Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Current reading: Tokyo Real

    Iconic enough, kids?

    This book, Tokyo Real by “Ryu” is something of a milestone for me! It’s the first Japanese book I have read completely, from beginning to end, in Japanese. This isn’t as much of an achievement as some might think, because it’s a “keitai shosetsu” (Mobile phone novel), I think, or at least it might as well be. Being a keitai shosetsu means that

    • it’s in large font, double-spaced lines, with lots of very short lines for dialogue
    • The kanji (japanese characters) are drawn from the limited set on a phone, and a lot of them I can read
    • It’s only 190 pages long, with a blank page at the start of each chapter
    • chapters are short

    so, you know, not really such a big deal. But it’s in Japanese! Since it’s untranslated as far as I know, and a pretty crap book, I’m going to lay out the plot, because there’s not much else to the review really. This means there are spoilers below. If you really want to read a crappy Japanese mobile phone novel about sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, skip the next paragraph:

    Aya is a schoolgirl who takes lots of ecstasy and parties a lot with her friend Yuko. She is raped after a trance party by 3 guys in a van and goes into a bit of a downward spiral that is arrested by a friendly yakuza chap called Naoya who is very rich and likes her very much (presumably because she’s a schoolgirl?). They fall in love but she can only have sex on ecstasy and he won’t let her use ecstasy because drugs are bad oh no! This means they don’t get to have sex (stupid man!) so he goes and hangs out with his favourite hostess (this is really not a relevant point in the story, it fills 3 sentences at at the very end). Aya starts using ecstasy during the day because she’s sad, and then she realises that she can have sex on ecstasy with men other than her lover, so she goes to her drug dealer and spends a lot of time having lots of sex with him, on ecstsasy, and becomes a junkie, and loses weight, and Naoya notices but doesn’t want to admit that his girlfriend’s a junkie loser so he ignores it. Anyway, Aya’s dealer gives her K and she has an overdose and her friend Yuko stumbles on her being a freak ,so she calls Naoya, who comes over to the dealers house, and Aya, in the middle of her k-hole dream, stabs him to death by mistake while she thinks she’s a god. Then she goes to prison (this takes a page) and when she comes out Yuko is there for her, so she decides to try living again.

    That’s it. It’s a classic overwrought teenage-junkie story, but it has a sweet ending: Aya has been in prison till she is 22 years old, and this means she missed coming of age day and spent it instead in her cell thinking about her dead boyfriend. When she gets out, Yuko takes her to a hairdresser and then a photographers, and reveals that, because Aya was not there for her, Yuko too didn’t go to her coming of age day celebration – she wanted to wait. So on the last page they’re wearing their kimono and having their coming-of-age day photo taken, and Aya gets to say “thank you” just before the flash of the camera and that’s it.

    It’s a perfect movie script, and in fact it was turned into a movie. Happy days!

    So, my Japanese is definitely not good enough for me to comment on the writing style. I asked a friend, though, and she told me that the narrative style is very plain and direct, really just stating the facts without any poetic twists or style. However, the dialogue is written in a very naturalistic style, like young people speaking, which helps to give a certain atmosphere of trashiness to the novel. Unfortunately, this means that for me it’s the equivalent of a Japanese student of English, having done one 6 month intensive course and a bit of self-study, trying to read the dialogue from Trainspotting. Bad plan. Fortunately by the miracle of Japanese characters (kanji) I could get the general gist of the dialogue without having to understand the nuance of teenage slang. Whew!

    My main complaint about the novel is that Aya’s slide into disgrace doesn’t seem to be related to her rape at all, which means that the rape scene could be construed as slightly gratuitous. Once she reveals to Naoya that it happened, and he says “you’re not dirty”, that’s it! It just kind of slides out of her pscyhe. But, even though it’s emotionally overwrought and sentimental, I really liked the ending. The final meeting between Aya and Yuko was quite moving. Maybe if I could actually read Japanese like a native it would have come off as trite and contrived (scratch that maybe). Incidentally, I worry about this with my Japanese in general – because my education is always going to be sub-standard compared to even a middle-school graduate, I’m going to be very vulnerable to sentimentalism, cheap imagery, etc. I don’t think this is true in English, even though I like Last of the Mohicans.

    My next attempt at Japanese reading will be the Japanese Pathfinder. I don’t want to tell you why because it’ll jinx me. This is going to be a lot easier to read than Tokyo Real because:

    • I don’t need to care about nuance
    • I already know what it will say
    • The language is like a formal document, say, a stats text, and I’ve studied that language before (plus it’s simple)
    • I can use rikaichan to read kanji I don’t know as I go (My God, rikaichan is the most miraculous software ever invented).

    Anyway, if you’re as crap at Japanese as me, I recommend this book. If you can actually read Japanese well, I strongly suggest reading something good.

  • Weapons and equipment of the Victorian Era: The Spindrift Clipper

    No keel-hauling for these sea dogs...The only significant enhancement on the tall ship in 200 years, the Spindrift Clipper represents a considerable performance improvement over standard seaborne vessels for a limited additional cost. Behaving in every way like a normal vessel, the Spindrift Clipper has had low-power levitation magic added to its hull so that it can become airborne when needed. This has considerable advantages, enabling the ship to move much faster in fine weather and to avoid the risk of running aground or being damaged by reefs or wrecks. It also enables the ship to avoid being swamped in storms, though in instances it may be driven significantly off course. Many advanced Spindrift Clippers come with a special “storm anchor”, an emergency flight device which forces the ship to ride against strong winds, keeping it from being blown off course. Most Clipper pilots prefer to use their levitation to their advantage, rising from the water and riding ahead of stormclouds in the hope of regaining their course when the clouds have gone – better to survive at sea than to risk all for a few days lost journeying, after all. The Spindrift Clipper has made long-distance trading and exploration much easier and cheaper due to faster trips with lower risks of shipwreck or mutiny. Spindrift Clippers do not fly high, however, as their levitation magic is always weak and the ship is not designed to survive the stresses of such heights.

    The characters themselves stole a small spindrift clipper, the Unfortunate Lapse of Discipline, from the Iron House, and renamed it the Inappropriate Response. It took them to Greenland and Ireland and back to America during the final stages of adventuring to date, and although it did not protect them from some of the less pleasant monsters of the Atlantic, it at least gave them some advantage in battle against the forces laying siege to New York. The Inappropriate Response relies for its levitation magic on a weak antipathic magic, cheap to install but requiring large bodies of water to move over. Later models of the Spindrift Clipper, particularly those designed for river travel, would have true levitation magic built in, so that they could act essentially as hovercraft or helicopters. These innovations would be another 100 years in development, however.

  • A note on opinions of story-based gaming

    I posted this initially as a comment over at Zak’s blog, but thought I’d put it here too.

    There is a common view, I think, amongst role-players of all stripes, that later and newer editions of role-playing games encourage more “story-based” gaming than older ones, or that people who prefer to play later edition games are more likely to be “story-based” gamers. I don’t think that this is a result of system changes encouraging the development of story-based gaming, but a lot of people believe it is due to a kind of gamers’ version of the anthropic principle. When the game started it drew from wargaming, and story wasn’t a big part of it. As it developed over the following 10 years, particularly with the magazine-based theorising (in Dungeon, etc.) story-based gaming became more common. At the same time the systems developed, new ones were released, and obviously products were also released to cater to the wider range of gaming styles available. I think that this diversification, and particularly the interest in story-based gaming and character development, came with the increased maturity of the systems, and the development of the teenage audience into young adults looking for more meaningful social interactions than could be provided by gaming in which each player had 5 or 6 characters that died rapidly (again, I recommend this book as an insight into how the early games were played).

    So, when the OSR decided to turn their backs on the later editions, they associated them with this “story” problem. But really the two developed side-by-side. I was doing story-based games with AD&D 1st edition in the 80s, and my reasons for switching to Rolemaster had nothing to do with story – neither did my reasons for switching back to D&D3.5 in the early noughties. I’m pretty confident I’m not unusual in this development process, I’m pretty confident as well that most people who switched away from AD&D 2nd edition did so because it was pretty complex, and more interesting (but often less playable) systems were coming out at that time. We grew up with the game and we diversified with the game.

    Similarly this idea that OD&D is associated with regular PC death is also representative of the style of play at the time, not the system. Back when it was a wargaming spinoff, death was all the rage (e.g. the 5 or 6 PCs at a time phenomenon). As the gameplay styles diversified, DMs learnt to balance adventures to match the frequency of death they thought players would bear. It’s perfectly easy to play a D&D3.5 adventure and kill your PCs by the minute. But again, when the OSR decided to return to their 80s roots, they also returned (partially) to that wargaming style, and they associate (probably in some cases blame) the other styles with later game editions – not with, as is probably more likely, the maturation and diversification of a gaming crowd that was largely teenage when the hobby first developed.

    Also I think when modern DMs dip into OD&D gaming, they often do so to experience that wargaming style of play, so when people sample OD&D, they often sample it with a particular historically fixed style of play. This doesn’t mean OD&D has to be played that way, or has to be representative of that punishing style of gaming. Compared to pure Rolemaster, OD&D is quite soft, for example. It is exactly the uncompromising harshness of RM which taught me to fudge dice rolls, something the OD&D crowd are very down on. Playing OD&D or AD&D, you can afford to be down on DM fudging (although the AD&D rulebooks are very supportive of this). Playing Rolemaster, not so much…

    Anyway the point is that these two phenomena – story based play and the TPK – are not system-specific so much as era-specific. But, because the systems developed with the eras, they two are easily confused.

  • Grindin’ for Gygax

    I am a regular reader of and occasional commenter at the left-wing political/academic blog Crooked Timber, though I don’t usually link my blog to them (the American political blogsophere is a bit scary). Recently, however, I discovered this post on the new Dante’s Inferno computer game, where anonymous commenter noen makes this great claim:

    The repetition [in porn and in WoW][1], the dross, is important. It is through the repetition that one realizes the value of the object of one’s desire by failing to achieve it. There is a great deal of the obsessional repetition of “dross” in religious observance also. That’s the whole point.

    The goal of religion, porn and gaming is the grinding. It is the core that is the real distraction.

    This is surely meant to be an amusing aside, right? But it got me thinking about sandbox gaming, story-gaming, and the oft-repeated claims that D&D 4e has been designed to be like an MMO. Particularly, I notice in the role-playing blogosphere a really serious dislike of story-based gaming. Old-school gamers (who seem to dominate the blogosphere outside of 4e bloggers) are really anti-story. They seem to have a strong preference for individual modules, and for sandbox gaming without a plot. Stand alone modules are often (especially in the early days which the grognards valorize) just a vague story and plot-hook to get the PCs on a treasure hunt – i.e. a kind of pen-and-paper based version of World of Warcraft’s grinding. Story is often associated with the “faggy” elements of the newer games like the “storyteller” systems by White Wolf, not with the “pure” older systems (and yes, I have heard them contrasted in this way). So what’s going on here?

    Fragmentary social relations and the Grind

    I don’t think this type of play is that popular with role-players. I have played and DMd in earnest since 1986, and I can safely say that I have played in very few sandbox games. The vast majority of gaming I have run or played in has been story-based. Not necessarily of the “kill the bad guy and save the world” kind – indeed some was quite nihilistic – but always with a plot. People like story, and our models for role-playing are mainly novels, which are pretty heavy on the story. In later years I have often played with friends who aren’t hardcore players, and I’ve noticed that the further I drift from the hardcore gaming community the less they care about randomness, system, and sandboxing, and the more they want story, description, description and story.

    But my experience was in Australia, where role-playing is not that popular or common and one often has to take what one can get, player-wise and system wise. My best players have (with a few shining exceptions) been almost invariably those who were completely ignorant of system, or the RPG scene. Now, something these people have in common is that they aren’t dysfunctional nerds, and they value coherent, wholesome social interactions.

    Then I moved to England, and had within 1 year three really bad role-playing experiences – shitty DMing and shitty playing. Two of these experiences occurred in a story-free, sandbox type gaming environment being run by hardcore old-schoolers (one shitty player was just a classic example of a violent British idiot, so doesn’t really fit due to culturally-specific retardation). It occurs to me that this style of play is very compatible with the fragmentary, meaningless style of interaction which characterizes the social relations of early teen boys – the exact environment in which a lot of players of my age grew up, and which is very nicely described in this book. These are also the style of fragmentary social relations which one sees in WoW a lot – join a group for 2 hours, fuck around, disappear. I think there’s a relationship between these things, and the grognard school of role-playing thought, which is all about trying to hang on to your old school roots, is also all about hanging onto a social milieu which we remember from our early teens, when this sort of fragmentary interaction made sense to us. I think the grognards are valorizing a style of play which is at best out of whack with what most people I have ever played or DMd with want to do, and which is tied to a socially disruptive and transient stage of human development which, let’s face it, a lot of nerd boys have never grown out of[2]. Those fat bearded know-it-alls at the pub who have an opinion on everything (and God, did I meet a lot of these pricks in the role-playing clubs in London) love this kind of teenage boy interaction – they’re still doing it at 40. Those of us who have moved on from that have also, I suspect, moved on from the stand-alone module plot-hook-for-a-dungeon-crawl random-monster style of play, to something a bit more socially and intellectually fulfilling. Grognardia essentially admitted this today with his little rant against change.

    Story-free gaming as religious observance

    The other noticeable trait of these grognard blogs, of course, is their worship of gary gygax. According to a commenter in the “I Hate Change” thread of grognardia, “D&D divorced itself from Appendix N entirely” when in 4e “Ioun has become the goddess of magic”. You certainly hate change if this is a problem for you. You also have elevated a single edition of a single game to the status of a bible, complete with appendices. This is religion at its heart, and what do all religions have in common? Hatred of change, unwillingness to tolerate dissent, they’re a haven for people who seek shelter from the consequences of their own social problems, they are full of bullies and disciplinarians, and they tolerate no narrative that conflicts with their own. This is why they suit the “grind” noen refers to in the comments at CT; and why their adherents are so fond of story-free games and suspicious of any later innovations which dilute a game-style that was developed for a feckless audience of socially isolated and emotionally stunted early-teenage boys.

    4th edition gamers and the story

    A common complaint I’ve read about 4e is that it has reduced the rules to a style of computer game, like WoW, with tanks, DPS characters, etc, and this represents the lack of commitment to real gaming of modern youth, their attention spans are short, blah blah blah. The irony for me is that the blogs which are most resistant to story-free play are the ones by 4e players. In the socially isolating and confrontational context of the British pub gaming scene, the most fun I had in a game I played in was a 4e game. Why? Because the person who chose to DM it had been lured away from previous editions by the promise of simplicity and freedom for the GM, and the character traits which drew him to 4e make a good DM.  It’s the focus on the story, the primacy of social interaction and the shared nature of the game which makes 4e alluring to these people. Ironically, this is what the grognards claim that OD&D encourages, even while they are eschewing the story and engaging in a complex grind, similar in fashion to the MMO they hate 4e for having “become”.

    I don’t intend to turn my gaming into a repetitive litany to Gary Gygax. Nor do I intend to reduce my DMing to a kind of sophisticated dice-rolling facilitator, or a disciplinarian high-priest of the Old School[3]. I will continue to DM for what my players want – an interesting story, in cool places, with high risks and high rewards, played in a way that is mutually satisfying for everyone involved, and not self-consciously situating itself at the heart of a geekish metaculture no-one outside of a few beardy opinionated fat guys gives two hoots about.

    —

    fn1: I think this is why you also see, in the threads of those blogs, a lot of comments about how players need to be “taught to be careful”, “disciplined”, “warned”, etc. For christ sakes, this is a game, something we do for enjoyment. This 80s British public-school model of “play” in which the bigger, stronger kids keep the smaller ones in line is not applicable anywhere in my life, and it makes me feel dirty when I see it being still enacted in my hobby.

    fn2: I am a strong proponent of the claim that porn has important validity as a measure of social interaction and political currents. Porn has changed a lot over the years, and its current gonzo incarnation in the west is as much a product of industrial decisions and consumer powerlessness as is the current plot-free dross that we’re seeing in the computer game world. I inserted (pardon the pun) porn into this comment thread for that reason…

    fn3: not that I’m suggesting anyone wants me to or is trying to make me do so. This is rhetoric by way of conclusion, ok?

  • On the mischaracterisation of role-players as escapist loonies

    Over at Terra Nova there is news of the release of a study conducted with the help of Sony, which is essentially a large survey of MMO users’ role-playing style, their attitude towards the game, mental health and degree of social exclusion. It’s an interesting attempt to characterise the qualities of MMO players by their degree of interest in role-playing and their sociodemographic and personal profile, and the first study of its kind to use data from the underlying game database. I have some problems with the statistics (outlined after my rant, below) which maybe will be clarified when the final version of the paper is released, but I have bigger problems with the interpretation of the results, and the view that the researchers at Terra Nova are taking of role-players as compared to the “non” role players in the survey.

    Specifically, in the summary of the paper, the first author Dmitri Williams states that

    Role players come much more often from offline marginalized groups, suggesting that some may engage in the practice to find acceptance or a safe outlet for their identity.

    Role players engage in the practice for a number of reasons, but the standout one tended to be for creativity. Escapism was present, but was rarely the main reason.

    which suggests a reasonably balanced view of gamers’ reasons for playing in the second paragraph (escapism is rarely the main reason) but a very blunt and anachronistic explanation in the first paragraph. It seems to assume that there is a higher level of escapism in these marginalised groups, which is supported only by a tautological hypothesis. The authors argue that marginalized groups would be more likely to role-play than the non-marginalised, because role-playing is a form of escapism, or a safe outlet for their identity. Having found this statistical difference, they conclude that escapism must be the reason for this higher representation. But the original hypothesis is untested. I see no realistic or reasonable link between marginalization and greater role-playing. It’s not like you get to be gay in an MMO, or your blackness becomes more acceptable, or your non-christian religion. You get to be an elf, or a magician. That there should be a relationship between taking another role in a computer world and being dissatisfied with your role in the real world is a highly dubious claim. The truth of this claim needs to be established before the next postulate can be finalised.

    However, the claims get a little more disturbing in a subsequent piece on RMT (Real Money Transactions) by a non-author of the paper, Castronova, who states that this paper

    shows pretty clearly that players who desire strong refuge from reality, the sincere role-players, are a distinct minority. My arguments were delivered with a background assumption that very large numbers of people were scrambling over themselves to get out of the real world. Not so. That doesn’t make the arguments wrong, it just indicates that any plea for the right to live in a deep fantasy is less socially resonant than I thought… I’m an advocate for a minority, a somewhat disturbed one at that according to Williams, Kennedy, and Moore.

    So Castronova’s assumption is that role-playing is about escapism, and plain and simple – people want to “get out of the real world”. Note in this paragraph Castronova doesn’t change his view that role-playing is about escapism, he just discovers that most people in MMOs don’t role-play much and therefore aren’t doing it for escapism. He goes on to use the loaded language of the claim that they are a “disturbed [minority] at that.” Judging the loonies is always a good look in academia, I find.

    My problem with this is that, as far as I can tell, all media are a form of escapism. You can’t run around claiming that only 5% of people who watch movies do it for escapism – they all do! So what’s different about MMOs? Why should it only be some select group of extreme role-players who are doing it for the escapism? Couldn’t it be that everyone is doing the game as a type of escapism, and role-players just have a different style? A style more suited to minorities, apparently, but so what? The assumption underlying the paper and Castronova’s further comments are that those people at the “low” end of the role-playing spectrum, grinding out the levels and the monsters, are not doing it for escapism. I’m sorry, but no matter what style of play you have, when you pay by the month to engage for hours in a computer game where you play an elf, orc or rogue, you’re in it for the escapism. The rest of it is just about style.

    So no, role-players are not a “disturbed” minority (at that!) who want to escape reality. They are a small subgroup of a large number of people who play a game as a form of escapism, and do it with a particular slightly pretentious style.

    —

    Problems with the statistics of the paper are:

    • they claim the survey is a “stratified random sample” taken on 4 strata (4 different servers) but there is no evidence in the analysis that the stratified random sample has been taken into account
    • They don’t report a response rate for the overall survey or the servers. Maybe “marginalized” heavy role-players were more likely to answer the survey than the non-marginalized heavy role-players?
    • The differences in the groups are in some instances very small and only significant due to the large numbers in the survey, and Cohen’s D statistics don’t really give any additional weight to the results (there are significant problems with the use of these kinds of stats in my experience). Consider the loneliness scale: high role-players differ from the low ones by 2 points on a scale of 4 to 80 (about 2.5%), which is not a big difference no matter how significant it might be. It appears that there was only 1 woman in the High RP group (out of 300 or so people!) but the gender difference between this group and the medium RP Group was statistically significant! These are large-sample anomalies
    • There is no multiple regression analysis, so no adjustment for confounders. Given the supposedly significant demographic differences between groups, it might be wise to have done this. Particularly, adjustment for the 7 categories of education, and for social marginalisation, might have removed the mental health differences between groups
    • Mental health appears to be estimated by a form of self-report. This is always a dubious measure.

    So the stats could probably have been better explored…

  • Have beard will argue

    This post at Grognardia reminds me of why I am uncomfortable with the “old-school movement” and its pronouncements on all things nerdy. Putting aside the strange fascination with naff artwork and Dr. Who style special effects, the weird, almost religious obsession with pronouncements by one strange, pedantic, over-opinionated game writer (i.e. Gary Gygax) is almost religious in its intensity, and disturbingly forgiving of his mortal traits. The thread in question, where people variously try to understand a completely pointless and meaningless quote by a man famous for his indecipherable prose, makes my point. But Wax Banks makes it better, with a few digs at Gygax’s noble character on the way.

  • Cyberpunk, postmodernism and Orientalism 1: outline

    In my previous post I mentioned stumbling across an analysis of cyberpunk and orientalism, which interests me for a lot of reasons, and I’ve subsequently decided that since I’m living in the shadow of the zaibatsu without a job, maybe it’s time I embarked on a shady criminal information-hacking project, so I’m going to try and read through the thesis I found and draw together some kind of themes or conclusions from the tangled mess that is postmodern critique.

    … So to start with I thought I’d do a survey of what is already available on the internet about cyberpunk and postmodernism. According to this (awesomely brief) description,

    markers of postmodernism recurring in cyberpunk include: the commodification of culture, the invasive development of information technology, a decentering and fragmentation of the “individual”; and a blurring of the boundaries between “high” and “popular” culture.

    which maybe helps to pin down why cyberpunk is considered to have such strong links to postmodernism, and also to nihilism – which, incidentally, I didn’t realise had a whole branch of academic theory devoted to it, primarily stemming from the work of Baudrillard. I don’t want to pursue the discussion of nihilism too far though because I find it seems to get incomprehensible very rapidly. Interestingly though, the intersection of cyberpunk, nihilism – which posits an absence of external morality – and postmodernism, with its reputed objection to “truth”[1], draws in a lot of young christians. For example, this blog describes some common misconceptions about postmodernism held by its christian critics, and maybe helps to show what postmodernism is not. Obviously, those whose religion is based on a single text are going to have some big issues with postmodernism, which is all about criticising the relationship between “the text”[2] and “truth”.

    Modern feminism has also found an interest in cyberpunk, as a fictional representation of the liberating effect of technology for modern women. This is briefly discussed here, with again some reference to the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway.  This could be interesting if it led me back to Haraway, whose work I struggled with many years ago with the help of a friend. I hope it doesn’t, though, because I’m largely not up to dealing with her language… But I don’t think I’ll be pursuing any further feminist involvement in cyberpunk in and of itself (though I may stumble across some in time), because I only have limited time and my main concern is the Orientalist part[4].

    The thesis I have started reading states its perspective on the importance of cyberpunk for postmodernism in the introduction:

    Cyberpunk’s postmodern scene, the flow of people, goods, information and power across international boundaries, is theorized in Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism as the cultural logic of late or third stage multinational capitalism, fully explicated in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(1991). Importantly, Jameson finds cyberpunk to be a significant manifestation of this, the “supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself”(419). … Moreover, this postmodern scene, a global array of disjunctive flows, specifically encompasses Japan: the multinationals, for example, are depicted as Japanese zaibatsu.

    I’m inclined to agree with most of this position, though I’m going to skip over the supreme importance bit to see what our resident theorist has to say about Gibson’s view of Japan from the perspective of Orientalism, which he goes on to say will try to

    “get beyond the reified polarities of East versus West” and in a “concrete way attempt to understand the heterogeneous and often odd developments” (Culture and Imperialism 41). By exploring a number of particular theoretical positions and terminologies, my intention is to work toward highlighting the dynamic of reflexivity inherent in postmodern orientalism.

    (The quotes here are quotes of Said). This paragraph is easier understood in the context of the abstract, in which our resident theorist explains that his view of “postmodern orientalism” describes

    uneven, paradoxical, interconnected and mutually implicated cultural transactions at the threshold of East-West relations. The thesis explores this by first examining cyberpunk’s unremarked relationship with countercultural formations (rock music), practices (drugs) and manifestations of Oriental otherness in popular culture.

    This distinguishes the modern cyberpunk narrative of the orient from that of previous centuries, described by Said, in which the imaginative process is entirely one way – western writers and academics taking parts of the orient that appealed to them to form their own pastiche of cultural and aesthetic ideals of the orient which suit their own stereotypes; and then using these to bolster a definition of the West in opposition to an imagined Orient. In the cyberpunk world, characterised by postmodern orientalism, the Orient is actively engaging with, challenging or subverting the images which western writers and academics form of the East, and importing its own distorted images of the West, in a form of postmodern cultural exchange.

    This cultural exchange is very interesting to me, and has been a topic of rumination for me on my other blog ever since I came to Japan. It’s clear that the West “dreams” the orient[5], not seeing much of what is really happening here; but at the same time the Orient has its own fantasies of the west, which have become increasingly influential in the west as the power of Japanese and Chinese media enables them to project their own images of the West back to it[6]. Both parts of the world also have their dreams of their own identity, and often these definitions are constructed at least partially in contrast to their dual opposite; but recently, with increased cultural exchange, it’s possible to see these identities becoming more diverse (at least in the Orient) as the “Other” hemisphere becomes less alien and the distinction between “Eastern” and “Western” blurs. I am interested to see if this phenomenon is sufficiently identifiable as to be described by a theory of postmodern orientalism, and that’s why I’m reading this thesis…

    So, that’s the outline of what we’re aiming for. Strap yourselves in kids. We’ve taken the Blue pill…

    —

    [1] I think this is a misreading of postmodernist theory, which mainly seems to argue that the way we interpret truth is coloured by our cultural and linguistic assumptions. There’s an excellent example of this in the paper “The Egg and the Sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on sterotypical male-female roles”, Emily Martin, Signs(1991): 16(3), 485-501.

    [2] “the text” is like a classic postmodern bullshit bingo cliche, but I actually think it’s a really useful word for catching the broad sense of what post-modernists[3] talk about when they do their critical analyses

    [3] I’m really quite certain that I routinely confuse post-modernists and deconstructuralists, (deconstructionists?), but I don’t care because it’s their fault not mine. Nobody confuses a statistician and a mathematician, do they?

    [4] Though actually I doubt one would have to google very far to find that Orientalism as a concept would have been significantly boosted by better consideration of gender relations…

    [5] mostly, in the case of Japan, through a series of wet dreams or nightmares, but still…

    [6] Consider, for example, the West as presented to the West by Miyazaki in Kiki’s Delivery Service, or in Full Metal Alchemist[7]

    [7] I just want to point out here that if I was going to be a proper academic wanker like Said I would present these names in untranslated Japanese, on the assumption that you, dear reader, can just read everything, or that if you can’t you’re a worthless loser who doesn’t deserve to know what I’m talking about. Aren’t I nice?

  • Cyberpunk theory

    After the dispute over my opinions about the nihilistic elements of cyberpunk role-playing, I did a little more digging and found that this element of cyberpunk is not exactly considered unique. I also discovered that, rather unsurprisingly, cyberpunk is a rich field of theoretical endeavour. I discovered a cyberpunk course at the peer to peer university (!?) which includes explicit analysis of the nihilistic elements of cyberpunk, along with some interesting discussion of the narrative components of the style. The conclusion of this post is that nihilism is a fundamental component of the genre (and some nice hat tips to the theoretical concept of nihilism are identified in The Matrix).

    The P2PU course on cyberpunk also includes links to a lot of open access journal articles about cyberpunk, some of which could be worth reading.

    Finally, I found an interesting-looking article on Cyberpunk and Orientalism, which might give an interesting insight into some of the things I’ve noticed before in Cyberpunk – particularly the 90s wave of Gibson et al – which seems to have a heavy degree of romanticisation of the far East. I have my suspicions about Said’s critique of Orientalism, but it does provide an interesting platform from which to analyse Western opinions of Asia, so I’m going to give this essay a go – even though it’s a PhD thesis so probably therefore hideously difficult to read – and I may provide a few interpretations of it on a future post. How’s that for taking one for the team?

  • Current reading: Altered Carbon

    The next in my line of eBook downloads, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is perhaps best described as a cyberpunk Space Opera. It is set in a near future, perhaps 500 years from now, in which humans have developed a technology of human mind replication. This technology is not cheap, but it enables people to back up their mind and memories (their stack) and install it in a new human being (their sleeve) when their current human dies. This provides a kind of immortality, and changes many aspects of ordinary human life, including:

    • punishment: prison is time spent “on stack” while the sleeve in which you committed the crime is rented out to others to use
    • insurance: every person’s goal is to get a resleeving policy, so that when they die they can be reborn based on their last backup, in a new sleeve
    • torture: if you really really want to torture someone, you upload their stack into a virtual system, and torture them there for as long as you want – they can’t die

    The very rich can afford regular backups, perhaps as often as every 48 hours and done remotely, but for the vast majority of even the middling rich, the mind and memories are backed up only internally, in essentially a memory chip inside their head. This enables them to die for real if their head is destroyed or the stack is removed and lost.

    The story centres around a criminal called Takeshi Kovacs who has retired from a specialist psychotic marine unit called the Envoys. He is dragged out of a long prison sentence (on stack) by a very rich and long-lived man (a methuselah, or “meth”), who was murdered two days earlier and wants his death investigated by an independent operator. Unfortunately all is not as it seems (of course) and after a slight mishap on the first day, Kovacs ends up to his neck in real and virtual shit. There are a lot of tricks based on the fundamental conceit of the altered carbon (at one point we briefly meet an assassin who uses a copy of himself for backup, because he can’t trust anyone else); but there is also a sensitive and intelligent investigation of the consequences of this backup process for human society. What does death and childhood mean when you can live forever? Does money become more significant or less when it has the power to buy you eternal life? How does one prosecute a war when the dead can come back to life? And how does one deal with criminals who have no fear of death?

    Kovacs answers most of these questions using an advanced array of extremely dangerous weaponry, and the author produces some very poignant moments based around the experiences of ordinary mortals cast into these situations. He also writes very well, giving simultaneously an excellent story, believable characters and an interesting and unpretentious exploration of some of the philosophical consequences of the phenomenon at the centre of the novel. This is an excellent novel, well worth reading, and I will definitely be pursuing the series as he writes more!

  • The Internet, 10 years ago

    I found this through Monsters and Manuals, a website devoted to people kicking their World of Warcraft Habit. Nothing special! I hear you say – but it has a number for a suicide help line, and check out the comments. 2250 pages of them. Here’s a sample:

    It’s no game anymore it’s like a gigantic dating service for ugly people.

    That’s like what happened to the whole internet 10 years ago, but with less porn.

    Some of the comments are priceless. I’m so glad I didn’t get sucked into that…