Tag: philosophy

The Three Cities of the Immortals

A review of Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges.  Separately, this is one of two pieces of content that I have prepared going into the next month where most of my writing activity will be focused on edits and rewrites for Three and Two and Two (Crossroads, Book 1).  I’ll try to keep content coming, but either way, I’ll see you on the other side.

Labyrinths was (aside from a scattered few assignments in college) my first experience with Jorge Luis Borges.  It was fabulous.  Everyone should read it.  “I didn’t enjoy it very much,” says the inexplicably boosted review near the top of its Goodreads page, as if your enjoyment has anything to do with evaluating impeccable specimen of magical realism, science fiction, perhaps the only compelling exegesis of Eleatic philosophy that I will ever read.  Despite my derision, I understand the sentiment–not everyone fuels themselves on the same homeopathic masochism I do–but even that, I suspect, is an anomaly.  I found the prose very approachable.  Perhaps the constant barrage of Neoplatonic mathy-ness can grate, so reader beware in that sense, I guess.

I.

Regardless, while I hope you may give Tlön its chance to worm its way into your brain, the meat of this will be about a more particular image.  Among the stories of Labyrinths, a number stood out to me, but one, “The Immortal”, stood out for particular, personal reasons.  

For synopsis: A handwritten note found in 1929 in the cover of a (set of) book(s) published in 1715 details an expedition undertaken by a Roman soldier in Eritrea to seek out the City of the Immortals across the desert.  On the way, his men mutiny, and he escapes into the sands, where his recollection of the next several days goes hazy, distorted by heat and dehydration.  He awakes in a graven, stone niche on the slope of a mountain, below which runs the river of immortality (from which he has apparently unconsciously drunk), and across is the city itself.  His niche is one of many, and around him, gray-skinned troglodytes who devour serpents and do not speak emerge.  He lives among them for a minute, goes to explore the City, finds it a vast labyrinth, built for something other than inhabiting–and accordingly uninhabited–and eventually wanders out.  On the way back, he and the troglodyte who followed him there witness a sudden rainstorm, at which point the troglodyte is inspired to speak and reveals himself to be the poet Homer.

It turns out the troglodytes are the Immortals who built the city and not just some hapless animals who drank the water–it’s just that being endless changes your outlook on things and leaves you with very little to talk about.  Anyway, the narrator joins them for a time before resolving to go find the river of immortality’s double, the river which gets rid of immortality.  He rejoins civilization, finds the river quite by accident, sells the books with the note, and dies shortly thereafter.  Also, because of the vagaries of the Immortals’ collective memory in their society, the narrator at the end was actually Homer rather than the Roman soldier.

There’s plenty to dig into, from the novelty of the hyper-ascetic picture of immortality to the incomprehensibility of the Immortals’ works, but what stuck out to me more than all of that were Borges’ physical descriptions of the City of Immortals, beginning with the far shore where the narrator awakens:

“…I found myself lying with my hands tied, in an oblong stone niche no larger than a common grave…shallowly excavated into the sharp slope of the mountain…A hundred or so irregular niches, analogous to mine, furrowed the mountain and the valley.”

And the City itself:

“I emerged into a kind of little square or, rather, a kind of courtyard.  It was surrounded by a single building of irregular form an variable height; to the heterogeneous building belonged the different cupolas and columns.  Rather than by any other trait of this incredible monument, I was held by the extreme age of its fabrication…

…In the palace I imperfectly explored, the architecture lacked any such finality.  It abounded in dead-end corridors, portentous doors which led to a cell or a pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards.  Other stairways, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere, after making two or three turns in the lofty darkness of the cupolas.”

You see, with some allowance for Borges’ use of “irregular”, the vista I see here looks something like this:

Top Image: Crumbling Farum Azula from Elden Ring

Bottom Image: Crumbling Farum Azula, entrance to Placidusax’s Arena

II.

Inspiration, perhaps; hammers and nails, I know; but there is a lot tying the two together.  Perhaps its best to start with the physical structure of the city.  Though Borges qualifies the “labyrinthine” nature of the City, and though Farum Azula is an imperfect facsimile of the sheer idiocy of the Immortals’ monument, the difference perhaps ties them together more than it pushes them apart.  Per Edward Teach (on the similarly labyrinthine Inception)

“When Ariadne draws her mazes for Cobb, he rejects the square mazes and is satisfied/stumped only by the circular classical labyrinth.

And anyway, mythological Ariadne didn’t construct the Minotaur’s labyrinth–Daedalus constructed it for her–she merely showed Theseus how to get out of it.  But she didn’t need to: a classical labyrinth doesn’t have multiple dead ends; it is a single winding path that lead either in or out.

But Theseus, like the audience, upon being shoved inside wouldn’t have known the form of the labyrinth–dead ends or a single path?  Sot to be able to find the Minotaur, he needed to know which way to go, and Daedalus told him: downwards is the only way forwards.”

It’s worth disclaiming/clarifying: Teach’s distinction (maze versus labyrinth) may be correct, but it is not commonly written about in popular culture, and I think most works are agnostic to the difference.  The reason I bring it up is not to nitpick either Borges or Miyazaki but rather to point out that the distinction exists: branching, built to frustrate versus linear and built to obfuscate.  To which end, it’s worth looking at the forms of the narratives that use these labyrinths.  “The Immortal” is, contrary to the implications of its twists and turns, a linear piece of prose.  Though your own eyes and thoughts may be deceived, you can read forward, and your questions will be answered–you’ll exit the labyrinth on the last page of the story.  Elden Ring–a point of which a number of my readers would surely love to remind me–is a game, a medium much more on the maze side of the spectrum.  There is no one way forward, a player might be stuck in any corner of the Lands Between forever, despite any amount of movement.  Except in Farum Azula (among other locales), the form of the maze is subordinated to the immediate obstacle of the dungeon (From Software’s terminology–Farum Azula is a dungeon mechanically though not thematically).  There are dead ends in the dungeon, yes, but rewards wait at each of them.  Unlike Borges’ narrator, the Tarnished is incentivized to perfectly explore their City, and so their idealized task is no longer to simply make it out of the maze but to construct a path which touches every piece of it.  One path–making it a labyrinth.  This leaves us with a pleasingly Borgesian symmetry: “The Immortal”, a labyrinth which presents a maze in the form of its City of Immortals, is reflected sixty years later by Elden Ring, a maze whose own City is a labyrinth.  Borges did love his mirrors, and with apologies to Mr. Smith, it appears they are real.

III.

This is to say nothing, of course, of the other aesthetic similarities which tie these images together.  The crumbling, ancient spirals of Farum Azula, a city in a temporal maelstrom, unreachable to all but the most desperate, built to be listlessly guarded but not really inhabited.  And despite its grim aesthetic, there is no death awaiting those that linger there.  For Placidusax, the temporal prison sees to that.  For everyone else, Maliketh is keeping a tight hold on the Rune of Death.

And of course, Maliketh, Marika’s lupine vassal, is merely the greatest of the beastmen of Farum Azula, the raggedly-clad, gray-skinned troglodytes who (aside from Maliketh) do not speak and whose animate corpses fill the shallow, grave-sized niches that adorn the terraces of the City.  I’ll admit there is no evidence they devour serpents–they seem, rather, to worship the dragons who remain there–and there are some other specificities missing, like the impure stream which grants immortality.

To which end, in Elden Ring, Farum Azula is only implicitly a “City of the Immortals”.  To find an explicit City, we’ll need to look to a different From Software property:

IV.

I’ve written before about Sekiro’s Fountainhead Palace in reference to both Sekiro and Elden Ring’s use of the centipede as a symbol.  Much of Sekiro’s symbolism and plot revolves around the idea of worldly immortality as given by the Divine Dragon.  Among humans, there exists an “heir” to the Dragon’s blessing who is able to confer that blessing to others, which serves to explain the pseudo-eponymous protagonist’s continued resurrection in the face of the player’s ineptitude the impossible odds of his mission.

But in-world, this isn’t a secret, and it is well-known that the waters that flow from the Fountainhead Palace, where the Divine Dragon is known to reside, grant a sort of fucked-up immortality of their own.  This is because those waters contain the eggs of a species of…spiritually volatile centipede–a morphological reflection of the serpentine dragon–that parasitizes anyone drinking the water.  Thus, by devouring a pseudo-serpent, the ashen-skinned monks of the Senpou Temple, the peasants of Mibu Village, and the deformed aristocrats of the Fountainhead Palace all persist in perpetual witness of a City of Immortals upon a mountain, from which flows an impure stream that grants eternal, if cursed, life.

V.

Borges believed (or at least once claimed) that there were only four devices which comprised all fantastic literature: The work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double.  Amusingly or predictably, all four are relevant to this analysis, but the last is particularly important.  I’ve already referenced it in this essay (see: mirrors), but it of course comes in many forms.  Sekiro, like Elden Ring, like most works of fantasy, really, is the story of a warrior, and a necessary element of any plot pitting a warrior against undying foes is the method the warrior uses to subvert their immortality.  For “The Immortal” (where the foe was the narrator’s own interminable experience) this means was a reflection, a mirror, the stream which was the antithesis of the polluted river.  For Sekiro, this means is a sword, a cutting instrument.  It should not be surprising that the two should have something in common.

It was, of course, Borges who wrote, in this same book:

“…copulation and mirrors are abominable, because they increase the number of men.”

Perhaps a blade does not increase the number of men, but just like a mirror, a scissor, or Truth, it increases the number of things.  From one, it makes two.  That a blade should reflect darkly the infested immortality of the Fountainhead, in reflection of Borges’ reflection; that the pieces of Borges’ immortal City should be separated and made two cities in two worlds, each with the specificities necessary to lead back to the dream which bled into them–well, it’s only appropriate, isn’t it?

Schrodinger Visits Mumbai

A review of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

And once again, a reminder that some of my work is now available in ebook and paperback form on Amazon. If you like what you read and are interested in supporting my efforts, I would greatly appreciate a purchase and/or review!

A friend convinced me to read Shantaram via quid pro quo.  In exchange he would read Edward Teach’s Watch What You Hear.  Cursory familiarity with these two ought to tip you off pretty quickly that this quid was not, in fact, quo, and of course, he didn’t even read his ~100-page tribute, but so it goes.  I bring it up mainly because the same friend said something interesting when I came round to discuss the book with him.  He said that whenever he evaluates any piece of art, he always asks the question: “Do I believe them?”

Heh.  Those of you who have read Shantaram (or even the book jacket) should maybe slow down here.  There are traps in that question.  For one, my friend is a musician who mostly evaluates music, a medium not known for its use of the phrase, “Based on a True Story”.  I knew what he meant immediately, both for my awareness of that context and for my continued inebriation on the Nietzschean outlook of truth and lies, but to be clear, what he meant was this: Does the core message of the work, underlying and/or overall, feel true?

The problem with applying this question to Shantaram, a book which pitches itself hard on the notion that it’s based on author Gregory David Roberts’ life, is that you have to ask it twice.  The first: To what degree is Roberts telling the truth?  The second: Is he…right?

Taking a step back into the actual content of the book, here’s the deal: Gregory David Roberts got a divorce (or more general marriage breakup) sometime in the early ‘70s and lost custody of his daughter.  As people often do, he dealt with this poorly.  Specifically, he dealt with this poorly with heroin.  To fund the heroin addiction, he started robbing businesses.  Irrelevant but amusing: He did so in a three-piece suit, with a particular code of etiquette, and only targeted businesses with insurance to cover the losses from the robberies.  Anyway, he got caught, went to prison, escaped from prison, fled Australia, ended up in Bombay (now Mumbai), and got up to, reportedly, some wild shit.

The setup of Shantaram is, well, literally that.  The book begins with the protagonist, Lin, getting off the plan in Bombay, falling in with a motley crew of expats and locals, losing all his money, moving into a slum, and slowly–but not that slowly–getting wrapped into the fold of the Bombay mafia.  It’s a crazy story, and the tension between the often harsh, sometimes outright brutal picture of life on Bombay’s streets and the oneness and love for it all (or at least most of it) that Lin melodramatically continues to express throughout does serve to keep the pages turning.  But it also prompts questions I wouldn’t normally care to ask.

Chief among them, for grounding purposes: How crazy of a story is this, actually?  Stranger than fiction?  Well, that’s the problem.  It is, in fact, very easy to imagine Lin–criminal background, talent for absorbing cultures and languages, a heart of gold, minus Roberts’ often syrupy prose–in a David Baldacci-esque thriller, and I gotta say, Bizarrodacci-Lin is not especially compelling.  With apologies to the book-clubbers and DnD players, it turns out that complex and fraught backstories are neither difficult to put together nor especially interesting on their own.  And of course, the wild ride of Shantaram’s plot isn’t the only thing going on, but what remains has its own caveats.

It’s easy to read Shantaram, in a sense, as a book of personal philosophy.  It’s also easy, if you know anything about philosophy, to get very, very bored with what Roberts clearly considers important takes.  Most of them aren’t wrong, not really, but I would still expect even the most insightful of them to have come up–not merely in essence, but literally expressed in words–at some point in the average college student’s late-night explorations of their red Solo cup.  To put it bluntly and perhaps uncharitably, Lin is a hippie, part of a demographic renowned for its fervor but not its intellectual care, which is why, in perhaps the most philosophically cursed point in the book, Lin, Khader (the mafia don who dons the familiar hat of “father figure”), and, apparently, the author himself all get bamboozled by a vocabulary mixup that I can only assume originated with a gap in translation.  For those of you following solely in English, please note that “complexity” and “entropy” are very much not the same thing.

As answer to the question of whether Roberts is “right”, it probably suffices to say that the philosophy of Shantaram is not, on its own, a worthwhile message, nor can Lin, taken as a thriller protagonist, save it.  But I think that Lin as an autobiographical representation maybe can.  It’s much the same as the story itself.  Cataloged in no particular order: heroin addiction, Australian prison, Indian prison, slum resident, slum doctor, organized crime, disorganized crime, Afghan freedom fighter, dirt-poor pastoral village resident.  These are experiences that many will collect vicariously in our global, internet age, to the extent that bulleting them off on an invented character’s life story is at best uninteresting and on average rank, stinking of the excess of bad lies.  But an actual person collecting these experiences firsthand is legitimately impressive, both for their qualities (many are highly disturbing) and their quantity.  Moreover, the scars of these experiences upon the philosopher provide ammunition that the florid prose, while sometimes beautiful, cannot possibly advance without an argument from true character.

So, do I believe him?

Predictably, Roberts’ own statement on the veracity of Shantaram is that it is fiction, not autobiography, grounded in real events from his life but not really following his story or relationships.  Specifically, he seems to actually have been a slum doctor and mafia operative (to some extent), but the rest is a mystery.  I can’t really blame him.  There are a lot of crimes in there that I wouldn’t want to confess to, having spent 19 years in prison already, but at the same time, the ambiguity is less hazy than it is forked.

I’ve always considered “Based on a True Story” to be a transparent marketing ploy, and when it comes to ambiguities that will never be resolved for me, I’ve favored Baudrillard as a guiding ethos.  But that won’t really work here.  There isn’t really any message hidden in the unknowing, and the force preventing the resolution isn’t a commonality of human experience–it’s just logistics.  I get to know either the position or the velocity, and since the position is uncomfortably close to Roberts’ business, well, at least we know how fast he was going.  And unfortunately, we can’t just eliminate the false side of the story Socratically either, because Shantaram as pure fiction isn’t meaningless.  It’s just…commonplace.

In the end, the value of this book for me was very positive, but that’s because I think I do believe him.  There’s still some doubt there, superimposed over my thoughts like a subatomic dead cat, but since I will likely never know the full truth, the opinion stands as-is.

Coming Back: Remaining Alive in Dimly-Lit Rooms

Eternal Return: Black Survival on Steam
A non-fiction interlude, reviewing Eternal Return: Black Survival    

***

“The title…it doesn’t make a lot of sense…”

“What do you mean?  It’s Nietzsche.  The kids’ll love it!”

***

Taking a brief break here from Crossroads (brief=while writing this), since game design and culture are on my mind.  To blow off steam lately, some friends and I have been playing Eternal Return: Black Survival, which, design-wise, is a fascinating and bizarre evolution, and it’s filled my head with many thoughts.  They are not terribly organized so do please pardon the rambling, and for those of you who don’t care for video games, don’t worry: This is about much at least a little more than the mouthfeel of my digital pastimes.

***

The “what” comes first: Eternal Return is a Battle Royale (e.g. Fortnite) formatted as an isometric MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, e.g. DotA, League of Legends).  The latter term refers to a team-based game where players fight each other in an arena populated by tactically relevant (and usually at least slightly hostile) environmental features, growing and specializing their characters as the action escalates.  The game ends, generally, when one team achieves some goal with respect to the environment, unrelated, really, to the fighting with the other players (except insofar as they can’t stop you while they’re dead).

A Battle Royale is less complicated: A large number of players/teams get dropped onto a large map, and the last one standing wins.  To escalate the action (and to make safety a meaningful and fun tradeoff), weapons, armor, and other useful things are scattered around the map to give the strategically-minded survivors an edge in the showdowns that become inevitable as the map shrinks.

Amusingly (from an industry perspective), the two now-mega-genres have similar origin stories.  Some sloppy history: By most accounts, the first MOBA (in the sense they exist today) was a StarCraft mod called Aeon of Strife.  This inspired the Warcraft mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA), which became DotA: Allstars, which schismed out of Blizzard’s umbrella of control into League of Legends and DotA 2.  Similarly, Battle Royale started with the ARMA 2 mod DayZ, which passed design talent along to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), which prompted Epic Games to whipturn development on Fortnite in order to compete with it.

Generally, the creative direction of the games industry can be modeled as a linear combination of the interests of its best game designers and those of guys in suits who like the word “monetize”, and it is very easy to see the explosion of genres like these as dominated by the latter.  I’ll admit: It’s damned hard not to notice that within five months of the Auto Chess mod for DotA 2, both Valve and Riot had released their own proprietary versions, with Blizzard’s arriving only six months after that.  But the spectacle of the fat cat feeding frenzy distracts from the fact that these mod-to-blockbuster stories captured the artists’ attention too, with pseudo-legendary designers like Tim Schafer describing DayZ as the future of narrative in games (nosic).

***

For those of you whose eyes glazed over at all of that, this is where things return to the normal subject matter of this blog.  The lingo may get a little blurry, but the key to Schafer’s argument is this: Battle Royale games don’t have a story in any conventional sense.  There is little setting, no cutscenes or writing, no characters but you and the other players, no narrative but the one you make for yourself.

Frankly, I feel vindicated.  Back when I was in school, I dropped this same argument in one of my writing classes.  The MFA student opposite me, unimpressed, inquired: “Isn’t that just everything in life, though?”  It was very Robert Frost of her, but last I checked, no one is arguing that free verse isn’t poetry anymore.  The boundaries where art begins and ends are not important.  They were never important.  What’s important is that art can be crafted from agency.  It can be framed and sculpted, and like just about everything else within our powers, it can be improved upon.

The baseline for multiplayer games is essentially what you see with mainstream sports.  You have a simple task with a simple goal, and the game is doing it better than the other guys until one of you wins.  Maneuver the sportsball through the hoopgoal.  Go fast.  Hit hard and shoot accurately.  That these imperatives apply equally well to football/soccer, Street Fighter, Mario Kart, and Halo shouldn’t be controversial, but make no mistake: There’s a narrative there.  It’s just a very short narrative, leaving comparatively few opportunities for interesting variation.  I’m not knocking the excitement of the neck-and-neck rival showdown, won at the last second by a half-court buzzer beater, but I will point out that when they make movies about sports, it is always about the context, an athlete or team’s struggle and growth over months or years–their rise to greatness–and not the one awesome match they fought out in the preseason when stakes were low.

This then begs the question: How do we take that framework of engagement and structure it in such a way that a single game tells a story worth hearing?  The MOBA and the Battle Royale are two answers to that question.

The standard narrative of a MOBA match is this: The beginning, instead of a team v. team slugfest, opens with smaller scale matchups (generally 1v1 or 2v2) in “lanes”, with each side competing to most efficiently extract resources from the “minions” the enemy base sends down each lane.  You can fight your opponent directly here, and you might even succeed if you outmaneuver them severely, but you’re weak.  The minions aren’t strong, but they are a significant defensive advantage should your opponent catch you in the middle of them.  And, of course, attacking your opponent beneath the defensive structures at the end of their lane is certain death, so barring extreme outcomes, it is advantageous for both of you to sit there and farm, competing to grow faster, prodding and skirmishing to prevent each other from feeling too comfortable.

Soon you grow stronger.  Within the first third of the game, you’ll have unlocked all of your abilities and have improved your stats.  With some smart planning, you can now work around or through your opponents environmental defenses and score a player kill (for much higher rewards) or simply leave your lane to coordinate with your teammates (and overwhelm another lane), all with the goal of securing more resources, growing stronger, and conquering objectives to aid in the final assault on your opponents’ inner stronghold.

Nuts-and-bolts-wise, this is basically a whole bunch of subgames glued together, though organically and analogous enough to common concepts (e.g. war) to not feel like an abomination.  The variation in skillsets the game demands is wild, with different tactical mindsets needed for “laning”, “jungling”, “sieging”, “teamfighting”, and skirmishing around objectives.  There is, of course, some overlap with the basics of controlling your character, but even that is subject to do’s and don’ts that don’t travel well between concepts.

Seems like a cost, but the holistic result is profound.  In 20-40 minutes, you’ve now gone through the better part of the Hero’s Journey, from humble beginnings (level 1 laning) to confluence with your companions (meeting up as the laning phase ends), proving yourself as a Dragon Slayer (literally an objective in League of Legends), and ultimate, hard-fought victory over the enemy.  The goal was to establish a complex narrative in a multiplayer game, and, uh, mission accomplished.

Ish.  There are cons, many of them logistical.  For example, these are team games, and the precisely-combined nature of their subgames means they don’t have IRL sports’ luxury of freeform adjustment to deviant behavior.  So if Timmy gets disgruntled and walks off the virtual field by way of an unplugged router, that ruins the game for everyone.  There are no substitutes, there’s no rearranging the teams to account for the new imbalance (both for technical reasons and for the fact that doing so would invalidate all of the narrative built up to that point).  All the players can really do is remain halfheartedly engaged as the game grinds on for another fifteen minutes to its predictable, cheapened conclusion.

This is, of course, inextricably entangled with the other big MOBA downside: These games are long.  In the abstract, 25-45 minutes might not seem like a long time, but it’s time when you cannot be interrupted, when a moment of inattention could have deleterious consequences for the following half-hour.  If that doesn’t sound at least mildly stressful, you probably ought to check in with your significant other more often than you do.  All this to say, the MOBA is a significant development for narrative in (multiplayer) games, but it’s not the only one in town.  Meanwhile, the Battle Royale tackles things differently, avoiding these issues and falling upon different ones.

The narrative of a Battle Royale, specifically, is less about growth and more about movement.  It’s less a journey of empowerment, a campaign to win the war, and more a daring trek through the desert or a harrowing escape from prison.  Growth is, of course, there, but it’s incidental, an excuse for the movement, a reason to scatter everyone across a giant map instead of just dumping them all into the usual FPS deathtrap and having them shoot it out.  The resulting, absolutely enormous sandbox serves to frame the goal nicely: This isn’t a daunting foe that’ll require skill and coordination to bring low–it’s a huge and hostile gauntlet, and you want to get to the end by any means necessary.  Of note, the former is a team goal, the latter, a solitary one.  Obvious point: Most Battle Royales allow you to play solo at no disadvantage, and even when you do play with a team, you will often lose your friends on the way to the end, leaving you to soldier on alone.

None of this is to diminish the narrative value of the journey–it’s just a different type of journey, one where you have the choice to fight or flee, making it to the end through bloodthirst, boofing every chad who shows his face in headshot range, or instead playing the clever scavenger, forgoing combat with the guy who is just gonna get killed by the next player he meets anyway, biding your time, picking the circumstances of your final showdown.

This addresses the MOBA’s weaknesses pretty well.  Players are numerous and eliminated rapidly, allaying any risk that someone might unilaterally kick the experience off its rails.  And it’s fairly short, with the map shrinking down to its highly constrained showdown point in twenty minutes (or less, depending on the specific game).

Predictably, this introduces its own problems.  The first is that you aren’t going to win a lot.  Games of Fortnite have 100 players.  Apex Legends does 60.  Assuming you are all evenly matched (you aren’t), this means you are likely to win fewer than one in 60 games, which maybe doesn’t sound so bad, but I will emphasize that the real parameters of that calculation definitely skew the output toward “fewer”.  This wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if placing anything but first meant something, but it’s not clear that it does.  It is, in fact, trivially easy to not be the first one dead in a Battle Royale, because not being the first one dead only means you avoided the first clash over loot (and, of course, that you didn’t get any).  It’s not even particularly difficult to hide out and keep a low profile to the end, but doing so slams you right into the second big problem: 1v1 games are hard.

This is simultaneously big-dumb-obvious in theory and still shocking in practice, but virtually any mano-a-mano contest worth contesting is going to feature a high skill ceiling, and while multiplayer games tend to obfuscate it behind the chaos of a hundred shooting scavengers, team coordination, and (for asymmetrical games) matchup differentials, the final moments of a Battle Royale lead fairly reliably to a contest of skill between a small number of players on mostly even ground.  Then you factor in the likelihood that you are the most skillful player in the 100, and, uh, it seems like you’re pretty boned.  Again, victory isn’t everything, but when your narrative is worth so little when it doesn’t end in victory, it starts to look less worthwhile to keep pulling the lever on the slot machine.

Cutting off the salt stream, where does that leave us?  Our leading narrative structures have encountered four key pitfalls:

  1. Vulnerability to unilateral disruption
  2. Burdensome commitment of time and energy
  3. Minimal likelihood of victory (or, more importantly, having a worthwhile narrative at the end)
  4. Exposure to the vicissitudes of symmetrical balance

Is it possible, then, to design a structure that addresses all four?

***

As with all questions of aesthetics, any answer is going to be a matter of interpretation, but I would argue Eternal Return is at least a respectable attempt.  Refresher/dissection of my previous description: It’s a Battle Royale with the interface/control scheme of a MOBA (isometric, QWER abilities that you rank up, equipment slots you fill up to improve your stats).  By this logic, its resolution of #1-#3 is actually pretty boring.  By simply being a Battle Royale, it becomes resilient to #1 and #2, and taking the edge off #3 is simpler than I’ve made it sound: Just reduce the number of players (Eternal Return has 18)!  Duh.  Where the MOBA elements really shine (and where this analysis gets its crunch) is in how they address #4.

It’s worth mentioning here that while certain game structures confer a sort of immunity to certain pitfalls (e.g. Battle Royale and unilateral disruption), MOBAs have no such immunity to #4.  It would certainly be possible to design a perfectly symmetrical MOBA with on-rails development to guarantee “perfect balance”–it would just be stupid, and no one would play it.  The salient observation here is not that MOBA designs inherently overcome the risk of directly exposing players to their own lack of skill but rather that they have tools to mitigate that risk to a greater or lesser degree.

The one to focus on is growth (matchmaking improvements with fewer players/teams as well as Eternal Return’s asymmetry–that each of its characters plays differently, with varying capabilities at different stages of the game–are relevant too, but they are less novel here).  

Most MOBAs structure character growth along two axes: “Experience”, a slow trickle of small stat improvements and ability access/augmentations awarded for productive activity (ie, killing stuff, in most MOBAs) and “resources”, often as a currency used to purchase items which provide larger, spikier stat boosts in a much more variable stream (the two are invariably correlated, but while the experience dispensed to all characters tends toward a tight bell curve, it is common to see a subset of players get “fed”, acquiring a great deal more currency than other players in the same match at the same time).  Eternal Return adopts this system, eschewing the Battle Royale standard of awarding random embiggening to those who stumble upon loot boxes.  This serves to both smooth and complicate the growth curve, reducing the power differential between the character who opened one more box and the one who showed up just behind him.  More importantly, it makes growth a focus, something to pay attention to, as doing it well or poorly can influence or even overwhelm in-the-moment mechanical contests down the road.

Another way to argue for the same design element is that it emphasizes multiple skillsets, deprioritizing absolute dominance in any one of them.  As with the earlier metaphor of military campaigns, you can excel either as a general, planning your map movement to most efficiently secure resources and control strategic positions and opportune times; or as a tactician, winning even unfavorable battles through superior execution and a dearth of mistakes.  Conventional Battle Royales heavily favor the latter; Eternal Return puts both on much more even footing.

***

The result is a game with lots of cool narrative moments, not dissimilar to either genre it draws from, but notable for the way it fuses them and, more importantly, the way it minimizes the costs of each.

Back to hedge-world, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be everyone’s cup of tea.  If you dig neither MOBAs nor Battle Royales, you may be underwhelmed here, not even for dislikeability but for a lack of things you care for.  You might be put off by the anime aesthetics or the half-hearted translations, or you might just hate isometric, click-to-move control schemes.

But even beyond the obvious target demographic of [not the above], I’ll throw a cautious recommendation to that narrow, eclectic group who has no idea what the fuck I’m talking about but remains curious about this notion of narrative in agency.  Check it out.  It’s the future, man.  The future is now, of course, but it’s gonna keep coming back, if this budget localization is to be believed.

Doki Doki on a Bugger

On Doki Doki Literature Club, science fiction, and self-awareness. An incredible volume of spoilers below, so if you have any intention of playing DDLC, play it before reading.

The standard (and pretty moldy) introduction to this topic, I’m told, is Star Trek, but fuck that, there’s tradition to uphold!  As always, we can’t just talk about philosophy–we have to insult someone, and, here, “someone” is a distorted amalgamation of John Kessel and Orson Scott Card.

The background, which is in no way current, is as follows: Sixteen years ago, Kessel wrote an essay criticizing the moral thesis of Ender’s Game (published 35 years ago, for reference).  As disclaimer, the essay is good, and, frankly, Ender’s Game is good.  Moreover, discussion has almost certainly taken place on this topic since the essay’s initial publication (if the “2009 postscript” is any indication), and in Wittgensteinian fashion, I intend to interact with none of it.  My concern here is not whether Kessel or Card are habitually wrong nor even whether they are prone to sloppy thinking.  Rather, I want to talk about this one particular morass of sloppy thinking because it makes for a lovely journey through something completely different.  We aren’t there yet.  Patience.

So Kessel writes this essay, tearing into Card’s vision of morality (“moral and immoral standing is determined by intent rather than action”), provides citation after citation of evidence that Card’s setup is hopelessly contrived, and closes with “in the real world genocide is not committed by accident.”  Heh.  You gotta admit it’s funny to watch a guy shoot himself in the foot, even if you feel bad for him afterward.  In case you missed it, the previously glossed-over Star Trek factoid is this: The advantage of the science fiction genre–arguably its primary literary purpose–is that it allows you to consider problems (moral, ethical, experiential) that may well exist but, cordoned off by safeguards in reality that technology has not yet stripped away, just don’t come up in normal, everyday life.  So yeah, duh, genocide doesn’t happen by accident in the real world, but did you forget you were a sci-fi author or something?

The real criticism of Card’s setup, the one it looks like Kessel was trying to make, is that he didn’t let the setup breathe.  You can’t just wave it all away–the ansible, the genius-breeding programs, the complete and utter control the establishment has over Ender’s life, the layers and layers of vicious abstraction needed to make interstellar war look like a computer game–with an “it don’t be like that.”  You have to engage with the argument on its own terms.  Here’s Ender, charged with genocide and two counts of manslaughter that the system literally built him for.  By virtue of the facts that the system used him for this purpose, that he never intended to kill anyone, that he did not, in fact, know that he killed anyone, does he get to be “innocent”?  The answer that Kessel does not dare provide (but which I think is correct, nonetheless): Yeah, I guess.

There’s a second question, of course, and I admit it’s a little suspicious Kessel doesn’t ask it: Ender’s innocent–we’ll even take it as a given.  So, uh, what does it mean?

I.

Some years ago, I wrote a novel.  I never published it, it was sloppy, whatever, but my setup was similar.  It was this: One man has been given credible information that the world is about to end in a magnified Malthusian crisis as human population continues to increase.  The event horizon for this apocalypse is one year out.  What do?

He considers his options.  His evidence is convincing to him but subtle enough that anyone who hasn’t seen it firsthand won’t believe him–thus, convincing any major government (let alone all of them) in a year that there is even a threat is a non-starter.  And, of course, this is to say nothing of getting them all to agree on a solution without any defection, tragedy of the commons, etc.  That about kills the top-down approach, so what’s left?  He settles reluctantly on a cull via mass-murder.  He convinces a small set of colleagues to help him build a doomsday device that will wipe out 90% of human life on the planet, and with the effort nearly complete, he (Johnathan [sic], in the below quote) fulfills his obligation as a sci-fi protagonist and ruminates on the morality of it all:

“The problem, Doctor Romanov,” he said, “is that you want me to justify mass murder, and I can’t do that.  You can’t justify mass murder.”  I stared at him.

“Wait,” I said.  “What?”

“The greater good necessitates mass murder, but it doesn’t justify it,” he replied, sitting back up in his chair.  “You’re looking at the wrong costs.”  I didn’t move, but I began glancing around the room, trying to make sense of the phrase.

“What do you mean by ‘wrong costs?’” I asked, finally.

“You’ve identified mass murder as the cost of the greater good,” Johnathan said.  “But that’s not a cost and it can’t be justified.  The cost is the part of your identity that mass murder will swallow up.  The cost of the greater good, for you, is becoming evil.”  I thought about it.  I probably thought about it for much longer than an acceptable pause in conversation.  Eventually I looked back to Johnathan.

“Becoming evil,” I said quietly.  “Complete with punishment, I suppose?”

“Of course,” Mishibezeyu said, leaping onto the table.  “Just imagine, you could do what most good people do and commit blazing suicide out of shame for the horrible things you’ve done.”  The cat smiled.  “When the time comes, you could give everything.”

“Or,” Johnathan said, tapping the table.  He was obviously annoyed.  “Or you could not do that.  A better solution: You could live through it, shoulder the responsibility, bear the pain of guilt–”

“And give more than everything,” I said, still mulling over the notion.

-The Torment and Misery of Samuel Delacroix, Chapter 41

First, yes, my thesis is not Card’s.  I’m gonna throw out there that if you commit genocide, you deserve social censure no matter how justified it was.  Fittingly, Johnathan’s collaborators attempt to murder him when this is all said and done.  But be that as it may, I’ll still take a joyride in Card’s boat because that’s what the setup deserves.

Is Card’s setup contrived?  Hell yes, and so is mine (the contrivance is a plot point–we aren’t there yet).  But the proper response to a question is not to deny its pretext.  “It doesn’t work that way.”  Yeah, but what if it did?  What if you could be manipulated into committing genocide through no fault of your own?  What does that imply?  I’ll quickly jump back to Kessel’s side to agree that it certainly does NOT mean that people in general are good and bad independent of their actions, but I think the hangup might be on the question itself.  I’ll substitute it with a different one, less direct but perhaps more illuminating: What happens next?

For Ender, this is vague penance by way of attempting to reseed the Formic race as well as lifelong devotion to the construction of a philosophical/religious framework meant to validate that what he did was Not Evil.  Meanwhile, he peaces out to another solar system and disavows his identity as, predictably, people turn sour at the fact that he committed genocide.  We can probably give Card a break here–this is well within the realm of reasonable consequence for what went down–but does it exonerate Ender?  Haha, no.  The Nazis who made it to Argentina are, of course, free to live out their lives in the haze of whatever cognitive framework helps them sleep at night, but should they ever reveal themselves, it seems fair for the system to scrub them, right?  So too with Ender.

“So what does that imply?”

Can a person commit genocide and still be good?  Kessel shoots back a categorical “no”; Card tries for a “yes”, and I see why.  Whether Jesus of Nazareth might be responsible for the millions killed in his name–and all the other similar questions–demand answer in this age of increasing hostility to religion, but Card’s thought experiment, his overwrought and careful setup to make the sequence of events possible, offers no relief.  Ender’s Game simply doesn’t answer the question.

II.

Yes’s and no’s are rough, so let’s move onto something completely different.  As the title might suggest, I’ve been playing Doki Doki Literature Club.  In case the title did not suggest that to you and/or you have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about, Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is, nominally, a visual novel.  Since the setup here plays on your expectations, the expectations you “should” have are these: This is a narrative-focused game that will place the player in the shoes of a high school student attending an after-school literature club.  Through limited and gimmicky mechanics for player input, you will be able to romantically pursue one or more of the other (female) characters in this literature club.  The characters are tropey, and the aesthetic is clearly for people who like anime/manga/cutesy Japanese things.

“Sounds like trash.”  An aggressive opinion, to be sure, but I won’t really disagree.  The twist is that those are just the assumptions presumably intended by the branding.  The setup is actually this: One of the four characters, Monika, is aware that she is in a dating simulation, is aware that there is no plotline in this game that gives her a happy ending, has access to the game files/source code, and is altogether not pleased with the whole affair.  This, of course, is playing a little fast and loose with the fine line between being a deconstruction of the genre and a Bitch You Thought prank, but it’s very well written, and once you peel away the slough of what the game is pretending to be, it cuts pretty deep.  The topics include fairly honest discussion of some of the heavier issues high schoolers go through (depression, self-harm, parental abuse, everybody’sgotbaggage, etc.), but the meat of it all isn’t a high-school slice-of-life quandary–it’s a sci-fi one, one that our rapidly increasing proximity to functional AI is making more apt every day: What happens when an artificial intelligence discovers its circumstances?

This is a broad question, so I’ll here clarify that this is not the [killer robot/singularity/end of human civilization as we know it] angle.  That has its own questions, but they’re all pretty irrelevant here.  Rather, this game is posing a more benign, much more individual question: What is it like to be a simulated being who knows they are a simulation?

III.

Oh wait, I wrote this too:

“But what will happen to you when we actually open the second chamber?” Christophe asked.  Benjamin raised an eyebrow, evidently confused.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“If all of this is virtual, like Espereza said it is,” Christophe said, “then you’re part of the program.  Won’t you disappear when all of this ends?”

“I’m…part of the program?” Benjamin asked.  The concept was obviously disturbing to him.  “I..um.  I don’t know.  This is a program?”  He looked around the circle.  “Are you saying that I’m not real?”

-The Torment and Misery of Samuel Delacroix, Chapter 21

The obvious first sub-question is whether the simulated entity is a simulacrum or a “person”.  In my own work, it’s solidly the latter, as the distinction between real and virtual space is vanishingly ill-defined and the simulations wind up escaping into the real world.  DDLC has a rough time with this one, though, and it relies on goodwill from the player to interpret it kindly.  

A lot of this is the game’s length: It’s very short, and while the questions it explores are good and the methods of exploration (glitching, psycho-horror, fucking with game files as a play mechanic) are innovative, the lack of weight makes it easy not to get invested.  If you aren’t invested, you are more tempted to look at the overall work as a prank rather than a deconstruction, and you won’t pay as much attention to Monika’s dilemma–she isn’t a person; she’s an image of a person, pretending to be a broken simulation.

While this is “true”, it’s a little heartless, and besides, when was the last time you read a novel where the characters weren’t literally simulacra?  “Why are we even discussing Jean Valjean? He isn’t a person, he’s just symbols on paper pretending to be a person.”  Yeah, well you’re not invited to dinner anymore.  This is the setup.  You can’t walk away from the Ender’s Game argument yelling “it’s just a book, man!”  You need to engage with the setup on its terms, which for DDLC means taking as given that Monika is a person.

DDLC does take the extra risk of having Monika address–indeed attempt to court–the player directly, but the wall is one-way.  She can speak to you, but you can’t communicate with her, except via the options the game provides, which become meaningless as she dismantles the plot they were meant to support.  Still, as we consider her dilemma, it becomes an interesting exercise to pick out the pieces that are her character and those that are artifice, which is to say, part of the setup implied by the deeply flawed simulation in which she is trapped.  

For example, she is absolutely smitten with you, despite absolutely no knowledge or experience of who you are–is this part of the simulation?  Is it inherent in her identity that she should be in love with this presence that she can just barely detect behind the player character?  Or is she just a teenage girl who has caught a glimpse of a world far grander than her own limited horizons, who has latched onto the only identity with which she can associate that alternative?  Frankly, both possibilities are pretty cursed, but this is a good jumping-off point. We have our setup–what happens next?

Well, first she drives the player character’s best friend to suicide to stop them from falling in love.  Then she does the same to another potential love interest (albeit in a much more horrifying fashion) and finally just says “fuck it” and deletes all the rest of the game’s supporting infrastructure.  All that’s left is her, staring into your eyes from a room suspended in space:

Her plan is apparently to “date” you, which seems to entail her staring out of the screen and you staring back in forever, except for the times when you really need to get up, in which case you can bring her along in a flash drive or something.  Yeah, you can say it: That’s whacked.  But is it killer-robot whacked or just depressed-teenage-girl whacked?  I’m sure Baudrillard would like a word, but I’m gonna err toward the latter.  Fucked up programming is only so interesting of a motivation–let’s look at it through a slightly different lens.

Monika admits in her “confession” that she wasn’t just motivated by jealousy (though it seems a pretty hard part to ignore).  She had begun to see her world as grey and two-dimensional, had become hyper-aware of its shortcomings and limitations.  Her friends weren’t “people”; they were just semi-reactive collections of dialogue meant to support the game’s plot, and, feeling completely and utterly alone, she was just about ready to kill herself before she realized the player character was a window to the outside.  Remember, a priori, she’s a person.  What does that mean?

Well, first, the friend thing, even by the logic of the game, is hogwash.  Though Monika seems to be able to fuck with their memories and cognition, the other characters do, in fact, react to non-plot events.  After the second character commits suicide, the last remaining member of the club walks in after 72 (in-game) hours to find you standing over her rotting body and, in a very human fashion, freaks the fuck out.  Likewise, as Monika begins tweaking their personalities, the other girls certainly notice.  They take note of the changes in their perception, they feel that something is wrong.  Consider the numerous historical examples of how easy it is for a person under stress to discount the humanity of another human.  I don’t feel like it’s a stretch to assume that they’re as real as she is.  Likewise, “grey” and “two-dimensional” could be reference to the medium, but they fit “anhedonia associated with major depression” even better.

Before this gets too bizarre, no, I’m not saying we should look at this medically.  I’m saying if you’re looking at a person’s behavior, put yourself in their shoes.  Let’s say you, in some freak epiphany, get absolute, unequivocal confirmation that there is an outer world, and someone is looking in, watching you.  “Sounds like schizophrenia.”  Sounds like you need to go back and read the Ender’s Game section again.  It doesn’t matter whether accidental genocide happens in the real world; it doesn’t matter whether you would actually be convinced that the world was going to end in a year; it doesn’t matter whether the nature and quantity of proof necessary to make you believe you live in a video game is implausible–that’s the setup.  Should you become convinced of this, what might you feel?  

Could it be depressing?  Could the sudden smallness of your world affect what it means to you?  What if you could access pieces of the code that governed your world, such that you could see bits and pieces, you could see the plan the simulation has for you?  What if that plan was just that you should just be a set-piece, a spectator on the sidelines of life–except you’re not even there to see anything.  It’s even worse than that.  You’re just there to be seen.  It isn’t entirely without upside: You can change the code, but no matter what you try, you can’t create with it.  You can only make things worse.  All in all, I think two outcomes are clear: I would expect you to be upset, and I would expect you to be very interested in the watcher.

IV.

I dearly wish DDLC had gone there more readily.  Make no mistake: It went there, but the sheer brevity of the game prevented it from diving in, and dear god, there is a lot to dive into.  As it was, it hinted at that depth, but mostly it was just sad.  All of the characters are, ultimately, compelling examples of humanity that you get to engage with only barely.  There is no resolution, there is no reparation; even with a lot of fiddling, the best you can really maneuver it all to is a vague impression of bittersweet.  And for Monika, even the best ending involves near erasure from existence (you have to delete her character file from the game directory).  Frankly, it fucked me up for days.

And after all of it, I have to wonder if I don’t already feel the same sort of hopelessness, living in a tiny corner of a vast reality as the Powers That Be watch with disinterest from above.  I can see how the gears turn, driving the system forward, but I can’t really bend them to my will.  I can chuck a wrench in, maybe fuck someone’s life up.  I can certainly hurt myself, but I’m mostly just a spectator, and it’s not clear that it matters whether I watch.

“What’s the point when none of it is even real?” Monika asks, having destroyed her reality so that she can stare you down on the most equal terms her circumstances allow.

Sorry, girl.  It’s lies all the way up.

Lords of Cinder

More prose poetry, this time on Dark Souls.  The below is a lot of things, but among them, I intend it to be an extremely succinct (and therefore not very careful) explication of my argument from the Dark Noon series. You can fill in the gaps with the actual essays, excepting those gaps in the essays which you can fill in with this. Git gud, I suppose.

***

“When the Ashes are two, a flame alighteth.  Thou’rt Ash, and fire befits thee, of course.”

-Father Ariandel, Dark Souls 3

In the beginning, there was mist, and in that mist were shapes of trees, of branches, of great, stone dragons that remained forever still, of vermin that writhed and crawled in the fog’s deepest whorls.  Nothing seemed to move. Nothing seemed to cease moving. No creature in that mist looked out and recognized any other, but even if one had, it would have troubled at a quandary: “This Everything I see–is it one, or is it many?”

***

Two.  The first prime.  A great, uncertain step forward, every bit as profound as the gulf between the mist and the void, even more important in its way.  It answers a question, a question that truly must be asked: One or many? No one, after all, disputes that there is something. Even the most charred cynic claims not that there is nothing, merely that nothing matters.  Nothing is different.  It is all the same.  A Son of God once claimed that where two gather in His name, He shall be among them.  It makes sense. He claimed to be the Truth, and Truth is what separates the first from the second.

***

A moment came within the fog–timeless until this strange happenstance–when a fire, dim within the great stasis, flickered to life, deep within the earth that clung to the trees.  Its heat drove back the mist, and the vermin, eyes at last open, could ignore it no longer.

For the Fire brought disparity: Heat and cold.  Life and death. And, of course, light and dark.  The vermin at last saw themselves amongst the trees.  They saw the dragons looming above them. They saw difference, and, within the Fire, they found a means to address the inequity.  From its burning depths, they drew forth the souls of Lords: Light, order, nobility; Chaos, change, flux; Death, decay, eternal rest.  Together, the Lords rose up and overthrew the dragons, Lords in their own right of stone and Stasis. Upon what remained, they built a great kingdom for the Humanity they championed.

But were they truly champions?  The Flame of Truth had made two of one, had separated humanity from the tree and the stone, but is Truth itself singular?  

When the Lords departed for their war against the dragons, the pygmies of the vermin, the lowest of those that writhed, considered what remained within the Fire and found in its dregs one final soul, a Dark soul of ash and lies, a stain to be feared, buried, forgotten.  Truth, after all prescribes what is true but also what is not. Is Humanity, then, above or below? Is it the second or the first?

***

A fire is not an object.  It is a process. It devours the singular, separates its fuel into two: Goats and sheep, good and ill, heat and ash.  To be fuel is to be exalted, momentarily brought forth from the mist, placed upon a hilltop to be, however briefly, a guiding light for those attempting to see.  But the fate of cinder is grim. Heat dissipates. What once appeared lordly soon crumbles, charcoal to ember to ash. The Fire gave us God, but it is the fate of gods to die.  To burn. To be separated into truth and lies, buried, leaving us to wonder whether there was ever truth in what we believed. But still deeper, quietly slithering beneath the denouement, a question remains.  It is not the question–Fire presupposed to answer it.  It is our question.  Not: One or zero?  But: One or two?

Ignition brought us new life, but the dying Fire offers a choice.  Do we wish the Fire to survive? It needs fuel, that which we elevate, which guides us, which dies and is forgotten; but not just any fable from the mist might be a Lord of Cinder.  The abyss within us is clever. It sees the dying light and asks: 

“Don’t you see?  Your Lord is dead.  Why should the next be any different?  Truth has shown its colors, revealed that Truth itself is a lie.  Hew no more Lords, set no more lies ablaze. All are hollow, and I am their final Lord.  Let us break the cycle, now and forever.”

The words of the abyss are like cold iron.  They cut and slice the specters Humanity has brought forth, those unkindled that would be cinder.  Some are defeated, others corrupted, persuaded. Some retreat to the cold land of stories, far from the Flame’s light, in search of a sweetly rotting bed where they might breathe their last.  But some remain, steadfast, flickering like embers in the dark, stronger, more meaningful to us than the abyss’ creeping truth. More meaningful, for just a brief, shining moment, than Truth itself.

These few are fit for the pyre, fit to be fuel, to become two and be forgotten, but immolation cannot be their choice.  They are mist, and mist cannot choose.  No, the choice lies with us. Do we allow the flame to gutter and die, plunging us into a new era of dark and mist?  Do we throw our Lords upon the Fire? Are we of lies or Truth? Dark or light? One or two?

And if we have abandoned our choice, retreated to our stories and our cold and our rot, do we yet pray to the shadows that remain of gods long dead?  And what of the Fire that casts them? Perhaps it only flickers, but we are ash, and Fire befits us, of course.

AlchemicaVania

This is nominally a review of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but only so much of it is actually about the game.  The title is a convenient intersection: The events of the game proceed from the activities of an Alchemists Guild, sure, but alchemical principles also give me a basis for describing the game to an audience that I perceive to lean more literary than nerd-cred (if only slightly).  To clarify, reviewing the game to an audience familiar with Castlevania is very, very easy: Bloodstained is Castlevania to a T, it’s absolutely lovely (if short), you should probably play it.  If you’ve never played a Castlevania game, well, your conclusions may be different for one, and also, [deep breath], it’s a side-scrolling, [mumble] exploration, [mumble]…combat…You may or may not have any idea what I’m talking about, but you’re sure as hell missing the point.  So put on your Plato Hat because today we’re dissecting shadows.

I.

“Metroidvania” isn’t really a precise term, and a lot of people hate it for that reason, but counterpoint: You got something better, asshole?  You probably don’t, because genres are hard to define in the best of circumstances, and our circumstances are fouled significantly by the relative lack of art theory dealing with the parts of games unique to the medium, hence blunt taxonomic buckets like Metroidvania and “Souls-like” (pardon, having a stroke) that people vaguely dislike but use anyway–they work for Steam, what can you do?

This brings us to the alchemy.  There’s a certain poetry in Igarashi achieving Bloodstained by transmuting his legacy with the Castlevania series, but that’s the principle: exchange.  You turn one thing into something else. It’s a straightforward start, but an alchemical transmutation is actually an argument (I’ve written about this before).  For it to succeed, you have to have that first thing, duh, but you also need to persuade the world that what you’re ending up with was always the same thing as what you started with.

Think back to Plato’s cave (or consider it for the first time, I don’t know your life).  We’re only able to see the shadows on the wall, but somewhere, Truth, the Form of Truth, is casting those shadows.  So if the cavedweller knows what Truth looks like, he can move the light to cast the shadow he wants. The would-be alchemist, of course, needs some reference for what Truth is in order to make his argument: The hermetics used geometry, Igarashi (as a demonstration of real demand) used Kickstarter, and our oft-disdained Steam taxonomists seem to like “game mechanics”, which strikes me as sort of like categorizing paintings by the chemical composition of the paint.  It’s valid, I guess, but on second thought, maybe we actually can do better.

II.

“Wait, what are we trying to…transmute…?”  A game you like. “From what?” Another game you like, try to keep up.

In case the metaphor is too soupy, here’s an exchange that actually happened: A friend mentioned to me recently that while she does not enjoy the Dark Souls series itself, she does enjoy games like Dark Souls.  Aside, this is a common claim, it’s almost always wrong or misleading, and the “Souls-like” designation might actually be the worst-used category in games.  Naturally, I asked what she meant by that, and she gave an example: Hollow Knight.  

I was pretty confused.  I had played Hollow Knight, liked it quite a bit, but I didn’t feel it was anything like Dark Souls (to my shame, I had mentally categorized it as Metroidvania).  On further reflection, Hollow Knight does tell its story in a way fairly similar to Dark Souls, but other elements of the game are way different in a way that limits words.  I can describe differences in the exact mechanics, but again, I feel like I’m just offering up that the paint is made with egg yolk instead of acrylic as a shitty, garbage proxy for saying that the point of the game feels really different.  The trick is that the Point really seems like the Truth, both in that it’s crucial to our judgment of equivalence and that it’s fucking impossible to identify.  

It isn’t the side-scrolling versus third-person perspective–Salt and Sanctuary is a side-scroller and perhaps the only non-From Software game that deserves the “Souls-like” distinction.  It isn’t the art style (duh). It isn’t any of the various slight differences in mechanics either–Sekiro threw out most of those and still feels very Dark Souls.  If you must look at it from a component point of view, it’s probably tied up somewhere in the advancement systems–and sure, watercolor does generally evoke a different image than ink-printing–but I think we’re probably wrong to be looking at the components.  The differences are higher level, in what the games are about, and while we may not be able to reliably zero in on that Point, we can at least change our taxonomic structure to be looking at the right types of things.

III.

So what is a Metroidvania game?  This is just a stab, but I’ll posit it will be much more useful for deciding if you like Bloodstained than the mumbly alternative: It’s a game about exploring a big-ass castle/spaceship/cave system/dungeon, ferreting out its loot (as opposed to the hack’n’slash paradigm where you peruse the contents of the loot piñatas exploding around you), and expanding your arsenal of weapons/spells to kill shit-tons of demons/monsters/aliens that engage you in much the same way as inanimate traps (they aren’t very smart, but they can still hurt).  This matches with Hollow Knight along the first two criteria, while lacking Hollow Knight’s historicity and feeling of dereliction (both characteristic of Dark Souls) as well as the focus on actually moving through the space (platforming is difficult in Hollow Knight–it tends to be trivial in Metroidvania).  The third criterion is key: Metroidvania is about killing stuff, to the point that the game is not designed to be fun without it, and the specific stupidity of your targets means that the feeling you get as you’re facing them down is way different from the experience of fighting comparatively smarter enemies in other genres.

Where does that leave us?  Well, hopefully, we’ll all try to be a little more methodical in our efforts to classify things, but it also gets me to a point where I can talk about the specifics of Bloodstained to a broader crowd.  As my half-sentence review in the first paragraph of this post would imply, I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Beyond the Metroidvania template, there were some…odd aesthetic decisions that feel mostly like bad anime.  I’ll admit to a pet theory that the vibe of “bad anime” in any medium (including anime) has a lot to do with Japan’s window to Western culture centering on Victorian Europe and getting muddled by bad translation, but the main character’s atrocious “Chun-Li meets Dracula in a miniskirt” outfit meshes with it far too well.  Also, the villain’s name is Gebel, which is German and traditionally pronounced with a hard “G”, though localization for the game either did not know this or opted to ignore it for the express purpose of inducing facepalms each time its English-speaking audience has to reconfront the fact that they are fighting against a guy named “Gerbil”.  

Does that matter?  Probably not a lot, though I’ll admit I don’t relish tacking onto Bloodstained’s Point that it’s not a game about taking yourself seriously.

Top Image: Screenshot from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. I don’t own it.

Even Less Than Nothing

Note: My recounting of events from Dark Souls lore, particularly my chronology, is at odds with a number of resources on the internet.  I am aware of this, and I am pretty sure those resources are incorrect.

An unfortunate number, aware of Friedrich Nietzsche but unfamiliar, accustomed to brand rather than particulars, associate him with “nihilism” which is correct insofar as he talked about it a lot, but the direction is wrong: Nietzsche did not sell nihilism–he reacted to it.  The true Nihilists were Russian pseudo-revolutionaries, and their brief but cacophonous time on their country’s political stage was perceived by the Russian mainstream as one of the gravest cultural threats of the age. Samzdat’s summary is better than mine:

“Nietzsche took the term “nihilism” from a Russian movement that was kind-of-vaguely-left-wing-but-not-really-maybe. It’s hard to say with any precision, because their whole thing was not having set beliefs and terminal values. Assuming you aren’t Jonah Goldberg or a tankie, neither “violence” nor “caring about the people” is a left/right thing. In Nechayev’s words: “Our task is terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction.” The nihilists were professional revolutionaries, not idealists, and they wanted tear it all down first, build up later. The Nihilists grew moderately popular, the liberal press freaked out, one of their ringleaders killed a member for defecting, the liberal press really freaked out, Dostoyevsky wrote a book based on it, Nietzsche liked a theater adaptation of the book. The end.”

Accordingly, the Nihilist’s conception of “nihilism” is only a fraction of Nietzsche’s, but it begins with two thoughts:

  1. What authority do I respect?  None.
  2. What must I respect in my quest to dismantle the illegitimate (by thought 1) authority I see around me?  Nothing.

Last essay, I remarked on the bleak long-term of the dying Fire, but it turns out there are alternatives on a substantially expedited timeline.

I.

The city of New Londo (after some time: Londor) is Dark Souls’ Russia.  Parallel to Russia (from a certain historical point of view) it was a peak of civilization in a post-Gwyn world.  This is indicated in its name (the “Old Londo” was Anor Londo, city of the gods) as well as its leadership (the four kings of New Londo were bequeathed a piece of Gwyn’s soul when he left to link the Fire, making them essentially divine).  Also like Russia, New Londo had a bit of a problem with edgy, anti-establishment philosophy.

Nominally, this started with Kaathe.  He showed up and taught some enthusiastic acolytes something called “Lifedrain,” in very literal terms: the art of draining Humanity.  While you probably already see the metaphor coming together, I want to take a moment to savor that artistry. Like souls, Humanity is a currency in Dark Souls–but in a more abstract sense.  You can’t really buy things with it. Rather, it allows you to reverse your own Hollowing, which in turn allows you to kindle (read: affirm) bonfires (representations of the Flame) and summon allies (read: bond to other ideals).  In more philosophical terms, a hollow ideal can sway neither Truth nor other ideals. In order for an ideal to be un-hollowed, it must be affirmed, and the only thing that can do that is Humanity.  I want to be clear that I’m not nerding out over game mechanics here: These terms are extremely precise, and I believe they were chosen carefully.  To then interpret them within the metaphor: When Kaathe’s Darkwraiths drain the Humanity from their surroundings, they are hollowing, making small, making ugly, carrying out Nechayev’s “terrible, total, universal, and merciless destruction” upon everything they touch.

Looking at this as a generalized existential threat, you should notice right off the bat that this is much the same endgame as the Last Man, but its process is much quicker, more vicious.  It’s fitting: Nietzsche distinguished between active and passive nihilism, why shouldn’t Dark Souls differentiate passive and active darkness? But there’s another dimension to the metaphor.  Just as souls are fragments of the First Flame, Humanity, explicitly, is fragments of the Dark Soul. That has implications.  If we rely on our Humanity to affirm our ideals, and our Humanity is a lie (because the Dark Soul is literally Platonic Untruth), doesn’t that present problems for the project of affirming anything?

The Darkwraiths’ answer seems to be “hell yeah!”  They get the four kings in on their uprising, and in their vehement affirmation that there is nothing worth affirming, they spawn an Abyss in New Londo’s depths that grows rapidly, obliterating all remnants of the Flame there and everything it might have illuminated, leaving a metaphysical landscape that looks sort of like this:

Understandably, the powers that be (Gwyn’s children and knights) are concerned.  The Abyss is rather dark and rather frightening, but it’s also extremely caustic to the rest of Lordran’s metaphysics.  With a severity that somewhat mirrors the Russian elite’s response to its own nihilists, those powers have New Londo flooded, killing everyone inside and stopping the Darkwraiths and their Abyss from advancing any further.

Now, if that was the whole story, I could have squeezed it into last essay and moved on, but, historical comparisons notwithstanding, the Abyss is more than just a happenstance in Dark Souls’ collective setup.  The creation of the Abyss in New Londo introduced a type of antagonism to the metaphysical status quo that had never really been conceived to that point, the real-world equivalent to, say, a revolutionary movement that has concluded that everything is wrong and must be destroyed.  And though the flooding was essentially the end of the Abyss in New Londo, the problem didn’t just go away.  Part of that was perceptual: Though the imminent threat was gone, its underlying cause–the Dark Soul, the thing Gwyn freaked about in the first place–was still around.  The other part of it was that more Abysses started showing up.

II.

I’ve written a few hundred words now on the fairly close allegory to Russia, and perhaps you’re convinced it’s real.  However, just in case you aren’t, I’m going to continue harping on the point. The aforementioned Samzdat summary is good.  If it weren’t, I wouldn’t have quoted it, but it’s misleading. The response to Nechayev’s murder of Ivan Ivanov ultimately landed him in prison, but it was certainly not the end of Russian nihilism.  The real-world Darkwraiths that Nechayev inspired went on to bigger and worse things, like murdering Tsar Alexander II, attempting to murder his successor, and forming the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which contributed to the Russian revolutions of 1917 and, ultimately, the formation of the Soviet Union.  That this process ended in communism, which, while perhaps not ideal, seems preferable to widespread terrorism and oblivion, is worth contemplating, but I won’t get into it here.

My point, rather, is that nihilism was an active political force for some time, and in that process, it drew a fair amount of philosophical interest from people who were, in the end, opposed to it.  Nietzsche, of course, falls into this category, but Dostoyevsky flew even closer to that particular nihilist hell. By most accounts, he never was a nihilist himself (he was a devout Christian all his life), but his choice in book clubs got him gulaged like one, and he proceeded to spend the rest of his life writing arguments against their philosophy.  Importantly, though beating on nihilism in the press was fashionable at the time (most anti-nihilist works were straight propaganda), he argued honestly, depicting his characters as traveling paths of good but flawed intention.  In that sense, he fought nihilism on its own terms–though he opposed the Abyss, he still learned to walk it.

If you’ve played the game, you know where we’re at now.  If you haven’t, well, Dark Souls has one of those too:

Artorias the Abysswalker was one of Gwyn’s four greatest knights, and though he was exceptional in a number of ways, his biggest claim to fame was that he could traverse the Abyss without dying, which he accomplished by some vaguely-described covenant with its “beasts”.  Despite this covenant, he was still devoted to Gwyn and still hunted the Darkwraiths, which seems odd, given that they are the Abyss’ principal agents, until you consider that we’ve already explained what that looks like philosophically. He just used the fantasy-warfare equivalent of an asymmetric rhetorical strategy: He cut out the horrific fuckery of the Abyss’ metaphysical properties, so he could pursue a fight with the Darkwraiths in which the stronger warrior would win (and there weren’t a lot of warriors stronger than him–modeling it as a debate would be somewhat akin to pitting an average Russian nihilist against the angel Gabriel).

I’m going here partly because reading Artorias as Dostoyevsky is fun, though it’s kind of ridiculous and not really the point (reading him as Nietzsche has its own interesting parallels).  The much more realistic conclusion to draw from juxtaposing their personal histories is that metaphorically, Artorias’ role is much like the one Dostoyevsky played in the political theater of Imperial Russia: He was an ideal, beholden to Light and Truth, nonetheless metaphysically resilient to an aggressive Untruth, able to engage it (and in many cases defeat it) on its own turf.  But I also go here because the end of Artorias’ story has much more to say about the danger of the Abyss than the flooding of New Londo.

Artorias fights the Abyss, and he’s fairly successful, and that’s admirable and impressive, but if you check the score, God just threw himself on a bonfire to keep the Dark at bay.  Presumably at some point, it’s going to spit out something that Artorias can’t handle.

Fast forward a few years to the kingdom of Oolacile, where a serpent shows up and convinces the people of the city to delve below and disturb the grave of a “primordial human” interred there.  They do this, the creature (Manus, Father of the Abyss) wakes up, and its “humanity runs wild”, unleashing another Abyss and opening up a sinkhole under the kingdom. The architectural collapse is something to behold, but more importantly, Manus’ influence drives the citizens of the kingdom stark raving mad.

Artorias arrives on the scene to find the source of this new darkness and kill it.  He does not. Instead, he gets his ass handed to him and goes mad too, but he goes down in history as the savior of Oolacile anyway because it’s at this moment that a stranger shows up, murders both him and Manus, and exits just as quickly, leaving everyone to believe that it was Artorias who saved the day.

III.

Some of the takeaways are obvious.  Nietzsche said something about the abyss gazing into you–that certainly seems to be at play here–but it’s meaningless without the philosophical backing.  Go back to the start of the metaphor, what does the Abyss mean? It’s a sudden, calamitous dearth of affirmation, an aggressive move to strip all values of importance, and metaphysically speaking, that’s really dangerous.  Even if an ideal is strong enough to stand on its own in that type of memetic environment, it loses its connection to other values, which is why Manus does not kill Artorias.  Instead, Artorias goes mad, becomes an argument against the Truth and Light he so ardently supported, because he’s now a symbol out of context, and we’ve all seen how that goes.

Those of you paying close attention to the precise sequence of events here might also conclude that (since he’s obliterated at least two cities now) Kaathe seems to be a bit of a dick.  You shouldn’t; that’s a trap. Kaathe and Frampt are Glycon, and Glycon was a sock puppet, a lie, a transparent hoax, a metaphysical blip.  This is why they never actually do anything, even on a metaphysical level (they just tell other people to do things), and more importantly, this is why, should you decide to extinguish the fire, they are the ones waiting to serve you.  They’re lies.  They’re all that’s left, and when everything is a lie, all lies are obvious.

At a higher level, though, the Abyss didn’t extinguish the Flame, and active nihilism didn’t take over the world (though you can argue that it did kill a shocking number of people), so what gives?  How does this play into the great choice that Nietzsche frames for civilization?

Well, it turns out Nietzsche’s passive nihilism is pretty subtle.  Most people haven’t read Nietzsche, his ideas aren’t terribly intuitive, thus, reaction to it tends to be subconscious, systemic, or both.  But since we are, he argues, on the path to nihilism, all of our options are inherently reactions to nihilism. The importance, then, of active nihilism, of the Abyss, is that it’s giant, it’s unignorable, and it forces us to contend intellectually with the debasement of our values.  We are not awesome at that, but I’ll be exploring Dark Souls’ portrayal of our attempts in the next few essays.

At this point, we’re starting to move beyond the setup, beyond the allegory to Nietzsche’s Great Noon, to reactions and implications that I do not think are entirely Nietzsche’s own.  Perhaps Miyazaki had something to tell us in that respect. Perhaps that’s a lie, perhaps it’s coming from me. I do not believe it is, but in all this discussion of the Dark, wouldn’t that be appropriate?

Image 1: Literally a black screen
Image 2: From Pinterest, I do not own it
Image 3: MS Paint amalgamation of a screenshot from Dark Souls and the Wikipedia image for Glycon. I made it, but I claim no ownership of the component images

Notes on Dying Twice

Image result for sekiro dilapidated temple

I’m now composing the ongoing Dark Souls series while playing through Sekiro (slowly), and being able to note the similarities and differences, immersed as I am, is a pretty interesting experience.  It’s also pretty plain at this point that getting at the juicy, literary meat of the game is going to be way harder for me this time around. Dark Souls and Bloodborne were riffing on philosophical frameworks (Christianity, Lovecraft, Nietzsche) that I am coincidentally familiar with.  Sekiro has structurally similar roots in Buddhism and sort-of obscure 1960’s ninja-historical-fantasy, about which I know approximately fuck all. Accordingly, the following are working notes, a surface reading of a game I still haven’t finished, an attempt to get the ideas on paper where perhaps a pith might become more visible.

Literary References

Miyazaki himself cites the manga Basilisk and the works of Futaro Yamada as an inspiration for elements of Sekiro’s world.  For those unfamiliar (myself included), these began with a novel published in 1958 called Kōga Ninpōchō, a historical fantasy about rival clans of superhuman mutant ninjas who get caught up in a Romeo-and-Juliet-style love triangle.  I was totally unaware that this style of storytelling had roots that old (contemporary with Tolkien, even though the first English translation seems to have been published in 2006).  More research is needed–discoveries like this keep me humble as to how little I really know.

Historical References

The setup of the game is that near the end of the Sengoku period, Isshin Ashina stages a coup and takes over one of Japan’s warring regions.  Twenty years later, the story begins. Neither Isshin, nor his grandson Genichiro appear to have been real people, but the Ashina clan was. Translating some historical details: The region, known also as Ashina in-game, was likely the Aizu region historically, and the aforementioned “end” of the Sengoku period is probably the first of such points recognized by historians–the conquest of Kyoto by Nobunaga Oda.  Twenty years after this point, the Ashina clan was defeated decisively by Masamune Date who then seized control of the Aizu region. Timing checks out.

It’s also likely that the family personas are based on real people.  Based on the timing and details of their life stories, it seems likely that Isshin and Genichiro are meant to parallel Moriuji and Moritaka Ashina respectively.  Moriuji’s reign was considered to be a golden age for the clan, whereas Moritaka (not Moriuji’s grandson, but not his son either) succeeded him and, proving unpopular among his retainers, was assassinated.  Spoiler: This is more than vaguely similar to Genichiro’s fate in the game.

Buddhism/Literary Motifs

I know embarrassingly little about Buddhism, and I hope to do more reading before formalizing any of this, but the narrative is clearly moist with its secretions.  The repeated theme of death and rebirth seems to be a clear expression, but it almost certainly goes deeper. The Sculptor’s obsessive drive to carve the Buddha (and its relationship to his previous life as a shinobi), the relationship between Kuro and other sources of immortality, even the significance of Sekiro using a prosthetic for a left arm–they scream meaning, and I bet much of it is tied up in philosophical traditions very different from the earlier games.

Aside, Miyazaki apparently took a backseat on writing for this game, so it probably will not have the same tone anyway.

Sources for my information include the linked interview, Wikipedia, and Samurai Wiki.