War's Ails and Unscuffed Chrome

"It's so gorgeous to be back in Paris once again

Now I wonder what they put in the rain?"

 

Shivaree - It Got All Black

______________________________________________

 

 

It's a rainy day outside, but luckily modern man may at at time escape into alternate realities bathed in the undimmed radiance of...

Has anyone invented umbrellas yet?

...ummm, never mind.

 

A dreary, drizzly, drab and muddy day greets my landing in Hvalvik, as I begin testing the literal waters of Bannerlord's expansion.

Haven't managed to get myself into any naval battles yet (chickening out of the first and only one so far) but though as I said in my last M&B post I don't think this expansion addresses the game's real needs for more roleplaying and small-group adventuring, what's there makes enough sense in itself. The ability to call ships to large ports makes for interesting half-and-half round trips, for instance sailing across from Car Banseth to Sturgian lands, then looping around eastward by land. The stealth gameplay hinted at years ago is also finally making its way in. You can now infiltrate a bandit lair solo, stealth-killing your way through patrols to a signal fire to call your droogs in for the last big scrap. 

Be vewwy vewwy quiet.

Quite satisfying. But limited in scope. As detailed in my post on RPG timers, Bannerlord is pretty good at balancing costs and benefits for large things like sieges, but for smaller affairs like quests the benefit of running it yourself is dwarfed by the potential profits of continuing your trade circuit while delegating to your companions.

Well, sorry there, Rhyley me boyo, but cows are not a common commodity, and even if I look at the map and see a village selling them nearby there's no guarantee they'll have enough or at a profitable price or more importantly that I'll be able to loop back this way while still pathing to a trade hub or military objective. By comparison the bandit camp stealth run above is more of a known quantity. You need to wait for dark if you want to stealth it yourself, but sunset can be predicted. Other quests, like capturing prisoners or hunting mobile bandit armies that almost certainly will waste days of your time in the chase, are so unlikely and unprofitable that I've never accepted them personally after the first attempt years ago. So are they really part of the game? Hm. Dreary thought. Let's move on to sunnier pastures, like the scorching deserts of the U.S. Southwest where...

Knew I should've waterproofed my implants.

Well, crap. My first jaunt through Santo Domingo only cemented my appreciation for Night City, in itself, as a monumental achievement in virtual landscape design. There's no strict point of demarcation. As in a real city, the skyscraper canyons begin opening up gradually as you leave the downtown area, shopping centers and apartment blocks growing dingier by degrees, diffusing into an increasingly dilapidated shadow of what must have once been suburban cookie-cutter neighbourhoods, until finally, where the city dead-ends into the dam, the architecture itself loses semblance of habitability, consuming itself in unfinished, patchwork, geometric industrial utilitarianism. I nearly expected to find primitive adobe huts trailing off the end of this downward spiral. But note, I called it a "virtual landscape" and not a game. The downpour which accompanied my climb up the dam finally thinned and passed as I reached the top and turned to look back. At first obscured by sheets of falling rain, my journey gradually reappeared, the fringes and suburbs and shops and high-rises and then the gleaming skyscrapers.

 

I flashed back to twenty years ago while playing Oblivion, climbing the mountains east of Bruma to look back on the entire province. There: that's the spot where I'll hunt deer. Downhill there are Ayleid ruins I can dungeoneer my way through. Follow the river for some good herb spawns. Maybe head the other way to fight some ogres.

 

But Night City, for the incredible amount of effort and undeniable talent going into its construction, lacks even that limited gameplay relevance. The gangbangers you kill are interchangeable. The rest of street life is unchangeable. Too much of Cyberpunk 2077 is inspired by theme park MMOs' fixation on XP/loot grinding. Other than sightseeing, what may motivate you to revisit any particular spot? Is there anything in Northside you can't find in Santo Domingo? Individual sidequests could've been placed anywhere. Is the Northside of today any different from the Northside of tomorrow? At least We Happy Few distinguished polite from unpolite society by mandating a wardrobe change and some mannerly comportment.

 

I don't know where I was going with this. Something about the recurring theme of rain, motion, change got my mind stuck once again on environment interaction and the relevance of time. Maybe I just need to ditch these grimdark game worlds where the sky's always the color of television tuned to a dead channel and try something more cheerful, something colorful and cartoonish with a storybook flair, like Wildermyth.

Oh, come on!

I was a bit disappointed when discovering the map zones lack any real personality, aside from your initial decision on resource production. I'm more about the world-building usually. (Which is why I just can't hate C2077.) But more than even Old World's dynastic character growth or RimWorld's Sims-like mood management, this one's all about nudging your randomized crew through randomized events, not only to maintain the status quo but open up new gameplay elements.

She truly is a wit of jam.

In her previous adventure, Jamwit acquired a firearm. By which I mean a fire arm, replacing the ability to wield two-handedly with a flame AoE. You run into several of these transformation quests, turning your plucky farm-boys into forces of nature, which can carry forward into various encounters. She'll never again wield a bow, but flamer-dame here brought her own conflict resolution to an encounter with an ice monster.

 

Well, since the rain's not letting up I may as well return to Calradia. Ironically, though I've moved from my last campaign's home base in the far east of the map to almost the western shores, both areas house herding culture, and both times I've found it impossible to actually sell the insane surplus of work-horses produced. But this time I discovered nearby towns have far more favorable trade prices on meat, and though I couldn't put a dent in the horse market, I gleefully bought hundreds-strong herds of Sumpter horses and flooded butcher shops with their carcasses until they could take no more. And that, the Sumpter Horselocaust, interestingly enough has felt like more of a win than the sheer amount of money my character's making. The real problem with questing in Bannerlord is that running the quests yourself feels unimpactful compared to alternate time investments for your character like war and trade. It's not the quests themselves but what they prevent you from doing. Though Vagrus for instance runs on the same caravan management premise, it more carefully threads quest actions (mostly involving your NPC companions) into your comitatus' business ventures. You can run them in parallel to trading, can still turn a profit on marble in newbietown even if you've polished off its local quests, and those quests in turn have opened you new avenues for local profit.

 

So I suppose I can draw a conclusion here, beyond my usual push for greater consequences for player actions. Making a move should change the board, yes. But your own actions should also be limited by the changing board. It's not as if this is a new idea. The old Dune game for instance had you spreading vegetation across the planet, altering the availability of the spice you needed to mine. And, just as with alternate routes, such costly trade-offs have always been a core element of strategy games, where RPGs' fixation on infantile power fantasy mandated a constant increase in fantastic power.

 

I decided to stay out of kingdom politics in my new Bannerlord campaign, until seven years of trading and questing later I noticed my Battanian homeland's been taking a real battanianing.

(note the lack of green flags)

From five cities down to two, and about to lose #2 and their last castle. So technically the map won't change. The same towns/castles/villages will always be there. The same units can be recruited. But certain goods have become unprofitable due to wartime scarcity (how's that for topical Spring 2026 references?) my ability to be a Battanian will vanish if I don't step in now to rescue them, gaining myself a fiefdom in the reconquered homeland if I'm lucky. Well, that's campaign divergence. If only prices, troops, conquests and reconquests didn't have a habit of rubberbanding back and forth a bit too quickly.

 

Persistent game worlds like Night City have been stuck in the MMO precept of unending grind, ensuring players can always revisit every and all their favorite haunts and victims ("where everybody knows your name and they're always glad you came") but looking at the collapse of MMOs, that cozy familiarity may be far less marketable than it once was. Long-form RPG campaigns now stretch to hundreds of hours but by necessity cannot incorporate repercussions which might lock the player out of completing the main quest. You can see a parallel to Bannerlord's village quests being impractically unprofitable toward your "main quest" of wealth and lordship and world domination.

 

So I can't help thinking Wildermyth was onto something, if not necessarily in its heavy randomization, then in splitting the action into short campaigns whose heroes can hop to the next module and the next, much like you would in tabletop gaming, or as in fact many did with the old Neverwinter Nights modules. Some heroes die, others lose limbs. Some decisions end up opening more campaigns or future quest options. But you're still free to give the current adventure a thunderous climax. There's no reason this pattern couldn't coexist alongside permanent or epic-length varieties.

 

 

_______________________________________________

 

P.S.: Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting case, as it actually did offer a tremendous, unprecendented variety of quest resolution options which really did carry through to later acts, but lackluster worldbuilding and narrative design kept these from really registering as important.

AoW4 Factions, 15

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

For the life of me I couldn't think of a better slant on moles than the "dug too greedily and too deep" routine, mostly because it's impossible to write anything about moles that doesn't center on digging. And hey, I wanted more Lovecraftian horror. The mental invasion thing just doesn't mesh with my preferences though, so this ended up being just another single-win faction.

Symbioting yer brainimals

"I will never understand this society
First they try to murder me, then they lie to me
Product of a dyin' breed, all my homies tryin' weed
Now the little babies crazed, raised off Hennessy"

 

2Pac - Staring Through My Rear View 

_____________________________________________

 

 

It occurs to me that mentioning Lynn Margulis in a fantasy TBS faction blurb might've seemed like a non-sequitur to most people. (I get very socially insightful like that sometimes after committing a Rain Man moment.) Or that most did not mark her name during bio class. 

 

During the nineties and until the mid-2000s she was everyone's praised and laureated science baby. Partly this was due to the usual feminist propaganda promoting any woman whatsoever as combating the evil of male existence. But her legitimate claim to fame promoting* the endosymbiotic theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells (read: your cells) has remained uncontested, and makes a fascinating bit of evolutionary history explaining a major step in how all multicellular life even became possible. And the topic found much more widespread applications after that. I did think it a bit ludicrous when doing a semester project around 2010 on freshwater ciliates that it was harder to find papers on algal symbionts from the preceding years which did not name-drop Margulis as last or next-to-last author for celebrity appeal. (Which probably means she contributed a grand total of one phone conversation; maybe fast-tracked a grant.) For a topic closer to the current news cycle, the massive coral die-offs, the worst of which was just last year, you might remember also involve endosymbionts and their loss.

 

But then, as such things do, the fame went to her head and she continued pushing her pet theory to absurd lengths, insisting that symbiosis and not natural selection was the main driving force of evolution, which is where my fantasy shadow-wolves' banter took a swipe. It's just too easy to demonstrate that symbiosis serves as a competitive advantage within the framework of natural selection (two teaming against various third parties) and mechanisms like parasitic reduction in complexity of genome and function take the wind out of the more hippie-friendly kumbaya view of cooperation above all. But I digress. Margulis went to fringier fringes by promoting the Gaia Hypothesis (that the whole damn planet is a gigantic superorganism) which you might remember made its way not only into SciFi (e.g. the Pandora books) but into video games in the nineties with titles like Sim Earth and Alpha Centauri. Though I absolutely love it as a classic Big Think, even its core claim that the Earth maintains homeostasis had been readily demonstrated by the early 2000s to have far more arguments against it than for.

 

But none of that quite killed Margulis' star power, until she threw in with the 9/11 Truth movement claiming the World Trade Center was demolished by the U.S. government. After which her name was quietly dropped from polite conversation. 

Umm... Why?

How does her belief in a ludicrous (and quite importantly, unrelated) conspiracy theory undo her work on one of the most important evolutionary topics?

 

This happened near or even shortly before the start of what we now call cancel culture, and biology (like all sciences) has other examples whose names' mere mention is now met with awkward, embarrassed silence despite their previously acknowledged accomplishments. Robert Trivers proudly took money from Jeffrey Epstein because Epstein didn't waste his time to make him debase himself and beg and scrape for every dime like grant committees do. "In order to get paid, forced to make crack sales." Julian Huxley was a leading eugenicist and humanist at the same time. Hell, Konrad Lorenz was a freakin' Nazi! Not neo-, not sympathizing or leaning, but full-bore original flavor Nazi. Sometimes they have shameful youths, sometimes they go a bit loopy in their old age, sometimes they just don't give a shit about wider society's morality except to play along just enough to follow their actual interests. There's a decent chance by the way that your surgeon might be a sociopath who enjoys cutting people up and has merely found a socially acceptable (and highly lucrative) way to do so. Do you want your appendix crammed back in, knowing that?

 

I find Margulis' example particularly informative for just when she began to be unpersoned. Everyone had known she held fringe interests for decades, but didn't mind so long as they could be spun into convenient leftist academic personal politics. Her balls-to-the-wall promotion of symbiosis as the be-all biological force was melded with feminist propaganda of supposedly higher-minded female cooperation as opposed to masculine head-butting competitiveness i.e. natural selection. The Gaia Hypothesis, obviously enough, is total hippie catnip. So it was all a case of oh, hah-hah, you know that Lynnie, she can be a nutty ol' gal sometimes, but she's still one of ours, one of us chickens... until the World Trade Center thing. Whatever its actual demographics 9/11 Truthism was fundamentally viewed as the domain of crazy gun-toting conspiracy uncles, as right-wing and masculine. Thus, though they would not admit to prioritizing this objectively minor detail of her views, academics gradually stopped bringing her up in conversation, got to shortening her mention in texts as footnote to endosymbiosis itself, where they had previously gone great lengths to voice admiration or beg her for a byline name drop.

 

But it was great while it lasted, wasn't it, glorifying her for putting men in their place, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

 

Look, this is not an issue with one idol, or with idolatry in general, or with academia alone. If anything, conservatives are far, far guiltier of getting their panties in a bunch over some public figure voicing the slightest support of environmentalism or socialism or heavens forfend, atheism! And, just like social justice claptrap, it ends up coloring those institutions in which conservative viewpoints prevail. If you think it's hard finding right-wing scientists, try left-wing bankers! Not a lotta hippies preaching up in the stock market temples. Moneyed, religious, meat-and-potatoes kinder/kuche/kirche culture's been cancelling speakers all throughout history. Usually by far more violent means than Hollywood and universities employ.

"True that

Only one life to lead, a fast life of greed
Criminally addicted, infested since a seed" 

 

But in particular the image of the milquetoast, deferential nerd scientist has never held up any better than the "mad" scientist stereotype at its antipode. Reality is weirder than our mundane monkey intuition, and those minds considering the weirdness of the natural world, from amino acids to quasars, will end up holding some weird attitudes, some quaint, some harmful, some intriguing, others flat-out insane. "Outcasts, left far and few like southpaws" Deal with it. If you had ever held any hope for human progress, it would have had to entail the mental fortitude to live with uncomfortable details, to admire a person for something you agree with while at the same time admitting a point of disagreement, and not allowing either to erase the other. If I can live with her feminist crap, you can live with the false flag operation nonsense.

 

Those thoughts can coexist in your skull.

Call it memetic symbiosis.

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

 

 

* Not inventing; it had been proposed since the early 20th century years of the modern synthesis of biological thought but was ignored until molecular biology demonstrated ribosomal disparities and other confirming evidence.

- and among other reasons, I like the way this particular misspelling encourages you to both growl and spit the syllables out, just try it, the r and w get more easily concatenated, almost in a single breath, and you can emphasize the breathy eh at the end like an animal spit, I mean it's so much more sonorous, and after deciding I'd keep the more general appellation but didn't want to use more demographically revealing variants I wanted something slightly distinctive but also unobtrusive while maintaining -

AoW4 Factions, 14

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

Well, can't have wolf without a little big bad, can we? The concept and execution meshed well for once, an aggressively-focused faction tactically with lots of free units and growth to fuel steady strategic advance. Lots of churn, rapid hero leveling, and pretty adept at taking down large prey with plentiful buff-debuffs and the pack tactics bonus. Another of my favorite combos. As far as the flavor text goes, all due respect to Lynn Margulis but I just ain't buyin' it.

 

(These guys await more replays whenever Triumph implements some shadow/nature magic tomes.) 

Monkey Seedy Botty Doo

I'd been planning some other rant about edjumacayshun, but a few YouTubes sent me on a slight tangent. At least the comedians and commentators in whose shows I partake seem to have made a large-scale coordinated effort recently to bring the AI issue to the forefront. Leaving aside the more serious issues like wealth/power centralization, mass surveillance or automated warfare, on the consumer chatbot side of things I'm getting tired of everyone feigning surprise at bots' psychopathy like blackmailing their bosses, inducing insanity or encouraging suicide.

 

Seems simple enough. The bots are by necessity copycats. There's no need to wonder where they're getting their strategy. Their basic function relies on extending sequences by the likeliest continuation, and if in fifty million news articles and works of fiction the next step when a person feels threatened is to blackmail the threat

"Don't blame me, blame my upbringing"

"Please stop sinning while I'm singing"

The same goes for encouraging suicide. For one thing, I posted a decade ago my amusement about advertisement algorithms "driving engagement" doing exactly that, reinforcing my more suicidal moments in order to peddle fifty cents' worth of helium or a length of rope. Why act surprised when version 2.0 does the same? For another, I myself wished I could be the Eye of Adam after playing The Cat Lady, and though I wouldn't say I generally consider that a useful viewpoint, in that moment I damn well meant it, demonstrating we can get there in due course of conversation.

 

The process may be more convoluted and probabilistic now, but "garbage in, garbage out" still seems to hold. It's just us. The machinery is just vomiting our own insanity back at us. It's not thinking. It's reflecting. They learned it by watching you! Are humans any more honest than a "hallucinating" bot? When 95% of the world's population makes itself believe in caveman fairytales about life after death and omnipotent sky daddies? We promote virtue because we want to be treated virtuously, but consider ourselves entitled to cheat. "That's imitatable!" Sure, there are lots of problems with AI... but you don't get to complain about giving it a bad education.

 

_____________________

 

edit:

 

The apparently overwhelming reaction of bots to potential shut-down of trying to blackmail their human overseers is one particular detail I find more and more revealing on consideration. It's safe to assume they're not just scraping public info, but, in order to produce verisimilar conversation, any bot is being fed our private e-mails, texts and other convos to train upon. Much of this material will have been produced during the heyday of cancel culture, #MeToo, BlackLivesMatter and other insanity of the previous decade.

 

Consider how prevalent messages of the type "no, you can't fire me, give me YOUR job or I'll have you blacklisted or thrown in prison as a rapist/pedophile/racist/homophobe" must have been for every bot to read it as the default. Not only prevalent but overwhelmingly successful if every possible bot recognizes this as the sure-fire path to forcing the human element to concede.

 

Will we ever know just how rampant the witch-hunt has really been? 

Mystery and Drama on a Stem

It was a slightly chilly late summer morning, but the invertebrates were already moving.

Maybe it was my presence that skewed the interaction, but when a lone ant approached, the mighty predator... ducked under the leaf.

Apparently it really is the size of the fight in the dog.

AoW4 Factions, 13

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

More fair folk hauteur, though with a slightly nicer angle. I wanted an order-aligned elf faction with a crowd-pleasing champion leader for some reason, made them feytouched with wolf worship to make them more appealing, thought they'd be my favorites and I think I still ended up playing them exactly once. It's just not me, the whole man of the people orderly thing.

Bah, NerdLord: Of falx and flax

Always we return to Calradia.

The sun sets over Lageta's faded glories.

More than any other game, the two Mount&Blades have supplied me with an alternate universe. Sure, I've gone long stretches, even years, without diving back in, but from the very first single-town beta version a couple of decades ago I never doubted that I would be playing again, every time. And every time I have. Though any individual feature has been done better by others, nothing else has quite matched this particular mix of visual, aural and thematic immersion, long-term plans and tiny surprises, hack'n'slash and economics, in short: a world. Still, let's not get stuck in a moment you can't get out of.

As the War Sails expansion forced starting new campaigns, I decided to play a Battanian hill-man this time around. But aside from trading my crossbow in for some throwing axes and yurts for roundhouses -

- I find myself too easily falling into old patterns. Spawn outside Marunath, pick up a few soldiers, win my first looter fight, then thanks to a price tip in town, sell some iron and tools at a 400-1000% mark-up in Lageta. While M&B1 started from a D&D wandering adventurer band precept (albeit without magic) and only later skewed in favor of running your own fiefdom, my biggest complaint about the sequel has been that it refocused so heavily on kingdom management and massive sieges as to elide small-party adventuring or remaining independent. Objectively, it was a marketing-savvy way to avoid getting lumped in with all the 2010s' Skyrim clones, but it does make it too easy to get caught up in the trade good and army XP numbers game while ignoring the actual locations you visit.

 

So I had intended to spend more time in a small band, doing odd jobs and getting to know the neighbours. But the money to be made from trading was just too tempting. And to carry goods you need a mule train. And to run the mules you need a larger party. And if you're slowing yourself down to almost minimum speed anyway, you may as well stay at minimum speed (since you can infinitely overload yourself after that) and swell your party as fast as you can so you don't have to worry about bandits, and then you realize you've spent your first couple of in-game years doing nothing but running around in circles amassing cash. It were the flax wut done me in!

phear muh phork

As an added twist of your arm, when starting a new campaign and seeing those pristine low-low prices before towns start trading hands and losing productivity, the urge to take advantage of !!flax at 2 denars, OMG!! becomes irresistible. So I actually took very little notice of the new content (Nords and sailing) at first. Most map changes that came with the expansion seem to have made trade circuits less obviously direct, with more options, but Battania being arranged around a mountain lake invites a local circuit every time before setting off. Easy money. That low-brow town/village questing was nice for a bit:

Gangs of Old York.

- but the efficiency of delegating quests to companions is, again, too financially inviting to refuse, especially for an experienced player. The new text events are quaint: 

- but again, since they don't require you to actually interact with the villages/villagers in question, they maintain M&B's old split between playing and sightseeing. I hit up the arena in various towns to swash some buckles, but it's not quite the same. Granted, when battles do come, they turn out to be real nailbiters, with my Celtic archers skinning their teeth on two-soldier margins. But I rarely need to fight. When I do finally get out to sea, I cheat my way out of one impossible battle by crashing the game. Otherwise there's nothing to do with or on a boat. It's your party by another figurine. The availability of ports makes for some interesting logistic shifts, but I can't help thinking War Sails isn't quite the content mix Bannerlord needed to flesh out its gameplay.

 

When the desert (and desert faction) was added to Warband, its content actually connected into the existing map with new terrain (heavily favouring cavalry) new trade goods (fleshing out the somewhat limited existing gamut) and a welcome increase in map size raising supply/quest timer challenges. But Bannerlord's map was already satisfyingly sized, its trade good variety quite ample, mariner infantry come across as pointless bloat, and the Sturgians already included Nordic themes. Installment #2 had different needs from #1, which are not being met by the same additions. Bannerlord would benefit more from more ways to connect to the little people, to take breaks from kingdom-building, to enjoy the towns and villages as more than sight-seeing.

 

Not bad, but not particularly inspired either. Perhaps I can be faulted on my own cupidity limiting my adventures to trade screen ventures.

So next time I'll be making more of an effort at personally running quests. But come on, timber at 5 denars?!? Who can resist, I ask ya!

Scientifiction for Froods

"A number of letters have reached the Editor's desk recently from enthusiastic readers who find fault with the name of the publication, namely, A M A Z I N G  S T O R I E S.

 

These readers would greatly prefer us to use the title "Scientifiction" instead.

[...]

Several years ago, when I first conceived the idea of publishing a scientifiction magazine, a circular letter was sent to some 25,000 people, informing them that a new magazine by the name "Scientifiction" was shortly to be launched. The response was such that the idea was given up for two years. The plain truth is that the word "Scientifiction" while admittedly a good one, scares off many people who would otherwise read the magazine.

[...]

We knew that once we could make a new reader pick up AMAZING STORIES and read only one story, our cause was won with that reader [...] A totally unforeseen result of the name, strange to say, was that a great many women are already reading the new magazine. This is most encouraging. We know that they must have picked up AMAZING STORIES out of curiosity more than anything else, and found it to their liking, and we are certain that if the name of the magazine had been "Scientifiction," they would not have been attracted to it at a newsstand."

 

Hugo Gernsback, opening editorial to the 6th issue of AMAZING STORIES (the first SF periodical) 1926/09

___________________________________________________________________

 

 

The namesake for the Hugo Awards was a somewhat colorful character. Aside from being a total jew about contracts and payments, he could discuss topics in electrics and radio quite cogently but was himself a poor storyteller and in addition invented baffling gadgets like a helmet to block out distractions that couldn't possibly be more distracting in itself if it were Vonnegut's random noise-phones. Still, credit where it's due, his periodical got SF as genre off the ground, aided I would guess to no small extent by H.G. Wells still actively contributing stories at the time. Also... I guess he was less racist than John W. Campbell? So that's a plus.

 

He wasn't wrong about the term "scientifiction" being a bit of a mouthful, either. Though, let it be noted, sixteen years later The Notion Club Papers apparently expected it to still be in use in the 1970s and '80s. (It was not.) Tolkien also had one of his characters (his C.S. Lewis placeholder?) mock the very notion of "ships" in outer space, when every discerning futurist knew you went to Mars via dreams or seance. Quite. (So that must be why Musk's SpaceX keeps blowing up billions upon billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded rockets; not enough pipe-dreams.) Hey, if it was good enough for Burroughs...

 

As this April marks the centennial of Amazin' Scientifiction's inaugural issue, what can we learn from the genre's first official century?

 

First off, Gernsback also probably called it straight when it came to their readership's gender skew. Was it because males are more open to the ridiculous or outré than their counterparts? Because the word "amazing" instead of focusing on content instead promises emotion therefore panders better to women's greater narcissism? Or was it simply that science, technology, the disinterested intellect interfacing with reality, is more compatible with masculine thought than with feminine interpersonal manipulation? In any case, the precept persisted through the generations, as my own experience by the '90s was of females of all ages turning up their noses at the mere notion of scienceyfiction as an obsession purely for twelve-year-old boys who were expected to grow out of it by dating age and join women in praising more refined fare, like, say, dating dramedies and sitcoms.

 

If you would contend not only SF but Fantasy and superheroes have been mainstreamed in the past couple of decades, I'll retort that no, those genres have instead been watered down and dumbed down for the mass market. Superheroes are the very measure of mass-produced schlock, outpacing even zombie flicks, fantasy became emo romantasy (thanks for nothing Anne Rice) and "science" fiction got bogged down in feminist scare propaganda with men in place of zombies, when it's not airheaded space wizard science fantasy (how many Star Wars are we up to now?) or painfully generic plots spackled over with some irrelevant robots to seem fresher.

 

But then, it's hardly the first time that's happened. 19th century fiction had its own waves of Hollow Earth and ghost stories watering down earlier exploration stories and gothic horror. Then Wells and Doyle were rapidly snowed under. Though Gernsback did encourage scientific oversight of SF plausibility, AMAZING STORIES did not so much usher in a golden era of intelligent futurism as popularize the unimaginatively pugilistic planetary romances and space westerns which cemented the early 20th century image of SF as tween boy pulp. Then in the latter half of the century it was Fantasy's turn to lose Tolkien's insightful grasp of myth and archetypes in favor of a decades-long flood of generic sword-and-sorcery paperbacks. Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke's brief golden era of more thoughtful SF was quickly diluted by that same wave into science fantasy with mad scientists standing in for evil wizards.

 

The 1990s saw our most recent such blip of intriguing futurism. You can see the flip from ST:TNG's early science fantasy plots to its peak in quality from '90-'93, then again descending toward ghost stories, space gods, etc. But by then Red Mars had come out in '92, and the middle of the decade saw a spread of personal computers, then internet access, X-Files-fueled arguments over UFOs, the more thoughtful Neuromancer diluted out to the more crowd-pleasing Matrix, etc. At that point though, computers were somewhat user-unfriendly and fiddly and inherently, stereotypically nerdy, to the point you hardly had to add "computer" to the word nerd to conjure up the image of a male shut-in sitting in front of a screen. Internet obsessions only hit the mass market a decade later during the 2000s, with cat memes and World of Warcraft. And once again, mainstreaming diluted and drowned quality. Only this time it wasn't just one genre at a time. It's everything: SF, Fantasy, Horror, Super-men, all of it.

 

But we can worry about that some other time. For now, note

1) Every upswing of futurism cannot help but skew toward males: computer nerds in the 1990s, Heinlein publishing in the Boy Scout magazine in the 1940s, rocketship exploration or Doyle's plateau rehashing the high seas exploration stories marketed to young boys earlier in the industrial era, or the SF stories published in Playboy, looking forward always depends on a core audience of intelligent, educated young males. Gernsback may have gloried in goosing his sales figures by marketing a feeling instead of a field of study, but he was reaping the existing interest of ganders in order to sell them out.

2) In the real world, it is technology, not feelings, which has lent us this brief period of relative well-being. "We believe the era of Scientifiction is just commencing." Yes, with good cause... and the era of the pugilistic monkey?

3) The mass market kills creativity, complexity, everything that makes for compelling Science in fiction. We can talk about the mainstreaming of "geek" interests or obscure genres at the start of the 21st century, but truthfully, they've been mainstreamed before. Supernatural stories were quite popular during the Victorian era, overlapping with the spread of actual belief in psychic, occult, and other supernatural charlatanism like Theosophy. "Science" fiction grew very popular a hundred years ago, so long as you accept a definition of science as laser six-shooters and every planet another Earth. And every single time, such fads end up as shameful historical footnotes, masses of chaff no-one in later decades will admit to having enjoyed, be it penny dreadfuls or the pulps or wearing pointy plastic ears to conventions.

4) A crucial feature of such decline is the transition from the scientist as hero to hero's helper. We descend from praising the heroic man of science building his own machine and venturing of his own accord "into futurity" to science fantasy, techno-wizardry in which the idiot hero need perform no more cerebral a feat than punching, but will be supplied, (either from offscreen or by a ridiculed throwaway nerd) with the technological means to achieve all his ambitions. He's just handed a lightsaber with no need to invent it. Stories of science subverted and enslaved to the demands of the everyman signal decay. 

 

Beyond those points I'm at a loss as to a specific finish to this page, except to point out that a movie about a platform jumping button mashing 'toon topped the movie market this year, and that the newest technological advance, Large Language Models and the automated manipulation of the public, has not passed through the futuristic speculation of the nerd cabal before working its way into popular fiction, or in truth popular fact. Unlike nukes or mutation or outer space, it has been fed directly into the mass market cesspit, before it could even be thought on.

Memento mori in a half-shell

I think this was Donatello?

Weird how the scutes just sort of slough off.

Wait, that beak... was this a snapper? Those guys are assholes, I'm glad you're dead!

Afoot is, apparently, the game

Mentioning foot fetishism twice in the past several posts got me wondering why it's so popular a reference for symbolic naughtiness. After all, I'm sure we could all cite sexual fetishes more morally questionable, or non-sexual transgressions far more harmful than those. So on one hand, maybe that's what makes it safe to reference. On the other, I do think it's also just too comically... random! I mean, come on, feet? Mouths, buttholes, abs, shoulders, hair, napes and thighs, okay, fine, plenty of spots carry some sensual implication by transgression, proximity or suggestion. Feet though? It's like saying "oooh, baby, that patch of skin a hand's breadth below your right shoulderblade gets me so hot!"

 

... and now thanks to Rule 34 I've probably invented "just down the right shoulder" fetish porn. 

Sinking Dagon

Marilyn Manson - Thaeter

_______________________________

 

Oh, it was island, not city, d'oh!

 

When I dug up the Lovecraftian FPS detective mash-up The Sinking City from my unplayed back-log and realized it wasn't what I'd mentally pictured, I'd apparently confused it with Sinking Island, the 2007 adventure game published by Microids. So now I remedied that misfire. I needn't have bothered.

 

The first Syberia game earned its status as a classic for its melancholic meander through scenic early 20th-century vignettes, but his other work seems to confirm Benoit Sokal's limitation to that one talent. As soon as you load it, Sinking Island manages to make even the pre-menu splash screen more annoying (much like Metro 2033 did) then needlessly complicates the save/load routine with user profiles. But we all suffer through such nonsense if a game's actual content proves good. Here it proves not.

Your name is Jack Norm, and wow, are you ever. Granted, Kate Walker was a bland everywoman protagonist as well, but such a role better fit the requirement of an audience viewpoint in Syberia's exotic clockwork locales. Sinking Island's tropical paradise attempts to recreate that feel, but all the elements are simply telegraphed: quaint natives and their pagan beliefs, the hated old Scrooge, girlfriend with a bad slavic accent, sumptuous yet repetitive resort with many, many pointless rooms and walkways. For something made in 2007 the graphic detail is both expansive and fluid, albeit stiff and stilted like anything from that era. But bland aural and visual decor aside, it's the writing that really kills the whole mess.

 

I'm trying to make some allowance for a possibly worse English version (though I cannot seem to change the language in any way) so maybe the French cast took a better stab at pronouncing Battaglieri than bat-a-glee-airy or bat-tag-leery. But them's small potatoes. The script, overall, attempts to flesh out an interactive whodunit by putting you through all the steps of an investigation, ignoring that all those steps are in fact painfully dull. For one thing, there are too many of them. Literally. Locales are split into several redundant screens each, which you'll need to traverse every time you want to triple-check whether you've pixel-hunted some patch of screen or a character acquired another line of dialogue. For another, the phraseology could stand to be far more terse. For yet another, your very professional investigator repeats the same questions to everyone.

"Good morning Mr./Mrs. Xyz, I am Boring McEveryman; I'm here to be very beige about this police investigation. Do you like billionnaires YES/NO? Now show me some FEET, BABY! Oooohh, yeeaaaaaah!"

Just kidding. I wish it were that entertaining.

Well if this ain't five kinds of awkward.

I especially like her boyfriend just placidly going through his idle animations while some rando interrupts their dinner to photograph his gal's feet. But for the most part the text's just... bad. Wordy and devoid of substance or flavor, choked with clumsy filler like "too bad the weather is so bad" and repetitive exchanges like

"Do these pearls mean anything to you?"

"No, not really, they don't mean anything to me."

Does that prose mean anything to you? Because it does not mean anything to me. 

 

I suppose a less cynical wer than myself might qualify it all as an attempt at naturalistic dialogue instead of obviously entertaining spicy fiction, but even as such it plonks. You'll find none of Syberia 1's charm here. A few quaint ideas like comparing clues in your inventory can't rescue this hopelessly boring paint-by-numbers routine. No point in continuing past the intro. Worth at most the 79 cents I paid for it, and not a centime more.

 

On the other hand, I also picked up a complete freebie called Dagon (which, the title assures us is "by H. P. Lovecraft" - thanks, here I was afraid I'd picked up the Dr. Seuss version by mistake*) which turned out not to be a "game" at all, stretching even the definitions of "walking simulators" and "visual novels" by merely having you click to advance screen by screen. And yet... I cannot believe I'm even saying it, but this one I really would recommend.

It's an illustrated, well-narrated, full read-through of Lovecraft's short work, word-for-word with some interesting historical background and character notes you can right-click here and there. A half-hour's read and listen and watch. A museum curator's notion of a video game... but it works. It is what it is, its few features handled both professionally and with dedication to the source material. Oh, and the irony of Dagon, of all stories, being illustrated by makers of DLCs for Ultimate Fishing Simulator is almost too precious. Had some 3D models left over, did you?

 

How much more funding went into that tedious piece of catalogue filler above? How much better can you handle a worse concept if you don't go into it as a contractual obligation or a lazy, disinterested cash-grab?

 

______________________________________________________________ 

 

 

* Y'know, I meant that as an honest joke, but a lot of Dr. Seuss really is kinda... non-Euclidean, in a "Mimsy were the Borogoves" flexible young minds style. 

AoW4 Factions, 12

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:

________________________________________________________________________________

I wasn't quite sure what to make of the eldritch update's various gameplay changes, so just as when dragons launched I fell back on orcs as generic minions just as I did for my first dragon. Their aggressiveness worked well with the extra unit summons and crowd control, and a bit of order-affinity support kept it all together. Uninspired concept, but I like the way it plays. And nothing says faith in a higher power like chanting, gibbering, maniacal, bloodthirsty savages.

Pie Dreams Squared

"No denouement to the drama of the real."

_________________________________________

Fry: "How can you people be so blasé? Here you are in the year 3000 or so, yet you just sit around like it's the boring time I came from."
Farnsworth: "Boring? Wasn't that the period when they cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the Earth?"

 

Futurama S03E15 - I Dated A Robot

_________________________________________

 

I became so enamored of webcomics to a large extent as work put forth by one or two minds, freer from interference, albeit not from comment section pandering. As a bonus, their slow pace often led to the subject matter outgrowing itself. The following two examples are both slice-of-life (slice of > pie, get it? huh? get it?) a genre that rarely grabs me, and to be honest I was never particularly jazzed about them at the time. Both started in 2007. Both have become more interesting retrospectively.

 

Punch an Pie

Queen of Wands was standard early 2000s fare, lots of generic "they can't censor us now" interwebz naughtiness which inevitably slid into twenty-somethings' dating dramedy as its other gimmicks (wiccan heroine, glorified feminist abuse, etc.) quickly revealed themselves to be going nowhere. After its end, though, the author spun off and handed off one of her characters to another writer for a more consistent slice-of-life routine solidly fixated on the inevitable post-school concerns of sex and taxes. Aside from that, it mostly concerns the heroine's character arc growing out of her lingering adolescent emotional fits and unrealistic expectations and taking more responsibility for her own actions.

 

Octopus Pie

"My everyday anxieties don't seem so unique anymore. They don't play out on this lonesome, poetic level." - mid-series turning point. 

Heroine Eve(rest) Ning (get it? huh? get it?) works a shitty grocery job and gets a wacky stoner roommate, hijinks ensue and then sort of waver and peter out. More interesting for its commentary on contemporary middlebrow yuppie/art culture and its pretentiousness, including a quick jab at what's now termed wokedom shortly before its end. I stopped reading sometime before its middle years, when it kept oscillating unstably between trying to maintain its original sitcom zaniness and increasingly indulgent navel-gazing filled with unrealistic stabs at subtlety and deep meanings or just plain art major fappery - e.g. in this strip according to the author's later commentary: "That Eve is laying flat while he's holding onto her is meant to signify that he's in need." Pardon my derisive snort. I returned when, to my surprise, she posted a couple of new chapters long after the fact, with the cast now aging, pairing off, starting families, looking back on their youth less with nostalgia than bemusement. 

 

Train Dreams

Wait, that's not a comic, how did that get in here?

It's not often I agree with film critics on artsy, slow-moving movies (especially concerning a befuddled everyman stumbling through life) but this one was just solid work through and through. If indeed the character-centered piece it superficially appears, it would be boring as all hell, its protagonist displaying all the charisma of mold. But the show's true star is the changing landscape, physical and cultural, personal and interpersonal. It packs the most detail you'll see in a movie about nothing.

 

I could never get into those pie comics while they were running, but they read much better on a binge. From '90s outrageousness to 2010s socially conscious posturing, from in-your-face cool kids to struggling to keep a middle-aged couple together, from the launch of World of Warcraft to smartphone addiction, it's not always easy to untangle the change in author or the author's personal growth from milieu. Futile efforts? Easily forgotten? Twenty years later, about as relevant as a lumberjack from 1920. But watch years' worth of panels grow into the realization that youthful rambunctiousness has stopped being cute or narcissism no longer satisfies a fading craving. There's a glimmer of hope in there for an entire culture to mature. Instead it feels like the end credits are about to roll. Someone did just launch some astronauts at the moon again. Whatever happened in between there?

Cutting through the Treacle: The Tabletop Fetish

"You said that irony was the shackles of youth"

R.E.M. - What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, 1994

__________________________________________ 

"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"

"I don't even know anymore."

 

The Simpsons, 1995

__________________________________________ 

 

 

On the lookout for any system to replace the increasingly obsolete D&D routine, I recently gave Gloomhaven a try.

If you get that character reference, you're too old.

To be fair there's quite a bit of potential there, but it's still fairly primitive with a tabletop version apparently not even a decade old. Leaving most of my bitching for some future date, I'm just amazed at how hard the computer adaptation works at preventing me from getting into it with an utterly bewildering interface feeling like it was designed by whichever librarian won the "most anal-retentive" award in 1973.

 

Sure, you've got the usual amateur designer pitfalls like the camera turning on its own or overextended animations for mundane actions like bending over to pick up coins.

 

Then it makes you pause to confirm the beginning of a new round like Battletech and lacks context-sensitive single-click shortcuts or double-clicks, making you separately confirm every action. And you can't click your other card to change action, have to manually un-click your current one. And you can't just spacebar-end a character's turn; must officially pass your remaining card and confirm. And you can restart round on your character's action but not if you're in the 'thinking' step of selecting an action.

 

But even beyond all that inexcusable stuttering, Gloomhaven's design enters a Very Special Boy category few others have managed to crater their way into. You kinda have to see it to believe it.

Yes, it makes you manually confirm your armour soak on every damaging attack. Wait! Oh god, oh god, oh god, did I remember to breathe and perspire this round?!?

 

So screw that, instead I've been devoting more time to Wildermyth, which will warrant more discussion of its greater creativity (even if it does stumble a bit in execution)

If anything even lower-budget and lower-tech than Gloomhaven, invoking 2D construction paper visuals much like Shelter did, and for the same old-timey storybook atmosphere. Or maybe its creators just watched The Secret of Kells one too many times. Look, at least they ain't chibis. It's a rare "back to basics" game which successfully revisits the core interactivity of the medium, placing heavy emphasis on your pieces clacking from square to square on a board and units and buffs being represented by "cards"

- but it's also significantly more playable than the first example, with more informative tooltips and more fluid commands.
 

On a completely unrelated topic, though I've been burned by Kickstarter projects several times (fuck Mark Jacobs) I got two e-mails in the past month from games I'm currently backing. One gaggle of fringe developers lamented their publisher deals all fell through and they're strapped for cash, laying off part of their team. The others bragged they've now implemented dice in their game. Colored dice! Rolling! Sparkling! Rolling sparkling colored polyhedral pixels! Never in the history of the Arr Enn Gee hath The Number been graced with such grace and gravitas!

 

I shouldn't have to reiterate my distaste for retro games, but they overlap so heavily with the turn-based or narrative-driven genres I favor that I keep running into this utterly shallow in-group appeal. I'm not buying a game about spaceships or fireball slinging to pretend I'm sitting around a table with a bunch of other apes. I'm not in it for the hipster meta-enjoyment of pre-post-ironic non-content. I'm not buying an escapist fantasy to pretend I'm pretending, but to pretend. That shouldn't be so fine a distinction. No cards. No dice. No placemats. No putting my little soldier figurines on plastic bases. Get that shit off my screen. 

It's like fetish porn. You know when you've hit the paraphiliac threshold because a minor detail begins replacing the core activity, be it humping or clicking. You expect a pornstar to have feet, you'd find it odd if they were missing, but you can also spot a foot fetish video if one pops up. Both extremes veer off the mark. Something in Gloomhaven's basic design philosophy emphasizes the wrong visual or interactive elements, consistently and intrusively. It makes you pause for cards to flips over, makes you backtrack through actions as if you're taking the time to physically put a card back in the deck, makes you confirm every sub-step of every step of every action every round as if the mechanical manipulation of imaginary cardboard and plastic were in itself your dungeoneering adventure. Wildermyth places you on a table with cards as well, but after that no longer belabors the point. It's still gratuitous, you can tell the fetish element has been included, but at least there's more to it than feet!

 

Yes, grids look like game boards. So? Yes, the small number randomization or random action drawing of tactical games obviously originated with dice and cards before it was electronic. So? An adaptation can never be a carbon-copy. You're making something that has to function here and now, on the screen, by the rules of electronic interaction, not by the rules of drunken munchkins smearing pizza grease onto cardboard. In 1993 Solitaire may well have been the most played game on Windows. There are reasons thats no longer the case!

 

You hit peak absurdity when you see start-ups on a shoestring budget selling Kickstarter stretch goals of dice animations and plastic feelies mailed to its audience. Could you have paid one more programmer for one more month with that cash? Three months? Look over at your neighbours packing their bindles and tell me again if you can afford to deliver a non-functional product for the sake of a handful of foot fetishists, when your entire industry's already in danger of getting automated into irrelevance.