Anyone familiar with The Punisher should be aware of his war journal. The concept was used as a framing device and narrative method in various Punisher comics over the past thirty years. The basic conceit is that Frank Castle’s internal narration, which is what the reader would see in caption boxes, is actually just pieces of text excerpted from his “war journal.” What the reader gets is what The Punisher writes down–everything is filtered through that lens.

PunisherMAX, Jason Aaron’s continuation and ending of Garth Ennis’ The Punisher MAX series, gives us some insight into the reality of Frank Castle’s war journals. In issue #22, the final one in the series, Nick Fury is going through Castle’s old home. The page begins with this:

We can immediately pick a few things out. First, the war journal is inextricable from the war itself. It is both a record and a means of sustaining the war–it is day 12,978, after all, which means that Frank Castle’s war went on for 35 years. Second, the journal is a way of marking all memory, not just accomplishments, victories, or defeats. The memory of his wife is imprinted there. Every adventure and every hit that Castle ever made are recorded there. It, more than anything else, is the sum total of The Punisher’s accomplishments, and for the comic book reader, The Punisher and the work of the Journal are one and the same.

This is Foucault’s argument about the idea of the “work” that the author creates. What is the dividing line between “non-work” and “work” for The Punisher? If every action is toward his goal of “making the world sane,” and all of those actions are written in the war journal, then that means they are the same; the war journal creates the author called The Punisher who authors the war journal.

Toward the end of the essay, Foucault says this:

In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. . . . I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint–one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced.

There are two important things going on here. First, Foucault desires a world in which fiction does not always have to be deployed in the name of a single author, a “great genius” to which we can ascribe a delimited discursive body. Second, he wants to see fiction deployed outside of that author mode, allowing anyone to take hold of it, though there will still be larger (perhaps cultural) “systems of constraint.”

I think that both of these concepts play out in shared comic characters like The Punisher. The character of The Punisher is not attached to any one author, but is rather available for anyone who writes in the world and character of Frank Castle. He is shared by a large, diverse group of writers and artists who all write and draw him at once. The “system of constraint” is cultural-reader based, in that there are certain limits that The Punisher could brush up against, places where the fiction cannot go because it cannot exist there–for example, The Punisher would never fly around in space with laser vision. That isn’t a limitation on discourse by some authorial spectre, but a broad assumption/assertion by the entire community formed under the banner of The Punisher–it is a social constraint.

So to reformulate what I wrote above: Garth Ennis and Jason Aaron and about ten different artists wrote Frank Castle who wrote a war journal which wrote The Punisher. All of these are interrelated, and cannot be extracted from one another, so why does this happen?

Nick Fury, in attempting to protect his friend, erases the life of The Punisher from the fictive world. Only we, the readers of the comic book, know the whole story. The narrative method that lays out The Punisher’s world is annihilated on the page.

This is where the really interesting stuff comes in. In reading the Ennis and Aaron issues of The Punisher, the reader has a very good understanding of the way he thinks. Frank Castle is literally insane by the time that he dies, and there are several moments where that becomes painfully clear:

The war journal, which narrates to the reader, checks against this insanity. The reader should, at this point, be fully aware of the slow decline that Castle’s mind has undergone over the past ten years of his life. To a reader of the war journal, it makes sense; the journal provides a depth that makes us understand that Frank Castle is less of a hero and more of a man with a sickness that will never get better.

The comic ends with images like this one:

In the moment that The Punisher is no more, the symbol is taken up by new people. It becomes a way of expression a dissatisfaction with the world that can only be alleviated with punishing violence. Everyone with a bone to pick becomes The Punisher. But the violence that these people partake in is not a war, not an attempt to correct systemic problems in unfairness, but rather a vent, an explosion, a riot during the death of the sovereign. They can only mimic the mass murdering tendencies of Frank Castle at his most violent and most ill. They replicate the ghost of a killer.

This is the same issue that we have in real life. Putting on a symbol to justify committing acts of violence with no reflection is a horrific tendency–a badge, a flag, and even The Punisher symbol have all become part of justifications for killing people outlined as an enemy. At the moment the war journal is erased, at the moment when we are not aware of the reasons for violence, violence becomes meaningless. It becomes mass murder, not justified punishment.

So Foucault is right about an author–Frank Castle, a writer who recorded every moment of his life, limited the amount of violence that could be done in the guise of The Punisher precisely because he provided a limit for the semiotic presence of The Punisher. The war journal becomes a cautionary tale. The symbolic function of the fiction that is The Punisher kills the cautionary, biographic pain of Frank Castle. The death of his wife and children disappears in a haze, and only skullfaced men with pipe wrenches remain.

So the writing subject is disappeared, in a Soviet way, and the author is dead. Without these referents, the symbols reign free without a sovereign. And it is terrifying.

The game is Station 37, a game made through some kind of weekend jam thing in Canadaland. It is old-school stuff, but the design is impeccable, and it has some really cool firefighting mechanics.

I can’t tell you anything else about the game without spoiling it. The bloody thing is free, so go get it, and play it immediately. I think that the end of the game is some of the most frustrating fun that I have experienced in a game, and I have played Skate 2. So, seriously, go check it out.

Here is the really boss trailer so you know what you are in for:

Go play it!

As faithful readers will know, I posted a transcript of the Dear Esther trailer and some thoughts about it a while back. I bought the game on release, and I just finished it a few minutes ago, so I thought that I would write about the game immediately.

1. Dear Esther changes on each playthrough. There are three scripts, and at each moment where the narrator speaks, the game picks from one of those scripts and delivers some text from it. That means that you get snippets from each story, and it really makes each playthrough of the game different. I have only played it through one time, though I plan on doing it more, and this is the story as I understood it.

The narrator is named Donnelly. His wife, Esther, was killed in a car accident. Donnelly, sometime after this, goes to an island that has particular meaning for him and his wife. The lines between reality and hallucination begin to blur for him–drugs could be involved. Before the game, Donnelly has done a number of strange things: burning all of his belongings, painting religious quotes and scientific diagrams all over the island, and throwing all of his letters to Esther into the ocean. Along with this, Donnelly is fixated on a man named Jacobson, a man who wrote the original history of the island. Jacobson died on the island a hundred years before, a victim to syphilis, and his infection drove him to mania. Donnelly, an infection from a broken leg spreading through his body, isolated from the rest of the world, makes his way across the island to a giant aerial tower. He reaches it, he jumps off, the game the world fades to black.

2. Dear Esther might not be a game. It uses the infrastructure and rhetorical devices of a video game to tell a crippling, affective story, but it doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of a traditional game. The player isn’t able to interact with the world through the player character, the entire story is told through disembodied narration, and there is only one goal–the end of the game. In the same way that a movie or a book plods, inch after inch, to resolution, Dear Esther has a clear end point, literally visible in the first moments of the game, and the player is taken there without deviation.

3.  Dear Esther is a game about making the player feel. That is all. There is nothing else that the game is concerned with. The symbolism is heavy handed, the writing purple at times, but the combination of those things with the stunning visuals is really just an effort to make the player understand the emotions that Donnely is feeling. The death of Esther is a blow to his very being, and it (apparently) shatters his mind. I felt deeply complicit in both the guilt that the narrator felt and also in his slow suicide–as soon as I saw the beacon, I knew what would happen. I felt it, and we started the trudge forward.

Alec at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (a favorite site of mine) writes that Dear Esther really did “work its dark, metaphysical magic” on him, and later writes

Not that it isn’t interesting, but I don’t see it as a puzzle to be pieced together. I do not believe Dear Esther is the search for an answer, or even for a meaning. I believe it is an experiment with the senses and the emotions. It is a Lonely, Guilt-Stricken Man Simulator. It is a journey through morbidly beautiful emptiness, a maudlin cocktail of sight, sound, implication and metaphor designed to conjure up a feeling of purposeful despair.

And I agree with this, for the most part. The game tries to make you understand what it is like to know that there is nothing left in the world worth caring about. I am resistant to the interpretation of the game that asserts that the whole thing is in the narrator’s mind, that the island is constructed by him, and that it is about an internal journey. I think that, in order to have real, stick-around meaning, the game world has to actually exist.

The reason is that there are two narratives going on. One is the player character, his guilt, his mourning, and his suicide. The island characterized as a space of death, of isolation, and of a slow decay, but that is only for the man-made intruders on the island. The lighthouse is ruined. The shacks are abandoned. Ships rot on shorelines.

The other narrative runs counter to that, and it is the story of the island. The island, through all of this, is blameless. Though shepherds die and ships run aground on unforgiving rocks, the island stands still as an unchanging haven. The narrator’s life is ruined because of a massive change, the interruptive terror of his wife’s death, but the island could never feel that kind of change. Its beating heart of crystal formations, unmoved for thousands of years, stands monolithic against time.

"Bent back like a nail, like a hangnail, like a drowning man clung onto the wheel, drunk and spiraled, washed onto the lost shore under a moon as fractured as a shattered wing. We cleave, we are flight and suspended, these wretched painkillers, this form inconstant. I will take flight."

4. The game presents us with a way of thinking about the separation between health and infection. The narrator, who spoke a lot about infection in my playthrough, is consumed by a psychic pathology–grief, and worse, guilt. He cannot shake it, and because of that, finds solace in a total infection of the body. His body has to match his mind. There becomes a pair bonding of the stained being, an existence that needs to replicate a stained soul with a ruined body. The result is predictably nihilistic–the only result of that is destruction, but on the way to that destruction, there is the recognition of beauty. The interior of the island can never be known without the recognition, and the movement toward, death. This is all pretty Romantic, syphilis-desiring stuff, but it really is the theoretical thrust of the game. Infection breeds death, but also a profound appreciation of the world, and a deep mourning for the loss of it, a loss that can only be truly understood on the way to death. I thought it was pretty beautiful stuff.

"I first saw him on the side of the road. I was waiting for you to be cut out of the wreckage. The car looked like it had been dropped from a great height. The guts of the engine spilled over the tarmac. Like water underground."

5. So you should buy Dear Esther. It costs less than two movie tickets, is about as long as that experience, and is infinitely better. The soundtrack is amazing, composed by Jessica Curry, and you would do well to listen to some of the free samples on her website.

6. It looks like thechineseroom, the developers of Dear Esther, have another game they plan on releasing this year. It is called Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and I can’t wait to buy it on day one.

7. I liked Dear Esther. I want to play more games like it. Cradle looks like it could be really, really amazing.

I am actually traveling today, so I don’t have the time or ability to make a long post any long thoughts on the series (I have them, they will come one day). Instead, this is the last page of the series, a letter from Jason Aaron to the reader about Frank Castle. It’s a good read.

There is something amazing to me about Aaron claiming that the death of Frank Castle happened during that train ride. For a fictional character, death comes at the moment that that death can be thought. We can then rehearse those deaths over and over again, tweak them so they fit an infinite number of storylines. Fictions, and comics particularly, could then be thought of as a space for best thinking through the deaths of all things–of ideologies, for example. It is like a supercharged speculative fiction space.

In any case, I liked the letter, I hope you do too.

As a Foucaultian, I find the concept of discipline to be a matter of tremendous epistemic significance.  Although it does not take nearly as much time to form as it did in previous ages, an academic discipline is a significant intellectual accomplishment.  It is, of course, contingent on other disciplines, flowing in and out of their histories and methods, and like all systems it is bound to experience entropy.  But it serves a critical function for intellectual work.  A discipline entails a set of conditions for asking questions, addressing experience, assembling data, and reading texts.  The discipline of sociology concerns the socius, the social body, as a thematic and problematic for the analysis of the comportment of groups.  The discipline of psychology concerns the psyche, the Geist (spirit) or mind, as a thematic and problematic for the analysis of meaning, intention, and individual comportment.  The discipline of communicology, as my colleagues and I have recently come to formulate and define it, concerns the communis, the relational body—the chiasm (or flesh), as Merleau-Ponty puts it. The chiasm, understood, again, as the relational-body, or the speaking-perceiving body, is not interchangeable with the socius or thepsyche.  The speaking-perceiving body is defined by its mortality—by the inarticulate vulnerability of its birth and infancy and, then, by the processes of maturity, aging, and departure.

Communicology, psychology, and sociology are, all three, quite recent developments in the history of intellectual work.  The three of them, along with the systematic study of language and representation (in the philological tradition as: semiotics, linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics) have immense potential to constitute a vital and responsive Geisteswissenschaften for the 21^st Century, particularly if the North American scholars in these fields would, once and for all, let go of positivism and behaviorism.  Simply, I have no idea how one can productively generate theory and insight into matters of human experience with the same general methods used for the analysis of the natural world.

I am, as you may now, heavily invested in the question of the community and what makes up communities (and the body of the community), and now you see where that (partially) comes from. Have some more!

Inasmuch as communication theory obliges us to understand the meaning of human community and communion, it follows that we must pay attention to the manner in which human experience is constituted in relationship.  Even with incredible scientific advances, such as in vitro fertilization, or even cloning, human beings are not ultimately created in laboratories.  We are, each, carried to term in a womb.  Upon birth, even after the umbilical cord is cut, we cannot survive apart from human nurturing.  Our existence is relational.  Our experience is relational.  Our meaning is relational.  From where I sit the only way of asking the right questions about experience is by way of existential phenomenology and, after the strong influence of Richard Lanigan, semiotic phenomenology (which he has termed “communicology”). 

This remarkably close to the kind of arguments that Peter Sloterdijk makes about the fetal life and what it means to live in a world where the second self is destroyed–we have to fix it, we have to repair ourselves, we have to try to reconstitute the womb.

In any case, read the interview.

2. Ludonarratology has an interesting post up about the Dark Brotherhood quest in Skyrim. The post is mostly summary of the questline, so be warned, but the post comes to an interesting conclusion:

Most importantly, Bethesda’s designers realized this wasn’t a literary project. In writing, the saying may be “show, don’t tell”, but in game design it’s “don’t show, don’t tell, do”. The quest works around some of its fridge logic by having the player perform the unbelievable process of following up on a rumor of the Black Sacrament. It demonstrates the character of the guild through the player‘s actions, before he even joins.

I think this is probably the most interesting thing said about Skyrim so far. The game presents the player with the option on following up on rumors of a child calling assassins to kill his enemy, and it really only gets more horrible from there. The interesting part, though, is that the narrative requires the player to have a curiosity about helping a child kill his enemies in order for the quest to even begin. The player has to think that that road could be one worth going down. It says weird things about our desires in games.

3. The Mary Sue reports on the Nielsen ratings that DC Comics released about their New 52 titles. I think the “interesting things” breakdown that they do is, well, interesting, so I’m going to just copypaste it here. Read the whole article, though, because it says a lot about DC Comics and really expresses how fucked I think that business, their titles, and the people who read their comics.

A few things to note:

• They introduced the survey after only the first month of the relaunch which meant buyers had only one issue of each book to go on.
• Just over 6,000 surveys were completed. That’s a small number overall and looks even smaller when you consider over 200,000 issues of Justice League #1 were sold.
• New readers, who may have not been as familiar with the DC Universe, may have been disqualified from the survey partway through thanks to a trick question about a fake book. If you answered you were planning to purchase that one, your survey ended there.
• The survey was not a general “who reads comics” survey, it was a “who bought our New 52″ survey.
• The words “women” and “female” are not actually used anywhere in their reports. Something which, to me, is extremely telling about the way they look at their business.

This is “Loner.” Buy the album here. This unofficial (I think?) video is pretty cool.

“Stories are not good. Nor are they bad. They’re just stories,” Schreier concludes, and I could not disagree more. There’s a weird sort of servile tone to his article, as he clucks his tongue at his fellow critics who dare to find fault with storylines. Why, people might like the stories of games you don’t like, and imagine how they must feel.

This is a brutal criticism of Schreier, and one what he responded to. Schreier posted a response, and I think that it is really smart, though I think that he is making a definite rhetorical shift from the first piece to the second. Schreier makes it clear that he wants games criticism to move into a more complex sphere, and clarifies his position:

My point is that we should be fighting for harsher criticism than “this is good” or “this is bad.” Those are not the questions we should be asking. So what should we be asking? How about: How does this story make me feel? When is it most effective? Does its setting fit its themes? Do its characters have clear motivations and desires? Does its plot follow a coherent path? How does it fit into Joseph Campbell’s monomyth structure? How does it integrate player interactivity? Do the player’s actions contrast with the narrative? Can the player fight against the story’s current? Is it worth the player’s time?

I’m not sure how I feel about this. The questions read like a checklist, and I feel like they reduce the critic to the role of the interpreter or the analyst. It seems like the absence of any of these qualities would constitute a pathology of the game, something that should have been there and wasn’t. That worries me. I think that the idea that criticism needs to move toward a literary-interpretive, New Critical-style stance means that video game criticism is arrested in its development.

On some level, I think that Goodness might be right. There is nothing that is sacred, and there does come a moment where a critic should be able to simply say that a game sucks. This happens all the time with film, novels, etc. and the world hasn’t ended yet, so I think that we might be okay. I feel like I can safely, and without any doubt, say that the storyline of the Call of Duty games sucks without any regard for the affective desires and connections that millions of people have made to those games.

I guess what I am saying, after that rambling, is that Schreier sees the possibility for a great destruction in the laziness of saying “game stories are shit” and that it could paralyze games criticism. I see a much greater problem in the notion that we should immediately begin with the notion that a story is good, that we should ever give the benefit of the doubt to a narrative simply because it appears in a medium that I enjoy. That’s essentially the worst thing in “games journalism” right now–I read positive reviews of the stories and mechanics of terrible games for months before they come out, and that all stems from a desire to give the benefit of the doubt to a format that the authors love. The games that aren’t shit, and there are a great many that have passed this marker (GTA IV, Mass Effect, Fallout), make themselves known. They resonate broadly, not just in the micro, and that gives them a cultural precedence.

It is simply true that some media artifacts reward analysis more than others. I don’t think that games critics aren’t asking the right questions, but rather that most games don’t meet very high standards when it comes to storytelling. Most books aren’t great novels, most movies aren’t classics, most games aren’t great at narrative.

Goodness also made a final response, basically being a peacemaker, finding common ground, what have you.

(A final note here at the end: I think that the most laughable thing I have read in a long time is that a narrative could gain credence or value by being aligned with Joseph Campbell. If anything, a narrative that tries to actively undermine that monomyth silliness is the best kind of game in my book. Maybe Space Invaders is where it’s at.)

But this is what they printed out for me at the gate:

The gatekeeper interpreted my name as Jungleman. I am officially a superhero.

THIS POST CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR TO THE MOON

So the basic plot of the game is that the two technicians are going into a dying man’s memories to change his life so that he traveled to the moon. This is pretty basic science fiction fare, but the game adds the notion of “leaping” back through memories. The basic idea is that significant objects are connected to earlier memories, and through tracing a lineage of significant objects the techs can go backward in memory/time. That means that we get the narrative backwards, from John’s own death, to the death of his wife, to building his house, and so on, all the way back until we reach his childhood.

And all of that is interesting, but the plot really turns on a moment when John is a kid where he witnesses the death of his twin brother. His brother runs behind a car that their mother is driving and in one quick moment he is no longer a twin. His brother is killed in as graphic a way as possible from a top down, 2d RPG. The mother becomes mentally ill and collapses the two children into on identity, calling John by his brother’s name for the rest of his life.

John, after the accident, takes “strong beta blockers” in order to forget the event. It is literally wiped from his conscious memory along with every other memory from before that time, which includes the meeting with River, his future wife. In the meeting with River, they agree to meet on the moon if they are ever separated, a child’s promise, but one that she continues to take seriously the rest of her life, even after it is apparent to her that he does not remember making the promise.

So John is left with a desire to go to the moon and no knowledge of why.

The plot of the game stems from the trauma of the brother dying, which seems to be a stand-in for the trauma of existence. For John, the trauma is watching his other half being killed by their mother. For me, the player, it takes on an enormous amount of significance. The mother kills Joey and replaces him with John. What kind of horrible life would that be, haunted by the ghost of a brother that you don’t even remember having? At this point the game turns into a narrative about a man who is buried under history, his brother, and the lack of fulfillment in his brother’s short life. John is forced to take that all in himself; the shattered connection when his brother dies simply loads him full of unfulfilled desires.

The way that the player character, Dr. Rosalene, fixes the scenario is that she reverses the break. She makes sure that the brother never dies. This means that John never has to branch out into finding River, or finding a partner at all. The death of the brother was a communicative break akin to an existential crisis. It put John into a position of radical difference from the world. His mother, a murderer, could never be trusted again, and his brother, essentially him, was exterminated. An infinite gap appears between the subject and the world around him.

This is the impetus for communication as I understand it. Communication is a product of trying to bridge the gap, to pull others into us, to try and make the world whole again, and it is a bankrupt project. Life happens in the middle of those two poles: wholeness on one side, the recognition of our subjectivity on the other. So the only fix is to prevent the break, to make sure that the world is always-whole, never-broken.

And that makes me think about video games on the whole. There is always a radical break between the player and the game world proper. Narrative normally makes this really apparent–the player/character is a chosen hero or a coming messiah or just a soldier with a destiny, outside of the game world, a subject apart from an organic whole.

But what are the techs but programmers of memories? It seems a lot like a video game, and if the organic whole can be programmed into existence in memory, why can’t we have games that function that way? The closest thing that I can think toward that is when I read narratives of Skyrim where players choose to live “normal” lives as parts of the game world. They chop wood, they get married, they don’t do a lot of questing. They are just regular people, living lives, and being part of the organic game world.

It gives us ways of thinking through new subjectivities, simulations of lives we cannot live in real life. I harp on this a lot, but there is something to it. The ability to create a world stitched from memory, fixing all of our mistakes, even the unconscious ones, that will come from video games first. To The Moon comes down to the basic thesis of, if we solve that initial break that splinters the subject/world, we could drive ourselves into anything we need.

But closing that gap opens others. The lack of River creates another lack, one that has to be fulfilled by going to the moon, so let me edit what I just said: video games is the field that will help us selectively close phenomenological gaps. And this could be great, like the game suggests, and allow us to artificially direct our lives in ways that I can’t explain or dream of.

I’m not making prescriptions here, and I don’t know if that would be a good thing, but the game presents a world that isn’t foreign from our own, and it terrifies me. I can’t see over that precipice.