Through a Scrambler, Darkly

"Reinstate, deactivate"

KMFDM - Get Out of My Head

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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.

 

 

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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.

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.

Argumentum ad rodentium

Following up from last time, if you need further indication of the behavioral sink experiments' applicability to modern humanity, I invite you to visit an MMO. And really, given the genre's shameless copycatting problem, most any MMO will do. My annoyance today happens to be fueled by City of Heroes, a game I got back into last year and which will thus be supplying more than two dozen character bios to this blog in the near future. Granted, said annoyance is compounded by my chosen server launching its Halloween event recently, at which point all other activity almost instantly ground to an absolute halt as the lemmings* set to infinitely grinding that one single activity. Never mind that sitting in one spot or running back and forth from door to door endlessly killing the same respawning zombies makes you more zombie-like than the mobs themselves.

 

But this is far from a merely seasonal affective disorder. The "game as service" business model hinging on constantly spammed content to bait customers into the cash shop, some of that content is of the playable variety. After two decades, older MMOs have accumulated endless instances big or small. So, wouldn't you think more customers would want to experience the content they actually paid for? You can shout yourself hoarse reminding them there's no actual cake at the end of the level/gear grind, that their time is just as well spent taking two steps along the infinite leveling treadmill as twenty, that they ain't none of 'em gonna win the motherfucking internet by grabbing the latest armour set which will be obsolete in three months anyway, that they could spend at least every fifth instance run in a different instance. Even if those're still repetitive "kill ten rats" nonsense, you could at least be doing the same thing in a different decor.

Nuh-uh.

Just like your mommy told you, never try anything new. Doesn't matter the game, the season, the year, the decade, the generation, doesn't matter which particular game you're talking about. 90+% of a game's content goes unplayed. Half a billion knucledraggers have played Dust2 nonstop in Counterstrike for a quarter century now, from the myriad custom maps which had sprung up around 2001. The deltas and epsilons keep chasing the same exact reinforcement, herded or rather herding themselves into narrower and narrower paths.

 

But here's where the mindless chasing of reward stimuli takes a more rodential twist, because before they perma-banned me for raging at a griefer, I had also tried Warframe, and I stand by my observation of its more proactive playerbase. I'd guess that has a lot to do with its overwhelming auto-queuing instead of forming teams via chat. When the mindless rats aren't actually watching the constant spam of THIS-THIS-THIS-IS-THE-COOL-THING-DO-IT-DO-IT because all the cool kids are doing it, you get a bit more overflow into less popular content. Not much, mind you. But, combined with the four-player team sizes, enough that you could actually take a step off the beaten path now and then, which simply does not happen in an MMO.

 

When the rats can't actually see all the other rats running to the same food trough, they suddenly rediscover some of their own freedom of choice.

 

Oh, and this has absolutely nothing to do with election season coming up here in the U.S. and each party making a show of popular support, trying to convince its rodential base it's the popular choice. I don't know why you'd even think that.

 

 

 

 

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* Yes, I know real-life lemmings don't-actually-do-the-thing, but until we get a replacement metaphor as vivid and mocking, I'll keep running those lil' rats into the ground and you can damn well add it to my list of sins.

Cram School

"Six such straigh As

Cut 'em in the bathroom

So this is it then?

You're here to win, friend

[...]

Ring-ring, call 'em up

Tell 'em 'bout the new trends"

 

Sleigh Bells  - Rill Rill

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"Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself."

Robert A. Heinlein - From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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"ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught."

 

Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary 

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"The fool room's out of order," he said. "It won't respond."

"Or---"

"Or what?"

"Or it can't respond," said Lydia, "because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room's in a rut."

 

Ray Bradbury - The Veldt (1950)

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The recent riots in France over... what is it this week? Education, right. They put me in mind of a standard complaint about complaining, specifically the repeatedly trotted out observation that everyone seems to have an opinion

DENHAM'S DENTIFRICE!

about what's wrong with the school system. Well, yeah? Because we've all been through it? And it's an artificial, one-size-fits-all environment that ends up fitting nobody? I'm not sure why you'd expect a blank Yelp page on that one.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time there were some mice. Mice in paradise. Para-mice. (You might've watched the spin-off when you were younger.) Plenty of food, no predators, a nice, cozy, weatherproofed wonderland. Forever and ever. Which lasted about a year before they started acting psychotic. Six hundred days before they altogether stopped even breeding then gradually died off, having never even remotely used up the food or shelter handed to them. J.B. Calhoun's behavioral sink experiments have been fashionably sneered at over the past sixty years. They were, after all, not properly controlled and the conclusions drawn were shamelessly verbalized in human terms. So unprofessional. So unseemly.

 

Okay, naughty-naughty Doc Bumpass*, let's assume we've given him the requisite wrist-slap... but have you actually tried reading some of his observations? Because much like the DENHAM'S DENTIFRICE! great dystopian novels which the opening decades of the 21st century have only proven more prophetic, not only does the general slant of the behavioral sink model paint an unflattering caricature of our current society, but so do quite a few of its uncomfortably rodential details. It is difficult to read of females demanding safe spaces and turning hyperaggressive, including toward their own young, without picturing an insecure she-mouse manically screeching from her nest box. It is downright impossible to hear of outcast males huddling together, randomly abusing each other with no hope of escape, without seeing the online cults built around macho figureheads. Or even more on-the-nose, to read of Calhoun's "beautiful ones" or mice whose sole activity beyond addressing their physical needs was reduced to obsessively grooming themselves, without seeing the fitness craze of the previous generation or rampant plastic surgery and "looksmaxxing" as its logical progression.

 

Which is not to say such results have been viewed correctly upon entering public consciousness. Thanks in no small part to the author's own abuse of Biblical allegory, you shouldn't be surprised at hearing right-wingers gleefully drawing a "careful what you wish for" moral from the story interpreted as proof that society must inflict hardship and privation, that the poor should never be helped, that the vast bulk of the populace should be constantly threatened with homelessness and starvation as "natural" conditions. Or, to take another often mistaken slant, though I myself would gladly take it as an argument against overpopulation, re-iterations of such environments seem to indicate that it's not sheer crowd size so much as social pressures which foment destructive behaviour and ultimate collapse. Perception of one's peers matters more than their physical existence for this purpose.

 

Which brings us back to the classroom. So as not to attempt sipping the ocean through a straw, let's limit tonight's point to a single facet of education: the basic, now quite universal class environment of many same-age students at their desks and a teacher lording it up front. A head-count of thirty could easily have counted as an entire clan in the stone age, covering everything from toothless infants to equally toothless old farts. Though villages in recorded history grew somewhat larger, even a growing youth's closest peers would only roughly be the same age. Most of your day-to-day life would be spent learning the monkey way, not memorization but observation and imitation of elders of various ages, being gradually included in their activities. A little tot might curiously watch his father sharpen tools, a slightly older kid might carry said tools back and forth, then later learn when they need sharpening, then a year later give some tools a tentative once-over, then a couple years after that be in charge of keeping them sharp. And all the while he'd be hearing comments about whetstones from mom and grandpa, and answer his younger brother's questions about the topic to the best of his knowledge.

 

No natural human milieu consists of a uniform swarm of the same age.**

 

Now, let's acknowledge that just as the complexity of a world beyond subsistence farming explains to some degree an extension of childhood as learning period, it also creates a need for formal education. We ain't just grindin' rusty old spades no mo'. Anyone who thinks homeschooling could ever again suffice on a large scale after WW1 deliberately ignores that a modern upbringing far outstrips the competence of ape instinct to instruct one's offspring.

Don't eat the red berries? Fully within a monkey's informational landscape.

Plow the field, plant it in spring, weed it in summer, harvest it in fall? Parental instruction can still encompass that.

Say your ps and qs, maintain your automobile's oil level and tire pressure, pad your retirement fund, don't (get caught) steal(ing)? Uhh, now you're demanding a bit of a stretch, getting shaky, quite a few parents flounder as we can see the haphazard results all around us.

Teaching your children to navigate the conceptual tangles of a multimillennial, multicultural artistic, scientific and philosophical canon, or post-industrial interpersonal and economic concerns? Far, far beyond the capacity of most Homo "sapiens" to even grasp, much less articulate to the understanding of a young dependent.

So before you question the capability of modern schooling to inform, acknowledge purely private instruction simply will not fill that role in the vast majority of cases. Most homeschoolers are religious backbirths reciting psalms to their kids and calling it trigonometry.

 

But communal life, especially within institutions imposing uniformity (often via literal uniforms) also imposes a competitive and conformative stress easily eclipsing any actual education that might occur, a topic again embarrassingly recognizable in Calhoun's famous article's concluding emphasis on "role fulfillment":

"the continuing high survival of many individuals to sexual and behavioural maturity culminates in the presence of many young adults capable of involvement in appropriate species-specific activities. However, there are few opportunities for fulfilling these potentialities. In seeking such fulfilment they compete for social role occupancy with the older established members of the community. This competition is so severe that it simultaneously leads to the nearly total breakdown of all normal behaviour by both the contestors and the established adults" 

There is no room for a twelve-year-old to be The Twelve-Year-Old per simian instinct as part of an extended family unit while lost in a sea of twelve-year-olds.

 

News stories have cropped up over recent years of first Australia, then Europe increasingly censoring internet access (focusing primarily on teenagers) based on poorly-defined mental health risks. But when it comes to social media sites in particular, the obsessive cliquish fad worship, the unending threat of public shaming, the weaponization of insecurity, it's hard to tell whether governments or media companies are the pot or kettle in that particular color palette. For all its capture of modern attention, Facebook does not have the power to imprison youths for full work-weeks over a period of sixteen years in glorified Mouse Utopias and set them against each other. The moral majority does that via schools.

 

Is it news to anyone that the bulk of time spent in school, from ABCs to college campuses (themselves increasingly forced to teach remedial ABCs) is not spent on academic work? Repeated stories of college-age sub-literates amply demonstrate the system is not investing that time in conveying knowledge. But all of it, every fucking second, be it recess or gym class or study hall or lunch or assemblies or recitals or after-school clubs or practicing filling in standardized test bubble sheets, is spent in the public eye, in the herd, in big rooms with many other bodies performing ritualized behavior, obeying authority and dodging public censure, being seen and judged and made minutely aware of one's social, not intellectual but social ranking according to the moral majority's consensus. That's the point. Just as Communist nations brought religious authority to heel not for an ideological opposition to irrational cultism but because they envied churches' competition to state cultism, no rational observer can ignore the screaming hypocrisy of censoring internet sites for biting older social institutions' act.

 

The decline in quality of education has done nothing to lessen the obsession with keeping youths in "educational" institutions, using any excuse to continue cramming them into those gigantic hives wallpapered with slogans. Far from it, the buildings have grown larger and the schooling lengthier and more dilute. The crowding is the point, because as those rodent Utopias demonstrated, the crowd itself, the unending impingement of public perception upon the individual, the cliques and popularity contests and sartorial fads and slogan chanting, that hell of others, will in and of itself instill dysfunction which can be weaponized as psychological lever by the rich controlling public discourse. Anxiety, aimless aggression, loss of personal agency, these are resources to be reaped by those who have always seen in that footage of mice huddling listlessly in a corner of their heaven turned hell not a warning of societal collapse but a promise of an unresisting underclass to be freely abused.

 

Stories like Bradbury's The Veldt are classic among SF's warnings of futuristic dysfunction, fear of a Santa Claus machine displacing parental authority, feeding the id until it overtakes the individual, fear of strange psychoses nursed in secret corners. Other tales prophesying conformity almost always portray it as imposed from above, by some government morality police, instead of the far cozier reality of naked ape mob rule, the "family" wall-screens Bradbury himself also posited in Fahrenheit 451. The psychosis is rather inherent in human evolutionary history, in dependence on family and tribe. It's not secret, but all too public. It's the superego, it's validation and belonging, it's a bigger entourage, more family, more friends, a bigger tribe, safety in numbers. It's every church and sports stadium and mosh-pit. Remember Jonestown needed no content algorithm or "share" button, merely the group policing itself. You don't need a hashtag to form a lynch mob, but it helps.

 

The insanity now cited as a result of social media is only the logical expansion of the playground jungle, of exploiting students' propensity to obsess over their peers' consensus instead of trying their best according to objective measures, of substituting social pressure for reality, a habit which will, observably, carry over into the adult life of a work force incapable of personal choice. Dependence, yes, but not on technology. On approval. Do remember Calhoun had already coined the term "behavioral sink" before he reached Universe 25, from earlier observations on rats which, accustomed to each others' presence, would voluntarily crowd together and scramble to all feed from the same food trough, despite multiple such food sources being made available.

No overlord.

No complicated futuristic gadgets. 

No training required.

Just sociability.

 

 

_______________________________

 

 

 

* Yes, I had to work his middle name in there. Seriously. Bumpass. Just imagine going through school as Bumpass. Not even bumpas. No. Two esses. Fully bumped. There are even places with that name! Why was I never informed of this? There's even a Bumpass, Virginia! Please tell me it's predominantly Catholic!

** Not that I'm a fan of such naturalistic arguments. You just don't get to ignore the mismatch to instinct. I would rather have actively selected for Homo superior, but obviously schools simply have not done that because they're not meant to.

 

edit:

I forgot to mention one particular memory which kept resurfacing while writing this, from when I was a fresh immigrant at the start of junior high. There was another little girl in class, and I do mean "little" as in the shortest of all of us, a tiny little sprig. Bit nerdy too, probably the most linguistically adept. At recess, having no place in their already formed play groups and not knowing the games they were playing, I quickly acquired the habit of just bringing a book out to read sitting against the school wall. So one day I'm startled by a manic screech from the playground "heeeee's pickiiiinnng hiiiss NOOOOOOSE!" and see her pointing wildly at me. That I had both hands on my book didn't seem to make much difference. While far from an extreme example, the moment's conciseness stuck with me as the sort of spontaneous sociopathy which invariably grows out of the need to divert the mob's aggression to targets of opportunity.

"Developed a cult following" developed a cult following.

Wildermyth

"Something in the woods is very strange

Birds have started singing songs of change"

 

Umm, not to nitpick, but your logo reads "saggyboobildermyth" and unless I see a helluva lot more battering ram action, that is falsely advertising a whole different fantasy subgenre!

 

Anyway, I've been putting off a Wildermyth summary due to conflicting impressions. Initially annoyed at its tabletop fetish elements, I quickly grew to love its core storytelling principle of taking heroes from humble beginnings as farmers with pitchforks and gradually building them up through chance events, avoiding the by now incredibly tedious Chosen One narratives of the Fantasy genre, fixating not on the foregone conclusion of an end-game power fantasy but various characters' tales of becoming. And really, Wildermyth appeals primarily as an RPG fan's RPG, addressing many such old complaints, my own included in the case of its magic system.

Almost entirely dependent on environment, your casters use various landscape objects to fuel their attacks. While they can be powerful in sheer damage, these more aptly fill in the offensive support elements of rooting or debuffing or shooting around corners, and magical or not, skills often show useful, situational applications. You can bounce a stone discus to an otherwise out of range target, knock an enemy back into range of a guarding warrior who didn't have enough move to reach, use splash or quick-action token damage to burn an enemy's defense, use fire to herd enemies into an archer's ambush. The tactical combat may not look deep at first glance but its elements interact for a great deal of unexpected complexity. Fights are well-varied with some requiring a bull-rush, others a gradual phalanx advance, other times forcing you to retrench.

If you can't tell, my fighter was nearly dead (and enemies will rather ruthlessly take advantage of that) but backing into a room with traps on the floor and an ambush on the doorway pretty much guaranteed the last mob would never get a shot off. 

 

But... Wildermyth retains D&D's reliance on over-randomization. High damage ratios encourage save-scumming, especially as your characters can very easily get killed/maimed in a single round based on an unavoidable roll of the dice. The opening fights of campaigns are quite apt to place you in nearly impossible fights before you've had a chance to level up any skills. Not exactly an increase in meaningful difficulty so much as "rocks fall, everyone dies" frustration. Also, your five-man band will plateau in their tactics sometime around the middle of longer campaigns, and as it's unwise to swap younger, lower-XP heroes in, you'll likely find the last ten or twenty combats quite repetitive. And almost all XP is combat XP. Forcing older heroes to retire may partly address this problem, but once you get a feel for the system you'll likely end up swapping them out even earlier to set up a fivesome for the end-game, which counterintuitively means that latter group will spend even more time together, running the same strat to soak up enough level-ups for the boss fight.

 

That "legacy" system for recruiting your old campaigns' heroes to a new one also sounds better on paper than in execution.

Recruiting old heroes makes them young again, or even revives them. It gets a bit goofy when a young sprat who learned at the old witch's knee one campaign ends up as her suddenly younger self's grizzled old mentor in the next, and it precludes any greater family tree development. Unlike for example the gut-worm quest, this harms internal consistency, not just "realism" and saps that long-term relationship building promised by their character sheets. After only the third campaign of six I found myself trying in vain to ratchet back my "legacy's" clutter of randos. For how ambiguously this plays out, let me tell you the story of Flamena the fuck-up.

When I recruited her in the second campaign she managed to get wounded in her very first fight, then lose a leg in another. At the end I "forgot" her from the legacy, only to have her inexplicably show up again... and again... and always just when I needed another huntress. So I gritted my teeth and made do with her lackluster performance. I laughed out loud when her daughter Flinena joined the band in the fifth campaign only to... you guessed it, get knocked out out in her very first fight and acquire exactly the same face-wound as her idiot mother. Which idiot then, in the climactic boss battle, one round away from near-certain defeat, ended up landing the winning hit on the big boss.

 

Well, y'ol flop-winged bat, what can I say, you were due. All golf-clap for the mighty dragonslayer. Is that a good RPG story? I guess... but too little of it was player input and too much a bug in the legacy system and comically repetitive randomization. I can't recommend all that heartily a game system more entertaining in its screw-ups.

 

That sort of wishy-washiness taints most everything else as well. There's no way to pass down artifacts as clan heirlooms, family relationships have little or no impact, and in fact you're explicitly building a new clan every time. Map locations are utterly forgettable. The cardboard cutout graphics aren't too ugly (hell I didn't complain about them in Shelter and I won't here) but the figurines' limited gamut of poses, animations and components gets, again counterintuitively, more repetitive than if they'd used simpler, more stylized pawns a la Rimworld.

I always loved that face.

But Wildermyth's biggest bugaboo comes in the form of writing. When I asked what can change the nature of a game, actively generating text was one of my stated options. But whatever LLMs are making of that now a few years after the fact, it's clear Wildermyth's approach, of swapping single words into the same sentence, or altering pre-written replies according to character personality flags, didn't get very far. The single word swaps forced very stiff dialogue which could accommodate any [FRUIT] while not being able to comment on its fruitiness, while the characters' personalized replies created non-sequiturs or jarring mood shifts. Repeating the same mini-quest is not made any fresher by one guy talking about apples instead of pears while the other randomly hates/loves them, especially since these are not allowed to impact decisions. Moreover, spotting such changes feels more like spotting the zippers on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers' suits back when I was ten. Aaaand, channel change. 

 

Sadly, this last complaint cuts to the very heart of Wildermyth's appeal in recreating the old fairytale spirit of adventure. Though less than in Sunless Skies, the florid prose tends to crawl up its own ass as often as not in attempting to imitate old-timey jawin' and simply lacks a coherent concept of the world it's describing. Folklore, writ large, is just too wide a category to have attempted to imitate even in a game with ten times Wildermyth's staff, scrambling in vain to rebuild half a dozen different boogeyman myths from universal principles. It's too inchoate to sound authentic or immersive. Occasionally the ridiculous turns successfully to heart-wrenching melancholy (Shy and the Shadow, When Dreams Were Young, both lovely pieces) but this tends to happen with vignettes written as single contiguous narratives.

 

Even then, it's hit or miss. The writers simply lacked either the practical experience or historical research to adequately portray a pre-information-age social milieu, and if that sounds familiar, it's a complaint I've leveled constantly against more recent authors, whether in comics or in games like Solasta, Sacred Fire or The Necromancer's Tale where characters sound like nothing else but twenty-something, 21st-century yuppies babbling around the game table. Even with the best of intentions and a solid core concept, generations raised incapable of gazing beyond their own navels prove incapable of describing any other society but their own immediate clique. Anachronistic, politically correct, unaware of class interplay except to spout a few interest group slogans by rote, needlessly florid or innocently crass, it's the modern perversion of storytelling into soapboxing and fan service that seems to harm recent cRPGs more than their interactions or aesthetics. 

 

And I would have expected better based on first impressions. The core atmosphere, the mood music, the attention to descriptive sensory details, the heroic trajectories, are solid. The Austin clan seems to have some connections too. I had certainly not expected to see Ursula Vernon's name among the writing credits, unless the name's a complete coincidence. Disappointed that this only seems to reflect one short credited interlude about a turtle, still her more coherent example of such modernized folklore in Digger should not have been ignored. A worse and more pervasive influence likely came from Shae Rossi, who if I'm not mistaken is the feminist cretin largely responsible for ruining LotRO from the pandemic onward. Though (I'll admit it) her ignorant, vandalist approach to folklore works better in Wildermyth's looser, happy-go-lucky interpretation of adventuring than in deliberately shitting on Tolkien for her own gratification.

 

Sad, because though it does not quite reach its ambitions as interactive storytelling, Wildermyth hits its mark quite often. I have begun every time with a sense of wonder and ended with a sense of accomplishment than no bombastic trailer or achievement list can duplicate. Several of my characters have acquired personalities in my mind, the boisterous shock troopers, the reliable one-eagle-eyed sniper and soft-spoken support caster, the versatile mid-range combatant, the grim-faced brick wall. Some events here and there are spot-on calculated to make for a satisfying narrative and strategic payoff.

At least it wasn't a bible in his breast pocket.

It's well worth playing, and serves as positive example in many respects, but also disappointing in how often it gratuitously undercuts its own strongest features. Sometimes you just wanna smack the good ones upside their heads for their fewer mistakes, y'know?