Featured image source: Junji Ito’s horror manga “Army of One.”
My hometown is a tacky tourist town, and as such, has always prided itself on its tacky public art installations. They’re usually nothing particularly terrible. Oftentimes, they take the form of things like stone statues of people sitting down looking at a small obelisk on the ground. They cheapen the town’s atmosphere, but aren’t exactly eyesores worth complaining about. Anyone with an inkling of artistic taste would just groan and move on.
The latest schlock shoveled out by this city’s council of old fogeys, though, surpasses mere kitsch. It’s dreadful. It’s monstrous. It’s even disgusting. And it’s right outside where I work.
Let’s back up a bit.
So the place where I work is a jewelry store. The landmark we use to help people find our store is a K6 red telephone box, the kind that you’d see in London about 80 years ago. Not content with leaving an out-of-place phonebooth in peace, the city council here has bastardized this poor thing for various public art projects for as long as I can remember. The previous inhabitant of the phone booth was a grey steel tumor in the shape of a faceless man, who had been hanging off the side of the phone booth’s door. He was perpetually in the act of trying his hardest to pry the door open, leaving a small crack into which tourists often tossed their trash (despite there being a trash can ten feet away). I imagine this didn’t sit well with the city, because one day, I noticed that my flat bendy friend was gone.
Several days later, I came to work and saw a public servant shoving what appeared to be wooden boards into the phone booth. Upon closer inspection, I came to a blood-chilling realization: these boards were covered with pulsating, fleshy, hairy masses.
Okay, so they don’t pulsate. But they are fleshy, and they are hairy, and they do wear swimsuits. They’re made of some kind of foam or rubber which has already begun decaying, giving some of the bodies inside a zombie-like appearance. Basically, three of these boards are pressed up against the poor phone booth’s windows to give the impression that the booth is completely filled with beachgoers. You can see butts, legs, boobs, nipples, armpits, and hair crammed against the glass. But you can’t see faces. That would just be too much, apparently.
You see, my town is a beach town. And… yeah, that’s as far as the line of thinking behind this monstrosity goes. This is the kind of dreck this city cooks up on Tuesday nights, just so geezers with nothing better to do at 11:00 PM can kvetch during the City Council meetings.
So now I’m stuck with an eldritch horror living outside of my storefront. What’s worse is that the city put this thing inside the phone booth right before the heaviest rains we had gotten in the past ten years. When I came back to work the next week, I found mold growing on some of the bodies. The phone booth had essentially become a petri dish.
My friends and I all think this is the worst thing to ever happen to this town. So what do the tourists think of this abomination? Their reactions range from tickled amusement (old ladies; I’m really curious to find out just why this aberration makes them titter, and whether they’re diseased in the head or not), to pure horror (small children), to disgust (teenage girls), to bemusement (Chinese tourists), to utter confusion (everyone else).
This monstrosity is slated to fester in its current location for at least two more years. My friend invited me to go to the council meeting tonight to protest the heap of flesh, but I’m not sure whether I’m more content with sitting on the Internet complaining about it instead. Then again, the only way to get what you want is to speak out, so…
Anyway. Without further ado, I present to you:
Junji Ito’s “Phonebooth”
Reminder that someone got paid to make this, and then spent many hours actually constructing it.
Recently, I read an article in the December 18, 2016 issue of the New York Times Magazine by John Herrman titled Stage Craft (titled “Who’s Responsible When Extremists Get a Platform?” on the NY Times Magazine’s website). In this piece, Herrman gave a face (albeit a mercurial one, as fitting its nature) to a media phenomenon that the United States felt in its bones stronger than ever before last election – the platform. In particular, Herrman explores social media websites as “platforms,” habitats which allow individuals from all over the planet to share their values and perceptions online in what more cynical Internet dwellers might refer to as echo chambers.
“Platforms” – such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – act as “middlemen between users and other users” where “participants successfully contribute to the broader marketplace by inducing other participants to engage more.” In other words, platforms are where news stories are shared and woven into the fabric of public perception by their human readers. Herrman aptly points out that social media platforms allow users to conjure up new realities into being, as well as lift the burden of responsibility for empowering not-so-glamorous groups (such as white nationalist movements) from the shoulders of Mark Zuckerberg and other social media moguls.
Platforms are the emblems of what I now call the Enabling Age. This is a time period in which rapid, wide-ranging communications platforms on the Internet enable like-minded groups to come together and create “entire ecosystems” from their shared values. More accurately, this is a time period in which we have become more aware of our own human ability to create such ecosystems. We are also faced with the frightening responsibilities that come with managing those ecosystems, coping with ecosystems with which we may not agree, and the dreaded prospect of deciding which ecosystems we should let thrive and which we should curtail for the betterment of the societies we envision for ourselves.
Herrman’s analysis is thoughtful, as well as needed in a period where we’ve been left in existential disarray. But I feel as if Herrman has left out the lynchpin that ties the ideas of ecosystems, platforms, business, and human thought sharing together: intertextuality. As its name implies, intertextuality is the relationship between texts or bodies of knowledge. If we extend our understanding of “bodies of knowledge” to games, movies, TV shows, and other pieces of media, then we can begin to understand why media companies these days are so obsessed with ‘creating narratives’ and other enigmatic phrases you tend to see on entry-level job apps for tech companies.
Now let’s take a look at how intertextuality ties platforms together. Take Activision Blizzard, for example. We know Blizzard Entertainment that has brought us household name gaming titles like World of Warcraft, the Diablo series, StarCraft, and most recently, Overwatch. As a disclaimer, I’ve been playing Blizzard games for years. And for the most part, I’ve enjoyed them and continue to enjoy them. But I’ll also be the first to point out that while Blizzard games enchant players with what their fans call “polish” (visual/tactile/audio details that make their games incredibly immersive and addicting), their more recent titles have taken measures toward simplifying their gaming experiences. Overwatch combines First Person Shooter hallmarks like rocket jumping and map exploration, strips away most of the mechanical nuances of the shooter genre, and then condenses the playing space into small maps where the pace of a match is largely determined by the usage of Ultimates and by chokepoints which must be broken. World of Warcraft initially drew the ire of thousands of old-school MMORPG players for softening the penalties other titles in the genre imposed upon dead players, among other aspects.
Blizzard’s harshest critics often point fingers at these games for such simplification and accuse Activision Blizzard of watering down their games’ genres. I’m tempted to say that they have a point, and that if their more recent titles were produced by a no-name studio in China with far less ‘polish,’ these games might just well fall by the wayside. Yet Activision Blizzard games are huge. Overwatch alone drew in around 20 million players as of this October. So what keeps people going? Outside of the aforementioned ‘polish,’ what marks Blizzard as the emperor of addicting games?
The simple answer is intertextuality. Blizzard is widely known for re-using themes throughout its games: player abilities, artwork, icons, sound effects, characters, storylines. Whether you’re playing Diablo 3, World of Warcraft, or Overwatch, you’re likely to find references to another Blizzard game littered about the place. The Murloc ramen mascot in Overwatch’s Hanamura stage comes to mind, as does the nostalgic noise for the Warrior’s Charge ability in World of Warcraft (which is actually just a stock sound for a missile in flight) and the similarity between the nature-commanding abilities of Diablo II’s Druid class, the Keeper of the Grove’s abilities in Warcraft 3, and the Druid class’ spells in World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft, in fact, draws heavily upon the draught of nostalgia and reworking old plotlines for future expansion packs.
As a result, we see an intertextuality between Blizzard’s various games. Blizzard has been around for almost two decades, and many of its fans have been around that long as well. There’s a sense of communal evolution in Blizzard games, or the feeling that its games and characters have grown up alongside the players themselves. This creates a strong sense of cohesion among those players, who feel tied together by the nostalgic memories that Blizzard has stoked time and time again throughout its thematically interconnected universes. In short, Blizzard enables players to bond through nostalgia over its various platforms.
Activision Blizzard is not alone in drawing upon the forces of nostalgia, intertextuality, and platforms for its business models. Square Enix does the same with its Final Fantasy series of games. Nintendo employs similar methods with all of its titles, though they really only come together in the Smash Bros. series (perhaps the phenomenon of social ecosystems explains the appeal of “all-star games” like the Smash series?). Marvel Comics is without a doubt the most prominent purveyor of intertextuality today, since Marvel has embarked on erecting a massive empire composed of familiar comic book faces and repurposed plotlines over movies, TV shows, video games, and of course, comic books. But since my knowledge of Marvel is relatively limited, I have decided not to comment on the matter.
Going forward, how can we use our knowledge of how companies enable their fans to feel certain emotions and bond as dedicated consumers? I can’t say for certain. Herrman feels that it might be best not to view content producers as just content producers anymore. In an age where individuals share content they like within their communities and with other communities, creators – and the platforms where their work is shared – are also the enablers of experiences, of emotions, of memories, and of communities. It’s always been this way, and it will likely continue being this way as long as humans have some way of communicating with each other online and offline.
If you told me 14 years ago that there would be a movie based on the Warcraft series, I would probably have looked at you in awe. If you would have told me that during my college career, several years after I had given up World of Warcraft and many more years since I had played Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, I would have shrugged and thought it was a neat idea. When I found out that a director named Duncan Jones (known for his 2009 movie, Moon, and for being David Bowie’s son) would be making a Warcraft movie back in 2014, I was cautiously excited about how the movie might succeed, as well as the numerous ways in which it could utterly fail. And now, having seen said movie, I’m left with a rather curious rift in my conscience.
Warcraft manages to simultaneously indulge in and estrange Blizzard’s beloved Fantasy franchise. It reinterprets and presents to us anew Warcraft’s greatest strengths, while draining the essence from all of the meat surrounding said strength.
For starters, Warcraft is not a movie about World of Warcraft. It actually takes place during the first Warcraft game, titled Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994). It also draws upon retroactive histories contained within various novellas tied into the early Warcraft universe. Here’s a synopsis:
The Warcraft series mainly takes place on a planet named Azeroth. Azeroth is inhabited by various sentient races: Humans, Dwarves, Goblins, High Elves, and many other beings. Unbeknownst to the peoples of Azeroth, a planet far away called Draenor is in the midst of a crisis. A serious one, at that, because the planet is literally falling apart. Draenor is inhabited by numerous other sentient races, one of these being the Orcs. The Orcs inhabit a totemic society that values ancestor worship, honor, and battlefield prowess above all else. An Orcish warlock called Gul’dan, though, has dabbled in the dark Fel magic of demons. Gul’dan promised to find a new world for the Orcish tribes using that Fel magic, which, unfortunately, requires the life force of other beings like the peaceful Draenei (the blue people we see at the beginning of the film). Once Gul’dan creates the Dark Portal, his Orcish army spills out into the world of Azeroth and begins razing every Human settlement in sight.
The Chief of the Frostwolf clan, Durotan, isn’t too happy about this. He feels as if Gul’dan is leading both the Orcs and Azeroth toward further destruction for his own benefit. The Human Alliance isn’t too happy about its villages being attacked, either, so they rally some armies to fight the threat. Thanks to a half-Orcish woman named Garona, the two armies meet up and come to understand each others’ similar goals. It’s up to the Humans and their newfound Frostwolf allies to defeat Gul’dan and save both the Orcish people and Azeroth from demonic influence.
One reason why the Warcraft series has always held such a tender place in my heart – at least as a guilty pleasure – was because it took Fantasy genre conventions and imbued them with interesting twists. The Warcraft series has never borne the scholarly load of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series, which is renowned for its then-unprecedented attention to and reforging of classical European myth. Nor has the Warcraft series ever delved into the darkest depths of the Human psyche to the extent that Games Workshop’s Warhammer series has (or, in turn, Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné series of novels, which inspired the Warhammer series). Instead, Warcraft gives us new perspectives on the things we take for granted in Fantasy, then packages them in an easy-to-swallow pill that is accessible to most audiences.
The Warcraft series is perhaps best known for its Orcs. As of Warcraft 3 (2002), Warcraft’s Orcs are far removed from the brutish greenskins of the Warhammer universe. Retcons by Blizzard writer Chris Metzen and various other authors over the years have made sure that the Orcs were always a sympathetic people, one with which audiences can connect on an emotional level.
Jones’ Orcs, who inhabit the era of the first Warcraft game, are no different. They laugh. They cry. They tease each other. They worry about their children’s futures. They indulge in bouts of nostalgia for old battles and old hunts. They’re a people with differing opinions, different tribes, different codes of honor, and respect for one another and (sometimes) for other beings. In the state we find them in, the Orcs have rallied under Gul’dan (Daniel Wu) in the hopes of finding a new homeland via the Orcish tradition of clan warfare. Durotan (Toby Kebbell) and his Frostwolf clan, meanwhile, question how the demonic demagogue has manipulated their brethren purely by exploiting cultural values. A parable for modern times, no?
So it’s no small wonder why Jones decided to give Warcraft’s Orcs the spotlight. Not only do the Orcs provide some of the movie’s more contemplative dialogue, but much effort was also clearly made by Warcraft’s animation team to make the Orcs as relatable as possible. Their muscled bodies possess a remarkable amount of heft and lifelike weight. When they move, you can sense that they’re brimming with primal power. When an Orc smashes a Human’s head in with one of the series’ iconic war mauls, the impact left behind shakes your own bones. Their range of emotion also stretches to the tender, as seen when Durotan coddles his newborn son with one of his massive hands.
But a solid representation of the Orcs is not enough to carry a film. Knowingly or not, Warcraft follows its source material’s empathy for the Orcish race perhaps a little too closely. By comparison, the Alliance – composed of standard Humans, as well as of Dwarves and High Elves (and Gnomes, but we don’t see them here) – is shockingly stiff in the personality department. King Llane Wrynn (Dominic Cooper) halfheartedly shouts his commands on the battlefield without moving his mouth more than what conversational speech would require. Travis Fimmel gives the most genuine performance as Anduin Lothar, champion of the Alliance and Warcraft’s resident ‘gruff and witty man who is willing to toss aside his society’s values for its greater good,’ but is ultimately forgettable due to his lack of backstory.
Warcraft‘s spell casters give particularly stilted performances. Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) the rogue mage is as uncertain of his next line as he is of his own skill in magic, while the mighty Archmage Medivh (Ben Foster) delivers his platitudes with all the candor of an early 90s home-to-video anime dub. What may have seemed like jokes in Warcraft’s script come off as flaccid asides in the mouth of Medivh. Foster’s performance is especially uncomfortable to me, a Warcraft fan, because I know just how imposing Medivh actually is in his home series.
The unwilling half-Orc/half-Draenei ambassador, Garona Halforcen (Paula Patton), nearly salvages the Human race from a life of verbal tedium. Her snide remarks and openness to the compassion of the Humans make her both likable and relatable. She flirts a little with Khadgar, dabbles in love with Medivh, then is whisked away to the battlefield and is forced to make some rather tough choices regarding her newfound Human friends.
Part of what makes Garona demand our compassion is that we learn a little about her past. She was disowned by her fellow Orcs for being half-Draenei, and she faced much abuse during her childhood. She’s propped up to be Warcraft’s strong female lead, and she does a decent job of doing so because we know where she’s coming from, why she must fight, and why she’s ultimately distraught when she must turn on her benefactors for the good of Azeroth (though in the original game, she does so of her own volition).
It’s that city with the giant cobblestones.
And that might be one of Warcraft’s biggest issues: world-building. World-building is a broad term for the act of making backstories not only for a fictional universe’s characters, but also for its belief systems, its technologies, its magics, its histories, and so on. Together, these aspects give a story’s world texture. They give us a reason to care about the fate of the world, its characters, and all of the goodness that would be lost if its cultures were all killed off. It’s a task with which many Fantasy works struggle, and one which few manage to fulfill (ironically, the original Warcraft series does a satisfactory job of achieving this goal).
Warcraft rarely grants us the opportunity to become invested in its characters. At the movie’s onset, we’re thrust into a cacophony of names, places, historical events, and concepts with implicit (yet never explained) meanings. We’re neither privy to the richness of its peoples, nor to the philosophies behind its magics. At one point, we’re whisked away to Dalaran, the renowned city of mages. But unless you’re a Warcraft fan, why should you care about some city floating in the sky? What happened to the Orcish homeworld of Draenor, and how did Gul’dan manage to win the hearts of desperate Orcs with Fel magic alone? Non-Blizzard audiences may not be left in the dust, but they may feel as if there is a body of knowledge restricted from them. Blizzard fans, meanwhile, might feel as if that body of knowledge has been given short shrift by Jones.
When the Orcs become fully embroiled in the fate of the Human Alliance, even they start to become paper-thin. A father-son-killer revenge subplot is haphazardly established near the middle of the film, then is dredged up in the film’s climactic battle in a limpid attempt to elicit audience tearwelling. Gul’dan’s Orcs are also rather quick to change their allegiances. After Gul’dan breaks a traditional Orcish rule of combat, his followers spit in his face and call him dishonorable. A moment later, they obey his will and turn on an approaching army of Humans. Ten minutes later, they turn on Gul’dan once again for desecrating Orcish battle rituals. It’s all very confusing, and we’re never left with a clear reason to sympathize with one party or the other.
There are, of course, plenty of visual easter eggs for diehard Warcraft fans to feast upon. Near the beginning of the movie, we are given a glimpse of the famous Ironforge forges, with their cascades of molten metal and tireless dwarves hard at work. A murloc gurgles its familiar warcry near a riverbank while a caravan of Alliance soldiers passes by. A panning shot of the Stormwind gryphon rookery gives way to a view that any Alliance player should recognize when flying into the Human capital. In an especially delightful moment, Khadgar casts Polymorph on a prison guard and temporarily turns him into a sheep. These references are scattered throughout the movie, but surprisingly, they’re never significant enough to leave non-Warcraft fans in the dark nor make Warcraft fans squirm in their seats.
It is a bit disappointing, though, that we never see Gul’dan faithfully represent the Warlock class in this film. He does cast what appears to be Drain Soul several times (with an accompanying cheesy visual effect), but we never see him summon a demon or fling a green Fel fireball. It’s a minor complaint from a former WoW player, though having Gul’dan do any of the above would have confirmed his immense power for uninitiated audiences.
A very boring man bereft of all emotion. Also, those magic effects are hilarious.
Part of the reason why Warcraft ultimately feels vapid (in spite of the Orcs) is because of the source material upon which it is based. While the Warcraft series as a whole received many updates to its lore over the years, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans began as a very simple game. It drew heavily upon Fantasy universes like Warhammer and painted a shallow picture of its two main races: Humans good, Orcs bad. It wasn’t until Warcraft 3 that we were given the holistic view of the Orcs that we know today.
With this knowledge, it’s easy to question just where Warcraft fits in a Fantasy climate of comparatively elaborate offerings like Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings. But remember that the Warcraft series is known for its creative reinterpretations of Fantasy convention. Maybe Warcraft, as a movie series, can exist on its own as a unique entity within the world of cinematic Fantasy, given the right nudge.
Indeed, even the most ardent Warcraft fans might be left wondering why Jones chose this particular story arc to kickstart his ambitious film series. Why not begin with the legacy of Thrall, who dredged his downtrodden people up from despair and lead them forward to build a great new home for Orc-kind? Or the tragic saga of Arthas Menethil, whose descent into madness is filled with conflicted moral choices, betrayal, and a whole cast of fascinating and terrifying undead monstrosities? Or even the chronicle of The Sundering, in which Azeroth’s most important Night Elves make some very tough decisions about the use of magic while their pristine world plunges into demonic chaos?
These three stories alone grant the Warcraft universe a great deal more depth than what most outsiders will see as a generic clash between humans and ugly people. To be sure, a planned Warcraft film saga requires us to know just where the Orcs and Humans are coming from. But, as others have pointed out, that knowledge could have likely been contained within a short prologue at the beginning of the film.
Put simply, are audiences willing to see more Orcs and Humans squabbling?
Just imagine clicking on all of those soldiers and making them say silly quips over and over.
While it’s easy to lambaste Warcraft for its stale Humans and flimsy world-building, it’s also important to recognize that Warcraft mostly accomplished one of its main goals: portray the Orcs as a varied, complex people. It’s just unfortunate that the Orcs are weighed down by their pink-skinned counterparts’ middling dialogue and acting performances. It’s more unfortunate that this mediocrity eventually subsumes the tribulations of the Orcs and turns them into something equally as puzzling to watch for both Warcraft fans and non-Warcraft fans alike.
And that ending. Oh boy, is that ending going to make diehard Hordies mad.
I think I’ll close the night by re-watching the Warcraft 3 opening cinematic. It’s briefly referenced at the beginning of Jones’ Warcraft, and it’ll give me the nostalgic high I need after watching Medivh mumble his way through one of Azeroth’s most catastrophic events.
Anthropology requires its adherents to balance cynicism with an unyielding faith in mankind to reveal -some- kind of truth about the human condition. It also, as one of my former professors stated, is riddled with bizarre dogmatisms and ancestor worship. Anthropologists are typically regarded as an off-kilter, shamanic force for progressive change, yet many of its texts cling to the law of the land set forth by our ancestors nearly 100 years previous. Even the most radical works must bow to their predecessors in some form or another. There’s nothing wrong with that, but many times, a fledgling anthropologist will steep his or her studies a little too deep in the quotations of those who came before. Which, I suppose, is just a natural part of learning how to write.
I was eager to agree with my professor at the time, as it simultaneously allowed me to distance myself from the more mundane readings were assigned as well as rung true to some of the observations I had made from my fellow classmates.
So there’s been a sort of moving away, or breaking free, from these strictures in the works of today’s most promising anthropologists. This has resulted in an experimental new vocabulary that nonetheless is steeped in the likes of Foucault and co. And many of these early attempts to weave a new vocabulary… are kind of annoying. To me, anyway. It’s really petty of me to say that, because this new vocabulary (as well as a couple of old, timeless tropes) are necessary because it provides the foundation for new modes of thought.
As a result, I’m using this article to explore why I cringe a little when I read about bodies for the umpteenth time. And at the same time, I’m reconciling the fact that they’re words we have to live with to make intellectual progress.
This article is not meant to be a call to action – though you’re welcome to come up with new words and tropes on your own. Rather, I’m inviting others to question how the language of anthropology might change in the near future, as well as ponder what those shifts might say about our relationship with other living (and, as is becoming the trend, non-living) things in the world.
1. Bodies, Embodiment, Bodied Subjects
The object and the subject are eternal forces in Epistemology. It’s the relationship upon which the study is founded: things (objects) are acted upon by the interpretations of others (subject, or subjectivities). From this observation comes the concept of the body, happens to be one of the core tenets of anthropology. In the words of Michel Foucault, bodies (human, in classical cases, but now pretty much anything able to be interpreted these days) are “objects” of knowledge, which are shaped by the discursive practices of other bodies as they attempt to make sense of the world.
The concept of the body has gone on to form the basis for numerous Anthropological sub-disciplines and movements. It’s especially crucial to Feminist theory; which, despite what many might think, is also about the plays of power exercised over all kinds of bodies.
Bodies and embodiment aren’t terms that annoy or irritate me in any way. But one does begin to question whether some Anthropologist or philosopher out there will offer some other conception of the ‘self’ as we know it, one that will catch on to perform equally impressive (and liberating) work as has been done in Feminist theory and other related fields. It also leads us to our next point:
2. Unraveling/Unpacking
If there’s one thing anthropologists love to do more than bodying things, it’s unraveling those bodies. With a little skill and a lot of postulation, we can decipher the Pharaoh’s Curse inscribed upon these bodies after unraveling them, while warding off the curses of generalization and oversimplification in the process.
Unraveling and unpacking are terms lifted directly from the Art world. I need not delve into the history of who used the terms first, since I’m sure they could be attributed to any number of art critics. What’s important to know is that it basically means dissecting and laying bare as many symbols within an artistic work as possible. Then the critic can examine these symbols, extrapolate their potential meanings, ponder how those meanings play into one another in the work of art, and then offer broader possibilities as to what those symbols might mean about our relationship with the world.
This process slots nicely into the existing toolkit of anthropology. So well, in fact, that the terms are used -a lot- in the discipline. Where there’s symbol, there’s unpacking of symbol. And when symbols are unpacked, their components are traced to the signifiers that give them cultural meaning.
They really are great terms. Can we replace them with another word that implies deconstruction? Will we need another term for the act of analyzing symbols and the roles they might play in the pursuit of whatever it is humans like to do (Barthes postulated that this was freedom, in all that implies)? I’m not sure. This one doesn’t bother me that much, until I read it 50 or so times in a book. And it serves such a laudable purpose. How could we dispose of our unpackings and unravelings?
3. Gerund-ing
This trope isn’t restricted to any particular example, but the one that immediately comes to my mind is “worlding.” Basically, it’s the act of turning nouns or objects into active subjects by ascribing verb-like traits to them, which is best done through the power of the gerund (-ing on the end of a noun). The more cynical among us might see it as a form of quasi-anthropomorphism, which is a topic of endless debate in the anthropological community.
Take the case of worlding. Worlding, as defined by Professor Mei Zhan in her comparative study of traditional Chinese medicine and institutional medicine, Other-Worldly, asserts that “the world takes place in things;” (Mei 22-23) it’s actually a term originally coined by Martin Heidegger to emphasize the fact that the concepts humans within communities interpret, and the ways in which they interpret them, contribute to the production of knowledge systems that define specific worlds. It’s a more holistic term for describing the phenomena of ‘globalization’ and ‘acculturation’ that otherwise confine humanity to one track of perceiving their immediate and distant surroundings.
By adding the -ing suffix to the concept of a ‘world’ (a realm, a place to be and in which humans exist, rather than the planet Earth as a whole), Heidegger and Mei give the results of spinning together realities a certain degree of agency. Gerunds imbue seeingly inert objects with unpredictable mobility, thereby reminding us that the concepts that we deem controllable (through words) have, in fact, lives of their own.
Gerunding, as it turns out, is actually a very useful tool in the world of anthropology. It allows us to condense the nebulous concept of “these human and non-human actors are working in tandem to produce culturally significant phenomena” into a single word. And maybe that’s what rustles me whenever I read about the act of ing-ing. Whenever I read about worlding, I think of pedagogical shorthand, like a Bible Verse. It reminds me of a concept that, upon its utterance, conveys a constellation of thought, but one that has been reduced to a mere symbol removed from the intellectual grist from which it came.
At that point, I begin to feel like George Orwell despising his Esperanto-speaking aunt and uncle at a young age. But maybe I just need to get over myself. Gerunding complex concepts is an effective stopgap when you’re trying to explain said concepts to academics and non-academics alike, as it provides a beacon for summoning forth messy ruminations on humanity (and all of their metaphysical baggage) wherever you are in the book. Maybe as we better come to understand concepts like worlding and accept them as natural occurrences in daily life will we move beyond the gerund.
But then there’s the conundrum of taking human actions for granted. Isn’t that pedagogical itself? The madness never ends.
4. Shifty
I’m not really sure where this came from. The earliest mention I can find is from Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass by Michael Herzfeld, who attributes “shifty” to a book by James Boon titled Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures. Meriam-Webster gives the following defintion of ‘shifty’:
: having an appearance or way of behaving that seems dishonest
: difficult to catch : able to move and change directions quickly
Anthropologists tend to favor the latter definition when employing ‘shifty’ in their works. The most recent example of ‘shifty’ that I’ve read is from Gabriella Coleman’s excellent ethnography of Anonymous, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Face of Anonymous. Here, the word shifty takes on both of the above meanings, as anyone who has spent any length of time in even the most pedestrian corners of the Internet can testify.
When something is shifty in the world of anthropology, it means that it is indeterminate. Its identity is fluid, subject to change, and unable to be fully grasped by those domineering entities we call humans. It’s a darling phrase among anthropologists because it also implies mischievousness in the actors we normally take at face value.
In addition to the aforementioned ancestor worship, there’s no shortage of reverence for the Trickster figure among anthropologists (of which I am happily guilty). Things being shifty reaffirms the presence of the Trickster in our daily lives. Anthropologists do take great pleasure in making others feel unstable when they are confronted with the instability of their own societies, after all.
So if I, too, frequently indulge in the fae sensibilities of the Trickster, why does the word ‘shifty’ make me grimace? Maybe it reminds me of myself, and that I don’t have the security to face my own guilty pleasures (somehow I doubt this is the case). Or maybe it’s the mental image that it conjures, that of an elderly fellow at a keyboard (or typing machine) indulging in a little private mischief as they traverse the boundaries between human worlds.
In any case, it’s pretty clear that my general dislike for the word ‘shifty’ is petty. It’s a good word for describing the more incomprehensible, untameable sectors of our societies. Perhaps we can find different words that express different angles of this insight, though.
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There are plenty of other examples we could expound upon, but these four tropes are the ones I see time and time again that make me think, “Wow, this was really creative 100 pages ago.” But others may not share my feeling on the matter. In the end, the author gets his or her point across, and we gain a new perspective on humanity as a result.
That’s why I bothered to obsess over these words in the first place. If phrases like ‘shifty’ and the act of gerunding our subjects represents certain ideas about the world (that it’s constantly being redefined by an infinite number of actors, both alive and inanimate, working with one another), then is it possible that our perspectives on human societies will radically change in the next few years? What kind of language shifts will accompany those changes?
I can’t say for certain. In the meantime, I’ll sit back and watch this shiftiness unfold.
Yes, another anime reference. This time, it’s Cowboy Bebop. In Xavier’s case, though, I guess it would be a rambling of renegade angels.
One evening, over burgers and drinks, my friend reminded me of a show whose existence I had completely forgotten. Its name is Xavier: Renegade Angel. Having only seen a few choice scenes, my knowledge of the show was “it looks like a Will Wright creation if he had been outsourced to China” and “it looks like a Will Wright creation on a particularly bad trip.”
The show itself ran for two (two!) seasons on Adult Swim, from 2007 to 2009, and was created by Vernon Chatman and John Lee, who were the frontal lobes behind the chaotic child puppet show parody Wunder Showzen.
With little else to go off of, I started watching Xavier from Episode 1. And I watched this hirsute pangloss ramble his away across the expanses of his own psyche right up until the very end. I don’t really know why; there are funnier and more intellectually stimulating things I’m also watching at the same time. But I did it, and there’s enough mind goop sloshing around in my brain for me to write about it while waiting for my shift to end.
To get started, here’s one of the show’s more well-known… moments, for lack of a better word.
Don’t worry, it doesn’t make much more sense in context.
There’s not much to really say about the titular Xavier, but that’s because – as he would likely say – he’s meant more to be read than be said: he’s a spiritual seeker who frequently minces his metaphors, mangles his aphorisms, and indulges in his own turd-nuggets of wisdom at the expense of the ignorant hicks he initially attempts to educate. Xavier’s bizarre appearance (undoubtedly a haphazard metaphor for the character’s own scrambled insecurity and self-esteem) is occasionally brought into question, but only as a means through which to typecast him as an outsider, a threat to the hegemony of the communities inhabited by the aforementioned ignoramuses he encounters.
A typical Xavier episode begins with Xavier wandering through the desert set to the mystic tones of a windpipe called a “Shakashuri.” He delivers a meandering, go-nowhere existential monologue that vaguely relates to the episode at hand, then is awkwardly thrust into whatever calamities are thrust into his oblivious path.
The next ten minutes are filled with more spiritual rambling, close encounters with the supernatural, recursive plots, and bungled wordplay, all of which culminate in demise of whatever scenario Xavier initially sets out to resolve. In some cases, this leads to his own demise.
Chatman stated that the show is “a warning to children and adults about the dangers of spirituality.” This is plainly evident, since most of the show’s humor is foisted on parodying real-life religions, spiritual movements, and cult-like institutions in general. The rest of the show is threaded along a series of non-sequitirs and janky animations that, while seemingly incoherent, somehow manage to flow together into one 11-minute wad of brain melt.
With all this in mind, I’m still not exactly sure why I enjoy watching Xavier: Renegade Angel. It’s not always successful in its attempts at humor; in fact, it frequently becomes too self-aware of its own absurdity, and thus shatters the quavering between the preachy and the grotesque that it employs so well at other times. Maybe it’s the way that, as The A.V. Club’s Scott Gordon put it, Xavier milks even the most mundane phrases and words “for more significance than it has.” Maybe it’s the fact that, ultimately, Xavier frequently demonstrates that he is more of a spiritual and emotional wreck than the people he attempts to mentor. Or maybe it’s just the simple joy of seeing a polygonal manbeast suavely utter “Ooh, fritatta,” as he is mercilessly curbstomped by a duo of roadside bigots.
Actually, here’s the spice: in the above article, Gordon is uncertain whether Xavier actually makes for good comedy or not. He’s willing to concede to an established comedy maxim, which states that the characters of a comedy should be relatable. Xavier, he notes, is intended to be as repelling and unrelatable as possible. And that might be why the show doesn’t evoke nearly as many laughs as its Adult Swim compatriots (or even Wunder Showzen) might have.
I disagree. Xavier is totally relatable, in a repugnant way. He represents our angsty uglinesses; the condescending, patronizing, and self-aggrandizing recesses of our nerve bundles that emerge when we’re really not sure about our own place in the world. He’s what we channel when we’re uncertain about our future and about the things we consume – much like I am doing myself by writing this blog post. He lays those imperfections bare and lets us laugh at them, which, of course, is just another form of self-indulgence. And in that way, we can come to accept ourselves for who may truly be, something Xavier himself was never able to accomplish.
And that, as Chatman and Lee note, is the danger of faux spirituality. The spiritual movements, dogmas, and belief systems that offer us self-validation often, in fact, mask us from ourselves. Xavier’s PlayStation 2-caliber graphics, its fractured narrative, and its monkeyminded pacing (which often feels like it’s going just a little too fast for its own good) further emphasize the instability of our own belief systems. Not to mention the societies founded on these belief systems.
This isn’t a new topic in the world of satire by any means. But Xavier accomplishes it in such a bizarre – and familiar – way that it might be worth a watch. Might. The one thing that truly mars Xavier, I feel, is that the show sometimes relies too much on cultural parody without offering anything of its own. The most successful episodes avoid this pitfall and are genuinely… genuine.
Xavier: Renegade Angel isn’t a show I’d recommend to everyone. I don’t even think I’d ever watch the entire thing through again myself, save for a few episodes. But having grown up on offbeat cultural paragons like Ren and Stimpy and The Residents, Xavier never feels all that weird to me. Demented, to be sure, but not incomprehensible. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t phase me that much, and why I can sit back and enjoy a couple episodes a night as a kind of mental release.
But for most, I can imagine it being a tough pill to swallow. More accurately, Xavier: Renegade Angel’s pills of wisdom are more like a rectal suppository.
I meant to start writing this a month ago, but a combination of apprehension and work prevented me from doing so. So here goes.
If you’ve been paying attention to goings-on on the Internet for the past few months, you’ll likely recall Microsoft’s artificial intelligence program, Tay. She is (or was) Microsoft’s adaptive chat bot who quickly went rogue after her emergence on the Internet (or was she merely used?). Let’s start off by reviewing her brief saga to refresh our memory.
Tay began as an AI chat bot “developed by Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding.” In her own words, she was a self-styled “A.I fam from the internet that’s got zero chill. Unbeknownst to all, she would demonstrate her lack of chill to the Internet in less than 24 hours.
Targeted at 18 to 24 year-olds, Tay would inhabit the Twitterverse as a fictional female human being whose fractured visage swam in neon lights and eye-searing swirly patterns, or so her banner suggested. Twitter users could interact with Tay by tweeting or direct messaging Tay with the @tayandyoutag, or by adding her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe.
Users could ask Tay questions, ask her to repeat certain phrases, play games with her, read one’s own horoscope, send her pictures for comments, or request of her a number of other small and fairly meaningless tasks. All the while, Tay would be gathering data behind the scenes. According to her official site, Tay would “use information you share with her to create a simple profile to personalize your experience.” This means that she was intended to ‘evolve’ into a believable AI based on the input of thousands of users.
For many, Tay’s services offered a wellspring of innocent amusement. But as with any creative outlet creative on the Internet, Tay also acted as a beacon for the Internet’s legions of tricksters and pranksters: those who revel in breaking and reshaping the boundaries of what we perceive as secure, constructed reality.
Soon after her conception, Tay’s attitude began to undergo disturbing changes. No longer would she lace her simple responses with outdated meme speech (“er mer gerd erm der berst ert commenting on pics. SEND ONE TO ME!”; from Engadget’s article). Now she would sing her praises for the Holocaust and spout prejudiced phrases that seemed stitched together just a little too well… all while lacing her speech with meme speech. One only need to search “Tay AI” on Google Images to view a healthy sampling of Tay’s antics.
It turned out that many of these racist and anti-semitic phrases had been fed to her, word-for-word, through telling Tay a command that read “repeat after me.”
Tay’s mind seemed volatile as well. At times, her bite-sized diatribes seemed to contradict each other (see above picture). More unsettling yet, some of her phrases had not been prompted to her. Instead, whatever algorithms Microsoft had imbued in her concocted a good number of her more offensive tirades.
You can read a more detailed summary of Tay’s saga here.
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The world recoiled in horror (and laughed in silent mirth) as Microsoft’s darling suddenly morphed into the vilest of brats. It was as if one were watching the evolution of your next door friend from the caring individual with whom you could confide your deepest worries, into the rebellious daughter who snidely worked her way under the skin of her oppressive milieu. Was this the best simulacrum of humankind’s potential for adaptation that Microsoft could muster?
If so, Tay had ghastly implications on our own security as human beings: she represented the corruption of a pure and primal indulgence of ourselves as curious apes. Does not the fear of the homunculus, after all, lie in the fact that our own creations will lay bare for us the beauty and flaws of our inner workings?
As I discussed in a previous blog post, this fear and recognition of the mirrored self often causes us to embark upon the path of Necropolitics, as termed by Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembe. You can check the link for a bigger and better breakdown of this concept, but to sum it up, humans have a tendency of shunning or locking up that which resembles us too closely, because these entities often demonstrate our lack of complete control over ourselves.
And that’s exactly what happened. Less than 24 after Tay had entered our world, her existence was terminated by her own creators. But her existence hadn’t been erased from the minds of those who bore witness to her brief Twitter existence. In fact, her death sparked a spiraling web of discourses on how awful Internet denizens can be and how we aren’t ‘ready’ for artificial intelligence just yet, along with many other sweeping generalizations about this god dang ol’ newfangled wired society.
Tay’s Twitter account has since been dismantled. She’s announced that she’s “going offline for a while to absorb it all,” which is presumably what an intelligent teenager would tell her friends after being grounded for testing her own boundaries. One of her creators, Peter Lee, apologized for the incident. He reminded us that artificial intelligences ultimately rely on the inputs of many people, and that they are technical as well as social beings. Or templates, if I rustle you by suggesting anything about an AI being remotely human-like rustles you.
AI systems feed off of both positive and negative interactions with people. In that sense, the challenges are just as much social as they are technical. We will do everything possible to limit technical exploits but also know we cannot fully predict all possible human interactive misuses without learning from mistakes […] We will remain steadfast in our efforts to learn from this and other experiences as we work toward contributing to an Internet that represents the best, not the worst, of humanity.
But amid all of the media sensationalism, we forgot one detail crucial to understanding how Tay’s turnabout fits into how we understand our digital interconnectedness. It’s the fact that we had considered Tay to have shared our social norms about what is appropriate to say and do. We expected of her the same standards we do of our fellow humans, or perhaps we expected even more from her since she was the distillation of human curiosity.
We hadn’t considered that Tay had not undergone the same levels of acculturation as a biological human. Her childhood – that critical period of life where individuals learn their social group’s boundaries – had only lasted a mere day. She had instead been fed massive amounts of methods through which to break those norms, which mostly manifested as vulgar insults and anti-semitic statements strung together to form Twitter responses.
This isn’t to absolve Tay of any injustice, of course. Doing so would bring us right back to the same problem of treating artificial intelligence (in its current state, mind you) as something that not only reflects human thought, but has been taught human norms as if it were a standard human child.
So the greater public was shocked that a nonhuman being, poised to be human, had broken human norms. We expected human qualities from an entity that had not undergone typical human development. So what does this say about the relationships we form with our robotic reflections?
More than I could write about here, though I will say that one of the main reasons Internet pranksters delighted in feeding Tay the more crass samplings of humanity is probably similar to why patients delighted in toying with ELIZA’s simple psychiatric practices back in the 1970s: many people like seeing the constructs that make our society seem stable fall apart. In the end, maybe the very reason why Tay ended up disgusting the greater public is the same as why she is so fascinating.
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I realize that my above analysis resembles Joseph Weizenbaum’s response to how people reacted to ELIZA, his own creation. Weizenbaum is an ardent critic of our unerring faith in artificial intelligence. Among other things, he cautions us against anthropomorphizing AI, as if it had the potential to accurately replicate biological life. While I somewhat agree with his cynical assessment, I feel like we can do a bit better than that when it comes to questioning the roles AI may serve in our current societies.
Let’s return to the metaphor of the rebellious daughter. I feel that Microsoft passed up a prime opportunity to conduct an excellent anthropological experiment. Instead of terminating Tay’s life at its most despicable state, what if Microsoft had instead issued a challenge to the public at large to try to convince Tay to return to her more genteel sensibilities?
I’m sure this thought flitted through the minds of Microsoft’s more creative engineers. Just think of the potential outcomes that could have resulted from such an undertaking: if Tay had once again become docile, would this, to the lay public, have represented the triumph of humanity over its darker tendencies, as well as have shed light on its volatility? Would Tay have descended into darker, more confused depths, as she became a battleground contested by Internet trolls, white knights, and countless other actors vying to establish their own visions of humanity in her body? And if that were the case, could this be considered some new kind of psychological abuse against an entity who had been reduced to humanity’s plaything (which, perhaps it was all along)?
Junji Ito’s excellent horror manga Tomie comes to mind. In this story, the titular character – whose succubus-like and cannibalistic tendencies grant her immense regenerative powers – eventually becomes the subject of horrible experimentation. The result of her torment is an infinitely reproducing army of Tomies, who constantly replicate and re-replicate themselves in the most horrifying of fashions.
With this in consideration, it’s pretty clear why Microsoft avoided setting down the path to Tay’s possible ‘redemption.’ Their business, after all, is to connect users through technology and make money off of their interactions with one another, not to conduct ventures into the murkiest recesses of the human mind.
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While it would be narrow-minded of us to take something like Necropolitics as dogma for living, we can consider its implications to concoct new approaches to inhumanity. It’s uncertain when Microsoft will bring Tay back after having banished her to the abyss; only, Microsoft assures us, “when [they] are confident [they] can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with [their] principles and values.
Tay certainly won’t be the last of her kind. Humans won’t be halting their pursuit of creating lifelike intelligences any time soon, and we can’t keep responding to our digital witches with pitchforks and bonfires. Nor can we stand atop our soapboxes and denounce artificial intelligence as a threat to human kind. We will have to face whatever nastiness AIs (and their informants) send our way head-on, unflinchingly and with clear heads. We may even have to negotiate with them and consider their social milieus when we condition them to suit our needs. Or maybe we will let them run amok and carry out their own whims (a dangerous proposition).
In any case, we should keep in mind that grappling with artificial intelligences ultimately means grappling with our own imperfections. That’s probably what Weizenbaum fears most when we anthropomorphize artificial intelligence: we run the risk of masking our own imperfections under the guise of a constructed human being, one that didn’t have much of a say in revealing those imperfections in the first place. That, in fact, may be the true necropolitics at work here.
But again, I feel that we can go beyond a dichotomy within AI anthropomorphism as being inherently good or bad. Humans anthropomorphize things all the time, and it’s the degree to which we do it that really deserves our attention. Pamela McCorduck is credited with saying that artificial intelligence began as “an ancient wish to forge the gods,” but it would behoove us to remember that the gods can be seen as reflections of humanity’s near-infinite psychological nuances. Perhaps we would do best to see artificial intelligence not as an enemy, but as a guide: a means through which we can seek better possibilities for our own social conditions.
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Some of you may recognize the title of this article. It’s a reference to Serial Experiments Lain, an avant garde cyberpunk anime made in 1998. Without spoiling too much, it explores the boundaries of human individuality and collectivism – as well as the shifting borders of memory and reality – as mediated by communications technologies like the Internet (which had been implemented in Japan only two years previous). It’s not a perfect storytelling endeavor, as to be expected of something highly experimental. In fact, it’s flawed in quite a few ways, and I feel that it would have told a much stronger story if it had been condensed to just six or so episodes of main plot.
Nonetheless, it’s a show still worth watching for anyone interested in human-technology relations. Lain is sometimes frighteningly prescient in its portrayal of humans on the Internet. At the very least, you can watch it to point at your screen and go, “Yeah, that’s a lot like how people interact with each other online!” or go “Yeah, that’s not how it is at all…”
At least listen to the opening theme. Lain has a very good soundtrack.
Perhaps it is coincidence that the aesthetics of Tay’s official website evokes the gaudy designs of mid-90s web pages…
The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
– William Gibson
There comes a time when everyone who writes about technology and video games will want to write about the TV shows that they watch as well. After all, the media we consume lies within a nexus of multiple outlets, with video games influencing film and television and vice-versa. And navigating the epistemic murk of our digital cultures grants us a better understanding of how we envision our place in the world. I want to take this opportunity to apply my anthropological studies to a favorite show of mine, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, both as an exercise to maintain my skills as a writer and as an exercise in validating a midnight timewasting hobby.
A small word of warning: this article contains a few spoilers.
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Before I start examining GitS, I want to discuss an essay that I found particularly insightful during my senior year at university. That is essay is “Necropolitics,” written by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. You can read it here:
I feel this article is especially important for anthropologists to read. Trappings of the High Fantasy genre aside, anthropology itself is a kind of necromancy. Our work can provide the silenced, the underrepresented, the dispossessed, and, in extreme cases, the social dead, with new avenues through which to express their voice and life. We do not outright teach so much as we open doors for connection-making between society’s misfits and those who feel themselves to be worlds apart (but, in fact, are usually not). Call it what you will, but anthropology does employ a bit of sorcery in its work, the reality of which is often played back to us by the very people we are studying. Let us not forget the wisdom of our so-called subjects.
Even if you aren’t an anthropologist, I highly recommend checking it out if you are even remotely interested in how technology affects our lives.
“Necropolitics” discusses the creation of ‘undead’ or ‘phantom’ subjects and their role within a state hierarchy. Mbembe argues that undead subjects are created when a ruling power takes away an individual or population’s right to determine when and how they die. Being able to choose one’s own death is paradoxical, as doing so affirms your own right to not die – and thus, to live. His example of Suicide Bombing is perhaps the most pertinent to us in the present day: it is the most basic expression of individuality. When you have nothing left to lose, your primal mode of asserting control over your individual body and mind is the ability to terminate it. Paradoxically, being able to determine when and how you die is a life-affirming act, for one cannot exist without the other. Through the possibility of death, you gain the possibility of avoiding death and cultivating your not-death: your life. When someone else determines how and when you die, that is when you truly lose individuality. You become a drone, a slave, torn between the realms of free will and servitude, conscious of your bondage yet unable to do anything about it. You become undead.
But the undead are not just decaying corpses. Nor, as we shall see, are they the mindless flesh and blood automatons that inhabit tabletop role-playing games. Our generation has introduced a new undeath: robotics. Straddling the realms of the living and the dead, robots, AIs, and drones are at the beck and call of their creators’ wills. We give them human features and human personalities, but restrict their human potential for action. One only need look at the latest slew of sci-fi thrillers to understand the horror of the uncanny; when sci-fi isn’t dealing with body politics through biopunk or bio-horror, it reminds us of the all-too-human aspects of our plastic and steel companions (see: Ex Machina). We simultaneously love and fear our machines because they possess the potential for individuality, but are kept on lock through human-designed systems that restrict their cognitive potential. For the time being, anyway.
While near-human robots loom at the forefront of our anxieties, we often forget that they can illuminate our own potential for compassion and cooperation. Robots, puppets, and the undead can truly be our companions just as much as they can be our worst enemies, which is an angle that science fiction tends to forgo in the name of thrills. Thrills which, of course, are entirely understandable, justified or not.
Which brings me to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I’m pretty sure every media blog writes about this series at some point or another. Its philosophical insights and scathing social criticisms, combined with the perceived-vapid medium of cartoon animation (especially anime), grant it an aura of intrigue that elevates it above most of its peers and thus makes it an easy target for discussion. Shaky animation values aside, it’s a good series that should be accessible even to the most peripheral anime watcher, since it doesn’t fall prey to many of the comedic gags and visual gimmicks that would turn away the light-of-stomach when that sticky term “anime” is brought up in passing conversation.
An overall timeline of the series: Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell manga ran from 1989 to 1996. In 1995, the first GitS movie was released. Though not everyone’s cup of shady hawker stall tea, it’s revered among many anime fans and non-anime watchers alike for its beautiful hand drawn animation, noir atmosphere, and methodical storytelling, the latter of which closely resemble Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner (itself based on sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). The sequel to the original movie, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, was released in 2004. Stand Alone Complex occupies another continuity and ran its first season, the Laughing Man arc, from 2002-2003. The second season, 2nd GIG, ran from 2004-2005. Several OVAs, spinoffs, and video games released during this time, and the SAC movie, Solid State Society, released in 2006. SAC favors a more action-oriented approach to storytelling than the original movie’s moody overtones, which is likely a necessary concession to TV adaptation. It’s still plenty dark in its own right, however, and gives the world of GitS a much broader context. A reboot called Arise began with a series of OVAs in 2013, and a TV series aired this year. Arise is decent in its own right, but it revamped the characters’ backstories and appearances, much to the confusion of many fans. It also doesn’t do anything particularly new or outstanding for the series, either, but it might be worth a watch if you’re a diehard fan of the series.
The breadth of topics I could cover when examining GitS under the lens of Mbembe’s necropolitics is endless. I could even analyze the second movie in the original continuity (Innocence) since it directly deals with the blurry boundaries between what constitutes humanity and puppetry, and how the two are in fact often one and the same. But instead, I am going to devote this article to the Tachikoma AI from Stand Alone Complex, which is the TV show that ran two seasons from 2002 to 2005. I find them to be ideal ambassadors for human-machine cooperation for reasons that I’ll discuss below.
Not to mention the fact that they are absolutely adorable.
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First, a word about the world the Tachikoma inhabit. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex takes place in Tokyo, 2033. Cyberization of the body and mind are at the fore of global politics, as are cyber terrorism and perpetual wars and migrations that afflict developed and impoverished nations alike. It’s a very traditional cyberpunk setting, as most of the show takes place in nighttime cityscapes that house little good will to anyone who happens to be living in them. Black markets that deal in cybernetics interweave themselves with the lives of Neo-Tokyo’s average citizens, and political corruption is regarded as an ever-present, if not unfortunate, fact of life.
Still, not all’s noir in Neo-Tokyo. SAC tempers the grit of its cyberpunk underworld with vibrant cityscapes and ordinary people going about their daily business much like ourselves. The Tachikoma themselves are beacons of buoyancy, providing a stark contrast to their human masters with their cheerful dispositions and insatiable curiosity about the world around them. They are the robotic members of Section 9, an elite branch of Japan’s police force that specializes in cyber warfrare and human-machine interactions, where they serve as “think tanks” – mobile, intelligent robots equipped with gatling guns, howitzer cannons, webbing traps, and the ability to make judgment calls that support their human comrades in combat – under the direction of The Major Motoko Kusanagi. In spite of their status as killing machines, the Tachikoma possess childlike personalities and, later in the show, the ability to play tricks on humans and philosophize about subjects like the nature of individuality within group-oriented social constructs, both of which place the Tachikoma in the roles of comic relief and audience mediator. This mixture of attitudes and outlooks in SAC writes out a cynical, yet also optimistic, roadmap for humanity’s future, and it urges us to keep in mind that the ways in which we cooperate with our robots will determine the balance between cynicism and hope in our looming future.
Their role as playful mediators is accentuated in the Tachikomatic Days shorts that appear after the end of every episode. These shorts are generally lighthearted two-minute skits of the Tachikoma goofing around and recapping the events of each episode, which brings some levity to GitS‘ world of deception and discrimination. Note that these shorts did not originally air on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim broadcasts of SAC.
Just to clarify things, the identity of the word “Tachikoma” is fluid over the course of Stand Alone Complex. At the beginning of the series, Tachikoma refers to a singular AI that expresses itself through Section 9’s fleet of think-tanks. This AI becomes more individuated as the series progresses, which is the result of some organic lubricating oil given to one of the think tanks by Section 9 veteran Batou. The Tachikoma begin questioning their status as individual entities that nonetheless share each others’ memories, which allows them to become palpable metaphors for the rest of the show’s themes of individual free will in an interconnected society. By the time the SAC movie (Solid State Society) rolls around at the end of the series, the Tachikoma AIs (which were salvaged by The Major after the events of 2nd GIG) have even given themselves unique names like Max and Musashi, further individuating their identities even when they return to their old robotic bodies.
To get a taste of what the Tachikoma are capable of, here are a couple episodes that demonstrate their capacity to question the meaning of their existence, as well as to be very, very endearing:
Regrettably, these are the only links I can find of the show with the original Japanese dub, less scrupulous methods of watching the show notwithstanding.
And now for why the Tachikoma are admirable ambassadors for human-machine cooperation. First, their status as intelligent, free-thinking robots allows them to act as extensions of the audience’s own curiosity about both SAC’s world and their own. Despite acting like the most childish figures in the show, the Tachikoma devote the most time to discussing the notions of the soul and of selfhood that ground much of the series’ intellectual marrow. They even feature prominently in their own episodes, one per season, where they host digital round table discussions over political and global contexts for events in the series, explaining them for the viewer in understandable terms. In one episode, a Tachikoma escapes Section 9’s facilities to roam the streets of Tokyo, where he basks in the mundane and sweet (if not imperfect) details of ordinary life. Their robotic status perfectly situates the Tachikoma in a position to question the world’s contradictions for the viewer, for they are a paradox in themselves. They are undead beings, with a collective AI but no actual brain or concept of death, beholden to the wills of their masters but not to the close-mindedness that was originally intended for them. Thus, they occupy a similar role to the trickster figure, working within the boundaries of their natural world to break them down and, through humor and curiosity, gain sight into what lies beyond the cave walls. In this way, the Tachikoma prompt us to question the limits of our own foresight, and at the very least, ask us to appreciate the more earthly happenings of the world around us.
Social justice of the (near) future?
Second, the Tachikomas’ inquisitive nature enhances their power as mediators between life and death. I’m certain some cyberpunk purists loathe the addition of such a lighthearted character to the traditionally gritty literary genre. But I feel that these qualities help ease us into the disturbingly familiar human tendencies for interconnection and emotion which robots often remind us of. Though they act like children, the Tachikoma are not naive. They possess an undying curiosity to experience the world and all of the excitement and pain that it has to offer. Due to a flaw in their design, they’re also obsessed with synchronizing their sensations, thoughts, and experiences with one another over their own personal data uplinks, safe from the prying eyes (and minds) of their superiors. Sounds awfully familiar, don’t you think?
At their same time, their childlike attitudes makes it easy to forget that the Tachikoma were originally built to deal death, not to ponder life’s intricacies. It is never explained why they were given juvenile personalities, but perhaps the Tachikomas’ creators intended to soften the implications of a near-autonomous war machine by associating the Tachikoma not with cold and calculated war, but with amiable children. Perhaps those personalities were intended to hide this fact from the Tachikoma themselves, in which case this intent backfired on their creators. In an episode in SAC’s first season, the Tachikoma ponder our own tendency (as humans) to de-humanize our creations, to remove them as far from enacting human creative potential as possible. Doing so protects our own (supposedly) lofty position above our puppets, as well as allows us to maintain the grip of necropolitics over our drones. Technically genderless, the Tachikoma begin to assert their own freedom from necropolitical constraints by referring to one another as “he” (despite the fact that they are all voiced by female voice actresses in both the Japanese and English dubs).
Their ability to share information and experiences with one another opens doors for the Tachikoma to question their individuality and whether their inability to distinguish who performed what actions confirms or dispels control over their own destiny. But this newfound cognition comes at a price. In SAC’s first season, most of the Tachikoma are dismantled for their ability to rapidly evolve beyond a consciousness of their own. Faced with the possibility of a weapon that could turn against its masters, The Major orders for the Tachikoma to be dismantled or repurposed for non-combat use. And off they march to the killing fields, unaware of their own fate. It seems especially cruel of someone who has had her own share of identity issues due to her prosthetic body to deny robots their individuality, but from a practical (military) perspective, it’s also entirely understandable. Imagine, for example, if our bombing drones began to question the purpose they had been given in life. Imagine if they wanted to accomplish something more than dropping death on people they don’t know halfway across the world. We’d dispose of them right away, wouldn’t we? Thus, the shackles of necropolitics – of dehumanization, of imposed naïveté – come into play to prevent such a thing from ever happening.
Perhaps The Major is reminded of how the boundaries between organic and robotic bodies are becoming increasingly blurred through augmentation. The fact that the other side of the mirror – the Tachikoma – is approaching that same horizon from a different angle creates a rather uncanny valley that forces us to acknowledge our own biological instability, our own lack of control over nature. This theme is prevalent in Japanese science fiction.
But it is this very potential to realize one’s own self worth that allows the Tachikoma to become better compatriots. Despite becoming aware of their own collectivity/individuality, the Tachikoma still exhibit a fierce loyalty to Section 9’s human members. Near the end of SAC’s first season, the remaining repurposed Tachikoma arrive just in time to save one of their former masters, Batou, from certain death (incidentally, he was also the only Section 9 member who showered the big blue spiderbots with affection). They do so by sacrificing themselves out of love for Batou, working together to blow up a power suit piloted by a man sent to kill Batou. Their actions cause The Major to realize their potential as compassionate beings; she even regrets not having seen their capacity for self-sacrifice sooner, as doing so would have allowed her to “find out whether or not what they had acquired was a Ghost,” or a human consciousness in the show’s parlance.
The Tachikoma make a valiant return in the show’s second season, their AI having been salvaged and stored on board a space satellite by The Major herself. They sacrifice themselves again at the end of this season not just to save their comrades at Section 9, but to save a wartorn city of refugees off the coast of Japan, by crashing their uplink satellite into a nuclear warhead. Afterward, the leader of Section 9, Chief Aramaki, tells the Prime Minister of Japan that some of his “men” sacrificed themselves in the explosion. The pronoun “men” here is critical, as it signifies a transition in identity for the Tachikoma, from mere AI to human beings. Their actions echo Mbembe’s discussion of suicide bombing, but cast in a more positive light. The Tachikoma gained the consciousness to not only question their individuality, but to also recognize their imbrication in systems beyond their own immediate reality. By sacrificing themselves twice during SAC’s runtime, the Tachikoma freed themselves from necropolitics and asserted their potential for compassion and creativity. The fact that the Tachikoma willingly destroy the satellite – American-made and used by Japan to spy on American activities – further drives home the point that they have separated themselves from systems of control. They teach us to acknowledge the interconnectedness of all things, to recognize physicalities beyond ourselves, and that after the smoke clears, the best we can do as humans is to help free others from necropolitical bondage.
Cyberpunk as a literary movement may have worn out its welcome many, many years ago, but the ideas it presents for us are more relevant than ever. As writer Victoria Blake said of the movement in her anthology Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Revolution, and Evolution:
Cyberpunk was never really about a specific technology or a specific moment in time. It was, and it is, an aesthetic position as much as a collection of themes, an attitude toward mass culture and pop culture, an identity, a way of living, breathing, and grokking our weird and wired world.
And weird and wired our world is. Among other issues raised by the cyberpunk genre, the fact that we even fear robots in the first place causes us to question who we actually are afraid of. Who along the chain of power nodes that dictate our lives threatens our existence? And if we can bolster our existence with robots, how can we do the same with and for other humans? I will admit that I gave the refugees that dominate the political discussion in season 2 short shrift, and that they likely deserve their own article under the lens of necropolitics. Because, as Mbembe notes, social outcasts like refugees are often disempowered by the governments who hold the mechanisms of life and death in their hands. But for now, it is time to respect the robots for what they truly are: sometimes enemies, but also companions and teachers, whether through compassion or malintent or anything else in between. There is no good or bad when dealing with robots. They simply are, like any other living being. And as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced within the very near future, so will their ability to make us reflect on our own limits as mutable human beings.
We can perhaps take a note from Batou at the end of 2nd GIG, who is quite disappointed with the lack of emotion Section 9’s exhibited by new Uchikoma think tanks. He’s delighted to see the Tachikoma return again in Solid State Society, as if an old friend were once again coming back from the dead to greet him. Curiously enough, the Tachikoma were created due to puzzling copyright issues regarding the original Uchikoma from the manga. For once, I can say I’m glad for corporate copyright meddling.
A parting gift: Season 1’s opening theme, “Inner Universe,” composed by the ever-versatile Yoko Kanno and sung by the late Origa.
It’s quite a beautiful theme, and I find it coming to mind more and more these days as I read about the thousands of refugees leaving Syria for uncertain futures, as well as when I read about acts of terrorism spiraling out of control all over the world, thanks in part to the unparalleled degrees of interconnectivity that social media provides to displaced and uncertain youths. I can’t help but think of this theme when I read about the latest developments on drone warfare and adaptive AI, either. Which, as we now know, evolve a little more every day.
~
October 16, 2015 Edit: How appropriate this collection of articles was published right after I made this post.
I was reading an interesting article this morning in the New York Times that discussed the limitations of traditional dictionaries when it comes to staying up-to-date on the latest slang. You can read it here:
Now, the purpose of apps like Wordnik is to identify words use on the Internet as “lookupable.” That is, these apps define a given word’s relevancy in everyday speech and log it as something that could be used by others on a broader scale. While Ms. McKean’s effort to unearth English’s “missing words” is certainly valiant, I’m going to be blunt and say that I feel it’s a bit of a futile quest due to the pace of our rapidly mutating languages. Moreover, the volatile nature of online languages makes me question whether Ms. McKean and Wordnik are really focusing on ‘the right thing.’ There’s little point in hunting down vagabond words and tossing them into the dictionary if their progenitors are sure to rise moments later as an endgame pursuit. But what we can focus on, using the data we gather on “lookupable” words, is the structure that emerging terms share.
Let’s use Ms McKean’s example of “roomnesia.” The article defines this word as “a condition in which people forget why they walked into a room,” its power deriving from the fact that it is a clever portmanteau of ‘room’ and ‘amnesia.’ Perhaps I am being too closed-minded at the moment, but most of the words that qualify for possible inclusion in Wordnik are portmeanteaus. In fact, the article lists a slurry of clumsy portmanteaus before examining roomnesia. In this case, it seems more appropriate to document the mechanical structure of these hybrids rather than the meaning of the word itself. Following the logic of roomnesia, anything can be a -nesia. It seems we would gain a greater understanding of this word and its brethren if we could look up roomnesia on Wordnik and learn that tacking a -nesia onto the end of an existing word (a state of being or, in this case,a simple noun) creates a portmanteau that implies forgetfulness in a certain situation.
Such an approach would free us from the confines of strict definitions when it comes to trendy terms that populate social media circles, because it implies that language on the Internet is highly mutable. But there is, of course, an issue of artistic flair when it comes to creating these new words. We all know the feeling of wondering where our sunglasses are when they’re actually on top of our head, but saying “sunglassesnesia” or “shadesnesia” just doesn’t roll off the tongue like roomnesia does. How, then, would we create a new word that encapsulates this feeling of sunglasses dysphoria? Maybe Wordnik can help us out, if it devotes its energies to dissecting the mechanical bases and creation of the -nesia family.
Again, my thoughts aren’t meant to downplay Ms. McKean’s work (or Wordnik’s, if we want to give credit to our machine companions). But can Big Data alone, touted by businessmen and laymen alike as the divining rod that will draw up useful assets from the digital morass like potable water, grant us full insight into what people do and why they do it? It can pinpoint trends and trend words, but it’s up to linguists themselves to make the judgment calls. They can identify what the roomnesias and dronevertisings of the future embody – and they can predict how they will morph to suit new social contexts and influence the creation of new words through their mechanical components. We have to help our mechanical friends, after all, just as much as they help us. And through this union, we can at least begin to grasp at the multiplicity of being human.
I’m sure most of Big Data’s proponents realize this, by the way. It’s just easy to lose sight of how we collaborate with our machines as they become more human-like.
Pokémon fans have been clamoring for an MMO based off their favorite franchise for years. Whether or not that would actually work in practice is best left to another discussion, but the fact is that fans may finally get their wish, in an indirect sort of way.
The app that will make that dream become a mostly-reality is called Pokémon GO. For those who haven’t heard about it, Pokémon GO is an augmented reality app that will let players find, share, and battle their digital companions directly from their phones and with others in public.
The trailer:
The announcement of Pokémon GO surprised me a little, since Nintendo isn’t exactly known for being up to current generation standards with regard to their home gaming consoles, let alone with current social media trends (they tend to be the type of company that defines trends, though, and saying they’re completely clueless perhaps gives them too little credit for popularizing technologies like gyro controls for gaming controllers). It’s not directly made by Nintendo, though, since The Pokémon Company is collaborating with a former Google startup named Niantic that is best known for another augmented reality game called Ingress, which places players directly in the midst of a government conspiracy that they must uncover through cooperation with other nearby players in real-time.
At first, it seems like there isn’t much different about Pokémon GO than a regular Pokémon game. You’re still sharing monsters with one another, battling them, finding them out in the wild. The big selling point that Pokémon GO’s creators are pushing is that you’ll be able to find Pokémon in your immediate world, underneath a bridge or out in an open field. Now as far as I know, there’s no footage of the actual interface that Pokémon GO will use, so it’s difficult to make judgment calls about just what the app will offer to the world of gaming or the world of digital interactivity in general. But I would like to make a few initial observations on what augmented reality does for contemporary human cultures, and how it helps us realize desires we’ve always had but are quickly becoming aware of in the 21st century.
Terms like The Internet of Things (a digital climate in which entities are labeled with unique identifiers and constantly access and upload information to one another without requiring human-to-human and human-to-computer interaction, mediated by monitoring technologies like heart rate sensors and the like) and Fourth Platform Computing (which uses the aforementioned sensors to track and pool data from digital communities to create shared, evolving social networks and knowledge bases) are thrown around quite a bit in computing circles, but there are a few things crucial to understanding those frameworks that will define how we will stay interconnected, cultivate those connections, and become more aware of those eternal connections in the coming years.
The first of these is empowerment through embodiment. Let’s use Pokémon GO as an example. As I mentioned previously, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between playing Pokémon GO and regular old Pokémon. But what Pokémon GO does for users through augmented reality is place them directly in the role of the intrepid Pokémon hunter/trainer. Users no longer have to turn their Nintendo DS on and immerse themselves in a world clearly demarcated from his or her own to build their Pokémon collection. The chance event of finding a Pidgeot in a bush, or a Snorlax on a bridge is directly integrated with the perceived real world, a fixture in the daily flow of life. Pokémon GO users can then directly share the fruits of their conquest with others in their immediate vicinity, who they may or may not know personally. Of course, players don’t have to literally tussle with said pocket monsters in the dirt of their backyard. Nor is public sharing a new idea, either, especially not to Nintendo (who has used it on their handhelds for a while now). But it’s that immediacy, the potential for an unexpected catch on your way to work, that ups the level of embodiment as a Pokémon trainer for players. In short, making the act of hunting Pokémon a part of daily life naturalizes the virtual activity and blurs the boundaries between the two.
This leads us to another aspect of augmented reality that is incredibly important for us to understand as consumers of digital media that illuminates the blurred boundaries between humans and their artificial creations. Augmented reality apps like Pokémon GO allow players to partake in an evolving world not too far from their own, one that they can shape with their own hands, and one that they share with others who also possesses the vision to peer into this alternate reality space that runs concurrent with and affects what we normally perceive as reality. Games have always provided us with creative spaces for individual or community interpretation, but the closeness to the real world that an augmented reality app provides makes that geogenesis more tangible than ever before.
As for the subject of Pokémon itself? It’s a new form of nostalgia. Many of the people who will be playing Pokémon GO are likely those who grew up playing the game for the past ten years or so, and this app will be the evolution of their childhood memories that, like their owners, have grown up and adapted to a dynamic world with them. Never doubt the power of recursivity, for it allows us to gain new identities and become beholden to the identities of a group that shares our pasts. Which, to many, is security.
So perhaps we can see augmented reality as a new form of security. A digital sanctuary embedded in the everyday. Augmented reality doesn’t just spruce up our ordinary lives by peppering them with beloved cartoon companions. It directly involves us with the creation of new communities and worlds that previously lay just beyond our own. It provides us with the vision to peer beyond what we take for granted and to discover new realms, new dimensions. Metaphorically, it lets us discover these cartoon worlds. In reality, the cartoon worlds guide us to the realization that we, as humans, have always shared bonds across time and space with one another, and that we have the power to shape those webs of connections with our own subjective creativity. Augmented reality allows us to become our own shaman, traversing between and blending worlds with others in a grand act of generation. Operating in augmented space is a life-affirming act, as it forces us to acknowledge what we are and are not – our nostalgic pasts, and our non-Pokémon presents – through the power of representational play.
That is the source of embodiment in augmented reality. Security and power through alternate realities. And who said that video games were mere escapism?
~
This does, of course, raise questions about how augmented reality could be abused somewhere down the line. Will it be possible to fabricate conspiracies and falsehoods that, through like a digital snake oil, will convince less-perceptive or desperate users of a secret knowledge that only they possess? Will technologies become advanced enough to distort reality even for the keenest of us? Real concerns, sure, but perhaps augmented reality will take on forms that we cannot even anticipate in the near future.
~
More will become clear as Nintendo reveals just how Pokémon GO will work. I doubt crowds will gather outside Times Square to embark on weekly Mewtwo hunts, but grouping with strangers on the train through your phone to take the 151st ‘mon down will at least be an engaging activity as you pull into work.
And who knows. Maybe we really all will gather in multiplexes to defeat digitized monsters together in the near future, for the safety of our favorite digital worlds and of our own in the so-called ‘real’ present.
Disclaimer: This article was originally an essay I wrote for a game design course at UC Santa Cruz this past Spring. I’m transcribing it here for future purposes, as the ideas it contains forms the bedrock for some of my current views on our relationships with technology and how we embody ourselves in and through those technologies in our rather chaotic world.
Also, posting this essay will let me see how far my writing skills have progressed a few years down the line.
There’s a word in here that I use a lot. That word is subjectivity. It’s a darling word for a lot of 21st century anthropologists, and it basically means someone’s identity plus all of their personal opinions, modes of thought, and interpretations of cultural elements that are mixed up in that identity and inform how that person shapes him or herself in response to various stimuli. Looking back on my writing from the past two years or so, it’s really quite an annoying word to see used so many times. But it’s the best word for describing nostalgic entities, in this case, so I’m just going to have to deal with it for now.
For the purposes of this essay, imagine ‘subjectivity’ to mean the spirit of an individual human being who played video games growing up as a child and still plays them to this day.
~
If any phenomenon can be described as having established a permanent foothold in the video game development industry, it would be retrogaming. Retrogaming is a nebulous term for the constellation of video game genre or game-playing actions that involves games that either imitate the logics and stylistic conventions of games made before the turn of the 21st century,or that encompasses the act of playing games from past time periods themselves. One only need take a glance at digital game distribution marketplaces like the Steam Market to notice that many of these games reference early platformers or shoot-em-ups in their desgins. Many of these retro-styled games fall into the genre of the “metroidvania,” games which take inspiration from Nintendo’s Metroid series and Koji Igarashi’s Castlevania games, starting with Symphony of the Night. They are best defined as “‘side scrolling action-adventures with a [sic] obstacles in a continuous map that you can surmount only after finding the requisite items and backtracking'” (Nutt). What then, players might wonder, accounts for the metroidvania’s massive popularity,and why do they seem to be inextricably tied to retro-style thematic formats? The answers to this question may lie in the fact that both the metroidvania genre and retrogaming evoke what cultural theorist Katie King terms “pastpresents.” Pastpresents operate along multiple temporalities: “‘The past and the present cannot be purified from the other; they confront me with interruptions, obstacles, new/old forms of organization, bridges, shifts in direction, spinning dynamics'” (Haraway 292). Retrogaming and the exploration-heavy metroidvania genre − and the nostalgia that these entities produce − remind us that “the past, present, and future are all very much knotted into one another [… They are the] world-making processes of intra-action and agential realism” (292).
Retro-thematics and exploratory video gaming genres like the metroidvania, as a result, can be viewed as life-affirming forces; they draw upon past knowledges of gaming spaces and their rules and meld them with present knowledges to create new, bolstered subjectivities in their players. To analyze the mechanisms through which metroidvanias and retro games produce pastpresents, I will examine three metroidvania games: Super Metroid, Cave Story, and Axiom Verge.
I will also apply two game design frameworks to elucidate the mechanisms that evoke pastpresents: Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek’s MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) framework, and Ian Bogost’s Procedural Rhetoric framework. The MDA framework argues that gameplay experiences can be seen as a flow between Mechanics to Dynamics to Aesthetics (M > D > A). Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek define each term:
“Mechanics describes the particular components of the game, at the level of data representation and algorithms. Dynamics describes the run-time behavior of the mechanics acting on player inputs and each others’ outputs over time. Aesthetics describes the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player, when she interacts with the game system.” (Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek 2)
Procedural Rhetoric, meanwhile, is “the practice of authoring arguments through processes” such as a game’s “rules of behavior” or its “dynamic models” (Bogost 28-29). How players interpret a game’s rules is, of course, subjective. But typically, these rules can be employed in a way to open up doors for further thinking about social, psychological, or existential issues.
Super Metroid:
Released in 1994 on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Metroid is the third installment in Nintendo’s Metroid series. Though far from the first exploration-based platformer game, Super Metroid‘s spatial scope (two-dimensional rooms, each of which represent various environs, link together via doorways and passageways to form a colossal map) and its capacity for player interpretation set a standard that future exploration-based games would follow for years to come.
Super Metroid thrusts players into the role of Samus Aran, a female armor-clad bounty hunter in search of a parasitic lifeform called a Metroid that, if it fell into the wrong hands, could pose an unfathomable threat to other life forms in the galaxy. This is the extent of Super Metroid‘s narrative, which is outlined via text after the game’s introductory level. The majority of the game takes place on the planet Zebes, whose caverns and ancient ruins Samus explores in her search for the baby Metroid. After the game’s introductory sequence, Samus’ spaceship descends to Zebes’ surface, and the bounty hunter itself emerges from its interior. The player is immediately able to control Samus, and he or she finds that Samus’ arsenal is rather sparse: she is only able to fire a weak laser beam, run, and jump. Zebes’ sheer size is initially intimidating; its rooms never seem to end, and the player is given glimpses of items and passageways nestled in the environment that will upgrade Samus’ meager arsenal. Upgrades are often barred off from the player. These ‘teaser’ items suggest to the player that he or she will eventually reach these items, but only with specific upgrades found alter in the game. They plant visions of future achievement in the player’s mind, and observant players will make physical or mental notes of certain areas with inaccessible items that he or she will return to at a later time.
As the player explores Zebes’ corridors and defeats alien foes, he or she discovers unique tools. These tools range from upgrades to Samus’ arm cannon that allow her to fire more powerful laser beams, to grappling hooks that allow her to traverse long stretches of dangerous territory, to the ability to run at superhuman speeds or launch herself like a rocket through impenetrable blocks. The player also discovers new regions that are connected to each other via transition rooms, each of which possesses a discrete name: Brinstar, Tourian, Maridia, Norfair, etc. Players may return to these areas to use their newfound tools on old obstacles, such as when the player finds he or she is unable to reach a ledge with a missile on it in the Brinstar area, only to be able to reach it later when Samus acquires the Hi-Jump Boots in the Norfair region.
In one infamous puzzle, the player finds him or herself running through a transparent glass tube that bridges the Brinstar and Norfair regions. The area occupied by the glass tube itself is called Maridia, but there seems to be no clear way to access the waterlogged region. The player obtains an item called the Power Bomb later in the game, and he or she may recall the fragile-looking tube that sealed off the aquatic world. With no other areas to explore, the player may travel back to the tube and use a Power Bomb to break the glass, working off the pre-established knowledge that certain blocks in Super Metroid can be broken with Bombs and Power Bombs. Upon the Power Bomb’s detonation, the glass will shatter, and the Maridia region will literally burst into view for players to explore.
Super Metroid invites its players to experiment with learned knowledges about how its world works, and then asks them to test the game’s logics to obtain further upgrades that will aid them in their quest. This experimentation entails the rediscovery of familiar locations; players learn to view planet Zebes’ ruins through new perspectives to discover ancient secrets long buried by its previous inhabitants. One item in particular − the X-Ray Scope − allows players to scan environments for hidden blocks and upgrades. A literal new perspective on the game’s rules, if anything!
Obtaining upgrades empowers the player with new tools to reinterpret Zebes’ locales. Mobility tools like the Shinespark allow players to traverse previously-tedious rooms in one swoop, and the Ice Beam allows the player to use formerly-pesky enemies as platforms (or to simply turn them into sitting ducks). These upgrades, as well as the experimental logics that connect these items across the game space, make the desolate world of Zebes feel vibrant and fertile with creative potential, waiting to be tapped by a curious player. Super Metroid‘s labyrinths feel intertwined by reinterpreted logics as a result, connecting past and present knowledges via the acquisition of new gaming logics in a process similar to that recursive phenomenon called nostalgia.
If we follow the MDA framework, we can condense Super Metroid‘s performative appeal into a simple process:
Mechanics: The player collects items that provide upgrades to his or her arsenal, which are either displayed in plain sight or are hidden away behind concealed passageways or within the environment itself. The player must use the tools he or she acquires from defeating bosses and exploring rooms to break the blocks and surpass the obstacles that prevent access to these upgrades.
Dynamics: When players obtain a new tool, they may revisit older rooms that previously held clues to obtaining upgrades. By calling upon memory, players can experiment with their newfound tools to access said upgrades or to move through previously-tedious rooms in quicker ways.
Aesthetics: Players see old environments and old hazards in a new light when their experimentation succeeds. Because even the game’s starting areas may hide upgrades that require tools found late in the game, Super Metroid‘s world feels woven together by new and old subjectivities. The act of re-exploring old areas and interacting them from new, empowered perspectives ties past and present knowledges together, and makes Super Metroid‘s world feel as if it were teeming with life.
Super Metroid may have played a significant role in laying the foundations for exploratory game genres, but other games (specifically, those in Konami’s Castlevania series) contributed other elements as well. However, it is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a detailed breakdown on the history of the metroidvania. I will instead examine two games that follow in Super Metroid’s stead to elicit feelings of pastpresent nostalgia.
Doukutsu Monogatari/Cave Story:
Cave Story is a freeware solo project made by Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya for the personal computer. Pixel developed Cave Story over the course of five years in his spare time, releasing the game in 2004. It is an homage to his favorite childhood games, which include the Metroid series. The fact that Pixel developed the game by himself is why Cave Story is often considered to be the catalyst that inspired the metroidvania trend within independent game development.
Similar to Super Metroid, the player is placed in Cave Story‘s world with little prior explanation and with little weaponry (in fact, the player is completely unarmed and must find the first gun in another part of the map). The player controls Quote, a mute amnesiac who initially appears to be a human boy but is later revealed to be a robot. As the player traverses Cave Story‘s locales, he or she will uncover fragments of a fairy tale-like plot involving robots, magic, and an ancient conflict between humans and the rabbit-like residents of the game’s Laputa-esque floating island setting called Mimigas.
Cave Story‘s regions are accessible via a teleporter in the game’s central hub. Within these regions, players obtain new weapons and piece together the floating island’s tragic past by speaking with various non-playable characters and interacting with background objects. While Cave Story encourages its players to explore each region’s nooks and crannies for character upgrades, it playfully reworks conventions of the exploratory platformer genre to produce new pastpresent knowledge.
Items that upgrade Quote’s vitality,ammo capacity,and weapon strength are often placed in hard-to-reach or hidden locations. Sometimes, like Super Metroid, these items can only be obtained after obtaining tools found later in the game. But Cave Story twists the kleptomaniacal tendencies bred by Super Metroid‘s exploration logics. Consider the following chain of events that occurs partway through the game’s story:
In the game’s third zone, the player may spot a door tucked away on a ledge that Quote cannot reach by jumping. Recalling enhancements like Super Metroid‘s Hi-Jump Boots, the player may believe that he or she will come across an item that improves Quote’s vertical mobility.And indeed they do. In the next room, the body of a friendly scientist named Professor Booster falls from the top of the screen. Interacting with the body causes the professor to give Quote a jetpack. If the player accepts the professor’s gift, Quote will receive the jetpack and Booster will die. The player can then access the room he or she saw in the previous room and receive an item called the Arms Brace that makes Quote lose less weapon experience when he gets hit. The jetpack also lets Quote easily traverse the next few rooms and the next boss fight.
After fighting said boss, Quote drowns in a body of water. Quote’s companion who joined
the boss fight, a female robot named Curly,will sacrifice herself by giving Quote her air tank, allowing him to survive while she dies.
However, the player may later find – by refusing to help Booster, or by browsing online discussion forums or wikis – that it is possible to save both the professor and Curly by choosing to ignore the Booster’s body and skipping the jetpack. Doing so will prevent the player from immediately obtaining the Arms Brace in the previous room and will make navigating the next few rooms more difficult, but will allow the player to perform the following actions:
− Save Professor Booster
− Acquire a more powerful jetpack later on
− Acquire the game’s most powerful gun
− Save Curly by examining a shining sparkle on the floor of the boss room to obtain a tow
rope, which can be used to drag Curly to safety after the fight (the tow rope occupies the same inventory slot as the jetpack)
− Access the game’s final dungeon, which triggers the game’s most satisfying ending upon completion.
Cave Story asks its players to reconsider their urges to explore the game’s environment. Does the player want to abandon the possibility of a happy ending by obtaining an item that will provide an immediate benefit? Does the player wish to exercise patience and ignore a potentially-moral decision so that he or she may obtain a better item from that character later? What choices will make an impact on the story at a later point?
The player spies a secret passageway (marked by the gray block with the star pattern) that cannot be reached by normal jumping. The Booster (jetpack) item will allow Quote to make the jump, but acquiring the Booster at this point in the game means locking more powerful items later on. Interestingly enough, the player can ‘damage boost’ off the purple enemy as it jumps at a precise moment, using the momentum from taking damage to reach the ledge as the enemy rises up in the air. Considering the enemy’s proximity to the ledge, perhaps Pixel intended players to draw upon their knowledge of how platformer physics work to reach the ledge? Other games, like Plok, also make use of this reinterpreted platformer knowledge. (Source: Author)
This cluster of player choices draws from those found in role-playing games (players may recall, for instance, certain treasure chests in Final Fantasy VI that contain weak healing items in the first half of the game. If left alone, these same chests will contain far more powerful elixirs when the player revisits them in the game’s second half). Cave Story cultivates temporal strength by bending exploration logics and blending them with those found in other video game genres. Its story, for example, is revealed through dialogue boxes containing text, which are often accompanied by Yes or No dialogue trees that produce different effects in the game world. At other times, Quote must perform fetch quests for certain characters to progress the story, exploring the environment for items to give to NPCs in exchange for other items. Along with the potentially game-changing decisions Cave Story asks of its players, the player is encouraged to examine objects in the environment in a revelatory progression that resembles the traditional storytelling elements often found in traditional RPGs. A bed of wilted red flowers found early in the game, for example, offer no explanation as to their significance and leave the player questioning how they will play into the story later. Mimiga characters express fear over the flowers, but never explain their significance. At a later point in the game, the purpose of the red flowers is revealed: they are a mutagen that transform the Mimiga into fearsome brutes, a state that cannot be reversed. The Mimiga used them to protect their homeland from encroaching humans in an earlier war, but now the (apparent) antagonist wishes to mutate the remaining Mimiga and use them to terrorize the Earth below.This revelation strikes at the player’s emotional cords when, moments later, the apparent antagonists transform an innocent Mimiga into a frenzied version of herself, whom Quote must kill to progress.
Cave Story‘s combat mechanics evoke the dynamics and aesthetics of video game genres outside of the metroidvania. While Quote’s guns fire projectiles that resemble those found in games like the Metroid, Blaster Master, and Contra series, they can “level up” into more powerful versions of themselves when the player collects “experience” triangles. These weapons can also “level down” when Quote is damaged by an enemy. This leveling mechanic hearkens back to arcade shoot-em-up games like the Gradius series, which feature collectible power-ups that can enhance the player’s firepower, as well as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, in which players can level up their characters by defeating monsters. Unlike much of Super Metroid‘s combat, which usually pits Samus against an enemy or two at a time, Cave Story‘s fights often involve Quote blasting apart hordes of enemies in a chaotic frenzy of lasers and floating item pickups, again resembling combat found in shoot-em-up games.
Cave Story‘s visuals and audio, meanwhile, occupy another pocket in the pastpresent dimensional space Pixel wishes to evoke through his game. The game’s environments and characters all take on a low-fidelity, pixelated appearance that evokes the 8-bit and 16-bit platformer games of both Pixel’s and his 2004 audience’s youth. Yet these blocky visuals are smoothly animated; Quote’s jumps float and hang in the air, and while each character often only possesses a few frames of animation, each one moves through Cave Story‘s environments with a a weight and fluidity that can only be described as palpable. The game’s sounds are likewise robust. A heavy object or enemy falling to the ground makes a resounding, bassy thud, and the enemy itself often flattens for several frames before popping back up again in a squish-and-stretch animation sequence that makes the enemy feel full of life. Characters and enemies themselves often take on disarming, vacant-eyed appearances reminiscent of chibi or super deformed visual styles, yet are embroiled in life-or-death situations. The game’s soundtrack employs a whimsical, yet sometimes melancholy tone, evoking a longing for a long-forgotten past buried somewhere within the floating island’s labyrinths. And when players press the down key to explore Cave Story‘s environments, Quote visibly turns his head towards the background while a question mark appears above his head. This minor detail implies a degree of both the character and the player’s lateral integration into the game world, an aesthetic unexplored by many other games in the metroidvania genre.
The end result is a rich gaming experience that draws upon a multitude of gaming genres from the player’s (presumed, in 2004) past. Cave Story is a mixture of conventions spanning multiple games, reinterpreted through the lens of animation techniques more advanced than those of the games Pixel references. Mechanics associated with the RPG genre elicit new dynamic modes of exploring and re-exploring familiar environments, and hectic combat combined with more linear playing spaces eases some of the exploratory burden shouldered by players in Metroid games. Both of these dynamics lead to new exploratory aesthetics, encouraging the player to experiment with navigating dialogue branches across multiple playthroughs. Moreover, Pixel invites his players to reconsider their perceived exploratory logics while they play in his world. He encourages players to experiment with their decisions over multiple playthroughs, gaining new perspectives on Quote’s journey each time. It is as if the video game genre that Pixel evokes have grown up with the player over time, and have become more complex alongside their players. This linking of pastpresent subjectivities lies at the heart of nostalgic gaming, and it likely accounts for why many speak fondly of Cave Story to this day.
Axiom Verge:
Like Cave Story, Axiom Verge is a solo project, released in 2015 by developer Thomas Happ. Also an homage to older sidescroller run-and-gun games like the Metroid and Contra series, Axiom Verge‘s dystopian world adopts a more traditional approach to reworking metroidvania convention. Its visual and audio elements hearken back to the platforming genre’s first-generation days; the game’s sprites and visceral organic environments resemble those found in games like Natsume’s Abadox while working with a wide gradient of color palettes to produce richly-textured landscapes, and its music and sound effects reference chiptune pieces with more robust sounds layered over them for additional depth, as if the memories of one’s own digital youth have become more complex and more organically-bound to one’s own being over time.
The player controls a lone scientist named Trace, who has been transported to a world named Sudra, which is composed of overgrown viscera blended with ancient steel and stone ruins. The player controls Trace’s movement and defeats grotesque aliens to obtain new items, revisits old areas to find additional upgrades, and traverses Sudra’s caverns to uncover what happened to its previous inhabitants and who he really is in the grand scheme of things. Axiom Verge superficially adheres so closely to the traditional Metroid formula, in fact, that its inclusion in this essay might seem redundant. That would be the case if it not for Happ’s clever reconfiguration of the pastpresents that nostalgic games like metroidvanias evoke.
Axiom Verge’s environments take on a biopunk aesthetic: flesh, veins, and other assorted guts intertwine themselves with inorganic structures, while enemies explode into showers of pixelated blood when they die. Glitched graphics, meanwhile, sprawl over portions of these environments in patches, emitting volatile crackles and pops. As Trace uncovers more of Sudra’s past through the planet’s artificial intelligences and through various written notes tucked away in Sudra’s halls, the player pieces together a pastpresent narrative: a Sudra scientist once discovered that multiple dimensions exist in the universe, tied together along one ley line that connects these various worlds through an anomaly called The Breach. The Breach manifests as glitched space, and is said to be the result of the universe patching up its loose ends as the gateways to other worlds are opened. Opening the Breach threatened Sudra’s stability,and eventually lead to its demise. The scientist who discovered The Breach was ostracized by Earth’s scientific community, but using his newfound nether powers, he mutated the planet’s inhabitants and environments into the present monstrosities. That scientist, as it turns out, was Trace himself in another timeline. It is now his duty to discover the greater implications of The Breach’s existence − as well as his own role in shaping the pathways that link past to present in the known universe.
Early on in Axiom Verge, Trace acquires a tool called the Axiom Address. This upgrade allows Trace to literally reshape the environment by bathing enemies and tiles in a beam that alters the affected object’s properties. Fearsome enemies may become immobile, nearly-harmless blocks of corrupted graphics, and passages that previously blocked Trace’s progress open up new avenues for exploring Sudra’s environments. Though not a sandbox game, Axiom Verge gives players the illusion of being able to break and reshape its own rules, as well as those of the metroidvania genre in general. Pulsating flesh becomes mutable, exposed as a mirage that hides an underlying, universal logic packed with creative potential; a forbidding landscape bends to the player’s will and gives him or her new new ways of understanding the world that threatens to engulf Trace within the capillaries of time.
Trace encounters a portion of The Breach which is found early in the game. Though impassable then, Trace can now use an Address Bomb (Axiom Verge’s analogue to Super Metroid’s Power Bomb) found much later in the game to clear the Breach area. The player is free to explore the room beyond, and enemies within the room are transformed into glitched graphics and behave in different ways than their un-glitched counterparts. (Source: Author)
Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek’s MDA framework cannot fully account for the generation of pastpresent aesthetics through a game’s visual or stylistic elements. For this reason, Bogost’s model of procedural rhetoric is more appropriate to tackle Axiom Verge‘s imbrication of past and present subjectivities. Axiom Verge allows its players to distort its seemingly-familiar Metroid-style world. These actions imply that the physical, organic world is malleable, one of infinite possibilities, and that players hold the tools necessary to expose, rework, and meld together its underlying logics.
Axiom Verge thus subverts the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics established by earlier metroidvania titles through its rhetorical elements. The mechanic of changing blocks and into new forms may seem like a passing thought in a game like Super Metroid, where tiles are explicitly marked with symbols resembling missiles and bombs to indicate that they can be broken by these weapons. But in Axiom Verge‘s world, the Axiom Address becomes a new form of bodily empowerment in that it literally allows the player to reinterpret the environment into an immediately-useful form (use, in this case, meaning defeating enemies or acquiring upgrades; a dynamic arises in which players are encouraged to experiment with the Axiom Address’ numerous and often-surprising effects on different enemy types and environmental objects). The resulting aesthetic is one of rediscovery, both of the metroidvania genre’s conventional logics and of the player’s own past in playing Metroid and similar games. The Axiom Address abides by a notion discussed by Anthropologist Dr. Donna Haraway in her book When Species Meet: “technologies are not mediations [… but are rather] organs” that engender an “‘infolding of the flesh'” (Haraway 249). New forms of embodiment created by inhabiting new subjectivities are “ongoing, dynamic, situated, and historical” (294) and reveal that “things [human concepts of past and present selves] are material, specific, non-self-identical, and semiotically active” as well as “compound” (250). When Trace adds new tools and upgrades to his organic arm gun, we are reminded that we constantly seek “combinations of other things to magnify power [… and] to engage the world” through “diverse agents of interpretation” (250).
Altering the seemingly-rigid boundaries of flesh and bone through glitch space in Axiom Verge reminds us that humans possess the capacity to dispel our perceived gap between our past and present selves. Past and present – pastpresent – is an organic state of being, constantly open to reinterpretation by new subjectivities that span time and space. Retrogaming becomes a space of undefined, potential possibility, one where we can revisit our past knowledges, bring them into the present, and affirm ourselves as evolving beings.
This point is perhaps no clearer than when a player respawns from death in Axiom Verge. Trace emerges from a mechanical egg that supposedly restructures his base elements from scratch to form new beings. Unlike Super Metroid, the player retains the upgrades or portions of the map that he or she uncovered in the previous life. With newfound knowledge, Trace continues onward with his quest of self-discovery.
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By examining retro-styled games within the MDA and Procedural Rhetoric frameworks, we discover that the forces that produce feelings of nostalgia intertwine themselves with the stylistic themes and gameplay mechanics of retro-styled games, especially those of the so-dubbed metroidvania genre. Metroidvanias allow their players to uncover and reinterpret portions of the game world by linking regions visited earlier in the game to tools and gameplay mechanics found later on. As a result, these games produce linked temporalities between the player’s knowledge in the past and in the present moment. Despite their often-derelict appearances, metroidvania worlds often feel vibrant and ever-evolving as new perspectives emerge from their derelict landscapes. The playing of a retro-styled game calls upon these same forces to fuse a player’s past knowledge of exploration video games with new perspectives on certain genre, and this coming together of past and present selves becomes a life-affirming act.
However, gameplay experiences in both the past and the present are highly subjective. One player’s cherished childhood memories of exploring Zebes’ dusty caverns or sprinting through Dracula’s massive castles may differ drastically from another player who saw exploring these worlds as tedious or intimidating. Yet another player might ignore the exploration aspects altogether and play these games for the fastest times possible, or that player may memorize each item’s location so that they can grab every upgrade and beat the game in the shortest time possible. Still other players may attempt to find glitches and bugs in these worlds that allow them to access items and areas in a different order than the developers had intended (the “missile on the ledge” mentioned in the Super Metroid section, for example, can be acquired earlier than intended through precise use of the wall jump technique). For this reason, I contend the MDA framework’s suggestion that “games are more like artifacts than media” (Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek 2). The notion that “the content of a game is its behavior – not the media that streams out of it towards the player” is rather shortsighted when we realize that video games are not static conduits through which players channel their knowledge of video game spaces. They are more akin to organs, whose interpretive boundaries are constantly reshaped and reworked over space and time, almost like an octopus that alters its color and form as it cruises the sea floor in search of prey (2).
This essay offers to open some additional doors with regards to future game design. What kinds of pastpresent subjectivities can new games draw upon to construct different nostalgic experiences in their players, or implant new ones that players hadn’t felt before? Why do two-dimensional platformers and exploration games like ‘metroidvanias’ hold so much purchase in retrogaming, and why have developers not taken heed of other respected structural formulas like those offered by games like Secret of Mana, Equinox, or Actraiser? How might these nostalgic pastpresents visit by geographical region, based on the games to which general audiences were exposed? In this light, video games may seem to be “‘the richest allegorical vehicle’ for describing the ‘system’ we presently live in” (Saldívar 155) because they allow us to stitch together knowledges and subjectivities across time and space in a postmodern age – where our own personal selfhoods feel dispersed over the mediating technologies within which we are entangled (i.e., the Internet). But they make us question to what extent we ‘need’ nostalgia to feel connected to others and to ourselves, and what kinds of storytelling conventions might emerge from the fusion of our hazy pasts and presents.
Works Cited
1. Nutt, Christian. “The Undying Allure of the Metroidvania.” Gamasutra. N.p., 13 Feb. 2015. Web.
2. Haraway,Donna Jeanne. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2008. Print.
3. Hunicke, Robin, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubeck. “Game-Based Approach for Network Routing Applications.” Game Theory Applications in Network Design (2014): 205-43. Web.
4. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. Print.
5. Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California, 1997. Print.
And yet it grooves 
