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…

  • 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…

  • The Shock of the New and the Benefits of the Familiar

    I remember playing a few sessions of Talislanta when I was much younger, and feeling confused and underwhelmed for most of it. I think this was largely because the Talislanta setting is so alien and rich with new ideas that unless one has done some kind of pre-development work of some kind it’s impossible to feel like you know the place. In Talislanta, there are 20 or 30 character classes, each essentially a different (often completely alien-seeming) race. All the animals are different to earth, the geography is different, and the history is a kind of magic-science mishmash. From memory it seemed like a great place to role-play but when one actually did join the game, it was confusing and felt remote and story-like, because there was nothing familiar to hook onto.

    I was reminded of this, compared to the alternative of setting an adventure in a world known intimately to all the players, when I read recently one of the Dresden Files stories, in which Harry Dresden animates himself an undead T-Rex from a Chicago Museum. This event, pivotal in the story, came from out of the blue when I was reading it, and I was struck at the time by how this is exactly the sort of thing my players would do if they were adventuring in a modern city whose museums they themselves knew; and it is exactly the sort of thing they don’t do when playing, because they don’t know where the graveyards, museums, zoos, etc. are.

    I think this is why a lot of groups settle for role-playing in elf- and dwarf-rich Lord of the Rings style campaigns. There are a lot of things they’re familiar with, and with that familiarity comes the ability to use the environment, the flaws of the enemy, etc. to ones’ own advantage. One can’t do that in fantasy worlds that are either very unusual (like Talislanta) or straight from the DMs own imagination. I have got around this in the past by setting campaigns in fantastic versions of our earth, so for example in the most recent Compromise and Conceit campaign, players quickly started to have their own ideas about what to do next based on their knowledge of the existing history and geography of the Earth. One, for example, suggested a spirit walk to investigate the history of a certain problem – he made this suggestion based on his own understanding of Native American myths. This is much harder to do if one doesn’t know the world.

    I was struck when reading the Dresden Files by how rich in role-playing opportunities the world Jim Butcher has created is. Not only does it have magic and all the monsters we know and love, but it is in a setting completely familiar to all of us – like Buffy too, I suppose – so if one plays around in that kind of world, it will be easy for the players to think about where to go and what to do to solve problems. Even if, like me, your DMing style is very story-focussed, the setting is automatically a type of sandbox, and people can have a lot of fun disrupting the plot. The real challenge – and one I don’t think can be pulled off easily given modern players’ time constraints – is for a DM to make players feel that comfortable and familiar with a world of his or her own creation. This is difficult to do in anything except the longest campaigns, I think.

    So for my next face-to-face campaign I may try this, playing in a world everyone is intimately familiar with – possibly even the town where we all live – and see where that takes us. Maybe a Cthulhu-style rural Japan could be fun…

  • Current reading: The Court of The Air

    Before moving back to Japan I bought an eBook Reader (more on which later) in hopes of reducing the size of my bookcases (they aren’t so portable, really). I then stumbled on the horrendous problem of choosing books to read, since doing so no longer involves browsing a bookshop. This is challenging. So in the end I downloaded The Court of The Air by Stephen Hunt, which is an interesting mixture of steampunk, Victoriana and high fantasy, set in a kingdom called Jackals that is obviously modelled on Victorian England (“a nation of shopkeepers”, in fact), if England were built on the ruins of an ancient Aztec-styled Insect-god-worshipping society of infinite evil, were powered by magic and steampower, and restored the monarchy only as prisoners to be jeered at by a “free” populace.

    So pretty much like modern England.

    The story follows the separate paths of two vagrants, Molly and Oliver, who become entangled in a very nasty communist plot to take over the country by calling back the ancient Insect-Gods. This is exactly the sort of steampunk story I love (though of course I would have the catholic church doing the demon summoning). Molly and Oliver, of course, have special roles to play in helping or hindering this plot, and rest assured that the plot is extremely diabolical so they have their work cut out. In the process of doing so they get help from many different sources and run afoul/afriend of the mysterious Court of the Air, which are kind of like Cromwell’s secret police in space.

    My characterisation of the story here is a bit unfairly glib, because all the fundamental components of it are great. The country of Jackals is a very nice little Steampunk version of Victorian England, the magic is interesting and fits the steampunk setting well, and the various technologies in use – transaction engines, steam-powered vacuum tubes for trains, rifles made with explosives from tree-sap, etc. – are very nicely done. It’s like Perdido Street Station if the latter were done in a quaintly Victorianesque manner, and very specifically tailored to be set in London rather than just any old megalopolis. The Steammen – a race of sentient machines with their own gods – are very very cool, and the feeling of a politically corrupt and personally dangerous 19th century London is very good, like Oliver Twist meets Lord of the Rings. In some instances there is, however, too much to digest and the book could perhaps have left a little of the detail out, for use in subsequent novels. Sometimes the amount of steampunk/magical innovations on offer in a single page can be a little dizzying. But I’m not going to complain about over-innovation in a steampunk novel, given how rare good steampunk novels are!

    However, the novel suffers from one significant flaw: it has multiple overly contrived deus ex machina moments. On at least 5 or 10 occasions I think the plot must have been forced to its next stage only by judicious application of divine or semi-divine intervention. I don’t mind that the plot was all clearly building up to a divine intervention at the end – the purpose of the story was to manoeuvre certain elements of the plot into place to enable this to happen, so that’s fine – but there were too many occasions in the build up when things only proceeded due to divine, machine or extra-planetary intervention. It left one feeling a little robbed of purpose at times, even though in many instances the intervention was consistent with the overall plan of the story. A little more free will on the part of the protagonists would have been nice.

    Still, overall it was a fun story and I’ll be reading the next couple!

  • Player-driven campaigns

    I’m not a fan of sandbox campaigns – I think plot and links between sessions make a campaign more fun, I don’t like wandering monsters and random encounters, and my experience of players’ attempts to navigate even small detail-rich worlds is that they flounder without a lot of guidance. However, at the end of my recent campaign, one of my players proposed essentially the whole outline for a follow-up campaign:

    • We liquidate and then disguise ourselves (magically) as the inquisitors who are to be set on our tail.
    • Disguised so, we seemingly proceed with the Church’s mission,  gaining their  aid in entering hell to rescue Cantrus and also collecting the amulet.
    • On returning from hell, we sacrifice the Pope himself (ought to be worth a bob or two!) to the demon of knowledge for a ritual to magically fragment the amulet so we can all benefit and then reverse the area of effect on the amulet so instead of granting anyone wearing it immunity to us, it grants us immunity from everyone else ! This would leave us vulnerable only to each other’s attacks  (but we’re a team right – non of us would pick off the other to be left an invulnerable ruler of all he surveyed right ? Right ? 🙂
    • Cantrus for Pope !

    This constitutes the entire plot of an ongoing campaign, set up by the players and very structured in its goals. All that remains for the DM to do is to fiddle around with the details of the challenges as set out above. In fact, I would argue that if the players told me they aimed to set out down this path, I would be very leery of changing the direction with ideas of my own unless I thought they were guaranteed to improve the players’ enjoyment of their own campaign. I’m not sure where this leaves the DM, who in this case has often complained about the hassle of creating a story for witless players but has never considered the possibility that the players would relegate him to the role of dice-roller and scene writer.

    I’m not sure that many DMs have actually worked in this fashion that often – usually they’re the masters of their own world, after all. Such a campaign needs to be run in a way which maintains the challenge for the players but enables them to keep an eye on their own goals, and – if it offers different goals at all – offers new opportunities in a way which tests the players’ resolve without undermining their original scheme. I’m really eager to run such a campaign, but not so sure that it’s going to work out… we’ll see…

  • When Denmark is full, the dead shall walk the earth…

    I had this fantastic moment of lego madness pointed out to me today: Zombie Apocafest 2009. It’s creativity such as I thought lego was no longer capable of sustaining. I particularly like the starbucks under zombie siege. The photos are on flickr so I can’t put an example here directly, but there is very creative use of modern lego pieces for flamethrower effects, and many homages to the famous zombie and apocalypse movies. Brilliant!

  • Current reading: The Elfish Gene

    Before I left England I was reading this book, The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe, which I was given by my flatmate, but for some time I couldn’t get very far into it because it was so nasty. The book is essentially the biography of a man who grew up as a role-playing nerd during the first wave of fantasy gaming in England in the mid- 70s. He begins the book buy explaining why he’s writing it, which essentially leads into a long rant about how Dungeons and Dragons ruined his social development and turned him into a wanker. There follows a couple of hundred pages of description, in excruciating detail, of how this happened.

    Initially I put the book aside, but after my computer was shipped off to Japan and I was snowed in with 5 days of nothing to do, I set to work on it. The book is interesting for two reasons: it describes faithfully the tedious and horrible nature of life in the lower classes in England in the 70s, and it shows some of the commonest ways in which young nerdy boys interact. Both aspects of the book seemed painfully accurate to me – particularly the descriptions of working class england, and school in the 70s, were painfully familiar to me – getting caned for running in the halls, being subjected to ludicrous rules by parents, living in really daggy and rundown homes and having nothing, nothing at all, to do. It’s a really interesting description of the time.

    Where the book goes wrong, though, is its attempt to pin a lot of the main characters social problems on his obsession with D&D. Given the massive social barriers he was already facing – raised in an ignorant environment, going to an all-boys school where students were caned for running in the playground[1], with only brothers at home, and peers who admired the nazis – is it any surprise that he didn’t know how to deal with girls? This isn’t D&Ds fault. It’s not D&Ds fault that when he was 15 he carried a spanner in his pocket to impress the girls with when he went on dates. That’s just grade A stupid kid. It’s also easy to tell from his descriptions of the role-playing he and his friends did that there was a lot of juvenile, nasty behaviour going on in his friendship circle which had nothing to do with D&Ds influence. He himself says at the beginning that the school system and society of lower working class 1970s England is a wanker factory – I think perhaps he has underestimated the power of that wanker factory, and overestimated the negative influence of the hobby which, really, he was turning to in order to escape the pressures of that society and its wankerisms.

    Unfortunately I don’t know how all this is resolved because I didn’t finish the book before I was due at the airport, and I had to leave it behind for my flatmate. I think it’s worth reading just to remind oneself of how completely awful 70s England was, and how lucky we all were to be role-playing then rather than doing something truly horrible like hanging around in the mall[2]. It’s also interesting to read about peoples’ first experiences of the original game, and how much nerd culture can be the same over long years. The book may be a little overstrong in its willingness to blame D&D for the social consequences of being British in the 70s, but it provides a really interesting historical document about the time and the early development of the hobby. I strongly recommend it.

    —

    fn1: The Daily Mail will have you believe that this is a consequence of the “‘elf and safety” people gone mad. But here it is, written in the book, that Mark Barrowcliffe was subjected to caning if he ran in the playground, during the reign of Thatcher…

    fn2: I was actually wandering malls unsupervised in that era, and some frankly very dubious things happened to me. If only I’d been inside wargaming…

  • Current Gaming: The Witcher

    I received The Witcher for christmas 2 years ago from my Australian friend and his Polish girlfriend, who live in Amsterdam. At the time my laptop couldn’t handle it so I put it aside, but since I completed the dark ritual of invoking the elder gods, I seem to have developed strange new powers of speed and graphical ability, such that the game plays reasonably smoothly. It’s still a bit clunky at times but the graphics are still really pretty, and I’m willing to put up with occasional jerkiness in order to enjoy the game.

    This game so far is great. It’s about a washed-up rock god, Geralt the Witcher, who seems to have lost his memory in a bad moment of slaughter, and is running around his world trying to figure out why some bad guys want to steal his secret society’s mutagenic magic. Geralt is a freak and not necessarily a very nice man, but the world he is in is harsh and he has to get up to some nasty business to survive. He’s also got a nasty sense of humour, he’s cynical, and he speaks in short, pithy sentences which drip with sarcasm or threat. He’s a womanizer (I’ve had 3 women already and I’m still on Chapter 1!) and everyone around him is a misogynist, a racist and a prick. It really is mediaeval Europe!

    The gameplay is also fun. Geralt is largely a fighter, with some small spells (so far, a knock-down/stun spell and a fire spell) to help him in combat. He makes lots of potions which can help him, and he has a couple of different combat styles. At the start of combat you choose his style to suit the opponent – strong, fast or group – and you have to click for him to hit, with the possibility of lethal combos. The myriad fascinating ways in which he murders stunned opponents are particularly entertaining, and in fact you can’t really get through this game without regularly using your magic to stun people so you can cut their throats. It’s particularly fun to take the Blizzard potion, which slows down the game and surrounds the battle in strange glowing colours, as if you were fighting in an acid flashback. The slowed movements enable you to better pick your combos, and you get to see the brutal murder of your opponents in great detail and slow motion. Heads roll, blood spurts, people make horrible noises, and Geralt grunts. It’s visceral, man.

    The plot is a bit too loopy at times but I don’t care. The game really reminds me of the books it is based on, which I have read (that is, The Last Wish and it’s sadly mistranslated sequels), and it is well worth playing. In fact, I’m off to slay a beast right now…