Destined

Because it's the "in" thing, video game studio Bungie (the creators of the Halo franchise, and, more recently Destiny and the rebooted Marathon) has laid off a significant number of staff. According to a statement published online, part of the reason for the reorganization of the company was that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years."

I played Destiny and Destiny 2 for quite a long time, even if I wasn't all that great at it. They were fun games, at least for a time. One day, after not having played Destiny 2 for some time, I loaded it up again, and within 30 minutes was having a grand old time, running, jumping around the map and shooting aliens in the face. After a couple of hours, when I logged off, I asked myself, "Why did I stop playing this game?"

The next day there was an update, and a new environment opened up. Being the sort of gamer who loves to explore the environments (especially when they are as well-crafted as Destiny's were), I jumped in, and found myself in a mission to fight my way through some sort of spaceship or orbital station... I don't remember which. It was fine, until my character encountered the final boss. And died. I tried again. And died. Over, and over, and over again, I adjusted my tactics, tinkered with my character's loadout, and tried again. Only to be killed by a powerful, and bullet-spongy final boss. Which reminded me of why I'd stopped playing Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 was a very particular type of game, and one aimed at a very particular type of first-person shooter player. It likely goes without saying that I was not that type of player. And so I eventually found myself pushed out of the game, because I didn't have the inclination, or the time, to mold myself into the sort of player that the game was geared towards, and Bungie wasn't ready and or able to make the game more accommodating of other types of players.

According to the "Bartle taxonomy of player types," first laid out 30 years ago by Richard Bartle, I'm an Explorer. I'm the sort of player who love to have their character wander around in new environments and just check them out. Finding a secret or hidden pathway to something I've never seen before is the highlight of a session for me.

And Destiny 2 wasn't built for that sort of thing. It had a number of really interesting places to explore, but many of them were gated behind difficult fight sequences, or were parts of raids and weren't really designed to just roam around and examine in detail. And so I drifted away.

With new companies, the question they have to be able to answer is: Why should people stop playing their current favorite games to play yours? For established companies like Bungie, the question becomes: Why should people continue to play your game, rather than explore what else is out there?" And I think that they didn't take that question as seriously as perhaps they might. And the business is starting to wither as a result.

Altared State

But to me, the thing that I take out of that is that there are gamblers who, for whom sports betting is their religion, right. They equate their sports betting communities and behaviors to kind of religious, a religious experience. Like, it is part of; it is their community, their identity, it's who they are. And I think that's a social catastrophe in the making, right. Like, sports betting, whatever you think of it: maybe it's a vice that needs to be much more heavily regulated, maybe if you have a more Libertarian approach, it's a fun hobby that a few people will, you know, turn into a bad thing in their lives, but for most of them it's, you know, a source of enjoyment. Um, it should not be central to who you are. It should not be a religious experience. And if it is, I think that it's that much more dangerous as a phenomenon.

McKay Coppins. Plain English With Derek Thompson; "The Casino-ification of America"

As someone who isn't religious, and has little use for concepts of meaning, the immediate question that this raises for me is why one source of community and identity is necessarily better or worse than any others. After all, one could make the point that religion can be either a vice or something enjoyable that a few people will turn into a bad thing in their lives. What is it about sports gambling, in and of itself, that means that when people make it central to who they are, that it's more dangerous than religion, when people make that central to who they are? I've seen people neglect things they claim are important to them, like family, friends or career, in the service of becoming closer to their idea of the Divine. I've seen people give away their money until they were impoverished, tolerate remarkable levels of what would otherwise be considered abuse and even kill in the name of their faith. Why is that no dangerous?

It strikes me that anything can become important enough to a person that it becomes dangerous; that it becomes something that they, and some number of the people around them, would be much better off had it never entered that person's life. And it's the effects that it has on the person's live, not the thing in itself, that is the dangerous phenomenon. The person who is willing to trade their material well-being for community and identity has a problem, regardless of the specific thing that they've latched onto while seeking community and identity. Whether that's a connection to the Divine or an expensive hobby is beside the point.

Derek Thompson, the host of Plain English, is fond of saying that dystopias don't come from bad ideas, they come from good ideas taken too far. I believe he makes the point twice in just this one episode. Giving the things that are important to one a pass may be a good idea, but it's one that's easily taken too far. Because it prompts one to stop looking at the actual things that are being done, and the effects that they have, and instead to focus on what's doing it. It's prejudicial in the same way that judging a person guilty on innocent based on who they are, rather than what acts they have committed, is. And it doesn't take much for it to be just as corrosive.

So I don't see the rationale for why some things "should" be religious experiences and other things "should not." If a career can be central to who a person is, why can't a hobby be, as well? Now, to be sure, gambling on sporting events strikes me as much more likely to lead a person to places that they will find both highly unpleasant and extremely difficult to extricate themselves from, than something like say, being a Certified Public Accountant. But that has little to do with one's ability to build one's community and identity around them.

But it's easier to decide that the downsides aren't worth the benefits for activities than it is to sort out who will, or will not take something and go off the rails with it. And it's easier to see the downsides, and to decide that they outweigh the benefits, for things that the person doing the judging does not find to be important. For my part, I don't really care which altar someone worships at, if it brings them what they're seeking from it. And when it doesn't, when it demands more than it can give, all altars are equally dysfunctional.

Small Problems

I understand the push for companies to automate as much as possible; they're looking to keep their costs as low as possible, and having people do things can be expensive. Sure, eventually companies run the risk that automation is in such widespread use that their customers find themselves out of work (or stuck with poorly-paying service jobs) and can't afford their products and services, but that's a problem for future CEOs.

The problem that high degrees of automation bring now is that it's not infallible, and if there are few to no people around, there's no-one there to catch mistakes, like this one:

I'm not sure how this was classified as a Technology story; there are any number of places along the way where that could have happened. And, because Age of Sigmar is a niche within the greater niche of Warhammer tabletop fantasy wargaming, it's unlikely that most of the people who scrolled past this set of stories realized that it was misplaced.

But these are the sorts of admittedly minor errors that erode people's trust in technology; because if there are problems in areas that one knows something about, might there not also be errors in areas where one doesn't have firsthand knowledge? In this sense, it's similar to "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy," which can be understood to be a reason behind a general distrust of media stories.

The answer from Google News would likely be that their classifications of stories are accurate enough... it's not like the categorizations are done at random, or anything. And that's likely true. But there's still a problem with not knowing if novel information is accurate that prevents these sorts of automated systems from being trusted sources in the way they were intended to be. 

More Specifically

I don't read as many other weblogs as I used to, mainly because Blogspot no longer has a "Next Blog" button like it used to. And as much as I used to peruse other people's blogs mainly to work out what Blogspot's algorithm was up to, it was something of an informative pastime.

Today, however, I found myself on the ars ludi (the art of games) blog. I'd been looking for the origin of what's called a "West Marches" game in tabletop role-playing circles, and that lead to me to Mr. Robbins' blog, as he is credited as the originator of the format. I found that to be interesting, as Mr. Robbins first posted about his West Marches campaign in 2007, saying that he's first started it about two years prior to that. There had been a similar format of game when I was in college in 1989. The difference is, as always, in the details; there are a lot of ways in which a modern West Marches campaign differs from our old "Adventurer's Guild" games, and many of them are driven by technology. When I was in school, the idea that you would communicate via e-mail with people on the same campus was ludicrous; it was simply too slow and difficult to access a medium for that. So I'm willing to go with the idea that Mr. Robbins invented the format. If for no other reason than this of often how "invention" works. Someone takes an idea that's been floating around, tweaks it, and packages it in such a way that makes it accessible to people. No need to be pedantic about things.

Which brings to the actual point of this post. (Because why place the lede on the surface, when one can bury it a little?) A much more recent, and non-gaming related post on the blog is: "I Don’t Envy Conservatives This Election." The general point was that (movement) Conservatives were in something of a bind, having now President-elect Donald Trump as their nominee. Because while Mr. Trump is a lot of things, a (movement) Conservative is not one of them. He comes across (at least to me and other people I know who lack loyalty to him as a person) as primarily interested in increasing his own personal power, influence and wealth. If championing, or actually implementing, things like small government, reduced taxes, or immigration reform gets that for him, he'll do it. But if increasing the size of government, raising taxes or walking away from changing the immigration system gets that for him, that's what we're in for. Mainly because Mr. Trump is in the enviable position of not actually having to deliver; he can always scapegoat Democrats, "the Deep State" or RINOs when he doesn't get his voter base what they want, and on top of it, can do this without having to admit to be ineffective or "weak" in the process. But I digress. More to the point, there was one comment on the post:

Trump will destroy our democracy?

Good, because we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

This is the sort of petulant pedantry that creates much of the rift between Trumpists and everyone else; the attitude that "it's not enough to be right; you have to be a jackass to everyone who doesn't think like you." While I do, on occasion, come across people who think that democracy in ancient Athens must have looked a lot like it does in the United States today (just like I meet people who think the same of slavery), the clear majority of people I know get that the term "democracy" has become inexact, and describes a number of different ways of governing that aren't necessarily (and sometimes, not even remotely) like one another. It's why "Direct Democracy" exists as a term.

It would be one thing if this sort of sneering language policing were actually in the service of clarity, it would still be acting like a jackass, but one could make the point that driving precision in language had benefits. But there's no beneficial precision being sought here. There are no nation-states governed by an expanded Athenian-style that one could actually confuse the governance of the United States with. It's just sneering.

To a degree, I think that Mr. Robbins set himself up for that sort of response. Donald Trump has made himself known for humiliating supplicants, and there are places where the tone of "I Don’t Envy Conservatives This Election" comes across a pleading. And so, to the degree that there is a segment of the population that emulates the President-elect, it's to be expected that "showing weakness" would be punished. But it was also perhaps predictable in the sense that the United States contains mutually-antagonistic and self-absorbed factions who are constantly on the lookout for slights from other factions. And, I can see how certain of Mr. Trump's supporters would feel slighted by Mr. Robbins' comments.

To be sure, this sort of thing is not the norm in everyday American discourse. Most people in the United States are neither bloggers or commenters on blogs. The term "chattering classes," after all, also exists for a reason. The people one sees sniping at one other online do not represent the population as a whole. Even though more and more people seems to be drifting towards thinking they do. I know a few Trump supporters who subscribe to the idea that "you have to be a jackass to everyone who doesn't think like you." But only a few. The problem is that if someone is going to actively reach out and initiate a political discussion with me, guess who it's going to be... The problem with there being a Silent Majority is that they also tend to be an Invisible Majority, drowned out and eclipsed by their more vocal and visible compatriots. The sort of sneering dismissiveness that the constantly online treat one another with colors not only the way that Americans see one another, it also colors the way that people think other people see one another.

The shame of the comment on Mr. Robbins' blog post isn't so much that it's there, but that it's the only word. It drives the sense that the mutually-antagonistic factionalism is the norm, rather than the outlier. And it's that sense that is most likely to make it the norm.

Tall Tail

What's been described as China's first "triple-A" video game, Black Myth: Wukong, has landed in the news due to controversy sparked by a rather strange set of instructions sent to some number of people who planned to livestream themselves playing the game.

Ahead of Black Myth’s release, some content creators and streamers revealed that a company affiliated with its developer had sent them a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game: including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

Not surprising, because this is China that we're talking about, and the Chinese government is notoriously sensitive when it comes to topics that it believes (correctly or not) might undermine or delegitimize it in the eyes of the populace.

I was watching a video-on-demand recording of one such livestream, and early in the game, the streamer responds to a viewer calling the game "Chinese propaganda." While the streamer wasn't interested in pursuing that line of discussion (after all, they were there to play a hot new video game), I'm sure that debate continued in the comments for a while.

It's an interesting commentary on the nature of relations between the United States and China. Black Myth: Wukong is a video game tied into the Chinese literature. And it's not the only property that's sought to mine the same story for details. The original Dragon Ball manga and anime draw very heavily from Journey to the West, and the Enslaved: Odyssey to the West video game couldn't be more clear about its inspirations. Even Lego got in on the act with their Monkie Kid set theme and accompanying animated shows. So it seems rational that Chinese companies would also get in on the act.

Responding to a video game that re-uses a very popular character from Chinese literature as propaganda speaks to the culture of distrust that has grown up under the geopolitical tensions between China and most of the developed Western world. (Except, it seems, where TikTok is concerned. Go figure.) While I'm sure that the Chinese Communist Party would like for games like Black Myth: Wokong to prompt young people in the industrialized West to think more highly of China, it seems unlikely that a game about an anthropomorphic monkey beating up on gods and monsters with a staff is somehow going to prompt people to overlook either the conflicts between China and other nations, or between the governing philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party and their own values. For some people, a video game is just a video game.

The charge of "propaganda" is usually one of disagreement with the supposed beneficiary of a message, rather than the message itself, and concerns that this new game is yet another plot to undermine China's geopolitical rivals/opponents seems to fall into that category. It's also a charge of stupidity (or at least pliability) on the part of others... no-one ever worries that propaganda will somehow manage to subvert them. And in that sense, it's as self-aggrandizing as what it seeks to call out.

Of a Mind

I was reading a blog post that set out to explain the dangers of groupthink, as seen through the lens of the beginning of the Satanic Panic in the early 1980s, specifically the connections that people made to Dungeons and Dragons. The author identifies four factors that they feel "contributed to the escalation of fear and the adoption of unfounded beliefs."

• Confirmation Bias
• Illusion of Invulnerability
• Pressure to Conform
• Outgroup Stereotypes

I can see the reasoning here, but these factors are present in a lot of different contexts, like organized religion, where one wouldn't say that the phenomenon as a whole is an example of groupthink.

I think that fear, rather than being a part of the groupthink phenomenon once it begins, is one of the major contributing factors to starting it. One of the important pieces of the Satanic Panic phenomenon is the idea that Satan was powerful, and sought human agents to act against the legitimate divine order. And it was fear of that which lead to people getting on board with the panic. And I suspect that this goes a long way towards explaining why it wasn't much of a thing were I lived at the time; the local religious landscape simply didn't take the idea of Satan, or Satanism, very seriously. I can't think of a single person I knew at the time who would have told you that the occult was real. So the sense of an external threat, or of being unsafe, that people needed to band together to fight wasn't there.

Similarly, I think another thing that drove the Satanic Panic (other than alliteration) was the fact that for many people, Dungeons and Dragons (and the occult), offered simple answers to otherwise complicated questions. When Patricia Pullen, founder of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.), claimed that an in-game curse caused her son Irving to kill himself, she now had a direct answer to what many people find an intricate, and often unanswerable, question. One that moved her son's suicide from a mystery to a problem with a clear solution. And I think that when a group feels that they have answers to difficult questions, there is an incentive to simply go with those answers, rather than hold out for something else that may never come. And again, where I grew up, there was no difficult question that "evil supernatural forces" was a workable answer to. And so that specific incentive, to go along with the answer provided rather than put effort into a new one, wasn't present.

A lot of time has passed since that particular episode of the Satanic Panic. Enough so that it's easy to forget that it never entirely died out; the QAnon set of conspiracies, with its belief in the ritualistic abuse of children and Satanic overtones, keeps the moral panic alive, although at a much lower level than I remember it from my adolescence. Human nature, however, takes quite some time to change, and so the exercise of seeking to understand it in order to create a better present is a worthwhile one.

Out To Sea

So I was in Barnes and Noble recently, and the manager there, who's an old acquaintance of mine, clued me into the fact that they were clearing out a number of books. (I tend not to read the big sale signs when I'm in a store, or I would have figured it out for myself.) One of the books on discount was Send Help!, "A collection of marooned cartoons," as it says on the cover.

As advertised, the book is mainly a series of cartoons about being stranded in the stereotypical "desert island." You likely know the sort, a small, roughly conical bit of land sticking up out of the ocean. It's completely covered in sand, with a single palm or coconut tree at its center.

But the book also touches on the history of the trope, and I was surprised to find that there were "stranded on a desert island" cartoons from the 1930s and 40s that could just as easily been published yesterday. It's one thing to be told that the central themes of island cartoons, like death, relationships or business as usual are timeless. It's quite another to see it for oneself. It's a reminder that some problems, even those that seem quite simple, are often insoluble in practice, and that the way people think of them hasn't really changed in the past nearly 100 years.

I hadn't really paid much attention to humor cartooning, outside of the occasional New Yorker caption contest. I think I should change that, because there's a richer history there than I realized.

Props

I'm not very good at modern video games, especially the big, "AAA" titles that sit at the top of the market. They require skills and reflexes that I no longer have, and lack the time to regain. Fortunately, I can get a sense of these games without having to play them myself, given the substantial number of people who hope to game their way into, if not internet stardom, a workable sideline by posting videos of themselves playing on YouTube.

And this is how I came to learn of Final Fantasy 16. It's an action-adventure game, that takes a lot of the elements that have found their way into the Final Fantasy franchise over the decades and seeks to tell a new, and somewhat mature, story with them.

One of the primary plot elements is a group of people (or non-people, really) termed "bearers." Bearers are, unlike the rest of the population, capable of using magic naturally, and as a result of this are despised and enslaved by the non-magical populace. (People born into the aristocracy often exempted, of course.) It's one of those design decisions that the cliché "bold choice" was specifically coined for.

The problem is that the delivery is about half as subtle and nuanced as carving "slavery and prejudice are bad" into an anvil and dropping it on someone's head would be. And it's not helped by the fact that model of slavery being presented is modeled on the practice of chattel slavery in the Americas, but without having any discernible basis in the economics of the setting.

The people I'm watching play the game have not finished it yet, so I don't know everything the designers have done with the story element, but, for the time being, the whole thing seems to be driven by the desires of national leaders at some point in the past. I'll be pleased if it turns out that there is some sensible reason that fits in with the world as they've built it, but I'm not expecting much change.

A common problem with including "difficult" topics in popular media is that people tend to forget that bad ideas didn't take hold because they were bad ideas; but because in the context in which they operated, they seemed like good ideas. Having the main characters of Final Fantasy 16 pushing back against a society that embraces slavery would likely work better if the slavery in question seemed to exist for any other reason than to have the characters fight against it; or for the audience to pat themselves on the back for being incensed by it.

Problems and Poleaxes

The team that produces the National Public Radio podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour didn't release an episode on Martin Luther King Day, and so the Code Switch team stepped in to present "Rolling the dice on race in Dungeons & Dragons." Not sure that I see the relevance, but whatever.

The episode was, as might be expected, a rather tired and perfunctory examination as to why the construct of races in Dungeons and Dragons (which are really better described as species) doesn't pass muster in the 2020s. On the off chance that anyone with even a passing interest in both tabletop role-playing and the social justice movements in the United States couldn't have figured that out.

It all felt kind of Nostradamus to me, in the sense that here were a group of people, examining a game that was first published in the mid-1970s through the lens of modern ideas of social justice and concluding that it was intentionally problematic by standard that didn't exist yet.

But here's the thing... it's not that Dungeons and Dragons, especially in its early incarnations, isn't wildly biased. It's just that the biases weren't tied to early 21st century notions of White supremacy. Rather the game reflects the biases of the sources that Gary Gygax and company consulted in putting it together, which were genre fiction and reference materials that in some cases, dated back decades. And the fact that Dungeons and Dragons grew out of fantasy wargaming. More than simply funny-looking people based on Norse myth and J. R. R. Tolkien's novels, Dwarfs and Elves were troop types. Which is why in the "basic" versions of the game, they were also classes unto themselves.

The biases, and occasional outright bigotry, that was present in many of these sources finds its way into the game, and it worth talking about. But in order to do that, one has to be familiar with the game in a broader context, rather than just trotting it out as curiosity to demonstrate to an audience that one finds problems in the same things (and for the same reasons) that they do.

Games People Play

Of all of the things I tend to talk about here, my personal interests and hobbies are only rarely among them. That's mainly because I'm boring... there isn't much about me worth talking about, and I'm not into my hobbies to a degree that makes me, or them, all that interesting.

That said, I was poking around in some old files and found this quote.

A good role-playing game provides the framework for a unique kind of narrative, a collaborative thought experiment crossed with improvisational theater.

I first encountered it, if I remember correctly, in a Slate article after Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax died. The article is something of a hit piece, blaming the late Mr. Gygax for the fact that so many Dungeons and Dragons games descend so easily into what it commonly called murder-hoboism within the hobby.

In any event, I call BS. Not simply because Eric Sofge chose to throw stones at a man who was no longer there to defend himself, but because the basic premise of his article, as articulated above, is false.

That is, in my opinion, not the hallmark of a good role-playing game (as in rules system), but rather the hallmark of a good role-playing campaign. Most game systems rely on probabilities to resolve outcomes, which, left to its own devices, creates a scenario about as theatrical as a game of Vegas craps.

But more importantly, the collaborative thought experiment and improvisational theatrics are the hallmarks of a certain type of sophisticated PLAYER, and not all players are capable of that. (To this day, I dislike the improvisational acting aspect of many role-playing sessions, preferring to narrate my characters in the third person.) When I first started playing, I was eleven years old, and if you'd told me that I was embarking on a "collaborative thought experiment," I wouldn't have had the first idea of what you were talking about, and "improvisational theater" would have sent me searching for a dictionary. I just barely had a grasp of the idea that these odd dice and arcane books would somehow allow me to pretend to be a Hobbit and/or a Knight better than I could without them, and that's really all that I was after at the time.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a hobby to be an avenue for some sort of self-improvement. And, truth be told, Dungeons and Dragons does not force its players down this path. But neither do GURPS or Runequest, games made by Steve Jackson and Greg Stafford, whom Mr. Sofge idolized in his article. Having played both, I can speak from firsthand experience that one can just as easily play a murderhobo in those games as in any other.

A good role-plying game provides what any other game provides. Fun. And, okay, in the eyes of Mr. Sofge, Dungeons and Dragons provides for what gamers term "badwrongfun," but it's fun never the less.

For me, what makes a tabletop role-playing game fun is the puzzle aspect of it. There is a goal (sometimes of my own devising, sometimes not), and at the start of the game, I don't know how to attain that goal. And through some combination of trial and error, observation and experimentation, I figure it out. And I find that process to be enjoyable. If a good story (one that's worth telling to other people) comes out of it, awesome. But that's the gravy. Am I a bad person for not seeking to rise above the simplistic man-versus-monster dichotomy that Dungeons and Dragons often rests on? Perhaps Mr. Sofge would have thought so. But the myriad of universes that people have created to play in have room enough for both of us. And that was the innovation of Dungeons and Dragons, and why it's lasted so long. It can be whatever someone wants to make of it. Few other things in life are that pliable.

Niche Humor

The tabletop gamer in me found this uproariously funny. While I have nothing against stick figure families (other than they've become a bit of a cliché), I do find the various ways in which they meet their ends to be amusing. The inroads that geek culture have made into modern society are also interesting. I suspect that many more people than one might initially think will get this joke, if for no other reason than Critical Role and other gaming-related media have become so popular.
 

Lockdown

I have to admit that I find the practice of putting locks on fences to be a curiosity, although I do admire the creativity that people sometimes manage to bring to the practice. In this case, however, it was he lock itself that caught my eye. These are made by a blacksmith, from Oregon, if I remember correctly. He comes up for the local Renaissance Faire every summer, with last year being an exception, of course. I have one of these locks myself, purchased several years ago, and never actually used to padlock anything.

It's a unique take on what has become a ubiquitous practice, and I have to admit that I enjoyed coming across it.

Hack and Slash

I was watching a YouTube "Let's Play" video of a computer role-playing game (RPG), and in the specific episode I was watching, a major plot point is the suicide of one of the non-player characters (NPCs) who was driving the game's storyline. The creator of the video dutifully warned viewers in the video description of the event, and noted that it may be triggering for some viewers. Fair enough.

But RPGs, whether on computers/consoles or tabletop, are often remarkably violent in their overall presentation. One of the primary adventure types for fantasy tabletop RPGs, of which Dungeons and Dragons is the prototype, is the dungeon crawl, which, in a number of contexts, resembles nothing so much as a heavily-armed home invasion conducted against a community. Tabletop RPG players have coined the term "murderhobo" to describe this, since it evokes what many characters in Dungeons and Dragons turn out to be: itinerant wanderers with no fixed abode who tend to use wanton slaughter as a solution to every problem they encounter.

This over-the-top level of carnage originated early in the hobby. A measure of the blame may be laid at the feet of one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax. Between endorsing player characters operating in a medieval moral space that strikes us as bloodthirsty today and being a poor writer (and thus failing to adequately describe the risk-reward system he appears to have had in mind), he created a generalized milieu in which killing things was often the best (of not only) way to get things done. The puzzle and problem-solving aspects of the game quickly fell by the wayside.

And as video games have become more sophisticated, matching the increased power and memory of the systems they run on, more open gaming styles have become the order of the day. Gone, for the most part, are games in which killing non-player characters not specifically called out as enemies a one-way trip to a "Game Over" screen. Even games that enact consequences for random NPC kills tend to go easy on the players in such cases; after all, the point is for players to enjoy themselves in a fictional world where the consequences have no real-world bearing.

But unless a game has something particularly egregious in it, and that usually means some sort of link to current events that really bothers people (terrorism and school shootings come to mind), little attention is paid to the high virtual body counts. A player can while away the hours using magical powers to have NPCs literally eaten alive by rats, for instance, but it's one scenario in the same game in which the non-lethal option for a mission results in a woman being given over to a stalker that drives attention.

Of course, role-playing games aren't really the culprits here. In my estimation, the link between heroism and violence is a strong one and so what would otherwise come across as gratuitous violence in other situations is seen as acceptable and praiseworthy, and so it's not thought much about, especially when it's sanitized. Bad things happening to specific characters is often seen as upsetting to many, especially children, but more generalized gunfights and brawls are par for the course.

It all strikes me as strange. Maybe it shouldn't. Perhaps I'm simply more squeamish than most people, and so what's normal to them seems excessive to me. But still, I wonder if a less drastic model or heroism wouldn't be good for us.

Details, Details

There are lots of "laws" named after people that speak to random bits and pieces of people's lived experiences. One of them is "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy" which is as follows:

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.

Erwin Knoll (1931 - 1994)

When I first encountered this, I felt that it was amusing enough to take down, but I really didn't think much of it. Until I came across that rare story of which I did happen to have some firsthand knowledge. It wasn't that I considered the story untrue, but I found that the details weren't quite right. There were a couple of things that were said that weren't quite accurate. And it has turned out the same for every subsequent story that I've read in the meantime.

The most recent example was a piece on the recently released computer game Cyberpunk 2077. There was a story on the NPR webpage excoriating it for not being true to the spirit of the original tabletop game. The author of the story sets out to prove his bone fides vis-a-vis the tabletop games.

Fact: I played Cyberpunk back in the early 90's when it was just a tabletop RPG inspired by Blade Runner and William Gibson's sprawl stories. It was a product of its time, existing in a universe with space stations and cyberarms, but without cellphones.
Jason Sheehan "In 'Cyberpunk 2077,' The Only Truly Punk Move Is Not To Play"

Here is what the game itself has to say.

Cellular Phones
The phone of the future is mobile and cordless, allowing the cyberpunk on the go to talk from his car, office, or even on the street. These "cellular" phones operate by using a series of stationary transceivers which pick up your phone signal and relay it to the regular phone Net.
Cyberpunk. Welcome to Night City: A Sourcebook for 2013. p.5

Now, I know this because I too played Cyberpunk back in the early 1990s. (Yep. I'm still uncool.) And I still have my copy of the game, from which I transcribed the above. And remember the cellular phones because one of the peculiarities of the setting was that there was no understanding that phones would become smaller and more powerful. In the Cyberpunk universe, a computer powerful enough to run a sophisticated VR setup and allow hackers to brute-force their way into heavily-defended corporate networks (and the batteries to run it for hours on end) was small enough to be carried in one hand (think the size of an old Sega Genesis or original Playstation console), but cellular phone handsets didn't shrink a bit. And so it stuck with me. The second I read Mr. Sheehan's remark, I knew it was incorrect, and I knew where to look to prove it.

In the end, it's not a big thing. Mr. Sheehan misremembered a detail from a game that was released some 32 years ago (or, like a lot of people today, conflates "cellphones" with "smartphones") and whoever edited the opinion piece for NPR probably didn't know any better and let it go by. It's a minor point, and one that doesn't really take away from the overall point that he's making. (What does detract from the point he's making is that Mike Pondsmith, who wrote the Cyberpunk tabletop games series, feels that CD Projekt RED "nailed it.")

But it illustrates a problem with "the media" as an institution. To convey the facts to others, one must first know the facts oneself. The media doesn't need to be corrupt or biased to be, from time to time, simply incorrect. And if they're just as fallible as the rest of humanity, they're not always going to know what they don't know, just like anyone else. And that makes them less reliable than they like to think of themselves.

Uniformly Pale

I was texting back and forth with my niece; I'd asked her what she knew about Cyberpunk 2077. She doesn't really follow video games (understandable) and so the answer was basically not much. So I asked her this:

Did you know that the guy who created the world originally is Black?

She didn't. And I'm not really surprised by this. While Mike Pondsmith has had recent articles penned about him in both Wired and The Atlantic (among others) due to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 being one of the most anticipated titles in gaming, the fact that he's Black is never really mentioned. It's beside the point of the pieces, which are basically there to credit him for his work on the cyberpunk genre. A quick Google news search brings up nothing about him that appears to emphasize this part of his life.

I mention this because when I asked my niece if the world of Cyberpunk 2077 has been created by a Black man, it was because I wanted her to know that Black people were involved in such things, because it's not often mentioned. Race isn't often a big deal unless it's the focus of a story, and that means that it is easy to miss.

To a certain degree, I don't want all of her role models to be Black, because that's limiting. Part of the problem with the quest for role models is that it can put people into the position of waiting for others who can't have or don't themselves need narrow role models. If Barack Obama had needed a Black role model to demonstrate to him that he could be President of the United States, he never would have become the President himself. Being the first at something, or even the first person one knows, means not having a role model to show you that it can be done. But I didn't want her to think that if she went into the production side of the entertainment business, that she'd be there alone.

Sure, there are Black movie directors and the like, but they're mainly known for making things for Black people, rather than general audiences. And the fact that they are Black is a major part of the news stories about them. And I think that this creates the impression that they are rarer than perhaps they are. Which contributes to a sense that the worlds they live in are almost completely White. When I worked for Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, people would sometimes ask me what it was like to be the only Black person there.

"I wouldn't know," I answered, "there are a fair number of Black people there."

Not that Wizards was as ethnically diverse as the nation as a whole; it was significantly Whiter than that. But it was nowhere near exclusively White, despite the fact that tabletop roleplaying, like Dungeons and Dragons or Cyberpunk are considered to be the sorts of nerdy pastimes that are engaged in almost entirely by White people; with only a few Steve Urkel types to break up the monotony.

And part of this is due simply to the fact that the Black people in the industry simply aren't talked about that much, leaving the impression that outside of a few independent creators who are women and/or non-White, that the whole place is populated by Gary Gygax lookalikes. Understandable, but it does a disservice.

Monsters in the Closets

As I've mentioned before, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games quite a lot in my younger days. I only really stopped playing fairly frequently about a decade ago. I've been meaning to get back into the hobby for some time now, but I have a habit of allowing things to get in the way. Not the least of which being a general exasperation with the community of gamers in general. The reasons for this are twofold; one is that, like any other group large enough to have entered the cultural consciousness, the gaming community is too large to not have a sizable number of assholes in it. The other reason is that despite years of working to be a less judgmental person, assholes still get on my nerves.

But I also find that I have a relatively low tolerance for drama. And while I don't find cross-generational drama to be worse than any other flavor, I can still do without it. And so when the "Orcs are racist" drama ramps up (which it does on a seemingly annual basis), I find myself rolling my eyes and wondering why I ever put up with this nonsense.

Part of the problem with Orcs is the way that people portray them in their individual games, and have for nearly the entirety of the hobby. Orcs are basically the equivalent of Stormtroopers in Star Wars, or other garden-variety Faceless Minions. The only real purpose they serve, from a narrative point of view, is to be mown down like grass so that the heroes can look like super-tough guys (and gals) in the process. This tends to mean that they have two basic traits; they're utterly incompetent and they're aggressive to the point of vacuity. While Orcs are, from time to time, portrayed as cowardly and willing to run for the hills with the least provocation, the image of waves upon waves of Orcs climbing over the bodies of their fallen comrades, seemingly each somehow thinking that they're going to be the one who brings down the guy who killed the last fifty who just tried the same thing, is common. And so Dungeons and Dragons, which, the complaints of same gamers notwithstanding, does actually respond to the player base, had tended, over the years to describe Orcs in the game manuals in ways that line up with them being Chaotic Vicious.

Because it's common for cultures, Western and otherwise, to portray out-groups in dehumanizing terms, the dehumanization of Orcs (who, recall, are not human to begin with) is often seen as a parallel.

There is always a tendency for the more activist holders of a given worldview to understand the wrong-thinking to be unintelligent, credulous or immoral. Feeling that the unintelligent and the credulous can be saved, or at least rendered less harmful, if the information they can access is controlled, leads to an understanding of the immoral as devious puppetmasters who must be censored, or possibly silenced, for the good of society at large. People who view themselves as intelligent and discerning, however, view their own thought leaders as visionaries.

Accordingly, with the benefit of enough distance, you can see similarities. And the "Orcs are racist" trope reminds me quite strongly of the Satanic Panic of the early 1980s, just without the media coverage. Both presume that somewhere in the Dungeons and Dragons design bullpen, one or more hateful people are dedicated to using a pseudo-medievalist adventure game as a means of subverting the morals of the trusting or dim-witted. In 1980s it was Satanists, looking to recruit more Witches and Warlocks to the cause via the in-game use of magic spells. In the 2010s, it's racists, looking to keep alive the idea of "they're different, and that's bad" through uncharitable portrayals of fictional monsters. Both look ridiculous to those outside the worldview, and both see the ridicule as a tool of the immoral other to hide their nefarious schemes.

Costume Play

Went to Penny Arcade Expo in downtown Seattle this weekend. It's a video game convention, but it's also a pretty good opportunity for people watching. Some of the effort that goes into people's costumes is amazing.

Grapes

I think I may try to teach myself how to shoot still life this summer/autumn. Not because I want to be a food photographer, but just because it seems interesting.

The Amored Warrior

When I was in high school, Robotech came out on television. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Robotech was a show cobbled together out of three Japanese animated science-fiction shows: Super-Dimension Fortress Macross, Super-Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada. In their native Japanese, the three shows were completely unrelated, and while the writing staff as Harmony Gold managed to alter their plotlines and backstories fairly competently and create a fairly workable meta-plot that wove the three together, there were still enough plot holes make the whole thing resemble Swiss cheese. But I was in high school - what did I care? In any event, my linking up with other fans of the show introduced me into a rather remarkable world of "Giant Robot" anime. That world turned out to have two primary branches. And at the base of one of them, the same one from which the shows that became Robotech grew out of, was Mobile Suit Gundam.

American cartoons, like G. I. Joe or Transformers were basically brawl-of-the-week-club. The "bad guys" would come up with some sort of scheme or plot, and attempt to put it into action. The "good guys" would sorté out to stop them, a battle would ensue and the bad guys would lose, returning the world a a whole to the status quo, after which a short Public Service Announcement would run. What set Gundam, and many other Japanese shows (imported the the United States or not) apart from this, was that there was a continuing storyline, and while the giant-robot throwdown was important, it wasn't the whole story.

Despite being just as much a 30-minute toy commercial as Transformers was, Gundam was also a drama, and one with a remarkably compelling story at its heart. The basic gist was this: In the 21st Century, mankind was united under the auspices of the Earth Federation; basically the United Nations. The national boundaries that had defined nation-states were gone. Earth was overcrowded, at least as far as the leaders of the Federation were concerned, and so they embarked upon an ambition program to colonize space in the immediate neighborhood of the Earth and the Moon. By mining the Moon and every asteroid they could catch for resources, the Earth Federation managed to construct hundreds of large O'Neill cylinder-style space stations (which the animation staff for Gundam simply copied more or less verbatim from the original designs), and clustered them into large groups called "Sides" at various LaGrange points in the Earth-Moon area. Then they began sending people to them. In a lot of science-fiction, it's the wealthy people who move to space. In Gundam, it was poorer people who were sent to be space colonists. Which makes a certain amount of sense. Space stations are relatively fragile. One errant asteroid or out-of-control cargo vessel can ruin your whole day.

Space colonies, like other types of colonies, have a habit of wanting to be independent, and that drive for independence eventually broke out into a shooting war. With giant robots. But it's not as silly as it might sound. Gundam pioneered what is now referred to as the "Real Robot" genre in animé. While the show doesn't always reflect them, the Mobile Suits that various characters piloted had descriptions and statistics that were meant to give you an idea of how these things fit into the real world. The RX-78-2 Gundam has a set height. Which is how they were able to build a "life-size" model of the thing and put it on display:

Big, isn't it? (Photo by Yoshiaki Miura in The Japan Times)

It has a defined (if not exactly realistic) weight, the machine-guns mounted in it's head are 60mm caliber, et cetera. This isn't to say that it's hard science-fiction, far from it. But it's defined in real-world terms.

In the end, Mobile Suit Gundam is a coming-of-age-story set against the backdrop of a civil war that rages through space and various places on the Earth and Moon. One where giant robot war machines fill in for tanks, space fighters, helicopters and any other of a number of more mundane types of military hardware, yet without completely displacing them. And it's one of my longest-lasting hobbies. From time to time, rather than grouse about current events or pontificate on things, I'll talk about this instead. Not from the point of view of an expert, but rather as a long-time fan. It should make for a nice change of pace.

Craftsmanship

I spend a lot of time writing about the things that people do that leave me scratching my head or get on my nerves, despite not wanting my blogging to be simply me complaining about things. So today I'm showing off some miniature painting work done by an acquaintance of mine. Enjoy.

Isn't it amazing what you can do with something only a couple of inches tall?