Cow Tools

"Belief remains

The mind ultimately reigns"

 

Faith and the Muse - Reine La Belle 

 

 

Among Amnesia: Rebirth's better parts, let me reiterate its excellent execution of the other-dimensional culture's stark, megalithic aesthetic, a common enough gimmick in soft SF but which often comes across as cheap or lazy for lack of definition. Much like those tiny touches which rendered the first Pillars of Eternity's locales so much more tangible, an inspired bit of detail work here and there can work wonders.

Quite a few rooms you visit manage to look lived-in, and thereby all the more unsettling. There are work-tables and reading nooks and the objects you find often make you feel like you can almost, almost guess their purpose. Then, much to your horror, as you advance a few of them reveal their purpose in unmistakable, pain-staking detail. But not that one; that one's harmless. Some kinda quipu dealie? Never could figure it out.

 

Not that I tried very hard. I learned some years ago to my surprise of the storm in a teacup created by Gary Larson's cow tools cartoon. I'd seen it long before and thought little of it. A quaint little jab at archaeo/anthropological reconstruction and its limitations? No mystery, just a weak joke. The Far Side usually came with a "don't think about it too hard" sticker implied, which too many readers chose to ignore. But cow tools, when properly deployed in a larger fictional context, are instrumental (pun intended) in both maintaining immersion and throwing a viewer off-balance, much as disconcertingly vague sensory descriptors can do for finger-creeping fiction.

 

It works in third person too. I was delighted to find late in Rogue Trader's fourth chapter a side-quest on an abandoned smuggler freighter where the log of the crew's interactions with their own mysterious cargo sounds suspiciously like Robert Sheckley's classic Untouched by Human Hands, where starving men desperately try to make sense of alien cargo to find something edible, with darkly comical results. But the same author cautioned in Mindswap against Panzaism, the mind's tendency to fit new information into schemas yielding blase acceptance of the fantastic as mundane. Which leads us to modern games in general.

So as to see what The Kids These Days are into (but avoiding Fortnite) I decided to try my hand at Destiny 2 a few weeks ago - and I'm almost a third through the tutorial campaign? I'll have to more thoroughly bash it in the future (and praise one or two of its better points) but for my purpose here it exemplifies the current trend of ever more lazily generic Star Wars inspired science fantasy landscapes. Does anything in its decor make sense? You've got bulbous things and angular things, of course some BIG GUNS, a Lothlorienish magic tree of some kind, stairways descending only so they can ascend again to the point even Escher would call them pointless, walkways to nowhere, redundant ramps, kilometer-high breathtaking vistas of nothing in particular... the whole place is a gigantic cow tool stretching far beyond the utility of such a visual device. None of it is usable or livable or evocative or purposeful, any more than the blank-walled, square combat maps of FPS games from Y2K. Just busier, much, much busier. None of it carries any meaning beyond occupying your field of vision. This trend has only grown across video game landscapes since I complained about Planetside 2's meaningless clutter fourteen years ago, and all for the worse. The fact that I walked by all this crap ten times before bothering to look at any of it speaks volumes of modern culture's inversion of fantasy and reality. Panzaism.

 

In contrast, Rebirth's alien artifacts retained their alien feel. And there are examples where seemingly inhuman details fall into place by conscious design. In The Secret of Kells, for instance, a late scene takes place against the backdrop spiderlaced in looping, contorted, nonsensical scribbles. It's only as characters move against it that you might glimpse, if you don't blink -

- our hero on the left has fleetingly acquired a halo and wings.

 

In an interactive medium where the player himself is the one bringing the abstruse into focus, such an effect can be even stronger.

"If any find this record, know that I was the traitor Kita, alchemist, apprentice to Temaku. Forgive us our folly."

 

Every aspect of this low key yet pivotal scene with its multiple layers of foreshadowing hinges on having recently discovered what one of the cow tools does. It all depends on the player being aware of or suspecting its purpose, power, current use, current utilizer and most importantly its provenance* soiling your conscience by your mere desire to utilize it. Seeing it waiting for you, approaching it, looking around for alternatives. Such clean, pretty light among this darkness. Shall human hands touch this? Knowing, or thinking you know, its potential?

 

All the gratuitous greeblies and cash shop funny hats imaginable cannot attain even one such moment of perfection.** Nor, for all its potential, can algorithmically generated content. It requires consciousness. To make a proper cow tool, you have to first convey the concept of a cow. More or less sacred.

 

 

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* Assuming you'd played The Dark Descent and remember how the sausage is made. If not, well, more foreshadowing for you.

 

** (SPOILER) The truly brilliant extra touch? You can hesitate and second-guess yourself, hearing your victim's gurgling struggles, and plug the damn life support back in, seeing and hearing the gasps of relief. I did, while I searched desperately for a replacement. Then, later, by the time you're extracting the stuff yourself, there is no room for such hesitation. The process goes ahead, implacably, industrially. All for you. The scene foreshadows not only the greater unplugging to follow, but your own moral decay. "This place, this horrible fucking place. It's making me into one of them." Or weren't you already? Weren't you always? Isn't everyone? Masterfully executed. Only wish the rest of Rebirth had lived up to this scene.