Our DM (who is so old-fashioned he doesn’ t even have a blog) is drip-feeding us information about the Feng Shui world, so I can’t say too much about where we are or what we are doing, but our characters have ended up in 2056 in a strange future “dystopia” controlled by a bunch of transdimensional lunatics called the Architects of the Flesh. I suggested to the other players last night that this dystopia’s properties say a lot more about the politcs and insecurities of the authors than it does about the evils of the Architects of the Flesh. I originally thought that the properties of the 2056 dystopia marked out the writers as a bunch of libertarians, but now I’m not sure if they are right-wing or moderate liberal Americans. Here’s a list of the properties of the world in 2056 which are supposedly different from the world of 1996, and what political leanings I think they point to:
- There are no cars: In 2056, cars have been banned “for environmental and health reasons”, which is a classic fear of libertarians and small govt right-wingers everywhere. First they imposed speed limits, then they took your cars, etc. Margaret Thatcher once made a beautiful comment about how every new car on the road was a new conservative voter, and followed it up with some nice observations about how the Tory party were trying to change peoples’ minds as well as the economy (look it up in Prospect magazine ). So this is a tick for “writers are crazed libertarians”. Even East Germany had private cars!
- First they came for our guns…: In 2056, the Architects are trying to abolish the study of martial arts, having already banned all guns. This is a classic fear of libertarians everywhere, and the American right generally. Compare this dystopia with the classic cyberpunk dystopia, where everyone has access to guns. Obviously a choice was made in this regard. And the slippery slope logic that since they banned guns, now they’re going to ban martial arts, is just classic unmarked-helicopter stuff.
- There is a minimum wage!: Obviously most societies have a minimum wage now. Making a point about this when describing your vision of a dystopia as if it’s a bad thing is like a big neon sign saying “I’m a libertarian fuckstick”.
- You can’t earn more than £1 million!!!: The guidelines state explicitly that there is an upper limit to the amount a person can earn, which is 40 times the minimum wage. It’s also pretty clear from the text that there is no tax in this dystopia (bit weird, that, we’ll get onto it…). In London today the minimum wage is £5.73 before tax, which means that this dystopia would have a maximum wage of about £240 an hour before tax. That’s about £500,000 a year. Of course, on the minimum wage you don’t pay much tax – to get an after-tax income 40 times the after tax income of the minimum wage, you would need to be earning close to £1 million in London. The text states that this wage can only be earned by 60 categories of person. Doesn’t sound so bad to me! And in these straitened times, it’s hard to imagine many people getting up in arms over the fact that they can only earn a million a year. This seems like a classic libertarian fear – that people will be banned from earning more money than they will ever actually get a chance to earn.
- Rent is 30% of your after-tax income: this is presented as if it were a bad thing. For the last 10 years of the housing bubble, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who paid this low a proportion of their after tax income in rent or mortgage. In fact, it’s below most definitions of housing distress. But in the text it’s presented as if it’s a catastrophe. (Admittedly in the tax-free dystopia (?!) this also means you pay 30% of your before-tax income on rent. But I know people in London working full time who pay 70% or more of their before-tax income on rent – on a room). I’m not sure what political streak this shows, except perhaps “trustifarian” (I live in mummy’s house, and the thought of paying more than nominal rent frightens me) or council estate bludger (ditto, but replace “mummy” with “govt”) or, I suppose, cheeto eating wingnut who lives in mummy’s basement and doesn’t know the price of eggs
- There are no taxes: This is a big hint at socialist writers. Only socialists would imagine that you don’t pay taxes in dystopia.
- Everything is pay-per-use: even the slidewalks! This suggests the writers aren’t libertarians, since libertarians would have this property in their utopia. But maybe it just means they’re stupid? Or socialists? Imagine a pay-per-use NHS…
On balance this suggests to me that the writers are naive or libertarians or both (the two go together don’t they?) They could be just trying to make an original dystopia, but a dystopia which suits feng shui would be cyberpunk, not this weird version of socialism.
A few other small points would be in order about how futuristic and dystopic their vision of 1996 is. In this dystopia:
- the food is tasteless
- the clothes are grey and everyone wears the same style
- the cops kill people by pushing them over until they die
- there are CCTV cameras everywhere
- all the products are sold by one shop
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but a society where everyone wears the same clothes, eats tasteless food, lives under the gaze of cctv cameras, pays for everything as they use it, and doesn’t have any guns, buys everything from one shop , and lives in terror of the police sounds an awful lot like London now. They just need to ban cars and put a limit on how much you can earn (a popular suggestion at present, due to the credit crunch) and they can rebrand the government as the Architects. If the wage limit is more than most people ever have a chance of earning (say, a million pounds) and one works inside the congestion zone, one pretty much wouldn’t notice the difference…
Compromise and Conceit 
April 27, 2009 at 2:10 pm
What the world of 2056 in Feng Shui really tells us is “… needs to move to decaf”. I’m serious. This topic is much more about you than about the setting and to explain why I’m going to need to cover 3 themes:
1. The need for a dystopian future
2. The need for faction alternate view points
3. Your immediate focus on Libertarianism/Marxism as driving factor in game design
So buckle in, it’s: Back to the FUTURE!!1!ONE!
1. The Future is Now, or 50 years in the Future (we’re still working through how this Time Travel system works)…
The game of Feng Shui was first published in 1996, which means the Cold War was over but terrorism was not yet on the radar. The concept of an American Hyperpower was looking like a clear winner in the civilisation stakes for the coming century and China and India weren’t on the radar the way they are today. I suspect all this limited the future scenarios that the author could think up but one criterion would be clear from the start. Every time period you can visit in game has to have conflict. Furthermore, the future’s conflict must be based on a scenario that can be extrapolated from the existing 1996 circumstances.
When we examine possibilities of future game scenarios, we don’t hit a huge collection. You mention a capitalist dystopia, a la Cyberpunk, as an alternative to the Big Brother world that Feng Shui presents, but realistically this is a false dichotomy. Cyberpunk runs from a premise of “Corporations have taken over the world” while Feng Shui shows “The UN has taken over the world”. Careful readers will note that the major difference in these premises is the noun used. In Cyberpunk the result is generally grimier and in Big Brother (UN) scenarios the world is generally cleaner but these are superficial differences. That difference is whether the world is superficially happy and how many centres of power/control there are in the setting.
Because of that, to suggest a Cyberpunk dystopian future better fits Feng Shui is just to say “I like grime”. If the game allows travel into the past (and I’m 99% sure it does) we’re likely to find rival warlords ruling over competing civilisations. That can cover the Cyberpunk dystopian themes of de-centralisation of power just fine and the other Cyberpunk themes can be covered regardless of the form of government in 2056. The future on the other hand provides opportunities for exploration of totalitarianism that the past does not (as you can’t easily have Genghis Khan ruling the entire world with an iron fist using men on little horses).
If anyone cares to suggest a future scenario which isn’t “Post-apocalyptic”, “Rebelling against crushing oversight (from corporations or the UN)” or “Star Trek” then please do so. We can then nick it and put it into a game. Under the 2nd scenario (“Rebelling against crushing oversight”), I’d have to say Cyberpunk has been done more frequently than 1984, so I support it as a game choice.
2. “Morally Ambiguous” means “Beat Everyone up”
Feng Shui presents a world where you can travel through time and beat up people. Clearly this is a good thing, but to allow people other than total sociopaths to enjoy the game, the setting must ensure that anytime you’re punching someone there is a valid in-character reason to do so. Furthermore, it’s easier when the in-character reason resonates with individual players basic beliefs – this is a large part of why “Nazi Prison Camp Guard: The Game” is never going to appear in your FLGS (though maybe on the Internet…).
The game could therefore have the future be a hell on earth, but what I’ve seen of Feng Shui suggests it wants to present multiple valid views on the world and juggle the characters between them. With this objective and given that we already know the themes the game presents in the future setting should differ from themes of the present and the past settings, we need to work out a world that people can object to or support. A superficial utopia is the easiest way to present this and exactly what the game does. It then dials down the Star Trek-iness until something that you can object to is available. Let the punching commence!
3. Now it’s personal.
There are no cars, no guns, no poverty, no fat cats, no taxes and no freebies. And there is also no suggestion in the game on whether this is a good or bad thing. That’s something the reader brings to the table. The sections of my post above cover the game design and attempt to explain why the choices Feng Shui authors have made are valid, but lots of your arguments are purely from your point of view and I’ll have to address them in that context. Let’s try this in roughly the same order you did:
-Get your motor running: If the game was trying to convince us that a lack of cars was a bad thing then that might make a case for it possessing a political leaning, but instead it says: There are no cars so you use a moving sidewalk and you have to pay for higher speed lands on the moving side walk. This does, as you point out, reflect some right-wing points of view. It also reflects peak-oil fears and deep-Green environmental desires. And keep in mind this is never expressed as a good or bad thing, so all we know is that the writer is either libertarian, environmentalist or attempting to extrapolate expected oil usage 60 years in the future from 1996. With information like that I’m struggling to find he has a political opinion, let alone that he inserted it into the game.
-I’d like to register my hands, feet and mouth as lethal weapons: The control over guns and kung fu could be a libertarian argument. Or possibly it could be this is a Kung Fu movie and the enemy in 2056 would prefer to fight Jackie Chan and Jet Li via a game of chess/economics/bowling/anything-that-doesn’t-require-fighing-a-Kung-Fu-Master. The rulers of 2056 would be failing at implementing basic Evil Overlord rules if it didn’t use its control of damn near everything to stop out the next set of “Ass-kicking-for-Great-Justice” warriors prior to their quest beginning. And as the Evil Overlord rules show, denying them the weapons and keeping them happy via “bread and circuses” are both just smart ways to act.
-I should be being paid for this: Yes, there is a minimum wage. Maybe it was just me that missed the sentence after that that said “And that is why demons show up and eat people randomly”. For crying out loud, I can’t believe I have to point out that the game presents this as a good thing(TM). The mage system in the world of tomorrow is fairer than 1996! Though given you probably can’t spend it on pr0n I can’t imagine why anyone would want to get paid…
-Being rich is good, looking down on others is better: I’m tempted to shown my libertarian roots by engaging with your argument, but that would also miss the point of the Feng Shui setting. The point of the setting was that 103 job categories can earn 40x the base salary and that 60 of these were in the military, 40 were in the government and 3 were Tom Cruise, Rush Limbaugh and Chris Rock. Great – it’s not the bankers keeping the little guys down; it’s the ruling military junta. If luxury goods cost 1% more than an average guy can afford then they may as well be 100 times what he can afford. Being told its only slightly more than you can afford instead of a lot more is just being a dick about it. This isn’t a comment on wage restraint or libertarianism, it’s on how you could set up a superficially fair system and then still hoard anything good for the people at the top of the pyramid.
-Maybe you need to re-read the section on rent and spending money: The excerpt we read said that rent was 30% of your income for a tiny shoebox. If you want it to reflect anything, it’s a comment on reports of Japanese living space. The same section also said that you spend the rest of your money on food, clothes and a range of meaningless consumer goods. OK, so it’s like real life and I’m tempted to go indulge in a nihilistic drinking spree, but my fury at the poor quality analysis you presented will have to get me though this. The section talking about spending is attempting to say “The people of 2056 live in a small box, have no privacy, no individual self-actualisation and will never escape.” Yes, that is a definition of hell. This is why 2056 in Feng Shui is a dystopia and not a communist utopia. However its not a libertarian hell, it’s a an actual shithole.
-Insert “Taxing” pun here: You’ve read the text, applied filters and successfully managed to see a blank page to project onto. There are no taxes as the government are the corporations and everything else. In an efficient communist country, why would you pay taxes? All your work is for the country anyway. That’s what’s happening in 2056 – It’s the USSR but you also get this collection of steak knives! It’s communism and consumerism in a movie of grey with sound track consisting of one note.
All of these points don’t boil down to “Be a Libertarian or this will happen” (unless you’re Rush Limbaugh, when everything comes down to that). They boil down to “The future is ruthlessly fair, which means it has some great stuff and some suck”. Would you or I live there? Probably not from this presentation, but living there is a valid choice. If the writers had gone further into how it was fair I sure we’d have to spend (more of) our time arguing politics.
Ultimately I really have to come back to the point of “It’s not Feng Shui, it’s you”. The setting is valid, it presents interesting ideas and conflict. It’s morally grey. And you insist on reading it like it was written by the BNP.
Given the way you insist on seeing this, do you want to come out of the closet and admit you’re a libertarian?
April 27, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Great response! But I’m not trying to say that the dystopia is invalid, or that there shouldn’t be a dystopia. I’m just arguing that because it’s a dystopia you can use it to infer things about the writers, though the confused nature of their dystopia makes this harder than one would like. I’m also not trying to say “Be a libertarian or this will happen” (I certainly hope not!) Rather I’m suggesting that major elements of the world invented by these writers appear to be what a libertarian imagines a dystopia would be like. Which makes one think that perhaps the writers are libertarians.
Your 3 arguments for why there needs to be a dystopia with gun control I mostly agree with, but:
1. The Future is Now
I didn’t suggest that cyberpunk is an alternative they should have chosen, just that it’s one they could have. They didn’t make this choice by accident – they decided that one form of hellish future is better than another. Typically, people who think that cyberpunk is a bad future tend to be social democrats[1]. Typically, people who think that 1984 is a vision of dystopia tend to be anti-communists. e.g. Orwell. Discussing the choices that the authors made is not presenting a false dichotomy, but attempting to understand why they chose between these options. Particularly since in this case they do present a strong element of the cyberpunk future – unrestrained consumption – at a time when cyberpunk was still a popular genre.
2. Morally ambiguous
I don’t think their dsytopia is intended to be morally ambiguous. It’s intended as a dystopia. The hint is in the food – grey tasteless food is not a morally ambiguous choice of setting! It’s the soylent green future with a dose of bread and circusses. We have no reason to think that the environmental explanation for the future food being grey is even true, given that all the pronouncements of the buro are presented as clear cases of egregious propaganda (so there goes your deep-green agenda boyo). Again, choices have been made about the setting, and unless you pretend they were all accidental or all products of good game design, you have to conclude they have some relationship to the writers’ idea of what is a good or a bad world.
3. Now it’s personal
Every utopia or dystopia contains the political views of the author. Utopic/dystopic settings more than any other represent transparent political rants. As soon as a writer decides to vary their dystopic setting from someone else’s (by retaining money, for example; or by inventing slidewalks) then they are depicting a vision of what they think is bad. No cars=bad. Grey food =bad. These are non-controversial choices. But retaining a minimum wage, and money? One has to conclude that their decision not only to have a minimum wage, but to explain in great detail the wage differential, indicates that they think these things are bad. This is a dystopia folks! If it was a communist writing the story, they wouldn’t have included a minimum wage, but would have returned to a Gilded Age of no minimum wage, no welfare and no upper limits. If the writer were a purist libertarian they would have gone for a straight 1984 style single wage. Or eating the grey food in your work shed.
I’ve got to say, I am completely mystified by the decision to represent the upper wage limit in so much detail. Why bother? The most obvious explanation is that this 40-fold differential is their attempt to set up a world with strong wage restraint, and they just cocked it up thinking that 40-fold is bad when in fact, it’s pretty good. And the way they have presented it makes it pretty clear that in ordinary life at least some wage differential is possible – presumably up to more than 2-fold, considering the upper limit.
Regarding the rent, you and I both know that it’s difficult in capital cities in the anglosphere now to find a shoebox for 30% of your after-tax income. These guys get to live alone on that! It’s easy in Japan, but for example in London a place by yourself will be 600-800 a month, which is 30% or more of most peoples’ income. The issue of “housing distress” has been pretty well covered in the western media, this is why England has social housing, and I don’t think it’s controversial to say that their take on this is a little ham-fisted. I have a friend in a shared room in Seven Sisters who is earning below minimum wage and, were she able to work full time, would be paying “only” 45% of her income on rent for that one shared room. Again, I think the writers were trying to imagine a world where life is hard and they just got the wrong number. Maybe they were writing before the housing boom though… which just goes to confirm my point that, in London at least, large slabs of this 2056 dystopia have already arrived[2]. [The no taxes point, btw, was just intended as part of a calculation].
So, in summary, my point was not that there shouldn’t be a dystopia or that this is the wrong dystopia (it’s certainly fun bashing people in this one), in fact if you dump the weird 40x differential and increase the rent thing to 50% it is an excellent UN-takes-over-the-world-nanny-state dystopia. But it’s still a dystopia, and the first thing one should do in a dystopia (or a utopia) is start scrabbling around for what it tells you about the authors, because they didn’t make choices about what sort of hellish future to write about randomly.
So, what do you think? Are these authors unmarked-helicopter UN-ophobes (it’s a good possibilty!) Are they libertarians who cocked up their wage restraint figures? Are they BNP? (I think not, because the BNP don’t role-play, at least not without whips and chains and black bbws).
This is the decision we have to make here, not whether or not this dystopia is a good or a bad one.
——-
fn 1: It’s interesting to watch interviews with the early boosters of cyberpunk as a genre and see how they actually slightly valorise that future – some american futurists didn’t seem to get that cyberpunk is meant to be bad.
fn 2: I’m pretty sure that after I wrote this gem of a piece, another news article appeared in the press in support of my contention that London is waaaay too close to this dystopia. A bit more wage restraint on the upper classes and we’re there… though admittedly london is a bit too dirty.
April 28, 2009 at 2:46 pm
OK, in an attempt to have some ctonrol over the formatting of my response and (ideally) improve the readability of it I’ve posted this to a blog I setup years ago: http://requiredtocomment.blogspot.com/