We're All Stars Now

"To swim you have to swallow"

Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show

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"To appreciate the emotional appeal of harmony, one must -- as the prisoner inevitably does -- contrast it with the basic fear and estrangement of the earlier phases of imprisonment. Instead of antagonism and total conflict, he feels in step with a milieu which appreciates him. Identified as a "progressive," he is permitted (and grasps at) a more direct form of self-expression. To be sure, he is still partly the actor; but performance and life have moved closer together, and he is not acting as much as he thinks he is

[...]

confession is as much a part of re-education as re-education is of confession. The officials demanded that their accusations become the prisoner's self-accusations, and that the confession be made with inner conviction. They required that he present himself in the evil image they had constructed for him"

 

Robert Jay Lifton - Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961)

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Welcome back!

Boy, it's been a crazy time since I talked to you last year. First everyone was excited, then that thing happened and everyone got even more excited, what a trip.

 

On a completely different topic from that last post, I honestly can't remember why I ordered Lifton's old book. Probably recommended in the same YouTube videos where I first heard the term thought-terminating cliché. In any case, by the grace of our Amazonian overlords I found myself the proud owner of Wheaton (MA) College Library's old hardcover copy of a surprisingly informative account of interviews with victims of Chinese torture / brainwashing in the 1950s. While brainwashing itself was cemented in popular parlance by spy movies (Thought Reform itself was completed soon after the release of The Manchurian Candidate) the text shocks sixty years later by how often totalitarian methodology and phraseology from 1950s "communist" indoctrination has melded into our public parlance and assumptions. Progressivism is only one of the most obviously soured terms in recent years for its ironic misuse in support of censorship and bigotry.

More than terminology though, it's the general pattern of brainwashing outlined in Thought Reform which crops up with alarming regularity, and not from governments or corporations directly, but in recent brands of activism and fad worship. To be sure, 1950s communists hardly invented the path of redemption from isolation and punishment to confession of past wrongs to active reconstruction of personal-within-group identity to proselytism to reinforce one's newfound moral grounding. Religions have been playing that game of addictive collusion ever since shamans got brand-name recognition, as do less successful cults.

It shouldn't be such a surprise that the original sin narratives of white guilt or male guilt rehash so closely those same methodologies based on the same human weaknesses. Nobody wants to admit to being wrong in the present, but penitence for past wrongs (the wrongs of a past you, some other you) represents a path to acceptance in the present.

 

Feminism in particular, given its 1960s-70s close ties to Marxist rhetoric (women as oppressed underclass, etc.) its partial success as lifeboat for ideologues disillusioned by inescapably mounting evidence of Soviet and Maoist villainy, has placed considerable emphasis on confession-writing, on forcing both converted men and women ("internalized misogyny") to endlessly reiterate their own guilt within a revision of all history as a male conspiracy against women. You can't take two clicks in any direction on the internet without stumbling over prostrate true believers self-flagellating over guilt narratives which under even the slightest scrutiny hold no more water than the confessions of imperialist collusion extracted by the Chinese under torture.

 

While lacking the torture porn appeal of being chained immobile until your flesh rots or beaten until your spine cracks to paralyze you, the very pervasiveness of the modern, polite threat of firing, blacklisting, ostracism and bankruptcy via court costs should you fall on the wrong side of accusations of crimes against your social betters are more than enough to ensure mass conversion to the new faith. That pervasiveness brings us back to last year's last post. Modern political correctness has achieved via media blitz, via an illusion of consensus what the more primitive Maoist torturers had to painstakingly inculcate via direct incarceration and beatings.

 

While ideological takeover of universities and legal codes played a large part in fabricating legitimacy, the sad truth of the internet age is that proselytes, in fear of finding themselves up against the wall when the revolution comes, have done much of the work of converting each other without revolutionary leaders even needing to schlep to a podium. The misuse of this new medium, of the internet's promise of free speech in propping up holier-than-thou-than-thou-than-thou echo chambers was seemingly baked into the very first newsgroups and did not improve with volume.

So we return to last year's question: are you playing the game or being played? Do you feel relief at your confession of original sin finally being accepted? Are you even more proud of being on the right side of history, of holding more modern views now in 2022 than you did in 2021? Who are you? Because if the first answer which pops into your excuse for a mind is "I'm a <SOMETHING>-ist" a borrowed identity, you'll find ready kinship with a host of converts to mass murder from the fifties.

In the Dope Show

"The drugs, they say, are made in California

We love your face, we'd really like to sell you"

 

Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show

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"Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur."

 

Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker (1937)

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"The sensories were an inescapable part of 2110, as omnipresent and popular as television had been in Blaine's day. Larger and more elaborate versions of the sensories were used for theater productions, and variations were employed for advertising and propaganda. They were to date the purest and most powerful form of the ready-made dream, tailored to fit anyone.

But they had their extremely vocal opponents, who deplored the ominous trend toward complete passivity in the spectator. These critics were disturbed by the excessive ease with which a person could assimilate a sensory; and in truth, many a housewife walked blank-eyed through her days, a modern-day mystic plugged into a continual bright vision.

In reading a book or watching television, the critics pointed out, the viewer had to exert himself, to participate. But the sensories merely swept over you, vivid, brilliant, insidious, and left behind the damaging  schizophrenic impression that dreams were better and more desirable than life.

[...]

In another generation, the critics thundered, people will be incapable of reading, thinking or acting!

It was a strong argument. But Blaine, with his 152 years of perspective, remembered much the same sort of arguments hurled at radio, movies, comic books, television and paperbacks. Even the revered novel had once been bitterly chastised for its deviation from the standards of pure poetry. Every innovation seemed culturally destructive; and became, ultimately, a cultural staple, the embodiment of the good old days, the spirit of the Golden Age -- to be threatened and finally destroyed by the next innovation."

 

Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc. (1959)

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Video games have been outputting more of an artsy fringe lately, but have yet to truly mature as a creative medium. Then again, how long did television take to outgrow the laugh track? Meh, games've got time. Still, re-reading Immortality, Inc. makes me wonder what Sheckley must've thought of the advent of video games by his death in 2005. Standard railing against new media used to revisit the same premise that increasing media sophistication brought audience apathy: the more work done by the program, the less done by the programmed, and thus new media will collapse civilization. When video games came along, the pretext to angst was flipped around faster than Procrustes could make his bed. They prompt too much action, hyperactivity, over-involvement, and THUS this new medium will collapse civilization.

Civilization having... sec (runs to glance out the window; nope, still there)

Civilization having neglected to collapse, we're left with the unsurprising conclusion that games are just another creative medium, amenable to personal or artistic expression, entertainment or propaganda in whatever ratios the monkeys in question produce and consume. Just like books, theater or television, some (like myself) in every generation will be prone to over-indulge by various standards, but as with every diversion the prevalence of indulgence is less an issue in itself than an indicator of the inadequacy of human life.

Engaging my superhuman powers of forevoyeurism for a moment, I can predict that media, genres and fads will continue to arise now and anon, and the relevant question each time will not be of the new mode's quality, but the quality of its creators and audiences. All the more relevant this to our slightly decentralized modern culture, with gamified public discourse encouraging us to score points against each other on every forum and comments section. The depth and complexity of a video game, more than that of a book or movie, depends not only on a target audience's ability to spot depth and complexity but its ability to behave deeply and complexly. Does your grand role-playing adventure consist of being ordered from HUD marker to HUD marker? Is your strategy just a race to the designated best unit? Is your city an endless reiteration of the same cookie-cutter neighbourhood?

 

Does your identity as an imaginary Werwolfe hold any meaning or are you just another werewolf? Games do hold one great, largely untapped potential to alter our thinking: establishing a personal playstyle, mode of interaction, be it expressed in simoleon expenditure, unit ratios or alignment wheel position... or preferences, or fears or aspirations. It gets you thinking about deliberately making your soul. Who were you in 2021, and who will you be in 2022? Have any words, sights, sounds altered your personality? With or without your informed consent? Are you moving or being moved? In our grand, global, interconnected all-pawn clash of psychological influences, are you a player or just another unit?

EndLand

"I squirm into you, now I'm in your gut

I fell into you, now I'm in a rut"

Marilyn Manson - Deformography

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"The same things I've written a thousand times before. After all, an act can lose meaning if you do it often enough."

 

I'd hoped to have more to say about Strangeland but in the end I find myself resenting its ending more than admiring its high points. I will say that despite its initial setup of a man feeling responsible for a woman's death, it didn't quite go the standard "man bad; woman good" route, and it's rare to find any form of entertainment these days not openly trumpeting feminist male-bashing. Unfortunately it does slide into an older version.

Of course, it would be hard to say much about Strangeland in the first place due to its oft-noted brevity. In fact its GoG summary lists most interactable characters and despite (unlike most adventure games) touting some built-in replay value, you'll make most of your decisions during the first zone. Which prompts the first question: how short is too short?

Before online distribution, the answer was obvious: game boxes cost $50 off the store shelf (expansion packs $35) and contained a predetermined quantity of escapism, long enough to ensure you didn't feel the need to buy from other publishers but also just barely short enough to leave you wanting more of the same. A "game" meant a couple weeks' worth of evenings. Then came multiplayer replayability, endless games, the return of quasi-randomized roguelike questing, and multiple play modes (e.g. strategic overland plus personal mission-running) blowing the roof off the high end of that scale. So why do we still prop up the mandatory low end?

 

Absent the overhead of boxing, shipping and storing physical disks, and given the evident accessibility of modern game engines (seems everything I play now carries the Unity logo) the minimal unit price to justify production has been rapidly dropping. Granted, emphasizing play time over sheer sales figures made a better measure of quality, but of course this can itself be abused by designers (especially startups or dilettantes) padding out their campaign's length with ludicrous timesinks and stalling. "Hours played" has recently grown nearly as meaningless a metric as the number of players in "free"-to-play games. Strangeland feels short, especially to those of us who'd hoped for a second Primordia, but it pointedly automates a repetitive task as soon as you demonstrate you've grasped the concept of mouths instead of forcing you to trudge back and forth, and mocks you for being willing to sit in place waiting for a slow reward. Why not pay $10-15 for a condensed dose of recherché psycho-symbolism you'll remember more keenly than you would a hundred hours' worth of Callin' Duties? As a fan of science fiction, that genre most prone to hard-hitting, thought-provoking short stories, I can't help but think our expectations are to blame for a perceived lack here, and depriving us of much potential interactive quality brevity.

Moving on, this is where things have to get spoilery, not only for Strangeland but for the postapocalyptic furry comic Endtown. For whatever my evaluation's worth, they're both worth an unspoiled sit-through, though neither is world-shaking work.

Aside from constantly retconning its cosmology, Endtown (coincidentally enough) has a major problem with endings. The author has set up some intricate intrigues (the milk and meat storylines starting 2012/10/25 and its followup 2016/12/28 being particularly well developed) stemming from his furries' physical and psychological tendencies and internecine squabbles, yet instead of tying up each plot's threads he lops them all off via some nonsensical wish-granter or other deus ex machina. While personally I was most annoyed by the spaceship that runs on feels, the culprit is usually that space wizard effortlessly invalidating all others''s influence. At the same time, formerly competent, driven (or at least cooperative) characters tend to inexplicably devolve to naive, childishly labile versions of themselves, the better for their newfound incompetence to make room for external salvation or damnation.

Which brings us back to Strangeland:

"You have one wish left"

"I wish to know who I am"

"Funny. That was your first wish."

No, that dialogue is actually paraphrased from one of Planescape: Torment's more famous anecdotes. But, given that Strangeland's writer's a well-recognized Torment fanboy and the protagonist's constant deaths to advance the plot recall the Nameless One without fail, I can't help but also question the "know thyself" angle. Though Strangeland's "good" ending ostensibly has you embracing your own worth, it reminded me of nearing the end of an Endtown storyline, the heroes having grappled with demons both inner and outer, conquered existential threats and existential despair, only for a space wizard to swan into the picture and snatch up control of the situation, denying them their well-earned victory. Admittedly, it works better for Strangeland's stricter focus on psychology, as mental disorders of most varieties are so difficult to overcome precisely because they turn all your effort against yourself, raising the stakes for external symbols as lifelines.

 

I'll also admit I'm mostly bothered by exactly that one line about his lover's eyes showing him his bright self. In real life, viewing a man through the female gaze yields precisely Strangeland: a world in which the man is ugly, insane, dangerous and broken by default and in need of a yoke and muzzle (or straightjacket) his life worth an order of magnitude less than that of his tribe's females, the value of his existence defined entirely by his potential utility as provider and protector to a woman and her offspring. I can't decide whether to call Strangeland's interpretation naive or insidious, but it rings painfully hollow against realistic observation of the human condition.

 

Torment's best ending packed you off to eternal war by yourself... but as yourself, your full self. Other noteworthy games from that same period like V:tM-Bloodlines also allowed for individual endings, striding into the (proverbial) sunset finally free of various factions' machinations. In Strangeland, after spending puzzle after puzzle struggling for individual integrity, piecing together my own shattered psyche, being thrown a "good ending" bone for embracing an external influence (even symbolic) betrays the player-as-protagonist's efforts. This "freedom is slavery" reinterpretation reeks of recent decades' cultural decay.

In short, I decided stabbing myself is my canonical lycanthrope-approved ending to Strangeland. I am worthless... but <I> am worthless.

To bring this back around to my earlier point, Strangeland is a short story, and short stories depend heavily on Poe's single effect. Ruin the ending, ruin the effect, ruin $5 of the $10 story instead of 5/50. In turn, this throws a new light on Endtown's ruining various character arcs and intrigues by needlessly contrived endings. If one were to view Endtown as a single over-arching metaplot, as the story of Aaron Marx and his magic powers toying with a postapocalyptic furry farm, it might hold together better. But that's not what you find yourself reading on a page by page basis. As each new protagonist's struggle is invalidated by each new deus ex machina, each short story is ruined in turn. Endtown becomes a chain of abortions, of setups fizzling out again and again, character development, future history and phlebotina all tortured into nonsensical conclusions that the beating of that hideous heart ain't so bad since we invented pacemakers.

 Newly failed short "story" attempt, Deliver, is now up for panning at your leisure.

Faith of our Frotteurs

"Cause the inquisition's here and it's here to staaaaaaay!"

History of the World Part 1

Just thought I'd prompt you to think about religious exemptions to vaccination in light of modern sensibilities to interpersonal harm. The same government, the same company, the same school that would gladly have a man fired, blacklisted, ostracised or beaten to death in prison as a rapist on a woman's say-so for no more substantive accusation than a whistle or raised eyebrow as mortal danger to all woman-kind will gleefully permit the subhuman troglodytes who kow-tow before stone-age superstitions to infect as many people as they can with as many diseases as they can, of varying lethality, for claiming their imaginary magic sky-daddy might frown upon public health.

Fine. Fuck it. Cough it up. Spread the love. Might as well. God bless your mucus.

The absurdity of this idiotic species does little to justify any efforts to save it.

But it does raise the question of why we don't have a religious exemption for hooter-honkin', a Church of the Holy Grab-Ass, a Priory o' Pinchin', a holiday of Fellate Me Mother For I Have Sprung.

If you're willing to condemn women to choke on their own blood for the sake of invisible pigeons with harps, I don't see that hoochin' their coochies by the power vested in me by the blueness of my balls would be anything but a step up.

Lockstep 3: Or, there and back again

Minor spoiler for Vagrus: The Riven Realms

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Unable to find any half-skim guanaco milk for my eyebrow perifoliation treatments, instead I've been trying my hand at That Game That Misspelled My Name In The Preorder Credits and so far it looks quite promising, if still awaiting some fleshing out of its various features. Despite taverns including a hint system pointing you to various content, for instance, I've been having a devil of a time finding the various NPC companions to fill my roster, which in turn is preventing me from questing. About to rail against this lack, I ended up glancing at an online cheat-sheet only to discover I'd hounded circles around what should have been an obvious freebie.

Repeatedly.

Plotting all three of my trips to Deven so far with a view both toward accumulating fetch quests for simultaneous delivery and taking advantage of market prices to waste as little inventory space as possible entailed avoiding the unprofitable direct route along the main road, and consequently the hidden ambush site where you can rescue Finndurath the Spellweaver. I'd still have missed her if not for a damn reddit thread.

While Vagrus explicitly advertises a lack of handholding as one of its core selling points, given the importance of companions to questing and logistics, this one's proximity and the location she asks you to visit, you're obviously expected to run into her quite quickly. It's supposed to be a gimmie, a nice surprise while starting out. She's even located in an obvious spot. Too obvious, in fact, so that any gamer worth his salt will instead hit other locations (like the salt mines) for fun and profit instead of plowing forward. Is sweeping for side-quests before main objectives not a core strategy in cRPGs? Is maximizing logistics' profitability not in fact my exact job description as Vagrus? Why am I being denied an early reward for putting more thought into things than running there and back again horse-blindered, ignoring possible rings of power and profit?

It is possible for game designers to predict their customers' reactions so perfectly as to give the illusion of free choice while laying out a linear path. Off the top of my head, Half-Life 2's introduction (running through the apartment building) managed it beautifully. But it ain't easy, and the nerdier the genre the harder the players are to predict. A managerial cRPG exploration sandbox? Quite nerdy.* So why did you predict I'd simplemindedly rush from big city to big city? The more I play Vagrus, the clearer becomes the devs' very, very precise idea of how your early game should unfold, and entirely too much of it depends on foreknowledge of where and in what sequence to unlock stores with discounts, companions and free stacks of loot... while hoping for lucky fetch quest randomization. Its tendency to over-predict player actions clashes with its fundamental randomization.

Oh well. With a third rusty side-chick in tow, at least now I can re-attempt to lick the neck romancer's swamp hole. Later, comes.

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* edit 2022/12/05 - And that's not mentioning the gratuitous LATIN. No really, why did you ever assume your target audience would go for the obvious?

Hey, what's another name for literary cannon?

A knowitzer.