I Give Back at You. I Give Back at Every You

It seems like just 2 months, 3 days, 14 hours and 31 seconds ago that MC Mosestime contacted me with my assignment; play and review Mother 3, or die trying.  This game was as red as they come, they said.  The fate of the free world depended on me, they said. So I took the assignment; after everything I saw I don’t know if I can ever trust command again.

Flash back to briefing, to the start of this whole mess.  I had just sat down to use my computer when a clandestine personal message arrived on my desktop, almost instantly.  You all know the scene.

Deets:  Have you heard of Mother 3?

Kilroy: No.  What do I need to know?

Deets: Mother 3 is a socialist allegory, never released in the United States.  A known extremist group comprised of various hackers, vidcon enthusiasts,  communists and japanophiles has been planning a smuggling operation to get Mother 3 stateside.  We never considered it a viable threat.  As of 0600 hours, they have succeeded.

Kilroy: Dear christ.

Deets: That’s where you come in.

Now if there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I take my job as a pseudo-professional writer and gamer very seriously.  It’s a lonely calling.  It takes a special kind of person to be able to write 10,000 word articles, knowing that the world will never know what you did, the sacrifices that you made, the horrors you endured.  Somebody needs to do it though.  Somebody needs to be there, when the world makes sense the least.

I got my hands dirty.  Mother 3 was a deceptive little creature, cunning, alluring.  At first it welcomes you in warmly, charmingly.  It knows better than to aggress against the gamer at first opportunity.  A lesser game would wait for you to let your guard down.  This one starts to put its hooks into you slowly, before you’ve even registered the sense to be on guard.  By the time you take notice, it owns you; there is no escape.  That’s when the game shows you just what a twisted sadomasochist it really is, and like a terrible, terrible joke it’s you that can’t find the strength to let go.  It hits you because it loves you.

The chaos of this assignment has left me reeling, even now.  I cannot offer any sort of linear recollection of the events that transpired.  I will try to organize them as best I can, not as they were, but as I can explain them.  What I experienced was a sort of raw substance incomprehensible to the human intellect.  It would be impossible to articulate.  Instead I will account, as any mortal must, for what I took out of it.

On Action

An RPG is arguably the grand narrative format of interactive media.  You would be hard pressed to find a reasonable place and person to argue such matters with, but in principle it is arguable.  I’m certainly not fit to argue such things, but that’s never stopped me before.

The cutscene has long been the weapon of choice for exposition, to the point that games which break the convention seem to by and large immediately generate a sense of novelty with players.

Mother 3 is, technically, not one of these games.  The cutscene is, to its great salvation, not inseperable from CGI and the “interactive movie” antics of games like MGS4.  It is at it’s heart, any form of exposition which takes control out of the hands of the player and proceeds from start to completion without giving it back.  Mother 3 has instances like these, for the most part simply bookending each chapter. However, the meat of it (which is between the bookends, for reasons unknown) is interactive.  You prompt characters to speak to you.  If they have more than a sentence to say, you prompt them to keep talking.  It’s just about the digital equivalent of turning a page, except you do it a whole lot more.

Mother 3 plays a number of neat tricks though.  First of all, text doesn’t scroll at a steady rate across the screen.  There is such a thing as delivery.  Text scrolls in ways that are reminiscent of human speech patterns.  It’s clever, and it’s deeply aesthetically pleasing.  Secondly, the battle system is used to add detail and as a form of exposition.  In typical RPG form you are told what the enemy is doing.  Sometimes they seem to lose focus on the battle itself in favor of doing things like laughing, mumbling, or trash talking.  Dialogue is also juxtaposed nicely in the middle of battles.

However, the juxtaposition effects the gameplay.  One of the attributes of the battle system is that HP only ticks down when the battle is in progress.  This means that you can take “mortal damage” a dozen times and as long as you beat your opponent before the counter reaches zero, you don’t die.  Naturally this becomes part of the strategy.  Did you just heal?  Perhaps you should wait until your HP is maxed before affirming the prompt which states your enemy is attacking (how does that work in narrative form anyways?  “Wait dude, hold up. I’m almost done healing.  Okay, go ahead now”).

So it’s a clever way of telling a story with interactive elements, and for all I know this game invented it, because I don’t play games.  So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

On Dialectical Materialism

Setting into the game, Mosestime appeared correct in his assessment.  We are presented with Tazmily village; a place which knows nothing of door locks, industrial technology, or money (or the gainful exchange of goods and services, for that matter).  The community is the wellspring of life.  The local shop is really more of a local give-stuff-away-place, the local hotel is operated for free.  There is a jail; there’s also a sign in front of it boasting about how no one is there because there’s no crime.  Why the hell did you even build it then, jeez.  Oh, and there are thieves, but they are thieves of justice and don’t actually steal.

So far, it seems just silly enough to actually be socialist allegory.

Suddenly, bad stuff starts happening.  This is entirely unfamiliar to the people of Tazmily village, who live in peace and harmony and such, and ultimately turns out to be the product of an external aggressor.  The game goes ahead and gives us a little insight into their motivations, in the form of a document stating “The animals here are boring.  We ought to make them more interesting”.  At any rate, tazmilly appears to be suffering at the hands of imperialists, and that’s enough for me to still consider it an intentional (yet ridiculous) attempt at socialist allegory.

Now there’s something I ought to say about modern marxist and socialist thinking, which I want you to keep in mind because it will help you understand my troubles a bit.  It is unfalsifiable.  Now this has a peculiar effect; first, it renders its language useless to any scientific discourse.  Second, it makes it perfect for the purposes of fiction, because a story that borrows unfalsifiable concepts gains internal consistency.  But this also means, unfortunately, that any work of fiction which has this character cannot be useful as allegory, because it cannot be brought to bear on the state of the world we live in.

This should not, however, be thought to preclude people from attempting such a thing.  Because of that, I continued to try and discern whether or not the intention was there.

Back to the main.

So essentially the story of Mother 3 is the story of a primitive, happy people’s ascent into industrial society, and the suffering that takes place as a result of this.  The journey is in mixed parts voluntary and involuntary, with seemingly as much emphasis being placed on armed conquest by a fully mechanized military machine as on the voluntary purchase of the town’s first televisions.  In fact the latter might even receive more attention.

Now back to the aside.

So Marxist language is, owing in some degree to its unfalsifiable character, very ubiquitous.  It can be found in use supporting a seemingly endless array of arguments, many of them contradictory.  After all when capitalism is the clear and necessary cause of all social ills, anything one condemns has to be, by definition, capitalistic.  So the corvee right becomes the defining feature of feudal capitalism,  the partitioning of land by government for the purposes of industrial development becomes industrial capitalism, the complete government regulation of the means of the production (fascism) becomes state capitalism, and so on and so forth.  If there is someday a world where every aspect of the economy is planned and operated entirely by robots, and somebody still has something to whine about, it’s inevitable that people will speak of the terrors of cyber capitalism.

Somewhere through the story, I began to think that while the work was allegorical, it was not a work of socialist allegory but rather of anarcho-primitavist allegory.  The difference is not in the language employed, as that is always the same, but in the positions actually advocated.  Traditionally the socialist cry has been “workers of the world unite!”  It has been an internationalist movement seeking to break down borders, which are after all artificial creations of the capitalists.  Something which cries out against both imperialism and industrialization is not internationalist (whether it realizes this or not).

So I began to think, maybe Mother 3 is an instance of culture-jamming, turning industrial societies own products (videogames, in this case) against industrial society itself…

…and to be honest I could write another thousand words in this vein and still not be satisfied.  So I will move on for time being.

On Magypsies

A rather interesting bunch in the Mother 3 universe, the Magypsies are basically sexual deviants with magic powers.  Now if that sounds outlandish to you, perhaps the first thing you should realize is that there are plenty of cultures in which such a concept is fully intuitive.

"Magypsies"

If I had to give you some sort of anthropological explanation for why the association exists, I would probably suggest it pertained to labor and the need for an agrarian society to have some kind of explanation for why they shouldn’t just banish or kill anyone who doesn’t fulfill their expected labor role in society.  To this explanation a more astute reader would perhaps respond “Aha!  So you recognize the societal importance of labor organization!”  Well, sure.  However, if I could have offered an explanation for why murder is bad, it would have been one of human rights and not magic powers.

Now of course individuals who have been infected with some of the more pernicious ideas commonly found in academia are bound to respond that the concept of human rights is just as “abstract and metaphysical” as the concept of magic.  Some of them will state this in derision of both concepts.  More will state it as some sort of argument for cultural relativism, and that, really is what I see at the heart of the Magypsies (should they be part of an allegory and not just a story, at any rate).

The world of Mother 3 is a world of both magic and technology.  Contrary to popular misconception, these two things are not inherently at odds, especially not in fictional worlds.  The question is, does this story try to portray them as such?

A capitalist pig explains why there are no ghosts in osohe castle

Welllll…  I think the answer is a definitive maybe.

If it is the case, then the theme runs pretty deeply throughout the game.  Suddenly the story of imperialism and industrialization becomes one of ethnocentrism as well.  After all, a belief in ghosts is just as legitimate as belief in science, who are you to tell other people different?  Different things are real for different cultures, and every belief is valid (except for the belief that every belief is not valid, because that is not nice.  In fact you might even say it’s mean.  Jerk).

In effect such an interpretation leads a good deal of allegorical significance to the fact that the denizens of Mother 3 literally put their cultural past in the closet.  It’s a stupid argument to be making, but this game might be making it.

Now at this point I feel the need to explain, since earlier I spoke great praises of the game.  What it boils down to is this (these are basically the same words I spoke to Deets when I found out he had betrayed me);  As a story it is outstanding.  It progresses well, has a good and dramatic plot, is emotionally evocative on many levels, and is substantive.  When interpreted as allegory however, it is The Worst Form of Allegory; the kind that fundamentally misunderstands its subject.  While it is true that something which is merely fiction cannot be wrong, something which is allegory makes statements about the actual world.  Since the actual world contains matters of fact, it is possible for allegory to be incorrect.  It merely has to make false statements about the actual world.

But wait, I guess truth and falsity are just western myths, right!  The use of mathematical logic to formulate and refute arguments is a western social tradition, and no more legitimate than the tradition many cultures have of beating each other to death with sticks.

Well to be perfectly honest I’m all for letting people beat each other to death with sticks if they really want to, but to say it accomplishes the same task as argument is absurd.  The fact that industrial society has things like video games, bottled water, and fucking cheeseburgers that will KILL you if you eat too many is a testament to the fact that if the method is different, the product is different.  You can live however you want.  If praying to Clispaeth to save you from disease with a 10% success rate strikes your fancy, and medicines produced with the help of western scientific philosophy and method seem terribly unfashionable to you, I guess that’s your call.

One last thing.

The only picture in existence of me voluntarily in drag

As a “Magypsy” I am terribly offended whenever anyone brings my existence to bear against the so-called “western cultural conventions” of logic, debate, science, or the critical method.  I do not stand as a refutation of these things.  I am not an example of the failures of “black and white thinking”.  I am a woman with male genitalia and an xy chromosome, and there is no contradiction.

Itoi, I await your apology on this matter.

On Psychology (AKA Chapter 8)

At the very end of the game, something very startling happened.  Basically, it committed seppuku.  Or something to that effect, anyways.

First, a guy who never talked once or had any significance in any of the last 7 chapters turns out to be one of the most important characters in the game.  There is nothing wrong with this.  In fact, it is awesome.  What’s dumb is that he tells you that Tazmily village was a myth, a story that the last remnants of a previous, great, industrial civilization brainwashed themselves to believe in, so that they might avoid the disaster that almost ended life before.

Oh, by the way, SPOILER ALERT.

What disaster do they speak of, you ask?  Well it’s conveniently left to the imagination, another unfortunate sign that we might have an allegory and not just a story on our hands.  It could be global warming, or pollution, or thermonuclear warfare.  The only thing we’re sure of is that the survivors thought they could avoid it by living in pre-industrial society, which probably suggests it was a result of industrial society.

So what does this do to the story?  Well it makes it more interesting, which is good.  It also allows a convenient excuse to dismiss any peculiarities in the story.  Why are there thieves in Tazmily village who don’t steal?  Why is there a jail when there is no crime?  Why, in a peaceful harmonious village do the shop owners give bombs to children, for free no less?    The answer to all of these questions becomes extremely convenient all of a sudden; only Leder knows, for he knows the real story.  And suddenly the buck doesn’t stop with Itoi anymore, at least not completely, because much of the story now has a different writer.  How terribly, terribly cheap.

Remember what I said earlier about unfalsifiability in stories?  This is the perfect example, and really, any story with brainwashing in it is a good candidate for such criticism.  It gains internal consistency via a cheap trick that negates its significance as commentary on the world we actually live in.

But Mother 3 doesn’t just pull the brainwashing card once, it pulls it twice; the villains all prove to have been brainwashed as well.  So do, it seems, a good portion of the civilians of the industrial aggressor society.  So at this point, if the game is still allegory, it’s fucked.  It works as a story though, and in that capacity it is deeply pleasing and rewarding.

The real killing blow comes in the form of the villain.  Now you may wonder, as I did, what the motivations would be for a person who forcibly industrializes a weaker civilization.  Does he believe he is making the world a better place?  Or is he just a dick?  I am sorry to break the news that the story goes the way of the latter.

I do admit, there is something fascinating about the concept of an extraordinarily powerful being who, being bored with the world he arrives at and wanting entertainment, guides the development of said world towards industrialization in order to produce things which interest him.  However, I do not think such characters are responsible for any of the industrialization in our world.  More offensively than that though, such a Deus Ex Machina eschews the question of whether or not industrial society is actually good or bad in favor of some kind of purely behavioral rendition of the world.

You know what the problem with behavioral explanations of the world are?  They fucking suck.  Erich Fromm, the famous psychoanalyst, thought capitalism was bad because it was death affirming.  Why did he think this?  Because he believed it forced people to behave in certain rigid, mechanical ways dictated by society.  Apparently only societies in which goods and services are exchanged for profit has this difficulty.  Apparently as well, “mechanical” is taken ipso-facto as opposite to living.  I would question what the hell mechanical even means in this context, people obviously aren’t literally being turned into steel and silicon robots by industrial society.

You know who else thought industrial society sucked?  Theodore Kaczynski.  You know why?  Pretty much the same damn reasons as Fromm, just explained with a bit heavier of an I’m-an-anarcho-primitivist-and-I-kill-people tone.  Kaczynski is essentially the epitome of academic irony.  He was a person that railed against prevailing academic thinking, while simultaneously representing it about as well as anybody.

So a story that seemed to be hopelessly romantic, to pit the evils of industrial society and “rationality” against the noble, earthy peasants of Tazmily Village, ended up boiling down to something completely unrelated and a good deal less epic, something which defeated the tone most of the game had worked so hard to build.  It ended up being love versus hate, not love versus reason.  And really now, who prefers hate over love?  That’s trite.  A good number of people prefer reason over love though.  Perhaps it’s significant that wasn’t resolved or even addressed, in the end.

On Itoi Himself

This is perhaps the least relevant, and therefore the final section.  As I began to catch on to the fact that Burgerman had probably lied to me (sometime after the game was already over) I decided to challenge him on the subject.  “Well, Kilroy,” he said. “I didn’t know that you would have taken the assignment otherwise.  I needed you, and that’s why I did it”.  Then he provided me with supplemental data about the man himself, the man responsible for it all.

What are the sorts of things itoi has to say about his game?  For the most part, he seems less interested in elaborating on ideas than on making them more ambiguous.  Happy boxes are not necessarily televisions, he says.  He leaves it up to the imagination why Duster is capable of kicking people in the face even though he has a gimp leg (which is stupid, because [Infinity Injun's Official Farmer Ally Backup Character who Isn't in the Main Party -Ed.] Farmer Ben has two gimp legs and can kick people in the face, so people shouldn’t even be asking that). The theme continues throughout the interview.

I guess ambiguity is fine, maybe.  If there’s one thing I have to single out in the interview in condemnation of itoi, it’s this quote:

Just as each of our lives will end, what we think to be the biggest thing in the world–the planet itself–will someday come to an end as well. There’s sort of a feeling of refreshment in coming to realize that. If people think that the world will just go on existing forever, they’ll think of an endless number of things that they’re going to have to keep on improving.

[...]to me, those thoughts of endless improvement are a display of self-denial. After all, what is “good” and what is “bad” changes depending on the situation. On top of that, there might be some people out there with dangerous thoughts, like, “in order to make the world a better place, I am going to kill you.” Take war, for instance. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Goddamnit itoi!  Are you really trying to argue that death is more life-affirming than life?  In matters of personality, vitality goes a long way.  Why would infinite room for improvement be a bad thing?  I happen to like improving a whole bunch.  In matters of truth, not everyone is content to live in a labyrinth.  The labyrinth may be infinite for all we know, but how does that change anything?  Yes there are murderers to be found in it, people who will kill if you tell them the exit isn’t where they think, or even if you tell them there is an exit at all!  Some people grow comfortable there and start to call it home, start to worship the idea that everyone is rendered equal in their cosmic imprisonment.

That’s not everyone though.  Some of us want out.  We could use infinity.  We could use it because as finite creatures, all most of us can do is smash ourselves against the goddamn walls until our blood starts flowing towards what we think is the exit, and then follow the trail until we pass out and DIE.  I happen to think infinite blood would be awesome.  Don’t worry, I’m not diseased and you won’t get AIDS.  But the gist of it is that some of us do violence with words so that we lose any traditional excuse to do it physically.

But hell, if there’s any argument for the fact you shouldn’t be making claims about what is or isn’t self-denial or death-affirming, it’s this game.  In it, you set up everything you love: friendship, diversity, family.  Then you get the player to love it.  Then, over the course of the game, you brutally murder each and every one of these things.  You make the player watch as the protagonists mother is killed, his way of life is destroyed, and his brother turns into a goddamn robot.  You make them watch as his father falls apart from devastation, as the townsfolk turn against him and his family, and as he himself has to murder almost everyone who is helping him, ultimately killing his own brother in order to try and; what?  We never even find out what society ended up like after the curtain fell on the world, only that it survived.  And after all that, what is the villain’s comeuppance?  He lives forever.

One last bit.  Itoi, you said (to quote you directly):

Players add more than half of the meaning and value to games, which is more than any other mode of expression.

If this is the case, then on behalf of all players of all of your games, I hereby issue this demand.  We want a check for 50% of the total profits generated by every game you have ever worked on.  Your product derives value from the labor of us, the workers gamers.  Therefore, either share your profits or be found guilty of capitalistic exploitation.  You may complain that we stole from you when we played the game on an emulator without paying for it, downloading it from some rom site.  What an absurd claim that would be.  Do you really think you can force gamers to add a full half of the meaning and value to your games and then expect them to respect your claims of property rights?  We were merely taking back that which was ours, which we were disenfranchised of by the capitalists; and we were only taking a piece back.  Now it’s time Itoi.  Give us the rightful product of our own labor.  All of it.

In Conclusion

Mother 3 is easily one of the best games ever made.  It boasts an exciting and emotionally powerful story, an extremely competent musical score, and a solid combat system.  The world and characters are thoroughly fascinating, and the Love Theme is bound to go down as one of the most memorable pieces of music ever made for interactive media.  Everyone should play this game.

~Kilroy Del Dancefighter Estallion the First