Kilroy’s Millions

Mazo’s journal. Kilroy called. Said he’s rich beyond mildest dreams. Could I have some? Must investigate.

Saw the Watchmen movie. Twice. Thought it was good. Now we need some burgers.

Nevermind

And thus ended my first, and likely last, Martial Arts tournament.  Oh wait, I haven’t written anything yet.

The day started off bad enough.  I had to wake up much earlier than I would have preferred.  That’s hardly a solid start.  Really though I should have known based on the previous day, which consisted of 4 hours of sitting around and a direct order to eat food.  I don’t like food.  Well, maybe when it’s free, like some of it was, but not even then really.

So the Taekwondoka thing apparently consists entirely of breaking boards, patterns, and sparring that lacks any sort of legitimate contact.  I thought that maybe this wasn’t the case, and that training was different from tournament play.  I was wrong.  I hung around the scene too long.  Bad things happened.  I broke someone’s arm, caused structural damage to someones diaphragm, and worst of all I put on muscle.  By the time the tournament came around I should have been long gone.  One of the only things that kept me there was the commitment I had made to team patterns, and I knew my team would directly suffer if I didn’t show.  Of course it’s not like things could have been much worse in that area.

It was the first event of the day.  Understandably everyone was still tired.  I’m not sure how that excuses this shit though.  I can understand staying awake until 3am the day before a tournament; I can’t approve, but I can understand.  No, what was really ridiculous was contained squarely in how shit went down.  First off there was the 5 minutes or so of everyone in my team running over ideas while we were at attention waiting to be called up.  Then there was the little issue of a dispute over who should call the commands, which ended in two different people calling them at 3 different times.

I wasn’t innocent in all this.  I suppose, however, that I could say my crime stemmed from rashly trying to compensate for the failures of my teammates.

So that ended poorly.  There were still 2 other events though, surely they would go better!

Armed with early morning tiredness combined with bounded optimism, I prepared for the breaking tournament.  It started with one of my classmates failing to break 2 boards.  Then there was this conversation, which went on for about 10 minutes:

“Man, that’s one gnarly knot in that board.  I’m going to wait until someone else breaks that board.  Do you want to go?”

“No, I don’t want to go.  I’m going to wait until someone else breaks that board.”

“Well I don’t want to break that board.”

“I don’t want to break that board either.”

“Excuse me tournament director, can we break a different board?”

“No I am the tournament director you can only break the board I put there I am the tournament director.”

After what seemed like an eternity of that, I stepped forward and, fearing the board of doom, neglected to put up additional boards.  Then with my mighty foot of justice I smited the damned thing to the 9th circle of tree and tree product hell, allowing the breaking tournament to continue.  Did I get thanks from anyone for this dirty work?  Did anyone stop to realize that things would have been different for me under different circumstances, that by taking this task upon myself I removed myself from competition?  No, of course not.  No praise for a fallen American hero.

The only interesting part of the tournament happened in the 10 hours between this and the third event.  I was called upon to coach Talon, a fighter who even at his young age has managed to have a totally badass name.  Thanks to what I could only possibly credit as my outstanding ability to shout platitudes and contextually inappropriate advice, he rose to 2nd place in his division.  None of the other coaches were skilled enough in that department, and I maintain the only reason he didn’t take first was because of the superior size and reach advantage of the other coach.  He also happened to be a grand master but whatever.

Then I stood around for 100 hours.  In defense of the tournament organizers, the standing took place in a large number of different locations, but if I am paying to stand then I would expect the standing to be much higher quality than what was provided here.  This was hardly even well thought out standing.

When it finally came time to do what I was most looking forward to, sparring, I had been standing around for at least 1000 hours.  Other people had ruined the fun and used excessive contact to the point someone ended up going to the hospital.  There was a big lecture about it, in which the tournament organizer, my instructor, told people that TKD was not about hitting people and that they should do MMA if they wanted to hit people.  Point taken, but also hilarious.

So I got up there and was worried purely about not having a repeat of previous incidents in a highly public, official setting.  So I didn’t throw a single technique with any sort of commitment or enthusiasm, and was promptly run over by a proper Irishman doing what came naturally to him; moving directly forward and punching a lot.  This strategy proved so successful that he took first place completely without incident.  The tournament was single elimination, and there were 5 people in the bracket.  This means 3 lost in their first match.  However for whatever arbitrary reason one of them was given a bye.  Because of that, he took 3rd in the bracket.  No,  no round robin or anything, and double elimination is apparently much too tedious, but a person deserves a medal if they managed to beat the fictitious person designed to balance brackets.

I mean Bye isn’t even good.  He’s been in damn near every tournament I’ve ever been in, sometimes in multiple brackets and sometimes even in the same bracket multiple times, yet he’s never won so much as a single match.  Bye sucks.  If I had been up against him, I would certainly have won, and so would anyone else, yet for whatever reason one person was seeded against him.  So that one person took 3rd.  That person, who prepared for the tournament by staying awake until 3am.  Talk about getting blown by the brackets.

This tournament was offensive in a number of ways.  Standing around doing nothing for 10000 hours was offensive.  Patterns, team patterns, breaking, sparring, the perfect body of the EMT (minus her injured Diaphram), the lectures, the pomposity, and the sheer ratio of tourney-faggotry not perpetrated by me over actual tournament, all make me pretty confident I wasted several hundred dollars.  There wasn’t even the possibility of a money finish even, just of a trophy.  That’s basically just a shiny, physical representation of the words “good job“.

So I think I’m done with martial arts.  I liked Judo better, but I was putting on muscle doing all of this stuff and I would like to at least try and salvage something of the figure I once had, before I start transitioning in a few months.  Also this is definitely not all just an elaborate excuse to avoid the problems and difficulties that would arise from training martial arts while transitioning, shut up.

Towards a New Tourneyfaggotry

Dedicated readers of the Injun will no doubt be familiar with my long and illustrious music gaming career.  It was a good long run, I think.  I wish it to last longer still, but that’s a matter of the community and not of my own desires.  Between the scarcity of popular tournament music games in Colorado, the cost of out of state tournaments, and my status as persona non grata within Colorado for my various misadventures, I’m not sure there’s much left for me in the music gaming scene.  Still, at least I didn’t ever let a loss put me on permanent tilt, as I’ve seen so clearly from certain members of the community.  I lasted as long as I could with what I had.  My soul still burns for competition, however.  Hence I’ve been trying to make the slow, painful transition to other forms of sport. TKD,

I took up TKD again a semester ago, after something like an 8 year hiatus.  This despite largescale consensus that the art is useless at the highest levels of competition.  Given my competitive background this ought to turn me off of it.  The reason it hasn’t reduces to two principal reasons.  The first is very straightforward.  It’s cheap, and it’s close to my house.  As a professional plasma donor there’s sadly only so much I can afford to take up.  The second is more convoluted.  It might be called nostalgia.

I remember the early days of the Colorado DDR scene (or rather the mid-days, but whatever, that’s when I showed up so I’ll call it what I will).  Those were the days when bar use was not only thoroughly frowned upon, but also completely unheard of in actual competition.  Nobody did it, and part of it stemmed from the earnest belief that the no-bar player could beat the bar user.  This spirit never fully went away in Colorado, and indeed even at this late stage of the community I can count on one hand the number of people who make a habit of bar use.

TKD play feels like those early days.  More importantly, it’s a base.  I started my music gaming experience with habits that didn’t translate well to high level competition.  Playing at all, however, helped me to gain the experience necessary to eventually transition to high level play.

However I haven’t let such nostalgia stop me from beginning to train in something that’s considered more sound at higher levels.  As of yesterday I’ve taken up Judo as well.  I expect it will take quite some time before I see any measurable return from either of these endeavors.  Indeed it will be a while before I can even live train during Judo at all.  I suppose it is as it should be, though.

This is perhaps supported by the fact that warmups for Judoka apparently consist of doing GodHand style backflips across the gym mat.  Such aerobic activities are so far beyond me the chief instructor had to step in, concerned either about my wellbeing or about the possibility of someone slipping on the excessive sweat I left behind.

Perhaps finding a job other than professional plasma donor will help.  I will have to look.

My only real fear, however, is that I do not know how much energy I really have left.  I outlived the Colorado music gaming scene, it seems, but is that because of my vitality, or the lack of vitality amongst my competitors?  When I was first learning music games, I was studying Sociology.  This essentially consisted of not studying at all.  Hence I had as much free time as I needed to play and get better at music games.  I burned out on Sociology after realizing how trivial it was; will my desire to transition a more legitimate field (programming) ironically sap my ability to become competitive at things?  I suppose time will tell; time is at the heart of this whole thing, I think.

On that note, I am at Mazo’s house right now.  Despite being entered in breaking, forms, and sparring events at a TKD tournament less than a month away, I neglected my training tonight in order to watch a video (and recover from terribly sore knees, but the former sounds funnier).  I have embedded it in its 1.5 hour long entirety right here in the middle of the article, for your convenience, or inconvenience.  Whichever you least desire I suppose.

Mazo and I had a discussion of countless lengthy seconds on why the competitive Starcraft scene is so much more substantial than the competitive music gaming scene.  He brought up some good points.  Part of it, he suggested, was that Starcraft is a game in which players compete directly against each other; their actions affect the circumstances other players must respond to within the game.  In DDR, PIU, ITG and all that, a player is ostensibly just playing for high score, against the game itself; the presence of the other player on the pad is borderline irrelevent.

Perhaps part of it as well is that Starcraft is a game of strategy, whereas music games are principally a game of skill.  That is to say, you only ever need to do one thing, you just need to do it well, and consistently, and you’ll win.  Thinking along these lines has raised a number of curious considerations.  I have traditionally disapproved of classic pump tournament rules, which graded based on combo.  This is because this method of grading subtracts from the role raw skill plays in winning.  The question to me now is, does it substitute strategy in its place?  I will be playing in a classic pump tournament in April, and you can expect to hear my impressions on this subject at that point.

In fact, it strikes me just how different most competitive games really are from the DDR and ITG tournaments I grew up with.  I have a long ways to go yet if I am to make anything of myself in any of these new games.  We will have to see if I make it.

Book Review: Arcade Mania!

Shit.

I got a text from Kilroy a half-hour ago. All it said was “I’ll be coming over. I’m bringing Ben.”

He’s here now. We had a fun conversation. It started when he knocked on my door and said “I’ll be taking that PS3, Mazo.”

“But I bought it from you already,” I replied.

“Not… not really.”

The PS3 in question sat on the table, unused due to a lack of games. I say I bought it, but it’s more like I forcefully took it, sold off all his games, and promised him an exhorbitant sum. Now, around a half a year later, I’ve only paid a fraction of the sum, which Kilroy was now shoving into my face.

“I need it back,” he said. “I’m selling it.”

“To who?”

“My dad. He’s paying way more than you were going to pay.”

I couldn’t argue with money, not at this point. Kilroy makes money by selling vital body parts (sometimes even his own) and I just don’t make money. The Injun, despite being a paragon of tabloid game reporting, makes absolutely nothing for either of us, outside of enemies. “All right, that’s fine. But don’t you live with your dad?”

Kilroy nodded. “That’s the best part. I’ll still be able to play it and everything.”

“Well that’s pretty awesome. Too bad you didn’t bring that book you said you had two copies of.”

“Oh, wait, I did. It’s in the car.” He ran out the door and came back a minute later with a copy of Arcade Mania!

Now I have a copy. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks really nice. Smaller than I thought it’d be, though.

Book Review: Arcade Mania!

Surely the question that immediately springs to the mind of the savvy reader is “what makes this book review worth my time?  There are many book reviews on this subject, and why should I spend my time reading and digesting this one as opposed to any of the others freely and readily available to me?”  Well dear reader, let me tell you why; because this review has character.  First of all, I don’t just have one but rather TWO copies of the book.  By simple math that makes this review at least twice as good as certain other book reviews that shall remain unnamed.  Secondly, there’s a better story behind it.  I didn’t go the boringly pedestrian route of buying my copies of the book, oh no.  I won them, in glorious MSpaint battle for the pleasure of Sir Aaron of Japan.  A man, I might inform you, of supremely high standing.  His forums exist as a glorious beacon for the righteous and proper ideals of music gaming (even in these dark times).  In addition to all of that, however, he actually makes a contribution to the contents of the book under discussion!  That, my friend, is why this is the superior book review.

A lot is covered in a fairly short period of words in this book, something I am at once suspicious of, as sheer unbridled verbosity is quite naturally a major goal of any true writer.  The book is organized as a Japanese game center presumably is, although having never been to Japan I can only question whether or not it even exists.  This in addition to clear contradictions like reports of game centers dedicated entirely to only one game, such as Purika no Mecca, which specializes in photo booths.  As far as I can tell photo booths aren’t actually a game at all.  Strike two Mr. Ashcraft.

The section on music games is about as slanderous and ridiculous as anything that has ever been said on the subject, which leads me to question why Sir Aaron of Japan has chosen to affiliate himself with it.  Then again, an outsider could never possibly understand the complexities of electronic rhythm-action games and the glorious and intricate communities that have been built around them.  This would hold equally whether they were writing a book on the subject or in fact reading it.  Upon investigation it turned out that Sir Aaron had been misquoted.  I suppose such errors will simply have to be written off as an unavoidable part of the cross-cultural discussion.  A non-player will simply never understand such subtle distinctions as, for example, the difference between doubles mode and 2p mode, or the difference between pattern recognition and pattern memorization.  It is not within their range of cognition.

Given this I cannot obviously recommend this book as a sound overview of music gaming.  In fact I am not sure I can do so for any type of gaming, as I can’t be certain that similarly eggregious offenses weren’t commited when describing other important genres and cultures.  However, as an unsound overview it may just be adequate, and in that capacity I not only recommend it but in fact wholeheartedly endorse it.

From this book I learned, rightly or wrongly, about the sheer complexity of 2d shoot ’em ups, or “shmups”.  The genre is much more malleable and rife for creative exploitation than I ever could have imagined, with games like Parodius, Otomedius, and Muchi Muchi Pork apparently combining classical 2d shooting action with pornography!  Truly exciting stuff.  “A shmup is  a good playground to try new game features” says Doujin software maker Kenta Cho.  Indeed.  With a backlog of clever genre mashups to look through, I will have plenty to study for ideas when I begin production on the shmup that I have been planning for the past few seconds.

One of the things that impressed me throughout the book was the constant reports of individuals and small groups who had made big things happen in the gaming industry despite seemingly large obstacles.  This includes Doujin software makers like Kenta Cho, but also Manga artist collective CLAMP and even the group that made Ikaruga, both of which consisted of a mere 4 people.  I guess it just goes to show that people can really do amazing things when they just get off their damn asses and put forth something even vaguely resembling an effort, Jeff.

The section on games of both luck and skill was interesting as well.  I thought it was especially fascinating to see the the subject of bad beats brought up in the context of Mahjong, because it reminds me that there are people who complain that they lost illegitimately or by luck in every game, and even though some of them are bound to be right, infinitely more are just whiny good-for-nothing scrubs.

Lastly the discussion about epic card-based arcade games was, well, epic.  I can’t understand how demand doesn’t exist for them stateside, considering things like Derby Owners Club made the trip across the pacific.  Apparently soccer based card game World Club Champion Football was released in Europe, I imagine principally due to the lasting international appeal referring to Soccer by the wrong name has for foreigners.  Games like Sangokushi Taisen, however, which is set in the Three Kingdoms era of the fictitious nation of China are apparently too culturally distant to present to Gaijin, even though stabbing people with swords for justice is generally a theme that carries quite well across cultures.  It’s also been my experience that westerners are typically quite eager to voraciously and senselessly devour anything that even hints of being cultural (in this case cultural meaning anything from somewhere else).  Truthfully, I always figured eastern culture was more popular in the west than it was in the east.  You’ll certainly never find any westerners extolling the virtues of western culture.  I say that fictional or not, the east is quite marketable in the west, and companies should bring games like these stateside.  I also wish arcades weren’t all dead here.

In conclusion this was a book review.  Goodbye.

-Kilroy Del Dancefighter Estallion the First

my traveled

i went for a traveled again.  it was longer this time.  i went on it because there ws was dancing games.  they didnt have the dancing game that i went there for though and because of that they are a liar and i hate them.  i had a layover in new jersey.  new jersy isfunny.  the only buildings in new jersey are in new york.  here is a piture.

new jersy

even though the game that i went there for was not there when i got there except at jboys house where it wasnt in the tournament there were a bunch of games.  the games that there were there was impressive.  there was lots of impressive scores.  here are the picures

a persons did this by their own

this was done at an aw in new jersie

i met a bunch of people there and stayed in attic

ONE OF THE PEOPLE THERE WAS EVERY PEOPLE, INCLUDING ME.  I took a picture.

Mr everyone

a guy got 5 on determiiatator.  it was fun.  the end.

Professionalism

The Infinity Injun no chousenjou prides itself on our high standards as a video game publication.  To that end, it was a while ago that Mazo* commissioned a professional quality theme song and intro, as is commonly expected of all such publications.  It still somewhat of a work in progress.  However, this is what I have managed to produce as of yet.  I humbly present it to you, the reader, for your enjoyment.  I hope it properly represents the quality and dignity of our publication.

*As represented through official transitive psuedo-proxy via publication associate (me)

Left 4 Dead: Horror without gravitas, zombies without politics

I suppose it is conventional in games journalism that writers take to examining products roughly as soon as they hit shelves, if not beforehand.  It would be awfully dishonest of me to say that I have made a conscious habit of violating this convention.  Mostly I just lack the traditional attributes necessary to such a method of operations.  I tend to spend what money I have on dance games and dance game tournaments, and what’s left over tends to go towards, if not food and necessities, games that have already been well played and discussed and lay discarded.  I lack the journalistic clout to secure free copies or beta copies of things, and sort of doubt I will ever have it; but perhaps all of this is to my benefit.

It’s traditionally said, by people, that an authors work is separated from the author at birth.  In general this sort of thinking has both elements of truth and elements of arrogance in it.  In vidcons in particular however, it seems to become particularly important, if not to take on an important and altogether new tone.  A vidcon is not read for meaning, it is interacted with.  With some fictional tome, the authors concern would generally be that their intended message of the book survives it.  Conversely with many vidcons, the bulk of the player experience seems by nature to be out of authors hands.

I’ve had the opportunity to play Left 4 Dead off and on more or less since it came out, and I am proud to say my impressions of it are not the same as they first were.

I must admit that I have traditionally possessed a great hatred for literary analysis, and indeed much of what commonly passes for enlightened discussion.  Virtually any discussion of meaning to me seemed, if not moot, then a fools errand.  As if, say, 8 people read this article and came to a different understanding of it, and then turned to each other and argued over which understanding represented the actual text.  Suppose they come to a conclusion; what have they resolved?  Their time would be better spent arguing over which of the 8 understandings is best, not which is most similar to the authors.  An author is not a foundation for the truth of his words, nor is such a foundation necessary any more than the earth need be resting upon something.

At any rate, Left 4 Dead initially struck me as a very competent, stylish, quirky FPS which makes you fight zombies.  It also struck me as having no story.  What I’ve come to realize is that the story is extrinsic.  You might say meta-textual, but that’s only because you like throwing math-sounding-words into conversations to make yourself feel important.

No, the story is extrinsic to the design of the game and to the specific, meaningful intent of the creators, but not to the experience of the player.  That is a different text, a synthesis of sorts, which is organic and whole and yes, individually subjective, but beautiful.  Let me try to explain the only way I know how; by throwing a bunch more words up on the screen.

It was just yesterday that something outstanding happened, that completely shook the way I was used to playing and understanding the game.  Ever since launch, I realize I had never really encountered a diversity of attitudes in any one campaign.  Looking back this truly effected how I appreciated the game.  There is only so much the game can do on its own, and it does it so well.  The musical cues, the occasional development of the characters through scripted comments, the writing on the walls, and the artistic style of things in general are all top notch.  They can do nothing, however, against the attitudes of the players.

I had been playing this game for what seemed like so long, and I had only ever known two attitudes from my teammates: A focused attitude, and a curious attitude.  One was about treating the game the way most people treat games, with the intent to win.  The other was about exploring and understanding it as a game.  Occasionally this took the form of hilarious trolling.  No matter what the competency of any given teammate, the attitudes were always the same.

Something awesome happened, and it taught me.  A person showed up with a different attitude.  I found, in a team-based game about zombies, an anti-social showboat.  Now of course one must be accustomed to considering such a person as a gamer considers such a person, as a hindrance to ones enjoyment of the game.  At first that was my impression as well.  Then, after being told to stay out of the way, stay off teamspeak, and that the person in question was the most valuable person on the team, three consecutive tanks promptly spawned and beat his “I’ll take point” ass to a bloody pulp.  Meanwhile the 3 remaining members of the team made a run for the evacuation vehicle.  One got jumped by a hunter, the other was pulled right out of the vehicle by a smoker right when we had both seemingly made it to safety.

And so it was that I, who had been up to that last chapter the least useful member of the team both by the objective standards of the game and by common team consensus; so it was that I, (playing Zoey), became the sole survivor.

In any George Romero zombie movie or any horror movie at all we would probably be forced to consider (if not by our own machinations or our inference of the directors intent then by some overzealous cinema buff) the exact significance of the fact that any given character was the sole survivor of the film.  In Cube, the sole survivor is functionally retarded.  This is probably important.  In this game however such an occurrence is entirely unscripted and incidental.  What does it mean that Zoey is the sole survivor?  What significance does the anti-social showboat have as allegory to blah blah blah.  What does it mean that Francis killed Louis with friendly fire?  It can’t possibly have any meaning to it that was intended by the author, it can only ever have the meaning the gamer writes into it.  Admittedly it will often be written straight from another text into this one, but the beauty is that it makes it whole, not some stitched together abomination unto God but its own complete, natural experience.

Realizing that made me think of that guy, getting beaten to death by the third tank, not as a hindrance to my enjoyment of the game but as the greatest contribution to it I had ever experienced.  In what story do you start with four protagonists and have all four cooperate, perfectly, without drama between them or treachery or disagreement, and then reach their goal?  That’s monotonous.  I suppose monotony is not bad, if the tone is pretty enough, and it was for me.  Then someone started singing along, and they were off-key.  It was perfect.

So I challenge you, the reader; add your own games on top of the games you play.  If you were in a real zombie holocaust perhaps you would cooperate as smoothly and efficiently as you do in your campaign, and you would be better for it.  What you may not realize is that you’re adding your own meaning to the game even there.  It is a meaning of cynicism and focus and drive and quiet hope, that drives the characters on screen through their horrors with the same detachment and level-headedness and perhaps gaminess held by you, the player.  If you should ever want a different experience though, you need merely play a different game with the tools you have been given.

P.S . Fuck Roger Ebert

– Kilroy Del Dancefighter Estallion the First

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

Zanac is pretty awesome

It is. What other shooter gives you eight different weapons and way too many enemies to fight?

Besides Radiant Silvergun.

Anyway, I’m here to sound the Official Infinity Injun Horn of Complete Victory for Kilroy, for… well, he’ll explain. Afterwards, I’m heading back to the sewers to play the Official Infinity Injun Moody Organ of Almost Beating Clash At Demonhead. Then, cheap beer.