take a look at that. As any self-respecting American knows, the CIA doesn't train spies, per se, but rather trains operatives to recruit spies on the ground. What an operative primarily does is convince people to help them. Money, patriotism, ideology, blackmail, and good old-fashioned cash payoffs: the tools of the trade when you want to convince someone to do something that is certainly in your interest, but probably a disastrous, life-ending mistake for them.

Politics, by definition, means making strategic alliances with people you don't like, because people you like even less are making strategic alliances with people they like only slightly more than you.

Fame...fuck it, I dunno. Lady Gaga seems to have a good handle on it, ask her.

So games are tricky. Games might involve compromise or deception. But the most salient thing about the pick-up game, to my reading, is Bernard Suits' claim that the defining characteristic of a game, often as opposed to "free" play, is a layer of unnecessary complication or difficulty.

To wit, a game requires an opponent of sorts. And what is the difficulty involved in...whatever the hell the PUAs are selling cheat codes for?

You want to have sex with women, right? So why all the training? Why the hilarious Soviet mind control techniques? Why the carefully employed scripts? Because they want to have sex with you, right?

Oh, wait. They don't?

Well, shit. You do have a problem then. Because, as we've currently configured the sexy sex-language landscape, if they don't want you, it's not sex. It's a sin, and a crime, and (if you're a conservative) a persistent metaphor for everything bad that happens to you ever.

And the thing is, at no point in human history is it as easy as it is now to find people who want to have sex with you. We have the internet, we have craigslist, we have (out of pocket) birth control and (sort of) legal abortion. We have fetish forums and online dating and Chat Roulette. We have speed dating and Facebook and, well, dormitories. In the Western world, young adult men and women are allowed to hang out together, in a wide variety of ways, with the most minimal outside supervision.

Working these various social affordances can be complex, of course, not the least for their sheer variety. If you want to have sex--and, being male, you're more than allowed to be open about it--finding someone who wants to have sex with you can, in fact, be rather gamelike. There's not really a problem with that. Trying to alter or conceal your personality or intentions to gain sex from someone who'd run screaming the other way if you presented yourself honestly, well, that's sort of a game too. It's just that the win condition is a valorization of the skill it took to get there, not a thing freely joined, to be appreciated in and of itself. The story of this kind of hook-up is one of triumph over adversity, and reduces the hunted to a disposable, replaceable entity.

Which is why we refer to this sort of thing as rape culture.

Surviving the Winter

2011-11-11T16:57:00.000-08:00

Hey, kids. It's winter in the Greater Boston Area, and if you're depressed and taking care of a chronically ill person, that means you're stuck in a time loop, revisiting the narratively compelling artifacts of your more rockin' years, and, appropriately, watching a lot of Doctor Who.

(We will not, in this previously-on-Undisciplined entry, deal with Torchwood. Because, come fucking on, Davies. Scrap it, try again with Crowd Hoot or Hot Rod Cow.)

The piece de resistance, or "piece of resistance," of my current domicile is my first-run PlayStation 3. The wood-burning model. It weighs seventy pounds, gives off 5,000 BTUs, it can theoretically run Linux, and it's completely fucking irreplaceable, since Sony has apparently blinded or executed everyone who worked on it. This means that I have hardware emulation of previous PS games, in the sense of having a PS2 emulator that contains a PS1 emulator. This represents the holy grail of gaming, because now I can play games that are a decade and a half old. Because I am an idiot. (For further research, check every other entry.)

When life is stressful and the sun itself has abandoned you, the logical thing to do is to hunker down and do a Silent Hill marathon. The first game weathers the ravages of time quite competently; the resolution drop is jarring at first, especially on an HDTV, but not seeing shit is kind of the sine qua non of Silent Hill's visuals, so you get used to it pretty quickly. What does stand out is the ear-splitting, high-pitched squeal the game will occasionally emit when you use the handgun too often. Since the handgun is the only firearm with which the player is provided adequate ammo, this does change the gameplay experience significantly. Apparently this flaw is also in the PSone classic download from PSN, because Sony hates us and wants us to suffer.

The internet is less than specific about the pervasiveness of the glitch; I don't much remember it, but some people seem to have reported it while playing in PS2 emulation. It's possible the only way to play Silent Hill correctly is with an out-of-production console, in the dark, while high on mescaline.

Which raises a curious problem for games studies. Obviously, access to earlier texts is something you're going to need in any serious (or comical!) study of a medium. Literature students have libraries, the bastards, and an adorable print industry that pretends to keep the medium relevant. Film schools tend to have extensive archives, and film archiving in general is an ongoing and respected cultural project. And I hear now and then about university libraries stockpiling videogames for the apocalypse.

A problem occurs. One, are we really going to need to keep all this fucking hardware on hand forever? Does the future need GameCubes? PC emulation solves some of this, I suppose, but leaves the purists grumbling. More to the point, not everyone has the opportunity to see Othello performed between two of their English classes. We developed a workaround, providing students with the "text" of the text, and asking them to "read" the play. This is a pet peeve of mine, and I intend to be entirely unreasonable about it for the remainder of my life. The screenplay for Casablanca is not fucking Casablanca.

But what if it were? It's good enough for a citation. Similarly, if you just need to swipe some plot elements from Metal Gear Solid 2, a transcript will do nicely. But if you need mechanics, architecture, ethics...you need the original game, on the original platform. In the dark. High on mescaline.

Except you don't. If we're to drop our narrative infatuations, it seems appropriate to ask where we draw the line between the text and a given performance of the text. If dialogue isn't key, spice it up or lose it. If graphics don't matter, spruce 'em up or trim 'em down. Does Silent Hill actually need low-res redraw to be Silent Hill? Can we get a better translation of the Japanese text? Can Konami hire people to write better Japanese dialogue? (The answer to this last question, as evidenced by MGS Twin Snakes, is: no.)

Preservation is obviously going to be a concern down the line, and every medium struggles with it at some level. I don't really know whether it's important to see The Great Dictator on film, or whether a digital copy is sufficient. But I also don't know where the line between "remake" and "restoration" lies for videogames.

Nonary for the People

2011-01-27T16:53:00.000-08:00

Whenever Roger Ebert pops up into the news, my little corner of the social imaginary grumbles anew about his failure to acknowledge videogames as an art form, which is apparently an important thing. In the midst of the grousing, examples are inevitably put forth, and the irritating people--in the past, we'd have called them "ludologists"--point out that the examples don't count, because they're notable for plot elements that rely on narrative (i.e. non-ludic) conventions. In short, movies are art, whereas videogames may not be, because the examples of arty videogames are actually short films. Which are art. Or they're not. I dunno.

Anyway, it's refreshing to see games that openly embrace the syncretic, and 9/9/9 identifies itself quite openly as being a mystery novel with graphic adventure "escape" scenes. It takes some getting used to, and I certainly ground my teeth a bit during the stretch between the opening escape and the four/five dilemma, but in time, and with the help of several extra-literary devices, it works very well.

Initially, the seeming sluggishness induces an odd sense of displacement, which is actually pretty appropriate, all things considered. As a player, I never seemed to see what I expected to see when I was reading about it, and the displacement faded only when I accepted that 9/9/9 really wasn't going for film as its fallback medium, but the novel. Just like it said in the damn manual.

So, it's mostly reading. The visuals are haunting, but more a series of illustrations than anything else, more for style and mood than action. As for said action, the prose is competent, and at times loving: never before have I read such a thorough description of what would happen to a human body should an explosive be detonated in his or her small intestine.

Which brings us to the plot, which is, well, spoilery, really. The genre kind of demands a lack of info. For our current purposes, it's worth mentioning the end structure. 9/9/9 has six categories of endings, if the save screen is to be believed, and when the game is completed, the player may restart with the (heaven-sent) option to speed-scroll through text already read, and with the choices already made highlighted for easy reference. The result is a system that encourages players to rapidly replay similar events, an area in which games happen to excel.

One of the few entirely unique affordances of the videogame medium is the ability to conceal rules from the player: the first goal of the game is to figure out the second goal, etc. The repetition of plot elements fits into the game's narrative very well (think Eternal Darkness), and it's genuinely unnerving when a character you find sympathetic and vulnerable kills you with an ax. It casts a strange light on your next time through the game, with the future ax-memory breeding with the previous one. And while any non-linear text of this type allows for differing futures, I'm personally unclear on whether even the past is stable: if something is true in the 5-7-1 path, can we be certain it's similarly true in 4-8-6? Even if it happened before any of us showed up on this damn boat?

Objectivist Ethics III

2011-01-22T15:27:00.000-08:00

By now, Rand has established her categorical imperative--"survive, goddammit!"--and toward its maintenance, suggested a first principle of government:

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

One is here tempted to wonder where property comes from, if it is to be synonymous with human life in our political values. Elsewhere, Rand's answer is similar to Locke's: "property," the concept by which materials cannot permissibly be taken from an individual to whom it "belongs," is created when said individual mixes his labor with it. Work, mentally and bodily, creates property from gross earth.

The trouble with this conceit is that it reeks of the mysticism she so defiantly claims to reject. Nothing in the laws of nature, to which Objectivism claims to owe its origins, corresponds to property. Life and death, troublesome concepts that they are, seem to exist objectively. The empirical evidence toward this conclusion is overwhelming. We can examine plants and animals in any number of ways and determine, physically, whether or not they are alive.

We cannot do this with property. No force field surrounds my car, protecting it from thieves. A physicist examining the car would not be able to determine any essential change in the car were I to sell it while she were examining it: she would not suddenly look up, a puzzled expression on her face, and mutter,"I sense a disturbance in the force...a document changing hands...insurance rates getting higher..." (In this example, the physicist in question is a Star Wars fan, and the car has been sold to a 17-year-old boy in another state.)

What protects the car from thieves--so far--is not a metaphysical fact but a social agreement to establish documentation of "ownership," and to maintain a persistent threat of violence toward those who would seek to challenge the authority of said document. The car ceases to be property when the community ceases to treat it as such. Under feudalism, we are entirely comfortable saying that property is created by soldiers, and you own what you are willing to expend resources to defend. Rand seems to believe that, faced with solidifying borders, technological improvements, mass production and international trade, humans suddenly discovered an a priori law of property that had always been there, written in the very eros of our being, and that it had no relation whatsoever to that earlier, fake "property" concept that had been developing and adapting to changing conditions since prehistory.

Rand treats property as a deontological law, as brutal and uncompromising as the God of Abraham. It must be followed because it must be followed. And because it must be followed, violence that preserves the law must be morally legitimate, whereas violence that threatens the law is forbidden. Rand prefers to express this concept in the form of a mugging--"A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man."

In the interest of being needlessly pedantic and snarky, I would suggest that a "holdup man" is probably hoping to avoid killing his victim, which is why he goes to the trouble of the "holdup" instead of flat-out murdering a stranger and looting their corpse. I am also unclear on whether or not it is strictly correct to call the person who kills the holdup man a "victim," given that only one of them is still breathing. Rand does herself a rhetorical favor by putting this parable in a readily recognized situation, and one that takes place in a society several orders of magnitude more complex, and interdependent, than the noble savage groove she's been rocking so far. It also conceals any essential difference between a wallet held by clothing affixed to the body and a patch of land in another country, or the right to translateFinal Fantasy V into English at some point in the future. It also makes property-defending violence perpetually secondary, despite the fact that the laws of physics give equal claim on any object to anyone. "Objectively," the mugger's seizing of the wallet is no less moral than the "owner's" decision to carry it around in the first place. The distributed threat of violence to protect the social construct, in addition to providing the mugger with an incentive to leave his victim alive in the first place, is primary. The decision that any action is forbidden, and must be deterred with violence, precedes any violence the decision might forbid.

This distinction matters because elsewhere, Rand is keen to note that slavery is not a properly "human" state, and mere survival is not sufficient to rational living. On the contrary, nearly suicidal behaviors can be considered rational if the "life" one risks is one of servitude, terror, and uncertainty. It is difficult to argue with this point, and every moral system acknowledges that there are different kinds of life, and different kinds of death, and one need not act on akrasia to choose the final death of the rebel over the living death of the slave. Rand is in agreement with nearly everyone here. She just happens to have added the caveat that this does not apply to countries with strong property laws, in which case those unable to procure "rational," "independent," "human" survival by their own ingenuity and labor are morally obligated to suffer and die, intentionally remaining in lives of danger and want, even if they could improve their long-term chances of survival by seizing the property of another. They must die, so private property can live.

Objectivist Ethics II

2011-01-19T19:11:00.000-08:00

Previously on "The Objectivist Ethics": "an organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil."

Righto. So, surviving? Good! And here we have the first common mischaracterization of evolutionary theory we so commonly see in pop culture: that of brutal, unending competition, for survival is a goal that can afford no compromises. Which, I suppose, makes for a fine moral philosophy. The only thing that could really threaten it--and I'm going way outside the box here, so bear with me--would be the repeating failure of certain cells to reproduce perfectly, leading to an utterly unavoidable ceasing of all life functions that nobody could escape, under any circumstances, ever.

So unless the highest moral state of man is that of an invalid sucking oxygen through a mask in a state of shrieking terror as his brain function becomes ever more tenuous, there has to be more to value than the life of the individual.

Moving on, Rand pays homage to Bentham's twin sovereigns, pleasure and pain. She tells us that such sensations begin the process of developing consciousness:

Consciousness--for those living organisms which possess it--is the basic means of survival. [...] The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.

But Man, it turns out, is a tricky biscuit. Because it turns out that bipedal primates can, in fact, get by quite well by hunting, assuming by "hunting" we mean "gathering and scavenging." We did so for a good long time. In fact, "hunting" itself wasn't something we were particularly good at until speech enabled us to enlarge our social circles and transmit knowledge more effectively, alongside such wonderful developments as traps, throwing weapons, and the porting of the popular "wolf" into a more consumer-friendly format. By going oddly Platonic in her tripartite "plant/animal/Man" hierarchy, Rand seems to hope we don't raise our hands and ask exactly what this Man thing is.

Homo sapiens clearly isn't sufficient, and it's unclear where exactly "producing" picks up from previous fuel-acquisition technologies. Man, the productive being, might begin with subsistence farming, or he might begin with Adam Smith's pin factory. But any sub-masculine homo sapiens is certainly capable of grabbing what he finds in his environment, even if he did not produce it. Why wouldn't he, if it helped fuel his survival? Rand and I, surprisingly, have different answers, which shall be covered in the next post, in which Rand tries to sneak a heaping pile of deontology into her theory without her audience noticing the glaring contradiction it creates.

I Don't Own This Post: Thoughts on The Objectivist Ethics

2010-10-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

First, as the essay I'll be looking at has been collected in The Virtue of Selfishness, I feel obliged to summarize the intro to that book, lest we end up getting Dworkined on a basic misunderstanding of vocabulary. (I'm pretty sure the use of Dworkin as a verb is my invention. I'm a communist, though: you looters can have it.) In the American English of Rand's day, as well as ours, selfishness is generally contrasted with altruism. The trouble is that altruism being accepted as a good necessarily presupposes that its opposite, selfishness, must be bad. And there is much to be admired about being interested in, skilled with, and dependent upon one's 'self,' whatever that may mean. Self-sufficiency, for example, is generally considered a valorous attribute. Self-awareness even more so. Self-interest, well, that gets us locked up in political lingo, as it's essentially a meaningless concept employed to summarize unrelated ideas.

But, getting back to Rand, selfishness probably ought not to have the exclusively negative connotation that it does. However, the fact remains that it does, and insisting that it be treated otherwise won't promote new ideas so much as require us to rework ever more vocabulary. Which might be useful, over a great deal of time, but it's not really in a philosopher's area of expertise at that point.

I once stumbled upon the website of a man who claimed to have found a way to divide by zero. It's a bold claim, perhaps, but an asterisk is warranted. Because, as many math-oriented people pointed out, the rule against dividing by zero is not a law of nature we found in a pristine state. It's an agreed-upon rule that's part of a larger mathematical structure. We could have designed a system in which dividing by zero is possible, but we did not. So one can certainly divide by zero, as long as they're willing to acknowledge that sundry other mathematical laws will not function in the new system. You'd be starting from scratch.

I leave the parallels to you. Moving on!

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions--the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics is: why does man need a code of values?

The Socratics, to whom Rand and I will soon turn, were very fond of this kind of philosophizing, and they had different answers. They were, at least, sensible enough to note that such values existed, and seemed to have existed for as long as there have been human beings, even when there were no philosophers around to tell people about it. The idea of not having values is an empty signifier, like not being on a boat. That something exists, and it is difficult to imagine an alternative to its existence, does not make the question of why less important, of course, but it does set an interesting tone for our reading. The writer does not seem entirely in control of her symbols.

Rand then asks whether a judgment of what is Good and what is Bad is a subjective whim, a "desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause, or on actual fact. Rand actually uses not merely fact but "metaphysical fact," although she is kind enough to explain in parentheses that she is using metaphysical to mean "that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence." Which is not, strictly speaking what metaphysical means, and may in fact be its opposite--exactly what relationship do abstract entities immune to empirical testing have to "reality" or "existence" this week? I had a doctor's appointment and couldn't make the last meeting.

Anyway, Rand claims that for most of human history, morality has been decided to be in the "whim" school, primarily expressed through the (literally) arbitrary will of gods, although a few have tried to break out of it into something scientific. Aristotle went with descriptive ethics, neatly avoiding the question of "why?" that so plagues the prescriptive, and others ("neo-mystics" simply reskinned religious dogma as agreed-upon social rules, substituting the "good of society" for the "will of God." Taking a brief aside from my usual concise, ruthlessly on-topic approach, I feel I should note that either of these seem like fine places to start for ethics, assuming the thing that "wills" exists. I'm not sure about God, and though certain people doubt the existence of society, the empirical evidence for society's existence is pretty daunting. Who the fuck is writing all these blogs, anyway?

Credit where credit is due, it is true that individual people exist, and society is just a made-up concept that makes it easier to refer to large groups of them in speech of writing. (We will ignore, for the moment, the possibility that the individual person is also such a made-up concept.) Because we lack the hive-mind technology of the Borg, or even the knowledge base technology of the Cylons, society can be referred to, lauded, or railed against, but it cannot act. And because it is difficult to coordinate the efforts of every individual in a large system to a common end, especially when some of them are dicks, the moral dictates of the will of God/good of society must be enforced by individuals who symbolically take on the identity of society itself and pursue actions that would be prohibited to them as individuals. Through this conception of "society," we have made men into gods.

This is not a minor point. The fact that the snarling beast of chaos can only be kept in check by the also-snarling beast of an army or police force is a serious fucking problem, and deserves to be taken seriously. A police class necessarily legitimizes coercion. The Western approach has generally been to set up so many checks on power that it's a pain in the ass for any of our public servants to step too far out of line, but it's not a perfect system, and the question remains: Who watches the watchers of the watchers of the watchmen? And who watches them?

Having established the shakiness of the persistent "whim" school of values, Rand suggests an alternative: existence. "The concept 'value' [...] presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative." As living organisms, our existence is a pattern of information whose continued function is not guaranteed to us, but must be painstakingly maintained. Because we need to exist and face nonexistence for "value" to exist, reasons Rand, then Good must necessarily be what furthers our existence, and Bad what hinders it.

Things get tricky here, because Rand is unknowingly treading on the territory of a field which did not exist in her time, that of evolutionary psychology. Like it or not, "The Objectivist Ethics" is an apologetics for evo psych. Which doesn't make her claim about morality being necessarily related to existence wrong, but does severely problematize her earlier concept of "whims," because it turns out we've identified those subjective whims, and they're the result of natural selection, i.e. technically random, but the very opposite of chance. We do care enough to discover the cause of these former-whims, and we are learning more daily about said causes. The fact that such subjective ephemera were nearly universal among our species, and that agreement on said principles was largely effective in getting people to pretend not to murder each other or sexually abuse their children, was enough reason to keep them around, despite our inability to locate their origins. (Oh, and hey, C.S. Lewis actually tries to deduce the existence of God from the ubiquity of said rules. Rand, if you're reading, check out that old post. I'm sure you'll get along.)

And now that you mention it, who wouldn't like to see C.S. Lewis fight Ayn Rand?

Ultimate The Mortal Kombat Problem 3

2010-09-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

Previously on Mortal Kombat:

Stryker? Seriously?

MK3 had done its business in arcades, and performed quite serviceably on the extant consoles as well, including the shiny new PlayStation, but the buzz was certainly nowhere near what it had been during the heyday of MK2. In an attempt to remedy this, Midway decided to emulate the most critically despised feature of its closest competitor: the non-sequel sequel, more commonly referred to as the upgrade.

Attempting to appear responsive to fans' griping that the third game hadn't been as groundbreaking as the second, the designers made it known that they were paying close attention to fan input on designing the inaccurately named Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Message boards swarmed. Magazines printed summaries. The results, unsurprisingly, were stupid.

Primarily this is because the fans wanted more MK2, and almost all of the suggestions boiled down to "make it more like MK2." So back came Scorpion, Reptile, Kitana, Jade, and Mileena, palette-swaps broken only by sex. The male portion of the palette-swapping duo, the mighty and stick-legged John Turk, also reprised two roles that had diegetically ceased to exist in the series continuity, "Classic" Sub-Zero and "Human" Smoke, along with Ermac, who was "created" as a hoax back in MK1. A few of the classic Outworld backgrounds returned as well, but really, now that we've had 3D backgrounds for a while, who gives a shit?

None of these characters added much to the game; most of their functionality had been rendered redundant by MK3 new cast, and in practice they were mostly interesting for people who didn't like or wouldn't learn any of the new affordances built into MK3's design. At any rate, UMK3 attempted to respond to accusations that the series wasn't as innovative as it used to be by explicitly recycling its own past.

In short, UMK3 was kind of a pointless "internet only" release of a game, appealing for diehard fans, but not particularly noteworthy from a design perspective. The rights to console adaptation of UMK3 were sold to Sega, who released it as an "exclusive" to their already faltering Saturn platform. Not willing to forgo the more lucrative PlayStation and Nintendo64 markets, Midway quickly came up with Mortal Kombat Trilogy, which was basically UMK3 with an additional level of recursion.

So the games built, in part, on what the fans wanted, ended up exacerbating all of the fans' complaints, because it turns out the fans aren't always the best designers. That's why they don't get paid to, y'know, design. But lo, respite on the horizon! The new, 3D Mortal Kombat 4 was to follow, cross-marketed with the series' first genre jump (the quirky but underrated MK Mythologies: Sub-Zero), and a brand new story that didn't involve Shao Kahn at all! Most importantly--this became a mantra for the fans--there would be no more silly, cartoonish fatalities (or babalities, or animalities...). No, MK4 was going to be a return to the dark and violent milieu of Mortal Kombat.

MK Mythologies bombed. MK4 added in some thoroughly disposable new features, including the most limited "3D" movement since Fatal Fury 2 did it with sprites, and left people generally unimpressed. Tekken was busily making the series irrelevant, and arcades were dying around both of them. The storyline, despite having the advantage of a very filmic paratext, was more vague than its predecessors: how Shinnok (the new villain) intends to take over the world through the not-officially-a-tournament tournament is rather unclear. In fact, diegetically, Shinnok seems to have no powers at all: humans can make him perform "impersonations"--a simplified form of Shang Tsung's morphing that wouldn't cause problems on CD-based consoles--but Shinnok the end boss ran around and threw rocks. As is, apparently, befitting a fallen elder god ruling over a desolate parody of the heavens in which he once served.

On the bright side, it was nice to be away from Kahn for a while, and once again the designers seemed determined to keep supplying us with fresh faces, despite the fairly large number of returning favorites befitting a series reboot. To that end, the (dead, it has been implied) Kung Lao has been replaced with the more interesting Fujin, the (dead, it is stated) Kano is replaced by the...well, not-that-different Jarek, Tanya points to the still tumultuous situation on Outworld, and Quan Chi makes his appearance as the only thing anyone will remember about this game. There's even a character added in v2.0 that's implied to be a weakened and pissed-off Shao Kahn, but turns out to be...well, nobody in particular.

Really, the only reason I bothered to spend more than a sentence on MK4 is the Feuding Ninja Paradox, which is not only an excellent name for a rock band, but a continuity clusterfuck more emphatic than even the Shao Kahn Shenanigans that preceded it.

Shamelessly plagiarizing one of the more long-winded and arrogant theorists, it bears repeating: For a sequel to take place, there must first be a coherent and reasonably specific decision as to which possible chain of events actually happened in the previous game. In the canonical conclusion of MK1, Liu Kang wins the tournament, an event that happens only in Liu Kang's ending. However, the events described in Cage's ending, aside from the victory itself, also take place: Cage has, in fact, made a movie called "Mortal Kombat." Likewise, Scorpion has killed Sub-Zero, as happened in his own ending, and as was explicitly contradicted in Sub-Zero's ending. The world is not swiftly brought to its end, as it is in Raiden and Kano's endings. The only element common to every ending, Tsung's defeat, is canonical. The rest seems to be a mishmash of all the endings, excluding only the events that explicitly contradict each other. This rule seems to apply throughout the series: Kung Lao dies in Liu Kang's MK3 ending, but also in his own, and so we aren't surprised not to see him in MK4.

In MK2, the recognition and reconciliation between Scorpion and Sub-Zero occurs in both characters' endings, and is nowhere else contradicted. It is the conclusion of Scorpion's character arc, and the reason for his absence in MK3. Midway went out of their way to reboot the Sub-Zero character, dramatically altering his trademark appearance, giving him new antagonists, and making him a white-hat rebel at war not only with the forces of Outworld, but with his former employers as well. Scorpion's UMK3 ending actually has him enlisted by Kahn to fight against the good guys, only to turn around and kill his master when the orders conflict with his spectral prime directive of "protect Sub-Zero."

Which is why it confused fans when Scorpion entered MK4 consumed with a desire to take vengeance on Sub-Zero, who murdered his family. The text very nearly provides a way to fanwank this problem, but gets caught up in the details. Clearly, this would require some sort of retcon, an official overwriting of an element of the canonical story. The lead designer went in a different direction, stating that all the games' endings were just hypotheticals, describing what would happen if that particular character had won the tournament. Since neither Scorpion or Sub-Zero won MK2, the reconciliation never occurred, and they were arch-nemeses again.

Conveniently, this logic undoes not only the Scorpion/Sub-Zero storyline of MK2 and UMK3, but also everything that has ever happened in the series past the conclusion of the first game. After all, the designers remind us that there hasn't been an "official" tournament since the first game, and they've decided on no winners since then, nor have they defined the consequences for any of the parties involved. While the fans were busy arguing out a canon, the authors helpfully reminded us that almost nothing in the entire series was canonical, and there need be no narrative connection from game to game.

Which is, I suppose, one way to solve the Problem: by stating it openly.

After MK4, it was announced that the follow-up would be a reboot to the series, a return to the dark and violent milieu of Mortal Kombat. The series picked up, eventually, with the console-only Deadly Alliance, which brought back some characters declared dead, killed some other characters, and brought in an entirely new, and quite brilliant, set of play mechanics. It broke the million-sold mark, but the diehard fans were furious for the game's severe dearth of the stupid bullshit they'd begged them to take out of previous iterations of the game. A sequel followed, Deception, finally attempting to paper over the giant story holes and answer some basic questions about the universe. Another sequel followed, Armageddon, in which the (hilarious) plot concerns the possibility that the ever-growing cast of the series will cause the universe to collapse under the weight of its own convoluted continuity. (It also, curiously, extended the tutorial "Konquest" mode into a full-length adventure game.)

Now, our eyes are drawn to 2011, two decades after the release of the first Mortal Kombat, and we have been promised that it will be a reboot, a return to the dark and violent milieu of Mortal Kombat. MK storylines are always best when stealing from other media, and I think the Star Trek reboot is a fine place to start. Warner Bros., the new owners of the franchise, are reputed to be interested in expanding the brand into the multimedia juggernaut that never quite came together under its previous stewards. The MK universe has all the raw materials for a pretty interesting fantasy world, which is why the fans have been so inclined to try to make sense of it, even when the authors couldn't be bothered to do so, even when the genre conventions worked against them. Here's hoping someone's actually paying attention this time.

Department of Redundancy Department

2010-08-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

I just found out that Might and Magic: Heroes Kingdoms has gone live in North America. This is the MMO based on Nival's Heroes of Might & Magic V, which was spun off into Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and the stellar Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes. It is not to be confused with Heroes of Might and Magic Online, a different MMO based on New World Computing's much more prestigious Heroes of Might and Magic I-IV. Also not to be confused with King's Bounty, either the original game that inspired the creation of Heroes of Might & Magic, or the recently released remake. Also also not to be confused with the Western RPG series Might and Magic I-IX.

There. Glad we cleared that up.

Means, Ends, and Win Conditions

2010-08-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

Between The Power and the Glory and Twilight, my fiction diet this year has been something of a mixed bag, so it should probably surprise no one that my scatterbrained lit-major-in-denial ass has spent most of my reading time in the non-fic section of the storyrealm. Among the highlights of such recent ventures has been Codeville and Seabury's War: Ends and Means. It's a fairly famous text in conservative intellectual circles, although one does have to wonder if it would be so fondly remembered were it released under its original title.

It's been updated to accommodate the decades of real actual history that took place after it's publication, and I must confess ignorance to the any substantive ass-covering in the editing process. (c.f. Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History Except Not Really, New York: Doubleday (2001)) Reading it in terms of politics, it's a surreal text, taking place in an alternate universe in which conservatives used the same buzzwords they do today for diametrically opposed reasons. In terms of war, it's a much more straightforward read, and the raw data on technology, expenditures and logistics is useful even when the political slant is a bit obvious. The introduction offers an apologetics, of sorts, for the book's existence, in the process arguing a point much more difficult to deny than any of the principles that follow: when it comes to the function, history, risks, rewards, tactics and procedures of war, modern Americans don't know shit.

I've written before--not here, so you'll have to take my word for it--on how modern war-strategy games tend to present war in a certain way, which is also how it is often discussed in media coverage of politics. Specifically, war is presented as armed and/or mechanized conflict between two or more parties who fight each other until either some specific goal is achieved by one side, or until only one faction has living bodies left on the field. (We are, for the moment, excluding the problem of necromancy from the model.) The results are final, and beyond the initial outlay of resources, the battlefield is presented as something of a closed system: if it meaningfully affects the map, it's going to happen on the map. Terrain matters, but ultimately technology is king.

It's a fine enough model, and makes for some thrilling games, but it's a pretty strange way to look at war, because it's strangely devoid of...soldiers. Players often lack a clearly defined avatar: diegetically, they are sometimes represented by an officer figure of some sort, and sometimes feel more like the non-specific godlike presence of a sandbox game. The soldiers respond in the affirmative when given commands, and...that's about it. With rare exceptions, such as the pleasantly diverting Elven Legacy and Battles of Prince of Persia, armies are never "broken": unit discipline cannot be seriously undermined, because the soldiers in the field are functionally part of a hive mind, being fed information from the semi-omniscient command/control system at the speed of the player's mouse hand.

Confusion itself is the greatest impediment to an army's ability to function, due to the seemingly obvious fact that soldiers, for the most part, are sane people who don't want to die. Those who command them--and who rely on their loyalty and ferocity for their own ends--usually aren't thrilled about the idea either. Wars are rarely fought "to the last man" in practice.

Which brings us to the largest glaring omission in modern war-strategy games: the curious absence of prisoners and civilians. The rules about what to do with each are neither new nor vague, but in practice it seems difficult to keep to them. Games seem like an ideal medium to get people thinking about why. The rules of war dictate that, when fighting is to begin in a populated city, both armies give the refugees safe passage out prior to the onset of combat. Simple enough, but...what to do with these people? Whose responsibility are they? What realistic options do they have? What tactics encourage enemy soldiers to raise the white flag? What are the consequences of ignoring these tactics in favor of a more decisive body count?

The Mortal Kombat Problem 3

2010-07-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

At around this time, the inevitable Mortal Kombat film adaptation was rolling around, and despite exquisitely high standards set by Van Damme's Street Fighter and Hopper's magical realist Super Mario Bros., it turned out...pretty ok, as popcorn flicks go. It's largely irrelevant to the topic, but two points are worth mentioning:

Shang Tsung's shapeshifting, a visual effect inspired by Midway's previous work in the Terminator 2 arcade game, functioned rather sensibly, as the storyline would have suggested. Which is to say, it functioned pretty much like the guy in Terminator 2.
Raiden, lord of thunder, war, and exposition, explains that tournament was designed to protect the aptly named Earthrealm from Outworld invasion. The rules dictate that if Team Outworld can win ten consecutive tournaments, they get a coupon that can be redeemed for one free invasion of Earthrealm. Goro, prince of the Shokan, ruler of Kuatan, and all-around jerkoff, has won the last nine.

There's no particular reason to think of a movie tie-in as a likely place to introduce canonical changes--or rather, if there is such a reason, the Freemasons are keeping a tight lid on it--which is why I find it bizarre that the "ten wins in a row" rule seems to have been leapt upon by fans eager to put the expanding story into some kind of cohesive order, and it comes up (without citation) on the "story" sections of most fansites. I don't know for certain that the rule emanates entirely from the movie, but I can't find anything in the games themselves or in contemporary paratexts that mentions it prior to 95. It's a particularly important rule, because it changes the apocalyptic loss condition from "give Tsung/Kahn too many powerful souls" to "lose too many times." This adds a specific, down-to-the-wire gravitas to the early entries in the series, mitigated somewhat by the fact that it makes no fucking sense at all.

First off, Goro has been champion for 500 years, having won nine consecutive tournaments. Assuming the tournaments are held at regular intervals--the tournament in Enter the Dragon was every three, and the MK movie says "every generation"--this would put the canonical tournaments on an interval of slightly over fifty-five years. Olympic hopefuls have difficulty being in prime shape for contests held every four years, mind you. Had be been born a decade or two earlier or later, Liu Kang might have had to compete when he was 11 years old, with options to try again at 66 and 121. On the bright side, Liu Kang's victory in MK1 guarantees the safety of Earthrealm for another 500 years, which is helpful because he'll be pushing 80 when next called upon to defend his title.

More to the point, this would seem to make MK2 an even more irrelevant display of puffery. Were it an "official" tournament--it's not, according to later canon rules--our heroes would be forfeiting a couple of human generations' worth of freedom for what is essentially an interdimensional gang war. There seems to be no actual victory to be had in the Outworld tournament: best case scenario, according to the "ten wins" rule, they've protected Earth for another three-hundred-sixty-five days or so. One supposes that killing Kahn would end the threat entirely, and since Kahn's defeat results in his body turning to stone and exploding, we'll have to assume that Earthrealm's warriors are hoping to kill the possibly immortal sorcerer-warlord in straight-up arena combat, in a tournament that has thus far failed to kill anyone of any importance at all. Statistically speaking, the Mortal Kombat tournament seems to be significantly safer than pro wrestling.

MK had never been a favorite of the gaming press, and the critical popularity of the Street Fighter provided no shortage of comparisons. By the time MK3 was approaching its arcade release, Capcom had released Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the fourth consecutive non-sequel upgrade to a brilliant game released four years earlier. While Street Fighter's narrative remained oddly frozen in time, and most of the new cast were widely despised, the gameplay had been finely tuned with an extraordinary eye to subtlety. Critics and players alike applauded the narrative trappings and secret content MK had successfully imported from adventure games, but the general stiffness of the gameplay was getting more and more apparent in light of the competition. It was in this context that the world, represented here by a thirteen-year-old boy living in Florida, got its first look at MK3, and discovered...

Well, it looked pretty much the same as the last one. In terms of gameplay, MK3 would respond to critics who harped on the lack of gameplay differentiation between characters, overreliance on palette-swaps, and an engine that disproportionately favored defensive tactics by implementing a series of changes that would halfheartedly address one of these problems, while actually making the other two worse. (Ultimate MK3 would go the extra mile by fucking up the palette-swap reduction as well.) To be fair, it was a much tighter engine in general, removing the sense that we were operating our avatars by remote controls with dying batteries, and Gathering-of-Developers bless their little hearts, the designers had been pretty ambitious in terms of character design. Five characters were dropped outright, and some of the new faces replacing them brought some legitimately new gameplay concepts with them. Additionally, these concepts were well mapped to narrative conceits. But that brings us to the story, which is actually what these interminable goddamn posts are about, in case you've forgotten.

Shao Kahn has invaded Earth. How? Well, it's unclear. The early press for the game said that he had won the Outworld tournament, which would suggest a double-or-nothing principle that makes the heroes' decision to participate even more insane, and which would seem to fly in the face of the soon-to-be-canonical "ten wins" trope. No, the story behind Kahn's invasion of our beloved realm is much more interesting than that:

For centuries Earth has used Mortal Kombat to defend itself against the Outworld's Emeperor Shao Kahn. But, Kahn becomes frustrated by failed attempts at taking Earth through tournament battle. He enacts a plan which began 10,000 years ago. During this time Kahn had a Queen. Her name was Sindel and her young death was unexpected. Kahn's Shadow priests, lead by Shang Tsung, make it so Sindel's spirit would someday be reborn: Not on the Outworld but on the Earth Realm itself. This unholy act gives Shao Kahn [sic] to step through the dimensional gates and reclaim his Queen. Thus enabling him to finally seize the Earth Realm.
Upon breaching the portal into Earth, Shao Kahn slowly transforms the planet into a part of the Outworld itself. Kahn strips the Earth of all human life: Claiming every soul as his own. But there are souls which Kahn cannot take. These souls belong to the warriors chosen to represent Earth in a new Mortal Kombat. The remaining humans are scattered through out the planet. Shao Kahn sends an army of fierce Outworld warriors to find and eliminate them.

So, the completion of Kahn's ancient lust for the domination of Earthrealm was attained by: an unrelated event having nothing whatsoever to do with the tournament for which the series is named. He could have cancelled the damn tournament before this Goro fellow even showed up and achieved precisely the same result. So, not that it matters now, but how did the Outworld tournament turn out?

We have no idea. The game doesn't actually mention it. If there weren't the odd mention of having "escaped" from Outworld, the game would have made no acknowledgment of MK2 having happened at all. So MK has now effectively (albeit temporarily) retconned out its most popular entry, in the process of rendering its origin and namesake largely irrelevant. Fans were, of course, free to imagine how the previous entry might have played out, safe in the knowledge that, according to the canonical story, no outcome of the Outworld tournament would have had any appreciable impact on anything at all.

By 1995, MK was ably bringing in money from a variety of revenue streams across multiple media, but the bulk of it was always adaptation to home consoles. Over in that neck of the market, the inauguration of what wikipedia helpfully denotes as the fifth generation was about to begin, and the wheeling and dealing over platform exclusivity would exert its own suck on the MK franchise. Some of it can be blamed on the Street Fighter trap, the tendency to advance a series' ludic elements while leaving narrative elements to stagnate, but mostly the black hole into which the series would soon sink can be blamed on a fateful decision to start taking design cues from the most unreliable, unimaginative, and thoroughly idiotic source imaginable: the series' fans.

The Mortal Kombat Problem II

2010-07-20T16:59:00.000-07:00

Previously on Mortal Kombat:

500 years ago, Shang Tsung was banished to the Earth Realm. With the aid of Goro he was to unbalance the furies and doom the planet to a chaotic existence. By seizing control of the shaolin tournament he tried to tip the scales of order towards chaos. Only seven warriors survived the battles and Shang Tsung's scheme would come to a violent end at the hands of Liu Kang. Facing execution for his failure and the apparent death of Goro, Tsung convinces Shao Kahn to grant him a second chance... Shang Tsung's new plan is to lure his enemies to compete in the Outworld where they will meet certain death by Shao Kahn himself. Now, the Kombat kontinues...

So says the attract mode for Mortal Kombat II, an achievement of the human species so impressive that it ranks alongside indoor plumbing, individual rights and the discovery of the female orgasm in our collective accomplishments.

Any sequel not explicitly accounted for in its progenitor will necessarily entail un-finishing a seemingly finished story. Usually this is accomplished by building backwards as well as forwards, expanding the diachronic past to accommodate the synchronic present. This is world-building 101, and not technically a retcon, since there is yet no con to ret. Sometimes it can be clunky, but MK2 manages quite well overall. We find out that Tsung has a boss, a warlord from another dimension known as Outworld, and that there is a vague long-term plan to "unbalance the furies" (to borrow a phrase from a couple of MK1's endings), but otherwise it's basically a soul-sucking necromancer running a once-noble martial arts tournament, and a variety of people who want to kick his ass. Classicists among us will note that this is also the plot of Sense and Sensibility.

The attract mode also helpfully alludes to previous, non-surviving combatants we never met, which is nice, because as is noted quite eloquently here, the player's experience of Mortal Kombat does not much resemble an actual tournament. If there are a bunch of extras getting eliminated each round, that does theoretically allow a sensible arrangement, although one wonders if there are weeks between each fight, or if there are multiple stages of brutal violence operating at once, forcing spectators to pore over their programs and choose their favorites, like at Lilith Fair. One also wonders if the non-surviving combatants were put off by the fact that the tournament decorating committee saw fit to commission statues of Goro and exactly six other fighters, as if they knew in advance who was going to merit permanent display in the Warrior Shrine.

However, the structure of the sequel demands a second look. As has been noted at great length by theorists far more ludological than I, a videogame is not a straight narrative, but a possibility space in which narratives can be enacted. For a sequel to take place, there must first be a coherent and reasonably specific decision as to which possible chain of events actually happened in the previous game. We don't need to have every moment of time or pint of blood accounted for, but we need to know a) who won, b) who's dead.

Officially, and established at the outset of MK2, the answers are a) Liu Kang, and b) Sub-Zero. Strangely, this has not prevented Sub-Zero from competing. Scorpion, who could have sworn he murdered Sub-Zero before--imagine losing your car keys, but instead of your car keys, it's revenge, and also you're on fire all the time--is back to try to kill him again. The attract mode leaves us with the mystery; the two fighters' ending texts reveal that the new Sub-Zero is the dead one's younger brother, and Scorpion has decided to protect the younger to atone for incinerating the elder. It is unclear when this discovery is made, for we don't get a sense of the social scene between bouts. I assume it's a lot like the Olympic Village. At any rate, in the now non-canonical comic, both of them have hugged it out and made this arrangement before the tournament begins, which will become a relevant distinction in...three or four years. I don't know why I even brought it up.

The only niggling plot problems at this point concern the Outworld tournament itself. Though it's never explicitly established, one can't help but wonder whether the hopeful combatants, by and large, are aware of Tsung's infernal doings. If the Mortal Kombat tournament, once a noble and fine thing to do in a heroic neo-fascist sort of way, is still attracting idealistic kids who just want to win medals to pad their college applications, they might not realize that they risk having their souls eaten and used to fuel an invasion of our reality by an interdimensional warlord with a striking baritone. If everyone knows about Tsung, the sensible thing would be to simply boycott the tournament, like the U.S. hockey team in the Olympics. If Tsung needs the souls of great warriors to open a gateway into our reality, for God's sake don't let strong warriors sign up. If one such warrior was willing to risk feeding the beast for a chance to kill Tsung and/or take the tournament back to its roots, entry would be a sensible way to do it in a kung-fu double feature sort of way.

These concerns about the logic of taking part in the tournament are exacerbated in the Outworld tournament, in that it's unclear what kind of reward might be gained from winning. With Liu Kang's victory, the tournament ought to be back in the rightful hands of the Shaolin/White Lotus Society, although Tsung had the presence of mind to send mercenary monster-guy Baraka to murder them all. One is left to wonder how this will affect ticket sales, or what the stockholders will think. So Liu Kang, the white-hat hero, is entering a tournament in which he risks his life, and possibly ours, for...revenge? The rest of the cast follows suit with their own motives: Johnny Cage wants another hit, and figures interdimensional martial arts combat is cheaper than hiring a talented screenwriter; Sub-Zero is going to take another swipe at assassinating Tsung; Scorpion is going to take another swipe at assassinating Sub-Zero (sort of); Col. Jackson Briggs ("Jax" if you're nasty) is trying to rescue the aforementioned Sonya Blade, who is being held hostage, along with Kano, for no discernable reason. (Neither Kano nor Sonya are playable in MK2, creating great demand for two characters who were ironically removed because they were unpopular with players.) In addition, Kung Lao, a descendant of the guy famous for being killed by Goro, is there, raising questions about where he was last year when his fellow White Lotus frat brother Liu Kang was risking life and limb in Goro's lair. The rest are various assassins or handymen on Shao Kahn's payroll, who fight for their own reasons, but mostly give the heroes meaningful rivalries and/or punching bags.

Other highlights and problems-in-the-making: MK1 had a hidden character named Reptile, a palette-swap of Scorpion and Sub-Zero, because hey, yellow and blue makes green, right? That Scorpion's appearance is nearly identical to Sub-Zero's is adequately explained in the plot, but Reptile seems to be pretty much a character of convenience. His existence spawned the rumor of a fourth ninja, the orange-clad Ermac, but fortunately this was not the case, and we all had a good laugh at the idea of anything so stupid. In MK2, Reptile makes an appearance as a playable character, and his previous hidden-ness is worked into both his storyline and character design: a bodyguard with chameleonic skills, he stayed in the background on Earth guarding Tsung, and is now trying out a solo act.

They pull the palette-swap trick again with Kitana and Mileena, in blue and purple, showing a great deal of leg (digitization technology had not yet advanced far enough for more advanced concepts like cleavage). They are introduced to us as twin daughters of Shao Kahn, whom he employs as assassins. Scott Brown, you might want to take notes. Shortly before the tournament, however, Kitana (good sister) has discovered that Kahn has worked a mind control spell on her, that she's actually the daughter of the king of Edenia, whom Kahn deposed/murdered. In perverting the realm's magical energies, Kahn turned Edenia into Outworld, severely confusing Old Testament scribes in the process. Mileena (bad sister) is in fact a clone, albeit one with terrible teeth, who (in her ending text) ends up dating the equally fangy Baraka. Nothing serious; she's been hurt before. Total palette-swap count: five males (Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Reptile, and hiddens Smoke and Noob Saibot) and three females (Kitana, Mileena, and hidden Jade). Actors Daniel Pesina and Kaitlin Zamiar are now carrying a substantial portion of the cast themselves, and it's looking a bit odd.

So we have some fairly neat characters, and they have increasingly interesting interactions with each other, friends becoming enemies, enemies becoming friends, etc. We can imagine some interesting and dramatic arguments, conspiracies and alliances as they plot their respective paths to power. We haveto imagine them, in fact, because there aren't any conversations in the game. Where would you put them?

It is generally expected in games, as in film, that plot follows genre/mechanics. You write about a martial arts tournament because you want people doing martial arts. You write a war story because you want big battles. You write about vampires and werewolves because you want gunfights. Ok, scratch that last one, that would be stupid. But now, MK's plot has gotten a bit big for its genre, and nobody seems to be thinking of ways to address that problem.

It's not just the characters. Outworld itself is a gorgeous invention. Every background glistens with delightful creepiness, from the growling trees in the living forest to the dessicated skeletons in the wasteland to the inexplicable (and unexplained) guy who seems to be on fire in the distant background of the bridge over The Pit II. (I think there was some kind of copyright problem with "The Pit.") The world begs to be explored, but interaction with the backgrounds during fights is very nearly nonexistent, and it's not like digitized sprites are exactly ideal for detailed exploration of space.

But those are fairly minor problems for a brilliant game. The series' success grows and grows. Console ports of MK1 are flying off the shelves and annoying Joe Lieberman, who initiates a plan to ruin my life. Merchandising takes off. More comic spinoffs follow. A movie is in the works, along with a TV show. What began as an attempt to cash in on the glowing celebrity of Jean-Claude Van Damme has become the hottest game franchise around, with legitimate multimedia appeal.

Clearly, it was time to fuck it up.

The Mortal Kombat Problem I

2010-07-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

Once, during in an enjoyably boring shift, I was called upon to explicate the conflict between Arianism and Trinitarianism. It was long, and convoluted, and required several detours to establish a frame in which the ideas being fought over made any sense at all. Afterwards, it was noted that it had been a lot like one of our friends' attempts to explain the divergent universes of Bishop and Cable in X-Men.

Mortal Kombat has taken up enough time, energy and thought in my life to qualify it as a religion of sorts, so it should be no surprise that it has its own incomprehensible and internally inconsistent cosmology. Or perhaps it should, because it was drafted by literate people who were protected by copyright law and under no direct threat from Roman authorities, and because the whole damn thing goes back only two decades. Nay, to establish a narrative clusterfuck of such utterly Shokan proportions, the designers and writers would have to have made terrible decisions at nearly every level of the world-making process.

Since this seems to be precisely what happened, I refer to these mistakes, collectively, as the Mortal Kombat problem.

Starting, as is in the fashion, at the beginning, the Boonverse is established in MK1 as thus: there is a secret martial arts tournament in which the world's best warriors fight to the death. Currently, the tournament is run by the immortal Shang Tsung, who took control of the tournament when his champion, a four-armed monster named Goro, defeated the previous tournament champion Kung Lao 500 years earlier. (MK1 is assumed to take place in the present or nearish future, so let's go ahead and put Kung Lao's defeat at the tail end of the 15th century.) People make their way to the tournament for various reasons: Liu Kang (intended at the outset to be the lone "good guy" in a roster of egoists, criminals, and psychopaths) seeks to put the Shaolin monks back in control of the tournament. Irritating movie star Johnny Cage wants more fame and money, Sub-Zero wants to assassinate Shang Tsung, Scorpion wants to assassinate Sub-Zero, Kano is in it for the money and the power, and leggy green beret Lt. Sonya Blade, captured trying to apprehend Kano, is just in it.

Of course, Mortal Kombat is a game about people beating each other into unconsciousness and then, for the bragging rights of the players, murdering each other. While comic book characters have long been able to have deep, soul-searching discussions of their lives and motives during fistfights, our beloved cast of misfits is not so lucky. The story is delineated initially by the "attract mode," a programmed series of images and (for lack of a better term) gameplay trailers that display while the machine in question is waiting for players to plunk in their not-money tokens. The attract mode gives us most of the playable characters' (potential protagonists') backstories, while each character's ending text, displayed as a reward upon beating the single-player mode, fills in any intentional gaps in the attract mode bios--why does Scorpion have it in for the Lin Kuei? Is Raiden really a god? These answers and more, tonight on Mortal Kombat--as well as a bit of epiloguing, describing what happens to the winning combatant, and the world, after the tournament's end.

The use of story as a reward isn't much talked about by theorists or understood by non-gamers, but it's both fairly prevalent in the medium and fairly effective in generating fan interest. In addition, the publisher produced a comic book companion that covered much of the game's storyline in a more traditional narrative fashion, although the comics were quickly decided to be extra-canonical when they became inconvenient. But the seeds of the canon wars are planted in MK2, and we ainnot there yet.

In fact, MK1 is pretty clean, as far as the storyline goes. It ought to be, since it's just dumping some Street Fighter aesthetics into Enter the Dragon. (And yes, sports fans, we're going to skip over the extent to which Street Fighter II borrowed so much of its je ne sais quoi from Enter the Dragon. I much prefer A Fistfull of Yen anyway.) The most interesting bit, really, is Shang Tsung, an apparently elderly man who can transform himself into any of the other tournament fighters. The story enacted in the comic and repeated in gaming mags was that he was a sorcerer who absorbed the souls of his defeated opponents, prolonging his unnatural life. This makes a great deal of sense, especially given the illustration (in the comic) of Tsung pulling a glowing ethereal mass out of a pile of human-shaped goo. He pulls in the soul, and with its owner's features, giving him the ability to "become" the defeated. This also gives him a nice motive for maintaining the tournament, as well as a reason that he needs to be killed. The tournament must be returned to its boring, sporting event equilibrium, just as any action flick must end with the hero once again rendering the world boring.

In the game's final battle (against Tsung, natch), the sorcerer "morphs" into all of the game's opponents, making Tsung a forerunner of the "clip-show villain" trope later typified by The First in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is assumed, at this point, that Tsung has eaten the souls of all the warriors the player has thus defeated, raising two easily fankwankable questions: a) When did he do this? Can he still get a soul out of a corpse in which the heart has been separated from the body? How about decapitated? Or burned to bone and ash? b) That said, how the hell does he morph into the still living person he is fighting at that particular time? The second question addresses what has been largely decided to be a purely extra-diegetic phenomenon of allowing two players to select the same character in fighting games; MK at least lampshaded it with the "mirror match" concept, but it didn't help with the finale. The first question addresses a much more fundamental problem with the series: franchises survive by world-making more than any specific character, but characters do have to be carried over, and actual questions of gameplay preference can exert their own weight on a story. The result is that, in the martial arts tournament for which the series is named, the tournament that is literally synonymous with fighting to the death, nobody ever fucking dies.

I take care establishing these things primarily to help elucidate exactly how fucked up it's all going to get over the sequels, and with the sequels shall I continue.

Fire Emblem and the Moral Meat Grinder

2010-03-10T10:24:00.000-08:00

What's the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.

-Frasier Crane

I bought Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon during my partner's bout with Solidus Mononucleosis last year, and I've been playing it, with varying degrees of obsession, ever since. I've beaten it, of course, backwards and forwards. I've built an impeccable, unkillable squad for online play by exploiting a minor feature the online build guides seem to ignore. It's far from the best game of its genre, nor the best game in my personal possession, and yet I am compelled to continue.

I am so compelled because there are a number of choices in the game design that seem bizarre, that just barely miss the mark labelled "brilliant" and have to settle for "weirdly nonsensical." I find that these are the games that demand the most of my attention: not the ones I enjoy most per se, but the ones that would be perfect but for inexplicable design choice X. Or, in the case of Fire Emblem, design choices X, Y, and Z. (That Oxford comma was for you, Beth-Ann.)

The most unique feature of the Fire Emblem series, and the feature for which it is most famous, is as simple as it is profound. You see, when a character falls in combat--whether felled by sword, impaled by a javelin, or burned with eldritch magick--they die. And they stay dead. And with one very specific, late-game exception, they're of no use in future battles, because they're fucking dead and nothing can ever bring them back. I suggest you pause for a moment and think how interesting it is that this is such a rarity in this medium that we consider it a bold design choice. We even have a term for it: "permadeath." Out here in the really real world, we just call that "death."

Shadow Dragon has about 60 playable characters, all with names, histories, and unique growth statistics, along with a short epilogue describing what happens to them should they survive the game. (These epilogues are neatly sandwiched between the "epilogues" of the dead characters, who are "erased from the pages of history.") The result, from an emotive standpoint, can be quite striking: a particularly costly battle that wipes out ten characters you've spent many hours building up, characters who call out to their friends and families with their dying breaths, can feel a mite traumatic. Given the value placed on the unique and named in the tactical strategy genre, one might expect that the overriding ethic would be to be cautious and avoid gambling with the RNG, to take care to protect each and every soul in your army, accepting only the most modest losses in the most hopeless circumstances. One would not be dissuaded of this opinion if one checked the strategy guide, which suggests more or less this strategy. Nor would one be dissuaded by walkthroughs available online.

One would encounter difficulties later in the game, though, because it turns out that this pious, humanistic strategy is utter bullshit, and will completely fuck you over by around Chapter 20. Because there are around 60 unique playable characters in Shadow Dragon, but there aren't nearly enough enemies around to level all of them up. (The hint guide recommends equipping the weakest weapons possible, and keeping opponents alive for as long as possible so your soldiers can use their living bodies for fencing practice. Try, for a moment, to narrativize this scenario.) So some of your dudes are going to have to go un-leveled. However, when your army drops below a certain number, scabs are brought in--characters without identities, whose experience and abilities are determined by an average of the surviving members of your party. So that poor Lv.3 kid you picked up fleeing the ruins of his hometown? Not only is he not helping, but he's actively making your job harder merely by being alive. In addition, those unique growth stats have a lot of variance: Altea truly is a land of natural masters and natural slaves.

As you've probably figured out by now, the optimal strategy in Shadow Dragon--I cannot, for the moment, speak of other Fire Emblem games--is to identify the heroes in your party, and throw the wretches in front of them should your enemies loose an arrow in that direction. Four hidden levels, each containing a powerful ally and most containing valuable rare items, are only accessible if you keep the total roster from climbing above fifteen. For me, this invariably requires me to intentionally send five or six souls to their gruesome, pointless deaths on the level prior to the check-in. I can think of no narrative reason to fanwank this blood sacrifice, but dammit, I want that sorcerer.

This strategy is, perhaps, more appealing to some than others. On a message board discussing the brilliant Battle for Wesnoth, I read a complaint from a player who found themselves unable to complete most of the campaigns, because they could keep no experienced troops alive for the duration. This player was presumably a devoted adherent to the meat grinder strategy, protecting a hero who could not be arsed to actually engage in combat with a constantly reinforced wall of human bone and sinew. Wesnoth, perhaps, takes its priorities to the other extreme. The more battle experience a unit acquires, the more suicidally risky it becomes to allow them to engage in battle.

But then, I suppose that's not significantly more insane than how these things have worked in real life.

Because I Could Not Stop For Neo-Geo

2009-07-09T16:23:00.001-07:00

How's this, gods of AP English: knowledge brings sorrow in the sense that knowledge is the conscious awareness of change, and therefore time, and therefore death. Righto, let's get this show on the road.

My partner came down with a mild case of brain cloud recently, and I spent a great deal of time lying around keeping her company and reassuring her that she retained basic language skills. Because you can only watch so much prime-time-in-the-daytime without going insane--we will, of course, make exceptions for Smile Time, Microscopic Disease Ninja, or anything pertaining to Rose McGowan--I spent a great deal of time on my DS. In the waning days of the illness, desperate for new content, I booted up my long-dormant Wii to see what demos were available for download.

Not much, in turns out, which is why I ended up wandering into Virtual Console. For those unWii'd among my readership--one, two...excuse me, sir? Are you reading, or just passing through? What's that? You're just a janitor mopping this part of the internet? Sorry to have bothered you, carry on--Virtual Console is basically a big collection of emulated games from previous, long and not-so-long extinct systems. The big sellers are predictable: Zelda, Mario, etc. The rest of the list is more interesting.

Hello, TurboGrafx? They bought the rights to TurboGrafx games? Because I'm pretty sure they only sold three of those things in the states, to me and two other kids from Boca Raton. (Oh, and Harold, Robbo, if you're reading? Fuck you.) And they have Y's I & II. You all remember that, right? A port of two PC games, way too big for the dominant storage medium of the day, let alone those pathetic HuCard things. A game so epic, it could only run on a strange technology believed to have been reverse engineered from a crashed spaceship, something called a "Compact Disc Read-Only Memory," or CD-ROM for short. Seriously future shit.

And now, just shy of two decades later, I have a Wii. The Wii is a casual system, at the bottom of the price ladder, and its wireless internet isn't great. And I don't have the strongest signal on the bottom floor. So it might take a couple of minutes for Nintendo to beam me a copy of Y's I & II from outer space.

Because, hey. We live in the future.

Toejam & Earl, nice. Ecco the Dolphin! Memories of being a Genesis fanboy flood my sensory perception apparatuses. Samurai Shodown, kickass! It only took me sixteen years to get access to a decent version of that game! Cybernator? Hrm...M, Me...fuck, no Metal Warriors. Goddamn socialists. And hey, M.U.S.H.A.

Wait, M.U.S.H.A.?

I never played that game. Never really wanted to. I saw a review of it in a gaming magazine I read eighteen years ago.

And I read about Romance of the Three Kingdoms, too. And Clay Fighter. And...shit, all of these.

And I am a child, disaffected, misanthropic, snobbishly disobedient, and spoiled rotten, looking through gaming magazines, a world of fan cultures (we didn't call them that then) and semiotic systems (nope, not them either) that still seems small enough to be kind of manageable. On the consoles, at least.

Those systems are gone, of course; I still have some of them, but at this point they're retro kitsch and not an object of serious veneration. What fills me with a quiet sadness I cannot easily identify, let alone explain, is not the realization of how old these memories are, or the mere shock at their resilience in the face of more pertinent data, such as my blood type, or why my girlfriend was angry at me the previous morning. What slows my breath and chills my bones is the memory of a trite story, of childish pride. I remember, suddenly, how very, very important this all was.

And it's important to me now, of course. The descendants, anyway. But not like that. I wonder sometimes if I'll spend the rest of my life seeking, consciously or not, that sense of mastery-belonging-comfort.

I was a gamer kid. Weird, and shy, and defiantly ungrateful, but not a bad kid at that. And then I went to college, where I discovered drama and, appropriately, acted like a dick for a while. And now I'm here (wherever here might be today), looking for work, looking for angles, looking for hope, and I'm not sure what the hell I am, and whether or not I'd be better served by selling all this shit off, cutting my losses at three published articles, and getting a job with a drill.

The good news, however, is that Samurai Shodown, even after sixteen years, is fucking amazing.

Project Darkside: or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Black Mage

2009-05-22T11:41:00.000-07:00

So, a few moons back, I'm playing Assassin's Creed, and thinking about good and evil, in games, like you do. Particularly in D&D, where the "payoff" for good or evil is so nebulous. More to the point, in a polytheistic universe with no dominance of celestial force in favor of good, what is evil? The best I could parse out was a general distinction between altruism (good) and selfishness (evil). This is a simple binary, by now intuitive to most people, backed up by common sense, personal experience, and not reading Ayn Rand.

This got me thinking about evolutionary psychology. (The group/self binary, not Ayn Rand.) I don't know what to make of evo psych as a science or social science; only the sexiest bits filter out into the mainstream press, and it's anyone's guess what the real research looks like at any given time. The stuff that's well-publicized, at least, tends to be a heady mixture of racism, sexism, and bullshit, and it's been argued that the field basically boils down to explaining modern behaviors (of which there exists little reliable evidence) by noting procedural similarities with ancient behaviors (of which there exists even less reliable evidence). Most of what you read about evo psych will fail to even accomplish the first of those two--if you want to explain why blonde hair is considered desirable by a significant majority of the species, for example, you first have to establish that it's actually true. (In case you were wondering, it turns out that it's because blonde women are more flammable than normal, non-blonde women, which makes them a valuable source of warmth in the cold Bronze Age winters.) David Livingstone Smith's Why We Lie was quite interesting and informative, and seemed to fall prey to precisely none of the huge methodological problems demonstrated in the shit you see in the Emm Ess Emm, so maybe the field's chock full of talented, sensible people who are drowned out by a couple of fame-whoring shitheads. Who knows.

That said, evo psych--not just people who claim to work in the field, but people discussing "natural" morality in general--tends to asume that selfishness is the default, and that works fine for reciprocal altruism. (In a shout-out to my demon-hunting brother, it is truly wonderful that our textbook example for altruistic behavior is derived from vampire bats.) But what about "pure" altruism, in which no obvious survival benefit presents itself? One current answer is that "pure" altruism is basically a glitch; early human societies may have presented few opportunities for altruism that didn't provide a likely survival benefit, so our genes don't account for the possibility. Ok, makes sense enough. Just because a behavior is widespread/universal doesn't mean it's necessarily adaptive, but could also be a spandrel or a malfunctioning of an adaptive behavior due to a change in context.

But really, do those circumstances exist even now? The theory above is meant to explain the Mother Theresas of the world--fuck off, secular contrarians, you know what I mean--but can we say conclusively that she did not benefit from her work? Because we sure as hell did. Missionary and humanitarian work within Christianity have historically yielded huge benefits for Christian cultures, establishing a cultural beachhead in what might otherwise have been hostile lands; while we're at it, poverty in general is a persistent security risk to pretty much everyone. But still, the benefit to the individual seems negligible, even if the benefit to the group--nation, in poli-sci terms, or just a general sense of "people around you"--is significant. Egoism generally assumes that altruism can only be "rational" when its benefit is fairly direct, fairly certain, and can reliably be calculated rationally. ("Rational" is a word I'll be using, and misusing, quite a bit. Bear with me, and try to tolerate some bendy definitions. Have a drink first, if that helps. I'll wait here.)

(Back? Ok.)

So we have the libido--which just means "drives" in early psychological usage, not specifically sex, although sex is certainly one of the strongest--which provides for selfishness, which encompasses reciprocal altruism. We also have this other, nebulous "moral feeling" that sometimes directs some of us to varying degrees of less-reciprocal altruism. (Or maybe we don't, but lots of philosophers think we do, and hey, sake of argument.) It's been suggested that this second urge is social, and not rational (assuming, of course, that they can be separated), but there are problems with this as well. Niebuhr uses the example of the individual whose moral feeling places him in conflict with, and therefore in danger from, his group to suggest that "conscience," his term for this nebulous "other" feeling, cannot be wholly rational or social.

So what if conscience isn't a glitch of the libido, but a key part of it? What if self-preservation, the drive to keep breathing, keep eating, and keep fucking, and make sure one's children survive to adulthood to do the same, has developed ways of presenting itself that are purely survival oriented, but not (consciously) rational, and therefore not calculable, in their expression to our consciousness? In a review of Christopher Strain's Pure Fire, a work concerning self-defense ideology in the civil rights movement, the author was criticized for including essentially suicidal actions under the rubric of self-defense. But there are, perhaps, different kinds of suicides, some quite life-affirming--there's some fine work on the social identity of suicide bombers that would seem to support this idea. Niebuhr's example, like Strain's, just means that the individual in question had determined, though not on a conscious or rational level, that staying in his current community "as is" constituted sufficient uncertainty and terror to be functionally equivalent to suicide, and a less pleasant one than a de facto suicide brought about by direct action.

So, essentially, what we have here is hard to pin down within the philosophical schools with which I'm familiar. In its early, pen-and-paper conception, I called it ethical nihilism, which is apparently a phrase both vague and in use, so here I use the more humble "Project Darkside," or simply D. It's egoistic, certainly, but not rational. It leads to a kind of enforced altruism (or "altruism," if you please), for reasons to be discussed, but doesn't require a god's-eye view like utilitarianism. It is ultimately consequentialist, but posits moral actions with no clear consequences in sight. More to the point, it encourages no particular actions, but seems to do a good job describing how people actually live; yet, by its insistent directionality it seems to be proscriptive as well as descriptive. It posits that morality is not a duty, per se, but but something that arises, emergently, from the chance interactions of horny people who don't want to die. Things like aggregate happiness, respect for free will, or adherence to rules derive their value from their contribution to the needs of the libido, and may be provisionally discarded when it's convenient to do so, i.e. when they cease to contribute. (And there it is, folks, the sentence that can be quoted out of context to undermine my credibility in anything I say or do in the future. Public office, here I...stay quietly away from!) Which is where it gets a bit creepy.

Because we can't accurately imagine the past or recreate lived experience from texts, D suggests that morality is entirely contextual. The treatment of women as property--or, if another of my pet theories is correct, the creation of the concept of "property" as analagous to women--might be so historically pervasive because, under different material/cultural conditions, it was actually beneficial overall. It's clearly not now, but when someone disagrees, all the ethical nihilist feminist may offer in reply is that the enslavement of women is detrimental to one's ability to keep breathing. (Conveniently, it allows said feminist to morally add, "...because if you keep doing it, we'll kill you.") So it's pretty damn relativistic about rights in general, and rights advance only by economic pressure and the threat of violence, but is that really so different from now?

Now, the theological implications. It's obviously compatible with atheism, and a rationalist would say it requires atheism, but a fan of D would make a rather crap rationalist. If religion is viewed primarily in terms of its value as tribal affiliation, things get muddier. It's fairly compatible with transcendentalism, or unitarianism, or the American civil religion, of course; interesting, since those traditions all draw heavily from Europe, but are also as American as cherry pie. Or, well, you know.

In more old-school religion, D is oddly compatible with the doctrine of total depravity. In fact, it might be the doctrine of total depravity, with a weirdly sunny eschatology tacked on. Simply put, if the sum of all human kindness and decency is an unconsciously calculated selfishness, it's easy to see exactly what's wrong with the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. We can't be moral because we can't even conceive of what real disinterested love would be. Or, for that matter, real faith in God. Faith is instead something we believe provisionally and socially, and through that loophole, you could drive a camel.

Now then. Back to the games.

The media effects paradigm has been validated!

2009-05-21T00:36:00.000-07:00

So, the girlfriend is still sick, three and a half months since she became too ill to attend class, and we're still trying to figure out why. I'm coping with the uncertainty by spending an inordinate amount of time with my DS.

On that note, I picked up Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, mostly for her benefit, as I'm not as into GTA as most of my particular subgroup, it would seem. I liked San Andreas a whole lot, but mostly because of the RPG elements that have been absent from the more recent iterations. But, after having failed to complete Fire Emblem more times than I care to admit, I gave Chinatown Wars a try, and was pleasantly surprised. Then, something disturbing happened.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars has completely desensitized me to market capitalism.

Oh, it started out as a way to break up the monotony of the story missions. A little E here, some downers there. Buy low, sell high. Not complicated. But soon, without any conscious effort, I began looking at the numbers more closely. In describing the game, I found myself using the term "ROI" in reference to my purchasing patterns. I began purchasing additional safehouses in key neighborhoods to lower the risk of getting pinched with six grand of smack on my person. (No, it still doesn't have any concept of "prison," but losing a hundred bucks and all your guns is a hell of a lot less threatening than losing a hundred bucks, your guns, and some small packages that were the fruits of an entire hour of gameplay.) I once found myself very frustrated when I couldn't afford to make a purchase I needed for a mission. I wasn't broke, you see; I had assets out the wazoo. The trouble was, I had no liquidity. Everything I had was tied up in weed, which nobody was interested in buying because the goddamn Jamaicans were flooding the market with their cheap shit, just like fucking Microsoft. Prices were low, and stayed low for some time. I hoped that perhaps I could influence the market by executing dealers with shotguns, but this failed to have any appreciable effect. I've recently opened up the ability to hijack shipments of specific gangs' merchandise, and I'm eager to see if that will give me a bit more of an edge.

So for now, I'm back to advancing the story, idly wondering which behaviors of the market are being modeled, and which ones aren't. If I buy up/steal and hoard all the coke I can find, can I create demand through scarcity? In a more robust sim, would it be prudent to put more resources into buying off the police, to both reduce my risk and inhibit competition? Should I tolerate the comparatively low ROI for weed transactions due to the inherently lowered risk of a smaller initial investment? Or should I be patient, maximizing profits by means of carefully planned, high risk ventures in powder? Even more disturbing than that, I find myself idly wondering about reading up on currency markets.

For God's sake, we really shouldn't let kids anywhere near this. Lord knows what they'll pick up.

In lieu of actual new content...

2009-04-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

...someone published me again. Follow the link, gentle readers.

Hey Kids, Do Ya Like Violence?

2009-04-08T22:55:00.000-07:00

So, we've had a few shootings recently. Brings me back.

We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Columbine, an event I've spent far too much time writing and thinking about in a world that also contains rape, slavery and Battle for Wesnoth, and the subject of a new book by the guy who really got me into internet journalism. (Not that I consider what I'm doing now to be journalism, but...y'know, internet journalism is cool.) And I'm proud to say that Mortal Kombat was not mentioned at all in the recent shooting of three police officers by a crazy guy who thought Obama was going to take away his guns.

Granted, I'm not sure why he felt that shooting three police officers would be an effective way of preventing this. I'm fairly certain his guns are now in the possession of the Philadelphia police, which seems to be the opposite of what he wanted. And even if Obama had taken them, he could have held onto them for at least a few more weeks if he'd just stayed at home watching TV like the rest of us. But anyway, he shot them, and I hope he was satisfied with that result, because it's kind of too late to change course for him at this point.

And then, with much fanfare and at least a little organ music, entered the blogs.

Distilled, some rather avant-garde, largely wordless posts from the left digging up old video and text of The Clinton Chronicles, G. Gordon Liddy's famous exhortation to aim for the head or groin of armored ATF agents--which I can only assume he picked up from Metal Gear Solid 2--and the modern-day Martin Luther who took an armed stand against the medieval tyranny of the Unitarian Universalist Church. The right picks up the ball and insists that the left should be ashamed for trying to criminalize speech on the specious grounds that the aforementioned clips, or conservative sensibilities in general, cause this kind of violence. And some of the posters seem to agree about the causation, and some are more vague, and I thought it deserved a think.

I've written stuff I'm not proud of. Which is not to say that I think it's dangerous, or that I'm not a total attention whore about urging people to read it. I have, however, written a thing or two that I'm proud of, but I'd never actually want published. Case in point, a short story written in my late teens called Last Will and Testament, which is basically an emphatic defense of suicide that borders on celebration. It should go without saying that I don't exactly agree with the protagonist, in the sense that there are around ten ways to kill myself located in the room I'm typing in, and I've not opted to avail myself of any of them. But I like (my memory of) the story, I like its parsimony, its rhetorical force, and its general shamelessness. But I really, really wouldn't want it falling into the hands of a random teenager I don't personally know. So that, apparently, is my line. That's the idea I wouldn't want to express in public for fear of what someone might do with it. I don't know if it's morally necessary for me to have a line, and I can't really apply my line, by analogy, to anyone else's work. They can draw their own lines; it's really not my job.

I don't believe that causality is as simple as yes/no when we're dealing with something like human relations, a subject so ridiculously complex that it only makes sense to deal with it in terms of metaphor and analogy. But I do think that, were I the kind of person who had disliked Clinton's policies to the point that I had (if not actually believed or endorsed) tolerated the kinds of insane conspiracy-mongering highlighted in these posts, to the point that I didn't actively ridicule them, I'd want to take this moment to stop and consider what I had said, and what I had done, and what I had implicitly or explicitly defended or repudiated.

Because, even if there's no causality, these ideas matter. Ideas matter for their own sake, and ideas about politics--ideas about power, and justice, and how rights, duties and resources ought to be allocated in a world of finite resources, fluid wealth, and unfathomable social complexity--ought to be respected. The processes of politics, maybe not. I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with thinking that representative democracy is, at its heart, pretty stupid. And I'm certainly not suggesting that there's anything wrong with treating politicians with no more respect than any other human being of similar character. But human beings matter, once the sun's up and all the trendy nihilists have eaten their pancakes and gone to bed. And politics is about us, about who gets paid, and who gets shot, and who gets left alone. It might not be a noble endeavor, but we are fucking stuck with it, for no reason other than because we are human.

I am not a principled conservative, and my imaginary readers may form their own opinions as to whether I am, by default, unprincipled, unconservative, or both. But were I a principled conservative, I'd want to look at the shooters, and look at their opinions, and take a careful account of where they differed from my own. And then I'd want to look again, to see where they seemed similar to my own, and see if that made me look at my own ideas differently. I'd think about my own writing, and how to express those ideas more clearly and more forcefully: if not to be more civil, or more safe, but only to be more honest.

Imaginary conservative reader retorts, why don't those other asshat bloggers and assorted media whores have to do this?

Well, shit, I hope they do. I think crafting words into communicable ideas is pretty much the most awesome thing about being human, and it's part and parcel of consciousness, rationality, and the very idea of intentional action. Words fucking matter. I think political discourse, in the main, probably ought not to be conducted via stream-of-consciousness or automatic writing. But when the "Bush/Hitler" stuff gets brought up, I can only say...yeah, kinda stupid.

On the other hand, Bush's government did kidnap and American citizen, Jose Padilla, take him to a legal phantom zone, and torture him until he lost his mind. His staff did write memos that granted the office of the president theoretically unlimited power, even if we do not honestly believe he planned to suspend elections and start building concentration camps. He did either a) start a war on false pretenses, or b) start a war by accident, from a bad reading of widely criticized intelligence. He did, publicly and repeatedly, utter false statements about Iraq's WMD capabilities, even if we didn't notice because Clinton had publicly and repeatedly uttered the same false statements. WMD experts knew Clinton was wrong, and they knew Bush was wrong, and we spent four ridiculous years arguing with each other over the largely irrelevant point of whether or not these false statements constituted lying. He authorized torture. I said that before, but I think it's important, so I'm going to say it again:

Oh my fucking God the President of the United States authorized torture. Of anyone. Prisoners of war, foreign civilians, American citizens, your mom, anyone. He made it legal for the government to waterboard anyone they felt like.

These things are facts; they are well-documented, and to deny them or dismiss them is to opt out of social reality and voluntarily take up the identity of a schizophrenic. This makes them a bit different than, say, claiming that Obama's volunteer corps thing is a) mandatory and b) suppresses religious practice, since in this case, but a) and b) are ridiculous fucking lies. Bill Clinton did not murder Vince Foster and half of the state of Arkansas. In 1994, ATF agents were not about to kick in the door of every American who had legally purchased a handgun. These things did not happen. So I'm hesitant to argue that it's equivalent to things like Bush=Hitler, which identifies itself as hyperbole by the very fact that it is literally absurd. Hitler died in 1945. In Germany. You can look it up. The Red Army got custody of his body, and in all likelihood they did something truly hideous to it. George W. Bush cannot be, literally, the same person. Are we all clear on this? That making a literally absurd claim is not the same thing as making a literally possible but factually untrue one?

Lastly, there is one more point that tends to come up in these arguments that deserves mention: the Bush=Hitler people don't seem to have actually murdered anyone specifically because of what they feared Bush would do, despite whatever horrible paranoid fantasies the left might have been feeding them. This isn't bragging, and it isn't an attempt to criminalize speech. It's just a suggestion if we are going to talk about consequences and tragedy, we would probably do well to focus on tragedies that have actually happened as opposed to imaginary future tragedies that might reassure us of our own innocence.

I really did use the word "fuck" quite a bit in that post. Which, I suppose, leads to a nice mea culpa to end on: I do talk about politics in a largely improvisational, stream-of-consciousness sort of way. More accurately, I think about politics that way, and then carefully and intentionally form sentences deliberately constructed to look spontaneous. It's not just politics, I do it with everything. Unless I've tried to date you in the past, you really can't imagine how irritating it is.

It's true. It's science.

2009-03-13T18:19:00.000-07:00

Since the birthing of the science-fiction genre from the sticky womb of the romantics--it was a difficult birth, as the mother was in poor health, having received more than a few machinegun slugs from the modernists--we have imagined many futures. Some are the bright, utopian dreams of the Christians and the Marxists; others are the black, dystopian nightmares of the Nietzscheans and the LaRouche Democrats.

But the one thing we all seem to agree on, in every iteration of the future, is that there will be co-ed showers.

One might think upon this, and wonder exactly where our predictive priorities lie.

PS-Tonight's Dollhouse hinges on the fact that one of the male dolls, when showering with Sierra, gets a boner. Leaving the plot itself aside, do you think they mentioned that the role would require ogling a naked Dichen Lachman when the actors were auditioning for the role?

This I Believe, part I

2009-01-17T18:34:00.001-08:00

Last night, I ended up staying up far too late, and found myself politics and philosophy on Facebook. Which in turn reminded me of just how confused my ideas about this stuff are. So, as much for my own benefit as anyone else's, I figured I'd lay down some baselines.

My formative moral influences are Christian. Partially because I grew up in Western civilization, and partially because of more direct parental influence, and a great respect for non-violent resistance and pacifism. So I start with a basic idea that violence is bad, and ought to be avoided.

Ok, pretty simple here, and few people would disagree with that under most circumstances. Where I started getting into trouble was, if violence is so bad, why the hell do we have armies? Or, for that matter, cops?

Because law enforcement is, fundamentally, state-sanctioned violence. That's not an argument about the validity or morality of law enforcement, but that's what it is. Contrary to what I always enjoy reading from Dennis "Marx was right, marriage really IS prostitution!" Prager, laws are not a psychic expression of a citizens' collective moral values. A law is nothing more and nothing less than an authorization of the state to use violence against its citizens under certain, carefully delineated circumstances. Some people might quibble with this, stating that some (most) infractions are dealt with via alternative means such as fines. Well, ok, you have to pay a fine. And if you don't pay it, alternative means of acquiring it are employed. If that doesn't work, agents of the state are authorized to kidnap you for the length of your trial and, if applicable, subsequent incarceration. If you run, they are authorized to chase you down and subdue you by force. If you fight back, they're authorized to extend that force. If you fight back enough that the agents' lives are in danger, they're authorized to kill you.

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with any of this--well, I did as a kid, and will discuss that in a minute--but this is what law is. Right or wrong, it's serious business, and ought to be taken seriously.

As a kid, I had a fundamental problem with the idea that any freedom, even the freedom to do violence to others, would be so unevenly applied between the state and its citizenry. There are reasons for this, many of them good, but we're in flashback mode now. I grew to identify as an anarchist. As I got older, and got into gnosticism and deontological ethics, I made the connection to Christianity. How can one be morally ok with any form of government when said government depends on institutionalized violence for its very existence?

"Well, because otherwise you'd be dead," was the common answer. And that works out ok if we assume that life matters more than principle. It seemed/seems to me that the Christian, pacifistic reply to this claim, however, is some variant of "so the fuck what?" Doesn't this world belong to the sinners anyway? Isn't this entire enterprise founded on martyrdom? In this sense, a "Christian state" becomes something of a contradiction in terms. An army of pacifists? More to the point, even Christian leadership of a democratic state presents some issues: if a president believes that martyrdom is a higher good than "defensive" killing, it doesn't seem like something that'd be wise or moral to put into practice if the voters don't agree. Martyrdom is one thing; volunteering others for martyrdom is trickier.

But, leaving aside Christianity for the moment, even a baseline belief that violence is wrong on a basic and transcendent level makes it difficult to interpret law enforcement morally. The most commonly employed argument is a utilitarian one, the "necessary evil" referred to in Common Sense: violence directed towards a net reduction in the total violence of a system is moral. The death of a multiple murderer is an evil to be balanced against the good it creates, i.e. a less fearful populace and a few lucky individuals who avoid being murdered by that particular person. But utilitarianism has its own problems that I don't particularly feel like going into here; suffice to say that this argument always kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

So what's left? Pacifism, I suppose, would seem to be the conclusion, except I'm not sure it's possible to practice it. I can sit here and promise not to kill, even in self-defense, and it might sound moral or crazy or both. I can even make it more ambiguous and promise not to kill in defense of others. But the society of which I am a part--there's extensive documentation on this, no matter how much of a shut-in I might be on a given day--has already taken extensive action on my behalf to ensure that I don't have to. Armed, uniformed men and women walk the streets of the city in which I live, and when something happens, they check it out, fill out a great deal of paperwork to ensure a record of the event, and when possible, arrest people who are then tried and imprisoned. I benefit from the violence done on my behalf, funded by my taxes and moderated by representatives elected by people like me. And, short of finding an unclaimed patch of land somewhere in the Massachusetts area that has no legal jurisdiction, there is no way for me to opt out of this system. I cannot avoid benefitting from the violence of others. And thus, as a citizen, I must accept that the violence done in my name is, on a psychic level, my own.

Rationality and Diminishing Returns

2008-12-05T17:00:00.000-08:00

Long ago, when Bill Clinton was president and reality television hadn't yet destroyed the American psyche, I spent a summer term in an intro to world politics class at a school that had not yet officially admitted me, with my stoner roommate and the non-talkative girl I had a crush on at the time and a professor who I believe has now become a sorcerer of some sort. I took four classes with this prof, slowly making my way up to an A--I think the A- I got for a 92.25% was sending me a message--but the first thing I remember from my short time as a poli-sci major was realism, and its Dark Knight Returns cousin neorealism. After the collapse of political idealism in the epic clusterfuck of World War I--the bloodiest, most hideous folly of human cruelty and stupidity until the next one a couple decades later--political realism sure seemed like a pretty sound theory, and held sway nicely through the cold war. Look it up; I don't really plan to explain it here, but if you pay attention to international politics, it's a concept with which you're familiar. And if you're a cynical dude, it's obvious and intutive. But I am not a cynical dude, all evidence to the contrary--I prefer hyperskeptic idealist, myself--and the view of human nature that political realism always seems to be coupled with, even if it's not strictly part of the theory, always rubbed me the wrong way. It's a view that's constitutive of the doctrine of total depravity, and therefore has its tendrils in much modern Protestant thought, as well as every consdescending lecture about "the real world" you ever received from a parent, teacher, or court-appointed psychiatrist. Put simply, I find it rather unfathomable that people spend so much time and effort thinking about right and wrong if they honestly believe that we're all a bunch of bastards who couldn't choose right if we wanted to, which we don't. In practice, total depravity is commonly deployed as a descriptor of everyone else's behavior, but is rarely (in my experience) argued coherently.

So, walking home one day, I stopped at one of those lovely sidewalk book sales that periodically dot the Cambridge landscape, and picked up a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society. It's a hell of a title, aside from the fact that it seems to have been so named in an effort to market to me, personally; it's a marketing practice reminiscent of Become Who You Were Born to Be, which I believe was designed to appeal to the tastes of Aragorn, son of Arathorn. Anyway, Niebuhr neatly dovetails political realism and original sin in a way that makes eminently more sense (to me, at least) than either of them do separately. To wit: though morality is neither wholly rational nor wholly social, the keeping of the Christian moral law--which is short, and you should know it by now--does require a rational mind, the ability to see ourselves and our neighbors as equivalent when our sensory perceptions and emotional reactions plainly think it's stupid. And yes, Virginia, small groups can behavor morally, with effort and forethought. However, the world does not consist of small groups, but a series of nested groups of varying size, and groups are not rational. Niebuhr suggests a kind of law of diminishing return for rationality among groups, and at a sufficiently large level, groups are incapable of acting in any interest other than their own. (There's a lot of "ifs" in here, of course, in that one could argue that all manner of moral behavior operates from self-interest, if one happens to be a psychological egoist, but I digress.)

Whatever the virtues of Niebuhr's theories--it's fascinating and thought-provoking, right or wrong--videogame design does seem to reflect a similar perspective. When we talk about moral choice in games, we almost exclusively do so in terms of individuals. Fable, The Sims, GTA, etc. What would even make sense as a "moral decision" in, say, SimCity?

I'm not sure if this is something new design ideas could surmount; the serious games movement has pointed in that direction with its public policy angle (public policy can be interpreted as a means to moral action by groups, but Niebuhr has some thoughts on that as well), but it does seem that we have an awfully hard time conceiving of morality outside of small groups, or imagining anything outside of self-interest for larger ones. The philosophers, of course, have gleefully attempted to reduce all morality to one or the other, to varying degrees of success. And perhaps it is the job of systems-thinking to help us learn to think both morally and collectively.

This, he mused, he must think hard upon.

Character Sheet

2008-12-05T15:28:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, I had the good fortune to be friends with a bunch of nerds. These nerds, taken collectively, connected me to most of the various nerd tribes, but there was a specific preponderance of Tolkien among their specific schools of nerditude. 2000-2003 were good years to be a Tolkien nerd, thanks to the efforts of various Australians, and it was comparatively easy to pick up my slack in that area. (Full disclosure: I still have not read Lord of the Rings. I read The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, but got caught up in thesis prep about 60 pages into The Two Towers. So my thoughts on Tolkien aren't exactly authoritative.)

My nerd lineage starts with videogames and spreads out from there. I've never seen the pre-Special Edition Star Wars, and therefore never saw any of them until I was 15 years old. Nonetheless, at 15, I developed a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the universe through games and a wonkish interest in Joseph Campbell. Similarly, I've never played Dungeons & Dragons, but picked up the basics of the ruleset through adaptations, and the elements that spread throughout the RPG genre. So, as I watched the Rings movies, I'd see a lot of things I recognized from various RPGs, many of them Japanese, and my Tolkien nerd friends would smugly assert that, of course, everything in the fantasy genre has a straight line back to Tolkien.

I thought this was a little odd at the time, in that even I knew that Gary Gygax and company had at least one other major influence, Robert E. Howard, in establishing the D&D universe. From what I've read since then, it turns out that Gygax wasn't a big fan of Tolkien--he liked the American pulps, mostly--and the references to LOTR in D&D mostly amount to marketing ploys. More to the point, however, what makes D&D important has very little to do with evocative world-making. I don't know if Gygax's rule system was the first or even the most effective of its time, but it seems to me that the relevant thing about D&D as it relates to videogames and simulation in general is that it devised a system for measuring human behavior through the narrativized interaction of random and non-random statistics.

Case in point: A D&D character is fundamentally comprised of 6 base statistics: Strength ("the muscle and physical power of your character"), Dexterity ("agility, reflexes and balance"), Constitution ("the health and stamina of your character"), Intelligence ("how well your character learns and reasons"), Wisdom ("willpower, common sense, perception and intuition"), and Charisma ("force of personality, persuasiveness, ability to lead, and physical attractiveness").

Ok, that's all well and good, but what do they do? Narrative niceties aside, the issue is how it ties into actual gameplay. (I'll be referring to the NWN ruleset here, so, y'know, take heed.) Strength covers carrying capacity, melee weapon damage, and the "discipline" skill, which resists various combat skills. Dexterity covers bow damage and dodging, as well as hiding, sneaking, lock picking, parrying, pickpocketing, and setting traps. Constitution covers HP (i.e. how much damage one could soak up and survive), as well as concentration and the barbarian's "rage" ability. Wisdom allows characters to ask more insightful questions to NPCs to get better information, covers divine magic for clerics, druids, paladins and rangers, enhances monks' dodging abilities, and contributes to healing, listening, and looking. Intelligence covers the acquisition of new skills (general learning speed), as well as arcane magic for wizards and the disable trap, lore, search, and spellcraft (counter-magic) skills. Charisma covers arcane magic for bards and sorcerers and contributes to animal empathy, singing, persuasion, taunting, and using magic devices.

So we're now in a bit deeper; certainly better than the bare-bones "physical/mental/other" trinity from which most RPG rulesets are, ahem, divined. And we've covered a good many things a hypothetical person could do, with a semi-coherent system for what skills govern which actions.

What interests me most at this point is the treatment of the mind: at first glance, two of the main stats, intelligence and wisdom, seem to cover this category. The manual notes that high intelligence and low wisdom makes for something of an idiot savant, while high wisdom and low intelligence makes for a kind of non-specific street smarts. After all, "wisdom" comprises a fairly wide array of concepts--willpower, common sense, perception and intuition--it's a pretty heavy stat, from a narrative level. (Notably, Arcanum goes to the trouble of breaking it into "willpower" and "perception.") So we have two stats standing in for "mind." Except...charisma? That's more "interpersonal" than smart, so maybe that's a third category. And once we're into threes, hoo boy. One could alternatively divy up the stats into physical, mental and spatial/temporal, or internal, external and liminal: strength and constitution for the objective, visible world, intelligence and charisma for mind and speech (speech being, in this projection, a manifestation of the inner self), dexterity and wisdom for the relation of the world to the self. That these pairings seem to oppose each other--constitution makes enemies' strength less effective, wisdom counteracts dexterity skills--adds some legs to this model.

One more thing about these skills, which have (of course) evolved considerably over many iterations of D&D: saving throws. Certain attacks, curses, etc. can be turned aside by fortitude (constitution), will (wisdom), or reflex (dexterity) saves. In the 4th edition ruleset, all six stats contribute to saving throws, essentially pairing off the starting six: strength and constitution, dexterity and intelligence, wisdom and charisma. And this pairing also makes a kind of sense, which raises a new question: do any of these stats really work in isolation? I mean, in the universe we actually inhabit?

In practice, it's difficult to build muscle without also improving endurance and general cardiovascular health. Dexterity is a matter for people with more medical knowledge than I, but there's certainly a fairly significant physical component. Similarly, how well can one actually think with an unhealthy body? If the brain itself--a physical organ that runs on oxygen and regulates an unfathomably complex machine via electrochemical signals--doesn't problematize mind/body dualism, perhaps the ubiquity of anti-depressants in modern American society will. And shouldn't the "willpower" part of wisdom affect all of these?

Working from this concept, one could easily split up the starting six into primary and secondary groups, making the secondary stats by combining the primary. Wisdom and dexterity are pretty convincing as the building blocks of charisma, at least where I'm stanging--dexterity is already associated, metaphorically, with wit and mental processes, and a general comfort with and awareness of one's company and surroundings is always the part of interpersonal relations at which I suck.

There are a theoretically infinite number of these kinds of models that can be produced, of course, even with a relatively small number of variables, just by rearranging the relationships between them. And each of these models would no doubt be consistent with some aspects of observed or imagined reality and not others. RPGs aren't my favorite genre to play, but they're definitely my favorite genre to think about, for the same reason I find my liberal-arts-major knowledge of science so useful in my everyday walkin' around time: it gives you a new way to look at your regular, boring-ass life.

The first of many posts on Mortal Kombat

2008-11-19T13:39:00.000-08:00

So, yesterday I picked up Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, because, come on. The first ad was a movie of Sub-Zero fighting Batman. Beating each other up in mid-air. I rest my case.

Anyway. The good: it's an old-school MK game. Not like Deadly Alliance, Deception or Armageddon. Not even like MK4 or the MK3 clusterfuck. It feels like MK2. Well, no. It feels like a version of MK2 designed by Capcom or Namco, a team more competent than ambitious. It's MK3 and 4 with all the gimmicks well implemented and balanced. It's simpler than any of the last generation MKs, easy to pick up, and a blast to play. The DC characters are well designed and narratively consistent (aside from the obvious Superman Problem, the graphics are gorgeous, and--let me say it again--Batman can fight Sub-Zero.

The story mode pretty much plays the MK universe as a superhero comic, in a way that actually helps iron out some of the narrative oddities of Boon and Tobias' little world. The comic association also makes it easier to swallow that MK has, over eight "main" games and two spinoffs, played incredibly fast and loose with its own continuity. The complete failure of MK's narrative is a multi-level train wreck I refer to as "The Mortal Kombat problem," a case study in how not to run a fighting game franchise, and it could easily fill several blog posts. And it will. Because, seriously, have you seen my output on this thing lately? It's not like the D&D, God of War and Jane Austen posts are writing themselves. If I don't pick up the pace soon I'm going to have to outsource this thing to grad students in unpaid internships, and even my supply of those has been threatened by recent events.

There isn't much bad to be had, aside from the lack of big New Features. Then again, after the run button, vs. screen "kodes," clumsy weapons and the most truly boring use of 3D movement yet seen in a fighting game, I hope we can agree that the MK team ought to have stopped bothering with New Features somewhere around 1993.

The one thing I will say in this post: this whole fatality business. Fatalities, as a gameplay device, only make sense in the context of arcades. They should have been radically revamped as soon as MK went console-only. And while that hasn't happened yet, a curious thing happened with MK vs. DC. Due to DC's stranglehold over portrayals of their IP, there were initially rumors that the game would have no fatalities, or that the DC characters would have no fatalities. Fine; whatever. It's not like anyone actually ever dies in either universe, anyway. They settled on the DC villains having fatalities, and the whole MK cast, but not the heroes. Instead, they have..."heroic brutalities."

Read that again.

Heroic. Brutality.

I appreciate the effort, but really, guys, you need to hire a lit major. Someone who could tell you that, unless we're openly embracing fascism, those concepts are antithetical.

While we're on the subject of violence, a parting shot--supposedly the Joker's famed gun fatality has been edited for the American release, but remains in the European release. I haven't tested it myself, but here's what amuses me. In America, it was edited so the game could get a Teen rating, and avoid legal hoopla. In the UK, where people beating the crap out of each other is, in and of itself, enough to be considered graphic violence, it got by with a 16+, which apparently presents no such hurdles.

So, in short, America gets the less violent version of the game because we are more tolerant of violent media.

Go figure.

(PS--I like that Liu Kang has something resembling a Chinese accent, but why does Kitana sound like the actress actually recorded her dialogue while wearing a mask?)