merritt kopas on games and education

Posted on 11/21/2012 by kunzelman

What I like about dys4ia over a film or textual narrative in this case is that it drives home the systematic nature of gender regulation. Too often, students come away from (often tragic) films or written accounts about gender and sexual minorities feeling upset about the particular circumstances of the unfortunate individuals’ lives – or worse, defensive and refusing to acknowledge their complicity in systems of power. What they miss is that these accounts are often not atypical – they’re examples of the results produced by oppressive systems, not reducible to the deeds of one or a few “bad people.” The point of these kinds of examples, for me, is not primarily to promote “awareness” or empathy – though I do want my students to become more empathetic people – but to get across the fact that people’s lives are structured by power.

– merritt kopas , “Gaming the System: Oppression and Play“

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On Final Fantasy VIII

Posted on 11/20/2012 by kunzelman

1. Lets get the boring stuff out of the way. Final Fantasy VIII is often derided as being the worst Final Fantasy game of the PSX era. As this very whatever article on Edge puts it: “The standard line on the trio of PlayStation games is that VII is the godhead, IX the neglected gem, and VIII the red-headed stepchild.” It is generally remembered for being confusing and the system you use for powering up your characters, the Junction System, actively punishes you for using magic that you have acquired. For more of that kind of thing, and a hopeful, reassuring paragraph, click here.

Unlike those two articles up there, I’m not here to offer up vague words and then say “well, history should treat this game better!” I just want to talk about Final Fantasy 8 for a while. There’s a LP of it here if you are so inclined.

2. The point of FF8 could be summed up thusly: “Everything you love will be taken from you. Life is mere palliation.”

3. A summary of the game’s story: a band of teenage mercenaries, in an effort to save those they love, defeat an evil sorceress from the future who seeks to collapse time and bend the universe to her will.

4. Final Fantasy VIII is based around the junction system. The characters in the game “junction” Guardian Forces (GFs) to themselves. Junctioning is magical bonding–the GFs imbue certain abilities onto the characters and allow them to enhance their physical and mental attributes by pairing magic spells to them. For example, a character will take a Thunder spell and junction it to their strength attribute, making them slightly stronger and increasing physical damage.

This system, like most systems, requires initial resources to make it work; characters need the magic before they can equip it. Therefore every GF imbues an ability called “Draw” onto its junctioned partner. There are “draw points” in the world–these are glowing purple fonts of magic that burst from the ground. However, this is not the only way to get magic. The most efficient and comprehensive way to gather magic is to draw it from enemies in combat.

An example combat scenario: the party encounters an enemy. The party draws a Fire spell from the creature. One party member uses a spell to put the enemy to sleep. The party draws Fire spells for the next ten minutes.

The general response to this system is that it wastes time and encourages “gaming the system.” Time is understood as a resource. The junctioning system allows for every character to have maximum abilities in all categories if the player spends enough time collecting resources, refining items, and playing the in-game collectible card game. We will come back to this.

5. The Garden is a school that produces elite mercenaries called SeeDs. They are hired out to commit military operations all over the world. Squall and most of the main cast of Final Fantasy VIII are SeeDs, and halfway through the game everyone learns that the “real” reason that SeeDs were created is in order to curb the power of sorceresses, which are powerful magic users who occasionally become violent and oppressive political leaders.

I told you that to tell you this: the latter half of the game is spent countering the machinations of a powerful sorceress from the future. Her name is Ultimecia, and she projects herself back in time via a machine that replicates a human being with time travel powers. The flesh rots. The machine exists forever. Long live the nonflesh.

6. Remember the junctioning system? Each character can only hold a limited amount of magic. If you want to cast a Cure spell, but you have it junctioned to hit points in order to have more life, then casting that spell decreases your maximum hit point total.

You make choices. You cast the spell or you don’t. But no matter what, the enemy is going to hit you, and if you don’t cast the spell, you will lose the battle. It will be Game Over. So which is the better choice? To decrease your potential, to work against the labor you have already done, or losing in the face of staggering odds?

7. I don’t think there is any argument about the complexity of the pre-FF8 Final Fantasy games when it comes to morality: there are good guys and there are bad guys and there are very few greys in between. Final Fantasy VIII breaks with that by immediately positioning the player as complicit with the teenage mercenary trade, and the critique extends explicitly into the game via a story about “the sorceress and her knight.”

When Seifer, the rival of player-insert Squall, defects to the side of the Sorceress Edea, it is under the guise of becoming her knight. We’re introduced to the concept in snippets–the knight does the sorceresses bidding. He is her love and her weapon arm. Later in the game and further back in time (inside a parallel narrative), we see a character named Laguna playing the Knight in a cheap film recreating a classic fable that involves the knight protecting the sorceress from a fearsome (yet fake) dragon. The scene is interrupted when a real dragon shows up; as RPG rules decree, a battle ensues.

For Seifer, the dream dies when he realizes that being a knight means being a tool, a sharp wedge that gets driven between the sorceress and her goals. For Laguna, the drama is shattered when a real dragon comes into play. For both of these characters, what starts fiction-fulfillment changes into something violent and political–the Real comes crashing into them.

8. Guardian Forces, the very entities that make the game system work and, diegetically, allow for the characters to fight the powerful enemies of their world, destroy memory. A fractured conversation: “the GF makes its own place inside our brain”…”so if we keep relying on the GF, we won’t be able to remember a lot of things?”…”we gave up our memories in exchange for power?”

Everything has a cost. If you choose a path, you have to accept the consequences of that path.

So what do you want to do? You wanna stop using GF now? As long as we continue fighting, we’re indebted to the powers of the GF If there’s a price I have to pay for that, I’ll gladly pay for it. – [Squall]

9.

So like…this is what I wanted to say. Let’s see… Oh yeah. I understand what Rinoa’s saying. I understand, but still I’m gonna fight. I want to stay true to everything I’ve stood for. I’m sure it’s the same for everyone. That’s why I thought it’d be best if everyone knew we would have to face Matron. You’ve all heard this before. How life has infinite possibilities. I don’t believe that one bit. There weren’t many paths for me to choose. Sometimes, there would only be one. From the limited possibilities I faced, the choices I made have brought me this far. That’s why I value the path I chose… I want to hold true to the path that HAD to be taken. I know our opponent is Matron, whom we all love very much. We might lose something very important on account of the GF. But I don’t mind. It’s not like I drifted here on the tides of fate. I’m here because I chose to be here. And more importantly… We all grew up together. But due to various circumstances, we were all separated. As a kid, you couldn’t really go out on your own… There were no other paths to take… All I did was just cry. But… – [Irvine]

10. The finale of the game takes place during time compression. Ultimecia, the evil sorceress from the future, compresses all of time into one space. Everything, and everyone, both exists and does not exist at the same time. All things are contingent on their relationship to other things–the characters promise not to forget one another. After all, if they do, then they cease to exist. A belief binary operation.

Remember all of those choices that I talked about before? In a time compressed world, none of that matters. All of those choices, and their power, are rendered moot by the eternal possibility of all things occurring immanently. The block quote above where Irvine justifies his life and the way he lived it is pointless when there is no path. No one chooses; no one is forced.

You can’t change the past. I just found that out.

11. A Number of Screenshots About Choice

12. A radical reading of Final Fantasy VIII: a sorceress tries to defeat the linearity of time and free the universe from the shackles of chronology–what Irvine calls “the path.” A world without linear time is a world where all choices have occurred in all formulations. Through belief, which we are reminded over and over again as something that has real power in a time compressed world, a person could choose to live in the best of all possible worlds.

In a time compressed universe, one could truly live in the best of all possible worlds just by believing that it was possible.

A world of labor, of self-sacrifice and pain, of wasted time in protracted battles–all of that would be nonexistent. The game itself would disappear and the media object would become what it wanted to be the whole time–a film. Not only could the characters escape a world of pain and suffering and bad choices, but we could escape the spreadsheet management that is the junction system. We could just watch.

Further Reading:

 

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On Shank and The Butcher

Posted on 11/16/2012 by kunzelman

Shank is a simple revenge story. The player controls a guy named Shank who, well, shanks and shoots and chops lots and lots of enemies. It is mass carnage as only video games can do–there is basically no consequence for player death, and the enemies die quietly and without a fuss. A world of obstacles dressed as military, guards, and prostitutes to be eliminated–welcome to video games.

But I’m not performing a longform critique of Shank. Instead, I want to hone in on some elements of the first third of the game. As per usual for revenge narratives, Shank moves through each declared enemy one-by-one, eliminating them and then quickly moving onto the next flashback-clarified target.

The first target is a luchador named The Butcher. Initially it is assumed that he is merely named that; his profession, after all, is a wrestler, not as a cutter of meat. But as I made my way though the second level of the game, I came upon this:

Of course, hanging meat on a train isn’t that weird. It isn’t the strangest thing I have ever seen in a game, certainly, but it wasn’t great. I avoid that kind of thing. Whatever, I finished the level.

Then I met The Butcher.

And I will be damned if he isn’t an actual butcher. I started wondering: what kind of person becomes a butcher? Obviously, the game is using some shorthand here. By showing us that The Butcher is, in fact, a butcher we learn that he’s an evil person. His handling of the life-become-meat is a signal to how he would handle us, the player, if he got his hands on us. A bloody apron is a warning to players–here there be a huge asshole who doesn’t mind murdering animals.

Why does the shorthand work, though? It certainly plays on a double consciousness on the part of the audience and the developers–we know, instinctively, that a person who kills, skins, and reduces an animal to mere meat is a bad dude. But this isn’t a plea for veganism, nor is it a message of nonviolence toward other beings. Lets not forget that the player has had to kill hundreds of humans and a few dogs to get here.

The image of The Butcher forces us to doublethink about meat: on one hand, the act of killing animals is bad; on the other, the meat that the player consumes can’t be this meat. The imagery forces a disconnection between personal eating practices and the system that is being demo’d on the screen.

Side note: did you know that Saint Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, forced criminals into slavery after too many offenses. Did you know that those slaves had to provide the animal slaughter services for the island of Utopia? Food for thought.

The solidification of the player’s two minds about animal slaughter comes after the battle against The Butcher. Shank takes the chains that hold the animal bodies and chokes The Butcher to death with them–his throat is severed by the tension of the chains. He hangs from them as he bleeds. Shank exits stage right.

The butcher is turned into meat, into a mere object that fulfills a function. Or has that already happened the moment we disavow the system of meat production in the form of scapegoating the figure of the butcher? After all, the sticker does the work; you have nothing to do with it.

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On The World

Posted on 11/15/2012 by kunzelman

So some of you might know that I’ve been working on the question of nonhuman ethics. More precisely, I’ve been trying to understand our ethical obligation toward purely digital entities–computer games, for example, or evolved virtual creatures. Since my proclivities take me far and wide in theory, I turned to Grant Morrison to give me direction.

Note: no one should ever turn to Grant Morrison to give them direction.

In any case, Grant Morrison has famously made all kinds of interesting proclamations in regards to the existence of totally fictional beings. Famously, he claims that comic book characters, and universes, are real. They are two dimensional and we, as readers, tower over them like gods (or like 4th dimensional beings would tower over us.) Morrison also believes that comics can effect our lives in significant ways; by playing out scenarios in this smaller world, a certain magical effect can spill over into our lived reality. For example, Morrison created the character of King Mob in his long-running Vertigo series The Invisibles as a magical way to improve his own life. He melded his own personality with King Mob’s and then began to write about good things happening to the fictional character. Good things began to happen to him as well.

Then he wrote about King Mob getting an infection that ate his face away and Morrison had the same thing happen. Shit got way real.

So that’s the relationship that Grant Morrison has with fictional, “human made” beings, and the further I get into my research, the closer I get to thinking equally madcap things. But this isn’t about that. In fact, all of that was the longest aside in the history of them.

What I want to talk about is The World. It is a laboratory used to make Weapons. You know Weapon X aka Wolverine aka Snik Snik Bub Bub? X, in this case, is the number 10. The program that made Wolverine wanted to make more, and so in Morrison’s New X-Men we learn that they have created The World in order to facilitate that project.

The World is a dome that is one square mile. Time is fluid inside of it–the operators of The World can accelerate or slow down time as they see fit. This capability is critical to their project–they are no longer with adapting humans or mutants to turn them into Weapons (as they did in the cases of Captain America and Wolverine). Instead, they evolve wholly new organisms by accelerating time and introducing forces like nanomachines into the environment. A being like Fantomex, a being from The World who has a parallel processing brain and an external nervous system, is wholly unlike any other creature on Earth.

So, to start with, The World produces aliens.

But I’m not concerned with that, really, because the connection that I want to make explicit here is that I think The World operates much like a video game does. The lab techs, or game developers, set the conditions of the small space of the game world (aka The World). They let it run. They kill it, reset it, that build didn’t work. They do it again. Eventually new figures are introduced; these are the players. Those players adapt, evolve, and become something more than they were before.

An organism is different once it has nanotech-grown second sight. A human player is fundamentally altered when it no longer things that shooting the arms off of other human figures is anything out of the ordinary.

Cyborgs of a different sort, in a different register.

So The World and the game do similar things. Whoopee. That isn’t particularly interesting. It is just a reading. What I am interested in is how Rick Remender, in his The List: Wolverine issue, shows that The World comes to life.

Let me explain: in that issue, The World creates a new Weapon: XVI, or the Allgod. As someone, I forget who, tells us in the issue, it is a virus that targets the part of the brain responsible for faith and turns it on. It turns it WAY on, and more importantly, it forces the infected to worship The World.

So there are a couple readings of this scenario. The first, and easiest, is a metaphor for the military industrial complex. Even if we forgot about it and let it rot, it would still be “alive,” morphing and changing out of sight, making more terrible things every day. The second is that the Allgod is a biological metaphor for the immune system. In the absence of protectors and lab techs, The World’s systems realize that they must protect themselves, and then sciences up a solution.

The third, and the one that I really thing goes somewhere, is that the Allgod establishes The World as a subject. It isn’t an immune system; it is an ego, a living pathogen that establishes an identity for The World against the world. It is the moment of actual life, not as metaphor, but as a psychic entity.

And I wonder if we can expect games to do that.

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Return to Skyrim: Whiterun and a Dragon’s Death

Posted on 11/14/2012 by kunzelman

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Designing Horror: Hugo’s House of Horrors

Posted on 11/13/2012 by kunzelman

This post is part of the Designing Horror series.

Game: Hugo’s House of Horrors (a complete playthrough at youtube)

I picked this game because Darius suggested it to me over Twitter. I remember the game faintly–it was on one of those shareware disks of ONE MILLION GAMES that you could buy at Wal-Mart for $10 back in the mid-90s. Shareware was a big part of my young life, and I think that I will probably write something in the future about the impossible-to-complete games that I had and how that really altered my view of art.

That is a digression for another day.

Hugo’s House of Horrors is a game about Hugo. This is the entire story as it is presented to the player in the opening screens of the game:

The story so far…You are in total control of Hugo’s destiny as he searches the haunted house for his sweetheart Penelope! (She was last seen going into this house on a baby-sitting assignment)

That’s all we get. The game is–and my vocabulary works is woefully bare here–the kind of game where you walk around and interact with things. A Sierra-style adventure game? Commands are input through a prompt at the bottom of the screen, and you better be damn sure that you have the words at hand to do what you want. I spent five minutes trying to pick up a weird blob, finally said fuck it, and died at a monster dinner party. C’est la mort.

1. How Does It Work?

There is a strong affinity between HHH and Deep Sleep, specifically in the way that action is framed. There is a terrible lag between player input and Hugo’s actions. Surprisingly, this makes the game more interesting. At the surface level, it makes it clear that Hugo isn’t some self-insertion character or a power fantasy that fulfills all of my dreams. No, instead he is clearly a vaguely inept person who can’t seem to navigate a home. The irony of this is that the opening of the game tells me that I’m “in total control” of Hugo. Total control is here reduced to “vague metaphysical actor.”

Hugo’s House of Horrors turns me into an impotent god and rubs it in my face.

There is also something amazing going on in Hugo’s House of Horrors. The game is a weird amalgam of story elements and just plain terrible writing and gameplay. At its most ridiculous, you have to pick up a plug early in the game and then much later you use it to plug a hole in a boat that travels ten feet vertically on the screen. Then you have to answer questions presented to you by an old man or risk immediate failure of the game. Oh, and those questions are massively nerdy questions about popular nerd culture like “What was the first name of the hero in ‘The Hobbit’?”

Let me remind you that you lose the game if you fail to answer these questions properly the first time. I’ll be clear and say that I’m not disparaging the design choices. They’re bizarre, of course, but they’re also unique. There is nothing I want more than to have a forced trivia section pop up in Halo 4 that immediately drops you back to the main menu when you get an answer wrong.

These design peculiarities mark the gamespace of Hugo’s House of Horrors in a particular way. HHH is a game that is trying its best to make you leave it. It wants to force you out, to keep you from playing, and to make you feel like a failure for not predicting the future.

A confession: this is how I ended my playthrough of the game:

Hugo went down like a sack of bricks because he walked into a room without a mask on. There’s something undeniably real about the scenario, or at least much more real than even your “best” sim of the contemporary video game era. The universe of Hugo’s House of Horrors doesn’t give a shit about you or your ability to prepare for an encounter. Sure, you can play the game again, but it controls so terribly that you don’t want to. It is a game that expels you from it expertly.

2. Why Is It Horror?

The horror is in that very moment of expulsion. I find horror in the moment that I realized that Hugo was doomed to death by a number of unexplainable scenarios and that I would have to live his life over and over again, making small strides, until I succeeded against overwhelming odds. Hugo’s House of Horrors turns the eternal return on its head. It presents the possibility of infinite life to the player and says “do you really want to go through with this?”

Hugo’s House of Horrors is a nihilism machine.

Also, a small note, but some of the environments of the game are profoundly scary and strange. I think the backyard is the peak:

3. What Did It Do To Me?

Read about other games in the Designing Horror series. 

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Flusser on life

Posted on 11/12/2012 by kunzelman

Life on earth is a specialized formulation or organization of this peculiar solution. Essentially, life can be regarded as drops of specialized seawater that eventually dissipate into unspecialized seawater. If we can imagine another planet covered in oceans of even a slightly different solution, the fundamental structure of this planet –regardless of where there were life on it — would be drastically divergent from that of our own. Humans and vampyroteuthes would be unable to recognize one another on such a planet.

Vilem Flusser & Louis Bec. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise

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James Kochalka’s “In Defense of Meat”

Posted on 11/09/2012 by kunzelman

I wrote a little bit about how unhappy I was with James Kochalka’s “In Defense of Meat” a few days ago (in the context of a much larger, glowing review of Digestate.) James commented that he thought that I was misrepresenting his argument, which is probably true, and so I asked if I could post his contribution to the anthology.

So here is the entirety of “In Defense of Meat.” I’m posting it without comment; make your own decisions about the argument being made.

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Return To Skyrim: Communing With A Chicken in Riverwood

Posted on 11/07/2012 by kunzelman

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On Black Hole

Posted on 11/06/2012 by kunzelman

WARNING: This post probably isn’t work safe or mind safe. There is some body horror and some straight-up violence. 

What is Black Hole about? I’ll just let Burns explain.

Right. Black Hole is about a disease that affects teenagers, and about the lives of those particular characters. In some way, the other elements are incidental. I mean, of course it plays an important role, but it’s not just about, you know, an STD that deforms teenagers. That’s not what the story is about. The story is about characters who are struggling with their adolescence and finding their way through that portion of their life. [1]

That’s the story. Of course, there are specificities. There are several characters. We follow them, we see them coping (or failing to cope) with The Bug (the teen disease [the STD {their adolescence}]).

Once you get it, your body changes, and everyone notices. You might just get little tadpole-shaped growths on your chest or bulbous things on your face, of your hair might all fall out, or you might grow a tail, or worse. You are never the same again, and you don’t belong at home anymore. “The bug” is, of course, sexually transmitted. (Wolk, Reading Comics 336)

But, honestly, this isn’t about that.

There is a version of this “review” or “critical intervention” or whatever it is you need this to be where I do a close reading of panels and plotlines and I draw the various protagonists together into a clear chronology and plotline. There is an alternate universe where I sew this whole thing up. But increasingly I think the project of sewing anything up, of making it explainable, of drawing it together, might be violent. More importantly, it might be wrong. If you want that panel analysis with plotline sewn in, I suggest you look to Vanessa Raney’s review in ImageText. It is smart and does that work really, really well. But, like I said, it isn’t work that I’m going to be doing.

I want to talk about the world as it is presented to us in Black Hole.

First, we need to take a trip through a wound.

Black Hole is about the wound that is the world. I want to note here, up top, that I’m not showing you all of the wound images to be found in Black Hole. If I did, I would be showing a full quarter of the book’s pages. It is the fundamental image that the book is built around, and this post is about trying to figure out why. Maybe we have to take two steps backward.

What is a wound? Physically, it is a presence and an absence. It is a new pain, neurons on fire, a flailing limp. It is the invisible inside given presence to the human; my cat scratches me deep and I’m suddenly flesh. But something goes missing at the same time. A hole opens up in the body. We have to peer inside–the grotesque comes then. The wound makes body horror possible, after all. But Black Hole takes a turn. What is inside the wound in that image? Blackness. A hint of something, maybe, but it seems to merely contain what it everywhere else. The wound itself becomes a black hole. In fact, we know a wound by the blackness underneath it–mere flesh isn’t a wound in Black Hole:

So that isn’t an “authentic wound.” Here is an example of a wound in Black Hole:

The face, in being wounded, becomes a wound. It becomes a hole.

The stark black and white of Black Hole is very much intentional on Burns’ part. He says that

In this case, it really had somewhat to do with the character of the story, the feeling of the story…a real visceral feeling of what those shapes are, what those images are, the textures, the forest. It starts to be a real character in the story, the atmosphere, the lines. Color doesn’t seem like it would enter into the story at all; it would be wrong. [2]

The world of Black Hole could only be in black and white. It could only be about absence and presence. However, it isn’t Manichean. It isn’t about light fighting dark and trying to bring something beautiful into the world. It isn’t a heroic struggle at all. Instead, blackness is the default. The vast, uncaring universe of decay and absence, of nothing-being, is the standard. Life is an anomaly here. What do we find when we see the wound? We see the base reality of things–we see the structure of it all, the ground of being. We see the sucking hole of the real. To quote Ben Woodard, the white on the page is “something that will fill space till the cosmos burns too low for anything to again cohere, ending only in an ocean of putrescence spilling over into the boundless void of extinction.”[3]

How else can we read the following panel?

The act of life, of will, is merely a flash that is extinguished in the dark.

It is. It is a mirror of the true reality of the world, of the underlayer. This is the full aesthetic experience of Black Hole. There isn’t a savior in the comic, though it does appear that The Bug merely disappears at some point (read the supplement to this post). There isn’t a victory over tragedy. The kids infected with The Bug being excised from society isn’t unique. The strange and senseless violence that peppers the comic isn’t a phenomenon generated in response to its internal world. The blackness at the root of existence wasn’t created from whole cloth.

These things are all happening all the time. While the world of Black Hole might look fantastical and terrible, it really isn’t. We can try to hold it at a distance. It feels impossible. The closing image draws us in–it sutures us into the folds of the fictional world.

The kids of Black Hole are in there, somewhere. The left spiral arm? And so are we. At the middle of that great unthinkable mass? A black hole, sucking it all in, collapsing in on itself.

You can buy Black Hole here.

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