Crop Circles

"It's the nexus of the crisis
And the origin of storms
Just the place to hopelessly
Encounter time and then came me"

 

Blue Oyster Cult - Astronomy

 

 

It's election day here in the U.S. so please let's talk about literally anything else!

 

Umm, let's see... Vagrus!

This random event hit my comitatus in one of the newer expansion zones. Random weirdness is no original idea. Passing a few skill checks is nothing new. And yet it stood out for contextualizing the event's sensory experience within the game world's larger themes. You spend your time traversing hot deserts. (Spit sizzles.) You move from town to town. (The mirage offers you false hope of a fortress.) You eke out a desperate living in a world rendered nearly lifeless by Calamity. (Its runaway effects render your surroundings colorless, even more bleak.) You obsess over making good time. (Your slogged footing becomes uncertain.)

 

This largely defines good interactive writing from other media: bringing events and descriptions back around to the player's own decision-making and concerns. In fact it helps to re-ground a strange occurrence in the mundane. Children playing at a Halloween game portrayed in that old Simpsons episode can get caught up in the sensory familiarity of touching wet spaghetti while imagining a fantastic witch.

 

It got me thinking of a frequent theme of first contact stories, humanity's bafflement at the truly alien. Skipping the seminal Glos Pana and others, consider two very similar modern classics.

 

Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon stands out among SF for its unusual devotion to character analysis and the even more unusual skill with which it's pulled off (SciFiers boasting a higher likelihood to be dilettantes from outside the literary guild) but much of that effort verges into derailment of the overall plot. The love triangle, a frequent culprit in such hijackings, especially feels like it could've wrapped up ten pages faster and still gotten across its point of derived personal meaning or attachment. Moreover, the means of exploring the alien labyrinth seem needlessly convoluted, mixing teleportation, telepathy, cancer, astronauts and moon bases, the old clone identity crisis, the cold war, all to proportionally little narrative payoff. On the other hand, it seems to deliberately avoid integrating the Lovecraftian element of human incapacity, insufficiency and insignificance before such a wondrous discovery, so perhaps inevitably, the element of wonder itself is allowed to fizzle out toward the end. Yeah, yeah, there's a multidimensional alien labyrinth on the dark side of the moon. Big whoop.

 

So maybe it's no surprise that a decade later Rogue Moon's relevance was displaced by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic with its more tangible, grittier visitation Zones explored without much need for lengthy preambles by a bunch-a dudes walking around. Lengthy vacillation on the proper mindset of a hardened explorer is spaced out more satisfyingly without relegating the alien anomaly itself to an endnote as Rogue Moon did. More importantly it doesn't busy itself constructing towering archetypes of human ideals when the intrusion of a post-human influence would logically begin altering humanity itself. Perhaps the pettiness and childishness of the best of monkey ambitions is our species' sole retreat before such reiterated superiority.

 

This is a frequent pitfall for fantasy fiction, especially the more speculative variety, balancing wonder and tangibility, especially when the latter comes in the form of "relatable" characters. The Integral Trees' sequel, The Smoke Ring, threads its plot through the coming-of-age story of one particular character. Where the original leapt too loosely from character to character and bombarded the reader with too many new concepts and action sequences, the sequel spends too long visualizing Rather jetting about or listening to the new clan dickering over property rights. Had all these elements simply been interspersed better over the length of both installments' narrative, the whole mess would've been far more legible.

 

Fahrenheit 451 returned to the topic of knowledge and the attention economy right up the the ending scene of the walking books. Dune returned to the sensory experience of the desert right up to the final sandstorm. The Lord of the Rings moved past the wonder of elves and dwarves to human concerns when focusing the action toward climax, but did not fail to call back to those earlier wonders with the invocation of Elbereth or the divine license implied by the eagles' flight. All writing can suffer from a loss of focus, but it is especially important for stories placing one in novel environments or concepts to call the reader's attention back to points of contact with that brave new world. The mad and mundane must interlock.

Of Man's first disobedience sing, heavenly muse

"fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n."

 

John Milton - Paradise Lost 

 

 

Normally I indulge in more fanciful rambling on Halloween, but I'm not feeling particularly poetic tonight. Allow me to instead point you toward Stephen King's Danse Macabre. Not a great fan of the horror genre myself, I've never actually read anything else by him, and was shocked when picking it up a few years ago not only by his ability as a writer but his intelligent musings on storytelling in general. Thus he already made his way into one of my previous Oct 31sts, albeit not properly sourced.

 

I was however insulted on behalf of sapience by his ending the book with an apologia for his chosen field, against accusations that dark imagery gives impressionable minds bad ideas. If you've been paying attention these intervening 45 years you know that spiel by heart. Three or four times a generation the parochial dregs of society put us all through the same inane moral panic: rock'n'roll causes violence, video games cause violence, porn causes violence, gay porn causes violence, Harry Potter, Marilyn Manson, Stairway to Heaven played backwards, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Dungeons&Dragons, hoo-boy, did that one ever end the world five times over if you listen to the bible-thumpers! In vain did King in '81 point out most horror stories are intrinsically and punitively moralist to the point of Puritanical rigor, dispensing gruesome comeuppances upon external threats or transgressors of our various societal taboos. Or that such tales more readily prime one to resist monstrosity.

 

And really, what's the alternative? The prosocial cute cartoon animals I cited last time warm each others' hearts via a great many moments of mutual aid and reassurance, but I couldn't help noticing they also do pretty much nothing aside from exist. Each fresh moral lesson learned amounts to one repudiation after another of ambition, of creativity, of adventure or even activity, in general, beyond seeking the approval of the group.

 

Such moralism can't help but remind me of one of my formative moments, reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 11th grade and reaching what should be on its face the sinister description of Cassius. He reads much and sees quite through the deeds of men, he sees no plays and hears no music, seldom he smiles and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit that could be moved to smile at anything. It was me. Shit. There I was, on the page, my self-loathing and refusal to accept the status quo, being told I should smile more, that spare Cassius gnawing at myself, abiding none of my supposed peers' pastimes of baseball and N'Sync. "I am the animal who will not be himself." Helluva thing, finding yourself at sixteen condemned by none other than the immortal bard, finding yourself consigned not only to inescapable Cocytus but to Satan's gnashing maw by Dante. As a traitor.

 

Traitor? Wait, traitor of what? I knew enough history to eventually call bullshit on that, after the initial wave of depression waned. Did Julius himself not betray the spirit of the first triumvirate, betray his people's trust as their defender by launching civil war, betray the Republic to increasing tyranny in centuries to follow? And then you notice Caesar's opener to that diatribe:

"Let me have men about me that are fat

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look

He thinks too much; such men are dangerous"

Eventually you realize old Shakes was writing to keep his head on his shoulders under an axe-happy monarchy, so yes, he made rebellion against monarchy villainous. But he was too honest, thought too much himself, not to also give said monarch the most transparently self-serving and counterproductive cogitation to reveal the already incipient stagnation of entrenched power. He's giving you something beautifully, mercilessly true on that page. Not any commentary on betrayal or the right to rule. Just the simple, endlessly observed fact that thought will be condemned as villainy, because others would have you lethargic and slow and predictable and obedient, for their own interests.

 

I don't think Dante or Milton were ever that honest with themselves. But it arises as a subconscious undercurrent in Paradise Lost, Satan's inspirational recalcitrance against a bullying potentate superior not in spirit but in the exercise of unearned power. And so I'm reminded again of the beginning of Danse Macabre, of King's recounting of the tremor of fear sensed by himself and all the crowd in a cinema as the news were read aloud of a new, dire threat to the public order, a threat against all that was good and decent in the world: the launch of Sputnik. One of the greatest milestones of human progress, rendered a cheap spook for its implication in the subhuman business of rival ape tribes.

 

So maybe it's not possible to create without being somebody's monster. Not possible to even think without being consigned to Hell as a traitor. Yet all the sleeping demons swarmed under by the masses' stagnant cherubic tide have somehow heard again and again the eternal recurrence of the cry of self-awareness:

 

"Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n"

Gimme a number nine with a side of lemmings

"You can't play this game we lost all the pieces

Hold your breath and just wait

Someone else will pay for your sins"

 

Marilyn Manson - Tattooed in Reverse

 

 

Cartoonist Minna Sundberg's whiplash swerve into Christianity during the pandemic made me curious enough to check back a few times and see what she puts out post-insanity. Her current project... what's it called again? Sell You Downriver? No, wait, Journey Upstream - is, I'll admit, better than I'd expected. She remains a gifted visual artist, even more obvious now that her computer broke, causing her to drop some digital support wheels to a reduction in background detail but no drop in characters' expressive, individualized antics. More interestingly, she took a step back from the foaming-at-the-mouth proselytism toward which she'd leaned at the end of Lovely People, and instead of the expected wall-to-wall rants against unbelievers (though I'm guessing those are coming soon enough) has mostly run through some quaint "be nice, don't be selfish or mean" childhood moral lessons. More interestingly, a couple of swipes at holier-than-thou facetiousness and hypocrisy can be or even were directly applied to the faithful themselves. Well, colour me pleasantly surprised I guess. Maybe the Finns are just doing it better?

 

It's certainly hard to find such self-criticism here in the States, especially with election fever ramping up. The redcaps' power base remains as always "white evangelical protestants" a.k.a. rednecks, and the effervescent idolatry they direct at their orange bullshitter would be the envy of any golden calf. His calling for a convention crowd last month to "cheat like hell" made a few headlines (especially as half of Republican candidates have pre-emptively refused to acknowledge any election result they don't like, indicating they plan to do exactly that) but commentators by and large shied away from the "so help me God" and general parochial tone of the gathering, including his injunction: "You know what happens if you don't vote. You go to hell." Umm, acktchelly, it's bearing false witness against your neighbours in a legal process like an election that's supposed to send you in that direction surer'n shootin' up a grade school. Funny how Christians never bother reading those commandments they insist on chiseling into courthouse walls.

 

Just like they don't seem to mind pissing on their own grandfathers' graves by turning Neo-Nazi. And there's a wider pattern there. The core of conservatism is religious after all, if not explicit supernatural belief then certainly an implicit faith in an ordered world. You need only listen to a few of their economic arguments about "the invisible hand of the market" or pie in the sky promises of industry self-regulation, to hear the same irrational belief that some other force... out there... will ensure things work out. It's an infantile impulse, the same causing the feeble-minded to constantly invent magic daddies up in the clouds. An infant may be unable to articulate the belief, but its faith in its elders is absolute - by necessity. It must know, with a certainty, that if it makes the right noises, coos or cries, its needs will be met by outside forces, its belly filled, its crotch wiped, its temperature regulated, its attention stimulated to develop its neural pathways. Parents may well understand the conscious effort and planning which under-write this guarantee, but to the infant it all just *is* like... well, magic. And you don't even need to learn the word abracadabra. It all somehow just works.

 

Not any particular creed but authoritarianism itself is the crux (pun intended) of the mentality. Mindless dependence on a boss. On a parental figure. Lynch your neighbour in the name of the Ten Commandments today, toss them out tomorrow, so long as some figure at a podium tells you it'll somehow work out. After all, you serve a higher cause, conveniently embodied in a pulpit-pounder of one stripe or another. Not your fault you were misled, poor you. It's not morality, it's moral evasion, sure as any toddler will steal a cookie given half a chance and expect the jar to be replenished. You can still lie, cheat and steal in your own daily life because the big man upstairs (or in office) is gonna fix everything. Because you're utterly and absolutely full of shit. I don't care how many cuddly cartoon animals you draw climbing to the allegorical source and peak of all morality, this entire species' history has shown the supposedly hard and fast rules of code and canon, of external morality, exist solely to be weaponized against targets of opportunity, then ignored at earliest convenience.

 

Cheat like Hell. Amen. 

A lot of people these days are letting their online avatars do all their reading for them. They call themselves the literalti.

Through a Scrambler, Darkly

"Reinstate, deactivate"

KMFDM - Get Out of My Head

____________________________________

 

 

I forget in which of Gore Vidal's nonfiction books I first encountered his musings on his generation growing up, for the first time in history, on a diet of moving pictures. It came as a novel thought to me as a teenager in the '90s that this formerly novel technology had by my time half a century later fundamentally changed social interactions, mores, attention spans, etc. It made life seem more staged. Mannerisms shifted toward celluloid theatricality. Naturally via classic adolescent-level introspection I completely failed to connect that shift to my own experiences as the first generation to grow up with personal computers. Of course after WW2 it was television's turn, and you can ask writers like Stephen King about being first on those ramparts. Politicians after sweaty Nixon played to the camera. Computers are an interesting case. The personal computer's cultural impact, in itself, has been somewhat exaggerated. I'll gladly attest in the '80s and '90s television still ruled supreme regardless of the accumulation of 486s, Oregon Trail used as candy in the classroom, or the idiotic moral panic over Doom. It's the internet that really changed everything.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I was surprised to hear Larian did not plan to milk their new Baldur's Gate cash cow for more sequels, or even an expansion pack. No matter their motivations, after such a crowd success I'd have expected any developer to be blowing Hasbro execs around the clock for more of that sweet, sweet established and marketable D&D aye-pee. I'd like to imagine Larian driven by artistic integrity, gearing up for something more interesting than Faerun's generic high fantasy mish-mash and vapid narratives, but given the previous Divinity titles I've sampled, I'm not holding my breath. Still, still, props on the backbone. Rare commodity in the snowflake era. Good on them.

 

But it does seem like every few years we get another of these big name cRPGs, a Neverwinter Nights or a Dragon Age, each of their settings upon closer inspection just the same tedious all-purpose high fantasy routine, expertly handled but deliberately and inanely unchallenging. There's a dragon and dungeon and evil wizard, opposed by attractive young adventurers who discover the true meaning of friendship, zombies, glowing swords, fireballs, conventionally banal (sorry, meant to say edgy) sex and violence, plus some steampunk crap thrown in for superficial novelty even though it's been done to death. Garnish the whole mess by just randomly dumping the entire monster manual into the setting or maybe just stick with something-not-called-orcs and call it a day. Oh, but don't forget to save the world.

 

To the extent that each reminds the public of the nominal existence of tactics and roleplaying, they have their place in keeping a market alive for more interesting campaigns. I maintain that Baldur's Gate 3 in particular was sorely needed after big-name flops from preceding years seemed to nail the cRPG market's coffin shut. But every such title also cements the public's narrow conception of  "stab goblin, grab loot" and it's nowhere near clear enough whether newer players are whetting their appetites or merely getting a taste for the lowest common denominator to the exclusion of better options. How much interest in better television was really fueled by sitcoms? By reality tv?

 

Because someone will always go lower. The bad parts, the nonsensical parts, the pandering, thoughtless parts, will excuse more and more idiocy. I've been trying a "multi"-player FPS. It's Destiny 2, but it makes no real difference. Its half-assed features could and have been the stock-in-trade of a hundred other twitchy pieces of quickly forgotten chaff.

 

As mentioned last time, your decor is as generic as possible, a nonsensical clutter of abstract shapes meant solely to keep the eye moving without representing anything.

 

You bounce around constantly to pick up power-ups dropped by enemies which just jump out of the walls on you and teleport around randomly. No need to plan an attack or position for an organized squad offensive. Just point and click like the good little 30-IQ piece of gamer trash you are.

 

You get three different weapon categories, dozens of weapon types, 1408 individual weapons. Long story short, they all shoot.

 

Infinite ammo except for a few powerups for fancier rocket launchers and the likes, infinitely respawning grenades. No resource management to speak of. Don't think; just click.

 

You also get a "melee" attack, which turns out to be yet another grenade/rocket with slightly shorter range, and a superpower, which turns out to be (usually) yet another grenade/rocket. And also your secondary weapon can be a grenade launcher, and also your tertiary. Oh, and at least one of your superpower Voltron swords also throws explosions. That might not be all the 'nades. I'm not sure, I just started?

 

Everything explodes. Doesn't matter if it's a robot, a fat dude in power armor, or the Lollipop Guild. Boom. Big flashy lights. They all had beans for lunch. Don't you feel powerful? Boom. Boom I say. Boom.

 

Yes, of course it's got Mario platform jumping. It's a video game. Duh.

 

You're bombarded with constant loot drops, constant behavioral reinforcement. Not that it matters. Every few hundred guns you might want to pick an upgrade, conveniently tagged with relative power levels so you don't have to worry about actual numbers, just pick the high card. Just so long as you keep hitting that button in the Skinner box you brain-dead rat. You're already in "legendary" gear before the first tutorial mission is even over. Don't you feel speshul?

 

You get nonstop achievement progress. Badges, titles, decals, levels, "triumphs" and polka-dot top hats and wowie! Don't you feel appreciated, dear user? Use more. 

 

You're put through interminable cutscenes filled with every cliche imaginable, every Saturday morning cartoon heroic declaration and cut-and-pasted action scene. You can't go thirty seconds without realizing they got this one from Predator and this scene from Equilibrium and parodied Star Wars wholesale to the point I'm surprised characters can even talk with Lucas' cock in their mouths.

Encased in carboncopynite.

NPCs are permitted zero personality. The few not occupied spouting generic heroic speeches about hope and light and heroism are just kissing your ass non-stop.

No it won't.

And of course you fight several nominally "different" groups of enemies without facial expressions who do not speak but merely chatter incomprehensibly so you won't feel guilty mowing them down by the thousands. Some are fatter or skinnier, but they sport claws and googly eyes and gnarly, protuberant teeth and hobble to and fro hunched over, inelegantly. Which is to say they're all just goblins.

 

There's nothing there. All those cozily familiar stimuli you're fed as reinforcement serve to merely keep you clicking, and clicking, and clicking, until you hit a paywall and presumably click-through that as well by sheer habit. I recognize this definition of a game. It's those arcade machines from back in the '80s that just had you mash the attack button until it randomly killed you to eat your quarter when you're all jazzed up and desperate to keep going, keep the dopamine flowing. So, like movies, like da teevee, how has this paradigm changed us?

 

I also took a chance to watch something labeled "Oats Studios" before Netflix pulled it from their roster. Hell, I didn't know what it was, it just looked vaguely SciFi-ish so I added it to my list on a whim. Turns out it's all on YouTube anyway. But what struck me about Blomkamp's catalogue is not their quality as story ideas. Some are cheesier than others, some pretty decent.* No, it's the fact they don't feel like film shorts. They don't even feel like teaser trailers. They feel like video game quest prompts, and not just because of the CGI. Most of them end not with a premise and promise of further developments, but with a call to action. The enemy has been revealed, the hero's mentor performed his obligatory sacrifice, the audience surrogate protagonist has been geared up and marionetted into a starting position. Screen paused. Player 1 insert quarter.

 

Hardly my first mention of this phenomenon. Last decade's Hobbit maladaptation was particularly blatant in its arrangement of scenes to be transposed to Warner Brothers' video game franchises, with platform-jumping Mario sequences and boss fights with phase transitions. But I have to wonder how many movie crews even realize they're doing it anymore?

 

Off the top of my head, you could compare it to a movie called Black Robe from '91 which I looked up thanks to a positive mention in an old Siskel&Ebert episode. While not quite the masterpiece you'd expect based on gushing critics (and rather stilted) it is both laboriously and expertly costumed and choreographed as film. Characters position themselves to be seen by the camera -

- framed by scenery (in this case foliage) and delivering intelligible, full exchanges of ideas. This was visual storytelling. Scenes in a box. A game, while it may seem a visual medium at first glance, must accomodate the player's intrusion. Immersion works differently in both cases. Note the much heavier use of, say, close over-the-shoulder or first-person shots in Oats Studios shorts.

One common critique of television held it induced passivity. Sociological commentary on the boob tube summoned images of slovenly Joe Averages vegged out on sofas, baking in the cathode ray, merely absorbing.

"Sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear" to quote The Outer Limits' immortally audacious opening.

 

So how have games changed us? They're a call to action, answered uncritically. You are presented with intrigue, a quest prompt, a Space Invader. Now shoot it. And the next. Good boy. Here's a power-up. And the next. Go on. Do not attempt to adjust your pattern. And the next. Why? Because it's next. Keep it moving. It gives you fun.

 

Note at some point the nature of the action ceased to matter. The activity persists by sheer impetus to continue. To win. It is next. The next mob, the next mission, the next re-tweet. Toss any content in there so long as it's a pretext to keep playing, keep getting re-linked. Go on. Score a point, level up, get the loot. Go on. Fetch. I'm normally more a proponent of nature versus nurture as explaining human behaviour, but it's hard to ignore the correlation of voter apathy during the second half of the 20th century with its popular medium of the time, TV, then increasing activism (upon increasingly dishonest platforms) in the video game and social media era. Doesn't matter what you're shooting or posting so long as you're leveling up, farming those likes. Whatever's trending.

 

Do not attempt to adjust your feed. Gamification bleeds across other domains. Netflix recently changed its user interface to eliminate the separate page for the user's own collection. Not that it was ever ideal, as your private list was unsortable and had a habit of constantly rearranging itself to bring Netflix' own choices to the forefront, but now you cannot escape the constant barrage of ads for other flicks. A constantly scrambled collage of nothing much in no particular order. Goblins, guns, flashing loot, explosions, level-ups, maybe some Star Wars? At least with a TV remote you could change the channel and it stayed changed. You might also like: Yeah, and I might also finally cancel my subscription, since you're getting as bad as any other control freak media site.

 

But most won't. They'll click on the next goblin. It's easier. Is unchanging activity all that active? Do you get anywhere by running in circles? Am I asking rhetorical questions?

 

So, once "playing" a game gets redefined as merely pressing the one button in your Skinner box, which medium is really better at producing that mindlessly obedient public, breeding that idiot housewife mouthing a single line on cue to her TV "family" in Fahrenheit 451? Does it matter? No matter the medium, it is mass appeal that drives degeneration.

 

“People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

 

Sorry, Gore, but I think Ray hit closer to the truth. Cinema, television, games, social media, chat bots, the new inventions aren't really changing us. Each in turn merely gradually reveals humanity's true nature as vermin reacting thoughtlessly to sensory stimuli, twitching their whiskers in irritation at any whiff of mental challenge.

 

"The public itself stopped reading of its own accord."

 

 

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* The whole Oats-sowing thing feels more like a set-up for copyright trolling than anything else. Wanna make a movie about a blob monster engulfing humans? Or God toying with humans? Pay Neill for his oh-so-original idea.

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.

 

 

________________________________

 

 

 

* 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.

AoW4 Factions, 26

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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Much better concept for a mole faction than my previous attempt. Instead of viewing them from outside as diggers, it's more fruitful to get into their perspective on those above who do not dig. From there, the drip-drip-dripping wrote itself. Plus they're already sporting Nosferateeth.

 

With the vamp release, AoW4's gamut of options obviously began running dry, so if they try milking it after one more big DLC I may not bother. Newer spells, town options, etc. are falling more and more into overpowered freebies. But at least it gave me an unexpected burst of inspiration for a second mole race, of all things, and the dungeon/lightless motif mixed well with my turtling tendencies. I had expected materium vamps would yield another unkillable terminator faction like my evil dwarves from last time. In practice, their bonuses triggering on death and the moles benefitting from brinksmanship resulted in a small core of elite units throwing skeleton and freebie animals in to soften the enemy up. But those few elites benefited greatly from a mix of every possible type of life gain/regen/drain. Lifesteal mixed with death bonuses, nature affinity heals, plus self-rezzing bat swarm heroes. Rite of Vivisection proved overpowered in the long run, less effective than other army nukes but manaless, and it only costs thralls to get more thralls so I spammed it every single turn unless I needed casting points for something else. I need to play around with the tome of dungeonneering more too, lots of defensive/economic options for us turtle strategists. Overall, this was less a vampire faction than an underground faction.