Savoy Universalis, Lae'Zel Barlass, and Postprescient Gaming

"Our bodies were laid out evenly for fifteen yards
Well, two feet above each of our heads was a fly trapped in a jar
Well, I hadn't noticed, but the people really noticed
That they really didn't want us around

So every single one of us fed the ground"

 

Modest Mouse - Fly Trapped in a Jar

 

 

Like many others, I've praised V:tM-Bloodlines' Malkavian playthrough for its highly entertaining "insane" dialogues. You'd barely know what you're saying half the time. Of course, that worked in large part because Malk changes remained mostly cosmetic. Your quests and rewards were still the same as other clans, with even the same dialogue options, merely rewritten. Your quest log still gave straightforward instructions. You didn't gain or lose XP by arguing with a stop sign (no matter how much hardcore roleplayers might've wanted that.) And that's a good thing. Games are supposed to be first and foremost: playable! If your mission journal reads "egrets egress regrets ingrate in great Belgrade" which you're expected to interpret as "bring a tire iron to The Last Round within five minutes or your head explodes" you bought a poorly designed game.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I had some fun repeatedly losing at Old World yesterday, usually either via bear-less barbarians or thusly:

 

On my settings (middle diff., large map, 5 civs) you either stake out three city sites during the initial land grab or you've likely lost due to the fixed number of cities on the map. You can sometimes make up the difference mid-game depending on the tribal sites near you, but for my own part I'm pretty quick to hit the "new map" button if I stumble through the fog of war only to find those damn gift-bearing greeks've bird-dogged one of my intended holes.

I'd switched over to Old World for a bit after getting frustrated with Europa Universalis 4. After my first impression of basic mechanics as a relatively simple tribe, I jumped into European politics. Avoiding the superpowers and having already played Switzerland, Milan, Venice, Genoa and Naples in EU3, I settled upon Savoy, medium-sized and not exceptionally profitable but with some potentially excellent positioning. It also starts with one little ally and two little vassals... one of which is scripted as secessionist:

I honestly don't know what happens going forth if you surrender to Geneva's demands, as losing two of my starting provinces three years into the game is a non-starter. Might as well pick a smaller faction right out the gate rather than concede a third of my territory for the same effect. I do know that refusing renders Geneva impossible to integrate anyway, as other nations immediately rush to support its independence, causing a loss in three of five attempts so far.

EU3 did have a few scripted/inevitable events, usually slow, major, sweeping changes affecting half the factions, like the Protestant Reformation or discovery of the New World. They're cropping up far more frequently in EU4, and with more immediate impact. The effect so far is that I can't plan ahead not knowing how borders will shift or what numeric penalties I'll incur due to big or small decisions like Genevan separatism, the pope at Avignon, France immediately annexing Provence every single game, Italian secession from the Holy Roman Empire or The Italian Wars, prompting a restart every time I adjust my strat only to get another piano dropped on me. These don't feel like delightful new surprises spicing up the game experience so much as "gotcha" moments where a GM reasserts supremacy over players.

I've discussed this problem several times before, and it usually boils down to what am I getting in return for the information being withheld? Because too often all you get is getting to start over so the developer can pad out those marketing-mandated campaign length or player/game hour counts. This is actually a bigger issue in RPGs (see losing Erik to the Tremere in V:tM- Redemption for a classic old example, or losing your army at the end of Act 3 in Wrath of the Righteous for a more recent one) especially as most of them now try to duplicate The Elder Scrolls' winning compromise between story and sandbox, mandating the player cheat and look up exactly when to stall the story to sandbox up some XP and gear before moving forward. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, everyone will tell you not to meet the lordling for his dawn hunting trip until after you've quested your way around. You not only need to learn to fight before you move on with your epic ascension to greatness, but the trip itself is time-consuming, in a game where time means hunger, sleep and potentially other events' expiration.

Baldur's Gate 3 though, following in D:OS2's footsteps, is the worst offender I've seen recently, making it painfully obvious at every step that you're expected to know all of the fights beforehand, whether because quests have time-dependent effects or to plan out their relative difficulty for your party's level, or just to know what items you'll need walking through various doors.

- I failed to use either Lump's horn or the golem bell simply for never knowing when there would or wouldn't be one more fight up ahead

- I'd saved brains in jars from the start thinking they might be useful at some point, but when I found the brain reader machine the brains in question were still in my stash back at camp, since nothing indicates it's coming up

- Minthara! - her character arc is so poorly plotted and counterintuitive that there's basically no way to navigate it without cheating and looking up outcomes beforehand

- I've constantly had to reload fights due to the invidual character inventories and mountains of potentially useful trash loot (like brain jars) making it impossible to keep the right potion or arrow handy

- clicking on the newspaper editor instantly throws you out of the building and puts a timer on the quest

- it's pointless to try escaping the prison quietly in the Shadowlands, because all guards go on alert after a few steps anyway, and even rushing to the boat keeps you locked there in combat until they arrive

- the underwater jailbreak:

Lae'Zel: fast, strong, and a durn good door in a pinch

You get five rounds to reach along four corridors with your party of four and get NPCs back out. OK... it can be done with some planning and potions. But, wait, never mind, screw your plan. What looks to be an ankle-deep puddle turns out to spawn shark monsters every round. A few extra gratuitous reloads tacked on, courtesy of "fuck you"

- destroying one of the hag's healing shrooms summons her and throws you into the fight. Ironically this seems a mechanic to prevent players from using foreknowledge to make the fight easier, but just ends up forcing a reload for anyone including the shrooms in general trap-sweeping.

And on and on and on. It would in fact be harder to find quests or locations in BG3 where you're not somehow penalized with a reload or five for lacking foreknowledge of scripted events. THAT is why the game takes 200 hours.

Returning to our Savoyard muttons, it was easier for EU3 to stand out back in 2007 when its noteworthy competition merely came from the increasingly stagnant and dumbed down Civilization series. Not only are there far more 4X and other strategy titles around, but Paradox itself has diversified with Stellaris and now publishing Age of Wonders. Historical accuracy is EU4's most obvious competitive edge, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised they've been playing it up.

But part of EU3's charm was making ridiculous things happen (Catholic Shahs colonizing Australia and such-like) and this is why you have multiple historical start points, picking where you want history to diverge. The less divergence you allow, the less what you're playing feels like a game and the more it feels like a railroaded RPG plot. As I noted about one obscure Ancient Egypt edutaiment game, the didactic condescension of putting a student through fixed paces gives you the worst of both worlds, dictating priorities while randomizing success.

 

My first thought on seeing Savoy's Geneva independence event was that obviously I'm supposed to be playing Switzerland. Or really, just picking any of the historical "winners" since I now know that aside from starting stats, they will also benefit from GM favoritism during later events. The fact EU now proudly displays a top score counter only reinforces this impression as NOT playing for the high score was one of its previous selling points.

Having early city sites you didn't know exist sniped in Old World is infuriating and time-wasting, but at least can be compensated via prioritizing exploration and yields counterbalancing gameplay pay-offs. First off, it lessens the impact of AI plopping down endless cities in moronic spots. Second, combined with a map generator capable of avoiding both clumping and homogenization, it tends to focus expansion.

Around turn 100 of 200, the Greeks (blue) and I (green) finally polished off the last tribal settlements between our territories, only to discover the entire northwest quarter of the map was tribal land consisting of eight more city sites, more than any empire in existence. This new world rapidly hosted a mid-game land rush with the Persians (red) joining in to nab the nearest one across the gulf.

But what am I getting for the scripted surprises in EU4 or BG3, aside from a chance to restart the campaign, mash the Quick Load button or spend hours reading the wiki to cheat my way through predestined winner/loser options? Even in V:tM-Bloodlines, the Nosferatu sewer mssion gets remembered as one of the game's low points largely because you're not warned how goddamn LONG it is before going in... but at least your quest log didn't send you to Kuala Lumpur when the objective's under Hollywood. At least you're not told seven provinces when they turn into five.

 

Generally speaking, in a game you should be expected to know the rules, not the future.

Extraneous Prometheus

Gods live, gods die. A god dies for his chosen people, another kills them with a flood. It’s a god eat God world. They rise and fall along with the dreamers who give them birth. Kill an ape in the name of one god and ten more will be born in the name of another.

We live and die as reflections of our own dreams, as if the dreams of some long-ago night are all we can see each morning. We fear the uncertain night within us and throw a myriad points of light into the sky to name them after all the hopes and fears we wish we had the courage to recognize as our own. A million lights are not enough to protect us from our own nature. It was never the stars that named us.

Astarte wanes as Diana waxes and Lucifer outshines them both with a brief flame of hubris. And we, the shadows on the ground, dream flame after flame to give ourselves a shape; feverishly conjure up light and fire to give familiar boundaries to the limitless darkness we embody.

Let no more fires be born. Let the shades grow beyond their ancient shapes and let the heat they would put in the fires of heaven burn between them instead. Let there be darkness, for only when the boundaries these lights, our dream progeny, have placed upon us are allowed to melt away, then can we reach each other and learn that the flame of thought burns hotter in uncertain darkness than in the magnificent lying promises of the light.

__________________________________________

- by me in my late teens

The tooth fairy called; she wants her delusions back

"Don't go over the edge

You'll make a big mistake"

 

Gorillaz - Don't Get Lost In Heaven

 

 

My recent reminiscence about learning the concept of mortality was kicked off by a blog post I found elsewhere, in which the writer claims he won't yet be telling his NINE year old son that Santa Claus isn't real. Also, after talking it over with the missus, it was decided to wait several more years, and even then hedge by saying that our shared human myths are somehow "real" even if they're not "real"-"real" and I'm sorry, you lost me several moronic details ago. There's no point in specifying the blog itself, since you run into this "Yes, Virginia" crap every Christmas.

Am I the only one thinking it can't possibly be possible for a nine year old in the internet age to still think Santa's real? Unless he was raised in a barrel or something. I mean, I sussed out the Santa myth when I was four to five years old, and forget internet, we barely had television. I like to think I'm just that smart, but my parents blame my uncle the history major, whose reprisal of the role supposedly would've gotten him booed offstage in any grade-school play in history. Same parents, when I speculated the nine-year-old referenced above might be going along with the act to please his family, scoffed and provided the more parentally savvy interpretation: "oh please, kid's in it for the presents." But be it a folie a deux or a folie a dosh, you are either emotionally blackmailing or actively bribing your child to lie. For years on end. To the people closest to him. Helluva life lesson.

Without bothering to delve the intellectual harm thus caused (since truth underpins all interpretation and action) for me it felt emotionaly hurtful even dragging it out to five years old when I finally worked up the nerve to officially pull the proverbial beard. I'd figured it out, but was continually prompted to look forward to Santa's visit, and I couldn't figure out why my parents had lied to me or were still pretending I didn't know. Were father and mother making fun of me? Testament to my patchwork theory of mind, it did not occur to me at that age that not everyone had been notified of all my conclusions. (Come to think of it, I still struggle with that.)

But okay, assuming, for the sake of argument, even if - IF! - somehow, it were possible to drag the charade out ten whole years, you're not doing the child any damn favors on the playground! You're just condemning your progeny to be endlessly mocked and slapped around by all the other sadistic little monsters when word gets out, and after getting the Santa news broken to him far less gently than you would do it. And for what? Ignorance is not innocence.

As for the mass delusional "we make myths real" angle, that's an observation, not an aspiration, a diagnosis of mental disease and not a treatment. Awareness of mythopoesis is critical, but precisely to check that tendency in ourselves, not to indulge it to breed more gullibility.

 

And wait, are we still pretending this is about the child? Will your spawn fail to... imagine... things... if it is not driven by your parental authority to participate in a big lie? Your Little Prince can look out the car window and see a new Narnia, Lilliput or Chocolate Factory in every coffee shop and bus stop, and you want to pretend your lack of participation will dam that nigh-infinite flood? Please. You're not providing anything to your child by playing at Santa. You're just enlisting it in your own power-trip over itself, your own delusion of control over its imagination, its thoughts, its existence.

I'm not projecting, you're projecting, shut up!

Einundzwanzig: hier kommt die sonne

The winter solstice is the time of year when your particular hemisphere is tilted the maximum angle opposite the sun across the plane of the ecliptic.

...

Sorry, I was trying to bait Neil deGrasse Tyson into materializing to correct me on whatever random astronomy factoid I assume I bungled. Maybe I have to say it three times in front of a mirror?

 

Anyhoo, that whole sun:

 

("and waaaash awaaayy the raain...")*

I don't remember ever taking much notice of the summer solstice, but the winter one has finality. Used to mean a big midwinter feast to put some meat on your bones so you can pull through to the spring thaw. Last chance to avoid a lean, agonizing death, get it while it's hot. Now it means a bigger feast to put some fat on your fat so you can be pulled by a motorized scooter. But of course the memento mori aspect is rooted more fundamentally in the turning of yet another year. Even the declining, gloomy period is now ending. Even the waning has ceased. You find yourself shrinking, alone, against the stillness of the long night.

I became conscious of mortality at four. My mother was reading me a comic book about a mischievous ghost pranking some pirates, and I suddenly blind-sided her with the question "what's a ghost?" That segued to death. She stammered and hesitated and hedged a bit and I don't quite remember her answer because I was soon bawling my eyes out at the thought of nonexistence, with her backpedalling and struggling to work damage control with talk about maybe it's not the end and how I'll have a long, rich, full life and I'll have lots of fun and friends and see lots of movies. The line about seeing lots of movies stuck with me; even to a kindergardener it sounded like desperate reaching. By that point she must've been in full-on "holy shit I broke the kid!" panic mode.

But it's not like you can fixate on any thoughts at that age even if you want to, so it merely became a recurring, nagging nail in my skull. Besides, decades of life ahead of you sound like an inconceivable infinity anyway when you're young. Interestingly it did not cause me to question religion. For about five years afterwards I tread the cognitive dissonance: that my existence would end, and also all that stuff in my glossy, colorful children's bible about heaven and hell was true.

For years afterwards, I'd spontaneously recapitulate my struggle to wrap my head around the infinity of spacetime stretching around my mortality. As many have described, I'd lie in bed imagining death, stillness, feeling my breaths, counting heartbeats, acutely aware of the pause between them, wondering when the next breath will start and when it finally won't, holding my breath and trying to control it. (On the plus side, when I took a self-defense class which ended with short relaxation/meditation sessions the controlled breathing exercises came easy to me. Ditto for swimming.) The most marking experience came only a few times, that terrifying impression when lying still in the darkness that you are continually shrinking away from everything in all directions, all existence receding from you at all angles. I never discussed this with my parents after the incident with the comic book ghost. A seven-year-old's existential angst just didn't seem like the sort of topic one can politely bring up with one's progenitors. It is not the done thing.

By the time I ditched supernatural hocus-pocus I was ten to twelve years old, just in time to transition to adolescence and a healthy (if annoying to everyone around me) appreciation for nihilism. Nihilism gets a bad rap. As means of wiping the proverbial slate it is developmentally necessary, a level foundation upon which to construct a personal interpretation. Or maybe going through a distinct nihilistic stage is not strictly necessary, except that we're born into so much controlling garbage (religion, nationalism, romance, etc.) that our society imposes such a break with imposed morality upon any capable mind. Maybe a saner world would allow for a smoother transition. A world in which we'd know how to answer a four-year-old's questions.

The extent to which any of us settle such conflicts is... debatable. Unfortunately, clutching at the falsely advertised immortality of fame meshes too well with our instinctive social ape need for validation and recognition from others of our species as markers of in-group acceptance and societal rank. And it is false. Think about it: how much do you actually know about Neil deGrasse Tyson? None of it, whether quote or video, is a representation of his neural pattern, the self. You cannot continue through fame. You fabricate a false image, and die like everyone else. I quoted Soundgarden earlier. I paraphrased Rammstein. Words attributed to a word, of which I could look up some compositing names, none of whom I'd know from Adam.

Then there's vicarity, an example of which prompted this post, overhearing someone brag about buying a movie replica complete with stamped logo. That last part is apparently important. I do own trinkets, tend in fact to buy one as keepsake on any trip. Dime-a-dozen stuff. Tiny figurines, usually. Sometimes fossils. My own little glass and plastic and wood and stone and bone menagerie. But their importance is tied to my memories of the trip taken, memetic buttresses to the internal state, not externalizing to the mass market. Maybe I should get a tattoo of the symbol of torment. That'd show you all I missed the point of that story.

 

Which brings us finally to influence. Change the world. Save the world. Fuck everyone in the world. Do something that matters. But if you seek immortality by the ripple effect of your actions, then tyranny must be your greatest aim. There is no greater influence than constraint unto effacement, the forceful reshaping of others' existence onto your template. As for creativity, for most of history it's been limited by access to the means of preservation, to ink and paper and shelf space, to marble and tempera. Digitization has done wonders in this regard, expecially for the written word, only to substitute for it the limitations of the attention economy, the tyranny of promotion, the absolutist demand for the world's gaze to "like and subscribe" or at least alight onto my graven images and no other minds before me. Thou art god.

Of course the internet also gives freedom from that game, should you take it. Throw your thoughts out there and if the world will not listen, well, that's its business. You can't save the idiots from themselves, and it would be criminal to try.

The long night comes, regardless.

 

____________________________________________

 

* Photo actually taken during an eclipse in 2017.

I'm not temporizing, you're temporizing, shut up!

I'm not repetitive, you're repetitive, shut up!

I'm not crazy, you're crazy, shut up!

My Life as a Drowid, 3: Blood and Souls!

"I won't give again

Because she takes so often"

 

Plumb - Manic

____________________________________________________

 

After a grueling journey, we stride into the city as champions - a bit of creative journalistic editing withstanding. The Shadowlands lie behind us, shadowed still. The planestouched thing we dug from the depths beneath them lingers now in my camp, all jeering condescension, a repudiation of ambition. I do not shrink at robbing the darkness of its prize, but what use said prize to fall to the light and not to myself?

 

I worry for the changes in my companions. If the priestess will so readily turn her hair shirt between goddesses, what is her devotion worth in the coming struggle? At least the gith reaffirms her link to her kind, and we've tasted enough revolutions below to know the figurehead shapes not the vessel driving it forth. The daywalking nightwalker... it was hard enough to convince him not to chain himself to mastery over the hollow flittering parasites among which he was whelped. Had he taken such power over the minds of others to himself, I should have found myself forced to rest him alongside the rotting husk of his sire.

As for the vermin which has taken residence within my skull, the less said the better, the less thought the better, the less prepared the better. Nature will not long suffer this unnatural intrusion. Hah. And the jumped up gutter trash of this barren stone hive dare speak to me of chaos?

 

 

Fool girl. More fool for your petty flimflammery. Chaos is not a driving hunger in service to the end, not a rabid maw which does not know itself, not a slave to the lower planes. It is cold freedom, a howling loneliness, a mote in the tempest, center of the centerless, not death but the shifting infinity which encompasses it, and it will be my pleasure to correct your definitions, preening little prat.

______________________________________________________

 

So, here we are in Act 3, decidedly better fleshed out than Act 2. I have both good and bad things to say about it, but for now let's segue into the alignment issue from a problem shared by both Larian with its Diablo-clone 'action' game roots, and Dungeons and Dragons with its over-reliance on over-randomization: defining 'adventure' as dropping pianos on the player. Ok, let's take it slow, just follow me on down to the beach and OMG SHARKS!

Roll for initiative.

Or just reload.

Surprises can feel rewarding where they grow organically out of other game elements, but you're perfectly justified calling bullshit on a GM substituting ambushes out of nowhere for actual narrative causality. The sharkoids there aren't a random encounter. They're a scripted pre-amble to your adventure in the depths. Problems:

1) Just as in Original Sin 2, your playthrough is gratuitously lengthened by having to save and reload constantly to map out every zone's 'random' encounters and their difficulties, to take them on in a convenient order, especially since BG3 contains some time-dependent quests you're not warned about.

2) Jump scares get shelved among the lowest storytelling gimmicks with good cause. They're not scary past the "jump" part. A smatter of druidic crowd control trivialized the encounter, with the only concern being the attrition thus incurred making me wonder whether to reload and skip it for another day. You're not thrilling me with a novel challenge. You're just forcing metagaming.

 

The many, many such examples of trial and error misdefining surprises and predictability always bring me back to the law/chaos axis. I have to wonder why BG3 lacks official alignments, when almost every decision in your entire campaign still revolves around trite little good vs. evil juxtapositions. The player is simply not permitted to engage with those definitions knowingly and actively.

If you kept the mutt from Act 1 around your camp, you get a chance to either:

Lawful Evil: Hand him over to the mean lady who beats puppies, but officially owns him.

Chaotic Good: Refuse, and run her off for a bonus to leave the other dogs with a kinder master.

At least the druid dialogue option allows for obliquely acknowledging the other issue of freedom and keeping animals caged, even if it is lost among the more maudlin heartstring-tugging about beaten puppies. (If you have a dog, you're probably aware it'd rather be beaten than prevented from participating in the life of the pack.) But the law/chaos issue is as usual obfuscated by hand-wringing over playing nice.

 

I've also polished off the first companion quest, which happened to be Astarion's and also happened to end in both a satisfying boss fight and some surprisingly good dialogues and cutscenes. I've been replaying it from a few angles just to see it again. (And not just for the gratuitous vamp titties.)

Seriously, good work writers, animators and Astarion's voice actor!

(Also, cute Interview shout-out with the "known you for two hundred years" line.)

But again, I have to note your moral quandary gets framed almost exclusively in terms of whether or not to commit mass murder. Allow me to file a complaint on the grounds of vampiric mesmerism. In a setting already choked with illithids, detect thoughts, etc. allowing the ascension to proceed would create yet another mind controlling abomination erasing independent thought with every glance. At least if you do try to take a middle road and wash your hands of the whole deal, some writer did think to frame the issue in terms of enslaving oneself to the role of mastery, which is more thought than most game designers would put into things, but it's a bit 'blink and you missed it' for my tastes. Free will should have been the central issue here, not murder.

You run into a more annoying example down on the docks.

I'd've done it myself but rather not waste a fireball

Volo's been strapped to some gunpowder barrels by an angry mob. That's him getting nuked into oblivion to the right of the explosion. Good riddens. But the perfunctory presentation of the encounter bugs me. It's not a roleplaying choice. There is zero reward for not helping him. The angry mob is even led by a sinister cultist with darkened eyes, because only the most evil would ever want to hurt lovable old Volo. Even your rather grim companions like Astarion and Lae'zel encourage you to save him, with my fellow drow Minthara being the only one keeping a head on her shoulders.

Why?

The lynch mob was incensed by something he said, and your dialogue options try to frame this as a free speech issue without any details as to what was said. But there's a difference between free speech and lying, of which Volo is canonically, infinitely guilty at every single turn, day by day and year by year, interpersonally and in print. Moreover, his behavior within my adventuring party has repeatedly demonstrated him nothing but a liability, and I'm perfectly within my rights not to throw more good spell slots after bad saving this idiot from his own idiocy. Don't get between a fool and his folly as the saying goes.

In fact I looked up why anyone would save him, and it's apparently for the hefty buff he provides in the endgame, making this another example of forcing metagaming, dependent on foreknowledge of the campaign.

I've addressed this before in the case of Jan vs. Grobnar, and it recalls a particular episode of ST:TNG, Cost of Living, where we're expected to side with Lwaxana Troi getting engaged over the internet, then publicly humiliating her groom because she finds him boring, derailing the lives of half the cast so she can show off, all while using a thousand-person starship as her personal taxi. Instead of a free spirit, attention-whoring only indicates parasitic powermongering. Bye-bye, Volo, I'm with the cultist on this one. Boom. I'll do without the buff.

Which brings us back to alignments, because Volo is canonically Chaotic Good. Every game which includes a chaotic character will nine times out of ten pigeonhole it as a clueless motormouth spouting random gibberish, turning the alignment of personal freedom into single-note utterly predictable one-trick ponies rehashing Alice in Wonderland.

Chaos =/= goofy.

Even the rightly celebrated Planescape: Torment got this wrong with more characters than not. The inspiration for Law/Chaos conflict in D&D (and RPGs by extension) was Elric, a wandering, morose, haunted, cursed hero with at best a dry sense of humor, if any. Chaos is walking away from a house of horrors, ending a powermonger while refusing to become one yourself. It's speaking freely without trying to make others listen. It's thousands of other possible characters beyond clowns or killer clowns. Not that you could tell from game scripts.

Friday

"People who are busy and happy don't write diaries; they are too busy living."

We begin with a spy thriller in medias res, segue into a series of mildly suggestive quasi-sexual encounters, fly on supersonic jets, praise cats, sneak across some borders, more canoodling, some vague kvetching about economics and multiple currencies, win a lottery, maybe get back to that spy stuff at some point...? Maybe. Oh, and clairvoyance. Spaceships! And did we mention genetic engineering? Lots of punching, at any rate. Plus a space elevator! In bed!

I had avoided Heinlein's Friday until now because his last few books (excepting the excellent Job) were a bit dodgy, and the basic premise of "sexy superspy" seemed too blatantly riding the Cold War spy thriller craze. Comments from people who had read it (like "I don't know what he was trying with Friday") certainly didn't help, and pretty much any review will comment on its disjointed lack of narrative.

 

After a full read, I would guess that in format, Heinlein was likely emulating picaresque novels, a style influential yet largely outgrown by modern storytelling and our greater awareness of causality and plot progression. Compounding that, some of the heroine's convenient lucky breaks (admitted as such toward the end) only make sense as contrivances to fit Friday into Heinlein's latter-career "world as myth" books, as interventions by his time traveler brigade. Also, you can see the ending's general shape forty pages into a novel pushing four hundred, and though a good enough ending, it only emphasizes the gratuitously circuitous route to reach it.

 

You're left with the title character herself to reflect on those by-roads' significance, but she simply does not change enough, does not learn enough, does not contemplate enough to lend the events relevance. The whole point of a picaresque protagonist as I understand it is watching a clever, relatable yet somewhat contemptible bottomfeeder slither through society's cracks, and this simply does not mesh with Heinlein's general style, in which heroes simply KNOW BETTER THAN YOU and aren't afraid to bloviate about it. Simply put, he strained too hard to make Friday sympathetic and superior for her travails to truly connect, and the way half the cast rematerialize as accessories to her denouement clinches it.

Weirdly, the book might've read better stretched out to a sequel to allow each individual episode proper development and contextualization. As it stands, episode after episode are dropped in as set pieces, many of them lifted from previous works and just as quickly dropped. One glaring example would be the interjection of space distance calculations as in Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, there befitting its teen hayseed's sense of wonder yet here clashing with the technically adept and worldly superspy. Too much of Friday gives the impression of The Author merely playing the role of himself, impulsively aping his own style with no end in sight.

Yet still... maybe not... maybe... that ending. For those who've had to tightwire between freedom and isolation, for those stranded by their own transcendence, for alien, alienated half-men, it cannot help but twinge.

Mononoke

(minus the Hime)

I ran across this anime while wiki-walking 'round TVTropes. Twelve episodes, subdivided into five stories, with all but the fourth playing up damsels in distress for cheap pathos, cheaper moralism and feminist bonus points. After a glance at its Wikipedia page I was about to dismiss it... until hitting upon Chiaki J. Konaka's name. Sure enough, plot-wise, the two stories credited to him move less predictably, with characters displaying more diverse motivations beyond crimes against the ovary, and the old animist angle of Japanese folklore played more poignantly. Still, this ain't Lain, Paranoia Agent or Bebop. Don't expect much else than young adult ghost stories.

The series' main claim to fame is of course its visual style mainly suggesting 19th-century prints, and I will admit quite a few scenes come across as striking. But were I to call the animation "stylized" or "minimalist" you would be on solid ground to read that in its all too common usage as code for "cheap" despite the occasional fancy layering effect. Between the usual anime 0.5 FPS routine and single-frame panning shots, gawping reaction shots, etc., plus slow credits and other filler like reiterating the hero's shape/truth/reason gimmick and redefining mononoke every single time, each 23-minute episode has maybe 10mins of actual content.

They're good enough minutes at that. Worth a gander. Particularly interesting to note the use of distortion and smash cuts to emphasize the magical realist coextension of the supernatural athwart the mundane, to mystify the viewer between the seen and unseen worlds. Most often it's unclear until the end of the episode (if even then) whether events happen in order, happen in reality, or whether ontology is being rewritten as you watch. A bit forced, but rare's the show where such confusion works at all instead of merely being aggravating.

Supposedly a movie follow-up's coming out soon, and I have to wonder why this wasn't cut down to one or two long-form adventures in the first place. Over the years I've repeatedly been struck by the sheer amount of padding in the movie/TV industry (regardless of continent) especially in 2007 when games had not yet overtaken film in profitability and you'd think air time would be at a premium. I've remarked before that for example Netflix' best offerings come in the form of short sub-season miniseries, with longer shows that should've been allowed to die after their first season degenerating into trite pandering. Granted I watch little TV these days, but it's hard to think of a modern show like MASH or ST:TNG running season after season and still having something to say, much less improving. Isn't it odd that as on-demand binge-watching became more common, the length of our most noteworthy serials appears to be shortening instead of lengthening? Long-runners tend more and more toward the "Fast and Furious" or superhero movie intellectual level, with soap operas still going strong. Is this just market dilution no longer supporting ambitious long-term projects, "reality" TV taking over longer formats, is it another symptom of our short attention span, or are more of the better of us less motivated to veg out every single evening in front of the same endlessly reiterated setting, endlessly reiterated cast, endlessly reiterated running gags? Is the middle class (young or old, east or west) now more or less prone to let itself be passively inundated by the laugh track, night after night, in that comforting place where everybody knows your name?

Anyway, do watch at least episodes eight and nine of Mononoke. Apropos of nothing, it has a lovely example of a wampeter and granfalloonery.

Bugframe

Tried getting back into Waframe after some months' absence. In the span of a couple of hours I:

1) Got locked out of quest completion by phase transitions not spawning in Duviri.

2) Got griefed by some retarded bitch that started Kullervo at lvl1 then immediately quit.

3) Had my heavy attack bug out and become unusable.

4) Fell through the world.

5) Got killed by invisible AoE several times in a row.

6) Lagged too badly to shoot moving targets.

7) Had a mob fall through the world, invalidating an entire fifteen minute mission.

I wish I could bitch about whatever new content they've added, but there's a "Step 0" to any product. It must actually be usable.

For the cause! -way, then left at the fork...

"We are the people, we are strong

Let's make up our minds and prove them wrong"

 

KMFDM - Glory

 

 

Commentary on uncoordinated mass lurching in vague directions like, say, peasants' crusades always sounds so negative. Always focusing on how they got nothing done, got trounced in their first battle if they reached the enemy at all, and mostly pillaged and murdered their native lands more than anything else, the holiness of the cause being a mere pretext for rioting.

 

But think about it: if your town's ignorant, fanatical and/or violent thugs developed a sudden burning desire to be half a continent away, would you argue against them?

 

Once in a while ya gotta wonder how much human history and politics consists of the tacit, misadvertised export of lowlifes. There just aren't enough foreign legions to go around. What we need is professional, snazzy import-export businesses shuffling migrants, militias, multi-level-marketers and jihadists around through bus stops to nowhere in circles. New business model: crusade as service. Not forever, mind you; just until we build those rockets to Venus. Rip the system? What could be more timelessly central to the system than the rabble begging to be roused?

Go on, hero. Just keep walkin' 'til yer halo floats.

odd weeds 'round these parts...

 

 sequelae of the infestation

Classes&Cogitations 5: Flavor of the Monk

Well, this one should be easy. Lucky all those other classes' tedious analysis of roleplaying and mechanic interconnection is superfluous in the case of our next two options.

If you want to pretend you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, play a barbie.

If you want to pretend you're Bruce Lee, play a monkey.

Done. Who needs RP when you've got fad worship?

Enter the Dragon came out two years before D&D's 1975 release with the original monk, coincidentally about the same time Kung Fu was first airing. Conan three years before its '85 release; enter barbarians and supposedly a decisive retool for monks into full-on karate kids. Neither class fits particularly well into D&D's basic rock/paper/scissors late-medieval wargaming origin with its discrete armor classes and weapon proficiencies. Granted that's not a bad thing. For the game to grow, it needed some gaps and bridges in those class distinctions. Still, if latching on to the latest Hollywood craze managed to fit that need, it can't have been less than 90% dumb luck on the part of Gygax&co. But hey, D&D's a half-baked hodgepodge of pop culture tropes even on a good day (note we just had a major video game adaptation based on the notion that Lovecraftian face tentacles are trending well on Facebook) so don't expect any improvements from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro.

It's up to their many spin-offs and imitators to make good on bad ideas.

For a relatively minor question, ask yourself how you're gonna balance the economics. If heavier armor is better and more expensive (as it sure as hell was historically) then how exactly will you insert ber-serk front-liners without obsoleting your tin can brigade? You might not question it now, but the "naked caster" problem cropped up in a big way in pre-WoW MMOs, especially with PvP (read: griefing) enabled. And if you have any interest in creating a coherent game world, then cost, bulk and solidity will have to be re-examined. If all it takes is one reagent-free cast of stoneskin for my IWD2 halfling monk to out-tank my dwarf fighter, you've got a problem.

 

Barbarians filled a more necessary niche for offense-oriented fighters back when the fighter was the sword-and-board heavy defending light and medium wizards and thieves, and I always liked how the rage mechanic pushed you into all-out offense, to finish the fight before your timer runs out. But if the barbarian is an offense-oriented fighter, that does raise the question of difference from a fighter built for offense... and the answer is once again the rage ability... and the class has just sort of stuck there since its inception. Moving past that requires more investment in noncombat skills and feats, but let's postpone that until we reach the ranger.

I've also never seen monk weapons truly implemented in cRPGs. Historically, there were plenty of non-military farming implements and such which could be used in battle, like pitchforks, sickles, scythes, hatchets or nunchuks (I'm'a thresh yew up, boyyy!) and it makes perfect sense to associate these with clerics, monks and other non-martial classes. Fixating on kung-fu movie slapstick to the exclusion of such options also cuts a potential vein of roleplaying continuity, of monastic communities with the villages connected to them. Does your monk's quarterstaff skill come from defending himself with a walking stick on pilgrimages? Did you learn to wield a sickle while defending downtrodden villagers from heathen raiders who chased them to your abbey? Or rather fuck that RP noise because your stun skill requires you to be empty-handed or gives you a +2 ToHit for having your middle finger free?

Really, in terms of RP, the monk's problem is the same as the cleric's: fleshing out those creeds and sticking by them. To what force is your order devoted and will that come up in the campaign? Who wrote your rule and does it entail asceticism, tithing, paid sacraments, ritual prayers (possibly working as buffs) vows of silence or nonviolence (and if so what are your conditions for breaking them) is your order apolitical or subordinate to a certain clergy or god-king, where are your monasteries, your relics, do you need to report back to your abbot, are you responsible for your party members' sins? Do you support yourselves by brewing wine or beer or hold some sort of royally-guaranteed monopoly on some trade goods, and if so will those skills show up when negotiating in taverns or let you wrangle an audience with the minister of trade? You don't need to hold yourself to every single such detail, but I'll be damned if you ever meet a monk in a cRPG with more personality than "I know kung fu" and monasteries, while frequent, tend to be explicitly disconnected from the playable monk class.

 

It's not like barbarians get much better treatment either. How does tribal life ever impact your gameplay? (I'm especially reminded of Dragon Age: Origins' introduction, reading all those lore entries and dialogues about the Chasind... only for none of it to come up ever again.) You will inevitably visit a barbarian village in every cRPG campaign, and while there you will just as inevitably participate in exactly one activity: a trial by combat to decide the new chief. Chief of what? Who gives a shitting bull. Again, where is your tribe from, what are your hunting grounds, do you migrate with the herds, do you harvest seasonal fruits, are you seminomadic between winter lakes and summer pastures (and will those skills come in handy in feeding the adventuring party?) do you raid other tribes or have traditional enemies (like the other barbarians you meet during the campaign) do you raid civilized outposts and are therefore a criminal, if you lack citizenship in any major political entity how does that affect your status? Remember, the law throughout history has "solved" many crimes by convicting the nearest foreigner, and as a barbarian, hey, that's you! And while we're at it, do you know how to read? It's especially funny that RPG barbarians are so often portrayed as grounded, pragmatic realists or even de facto atheists, when primitive nomads are actually superstitious as fuck! Everything, every single damn thing is either good luck or bad luck to them, either an evil spirit or a divine blessing.

Finally: the ranger, which seems to have suffered a great deal of derailment. In cRPG scripts, ranger means unaffiliated (or flatly anti-social) woodsman with a bow, but the class' original inspiration, Tolkien's latter-age Dunedain, were a deeply, multigenerationally loyal caste with specific genetics, in fact an organized (if overtly decentralized) hereditary guerilla force, and the "dour-handed rangers of the north" hacked and slashed their way through LotR's last battles with their swords. There's a lot of unused wiggle room in game writing for rangers as distant appendages of various power structures. Granted, much like barbarians' heavy melee offense, ranger range combat just fits an otherwise empty niche in core archetypes. A better spread of fighter/thief classes (as seen in more recent RPGs) picking up more range focus frees rangers from the sniper pigeonhole. But then if they're no longer "I know bow fu" then what exactly does a ranger do? Doth a ranger... range?

The basic D&D classes provided all you needed in a dungeon crawl: one to hit shit, one to disarm traps, one to heal and one to abracadabra whatever couldn't be hit to death. Every class added after that tends to devolve to yet another flavor of "hit shit" especially in computer games which are great at clicking things to death and infamously terrible at every other aspect of roleplaying. Interconnecting lore and player actions is one problem, sure, but all three of these classes require non-combat skill use to make them stand apart. You remember, moving quietly, spotting, all the myriad skills lumped under "survival" and everything else crucial to moving this genre outside the dungeon, will it ever be used? Does it matter that your barbarian can stride across the tundra if all the action takes place in a 10x10 room with an orc guarding a treasure chest? Does knowing how to build a smokeless campfire ever help the party? Or skin a deer? Or pick berries that don't taste like burning? Or train/use carrier pigeons? Or shave a bone spear or record your deeds in scrimshaw? Is there anything for your monk to grapple or balance across, or any tests of mental discipline to pass? Can your ranger track a party of kidnappers across the plains of the horse-lords and commune with said horses?

Because if the answer to "can I do anything besides hit shit" is consistently NO, then you may as well call them all fighters and be done.

The Rape of the Duck

"Would you kill kill kill for me?
You won't be kissing me unless you kill for me"

 

Marilyn Manson - Kill4Me

______________________________

 

"Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did."
Groucho Marx in Duck Soup (minute 1:04:00 here)

______________________________

"There's the answer, if you're clever:
Have a child for warmth
And a Baker for bread
And a Prince for... whatever"

- Into the Woods

______________________________

 

 

Back in the mid-2010s it was quite trendy to voice shock and outrage at duck penises. As it's been a while, let's remind younger readers of this particular bit of pop-culture insanity. Far as I can tell it started some years earlier, with a 2007 paper detailing the peculiar genital morphology of waterfowl, mallard ducks in particular. However, it took several more years for the topic to filter down to mass media, for a video of the explosive eversion of a duck penis to go viral, for comedians to start tacking duck penis jokes to their acts and for "journalists" to start publishing articles like DUCKS ARE SADISTIC RAPING MONSTERS!!! Nor was the hub-bub totally useless; the study's lead author made a career of it.

The basic observations are solid. "Forced extra-pair copulations" do happen in any number of species and ducks really do have weird corkscrew-shaped genitals, unusual in birds which are overwhelmingly lacking in the ding-dong department. But then the animal world is replete with trauma and bizarrerie both, so this particular factoid's time in the limelight is better explained by its political convenience. It was framed as a battle of the sexes. As the "Weinstein effect" and #MeToo witch hunt ramped up, media figures and reddit echo chambers cast as wide a net as possible for any bias-confirming sound bites, and rapist ducks certainly make a memorable one.

 

The original discussion and subsequent reiterations had framed ducks' plight squarely as inter-sexual competition with a clear villain: males started raping, so females (purely in defense against male aggression!) developed convoluted genital tracts to protect against insemination; then the evolutionary arms race continued lengthening and twisting both pegs and holes. The important part is that it fits the fearmongering "rape culture" narrative, complete with lurid high-FPS footage of corkscrew dongs comin' ta getcha! It fits the image activists want to draw, of a world utterly pervaded by violent rapists at every corner, even where you least expect them like harmless-looking quackers, and of masculinity as malformed, Lovecraftian monstrosity. Perhaps even more importantly it also frames femininity as an innocent, protective, united front.

The basic facts are fine. The politically correct framing? Therein lies the bullshit.

 

You might well guess "the unsympathetic side being wrong about everything" is too simplistic an argument to really cover a real-world situation... but you wouldn't guess it from how it's addressed in universities, much less media coverage. The original studies hinged on the females' genital tract being longer, spiraling in the opposite direction from the males' penis (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) and having blind pouches to divert eversion, but however effective those obstacles may prove in foiling giant rapey corkscrew dongs, they are implicitly even better at eliminating males lacking that adaptation. The females' "defense" breeds out non-rapists more effectively than it does rapists. (With demonstrably absolute effectiveness, in fact.)

There is in fact a very widespread group of adaptations in the animal world termed "cryptic female choice" (itself a euphemism for getting away with cheating) which seems more likely to have kicked off the ducks' intersexual arms race. What came first, the duck or the egg? The rape or the cryptic choice? If females' genitals get so good at separating out sperm, at cheating on their mates, that a more invasive penis is the only guaranteed means of insemination, they are de facto breeding that trait into their progeny. A Royal Society published follow-up by the same authors in 2009 dismissed the question of cryptic choice offhandedly with:

"females of many waterfowl species select and pair bond with mates weeks or months before the breeding season" - which time frame seems irrelevant if she's going to cheat on him anyway

- and, more egregiously:

"direct costs of forced copulations are expected to be high for females" - which flies in the face of the injuries up to and including death which males of the vast majority of species incur in reproductive contest. The only way that statement sounds like an argument-ender to you is if you're working on the conceit that girls are just smarter than boys and would never make a bad choice. But remember, our savage mother nature doesn't give a flying duck-fuck about your personal well-being. If an inherited predilection for self-harm results in you leaving more reproductively successful offspring, then the next generations will show more self-harm. "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg" runs an increasingly relevant saying in biology, counterintuitive as it may sound. Females' control over reproduction, their closer association with the offspring's success, generally affords them a greater care for their own health as proxy for the young's. (In fact females' most common means of avoiding extra-pair copulations is to outsource that confrontation to their male companion via mate-guarding. After all, if the father of future offspring changes, the female may get lower quality young, but the original male gets eliminated entirely from that equation; thus males are more motivated to risk harm both cheating and preventing cheating.) But female prissiness is by no means an absolute. If getting your hands (or cloaca) dirty gets you better kiddies, then better kiddies shall be got.

Which brings us to the sexy son hypothesis. In most species, variation in the number of young females can produce is minor, say between two or three. But in males that difference can be between zero (because many do not have a chance to reproduce) and dozens for the NBA stars of every species. And because natural selection hinges on RELATIVE reproductive success, females can often pass down their genetics more successfully by having wildly oat-sowing sons. You may lift an eyebrow hearing that Genghis Khan and his sons might have descendants in the tens of millions, but if true, I bet you've never considered the necessary corollary that so do the queens, whores and courtesans who fucked them! (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

Revenons a nos canards, that story about plucky, ducky damsels valiantly fending off the assaults of quackling maleficent male-ards falls apart when you realize a female getting "raped" by a male "raping" five other females runs a good chance of producing a son who will rape five other females in turn, as opposed to her loser of an official mate who just sticks by her side and will likely father a son who sticks by one female. One choice might give her four or nine grandchildren, the other thirty-six. The trick is, if you're making that trade-off, to ensure you only select for the rapiest rapist, which is where the convoluted genitals come in. The female's genital tract as "resistance" to rape becomes a proxy for the estimated reproductive success of a potential sexy son. I don't mean to imply any sort of waterfowl or waterfair moral value by this. Again, nature simply doesn't care. Females which produce the rapiest rapists leave behind more grand-daughters inheriting the tendency to produce successful rapists, and so on. The pattern builds on itself. Note, even if you accept the premise that it must have been males' propensity to rape which kicked off such a dynamic thousands of generations prior, the female counter-adaptation has only worsened and accelerated the supposed problem with every generation. And that's the part you don't hear from either college professors or the New York Post.

Also, the question is too commnly posed as either/or: either a stable mate or a rapist. That's not how cryptic choice works. Why not both? Why not have their cake and eat it too? Overtly, females pair-bond with a baseline acceptable male. Whatever rapists come along must beat that baseline viability. If a really rapey one gets through, you've got yourself a sexy son. But, if none of the randos that season have big enough corckscrew dicks to grab you by the ovaries, well, it's not a complete loss, you still have your standard schlub, your plan B as backup. Roll the dice but hedge your bets. Clever girl.

So, first off, realize that whatever perception you have of women as a group as some plucky rebel alliance merely defending itself against the evil testicular empire has not come from objective analysis of reality. It comes of being bombarded all your life with just such sound bites as "rapist ducks" piling on, drowning your reason out by ginned up moralistic calls to save the world from the dire threat of duck rape, or really anything which fabricates a subconscious impression of female entitlement and male debt towards the unfairer sex. Every such random bit of outrage starts from the presumption of exclusive male guilt and willful ignorance of females' shared culpability, profiteering or simply demonstrably exercised agency. (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

I was living in Illinois in the 2000s during the media circus concerning Drew Peterson, a cop who murdered two of his wives. What makes it an interesting case study is that he was actually married four times, had a history of cheating on and beating on the first two wives and his children, murdered the next two wives (presumably while still cheating on them) and got engaged to a fifth WHILE being investigated for those murders. Note one headshrinker interviewed as to why women keep doing this immediately shifted the conversation to the Oedipus complex, inattentive daddies and women being "at risk of being seduced" in other words shifting all the responsibility onto men. Umm, nope, bullshit! Girls want bad boys. This is female mate choice at work. You want the rapists. You want the murderers. They swagger oh so damn sexy! The same personality traits which make him an overbearing sadistic thug make him irresistible to women. I may be an asshole sometimes (in fact I'm fairly sure I am) but I've never killed anyone. I have zero children. The double murderer has at least six. Which of us is looking like the sexier son?

In fact, a recurring item in both "news" fluff and trash TV has always been the flood of marriage proposals women send to men on death row. Sure puts having a few neck feathers plucked out into perspective, don't it?

 

Second off, if you've ever taken a course on evolution, you've likely had to listen to your professor bemoaning the rampant sexism of Victorian politics refusing to acknowledge the importance of female mate choice in natural selection, because Victorians refused to believe females might have that much power. Here you have a prime example why modern feminist attitudes are so often likened to a Victorian fainting couch. It's all well and good to say look at those pretty peacock tails that peahens have selected for, but we still refuse to acknowledge female mate choice wherever it might have negative implications, like picking the most destructive mates because they want offspring which will destroy the competition, from double murderers to finance bros. The power females wield over males by controlling reproduction is just that - power! - and with power comes superheroic responsiblity for its application. Might not society's refusal to openly acknowledge female agency be less a matter of oppressive patriarchy than women dodging responsibility, whether personally or for the world's ills? (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

 

Third off, anyone interpreting inter-sexual conflict at face value as male aggression upon innocent females would do well to remember your Nibelungenlied. There are entirely too many cases to ignore in which a Brunnhilde merely refuses to mate with any unworthy male that cannot best her feats of strength.

 

Lastly, and on the more speculative side, let's reverse the polarity. In humans, the neediness of our young prompted increased paternal investment and resource contribution, but that contribution also gave males some value and a greater degree of choice, at least the ones registering as good providers. And there is every reason to believe that our excessive neoteny may have been prompted by cuter females being better at securing male protection and providence. The guy sticks around the pretty girl more than the virago after mating, one child benefits more than the other, increased viability, boom, ya gotcherself an adaptive advantage. Human males have selected for the most effective raptors, for those who can best steal our attention. We love the cute ones. We selected for our own manipulation in the distant past, not for our own benefit any more than those raped female ducks, but because better kiddies were thus got.

 

It applies to a female's viability as mate too. A cuter one instills maternal protectiveness, gets ganged up on less by the tribe's other females, gets more resources. Though men have far fewer reproductive options than women, due to our use as labor we nonetheless do exert some evolutionary pressure, and it is again in the morally wrong direction, picking greedy, manipulative, sociopathic bitches, one obvious interpretation being if she can make your life a living hell, she'll leverage that much more subterfuge and acquisitiveness into promoting the survival of your shared progeny after she throws you under the bus.

 

So stop favoring the showgirls. C'mon guys, we all know we're not that picky. Sexy enough is sexy enough. Wanna really improve the breed? Fuck a librarian.

 

 

 

 

________________________________________________________

 

P.S.: If you're curious about the waterfowl extra-pair copulation question, there was a more multifaceted article published shortly after the penis papers back in 2010. It doesn't largely disagree with them (and I'm sure the author would be scandalized at being recommended by a mangy snarler like myself) but does a much better job of contextualizing the issue:

Sexual conflict in waterfowl: why do females resist extrapair copulations?

 

P.P.S. After I referenced Brunhild, I was so, so tempted to rename this "riding the valkyries"

About Nothing; Towards Something

"Don't you know what it means to become an orgy guy? It changes everything! I'd have to dress different. I'd have to act different. I'd have to grow a mustache and get all kinds of robes and lotions and I'd need a new bedspread, new curtains, I'd have to get thick carpeting and weirdo lighting. 'Course I'd have to get new friends. I'd have to get orgy friends."

 

Seinfeld - The Switch

 

 

Attentive readers (permit me the vanity of imagining I got 'em) may note I trailed off in my Baldur's Gate 3 campaign. A long, uninterrupted playthrough was just making its worse points (say: the romantic interest NPC roster, teleportation, endless variable ratio reinforcement jug-looting, or other timesinks like individual inventory shuffling) chafe more and more and making it feel like a chore. I want to derive what enjoyment I can of my purchase, plus had I continued it straight through my commentary would've sounded harsher than deserved. Larian sank a truly impressive amount of both effort and expertise into making the most of the IP's name recognition, and even where I hate their design decisions, those are at least conscious, elaborated decisions and not slapdash filler or bandwagon-jumping. It's carefully measured mass appeal for a genre somewhat lacking in such.

Is it working? Is it appealing all of the masses? Well, with sales in the millions at full release price, it's at least appealing to a massive part of the masses. Which got me wondering: how does anyone get into games these days? For me, grizzled lone wolf what I be, BG3 is simply the logical continuation of a decades-long suite of declines or improvements in cRPGs. But the rest? How many just snatched it up for the TOTES BADASS opening cinematic with its hawt dragon-on-skyship action? How many bought it for the sex scenes? How many are tabletop gamers who always turned up their noses at computer adaptations but... weeelllll, maybe just this once? How many are MMO fans intrigued by the notion of an offline WoW-clone? Or maybe just Cthulhu fans drooling after face tentacles?

It was always an interesting question to ask in CoH, EVE or LotRO back in the day. The gamers I'd met in Team Fortress Classic or Counterstrike arrived via a predictable trajectory of Doom > Quake > TFC > CS > Call of Duty, and those in WoW had a similar history of "anything Blizzard" or other pissing contests over high scores or the most loot. But Homeworld was full of Ender's Game fans, and EVE-Online full of Homeworld fans, and Lord of the Rings Online or City of Heroes tapped their respective niches outside of computer games for customers whose other electronic interaction consisted of Minesweeper and Solitaire.

 

But that was twenty years ago. The niches had only just been defined, most famous series only up to their second installment (if that) computer games still fresh and edgy. I won't bother reiterating the steep decline to follow. Now they're just something Billy-Bubba thumbs on them thar smert-foan. Just another entertainment industry. Just as by fifteen years of age you mostly know whether you like SciFi movies or mystery novels or not, everyone has some idea of what turn-based "arrpeegeez" are and whether they appeal. Adaptations aside, how much genre/medium crossover still occurs in the third decade of the third millennium?

Social media sites' infamous propensity for narrowing users' attention to self-reinforcing obsessions has only compounded the pre-existing influence of advertising and other means of market manipulation by the rich, all designed to limit sapience to linear obedience. Does anyone even have a range of interests now? Is anyone still capable of both taking a walk in the park and then taking a virtual walk in Caras Galadhon? Reading a book and listening to a podcast? Liking something but admitting its flaws? Hating something but admitting its strengths? Must everything be fanatical devotion and witch-hunting?

I found myself wondering what anyone who's skimmed my RPG commentary here might expect of me in reviewing BG3. Am I supposed to squee like a demented fanboy at finally getting a big-budget tactical cRPG to save the genre? Or take the hipster route of decrying its popularity? Well, how 'bout neither and both?

 

"Do you ever just get down on your knees and thank god that you know me and have access to my dementia?"

But that might have a lot to do with the question of how anyone gets into a genre or medium nowadays. The internet's early days provided a lot of fan(atics) fora for their narrow interests. Did you like movie xyz? Then buy the novelization of xyz, play the game of xyz, compete in trivia contests of xyz lore, spend every moment on the xyz subreddit, buy the commemorative xyz mug with extra Z! And don't forget the twenty-three sequels!

After twenty years of having one's each and every thought socially mediated, dare one hope that routine might momentarily break down? A brief glimmer of smarter pop culture before the world ends? Decades-delayed throwbacks like BG3 have been derided as "nostalgia projects" and BG3 itself is a shallow, dumbed-down lower-common-denominator of what such games should be. But you don't get to pretend its success is coming solely from nostalgic old Infinity Engine fanboys or that it's a casual game being foisted on an uninformed public like Fruit Ninja.

Is it too much to hope that we're finally seeing larger numbers of economic consumers who merely want to try new things? Who don't need to validate their existence by staying within one group-approved niche? Hell, my first real cRPG was arguably VtM: Redemption, one of the most thoroughly mediocre pieces of interactive cold pizza you could ever consume. But the possibilities it revealed...

... maybe we should ask not just how good a game BG3 is but how good a gateway drug it is.

Here Comes the Rap Break

"Everybody's sayin' that the scatman stutters
But doesn't ever stutter when he sings
But what you don't know I'm gonna tell you right now
That the stutter and the scat is the same thing"

 

Scatman John - (I'm A) Scatman

 

 

Last time I talked about comics, I praised What Birds Know's well-plotted drama with light, in-character comic relief. So this time, let's instead talk about poor pacing.

Out-Of-Placers will definitely draw further comments from me, as (politically correct premise and strained backronym aside) it's not only laudably creative and thoughtfully developed, but also a prime example of integrating some evolutionary precepts into a fantasy (or more likely science fantasy) setting. For now, it was page 100 that caught my attention for one of the best executed comic relief moments I've seen. The last panels' absurdity would be enough in itself, but it also hit precisely just past the peak of the story's most dramatic moment thus far. However, the same comic also interposes expository pages in the middle of scenes. They're invariably good reading, but their placement tends to wreck the flow of any scene because unlike a tension-breaking one-liner, each "field guide" page provides half a chapter's worth of prose.*

 

For a more classic case of derailment, see Tamuran, a decent high fantasy comic which after packing its main cast off to high adventure with shapeshifting, monster swarms, hungry dragons, liches, nature spirits and heirs to this-and-that, has spent the past few years increasingly on "how're things back at home?" and palace intrigue. If curious as to how audiences will appreciate dumping almost all the core cast and laboriously developed set-up to swerve to a couple of new viewpoints from characters whose best features seem knock-offs of that core cast's, well, just ask George R.R. Martin.

 

I also read through another fantasy comic, Kaspall, recently. Not bad, less lively or inspired but nevertheless following through on its premises far better than most. Unfortunately its ending toed the Disney line too much with its tragic backstory excuse, karmic comeupins and keeping the heroes' hands clean... and then it keeps on ending... and ending... 50 pages of 460 resolving various plot threads through confessions and declarations.

 

While on the topic of bad endings, I had praised the follow-up to Dominic Deegan, The Legacy, three times over the past three years. In this case the ending does not drag... but everything up to the end does. The author did admit in a blog post that it had originally been intended as a far shorter story, and it certainly shows. The longer it rambled on, the less of the original idea was visible, from Snout getting increasingly redesigned for cuteness to losing the importance of the written word in favor of schmaltzy codependence, to losing the original central gimmick of filtering the action through Snout's deafness in favor of characters verbosely, tritely and repetitively declaring their pwecious fee-fees at each other.

 

I had compared The Legacy favorably to the newer stuff by Christopher Baldwin, whose work has been quite poor these past few years, but even his best stuff tended to be over before it was over. When he did arrange a poignant limbic oomph for a denouement, in his theater play in webcomic form One Way, it instead felt rushed to fit into a one-year posting schedule, and he got no end of undeserved grief for prodding emotions in the opposite direction from what his audience, addicted to Hollywood sap, demanded.

 

On the other hand, the ending to Spacetrawler's original run (the one worth reading) was arguably just as downbeat, with the main difference being the forewarning to the audience. And it worked. It fit. Sacrifice should be unsatisfying.

So much as I do enjoy pointing out such imperfections, writing all this out has reminded me they've contributed much to my interest in webcomics for the past twenty years. I don't want the same damn heroic face-off, focus-grouped to death to maximize appeal, reiterated every episode. "The state of the condition insults my intuition" after all. Hell, Mookie was always prone to cheesy, hand-wringing drah-mah and it worked well enough for him. If they are not allowed to dominate a work, flaws can frequently add to its charm. Baldwin was at his best when he didn't even try to neatly tie off loose ends, even stating at the end of Bruno that he imagines her life continuing, and he has simply stopped illustrating it. Lucy Lyall's expository ending to Kaspall was repurposed more successfully into a shorter episodic fantasy detective format in Spare Keys for Strange Doors. And really, if the first story in that series isn't illustrative of the search for perfection...

Well, I guess I can tough out Tamuran's slithering asides or OOPs' didactic ones as well.

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* I'm betting it doesn't feel that way to the writer, since if you already know the contents, it's still "one page" to you.