"Ich nehm dich fester in den Arm
Dass ich dich besser führen kann
[...]
Purpurrot auf bleichen Wangen
Kleidet dich ganz wunderbar"
Eisbrecher - Tanz mit mir
Y'know, I was preparing a post about squad management games tonight, but I unwisely checked if the webcomic Weregeek might be trying to pull out of its snowflake tailspin, so we're gonna talk about that instead. (Short answer: no, it's not.)
Apparently we've moved on from crowd-sourcing our sexual orientations to... I guess it's a renaissance fair? Yeah. Ok, so we're at a RenFaire and one of the characters puts on some idiotic rainbow-colored tapir head, pink tutu and paw mittens from a furry costume. Other attendees in tunics and shawls voice disapproval at this and are painted as intolerant snobs, but a little kid runs up to the furry, calls her cute and hugs her, to which she exclaims at her audience: "That's why I wear this, haters!"
We may need to unpack this:
1) I don't go to RenFaires. For one thing, any activity requiring costumes doesn't seem worth it (and I am very much including weddings) but let's call that personal taste. Also, unlike most of the target demographic, I've actually gotten a taste of traditional village life and while it certainly boasts some charms, medievalist nostalgia is overall woefully misplaced. Try actually harvesting a grassy hillside with a scythe and then count your blisters... and your toes. Still, the point of the activity does seem to be creating a particular atmosphere. That not all participants will go whole-hog on the clogs is not the issue. We're not talking about people wearing sunglasses, or anachronistic porta-potties being provided for comfort and hygiene. A furry would be putting a great deal of deliberate and active effort into crashing the re-enactment party for no apparent reason than egomania.
2) If you want to put on an eye-poppingly colorful animal costume and get hugged by children, you don't need to be at a RenFaire to do that. There are actual furry conventions you could be attending. Or get a job juggling and making balloon animals at children's birthday parties: get paid for doing what you love! In other words, you already have your own thing going, but you'd like everyone else's thing to be your thing also. It's no more justifiable than Civil War re-enactors running their drills in the middle of a furry convention. You're not being oppressed by being discouraged from that. You're just an asshole being called out on your abuse of others and invasion of their space.
3) Most galling, the opinions of informed, adult attendees are supposed to be completely invalidated by the approval of a five-year-old. The ultimate arbiter of intellectual and moral taste is supposed to be someone with no clue whatsoever as to the Renaissance or a Fair, and who would be equally impressed by lighting farts, pulling a cat's tail or stomping around in a puddle. May we all be vindicated by praise from the mentally incompetent.
4) Irony of ironies, Weregeek's comment section itself warns me, when trying to paste a paragraph of this post into it, that I have a 90% likelihood of being considered "toxic" despite containing no slurs or motherfucking swearing whatsoever... in other words the author herself finds it necessary to police her own audience's participation!
Hater.
A microaggression to the jugular. Random rabid rambling by me, a.k.a. Werwolfe. Games, books, movies and general complaints about the world. Most of it bites. The world, that is. The Den is the blog. Other pages house my attempts at writing fiction.
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Sunday, July 26, 2020
The Corsair Demographic, Part 2: No Dread of Death
"No dread of death—if with us die our foes
Save that it seems even duller than repose
[...]
Ours are the tears, though few, sincerely shed,
When Ocean shrouds and sepulchres our dead"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
What do pirates do? They pirate, right?
For what? For booty!
Ah, but how to pinch said booty? One must needs muster a needful ship!
One must cooperate with the rest of the crew to crew said communal tub.
One must accept the inherent risk of the enterpri[z]e.
In other words, a crew, a vessel greater than oneself, teamwork.
Teamwork is dead.
Back around the late '90s and Y2K the biggest news in online games was the shift away from 1v1 or deathmatch toward coordination. Even Starcraft, poster-child of twitch-gaming, encouraged 3v3 matches and spawned the Aeon of Strife cooperative mode which would eventually balloon in popularity in Warcraft 3. The likes of Starsiege: Tribes and Team Fortress Classic brought to the forefront a 'capture the flag' match mode which had barely been a sideshow in the glory days of Quake and Goldeneye deathmatches, just a couple of years earlier. The Infinity Engine games offered a single-player perspective of class-based RPG mechanics which would largely shape the expectation of online teamwork as well. At the same time, the first graphic MMOs pursued the culmination of what appeared a logical trend to any informed customer: ever greater, more protracted conflicts in ever more complex, persistent virtual worlds.
As companies shifted to capturing disinterested, casual customers instead, mass-market deadheads looking only for instant gratification and lacking the brainpower to view themselves as part of a larger system, the trend toward complexity was reversed. Pettiness became a virtue. Strategy games were redefined into "actions per minute" clickfests, team RPGs all but exterminated by Diablo-clone A"R"PGs, AoS got rebranded as MOBAs (cheap knock-offs of Mortal Kombat with ever smaller teams and ever smaller maps) simulations shifted from grandiose city-building to micromanaging a couple of Sims' bodily functions, and two decades later the biggest name in multiplayer is... Fortnite, a deathmatch game.
On to the wider issue: teamwork is dead. Unfortunately, modern online titles claiming to offer interaction motivate their customers entirely via individual rewards, be they high scores, funny hats or the almighty +1 sword (you can always +1 a sword, no matter the number of +1s already in play... I think WoW's up to +1111111111111111111 by now.) While such gimmicks certainly have their place, they don't justify a multiplayer label. Getting The Loot cannot be the point of the game - because the next logical step is to get The Loot via the quickest, simplest, least demanding method possible; this is largely how WoW-clone MMOs have continually shrunk. A game should define specific means by which the reward is acquired (otherwise I could simply buy myself a golden cup) and multiplayer games should imply multiplayer means. It's inherently dishonest to advertise a majestic triple-masted pirate ship when 95% of the action flows in and out of each pirate's individual dinghy. Easily observed with the shrinking of content from realm vs. realm raids to 40-man raids to 20 to 12 to 6 to 3 to "bring your own friend" to single-player. Every time you let players advance toward The Loot in a simpler, more egocentric fashion, that is exactly what they will do. They will always take the easy way out. Every single time. Do not even call it a slippery slope. It's a dive off a cliff with no air resistance. Do not give the simpleminded a simpler option - or, obviously, they'll take it.
The solution is of course to refocus multiplayer games on communal objectives, in both constructive and destructive aspects. I addressed the need to proliferate interconnected constructive roles in the previous Corsair Demographic post, and I do think it can be done so long as players are given the ability to build an identity or brand image, to hang up a shingle around their niche role within an in-game economy and village life. It may be significantly more difficult to enroll players in the destructive side of multiplayer, given that it necessarily entails self-destruction as well. Let's remember PvP in MMOs died out even before crafting did. By the way, I use the term teamwork deliberately in contrast to the overused and over-abused "community" because a team is dedicated to an objective goal (football pun intended) a gesselschaft system, not a cozy gemeinschaft where you just sit around telling each other what you had for lunch. The goal of the team over-rides individual grandstanding. Teams need cannon fodder, or at the very least support players. A team of degenerate petty narcissists, of prima donnas who declare "I don't play support" * from the get-go, is a non-starter.
If you want to be the only one that matters, play a single-player game.
So what would be the correct mentality? Well, I hear that "losing is fun" and Dwarf Fortress is about the fortress, not the individual dwarves. But have any MMOs in recent memory even tried getting players invested in in-game locations? Sacrificing themselves for a common objective?
Darkfall, from what I remember of it during beta (and the nasty rumors confirming this for years afterwards) failed by excessively incorporating The Loot into castle-building, which resulted in self-perpetuating mob rule. Holding a prominent position in the world gave the guild in question massive amounts of free resources, instead of requiring resources to sustain. Meaning that mindless zerg guilds didn't have to coordinate much or attract worthy players - you don't have to be better than your opponents if you're sitting on mountains of free support.
Planetside 2 came close, though it failed by promising players exactly what they had no right to expect: a constant string of easy, unopposed victories. Worse yet, it delivered in its early years, with factions avoiding fighting each other in order to constantly circle around re-capturing bases. It's hard to give a shit about any particular base in PS2. Though it has made some effort toward fixing this later (base construction and alerts with fixed victory conditions) it also serves as object lesson in misaimed advertising via an early batch of loading screens showing groups of players trampling helpless opposition.
If you want to recruit corsairs, recruit them by promising victory via personal risk and loss. Show them bullet-riddled soldiers planting a flag, a tank sacrificing itself by physically blocking an enemy advance, a tempest-tossed ship lost amidst the waves, a lone guard on the parapet sounding a horn as the dragon swoops down upon him, a peasant facing an entire squad of orcs with naught but a pitchfork and the shirt on his back, an elf shooting an arrow with a missive wrapped around it as the forest burns down from under him, a starfighter among hundreds burning up in the atmosphere with its engines shot out but letting loose one last laser-shot at the enemy mothership. You should never advertise narcissism and grandstanding and personal gain when trying to build an entire virtual world, because it is, quite simply, false advertising. If you truly populate a world with ten thousand interconnected players, then no single player should ever expect to feel like more than one ten-thousandth's worth.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: a good virtual world makes you feel small.
We want to escape into a fantasy of being corsairs. Fine. But don't advertise it as the captain, swimming in dubloons, giving orders. If you want to address the right audience, a lasting audience, advertise from the viewpoint of a lowly scurvy dog, barefoot, filthy and gap-toothed, swinging madly, suicidally away at the king's men with his notched cutlass - because if you truly intend to deliver on your promise of MMOs as persistent worlds, this is what most of us should expect to be. Just as importantly in the background somewhere, instead of The Loot show us The Ship, the focus and goal of our communal effort, the subject of the struggle for which we are mere objects, its masts looming proudly against the night.
________________________________________________
* For anyone who doesn't play so-called MOBAs, I haven't indulged much in them lately, but yes, that used to be an actual catchphrase you'd hear in every pre-match lobby in League of Legends, Smite and the like: subhuman retards declaring themselves too important to support others. In a team game. Sign of the times.
Save that it seems even duller than repose
[...]
Ours are the tears, though few, sincerely shed,
When Ocean shrouds and sepulchres our dead"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
What do pirates do? They pirate, right?
For what? For booty!
Ah, but how to pinch said booty? One must needs muster a needful ship!
One must cooperate with the rest of the crew to crew said communal tub.
One must accept the inherent risk of the enterpri[z]e.
In other words, a crew, a vessel greater than oneself, teamwork.
Teamwork is dead.
Back around the late '90s and Y2K the biggest news in online games was the shift away from 1v1 or deathmatch toward coordination. Even Starcraft, poster-child of twitch-gaming, encouraged 3v3 matches and spawned the Aeon of Strife cooperative mode which would eventually balloon in popularity in Warcraft 3. The likes of Starsiege: Tribes and Team Fortress Classic brought to the forefront a 'capture the flag' match mode which had barely been a sideshow in the glory days of Quake and Goldeneye deathmatches, just a couple of years earlier. The Infinity Engine games offered a single-player perspective of class-based RPG mechanics which would largely shape the expectation of online teamwork as well. At the same time, the first graphic MMOs pursued the culmination of what appeared a logical trend to any informed customer: ever greater, more protracted conflicts in ever more complex, persistent virtual worlds.
As companies shifted to capturing disinterested, casual customers instead, mass-market deadheads looking only for instant gratification and lacking the brainpower to view themselves as part of a larger system, the trend toward complexity was reversed. Pettiness became a virtue. Strategy games were redefined into "actions per minute" clickfests, team RPGs all but exterminated by Diablo-clone A"R"PGs, AoS got rebranded as MOBAs (cheap knock-offs of Mortal Kombat with ever smaller teams and ever smaller maps) simulations shifted from grandiose city-building to micromanaging a couple of Sims' bodily functions, and two decades later the biggest name in multiplayer is... Fortnite, a deathmatch game.
On to the wider issue: teamwork is dead. Unfortunately, modern online titles claiming to offer interaction motivate their customers entirely via individual rewards, be they high scores, funny hats or the almighty +1 sword (you can always +1 a sword, no matter the number of +1s already in play... I think WoW's up to +1111111111111111111 by now.) While such gimmicks certainly have their place, they don't justify a multiplayer label. Getting The Loot cannot be the point of the game - because the next logical step is to get The Loot via the quickest, simplest, least demanding method possible; this is largely how WoW-clone MMOs have continually shrunk. A game should define specific means by which the reward is acquired (otherwise I could simply buy myself a golden cup) and multiplayer games should imply multiplayer means. It's inherently dishonest to advertise a majestic triple-masted pirate ship when 95% of the action flows in and out of each pirate's individual dinghy. Easily observed with the shrinking of content from realm vs. realm raids to 40-man raids to 20 to 12 to 6 to 3 to "bring your own friend" to single-player. Every time you let players advance toward The Loot in a simpler, more egocentric fashion, that is exactly what they will do. They will always take the easy way out. Every single time. Do not even call it a slippery slope. It's a dive off a cliff with no air resistance. Do not give the simpleminded a simpler option - or, obviously, they'll take it.
The solution is of course to refocus multiplayer games on communal objectives, in both constructive and destructive aspects. I addressed the need to proliferate interconnected constructive roles in the previous Corsair Demographic post, and I do think it can be done so long as players are given the ability to build an identity or brand image, to hang up a shingle around their niche role within an in-game economy and village life. It may be significantly more difficult to enroll players in the destructive side of multiplayer, given that it necessarily entails self-destruction as well. Let's remember PvP in MMOs died out even before crafting did. By the way, I use the term teamwork deliberately in contrast to the overused and over-abused "community" because a team is dedicated to an objective goal (football pun intended) a gesselschaft system, not a cozy gemeinschaft where you just sit around telling each other what you had for lunch. The goal of the team over-rides individual grandstanding. Teams need cannon fodder, or at the very least support players. A team of degenerate petty narcissists, of prima donnas who declare "I don't play support" * from the get-go, is a non-starter.
If you want to be the only one that matters, play a single-player game.
So what would be the correct mentality? Well, I hear that "losing is fun" and Dwarf Fortress is about the fortress, not the individual dwarves. But have any MMOs in recent memory even tried getting players invested in in-game locations? Sacrificing themselves for a common objective?
Darkfall, from what I remember of it during beta (and the nasty rumors confirming this for years afterwards) failed by excessively incorporating The Loot into castle-building, which resulted in self-perpetuating mob rule. Holding a prominent position in the world gave the guild in question massive amounts of free resources, instead of requiring resources to sustain. Meaning that mindless zerg guilds didn't have to coordinate much or attract worthy players - you don't have to be better than your opponents if you're sitting on mountains of free support.
Planetside 2 came close, though it failed by promising players exactly what they had no right to expect: a constant string of easy, unopposed victories. Worse yet, it delivered in its early years, with factions avoiding fighting each other in order to constantly circle around re-capturing bases. It's hard to give a shit about any particular base in PS2. Though it has made some effort toward fixing this later (base construction and alerts with fixed victory conditions) it also serves as object lesson in misaimed advertising via an early batch of loading screens showing groups of players trampling helpless opposition.
If you want to recruit corsairs, recruit them by promising victory via personal risk and loss. Show them bullet-riddled soldiers planting a flag, a tank sacrificing itself by physically blocking an enemy advance, a tempest-tossed ship lost amidst the waves, a lone guard on the parapet sounding a horn as the dragon swoops down upon him, a peasant facing an entire squad of orcs with naught but a pitchfork and the shirt on his back, an elf shooting an arrow with a missive wrapped around it as the forest burns down from under him, a starfighter among hundreds burning up in the atmosphere with its engines shot out but letting loose one last laser-shot at the enemy mothership. You should never advertise narcissism and grandstanding and personal gain when trying to build an entire virtual world, because it is, quite simply, false advertising. If you truly populate a world with ten thousand interconnected players, then no single player should ever expect to feel like more than one ten-thousandth's worth.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: a good virtual world makes you feel small.
We want to escape into a fantasy of being corsairs. Fine. But don't advertise it as the captain, swimming in dubloons, giving orders. If you want to address the right audience, a lasting audience, advertise from the viewpoint of a lowly scurvy dog, barefoot, filthy and gap-toothed, swinging madly, suicidally away at the king's men with his notched cutlass - because if you truly intend to deliver on your promise of MMOs as persistent worlds, this is what most of us should expect to be. Just as importantly in the background somewhere, instead of The Loot show us The Ship, the focus and goal of our communal effort, the subject of the struggle for which we are mere objects, its masts looming proudly against the night.
________________________________________________
* For anyone who doesn't play so-called MOBAs, I haven't indulged much in them lately, but yes, that used to be an actual catchphrase you'd hear in every pre-match lobby in League of Legends, Smite and the like: subhuman retards declaring themselves too important to support others. In a team game. Sign of the times.
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
The Year of the Jackpot
"What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a touch of poetry in them"
Robert A. Heinlein - The Year of the Jackpot
I rarely find myself agreeing with public opinion, but I'll gladly echo one increasingly voiced sentiment: the year 2020 can go fuck itself with a rusty piece of rebar. Whether it's the weather, disease, economics, politics or just mundane insanity, it's getting harder finding any aspect of the world which hasn't gone cockeyed this year.
So in the spirit of this dispiriting time I'd like to recommend one of my favorite author's less known stories: The Year of the Jackpot, published in 1952 and underappreciated for the surprising punch its thirty-ish pages pack. Its heroes fit the usual Heinlein mold: a mathematically inclined, free thinking renaissance man accompanied by a cuddly yet plucky spitfire of a love interest, both bantering like a whole troupe of gangster movie wise guys, navigating a crisis by taking charge of their destinies.
Did I say "a" crisis?
Correction: as the statistician hero explains, 1952 is to be the year that all of humanity's behavioral cycles (long or short) peak, from fashion to sexuality to religion to bellicosity, etc. As the sinusoids sync up and the crises accumulate, the two escape the city just as...
Hell, go read it. Heinlein was a master of the craft, and this was hardly the first or last time he demonstrated a firm grasp of dramatic escalation. For those of you who don't mind
*SPOILERS*
- I will comment that there's something incredibly powerful about the heroes embracing through the last gasp of the solar system (after struggling through disaster after disaster, each more preposterous than the last) which comes across as neither cloying nor gratuitous nor nihilistic nor cruel. It is merely an acknowledgement of the indifferent grandeur of the universe, the callous horror of impermanence which Science Fiction, more than any other literary genre, is best suited to capture thanks to its transhuman, posthuman, inhuman scope.
The heroes, as in every other Heinlein story, really are hypercompetent suvivalists - they make it, beyond all reasonable expectation, as far as anything can be made. Does the lack of a happy ending detract in any way from their positive qualities as representatives of the human ape? Why do we so rarely appreciate competence in the face of futility?
Robert A. Heinlein - The Year of the Jackpot
I rarely find myself agreeing with public opinion, but I'll gladly echo one increasingly voiced sentiment: the year 2020 can go fuck itself with a rusty piece of rebar. Whether it's the weather, disease, economics, politics or just mundane insanity, it's getting harder finding any aspect of the world which hasn't gone cockeyed this year.
So in the spirit of this dispiriting time I'd like to recommend one of my favorite author's less known stories: The Year of the Jackpot, published in 1952 and underappreciated for the surprising punch its thirty-ish pages pack. Its heroes fit the usual Heinlein mold: a mathematically inclined, free thinking renaissance man accompanied by a cuddly yet plucky spitfire of a love interest, both bantering like a whole troupe of gangster movie wise guys, navigating a crisis by taking charge of their destinies.
Did I say "a" crisis?
Correction: as the statistician hero explains, 1952 is to be the year that all of humanity's behavioral cycles (long or short) peak, from fashion to sexuality to religion to bellicosity, etc. As the sinusoids sync up and the crises accumulate, the two escape the city just as...
Hell, go read it. Heinlein was a master of the craft, and this was hardly the first or last time he demonstrated a firm grasp of dramatic escalation. For those of you who don't mind
*SPOILERS*
- I will comment that there's something incredibly powerful about the heroes embracing through the last gasp of the solar system (after struggling through disaster after disaster, each more preposterous than the last) which comes across as neither cloying nor gratuitous nor nihilistic nor cruel. It is merely an acknowledgement of the indifferent grandeur of the universe, the callous horror of impermanence which Science Fiction, more than any other literary genre, is best suited to capture thanks to its transhuman, posthuman, inhuman scope.
The heroes, as in every other Heinlein story, really are hypercompetent suvivalists - they make it, beyond all reasonable expectation, as far as anything can be made. Does the lack of a happy ending detract in any way from their positive qualities as representatives of the human ape? Why do we so rarely appreciate competence in the face of futility?
Saturday, July 18, 2020
Do not give what is holy to the dogs
"Crooks and deceivers
Misled believers"
Billy Talent - Reckless Paradise
___________________________________________________
"Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea.""
Nietzsche - The Gay Science, 343
________________________________________________
"Life is a well of joy; but where the rabble drinks too, all wells are poisoned.
[...]
In their hands all fruit grows sweetish and overmellow; their glance makes the fruit tree a prey of the wind and withers its crown."
Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra, On the Rabble
_______________________________________________
"After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."
Nietzsche - The Gay Science, 108
_____________________________________________
We've heard it for the past two decades, from anti-theist speakers, from comedians, from political commentators: God lies at long last moribund. Sounds nice. Articles upon articles inform us yearly that religiosity is decreasing. Atheism and agnosticism, once trademarks of the "liberal elites" are gaining more and more traction among the populace at large, especially the younger ones.
ORLY? quoth the wolfe, enemy of his counterfeit kind.
Why are you so willing to take their word for it? Take a look at how these newly non-religious hoi polloi truly act... especially the younger ones. Note the beatification of nominal martyrs like George Floyd or Michael Brown. Marvel at the Edenic promises of the meek inheriting the Earth, of perfect enforced Bolshevik equality between arbitrary social groups, lions and lambs who, if not for their common hatred of straight white males, would (and soon will) be at each others' throats. Track art's descent into primitive, stilted iconography, none being permitted but in service to the scriptures of woke-again bigotry. Mark well the paroxysmal lurching of the mob against targets of convenience, scapegoats readily available in the persons of their neighbours of the wrong sex/race/sexuality. Hear the demands to always believe and never question the pronouncements of the faithful - for to ever question a woman or a black or a queer makes you an infidel. Witness the revival of the auto da fe, terrified individuals stammering public, emotional apologies for their "privilege" in being born into original sin as a filthy male / European / heterosexual - the privilege of cowering before a brainless mob howling for your blood, with a few being randomly ostracized at the stake to "put the others on notice" and teach them their place in the new social order.
This too shall pass. This counter-revolutionary Terror shall run its course, new Emperors rise by the dozen, the Stalins and Maos wage their ever bloodier civil wars to crown themselves in Messianic glory.
And then?
A decade from now, their feeble, fabricated afterthought of revolutionary fervor spent, the false premises and false promises of "actually existing" intersectionalism having grown too obvious for even the donkeys and workhorses to ignore, the petty demagogues of the new order having cut and run with their profits, where will millennials turn? Where will their fundamental belief in value without evidence and intrinsic states of grace lead them? When snowflakes' entire worldview apes religious irrationality in all but name, can anyone doubt the rising profitability of crucifix futures?
Misled believers"
Billy Talent - Reckless Paradise
___________________________________________________
"Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea.""
Nietzsche - The Gay Science, 343
________________________________________________
"Life is a well of joy; but where the rabble drinks too, all wells are poisoned.
[...]
In their hands all fruit grows sweetish and overmellow; their glance makes the fruit tree a prey of the wind and withers its crown."
Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra, On the Rabble
_______________________________________________
"After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we - we still have to vanquish his shadow, too."
Nietzsche - The Gay Science, 108
_____________________________________________
We've heard it for the past two decades, from anti-theist speakers, from comedians, from political commentators: God lies at long last moribund. Sounds nice. Articles upon articles inform us yearly that religiosity is decreasing. Atheism and agnosticism, once trademarks of the "liberal elites" are gaining more and more traction among the populace at large, especially the younger ones.
ORLY? quoth the wolfe, enemy of his counterfeit kind.
Why are you so willing to take their word for it? Take a look at how these newly non-religious hoi polloi truly act... especially the younger ones. Note the beatification of nominal martyrs like George Floyd or Michael Brown. Marvel at the Edenic promises of the meek inheriting the Earth, of perfect enforced Bolshevik equality between arbitrary social groups, lions and lambs who, if not for their common hatred of straight white males, would (and soon will) be at each others' throats. Track art's descent into primitive, stilted iconography, none being permitted but in service to the scriptures of woke-again bigotry. Mark well the paroxysmal lurching of the mob against targets of convenience, scapegoats readily available in the persons of their neighbours of the wrong sex/race/sexuality. Hear the demands to always believe and never question the pronouncements of the faithful - for to ever question a woman or a black or a queer makes you an infidel. Witness the revival of the auto da fe, terrified individuals stammering public, emotional apologies for their "privilege" in being born into original sin as a filthy male / European / heterosexual - the privilege of cowering before a brainless mob howling for your blood, with a few being randomly ostracized at the stake to "put the others on notice" and teach them their place in the new social order.
This too shall pass. This counter-revolutionary Terror shall run its course, new Emperors rise by the dozen, the Stalins and Maos wage their ever bloodier civil wars to crown themselves in Messianic glory.
And then?
A decade from now, their feeble, fabricated afterthought of revolutionary fervor spent, the false premises and false promises of "actually existing" intersectionalism having grown too obvious for even the donkeys and workhorses to ignore, the petty demagogues of the new order having cut and run with their profits, where will millennials turn? Where will their fundamental belief in value without evidence and intrinsic states of grace lead them? When snowflakes' entire worldview apes religious irrationality in all but name, can anyone doubt the rising profitability of crucifix futures?
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
The Corsair Demographic, Part 1: The Thirsting Eye of Enterprize
"In scattered groups upon the golden sand,
They game—carouse—converse—or whet the brand;
Select the arms—to each his blade assign,
And careless eye the blood that dims its shine:
Repair the boat—replace the helm or oar,
While others straggling muse along the shore;
For the wild bird the busy springes set,
Or spread beneath the sun the dripping net:
Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies,
With all the thirsting eye of Enterprize—
Tell o'er the tales of many a night of toil,
And marvel where they next shall seize a spoil"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
LEVEL UP!
What do pirates do? They pirate, right? We all know what that looks like.
Shoot a cannon, wave a sabre, drop a plank from one ship to the other - then walk it. Lub-landers get avast-ye'd and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Then there's another ship right behind it, right?
So you shoot the cannon again, wave the sabre, drop that same plank, lubber some more landers and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Luckily there's yet another ship right behind that one, so you shoot the cannon again, wave your sabre, drop the creaking plank, land ye some more avasts and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Good parrot.
Hey, look, there was another ship sitting right behind that one! What're the odds?
So you shoot the cannon again, wave that sabre like it's going out of style, drop the now splintering plank, avast lub some more landyes and the parrot goes *squawk*!
But wait, there's another fiscal year behind that!
So you reskin the same skeletons and goblins again, use the money you could've spent for development to fund an ad blitz instead, raise the level cap another ten levels, shuffle the overpowered cannons into overpowered sabres to give the illusion of activity, toss the plank overboard because customers complained such an advanced piece of equipment convoluted the ship-boarding experience into inaccessibility, and Blizzard Entertainment pockets another seven million of the rabble's dollars -
- and the parrot goes *squawk*!
LEVEL UP!
The more I think about it, this comparison of games to Romantic Age escapist tales of high seas adventure seems increasingly apt because only with mounting industrialization from 1800 onwards did escapist fiction as we now know it begin to take shape. In industrial society, one's effort is bought or sold as an ephemeral, inchoate abstraction, and vanishes into an incomprehensible maelstrom of parts and labor, services and products, digested and excreted by the untouchable pantheons of corporate profiteering and speculation. While I'm obviously maintaining a narrow focus here within much broader issues, one thing virtual worlds can offer (paradoxically enough) is tangibility. Your high score, your latest set of enchanted spaulders, your custom-painted spaceship, they're all <yours> by direct personal causality, in a way your grudgingly bestowed paycheck, mass-produced t-shirt or cookie-cutter house can't hope to match. Just as comfortably literate Londoners in Byron's time might envisage themselves setting the "busy springes" to catch their supper, games provide us with measurable results for our efforts, and persistent worlds can go a step beyond that, fabricating an interconnected community matching our instincts' demands for membership in roving packs or scores-strong villages - an opportunity to be THE butcher or THE baker or THE candlestick maker all engaged toward a common goal, instead of data entry drone #34729.
One (of the many) area(s) where MMOs in their dumbed-down WoW-clone interpretation have fallen short is in trying to distill our instinctive expectation of pack / tribe / village life to nominal, symbolic victory messages. There's more to pirate life than buckling one's swash; if Lord Byron could figure that out in 1814, lesser minds might reasonably be expected to catch up to him given a two century handicap. At some point someone has to restock the cannonballs, sharpen that sabre and net some actual food for everyone since you can't eat dubloons.
Note, this is not an argument for absurd, fiddling "realism" but for allowing players to differentiate themselves, to put the RPG back into MMOs, by being the pirate who sets the fishing nets or the pirate who spots new ships from the crow's nest. It feels good to have one's own identity, to fulfill a necessary role instead of simply being data entry pirate #34729. One can easily observe that in any class-based game everyone wants to play the damage dealer, the goal-getter racking up the highest kill count... but that's ignoring all us nobodies who happily consigned ourselves to the roles of back-row support casters or crafters or resource gatherers in multiplayer games other than WoW-clones. Despite the game industry ignoring us, we nonetheless, shockingly enough, continue to exist. The MMO genre's fixation on copycatting Diablo is as much a fabrication of developers eager to cut corners as it is a result of the majority of customers' idiocy and lack of imagination.
Nor is this a question of whether or not such games will still be centered on combat, on victory, on conquest - but of acknowledging that making a kill involves more than killing. Conrad had a whole crew behind him, and it's long past they got their due. Any MMO worth the title would include both a final goal and the miles of careful planning, deliberation and coordination beforehand to ensure success: supply chains, scouting, siege engineering, the works. You don't need to expand your customer base by attracting more wannabe pirate captains; they're a dime a dozen anyway. What the genre needs is capable underlings, villagers plying their crafts: Alfred the butler, the pirates who can look beyond mere brawling to eye a prize on the distant horizon.
For an MMO to build up that network of interdependence that would make it a virtual world, it needs to appeal not only to the portion of the playerbase which wants to charge across a plank to the enemy ship, but to those who take pride in crafting sturdy planks. Designers should be asking themselves: how does this product appeal to fans of city simulators, of grand strategy or survival or base building. That this will result in watering down said genres is inevitable, but then again it's not like MMO classes are anywhere near as complex as single-player role-playing games in the first place, and we're more than willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of convergence.
The parrot... can still go *squawk!* I've got nothing against that parrot - but we need to give it something to squawk about.
They game—carouse—converse—or whet the brand;
Select the arms—to each his blade assign,
And careless eye the blood that dims its shine:
Repair the boat—replace the helm or oar,
While others straggling muse along the shore;
For the wild bird the busy springes set,
Or spread beneath the sun the dripping net:
Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies,
With all the thirsting eye of Enterprize—
Tell o'er the tales of many a night of toil,
And marvel where they next shall seize a spoil"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
LEVEL UP!
What do pirates do? They pirate, right? We all know what that looks like.
Shoot a cannon, wave a sabre, drop a plank from one ship to the other - then walk it. Lub-landers get avast-ye'd and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Then there's another ship right behind it, right?
So you shoot the cannon again, wave the sabre, drop that same plank, lubber some more landers and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Luckily there's yet another ship right behind that one, so you shoot the cannon again, wave your sabre, drop the creaking plank, land ye some more avasts and the parrot goes *squawk*!
Good parrot.
Hey, look, there was another ship sitting right behind that one! What're the odds?
So you shoot the cannon again, wave that sabre like it's going out of style, drop the now splintering plank, avast lub some more landyes and the parrot goes *squawk*!
But wait, there's another fiscal year behind that!
So you reskin the same skeletons and goblins again, use the money you could've spent for development to fund an ad blitz instead, raise the level cap another ten levels, shuffle the overpowered cannons into overpowered sabres to give the illusion of activity, toss the plank overboard because customers complained such an advanced piece of equipment convoluted the ship-boarding experience into inaccessibility, and Blizzard Entertainment pockets another seven million of the rabble's dollars -
- and the parrot goes *squawk*!
LEVEL UP!
The more I think about it, this comparison of games to Romantic Age escapist tales of high seas adventure seems increasingly apt because only with mounting industrialization from 1800 onwards did escapist fiction as we now know it begin to take shape. In industrial society, one's effort is bought or sold as an ephemeral, inchoate abstraction, and vanishes into an incomprehensible maelstrom of parts and labor, services and products, digested and excreted by the untouchable pantheons of corporate profiteering and speculation. While I'm obviously maintaining a narrow focus here within much broader issues, one thing virtual worlds can offer (paradoxically enough) is tangibility. Your high score, your latest set of enchanted spaulders, your custom-painted spaceship, they're all <yours> by direct personal causality, in a way your grudgingly bestowed paycheck, mass-produced t-shirt or cookie-cutter house can't hope to match. Just as comfortably literate Londoners in Byron's time might envisage themselves setting the "busy springes" to catch their supper, games provide us with measurable results for our efforts, and persistent worlds can go a step beyond that, fabricating an interconnected community matching our instincts' demands for membership in roving packs or scores-strong villages - an opportunity to be THE butcher or THE baker or THE candlestick maker all engaged toward a common goal, instead of data entry drone #34729.
One (of the many) area(s) where MMOs in their dumbed-down WoW-clone interpretation have fallen short is in trying to distill our instinctive expectation of pack / tribe / village life to nominal, symbolic victory messages. There's more to pirate life than buckling one's swash; if Lord Byron could figure that out in 1814, lesser minds might reasonably be expected to catch up to him given a two century handicap. At some point someone has to restock the cannonballs, sharpen that sabre and net some actual food for everyone since you can't eat dubloons.
Note, this is not an argument for absurd, fiddling "realism" but for allowing players to differentiate themselves, to put the RPG back into MMOs, by being the pirate who sets the fishing nets or the pirate who spots new ships from the crow's nest. It feels good to have one's own identity, to fulfill a necessary role instead of simply being data entry pirate #34729. One can easily observe that in any class-based game everyone wants to play the damage dealer, the goal-getter racking up the highest kill count... but that's ignoring all us nobodies who happily consigned ourselves to the roles of back-row support casters or crafters or resource gatherers in multiplayer games other than WoW-clones. Despite the game industry ignoring us, we nonetheless, shockingly enough, continue to exist. The MMO genre's fixation on copycatting Diablo is as much a fabrication of developers eager to cut corners as it is a result of the majority of customers' idiocy and lack of imagination.
Nor is this a question of whether or not such games will still be centered on combat, on victory, on conquest - but of acknowledging that making a kill involves more than killing. Conrad had a whole crew behind him, and it's long past they got their due. Any MMO worth the title would include both a final goal and the miles of careful planning, deliberation and coordination beforehand to ensure success: supply chains, scouting, siege engineering, the works. You don't need to expand your customer base by attracting more wannabe pirate captains; they're a dime a dozen anyway. What the genre needs is capable underlings, villagers plying their crafts: Alfred the butler, the pirates who can look beyond mere brawling to eye a prize on the distant horizon.
For an MMO to build up that network of interdependence that would make it a virtual world, it needs to appeal not only to the portion of the playerbase which wants to charge across a plank to the enemy ship, but to those who take pride in crafting sturdy planks. Designers should be asking themselves: how does this product appeal to fans of city simulators, of grand strategy or survival or base building. That this will result in watering down said genres is inevitable, but then again it's not like MMO classes are anywhere near as complex as single-player role-playing games in the first place, and we're more than willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of convergence.
The parrot... can still go *squawk!* I've got nothing against that parrot - but we need to give it something to squawk about.
Saturday, July 11, 2020
The Corsair Demographic, Part 0: Not Thou, Luxurious Slave!
"Ours the wild life in tumult still to range
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Oh, who can tell? not thou, luxurious slave!
Whose soul would sicken o'er the heaving wave;
Not thou, vain lord of wantonness and ease!
Whom slumber soothes not—pleasure cannot please—"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
The Lord of the Rings Online is dead. Granted, this will come as news only to the troglodytic woses who still inhabit it and not to the noble Eldar who undertook their journey away from it in ages past. Well into its second decade now, LotRO has languished in MMOs' eventual and perpetual state of undeath for the last decade or so. The Rise of Isengard expansion revitalized it briefly in 2011 by some appropriately complex fights, but every patch after that slid farther downhill into meaningless reputation / gear farming via ever more oversimplified simplicity and ever lengthier timesinks. The litany of features removed or trivialized into irrelevance in order to make the game more "accessible" (to retards) makes one wonder what if anything at all could remain.
The answer of course is that despite having long since shed any value as a team RPG, LotRO's been largely kept afloat by its Tolkien license, profitable enough an intellectual property in its own right to justify the development team in striking out on its own after WB had had enough of milking the game as cross-promotional material for those vomitous Hobbit maladaptations.
I had hoped and cautiously predicted that the split would motivate the developers to better groom their now sole cash cow.
I also predicted that it would not matter, given that LotRO's long years of catering solely to cretins had hollowed it of the core of intelligent players who could actually have appreciated any improvements.
I was correct -- unfortunately on both counts.
The new instances feature more AoE attacks to make positioning matter, more adds which make crowd control at least marginally useful, shifting terrain, status effects dangerous enough to keep players from simply healing through everything. The writing, though terrible at times and wildly uneven, does a better job of not raping Tolkien's corpse than it used to. None of it matters; good or bad, you won't find any players above the intellect of a rodent with whom to give this ersatz multiplayer game an honest try. In the past seven or eight years the chat box of the four or five guilds I've tried has either been completely empty or followed a painfully predictable pattern.
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"welcome to the kin!"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"what's the best weapon?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hey, has anyone seen PlayerName lately?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hey, has anyone seen OtherPlayerName lately?"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hey, has anyone seen all those other players lately?"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
Other MMOs have established the same behavior pattern since the early 2000s: pablum and somnolence peppered with the occasional impulsive pro-social backstabbing. Not a single organized run or other purposeful action in sight. Once MMO gameplay was redefined as simplistic "kill ten rats" endless repetition, it turned out that marketing an entire genre to nothing but brain-dead filth gets you a customer base of exactly that. LotRO just makes a sadder example than most because its subject matter had, for the first few years, attracted a more intelligent nucleus of the right customers in addition to the usual subhuman chaff, attracted people who were in it for more than just the simplistic, repetitive nightly endorphin rush of giant flashing victory signs. Like EVE or City of Heroes, it was once a place where conversations about blue-shifting, bone tensile strength or the intersection of classic mythology and modern pop culture would simply spring up, casually, spontaneously.
And now?
The sole remaining activity of online game "communities" these days seems to be inviting each other and greeting each other, congratulating each other on existing and informing each other of what they had for lunch... and occasionally, awkwardly, visibly avoiding the question of why those other few, more interesting people have lost interest. You would never guess, looking at guild chat for several days on end, that there exists an actual game to be played somewhere beyond that chat box. Were it not for that bare glimmer of activity, you'd never guess the existence of players at all. They log in, chase their cake and log out again, pathetic addicts incapable of doing anything but mindlessly repeating the minimal actions they're prodded into by loot rewards. LotRO has scores of instances instantly available, but if you see more than three or four of them being played on a given week it's a miracle. The grim irony being that online games were originally where we went to escape human degeneracy; in a purposeful interplay of classes, gear and various maps we could find the antithesis of sitting in a cubicle stamping forms and replying to form-e-mails while listening to our coworker tell us about her cat and what she had for lunch and what her cat had for lunch.
For now, I'm just wondering: what would it take to rebuild the persistent virtual world mentality among a new crop of gamers? After all, it's 2020. Fifteen years have passed since graphic MMOs were strangled in their cradle by World of Warcraft, and a new generation is now growing into their high school and university mind-expanding period. They may wish to rebel against the previous generation's choice in "entertainment" - but where might they come by an alternate mindset?
I've talked at length here about the sort of world an MMO should be, but less about the necessary mentality of those who would inhabit it. To seek the antithesis of mindlessly repetitive instant gratification, bringing back the nineties just won't be enough. We have to go farther back, much farther, beyond the internet, beyond dungeons, dragons and Tolkien, to the era which defined our concept of escapist fantasies marketed to polite urbane audiences: to Romanticism. So, in order to wrap my head around what kind of audience would want to be plot devices instead of heroes I'm going to build the next three or four posts on this topic around lines from Byron's immortal Corsair... or mostly from the scene-setting first canto, and not from the bulk of Conrad's largely tedious personalized palpitations.
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Oh, who can tell? not thou, luxurious slave!
Whose soul would sicken o'er the heaving wave;
Not thou, vain lord of wantonness and ease!
Whom slumber soothes not—pleasure cannot please—"
Lord Byron - The Corsair
The Lord of the Rings Online is dead. Granted, this will come as news only to the troglodytic woses who still inhabit it and not to the noble Eldar who undertook their journey away from it in ages past. Well into its second decade now, LotRO has languished in MMOs' eventual and perpetual state of undeath for the last decade or so. The Rise of Isengard expansion revitalized it briefly in 2011 by some appropriately complex fights, but every patch after that slid farther downhill into meaningless reputation / gear farming via ever more oversimplified simplicity and ever lengthier timesinks. The litany of features removed or trivialized into irrelevance in order to make the game more "accessible" (to retards) makes one wonder what if anything at all could remain.
The answer of course is that despite having long since shed any value as a team RPG, LotRO's been largely kept afloat by its Tolkien license, profitable enough an intellectual property in its own right to justify the development team in striking out on its own after WB had had enough of milking the game as cross-promotional material for those vomitous Hobbit maladaptations.
I had hoped and cautiously predicted that the split would motivate the developers to better groom their now sole cash cow.
I also predicted that it would not matter, given that LotRO's long years of catering solely to cretins had hollowed it of the core of intelligent players who could actually have appreciated any improvements.
I was correct -- unfortunately on both counts.
The new instances feature more AoE attacks to make positioning matter, more adds which make crowd control at least marginally useful, shifting terrain, status effects dangerous enough to keep players from simply healing through everything. The writing, though terrible at times and wildly uneven, does a better job of not raping Tolkien's corpse than it used to. None of it matters; good or bad, you won't find any players above the intellect of a rodent with whom to give this ersatz multiplayer game an honest try. In the past seven or eight years the chat box of the four or five guilds I've tried has either been completely empty or followed a painfully predictable pattern.
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"welcome to the kin!"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"what's the best weapon?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hey, has anyone seen PlayerName lately?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hey, has anyone seen OtherPlayerName lately?"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hey, has anyone seen all those other players lately?"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
Other MMOs have established the same behavior pattern since the early 2000s: pablum and somnolence peppered with the occasional impulsive pro-social backstabbing. Not a single organized run or other purposeful action in sight. Once MMO gameplay was redefined as simplistic "kill ten rats" endless repetition, it turned out that marketing an entire genre to nothing but brain-dead filth gets you a customer base of exactly that. LotRO just makes a sadder example than most because its subject matter had, for the first few years, attracted a more intelligent nucleus of the right customers in addition to the usual subhuman chaff, attracted people who were in it for more than just the simplistic, repetitive nightly endorphin rush of giant flashing victory signs. Like EVE or City of Heroes, it was once a place where conversations about blue-shifting, bone tensile strength or the intersection of classic mythology and modern pop culture would simply spring up, casually, spontaneously.
And now?
The sole remaining activity of online game "communities" these days seems to be inviting each other and greeting each other, congratulating each other on existing and informing each other of what they had for lunch... and occasionally, awkwardly, visibly avoiding the question of why those other few, more interesting people have lost interest. You would never guess, looking at guild chat for several days on end, that there exists an actual game to be played somewhere beyond that chat box. Were it not for that bare glimmer of activity, you'd never guess the existence of players at all. They log in, chase their cake and log out again, pathetic addicts incapable of doing anything but mindlessly repeating the minimal actions they're prodded into by loot rewards. LotRO has scores of instances instantly available, but if you see more than three or four of them being played on a given week it's a miracle. The grim irony being that online games were originally where we went to escape human degeneracy; in a purposeful interplay of classes, gear and various maps we could find the antithesis of sitting in a cubicle stamping forms and replying to form-e-mails while listening to our coworker tell us about her cat and what she had for lunch and what her cat had for lunch.
For now, I'm just wondering: what would it take to rebuild the persistent virtual world mentality among a new crop of gamers? After all, it's 2020. Fifteen years have passed since graphic MMOs were strangled in their cradle by World of Warcraft, and a new generation is now growing into their high school and university mind-expanding period. They may wish to rebel against the previous generation's choice in "entertainment" - but where might they come by an alternate mindset?
I've talked at length here about the sort of world an MMO should be, but less about the necessary mentality of those who would inhabit it. To seek the antithesis of mindlessly repetitive instant gratification, bringing back the nineties just won't be enough. We have to go farther back, much farther, beyond the internet, beyond dungeons, dragons and Tolkien, to the era which defined our concept of escapist fantasies marketed to polite urbane audiences: to Romanticism. So, in order to wrap my head around what kind of audience would want to be plot devices instead of heroes I'm going to build the next three or four posts on this topic around lines from Byron's immortal Corsair... or mostly from the scene-setting first canto, and not from the bulk of Conrad's largely tedious personalized palpitations.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Rosemary's Litter
Adventists have been crying wolf for almost two centuries now. Their splinter of a splinter group, the Branch Davidians, apparently thought Jesus would need assault rifles to enrapture the world... or somesuch nonesuch.
Pentecostals worship the holy olive and the healing power of fondling. Their own splinter of a splinter group somehow mixed all of that with Communism and the sermonizing style of a thoroughly profiteering self-proclaimed Yahweh incarnate who thought hotels made better churches. Then they moved to South America. The good communistalistians of Jonestown seem to have held crossbows in equal esteem to rifles. Also, their version of communion wine had a real kick to it.
The Heaven's Gate cult was partly inspired by Theosophy (a.k.a "occult science" (a.k.a. unknown knowledge (a.k.a. huh?!?))) and partly by Biblical prophecy and partly by science fiction: a Texan couple proclaimed themselves the second coming of Jesus, and also his witnesses, and messengers of extraterrestrials, and also a descendant of Jesus... plus God the daddy-o, who just happened to currently be incarnated as a woman (who ended up dying of liver cancer (not that it stopped her followers))... and they had also both metamorphosed into post-human beings (though apparently not cancer-proof ones (not that it stopped their followers))... and also they would die and be resurrected... aboard a spaceship... so that everyone could witness the second coming (from Earth? aboard the spaceship?) and they registered a website (in eye-popping technicolor, as any self-respecting post-human metamorphosed extraterrestrial pre-re-incarnations of Jesus and Yahweh would, natch!) until in 1996 some three dozen of their followers finally rode a comet into the history books.
Jews for Jesus... no, fuck it, ain't touchin' that one. Can't have this post getting too crazy now.
Human irrationality can latch onto any number of inspirations: fiction novels by Robert Heinlein, Communism's Messianic promises of proletarian paradises, the American fetish for firearms, a laughable X-Men grade misinterpretation of mutation and evolution, take your pick. However, the most common thread by several orders of magnitude in every human society, across all social strata, the undisputed champion of insanity and especially mass insanity is religious faith. Every religion* will try to disown such tragicomic spin-offs of their creeds as mere accidents, focusing on their points of divergence as proof that outside influences had corrupted their faith's orthodoxy. While it can be fascinating to track the various spices by which the faithful of all faiths season their cretinism, nothing eclipses blind faith in the supernatural in explicitly trumpeting the virtue of irrationality for its own sake. Faith. The observation that such insanity spreads heterogenously from a central point, in each, every and all directions, renders that center no less central. How far would any of them get if the entire populace were not indoctrinated, from birth, into anti-rational belief in supernatural forces?
______________________________________________________
* Remember these examples constitute an infinitesimal sample, albeit famous in the United States, of the hundreds of staggeringly crazy religious splinter groups from the past centuries across the world, across all faiths -- and that's not even scratching the core lunacy of mainstream communicable mental diseases.
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