Our Darkened Age

"I've been through magic and through life's reality

I've lived a thousand years and it never bothered me

I've seen the future and I've left it behind"

 

Black Sabbath - Supernaut

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"demons may have been all but forgotten by modern historians, who tend to pass over demonologies with a silence that speaks eloquently of embarrassment, but such fiends obsessed, perhaps even possessed, some of the greatest minds of early Christianity.

[...]

Another monk was visited in his monastery by a particularly timeless apparition: a middle-ranking government official. The official then grabbed the monk, who started to wrestle him. As the struggle progressed, the monk realized that he was in the presence not of bureaucracy but (the distinction seems to have been a fine one) of pure evil. This, he realized, was a demon."

 

Catherine Nixey - The Darkening Age, ch. 2: The Battleground of Demons

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"when you read a lot of ancient criticism of Christianity, it seems strikingly modern, because, I suppose that's a trick of events and of history [...] to see that it's all there right at the beginning, and that there were these, y'know, sophisticated people from a different culture, y'know, a non-Christian, a pre-Christian culture to be making those criticisms is eye-opening"

Andrew Copson interviewing Nixey for Humanists UK

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Historic recurrence has featured... recurrently, just to get the pun out of the way... here over this blog's many years, especially given the striking similarity between the mass manias of our own time and those of the previous turn of the century. And no, it's not because we're being carried on any mystical universal carousel, but because most humans are subhuman, too willfully ignorant and flat-out stupid to contextualize their latest rehashed fads. Religion, in particular, fathoms depths beyond even the reactionary by its mesolithic stagnation. Even nonsensical supernatural fabrications though can be diagnosed according to their degrees of virulence and lethality.

 

The Darkening Age meanders back and forth among such a decline from bad to worse, through Christianity's rise to power in the waning Roman Empire, and its contribution to said waning by vandalism and terror. In case you haven't been keeping up, it's very un-p.c. these days to refer to the Dark Ages as dark ages, because the decline from fumbling Greco-Roman attempts at reason and science into utterly unreasoned primitive superstition was not as absolute as historians of the 18th-19th centuries initially presented. But when even the few early medieval scientific advances were driven by, say, monks' desire to best pinpoint the numerous times of day to kneel and chant at their magic sky-daddy, you can safely point out the main restriction in thought. If the dark ages were a candle or two less dark than once imagined, even a passing glimpse at Roman religious imagination alone can shame those of us born sub crosa at our fabulistic impoverishment. The Darkening Age deals largely with the loss of this cultural, scientific, artistic and humanist wealth, not merely by pagans willingly converting because they've seen the light of dog and abandoning their old statues, as most of us have been raised to believe, but by deliberate destruction and general Christian thuggery.

Nixey's detractors (which could fill quite a few temples and spare) tend to ignore the central question of degrees. Of course belief in the supernatural is only one facet of human irrationalism and the old pantheons certainly had their dark side, but monotheism, by its totalizing proposition of a single absolute source of all good, carries the implicit moral imperative to erase all that is not of the one true god. Good vs. Evil: Fight! was baked into the pre-Christian formula from Zoroaster onward. Nixey's vignettes of late-Roman life do a wonderful job of illustrating the effect of endorsing crass, ignorant malice by absolute supernatural entitlement, and if you think for just a second you can probably picture it from examples of "Christian" values seen on a daily basis even now. Every form of paganism had its idiosyncratic sexual hangups, sure, but under monotheism physical pleasure itself was vilified. Paganism had its notions of blasphemy, of utterances which might offend the divine, but only with monotheism was blasphemy expanded to anything diverging from official doctrine. Pagans did occasionally burn books, but monotheism routinely fabricates the moral imperative to burn all but one book. Ignorance ran rampant through the empire, but the faithful of the new faith made a virtue of it. From the myriad invocations and depictions of monsters and gods glorious, amusing, beautiful, terrible or wondrous, Christianity reduced all culture to mindlessly regurgitating the same rabbi on a cross and the same "virgin" with child in the least imaginative or skillful ways possible... spiced up by pictures of saints best described as nondescript dudebros holding a couple of mundane objects as identifiers. The imagination does not boggle.

Though the author opens her book in a borderline apologetic tone for presenting historical events in narrative form, this necessity becomes apparent when you remember philosophy may be personal, but religion is a tool of social control. Religion manifests in our daily lives not by high-brow dialectics on the metaphysical being/rebeing of the not-being-being there being been, but in the unthinking masses surrounding us, willing to do anything in the name of the assuredly supreme being. What worth is the preacher's talk of peace and wisdom up at his pulpit when in the streets behind him, lurching to his rambling cadence, skitter rank and sanguine the better part of the worst of humanity, unconcerned with such vagaries of self-deception, wanting only the license he provides, knowing only that soon he will lift his hand... and point... and they will kill.

 

Overall though, Nixey's tone throughout the book is not one of moral outrage or even lamenting lamentable losses, but wonder and no small amount of exasperation, perhaps at our continued revisionism of this otherwise mundane sect's forceful rise to power. I'd say we should at least acknowledge our refusal to acknowledge that Christians' common modern manifestation of crass, anti-intellectual petty thugs is by no means incidental to our individual home towns. It has been observed all through their history, at any time the Christians themselves were not in a position to torture their observers to death. They were thus in the time of Pliny the Younger and Hypatia, of Galileo and Darwin, and they will continue to play such roles for the foreseeable future, if not directly then as the masterclass in rabblerousing to which other aspiring charlatans and demagogues pay the homage of imitation.

I've ranted quite often here about the religious bent of modern social movements, from economic creeds to snowflakes' myriad sects of woke-ism: their absolute good/evil dichotomies, their adherents' race to outstrip each other's fervor, their blind belief in the advent of some flavor of paradise/utopia once their arbitrary and impossible demands are finally met, their psalmic chanting of slogans and catchphrases. But religion itself remains the most abundant fountainhead of irrationality. Quite a few modern adherents imagine themselves to be wrestling with demons in human form whenever they meet unbelievers.

 

If the events described in The Darkening Age don't immediately sync up for you with modern fads, if you still doubt that the Christians of yesteryear are still very much the Christians of today, let me point out one of the more amusing recent cults, one so ludicrous I can't but see it as an elaborate practical joke played on its own followers, continually upping the stakes to test the depths of idiocy to which they'll sink. Everything from the deliberate improbability of its claims to its comically monosyllabic slogan approximating "woo-woo" in sound points to the sort of hoax that'll only grow into its humor after a century or so, like the Loch Ness monster. QAnon is among other things a Christian movement, making liberal use of messianic rhetoric, quite literally demonizing its preferred targets and even repurposing the old antisemitic baby-eating blood libel. I'd say the apple didn't fall far from the tree, but these imbeciles' ancestors obviously never visited that side of the primordial garden. If you find yourself exasperated with their antics, you might just find a kindred spirit in Pliny or Celsus.

Look Both Ways Before Fucking

"We are of reptiles
We are of stardust
We are of mercury
And these things are our kin"

 

Ego Likeness - Save Your Serpent

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"If all you can muster to say about this event is 'stabbing is bad and I'm against it' without looking at the reasons behind it, you're useless, and that describes pretty much the entire mainstream media."

Bill Maher - New Rule: Straw Man Arguments

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Continuing from yesterday's post: while John Oliver devoted a decent bit of air time to lamenting Qatar's indecent, primitive, filthy and dangerous labor camps for foreigners, he passively verbalized then elided the little detail that the victims of that system have been almost exclusively men, accounting for the country's absurd, overwhelmingly male demographic ratio. But you can be sure most of whatever money those men have accumulated will, in some way or another, make its way to women. There's nothing new here, really. Just the timeless routine of men being driven over the horizon, to return with spoils or die trying, in order to (consciously or not) demonstrate their fitness as providers and earn the right to be bled of a lifetime's effort by their tribe's females upon return.

This is perfectly normal.

This is unremarkable.

I was skimming through a Reuters article on the Iranian riots last week which cited the hundreds of "people" who have died so far, either in street clashes or executed. To their credit the article's cited source, HRANA, was a bit more open about the demographic breakdown: "women are 7% of the victims. Shockingly, 29% of the victims are under the age of 18" Reuters picked up the shocking youth mortality but excised the boring gender disparity. In fact I looked up the original source precisely because I knew that if any appreciable percentage of women had numbered among the victims, the entire article would have been devoted to them, but the blanket term "people" leaving you to assume parity always masks men's sacrifice. It is normal for men to die. When "people" die it's supposed to be men.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

To Ukraine. Where judging by media coverage earlier this year, you'd have thought the Ukrainian war effort consisted entirely of adorable young blonde girls and grieving widows. Because putting a real face on reality would elicit not a joule of sympathy from audiences abroad. If you admitted to our voting public that the war's victims are almost all straight, white men, you'd soon find them cheering the Russians on and chanting "nuke 'em!" at the top of their lungs. It's normal for men to be killed, it's natural, it's right, it's righteous, it's dulce et decorum et all that jazz.

Every day in the States you can hear the same retread moral outrage at uneven incarceration rates for blacks... but rarely will the same speakers admit it's specifically black men... unless calling them "fathers" in the "community" to justify their existence by their utility. You can be outraged at the suffering of blacks but not of men. Men's suffering is as it should be.

 

I've been catching up on Bill Maher's New Rules recently, only to find him returning several times to the breakdown of sexual relationships here in the states - and in the developed world at large; in fact it may have started with Japan. And every time, HBO's staunchest voice of reason places all blame unilaterally on men, ranting against that hated "incel" subculture and calling them all a bunch of school shooters. (Not a straw man argument at all, right, Bill?) As if he can't figure out why men are failing to throw themselves at women's feet begging for sex.

 

Well, I can't claim to have the complete answer, but having commented on this topic a couple of times before, I would hope it's partly due to men's increasing awareness of just where we stand in the natural order: disposable draft animals, to be worked to death or slaughtered as convenient. If you're lucky enough you might even achieve that enviable state of masculine success, of a soulless, hapless, hollow-eyed sarariman measuring your existence by the pension your wife will be sitting on after you work yourself into an early grave. Because we all know men owe women absolutely everything up to and including their lives, and thanks to our modern sensibilities we now also know that women owe men absolutely nothing except abuse.

 

What's more, we are not permitted to even address the issue. No-one will admit Qatar's government has colluded with the women of South Asia to work their men to death. Iran's revolt will continue to be painted by every media outlet as a conflict of plucky females rising against male oppression, no matter how many men die in a woman's name. When those of Ukraine's menfolk lucky enough to survive the war return to their bombed-out homes to struggle to rebuild them for their families, they'll find those homes occupied by a feminist movement spitting in their faces as patriarchal brutes, tossing them out on the streets or in jail on groping accusations and demanding they surrender all white-collar work to women as more deserving. Thug until the day you die, lavishing the spoils of your crimes on women in hopes they'll sleep with you, then on your deathbed listen to Bill Maher lambaste you for not bending over backwards far enough to appeal to women.

This is our species' normal. "They don't give a fuck about us."

You know, Maher, you're right. Being unable to get laid, or giving up on sexual relationships altogether, it hurts, it's a miserable state. But thanks to the occasional reprieve afforded us by modern amenities, a few of us can sit back, breathe freely for at least a moment, and realize celibacy's still better than trying to play Prince Charming.

Masturbation might not be enough to make us truly happy, but beating off beats dying off.

Look Both Ways Before Praying

"We are of dignity
We are of mercy
We are of cruelty
And this is not our sin"

 

Ego Likeness - Save Your Serpent

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"Every country has human rights issues, including this one. For more of that, see every other story this show has ever done."

- John Oliver nearly making the mistake of admitting his show's prejudice

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If you'd like a tidy conjunction of Social Justice Warrior willful ignorance and hypocrisy, try Last Week Tonight's last two week nights this year, respectively on the British Monarchy and the Qatar World Cup. John Oliver spends two thirds of the British segment condemning the royals (not unjustifiably) for their role in colonialism, the slave trade, the mass murder of natives, etc., and even mumbles a brief mention of the Catholic and Anglican churches' genocidal actions, making a reasonable point that not only a nation but its institutions and their representatives should be scrutinized for their roles in injustice present or past.

 

Jolly good. Now, about those mullahs...

 

A week later, Oliver manages to yammer an entire 24 minutes through his Qatar segment without ever once saying the words "Islam" or "Muslim" even as he acknowledges that Qatari migrant workers have been kept in a system of modern-day slavery as opposed to merely being the descendants of slaves two centuries prior. Odd omission, given that like everything else in a theocracy de jure or de facto, kafala has an explicitly religious justification and legal underpinning:

"In Islamic adoptional jurisprudence, "kafala" refers to the adoption of children. The original Islamic law of kafala was expanded to include a system of fixed-term sponsorship of migrant workers in several countries in the late twentieth century"

Neither does he dare to even attempt placing Arab slaveholding in historical context, as though this one minute country with its myriad redundant and now utterly useless football stadiums had only now stumbled into error and need only issue a few visas to erase its crimes. But then Oliver has been all too eager to wail "islamophobia!!!" over the years at the drop of a turban. So while he eagerly wrings his hands at how shamefully late the British Empire ended slavery in 1807/1833, he will likely never mention (as just one example) that the Turks did not do so until rather precisely a century later. Under heavy pressure from Europe. Or that terms like "kafir" or "giaour" were never mere neutral delineations of religious belief as muslims now try to pretend, but blanket slurs leveled against those filthy infidels unworthy of anything but being enslaved and tortured to death for the glory of Allah.

 

For a thousand years! There's another facet. While the European, Christian colonialism now so universally (and vociferously... and repetitively (the lady doth...)) condemned as crimes against humanity lasted about four centuries, don't expect the likes of John Oliver to acknowledge the solid millennium of genocide and slavery inflicted by muslims across three continents. Much of that time, by-and-by, coinciding with entire centuries when the various Sultans and Caliphs were far better positioned (in material resources and safety) than anyone else to gradually transition towards secular humanism, being at once obscenely wealthy, militarily unmatched and possessed of the largest, most diverse and advanced store of scientific, legal and political thought in existence. Which they apparently never bothered browsing. By all rights, you'd think Arabia should have beaten Europe to the Enlightenment Age by about five hundred years, if they'd wanted to. Dun' wanna! Rather rape a few million East-Europeans to death. Toodles.

But, in SJW rhetoric, only those born the wrong race can be accused of racism. Only those of the wrong sex can be sexist. And those legitimizing oppression by their support for violent, sadistic, totalitarian primitive superstition about divine rights can never be called out on their collusion with villainy... unless they keep a spare bedroom at Balmoral, I guess.

You can stop calling the midwife now.

"You were talking, I was watching

You were looking at your new friends

You were coercing

Yeah you're the worst thing that ever happened to this party"

 

Simon Wilcox - Mother's Ruin

 

 

Weird as it may sound given my distaste for our innate plains-ape obsession over threats to women, our emotionality and our predilection for nonsensical superstitions, I found myself captivated by Call the Midwife's first season when PBS first aired it here in the states, regardless of it being hailed as a feminist mistresswork and based on the memoirs of a Jesus-freak who blathered so much about love as a cosmic force you'd think she'd lived at a "nunnery" instead of a nunnery. For as long as (supposedly) it still clung to the memoir's original material and tone in Season 1, the show worked admirably as a period piece focused on the concerns of its time and place.

It's a delivery bicycle, get it?

 

Interestingly though it does so by focusing on late '50s characters' own awareness of the passage of time. The endearingly caballine Chummy in particular seems a walking sequel to H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay and The Wheels of Chance. Generally though, unlike most period pieces which focus on feeding the audience points of contrast with the present the easier to foster a sense of superiority, Call the Midwife contrasted postwar society with the even paster past. Even cramped, vermin-infested tenements could be preferable to the abject poverty that preceded them, and hey, at least they closed the damn workhouses. And imagine affording an automobile, even if it is a ridiculous old jalopy. Plus a healthcare system actually struggling to get care to the poor instead of just letting them rot in the streets? What wondrous times.

By the time I got around to sampling latter seasons (when the stories had about as much to do with Jennifer Worth as with Jennifer Anniston) quality had dropped noticeably: themes and plots more contrived, acting more clownish, dialogue and editing looser and temporizing at every turn. Worse, its plots had obviously shifted anachronistically to feeding our politically correct racial/sexual narratives of the 2010s, mixed with tedious soap opera threads minutely tracking various characters' tedious lives. But I couldn't put my finger on exactly when the whole routine had gone stale, and so shrugged it off assuming season four or five would see Call the Midwife through it long-overdue cancellation. Gave it no further thought until running across it on Netflix last month when my jaw dropped at seeing eleven seaso - oh holy fiddlesticks* it's still running!

How? Why!?

Ugh, never mind.

At least it answered my old query: the show got dumbed down, instantly and violently, at the very start of Season 2. Aside from overextending the already lengthy birthing scenes, needlessly contriving a dislocated shoulder and turning a formerly short-tempered but dedicated senior nurse into a petulant bully, S2E1 also shows an abrupt escalation in male-bashing. Season 1 had shown little political agenda beyond applauding the nuns and indulging in a bit of maudlin sentimentality. Men could be remembered as kind old soldiers, young men struggling in the work force, heartless pimps, heroes, innocents or villains on a case by case basis with intrinsic value. It even acknowledged conflicts between women, notably in one death to eclampsia when a nervous mother-to-be skips her check-up due to verbal abuse by the gutter trash at the clinic. Turns out cramming a dozen hormonally challenged apes together into one room doesn't necessarily make for polite conversation.

After getting good press for showing a female viewpoint however, the show was re-tooled for female entitlement. Season 2 came out swinging with one woman complaining about her absentee husband** a father pimping his daughter (who "lived without friendship such a long time" on a ship full of men***) and browbeating her father for why it took him so long to give her the biggest cabin, plus a B-plot about a cartoonishly sputtering manic wife-beater - and of course his wife's only flaw is failing to run back to her mother - not parents mind you, but mother. And of course in a perfectly logical plot twist their apartment catches fire at the end. All that and more in one episode.

 

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me by now that the show's drop in quality went directly in hand with its descent into rabid chauvinism. As I've said before "propaganda is not art. It's psychological conditioning" - the more crass and repetitive, the better to beat reason into prosocial submission. Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra. But this 2013 flashback also serves as reminder that most of our current snowflake idiocy started with feminism, with the political lobby benefiting not only from the largest baseline of beneficiaries but from a class of victims instinctively pre-programmed to accept all abuse as part of their necessary sacrifice as providers and protectors of the self-appointed fairer sex.

 

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* Don't look at me like that, NUNS might read this!

** Never mind in the real world she'd bitch him out even harder if he lay around the house in case of labor, instead of laboring at pinching every penny for her benefit.

*** Reverse the polarity: a male character being written as weeping for having "lived without friendship such a long time" while being surrounded by women doting on him and lining up to fuck him. You could reasonably read suffering in that scenario... but no modern audience would, absent the feminist conceit.

Pssst... hey, why's the Goldbergs' kid a head shorter?

They went the extra mohel.

Meta-Averse (or: Stick It, Redux)

"Long story short, it was aaall a dream."
"Thank you [...] for making [dumping you] a little easier for me."

 

The Good Place S02E09 Best Self

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Spoilers follow for Gamedec and The 13th Floor. Actually even the epigraph might be a bit much. Though let's face it, both cases offer little to spoil.

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Funny. Apparently they made a fourth Matrix movie which I never even heard about because nobody gave a shit. Having been informed... I still don't. Does that tell you anything about the direction the whole cyberpunk routine has taken? Like maybe it's taken no direction because it's so routine?

 

I bashed Gamedec last week partly for so ineptly telegraphing its climactic last act grand reveal a quarter into its story. The second mention of "the tree" at the start of chapter 2, appearing mysteriously in random places beyond the bounds of game worlds, immediately triggered flashbacks to The 13th Floor, if not for their content then for their ineptitude in foreshadowing a big mystery about as mysteriously as your drunken uncle elbowing you in the ribs asking if you got his fart joke. But had Gamedec even managed more subtle presentation, that reveal would still be... a fart joke. As soon as the tree was confirmed as important I found myself mentally repeating "please don't go meta, please don't go meta" until the tale inevitably fell back on cyberpunk's most obvious, most gratuitously rehashed logical conclusion of the world itself being fake.

Except nobody's been surprised by that since March '99! At this point we've all been treated to that "twist" so many times over that even if we literally woke up tomorrow on the other side of a virtual reality machine, all you'd hear is eight billion yawns and "yup, saw it coming" in every language from Albanian to Swahili. A plot twist stops twisting once you've so assiduously hammered it flat!

But this is hardly just a cyberpunk problem, predating it in soap operas by some decades, to the point it's its own tired cliche. You might justifiably argue some difference between the low-brow "it was all a dream" cop-out and the postmodern metatextual, fourth wall breaking, audience participation routine, but for the moment let's just admit they've both simply gotten old. Hell, this schtick's been old for almost half a century. Retcons, amnesia, coma dreams, alternate universes, magical construct worlds, amnesia, evil clones, long-lost twins, amnesia, irony, post-irony, meta-irony, trans-irony, irony 2.0, hirony and Byrony and don't forget the amnesia, all such cheap tricks to dodge the burden of coherent causality have long needed a few decades' worth of pause from common usage in order to regain any clout. Gotta let 'em air out a little. "It was all a dream" faceplanted as infamously contrived even when Dallas pulled it back in the '80s. Just frikkin' STOP IT!

Of course, aside from laziness and incompetence, one must address the added dimension of feigned cleverness or depth, both on the part of writers and their degenerate dysgenic audiences. Declaring the world a mere fantasy allows writers to position themselves oh-so preciously above it all, never stooping to the naivete of those penning honest, engaging narratives (while also never actually publishing anything more thoughtful) and allows audiences to forego understanding any complex plot, symbolism or characterization in favor of feeling clever for dismissing storytelling as make-work filler. Oh, never mind the originality, nuance, insight or coherence of our first four chapters; they were never the "real" game all along.

So what exactly did I pay you for?

 

Feigning such deep thoughts also allows both the writer and audience to indulge in mysticism so shallow it would elicit eye-rolls from snake-fondling Pentecostals, in some hogwash about the human spirit.

"Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly [...] as you are undoubtedly gathering the anomaly is systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most symplistic equations"

- translation: "shit's nuts bro" puffed up to five minutes of bearded bloviation.

Whatever the motivation and appeal behind such gimmicks, their common crime (aside from trite repetition) is disengaging the audience from the story they're reading/watching/playing. It's harder to get invested in saving the world once you figure out that by lvl20 your character can just reboot WorldOS(tm) and defrag its hard drive. Even if the grand reveal is pulled off flawlessly, your now demonstrably irrelevant setting and characters will have added little to nothing to the overall conflict. For cyberpunk in particular, it's not like the idea of humans getting stuck in virtual worlds can't be included, so long as it's downplayed, merely an accepted element of the world, a possible threat to be faced, to be dealt with via the protagonists' techne and technology, and not some cosmic revelation. I seem to recall the Shadowrun cRPG adaptations treating it just as such. Torment: Tides of Numenera's cadre of experienced professional writers, despite working within a telepathy-riddled science fantasy setting, rather wisely treated the question of the world itself being fake as the demented ramblings of primitive cargo cults.

 

Examined from our vantage point several decades later, despite its popularity since the New Wave SF of the '60s this sort of "what is real" magical surrealism has rarely borne fruit even under the pen of Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick or Neil Gaiman... and the rest of you ain't Lem, Dick or Gaiman.

Give it a rest.

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P.S.:

I may as well admit I've just rehashed this post from 2018... but honestly, the issue has only grown more aggravating with time.

It's once again that magical time toward the end of most companies' fiscal year when the crawler bots come out to play. Awww yeah, index me like that big spammy daddy, I've been a naughty little ad-free data packet.

*pout*

Gamedec

"I could've been a whistle, could've been a flute
A real life giver, could've been a boot
I could've been a signpost, could've been a clock
As simple as a kettle, steady as a rock"

 

Nick Drake - One of these Things First

 

 

If anything makes my little lupine ears perk up, it's small-time developers promising to revolutionize cRPGs. Every time. No matter how many times I've gotten burned. Gamedec was even pushed hard by GoG, front page and center for months on end last year, but its launch was received tepidly at best in user reviews - and not without cause. Long story short, don't bother.

screw this, let's go pick pumpkins

Where to start?

Visually, less popular genres like isometric RPGs have benefited greatly from increased accessibility of mid-quality graphics in recent years, and Gamedec exemplifies the new standard of "good enough": pretty but not over-reaching, so you're not jazzed but also never feel any lack in their expressivity or immersiveness. Which makes all the more glaring any lack in what is actually expressed or immersed.

 

Storytelling premise:

You are a private detective solving cybercrimes among futuristic skyscrapers where everyone games in full-body suits with neural interfaces. Meaning from chapter to chapter you'll be jumping between your generic cyberpunk world into three "virtualia" (a sanitized S&M fetish world, a Farmville clone and a samurai MMO) which makes for some quaint whiplash moments meeting various players in multiple environments... or would if Gamedec had been written more skillfully, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Gameplay premise:

Mixing genres between adventure and RPGs, you interact with the environment via point-and-click clues (no physics or combat system) but also unlock four kinds of points via dialogue and advancement, invested in character skills unlocking more interactions. A laudable precept, as I've been arguing for years on this very blog for more choice-centered RPGs instead of score farming.

So where's the rub, bub?

1) Awkward, nonsensical, unfinished

"do not translate" - good advice to deduct

If they're demanding $30 for their product, they damn well better proofread it more carefully than I do my random babbling here. Worse, many of your inter[FILE NOT FOUND]actions depend largely on trial-and-error, despite GameDec's "Dec" conceit. For instance you advance through each chapter by gathering clues then selecting from several unlocked "deductions" to move the plot along.... but much of the time you simply have to pick a deduction, any deduction, then run around to every single NPC to check for new dialogue options. Chapter 1's alleyway puzzle gets repeatedly cited as having no particular rhyme or reason to when it unlocks its clutter of clickable clues, but it's far from the only one.

Chapter 4 (the samurai game) deserves special mention though. You're up against a "timer" where certain of your actions count toward a 15-tick limit before you need to appear before the boss NPCs to account for your progress. Sorry, did I say "certain"? I meant uncertain. Many actions add unadvertised ticks to your total (even merely LOOKING at some objects) rewards appear out of nowhere and you're forced to deal with a crafting system adding ticks whenever you try to fumble through a list of recipes... which amounts merely to forcing players to alt-tab to some online guide.

2) Unprofessional professions

 

 

After the opening cinematic, I thought, nice, let's catch and punish some cheaters. I shall be the hand of virtual justice! No rest, no excuses, no mercy, exterminate the filth!

But from the start the "profession" system standing in for RPG stats/skills/feats simply makes no sense. You should gain points by exhibiting your personality (aggressive/intuitive/analytical/empathetic) but professions tend to require points in every category, denying you any personality in favor of farming green points. I picked Self-Direction at character creation, but how exactly does that equate to my only available job being a social butterfly? Sigh... re-roll. In an echo of Torment: Tides of Numenera, Gamedec tries to do away with the old good/evil dichotomy and implement an original morality system... but gave too little thought to its implementation. Basically, all four skill trees (aside from being shallow to begin with) amount to cheating in completely interchangeable ways.

Also, this ostensible detective game underutilizes the analytical approach. The blue tree is about 1/3 green.

In one instance simply looking at the scenery gives you a red point. Was I just staring at clouds that aggressively?!?

Being asked what kind of music you prefer limits you to three choices split between blue or yellow, when music is one of the few topics providing easy justification for ANY answer.

The lack of meaningful choice extends to chapter conclusions as well. Chances are you'll know the right answer at the end of the Farmville quests, but it's too much of a pain trying to finagle dialogues into permitting you to accuse the culprit, and even after a dozen reloads there seems no way to both acknowledge the obvious answer AND side with what the devs decided is the "wrong" NPC... despite talking more sense than the official correct choice.

To top it off... your character advancement doesn't particularly matter, as you can't seem to fail. The extra dialogue options you unlock rarely do more than let you fast-forward past some interactions by cheating.

3) Incompetent writing

So: Gamedec is a facetious, linear, slapdash mess with a shallow, irrelevant skill system. Might it be redeemed by its storytelling?

Despite a decent ending... no, it is not.

Characters speak indistinguishably from each other, relying on the same mix of awkward, incongruous officiousness colored by random colloquialisms.

Dialogue trees, aside from being overstuffed with red herrings, also place many options out of order as in the image above. And no, I'm not particularly worried about spoilers there, since the game's own blurb on GoG openly reveals chapter 2's big plot twist.

One can't accuse the writers of laziness, given the scores of pages of text you can unlock fleshing out the setting, but most of that flavor text suffers from the same monotony and redundance.

Best not even mention the most comically bland fetish sadist murder ever portrayed in any medium. Think Tom&Jerry on a heart bed. On Valium.

One consistent bit of weirdness: who did they think their target audience was? Because I would have assumed a game about gaming is marketed to... gamers. People familiar with games. So why do NPCs feel the need to explain terms like DPS or RNG? ... or NPC? The more I played, the more I was reminded of watching an episode of CSI Cyber: purportedly topical commentary by and for people still seething over a brief brush with modernity decades prior. Even Gamedec's virtualia, boiled down, read like talking points by Jack Thompson: sex&violence, children in peril and heathen cults.

I might hold off on wholeheartedly bashing this embarrassing thirty-dollar mess for the last chapter, which does at least think a step or two past the point you assume it would end, exploring your adventure's multiple possible repercussions.

...

But the fact its grand reveal was painfully obvious FROM THE START OF CHAPTER 2 and even follow-up reveals get telegraphed a chapter in advance, this itself can count as damning praise.

 

4) Pandering

 

Can I trade that box in for some coherent dialogue trees?

Siege of Dragonspear. Deadfire. Wasteland 3. Wrath of the Righteous. Etc.

Etc.

Etc...

In games as in any creative medium across history, incompetence, laziness or profiteering will readily hide behind posturing as champions of a popular cause. (See previous post for a webcomic example.) It does seem though like in the field of cRPGs in particular, the last few years prove that the less confident a game's writers are about their work, the harder they'll lean on Social Justice Warrior crutches to deflect criticism; whether incapable of penning more than two or three endlessly reiterated stock characters as in Deadfire or they've stretched themselves much too thin with a hundred-hour campaign and can't integrate that many characters into their setting coherently, as in WotR.

If you're ever at a loss as to guilt and innocence, right and wrong in Gamedec, just remember the all-purpose FEMale chauvINIST mantra: "man bad, woman good" - always side with women against men.

That's what we call roleplaying now.

Also, gaze enraptured at the magnificence of our homosexuals. Does it not make you want to forget all about those typos and bugs and telegraphed plot twists and tangled dialogues to prostrate yourself before the developers and kiss their feet in praise for their support of homo-righteousness? I keep saying this, but it bears repeating: Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent.

I also doubt it's any accident that a story ultimately presenting (like so much Caveman Science Fiction) an ultimately luddite warning against the abuses of scary technology, also strains so hard to pander to current narcissistic social fads in overcompensation for its reactionary leanings.

 

Anyway, unless like myself you suffer from some morbid interest in bad RPGs as object lessons, Gamedec's a waste of time and money.

Soul to Call Waiting

"Daintier, smarter, better dressed"

Rasputina - Antique High Heel Red Doll Shoes

 

 

A tenacious teenage traceuse joins a magical self-cutter, a hard-bitten mercenary who'll probably bite it in the last act to defend those more sympathetic, and a twenty-faced lying bitch who's too cute to criticize, all on a quest for demonic fog. Or maybe against demonic fog. I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually. Nah, screw all that, who needs plot when you've got lesbians?

I've actually mentioned Soul to Call a couple of times before, first for its demon-Apocalypse premise and second for its heroine's obligatory politically correct daddy issues. Unlike most good webcomics which only gradually grow into their potential through painstakingly amateurish fumbling, this one benefited from a forceful, memorable introduction of its world and core cast with well differentiated personalities and goals, not to mention unusually high-quality artwork. Too bad that in the intervening years it's degenerated into more of a case study in poor pacing.

As to why that is, the short answer's that the author got addicted to the woke-aid halfway through. It now advertises its pronouns. The long answer has more to do with marketability and profitability. Granted, those early chapters' quick pace carried the caveat of introducing too many phlebotina on rapid-fire, but these could have been more gradually fleshed out (demon types, rituals, etc.) afterwards. They were not. Soul to Call peaked back in 2017 shortly before page 400-ish with the resolution of its first boss fight. (Mind spoilers if you click forward or back.)

 

It spent the next ~300 pages mired in interpersonal drama, ditching the urban decay, improvised weapons and monster-dodging in favor of an all-human inhabited area expanding a bit on the core cast's backstories and introducing their party's bard. As character development goes, this was a necessary step and well-timed breather... until it started dragging... and dragging... repurposing two chapters to lament racism against colored(-eyed) people and to introduce purposeless bit players whose plot relevance could've been discharged in one page if not for the score of pages they needed to devote to BEING HOMOSEXUAL which is obviously highly relevant in a post-apocalyptic demonic drama.

Every professional author is always on the lookout for new ways to choke more filler down the audience's throat, whether to pad out word counts or run time or stall on a high note while those Patreon subscriptions keep trickling in. Florid descriptions or digressive subplots are time-honored favorites (see Dickens) as are romantic/sexual interludes. Movies have their lengthy establishing shots or Rashomony reiterations and flashbacks. In video games it's forcing reloads and damage sponge mobs. In superhero comics you can easily burn page after page through frame-by-frame pugilism. The current era of hashtag mobs merely offers a variation upon that theme: posturing as socially conscious by reiterating the endlessly reiterated stock moral high grounds like "prejudice is bad" with all the parochial ingenuousness of a 1990 "drugs are bad" Very Special Episode.

With Soul to Call having returned to advancing its action for a hundred pages to whet its audience's faltering appetite, I'd give even odds it might now spend another three hundred and four years watching chicks holding hands in the hallowed name of "representation" for lesbians, the neuroatypical and homeless ponies.

Keep on Patronizin'!

Foundation

"And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz!"

The Beatles - Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite

(though you gotta love Eddie Izzard hamming this one up)

I did play (and thoroughly enjoyed) SimCity 2000/3000 back in their heyday, but for the most part city sims ain't my thing. Gave SC4 a pass after hearing about some of its TheSims-inspired "features", never entirely got into Settlers&co(pycats), and only really got back into the genre with Banished, Surviving Mars and especially that nippy delight Frostpunk. Thanks to them I've gotten to really enjoy the lower-pop, more survival-focused village simulators, so three years ago I also snagged Dawn of Man and Foundation during a sale for about the same price. While Dawn of Man, despite its glaring flaws, engaged me more than enough to make me feel guilty for underpaying, Foundation should count as my karmically-balancing rip-off.

 

Apparently my complaint about French games' aesthetic focus and mechanic failure extends to French-Canadians. I was intrigued by Foundation's main selling point of freeform expansion, which turned out to mean drawing your grain fields and wood chopping areas using an MS Paint airbrush tooltip, and expanding buildings by modular rooms/doors/decorations by snapping them onto each other. Quaint... but also, ultimately, adding nothing to gameplay that traditional building upgrades or grid selection wouldn't, no further choices or decision-making.

The flip-side of such malleability is of course precision. Villagers lay down their own roads between destinations, which can end up cutting needless chunks out of grain fields as in the lower right in that image. Building expansion suffers from space and accessibility concerns, as it's often unclear how much room you'll need or waste. At the intersection of those two problems, the populace also plop down houses haphazardly within the residential areas you paintbrush for them. End result? "Villager path blocked" has been by far the most frequent message I see, and several buildings' construction stalls inexplicably when builders just stop bringing resources in, as seen in the tooltip above.

 

Bugs aside, while this may be meant to convey "the organic aspects of urbanism" in the words of Polymorph Games' sales pitch, it would take a great deal more interconnection to yield the sort of meaningful adaptation to needs and wants (heat, water, defensibility, pastures, neighbours, availability of construction materials, light, superstitions about lucky and unlucky orientations, etc.) dictating the concatenated, conjoining sheds, walls and annexes visible in medieval villages of yore. As it stands, you're paying for a shallow implementation of paintbrushing and equally shallow algorithmic residential automation, both merely perfunctory to your core resource management tasks.

To shift attention away from these basic flaws, Foundation seems in the process of tacking on lots of achievements or "collect 100 wood" miniquests, plus a mildly promising three-faction reputation grind between the traditional preindustrial three estates, which nonetheless boils down to "pick one" in terms of game mechanics as far as I can tell. Sure, the standard elements are all there, resources to be harvested and stored, constructions to be constructed, and you can watch your little chibified NPCs walking from home to market and work... but then, none of that's new, and others like Banished or Dawn of Man have done it better without tacking on superficial non-features that only an art major would want. Through it all, I just kept wanting to ask: why is your show on trampoline?

Another one for the Bozo tag.

Gargoyles

"Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared. [...] It was just a matter of knowing the secret of all TV shows: at the end of the episode, everything's always right back to normal."

- Futurama, When Aliens Attack

 

I miss Gargoyles.

 

"To kill in the heat of battle is one thing, but not like this"

 

Well, OK, I couldn't sit through it all now, but I miss being twelve years old and finding a show that transcended children's entertainment as I understood it. Aside from Animaniacs the '90s were weak on comedy cartoons, but they hit a gold-mine of heroic drama. Even amongst the Batman / X-Men hits though, Gargoyles stood out for giving its young audience more credit than the industry as a whole was wont to. Complex antivillains like Demona or Xanatos kept the episodic plots from being too linear. The unusual emphasis on gliding physics got you thinking three-dimensionally. Shakespearean characters dove in and out of various plots with surprising grace, neither completely dumbed down nor too pedantic. Most of all, Gargoyles could at times be unabashedly, pointedly, bombastically, roaringly, operatically gritty and dramatic, above and beyond what you'd think Disney (of all companies!) would permit.

However, I'd missed one particular oddity, lacking the greater context of television in general back then. While some continuity had been sneaking into TV shows over the previous decade, it was still assumed the audience could not be credited with a real attention span, much less an audience of children. Shows defaulted to unrelated, episodic plots reinstating the status quo every single week, and when some like The X-Files tried building longer, more complicated intrigues the results were... let's say unpolished. For the most part, you'd occasionally get at most a two-parter, and when ST:TNG dangled its Locutus cliffhanger, it pretty much broke its fans' brains. The villain of the week still ruled supreme.

Gargoyles starts with the five-part Awakening storyline, which establishes not just static character quirks but backstory and original phlebotina like the stone skins, tears down its status quo twice, shuffles heroes and villains and generally kept knocking you over the forehead to see if you're paying attention. And sure, it was still a children's show and often gratuitously goofy or cheesy... but damn, it also carried a rare implicit statement that utterly despising one's audience is not integral to the creative process.

Ping Shading

I've found my mind wandering toward online gamer culture recently (and not just because I'm trying my hand at Gamedec) and I'm reminded of one glaringly constant quibble. See, from the mid-'90s we've gone through 2D, 2.5D, 3D and back to hipster-retro "pixel art". We've gone from 28.8 modems to cable and fiber optics to having nothing worth playing online because multiplayer quality has stagnated or deteriorated so badly. We've gone from hyperaggressive little cretins charging in blindly to dickless retarded little bitches too scared to ever risk their own scores for the sake of the team.

 

But no matter the decade or the generation or the polygon count, somehow, for almost thirty years running, online gamers still don't know the difference between network lag and FPS. It's... well, at some point the overt effort put into such willful ignorance starts rivaling that of religions. Mind you, we're not talking about specialized knowledge like Nvidia's latest thread-tunneling-vertex-packets, or about the general knowledge no-one seems to acquire anymore. Ping/frames is a very basic distinction which not only affects your favorite hobbies on a daily basis but has done so for uninterrupted decades, to the point that for any gamer it should some as naturally as differentiating between coffee and gasoline. Both keep things running, but they're not interchangeable!

Yet a couple of days ago I saw, as I have in innumerable game discussions since the days of Warcraft 2 and Quake, two knuckleheads trying to fix rubberbanding by turning shadows or reflections off in their graphics settings. I had half a mind to tell them to press Alt-F4.

How has an entire global population who routinely download and upload entire terabytes on a whim not managed to transmit such a minute yet critical factoid over an entire medieval serf's lifespan ?!?

In the Name of the Holey Sprocket

"If I was high

I could be a flame

I would bend the sky"

 

Velvet Acid Christ - Bend the Sky

 

 

Look, I'm a SciFi fan. I can't help but feel a slight rush hearing about the space program ramping crewed missions back up. I do have to remind those getting a little too excited that "possible long-term moon base" doesn't mean "moon city." Far as I know, astronauts've got little in particular to do on the moon except practice pitching tents on more interesting worlds. Also, I'd like to reiterate that any interplanetary expansion would invevitably be a dictatorial echo of Terran politics. It won't save our idiotic species from self-destruction. It'd just erupt in a tiny little faraway ka-boom to accompany the symphony down here.

Nevertheless I found myself rather basking in my morning newsfeed's mention of the Artemis I launch, aside from an exasperated sigh at the line "followed within a few more years by the program's first lunar landing of astronauts, one of them a woman" - how 'bout you tell us their actual qualifications instead? Or maybe something about intended landing/construction sites? Compare old/new technologies in use since the Apollo Program era? Something besides assuring the public you're striking valiantly against the testicular menace? Because that's not really either of your jobs as rocket engineers or reporters.

 

Still, I could've let that one slide and moved on... but the morality police couldn't. Human stupidity being endless, Reuters' article followed up with this delightful gem: "although no humans will be aboard, [the current flight] will carry a simulated crew of three - one male and two female mannequins" - one step closer to completely eliminating our man-nequin oppressors! Marion-ettes of the world, unite! Yes, those are the results we needed from NASA and the century and trillions of dollars in accumulated aerospace funding it represents: whether they penciled in a ding-dong or a hoo-hoo on the crash test dummies' crotches.

On a completely unrelated topic, I nostalgically reminisced some years back about a sociopathic drama queen from my old WoW server in the mid-2000s. It got more attention than I'd expected from a throwaway obscure anecdote, partly because she had just driven THAT many people nuts back in the old days... and partly because Retrodruid herself, still playing the game apparently, dropped by to sock-puppet some third-person glorification of herself, and likely personally accounted for half the post's hits basking in her renewed attention. Her sheer weirdness derailed my original point somewhat, as her exact antics were only relevant to the extent fellow players wouldn't've stood for the same shit in context from a male, much less kept forgiving and re-inviting him, time after time, for months and years (and apparently, decades!) running. Her apologia's wording however did emphasize key similarities in the cult of personality she'd attempted to build around herself and the general cult of femininity in society at large: the self-appointed martyrdom and conspiracy theories belied by the enormous amount of favoritism bestowed upon her, the claims to special knowledge, the possessive declarations of belonging and betrayal, and the cathartic wail of "I fheel unprotected by-y y-you a-a-aalllllllllll!"

 

All social justice causes in the past couple of decades carry a nasty reek of superstitious proselytism, but femininity's presumed entitlement preceded them all in our cultural consciousness and deserves special attention for its primeval cultish aptness. Such devotional ecstasy can be rarefied and sublimated or "switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp" to repurpose Orwell's phrasing from hate to adoration, at least so long as the new object of worship displays some nominal, performative femininity, be it an MMO avatar or an anatomically/politically correct rocket payload. One wonders why NASA bothered with realistic mannequins at all when they could've just loaded their capsule with a puppet of Snidely Whiplash and a couple of roped together Venus figurines, the better for the crusading masses to affix their dewy gaze to the heavens in meek lamentation of the plight of our plasticine sistren.

Has mass insanity on this scale ever avoided disaster?

Am I the only one in the States glad to be back to regular marketing phone spam now the election's over?

Fantasy Evolved

Continuing where I left off, to better account for evolution in fantasy worlds, the most important step is to switch from top-down to bottom-up thinking. Sounds easy until you remember you're thinking of art, lit or marketing majors (or worse, video game designers) none of which are big on logic or have learned any science since tenth grade, and all of which probably have a massive god complex when it comes to finessing their babies into the exact perfect artistic (and profitable) vision that came to them last St. Andrews' day in a dream while on the toilet at a luxury expositional expo. This in fact makes fantasy storytelling particularly recalcitrant, playing god in a setting with actual gods, as "so the prophecy foretold!" melds perfectly with "this half-assed backstory sounded hella dramatic in my plot outline." It's not like the internet isn't peppered with such rants already, but if you're wondering why anyone would even bother with such speculation, I'll get to that at the end.

 

Remember: fantasy is a top-down system where the rules are handed down by magical beings, while SF is a bottom-up construction upon consistent (if imaginary) physical laws. SF is evolution; F creationism.

However...

I would be curious to see more settings (and to me, fantasy mostly means game settings) bucking that trend, or at the very least doing a better job of worldbuilding than slapping random species onto a random landscape like pizza toppings. Besides, I already promised a post on fantasy evolution earlier this year when complaining about Lord of the Rings Online idiotically drafting dwarf women into front line combat in the name of female superiority and in defiance of Tolkien's well-reasoned dwarven hyperprotectiveness toward their minimally fertile 1/3 female population. Given I already touched on dimorphism (that's what she said) back in 2017, I'll shelve sexual selection for some future date and widen the scope to general morphology/behavior.

 

Let's start with some basics:

Evolution, fundamentally, can be expressed tautologically: what lasts, lasts. (The devil's in the details.) Also, since the cell/body/colony does not get copied over via reproduction, it's genomes, genes or whatever gets reproduced generation by generation out-lasting each other by expressing more favorable proteins/cells/bodies/behaviors. Not a huge issue in works of fiction, until writers forget their creations would need to reproduce in order to continue existing as species or societies - see the dwarf example above. It also means that anything which interferes with reproduction is severely, severely, SEVERELY maladaptive, something to think about when you're designing all those noble, monkish space-elves who do nothing but write poetry and practice their katas all millennium long, but somehow manage to coexist with pod-people and sapient fungi. It doesn't take a war to get over-run and starved out by the numerically superior.

 

Also, something doesn't need DNA to evolve. If your robots or nature spirits make copies of themselves and each has minute differences in their programming/soul/WhateverMakesItTick then those which reproduce more successfully will compose more of the next generations, and so on until they replace the original stock. Saberhagen's Berserkers would long have replaced themselves with a version that doesn't expend resources and endanger itself by hunting down all life in the universe.

 

Aside from that, the general pattern is:

1) shit happens - random mutations in germ line (remember, if it's not passed down, it doesn't count)

2) shit gets cleaned up - natural selection (less adaptive traits reproduce less successfully and so do their bearers) (this is the part creationists like to ignore when scoffing at the idea of random chance producing complexity.)

Remember that even if a body part is not directly harmful or beneficial, it still imposes an energy (nutritional) cost on the organism growing and maintaining it. So please stop sticking all those redundant crests, spikes, limbs and feathers onto your fantasy races! Art majors, THIS MEANS YOU! ... "Dire" badger my dire ass. Remember that mutations pile on very gradually into recognizable features so if you want something to suddenly sprout wings in a single generation, you'll have to resort to an explicit "it's magic" dodge. (The mariner's gills in Waterworld were a real groaner.) Remember also that selection works in the present. Plants don't randomly start producing gigantic colorful flowers just in case bees might appear in ten million years. Exception: exaptation, where a feature you already have acquires a second use, like insulating feathers also aiding flight.

Selection is anything but random. The environment directly impacts which related organisms reproduce more successfully, and therefore how the overall population will look in a hundred or thousand generations. Which is actually good news for writers, because you get to start with a map! And you love maps, don't you, you Tolkien wannabe ha- aherhm, where was I... maps. You probably have a vague map in mind already. You know you want your heroic band of adventurers to cross some snowy mountains and some rivers, exactly one swamp and definitely an erupting volcano or seven along the way. You're already picturing both the boundless creaking taiga and the chokingly dense multicolored vines overwrapping the rainforest. Cool. Plate tectonics and erosion lie beyond my current scope, except to note it's one aspect Tolkien tended to be weak on, slapping mountain ranges perpendicular to each other and rivers flowing every which direction.

Figure out your landscape first, then start deciding where your heroes will encounter various creatures based on a few general rules of adaptation, starting with temperature gradients. (I won't bother citing them one by one, but I should note Wikipedia features a nice list of biological rules)

- Cold environments favor warm-blooded creatures large enough to conserve heat. (Ice-snakes are weird.) Corollary: compact bodies conserve heat better, so cool it with the stilt-legged, bat-eared icewalkers. Even moose and reindeer are stockier than their tropical cousins.

- Reptiles are good at conserving water and require fewer nutrients, outcompeting mammals in hot deserts. Which is to say, there are other animals than camels in deserts. Look them up.

- "Amphibious" does not mean perfectly adapted to both environments. Keep in mind frog locomotion mainly gets them back in the water as fast as possible. Aquatics would have support and locomotion issues on land (see seals). Please, no prancing mermaids. Also, long flowing hair is NOT hydrodynamic.

- Cave dwellers might see better in dark but more likely favor other senses (see the famous blind cave _____) Goblins probably would not have amazing vision, and even if they're just nocturnal would likely be colorblind to increase light sensitivity (see bats.)

- Islands have a weird effect on body size, with large species getting smaller due to limited resources, and more often small species getting larger due to lack of predators. This would be an excellent way to work that cosmetic re-skin game designers love so much in a logical fashion... and one I never see used.

- Parasites tend to fit their host, both in size and intersecting life cycle. In fact, they closely co-evolve with their hosts over generations, to the point of strictly specializing (especially internal ones) in a few closely related species. Your heroes have nothing to fear from dragon tapeworms. This was one major plot hole in the original Alien movie, addressed in pathetically hamfisted fashion with Prometheus.

- Magnifiy that by orders of magnitude for anything which evolved in complete isolation (e.g. on different planets) and especially do not EVER talk about miraculously compatible alien genetics. DNA is not just a linear code, but produces and depends on a myriad scaffolds, chaperones, cofactors, regulators, markers and processes like tagging or splicing, not to mention the million convoluted signal cascades required for DNA to react to its extracellular environment, all of these developed in tandem between the existing template and iterative selective pressure over literally billions of generations. The odds of something which has never encountered either the same template or the same pressures spontaneously producing hybrid offspring are, statistically, nil! Nil squared! Nil to the tenth! Just... don't! If you want half-alien babies, you'd end up needing to genetically engineer some hopelessly wasteful monstrosity operating on two separate metabolisms at once (and they'd probably be sterile and poisoned by BOTH parents' native environments) to the point any intelligent species would give it up and opt for robots. Golems. Whatever. Sorry, didn't mean to get S all up in your F.

That brings us to the issue of divergent and convergent evolution.

Divergence usually results from separation. Half your elves go over the sea, dark hair randomly predominates in one population, light in the other. One side's taller, one side has longer pianist fingers. Cool, whatever. It can also result from specialization (as Larry Niven so memorably tried to portray in Ringworld) and this is where your handy-dandy map comes in. Do you have populations of elves living in plains/mountains/forests for tens of thousands of years before developing civilization? Give the plainsrunners long loping legs to cover long distances, and the tree-climbers shorter legs with prehensile toes, and the mountain-climbers partially hardened, hooflike foot soles and oversized lung capacity. Chesty elves. Hell, why not? We've tried every other kind.

Convergence generally results from different species adapting to the same necessity, and for fictional purposes largely concerns morphology. Limb shape is a famous example, as each medium strongly favors one or two modes of locomotion, so that even across hundreds of millions of years and distantly related clades, runners, swimmers and soarers will gradually develop legs, fins and wings independently of each other. What does this mean for fantasies set in alien landscapes? Well, if you create an environment of shattered floating islands over a bottomless void, everything from bugs to buffalo would need some way to cross those gaps, be it by flying, gliding, steering the islands, or clinging parasitically to flyers, shooting spores to the wind or ballistic seeds. If you set your adventure among the vertical trunk and branches of a world tree, then climbing adaptations (prehensile tails, low centers of gravity, gripping pads and claws) would predominate as would ways of taking advantage of the world-tree's sap, a world of squirrels, geckos, aphids and orchids.

Above all, remember everything must somehow acquire the energy and chemicals it needs to carry out its metabolic processes. Case-in-point: Herbert's sandworms. Leaving aside the question of whether their burrowing friction would glass the sand around them, no way in hell would they ever filter enough food from desert sand at their size to fuel such an energy-intensive method of travel, in direct contrast to their likely inspiration, baleen whales, which make use of buoyancy and currents. Even if it were possible, they'd get out-competed for food by smaller, more efficient burrowers. If you want a big impressive beast in your story (like dragons) first ask yourself: what does it eat? And does something else eat that better? Moby Dick ate giant squid... did Smaug eat giant flying squid at altitudes other flyers can't reach? This also goes for armies, with the classic question of how exactly the utterly barren Land o' Murder's provisioning all those tens to hundreds of thousands of indigenous orcs. How many Mordors' worth of farmland would it take to supply one Mordor's worth of orcs and trolls?

This brings us to behavior.

Try orcs. They live in close, overpopulated, hypersocial bands but act like Tasmanian devils or other infamously solitary, hyperaggressive beasts. They're basically locusts in a perpetual state of swarming, except swarming behavior is better interpreted as a terminal investment strategy, where an organism responds to drought, overpopulation, other scarcity or morbidity by investing its energy reserves in a massive reproductive / dispersal gamble. Inherently untenable, and functional only as such. Orc-like fantasy/SF races would work better if the author more carefully described a population boom/bust cycle and paid closer attention to the triggers which turn mundane pests into plagues. Note this carries far more plot-driving potential than the basic description of orc-types as "mean and many." To some degree, the idea that they coalesce as armies and pose major threats only under Bolg or Sauron-like leadership approaches this, but how much better would it get by tying it all together with physical and hormonal changes?

In a greater sense, while the r/K distinction is less distinct than once thought, it still pays to think of your fantasy races in terms of their life histories relative to each other. Long-lived, slow-growing, slow-breeding elves which take a thousand years to repopulate would need stable environments, something Tolkien rather elegantly incorporated into those secretive, defensible elvish enclaves like Rivendell. Just randomly scattering around unexplored woods in vulnerable bands would open them up to disaster. Note, great apes are classic K-strategists, and humanoids would not spread easily through that standard-issue dramatic fantasy landscape constantly erupting with volcanoes and getting wiped out by manageddons and genocided by evil wizards at random intervals. You need to give your humanoids some breathing room for them to form believable societies.

Conversely, rapidly reproducing, short-lived, expansive species replenish their populations better after disaster but gradually fall prey to more careful, resilient competitors during stable periods. Klingons would probably live to thirty and have fifteen children each to offset their idiotic hyperaggressiveness.

 

Keep in mind environment shapes both biology and culture. Creatures adapted to constant Under-dark or the deep ocean, even if they can see, would probably not wax poetic about light/dark dichotomies like those of us subjected to circadian cycles; nor would they winter their discontent when they've never seen the passing of the seasons. Burrowing creatures would not have a "high" king like we arboreal descendants.

If you've had the patience to read this far, you might be growing a tad exasperated at my making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it's freakin' fantasy, dude! It's like, magic! Unsure how something works? It's magic! A wizard did it!

Therein lies the problem. Magic is magical by contrast to the mundane. Make it mundane and kill its appeal. Don't gratuitously fabricate unicorn-fart-powered lightbulbs where "a candle" would fit your narrative purpose just as well. Just as you should do your homework for the fields of basic mechanics or sanitation so you don't need to resort to wheelbarrows or outhouses powered by pixie-dust, get some basic nature documentary understanding of biological principles so you don't need to magically explain why your rainforest's full of polar bears.

 

One common surprise expressed by younger audiences when finally getting around to reading Tolkien, the precursor of D&D or WoW, is just how little magic actually plays into his plot twists. The stories which created high fantasy are in fact low fantasy. Yeah, and that's why Middle-Earth is still the champ. Its author did his homework, and didn't resort to gratuitous, amateurish overstatement where a mere understanding of the world would fit more naturally. When Gandalf casts a "light" cantrip or Samwise tells a rope to un-knot itself, it actually comes across as magical!

I leave you with one last question to be addressed in the future: how would magic itself affect evolution?

Fantasy Unevolved

"Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct - because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd."

 

Nietzsche - The Gay Science #1 "The teachers of the purpose of existence", 1887

 

 

I may not be a writer but I am terrible, so I've been taking Terrible Writing Advice. While for the most part I find JP's sarcastic jabs both incisive and insightful (translation: hating the things I hate makes you a genius) his segment on villains did raise an eyebrow for decrying the will to power as insuffucient motivation for a megalomaniac. Sure, "I wants it 'cuz I wants it" does lack a certain narrative oomph, but here unfortunately narrative conflicts with verisimilitude. As I've laid out the issue several times here before, even with stone-age technology a tribe of naked apes so efficiently concentrates usable resources that evolutionary pressure will increasingly favor not just ability in acquisition but partitioning the take, by hook or crook. We lionize taking the lion's share because that tendency gave our ancestors a higher chance of passing down their genetic material, and we have inherited their predispositions. Powermongering and the race for social status have obviously suffered from runaway selection within our species (indeed may well be more responsible for our increased intellect than tool usage) and being baked so hopelessly into our instincts will fuel any amount of insanity. Asking why someone might want a bigger house than the neighbours' (or by extension, ALL OF THE HOUSES) is as obvious and meaningless as trying to define complex motivations behind the desire for sex or sucrose: a beginner's lesson in evolutionary psychology, which from the point of view of the individual just *is*!

If you must fill in some Dark Lord backstory, focus not on why the villain wants power, but on why the villain's powermongering strategy has shifted from cooperation to domination. Tolkien, for instance, did this quite naturally with his famous Quisling deciding he was better off biding his time and growing stronger under Sauron's newly stretching wing than supporting the ostensibly toothless White Council. Same goes for Sauron himself making a personal power-play at the end of the second age, with his greatest potential opposers' mutual defeat / retreat beyond the boundaries of the world made round leaving him poised to seize control, and his own physical change rendering his previous covert strategy untenable. His motivation never once changed. His circumstances did, and his story accordingly.

While you might say Sauron's not human and did not evolve, fantasy authors invariably base their races on the human lowest common denominator, motivations tracking human ones with little divergence and even less creativity. Which is odd given that fantasy paradoxically is in some ways better positioned than Science Fiction to include evolutionary change. Not only do Fantasy creatures inhabit more natural worlds with fully connected ecosystems (rather than SF's spaceships or run-down cities) and conflict-prone environments which could easily apply adaptive pressure, but Fantasy's kalpa-length timeframes frequently dwarf SciFi stories' more condensed action, allowing for gradual change. Evolution (a hot topic in the late 19th, early 20th post-Darwin media landscape) or the passing of geologic ages featured in many of the stories which jumpstarted SciFi's popularity (think The Time Machine) and also helped Tolkien drag fairytales into modern relevance by providing a LostWorld-ish sense of depth to LotR's history. Ghan-Buri-Ghan the primitive knuckledragger, many passages of troglodytic goblins once again recalling cavemen, the Nazgul's winged mounts* immediately suggesting pterosaurs, and Saur-on himself as master of a world before the world of men (to my teenage self that always read "he's a dinosaur" and canon be damned) consider just how much more believable, more solid as a world, these little touches rendered Middle-Earth.

 

I consume little fantasy in general (Song of Ice and Fire, Dark Materials, Kingkiller Chronicle) but such settings and tropes are inescapable in computer games and much of the frustration fueling this post and its upcoming sequel comes from hopelessly generic landscapes like Faerun, Dyrwood or Ferelden with their rule of placing every single monster in every single zone for the sake of monetizing assets to the fullest possible extent. Still, I'd blame this lack of imagination more on the genre than on the medium, and my last example comes from a webcomic.

 

I've mentioned Selkie here before in the context of webcomics' treatment of fatherhood. It's a science fantasy story about a human adopting a child from a species of (suspiciously humanoid) aquatic predators with claws, webbed digits, razor-sharp teeth and poison spit. Lot of potential there, predictably squandered in an effort to keep the Sarnothi relatable and familiar to the audience in the worst tradition of Star Trek wrinkly forehead aliens. They could, for instance, not have been given hair to increase their drag while swimming, but you're just scratching the surface there. A recent comic addressed the heroine on a playground as "Sarnothi of the climber bars" and I couldn't help but groan at the wasted potential. A swimming species would likely not develop a very strong grip for climbing. Otters don't do chin-ups. Sharp slashing claws and webs don't mix - see drag again. Nor do flippers generally maintain spring-toed musculature, but I guess it was more important to show the young heroine bouncing around in gym class with the human children. Nor are poisonous species, for that matter, particularly prone to develop massive overpowering musculature (picture viperacondas or mantispiders) but a species of spindly ambush predators using one-hit poison tactics wouldn't have yielded an imposing enough strongman in the figure of Mr. Scar-Kill-Him-Die. For that matter, how did their hunting style develop and how does it compare to human/wolf prey-harrying tactics... and given the impact such organization has on social dynamics, how would their society differ?

The entire spectrum of differences between Atlantean aquatic / predatory specialization and human plainsrunning prey-harrying is wasted because:

1) The author's desperate to drive home a politically correct message of coexistence and unity, willfully ignoring necessary divergence

2) The author just wanted to make them cool, but never considered they don't need to out-human humans to retain their coolness as fanged, poisonous sala-Man-ders

If you'd like to see a better take on the same divergence, you could try War with the Newts by Karel Capek (you remember, the guy who repurposed the word "robot" to its current usage?) War with the Newts' fairly relentless dark humor largely stems from humans' incapacity to recognize the other species' capabilities and danger, simply because it does not manifest in cozily familiar human facial expressions and social interactions. Moreover, the greatest danger stems precisely from our similarities in newts' ability to absorb human ideologies... while repurposing these in pursuit of their own instinctive drives and biological prerogatives.

So how might our current fantascifi worlds better integrate the truism that aliens are alien? Well, I've rambled enough for one night, so I'll cut off the observational half of my musings here and devote the next post to the speculative half.

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* Weirdly, Tolkien denied consciously tailoring the flying beasts as pterosaurs, and true enough in early drafts featured in The History of Middle-Earth, they're initially just nondescriptly vulture-like.