Eruditorum Press

A workers state with executive dysfunction

I Think It Would Be a Good Idea (Civilization)

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In case you missed it, “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” a longform piece on topics closely related to The Super Nintendo Project, went up on Saturday.

At last, the false dichotomy between playing video games and saving western civilization stands revealed. But when we choose to do both at the same time, what exactly is the civilization that we are saving, and how might that shape our understanding of certain larger conceptual wars?

In bluntly materialist terms, which are after all the best way to approach civilization, it is another instance of a PC game getting a fundamentally middling SNES port, in the same vein as Populous and SimCity. There are no doubt those for whom this is “their” Civilization – the version of a monumental piece of video game history. This is the game that inspired Iain Banks to the phrase “outside context problem,” for fuck’s sake. Or, at least, it’s the crummy console version of the predecessor to that game. Certainly that’s where my history here intersects – somewhere past 1996 with a lot of Civ2, in a phase of video gaming otherwise defined by Diablo and Quake. High school, notably, where the Super Nintendo was late elementary school/early middle school.

The games are largely similar – Civilization II refines the original, as opposed to reworking it from the ground up. It’s more balanced and more elegant. This is doubly so when compared to the SNES port – the gap from this to 1996 is in many regards far more shocking than the gap from Donkey Kong Country 2 to Super Mario 64. But the basic thrill of the mechanism and its dizzying central metaphor persists. I compared it to Populous and SimCity earlier, and it really does manage to be a fusion of the two, combining the granular deep systems of SimCity with the cosmological scale of Populous to great effect. You may have had godlike powers in SimCity, but the scale of it was always small – one’s cities fundamentally never felt vast. Civilization feels vast easily, especially in the early stages of the game, which is as it should be. The effect of your initial tiny and contextless patch of land on which you build your capital slowly opening outwards until you encounter the Other, then borders, and finally a coherent world is genuinely effective, making the scope of what you can do feel real and substantive.

But we must be careful here. This sense of progressively illuminating an exterior world is certainly the form of western civilization as depicted here, but it is not the content. We’ve identified the story Civilization likes to tell, but not how it tells it. The answer to that question is inherited from the Avalon Hill board game Civilization is unofficially based upon: a tech tree. This is perhaps Civilization’s most significant not-quite innovation – a sublimely smooth implementation of an interlocking ladder of game upgrades that also serves to create a technologically deterministic narrative of human history from road-building to space colonies.…

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The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate

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An excerpt from my book Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

One measures a circle starting anywhere, so let’s pick up where we left off. Vox Day, who got in on the ground floor, back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, begins his description like this, in the first of two chapter fives:

In 2012, a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings decided to play at being a ‘game designer’. She plugged forty thousand words into the Twine engine, a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programing to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977, combined it with a ten-second piano loop, and called it a game.

It is ironic that the book should be called SJWs Always Lie, because he lies right there. He lies when he uses the same disaffected tone of factual declaration for “a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977” and “a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings,” as though these are both straightforward truths in the same way. He lies when he shifts the definition of game throughout; one moment she is a faux “game designer,” the next the not-games she not-designs are defined straightforwardly in terms of an iconic piece of gaming history. (And he gets it wrong for good measure; Zork was a parser game, not a hypertext.)

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game.” He brings a gun to a knife-fight, eviscerating the game with a level of contempt that raises the question of why he even gives a shit about it if it’s so self-evidently unworthy of attention. Of particular note; his citation of its 1.8 score on Metacritic, based on 308 ratings.

Eventually he reaches his point, saying that the game was a complete irrelevancy until “August 2014, when an upset young man who had finally broken it off with his cheating girlfriend created a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post that documented, in excruciating detail, his experience of having loved and lost.” Apparently the designer of this game cheated on a guy with some people who wrote for some websites that had mentioned the game in articles at some point. From this he casually spins out a conspiracy theory; “Given the very poor quality of Depression Quest, it seemed readily apparent to casual observers that the unusual amount of media attention garnered by the game must have been the result of the developer’s liberal distribution of her sexual favors.”

At this point, three pages into the chapter, entitled “Counterattack,” Vox Day makes a stunning reversal, admitting that “this does not appear to have exactly been the case.” And no wonder.…

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Consider the Ray Gun: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land

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Because apparently it’s podcast week here at Eruditorum Press, and creating new podcast threads is more fun for me than watching Firefly again, today I’m going to introduce yet another new podcast as part of the Oi! Spaceman family. This one is called Consider the Ray Gun, and it’s ostensibly going to be about reading old science fiction books, but since it’s an Eruditorum Press thing it’ll likely go wildly off topic in an episode or two. 

For the inaugural episode, I’m joined by Pex Lives’ own James Murphy to chat about Stranger in a Strange Land, a book that I grew up with and meant a lot to my teenage years, but which James had never encountered. We chat about the counterculture, period sexism and racism, Hugh Hefner wannabees, Heinlein’s political evolution, and whether American science fiction authors live more colorful lives than British fantasy authors. Among many other topics. It’s a fun listen, I think, although of course I’m biased. …

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Shabcast 24, Part 1 of the JFK / Nixon Conversation

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It’s Shabcast listenin’ time again. 

This time I was joined by James and Daniel again, and – for the first time – by Kit Power.  We talked for as long as you’d expect about Oliver Stone’s insane, brilliant ’90s political movies JFK and Nixon, thus helping to remedy the desperate online shortage of white guys talking about movies about white guys made by white guys. 

This week you can listen to the first half of our conversation, here. 

 

 …

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Comics Reviews (August 24th, 2016)

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Chew #57

Three to go.

Deathstroke #1

Good, competent stuff. I’m still not sure the non-chronological storytelling has a point as opposed to just being a thing Priest likes to do, but it’s at least a better way to introduce an important “old friend” character than many approaches in comics. Unless Wintergreen’s a longstanding supporting character; it’s not like I know Deathstroke’s supporting cast well. But still, Priest is working to introduce him, and the non-chronological story helps with that, even as it leaves the actual status quo of this book a bit muddy. This hasn’t grabbed me yet as such, but I’ll persist for an arc or so.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #10

A frustratingly unfocused issue that sutures two half-issues together without much in the way of payoff or connection. Still good, as this book always is, but an obviously lesser issue that ends up feeling like it’s wasting a Ms. Marvel guest-slot, which, as I think about it, is probably the thing that’s most knocking this down towards the bottom of the list this week. 

Snotgirl #2

Has the typical second issue problems of a modern comic, which is to say that it’s mainly tasked with fixing the problems that crafting a coherent and catchy first issue has created for the overall arc, which typically means going “right, so instead of paying off that cliffhanger we’re going to take a step back and fill in details.” And complaints that the book is mean-spirited about fashion blogging have a few more teeth after this one than they did after the first, although I still have a good amount of faith in O’Malley such that I’m willing to assume loving satire. Still, this is good, interesting stuff that I’m going to at least read a full arc of. 

New Avengers #15

Al Ewing in his finest form, paying off scads of earlier stuff in inventive and unexpected ways while remaining funny and full of good character moments in the present. This is the sort of book that makes sure if it’s going to randomly bring in Warlock for a guest spot then Warlock is going to get to appear in a heartbreaking scene and also get to do a Warlockified “do you feel lucky punk” at the book’s opener. This is not a book invested in offering particularly deep pleasures, but it remains the book that most feels like my idea of what reading Marvel comics is meant to feel like, and that’s always welcome.

Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat #9

There’s a delightful slowness to the structure of this book – a willingness to spend time on the human moments just being goofy before getting to the nominal plot. So much of this consists of the characters converging at a karaoke night, and it’s scintillating. Eventually the plot shows up and is also good, in part because Leth is focused enough to make sure that the long setup actually feeds into the plot and keeps all her plates spinning, avoiding a Bendis-esque “and now for the one panel in which the thing we put on the cover shows up” bit of bullshit.…

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Failure is Always an Option

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So I’ve been playing a lot of Sonic Generations lately. This is partly because it’s Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary in 2016 and while SEGA has announced two special games to commemorate this event, neither will see release until 2017 because SEGA. So I figured I might as well mark the occasion by revisiting the last milestone anniversary Sonic game. Also, I just recently got a somewhat hefty new gaming laptop to replace my aging workhorse with the cracked monitor and failed hard drive I used to write to you all on that was as old as Sonic Generations, and I’ve been putting it through its paces with a collection of PC games I’ve had saved in my Steam library but have been unable to, you know, actually play until now.
 
For a five year old game, Sonic Generations has held up *exceptionally* well. Even just in terms of sheer visual appeal, this is a gorgeous, gorgeous game, especially if you download and install the optional shader effects to unlock the full lighting range of the Hedgehog Engine. For those of you who might not know, the Hedgehog Engine is a proprietary game engine SEGA’s Sonic Team built for the 2008 game Sonic Unleashed and was used again in Sonic Generations. I’ve been a huge fan and defender of the Hedgehog Engine since I first saw it in action and I always find new ways to be impressed with it. It’s the lighting that really sells it: The art style in Sonic games doesn’t try to be hyper-realistic like a most other games, but is instead bright, colourful, stylized and vivid, and the lush sunshine and cool shadows allowed by the Hedgehog Engine really bring Sonic’s world to life here.
 
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the same age as Sonic Generations and was once a visual tour de force, but, on my new gaming rig, its age is finally beginning to show itself and Skyrim is starting to look a bit plasticky and rough around the edges. Yet another reason we desperately need that Special Edition re-release. Not so with Sonic Generations, which, barring the odd mesh here or there, looks like it could have come out yesterday. It’s not always a good long-term investment to chase the dragon of graphical photorealism.
 
But it’s the gameplay where Sonic Generations shines the brightest. What made this particular entry special is that there was a genuine attempt made to sum up, hone and refine years of gameplay evolution in the Sonic series. Now believe it or not I’m not talking about the “Classic Sonic” sections: To be honest with you, I’ve always found them the weakest parts of the game, chock-full of tedious platforming and unfair death-traps that demand countless amounts of trial-and-error. In spite of their conceit, they don’t succeed in recreating the feel of the original SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis games, but we shouldn’t ever have expected them to because that’s functionally impossible in the Hedgehog Engine.
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Of Spaghetti, Myths, and Donuts

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No, I’m not going down the rabbit hole writing an essay on spaghetti, myths, and donuts.  It’s just a clever title to cover up the fact that I haven’t had time to write in a while as I’ve been whipping The Last War in Albion: Book One into shape, and it’s finally given up and submitted to my ministrations.  It looks like it’s clocking in at 237,000 words and 210 pretty pictures, covering 760+ pages.  Whew.  So that should be coming out pretty damn soon. 

In the meantime, though, I was able to squeeze in some rather lovely conversations with some rather lovely people.  A few weeks ago I sat down with James and Kevin of Pex Lives to discuss some Westerns and some Doctor Who.  We’ve got three Sergio Leone flicks on tap — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.  This “Man With No Name” trilogy (which, by the way, totally applies to LOST) is juxtaposed with the fan-favorite Tom Baker classic, Underworld, which I chose especial for this chat. “What on earth,” you might be wondering, “is this woman going on about? Underworld?!?  Compared to Sergio Leone?!?!?” Well, if you want to find out, you’ll need to listen to the podcast, which you can get here. Because the quest is the quest.

In even more exciting news, I am happy to announce what should be a new regular(ish) podcast series called Giant Woman, as the amazing Shana Wolstein of Oi Spaceman! and I both have a deep abiding passion for Steven Universe and we can talk about a few minutes of material for hours on end! (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but only kind of.)  In our pilot episode, we talk about the first episode, “Gem Glow,” and compare it with the unaired pilot episode that got Steven Universe greenlit into a regular series on the Cartoon Network.  We would be very happy if you would catch that episode here and listened to it with your undivided (undivided, that means “a fusion,” get it? Get it?) attention, and then come back (comeback!) to let us know in the comments what you think.  (Sorry about the sound quality on this one, as we had a small technical snafu, which should totally be fixed when) we cover “Laser Light Cannon,” “Cheeseburger Backpack,” and “Together Breakfast” in our next podcast, which will hopefully come out next week.

And hopefully I’ll get back to writing more about LOST and Doctor Who in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!…

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You Should Have Been a Mother (Earthbound)

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A Guest Post By Anna Wiggins

As any die-hard EarthBound fan will tell you, in Japan EarthBound is called Mother 2, and is the middle of the three-part Mother trilogy. As a child, I just knew that I didn’t like EarthBound very much. The game is full of unpredictable tonal shifts, genre pastiche, self-awareness, and quirky humor, and these were either things I didn’t fully grasp or just didn’t enjoy. Somehow, the game just left me feeling vaguely alienated. Possibly, I just wasn’t ready for it.

Part of this may have been the gameplay, too. The basics are familiar to any JRPG fan: wander around, get into fights, select actions from menus, pray quietly to yourself. But the game is difficult, even by the standards of the day. It falls prey to a lot of common design flaws in JRPGs that raise the difficulty without adding fun. For instance, many enemies summon ‘backup’ occasionally, but with no bounds on how frequently this happens in a single fight, fights can become increasingly resource-draining without bound. Critical hits from enemies are far too common, and respawn rates are high enough to make getting anywhere a slog.

Aesthetically, the game is very distinct. It has cartoony graphics; the character design is frequently compared to Charles Schulz. The battle sequences featured bizarre, abstract backgrounds, a style referred to by the designers as an attempt at creating a “visual drug” experience. The spell effects were likewise highly abstracted, patterns of lines and diamonds that feel almost like sigils. The music direction is some of the best of the era; the soundtrack has an amazing range of styles and moods.

Despite all of this, I didn’t remember much about the game before returning to it. There is one part of the game, though, that left a very strong impression on me, and which more than lives up to my memory: the final battle.

The source of evil and ultimate villain in EarthBound, Giygas, remains an unseen but often-named actor throughout the game. The final battle with Giygas is one of the most deeply unsettling experiences I’ve ever had playing a video game. It takes the game’s underlying “weirdness” and cranks it up until it lands squarely in “uncomfortable.” Even in the battle with him, Giygas remains unseen. Instead, you seem to be fighting reality: Giygas is the wavy, “visual drug” battle screen background itself, and the combat music, both of which are now more sinister than anywhere else in the game. As the fight goes on, and you damage Giygas, the music gets increasingly frantic, the background increasingly angry.

After a short intro sequence, though, the only way to hurt Giygas is via one of the character’s (Paula, the lone girl in the cast, incidentally) “Pray” ability. Throughout the rest of the game, this ability has random (and usually very minor) effects. But now, each invocation of prayer leads to a cutaway scene of the characters you’ve met along the way, each feeling called to pray for you, until the whole planet is praying at once, lending their psychic power to help you.…

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Are You Sitting Comfortably? – First Movement

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Stories belong to all of us.  Sounds like a trite, sentimental truism, doesn’t it?  So let’s add a vital corollary: Because we make them. 

Let’s put it another way: the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails (and probably any form of class society, if you ask me), presents itself as an immense accumulation of stories.  Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a story.

In the original lines that I’ve just travestied, Marx is actually talking about commodities, but he recognises stories as commodities, as – in other words – one of the things that are made for the market in capitalist societies.  He goes on to say that a “commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference”.  Here we shall concern ourselves with those that satisfy fancy.

Just as surely as the material products of human labour should be controlled by those who produce them, just as surely as the services we perform for each other should be ours to control, so should the stories we make be ours.  Those who profit from them should be those who create them. 

This is not going to be a whinge about torrents and filesharing (much as I don’t think you should diddle artists).  This is nothing to do with the impoverished bourgeois view of individual rights.  This is nothing to do with profit.  Indeed, by distinguishing what I am saying from such concerns, I can also distinguish something else important. 

What do I mean by ‘those who make them’?  I’m talking about the human race communally. 

Absolutely, individual producers should retain control over what they produce, and when, and how.  Absolutely, individual service workers should have the freedom to control their own creation of services.  Absolutely, those who produce should benefit to the full from their production.  Absolutely, such elemental human rights should be respected, rather than routinely violated in the way that we currently take for granted as an everyday fact of life.  I don’t doubt the existence of individual rights, to the extent that abstract concepts exist.  Individual rights are a natural and valid and useful inference based on the facts that we are sentient beings capable of reasonably inferring the sentience of those around us, that we are limited in time, that we are separate bodies in space, and that we all feel emotions – not least simple pain and pleasure.  Rights are real.  Bourgeois philosophy and politics got that much right.  However, bourgeois philosophy may not have grasped why they are real.  The truth is: we make them real.  They emerge from a dialectical interaction of our material circumstances with our evolving personal and social and historical conceptions of those circumstances, which then feed back into the circumstances…  To be crude: rights are real because, at some point, we decided we had them. …

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Comics Reviews (August 17th, 2016)

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Demonic #1

Perfectly serviceable cop-horror story, and competently executed, but painfully by the numbers. The main character sells his soul to demons, which is a perfectly good hook, but it’s all executed so quickly that there’s no room to make him interesting before that, and Sebela is stuck establishing him entirely in terms of cliches. The big turning point when a demon shows up to offer him a deal on page thirteen should probably have been the cliffhanger. Still, if demons and cops is a genre setup you like, this’ll probably satisfy.

The Ultimates #10

As with the last issue, a bit of a mess between the brilliant art of Kenneth Rocafort and the bland and lumpy faces of the guest artist who does half the work on this issue. And it’s a bit of a mess with Civil War II. But Ms. America kicks ass and takes names, Black Panther gets a genuinely hilarious moment, and Al Ewing remains entertaining. Still, this is not a great stretch of this book, I fear.

Deathstroke Rebirth #1

Came out last week, and paid for by a reader. Nice to see that Priest’s still got it after frankly too many years out of the game due to his (entirely reasonable) desire to be offered something other than books about black people. His inclination towards non-chronological storytelling doesn’t quite do him any favors here, though, and the occasional muddy plotting his work can suffer from is alas in full swing. Still, this is smart and well-characterized, and probably the best book of DC Rebirth so far. I’ll probably check out another issue or two. 

 

The Black Monday Murders #1

Also from last week, and not at all sure how I missed it. It’s a Hickman #1, so massively long on promise, absolutely pregnant with insinuation and ideas, and clearly with the potential to be one of the most briliant things ever. One expects, being a Hickman series, that it will instead either go completely off the rails or simply stop coming out entirely after three issues, but this left my brain absolutely fizzing after reading it, and I intend to enjoy the hell out of the ride while it’s still quasi-functional. 

The Wicked + The Divine #22

Well I think we all expected the end of Rising Action to be mind-blowing, but it also turns out to be heart-stopping and gut-wrenching. And the other panels are brilliant too. I’m starting to regret the enthusiasm I showed for the early issues, because I’m not sure I left room for my critical assessment of this comic to grow and emcompass the range of what it can and does do. Fun game: immediately after reading the final panel of this issue, go back and look at Laura’s first appearance in #1. Then try to wrap your head around the fact that we’re only at about the halfway point of the series, and there’s presumably just as much character development to go. Meanwhile, the next arc looks set to tackle big ideas I’m massively invested in.…

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