Only a Game

The Ignorant Dogmatist

Over at Ice Water Games, Kevin Maxon provides another glorious rebuttal to my firestarter. Here’s an extract:

In some sense, ignorance might be an appropriate word for what I’m advocating: for creators to intentionally ignore with greater diligence the pressures to be similar, to follow fashion or money or power, pressures to use objective, scientific methods of art production. And similarly, I think part of what I’m advocating for could be called dogmatism: for creators to hold firm in their values and goals in order to create works that are more distinct, more filled with themselves, more honest and interesting and worth talking about.

Please rush over to his blog to read the entirety of The Ignorant Dogmatist right away!

The original firestarter makes one of its targets the kind of self-focussed indie game design method Kevin defends here. Yet I cannot do anything but respect Kevin’s commitment to exploring his own creative vision in games. For me, what Kevin is doing is making what I call artgames, and the moment you’re committed to art you are no longer practicing a commercial craft. You’ve gone down a marvellous rabbit hole, one where money may be tight but that worthwhile things get made. Almost everything I’ve thought worthwhile in games in the past five years has been an artgame… This is largely what I choose to play these days.

Why sell out artists in The Craft of Game Design Cannot Be Measured By Any Metric, then? When I look at Kevin’s output, which includes Eidolon and The Absence of Is, I see someone pursuing their vision for its own sake, which is the mark of an artist – a way of life I greatly respect, not least because it now feels closed to me. But when I look at the indie market, I see people pursuing a similar kind of self-focussed process and making yet more-of-the-same violent, repetitive ordinariness. Such indies are, I presume, trying to make a living – and they’re doing it badly. It was these indies I wanted to lambast.

If my piece in any way discourages someone from accepting the role of the starving artist, with all that entails, I apologise unreservedly. Art is one of the greatest ways to add value to life beyond money. But most indies aren’t making art. They’re masturbating into a codebase and thinking they’ll hit big doing so. Maybe I should respect that as a kind of art, but I just see it as bad commercial practice.

With my philosopher-hat on (I wear many, conflicting hats), I can only smile with an inner warmth at this line:

I think that often, the non-mechanical components of a game are more important than the mechanical ones, and so I tend to work on visuals and writing at least as early as mechanics.

I wrote Imaginary Games in part to defend this philosophy, and next week I’ll present to a hundred game academics about how games are more than their merely artefactual machinery. Kevin describes himself as willingly ‘ignorant’… his ignorance, though, is closer to the kind praised in Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster – it is a freedom from stultifying conformity. I could never oppose this, especially not when it is done in the pursuit of art. Everyone must discover who they are, sometimes over and over again… and never let someone like me tell you otherwise.

Cross posted from ihobo.com.

Bateman and Bartle on Pokémon Go

Delighted to announce that Dr Richard Bartle and I came the closest yet to actually meeting as we were both guests on Afzal Ahmed’s Asia Wired TV show. We’re discussing Pokémon Go, including the reasons that the game has been so late to release in Asia, why it's garnered such attention, and a little bit of the history behind it. Despite Richard writing a chapter for one of my books, and our occasional email exchanges about player modelling, we’re never actually met in person – this is our first real time conversation. Check it out!

Airs this Sunday (31st July) at 11 am on the Islam Channel in the UK. Also available via YouTube.

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

Defending Game Metrics

Over on ihobo, Dan Cook defends game metrics from my lambast. Check it out!

Top Ten Incredible Philosophy Books No-one Recommends (2): From 10 to 6

Following yesterday’s background to this Top Ten, here are the first five books in the countdown of obscurity.

 

10. Maurice Blondel’s Action (1893)

211,000-426,000 hits
Nominated by Greg Sadler

To say that I was surprised by the search engine results for this one was an understatement, and I began to wonder if the results were skewed by the simplicity of the book’s title. While that might be the case, there is still tremendous discussion of this text out on the internet, although it is no way considered a standard text in phenomenology, existentialism, or deconstruction, all of which could be gainfully compared to Blondel’s work. Action was Blondel’s fiercely-contested doctoral thesis, and provides a philosophy of action that breaks substantially with the rationalist currents of Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers. Blondel claims “action is that synthesis of willing, of knowing, and of being, the link of the human composite that one cannot separate without destroying everything that has been deunited.” The obscurity of the book in philosophy circles is inverted in its importance in French theology, and Sadler’s Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy page for Blondel (which was the top hit) stresses its influence in forming the “New Theology” that influenced the Second Vatican Council.

 

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

180,000-290,000 hits
Nominated by Benjamin E. Hardisty

There’s an irony to this appearing in the list, since I had originally given it as an example of a book that overshadows others by its author. But there is a very real sense in which Hardisty is correct to nominate this: despite its huge importance for twentieth century philosophy, almost no-one now recommends reading the Tractatus. In part, this is because the significance for this text has radically changed over the last century. Whereas Wittgenstein’s mentor at Cambridge, Bertrand Russell, considered this to be an essential advance in understanding philosophy, it has gradually come to be recognised that Wittgenstein’s own view of this book was radically different, a point I briefly explore in Wikipedia Knows Nothing. Another significant issue with the Tractatus is the sheer difficulty of the text, which makes even Heidegger seem straightforward.

 

8. Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

172,000-192,000 hits
Nominated by Adrian Voce

It’s certainly the case that few if any philosophers recommend this book, although Pirsig’s narrative has been hugely popular ever since its first publication. Espousing a ‘metaphysics of quality’, Pirsig is not especially involved with Zen (or Ch’an) Buddhism, but rather in a distinction between “romantic understanding” and “classical understanding”, which is sometimes compared to Nietzsche’s split between Apollonian and Dionysian. This is the highest selling title in this Top Ten (indeed, the highest selling philosophy book of all time), having shipped more than 5 million copies, and also holds the world record for greatest number of publisher-rejections, at 121. While it scarcely qualifies as a candidate for a ‘library of forgotten knowledge’, it is resolutely exiled from academic philosophy, where it is never recommended. Neither the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy nor the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy mention it once.

 

7. Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man (1964)

60,400-79,500 hits
Nominated by Stefano Gualeni

Now the search engine hits are beginning to recede, and we proceed more convincingly into our deep dive into publishing obscurity. Marcuse’s book, subtitled Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, is another text (like Blondel’s Action) that is well-read, but only in a particular context, in this case the ‘New Left’. But this is a book not just for Marxists, and its critique of “one-dimensional thought” offers palpable rejections of twentieth century linguistic philosophy, philosophy of science, and social science. In his retrospective upon this book, Ronald Aronson, a student of Marcuse, declares that it “teaches us that we need to slow down in making our assessments”, and suggests Marcuse’s thought still possesses revolutionary potential.

 

6. Georges Bataille Theory of Religion (1973)

30,900-43,600 hits
Nominated by Will H.

We have still not reached the depths of the truly obscure, but we are far from the well-trodden paths of philosophy now. Bataille’s provocative and challenging book, a slender volume of little more than a hundred pages, presents religion as a search for a lost intimacy, and recognises that life can be affirmed through destruction. Despite its short length, it is often viewed as a difficult read, which perhaps accounts for the lack of any clear critical consensus upon it. One of it’s core idea is that an animal exists in the world “like water in water”, whereas humans develop an awareness of mind that severs them from this state of being. Religion, in Bataille’s view, is an attempt to recapture this pure immanence. Clearly influenced by both Nietzsche and Durkheim, Bataille himself seems to have viewed this text as a radical reworking of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He never got further than drafting it during his lifetime, and it was published posthumously.

 

Next Week, the Final Part: The Top Five

Top Ten Incredible Philosophy Books No-one Recommends (1): Prelude

Which amazing books of philosophy are the ones that hardly anyone suggests people read? That idle thought set me down a path that culminates in the Top Ten list that begins tomorrow, and concludes next week.

The Top Ten is a cheap trick, a means of adding the vicarious thrill of competition to what would otherwise be just a list. But as it happens, the list itself is also an artifice, a simple game that lures us in by evoking our curiosity. Whatever the number of items in the list, and whether or not it is ordered, we become tempted by the list whenever we think we might know something that might appear. This confession, that at root what I am doing here is something of a subterfuge, belies my motive for undertaking this exercise. For I am not interested in clickbait so much as I am motivated to find ways to render discussion of philosophy into forms with a modicum of popular appeal. Hence the Top Ten.

As for its subject matter, it emerges from the wonderful yet tragic predicament of the reader of books in our time: we have more books than anyone can possibly read, a situation I lamented in Crisis in the Infinite Library. This thought was fresh in my mind as I finished reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and it struck me that this was a text no-one I knew of had ever recommended reading, despite it’s incredible reflections upon our contemporary academic situation. That’s because the book by MacIntyre everyone recommends is After Virtue (which, for context, would have been #9 in the Top Ten, if it had been nominated). I began to wonder: how many other incredible philosophy books are there that no-one is recommending?

I asked for nominations primarily on Twitter and Google+, and referred people to the blog post For a Library of Forgotten Knowledge for the terms and conditions, taking the title of the post from a remark that Babette Babich made in response to my enquiries. I never got a nomination from her, alas, but she made this remark in connection to the practical limitations I was imposing:

…a list of forgotten books cannot be limited. There are bookshelves full of overlooked studies. Each a world, each worth the attention required to read it. But there are topics we like, and topics we don't...

I could not agree more – but the task I had set myself was to produce a Top Ten, primarily because I have been somewhat neglecting my task of ‘popularising philosophy’ recently, and so wanted to do something that was at least ostensibly ‘popular’.

In a move that rather blindsided me, Terrance Blake nominated Babich’s book The Hallelujah Effect... This one has been on my reading list for a while, but became even more interesting in the light of Blake’s capsule review that the book was an “excellent treatise on neuro-power, psycho-power, and noo-power.” However, incredible or not, it seemed cruel to me to include so recent a publication in a countdown of philosophical obscurity. If it had qualified for inclusion, it would have been #2 in the list i.e. extremely obscure, but as I codified the rules I took the precaution of excluding books that weren’t at least twenty years old. A recent publication, I hope and trust, is still being mulled. What I was hoping to focus upon was texts that had already become somewhat lost... 

Steadily, slowly, I acquired a set of 12 nominations (including my own nomination of MacIntyre), and to judge their obscurity – since there was no even remotely plausible way to parameterise their incredibleness! – I generated the range of search engine hits based on an exact-title match plus an author name field. I have taken the midpoint of this range of values as the ‘obscurity score’ of the book, so that #1 is the most obscure, and #10 is the least. The list has a number of peculiar qualities, but I feel these add to its charm. In particular, it contains things that some people will feel are not in any way obscure. This, if nothing else, effectively calibrates the exercise.

Two nominations didn’t make the list, of course, since it was capped to ten. These were #11, Richard Bach’s Illusions (nominated by Brenda Holloway) and #12, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (nominated by Lee Douglas). These pulled in well over 346,000 and 444,000 hits respectively. Some of the books you see in this list might not seem to qualify as philosophy, but I was open in my criteria in this regard: as long as the nominator felt it was a work of philosophy, I allowed it. I have no interest in erecting a boundary fence around whatever ‘legitimate philosophy’ might be… what I wanted to do was explore obscurity in philosophical writing, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my adventures in doing so.

The first half of Top Ten Incredible Philosophy Books No-one Recommends, charting the nominations from least obscure to the most, begins tomorrow, with the concluding part next week. Hope you enjoy the ride!

Tomorrow: From 10 to 6

With especial thanks to Babette Babich, Terence Blake, Lee Douglas, Stefano Gualeni, Will H., Benjamin E. Hardisty, Brenda Holloway, J. Moesgaard, Michael Pereira, Greg Sadler, Bart Stewart, Judith Stout, and Adrian Voce.

The Purpose of Metrics in a Game

Brian Green (AKA Psychochild) has a piece responding to last week’s firestarter and arguing that there is a purpose for metrics in a game. Here’s an extract:

I dislike the absolutist nature of the argument, and prefer the more nuanced version. As a creative person, I still like things like food, a roof, and perhaps air conditioning when the temperature and humidity get high outside. But, I think it is important to realize that there is a decision to be made. One can choose to pure creative energy to create experiences on one extreme, pandering to tastes and maximizing for profit on the other, and a lot of room between the two extremes. And, as much as we might lionize the indie iconoclasts, the reality is that sometimes it takes a lot of work and understanding what people actually want to survive as an indie.

The argument Brian refers to here is art vs. commerce. Personally, I don’t accept a significant divide between art and commerce here… the vast majority of art is commercial in the sense that this term is used today: music recordings and performances are sold, paintings are auctioned, theatre and cinemas charge an entry fee. Knowing that games are artworks doesn’t mean the people who make them don’t deserve to be fed. I absolutely agree with Brian that game developers are no different in this regard: part of my argument in The Craft of Game Design Cannot Be Measured By Any Metric is precisely that indies, in rejecting commercial design considerations, are gambling on their livelihood.

So I accept Brian’s point that metrics can be used responsibly, at least in principle. My argument is only that there is a tension between the craft of game design, and engineering systems for commercial exploitation. Developers who can use metrics to assist their game design practices ought to make clear how this can be achieved without it becoming exploitative. I welcome the discussion here – it is this discourse that I feel is substantially missing.

You can read the entirety of The purpose of metrics in a game over on Psychochild’s Blog – check it out!

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

The Craft of Game Design Cannot Be Measured By Any Metric

Over on ihobo.com today, a tirade about analytic metrics, game design as a craft, and 21st Century Game Design being about to go out of print. Here’s a quote:

We made one crucial error in 21st Century Game Design. My assumption had been that modelling player behaviour entailed understanding how to satisfy play needs, which is to say, having a positive, inclusive, moral and practical relationship with players. But the dominant forms of player modelling right now have absolutely no need to understand how to satisfy players in any form, because the principle form of model we are using are analytic metrics – and these metrics are blind to any aspect of the mental states of the player whatsoever. If our image of game design in the 21st century was that the industry was going to be making money by creating games that deeply satisfied their players, what we are actually facing now is an industry that makes the majority of its money by simply analysing where the leaks are in their player community, and acting as digital predators to suck spare change out of their digital wallets.

You can read the entirety of The Craft of Game Design Cannot Be Measured By Any Metric over on ihobo.com.

Pokémon GO Round-up

Before you ask, I’m not playing Pokémon GO, nor do I plan too. I’m a father, a writer, and a business owner – I don’t have time to play an MMO. But it’s interesting to me, since this is another example of a game where the fictional content is far and away the critical factor in its success. My old MUD crowd played Niantic’s previous game, Ingress, and had a lot of fun with it – but anyone who has ever enjoyed any aspect of Pokémon is playing GO, and that’s not just the power of branding – it’s the power of fictional worlds.

I've shared the best articles so far about Pokémon GO over on ihobo.

A Study in Psylocke

A Study in Psylocke was a short two-part serial that ran here at Only a Game from July 5th to 12th 2016. Effectively a sequel to Corporate Megatexts, it examined the relationship between the different comic series that featured Betsy Braddock (who becomes Psylocke), the circumstances in the Marvel offices surrounding her transformations, and the challenges involved in bringing such a racially ambiguous character into the X-Men movies.

The two parts are:

1. Betsy Braddock
2. Olivia Munn

If you enjoyed this serial, please leave a comment. Thank you!

A Study in Psylocke (2): Olivia Munn

Last week, I discussed the circumstances surrounding Betsy Braddock A.K.A. Psylocke both inside the fictional world of the X-Men comics, and within the offices where her stories were created. This week, I want to pick up this megatextual odyssey by turning our attention to the big screen narrative offshoot established by 2000’s X-Men. After two successful X-Men movies, Bryan Singer walked away to direct the disappointing Superman Returns, leaving Brett Ratner to complete the original trilogy with the choppy mess that is 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. One of the bit parts in that movie is a mutant called (so the credits claim) Psylocke, played by Meiling Melançon. You could be forgiven for not connecting Melançon’s character to Betsy Braddock, however, or indeed for never noticing her at all. In a very practical sense, the opportunity to bring Psylocke to the big screen was still substantially open.

 

Enter: The Munn

We come at last to Olivia Munn’s role in our story. She was auditioning for the role of Vanessa for Deadpool when somebody (nobody seems clear who) spotted the potential for Munn to play Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse. Another significant ambiguity is whether Psylocke had been written into the screenplay for that movie by this time, as she wasn’t originally part of the plan. Indeed, the Fourth Horseman would have been Xavier, a plan that began to feel hollow during production, since James McAvoy does very little in the final act of the movie beyond whinging. So a mutant character needed shoehorning into the story to make up the requisite number of minions for the dullest of all X-villains, Apocalypse. Whether because Munn had been auditioning for a role in Fox’s branch of the Marvel movie megatext and an opportunity was spotted, or because Psylocke had already been chosen to plug the gap in the story (which seems less likely), Munn was thus brought into the production.

This helps explain in part why Psylocke has so little backstory in the film, and very little to do other than provide another foe to fight in the rather flat final act. But the other side to this coin is that it would have been highly difficult to provide any context or origin story for Psylocke for the reasons explored last week: Betsy’s character is a clunky amalgam of three separate storylines,  the Captain Britain continuity from Marvel UK, the original Psylocke character that brought her to the US comics, and the Jim Lee-designed Lady Mandarin Psylocke who has lost all the vulnerability and ambiguity of Betsy’s previous incarnations and serves as yet another kick-ass anti-heroine to throw on the pile of scrappy new characters added to the X-megatext by the future Image artists (e.g. Gambit by Lee and Claremont, Cable and Deadpool by Liefeld).

Adding Psylocke to the already crowded story-space of Apocalypse must have presented director Bryan Singer with something of a conundrum. There wasn’t enough narrative space to do justice to the characters they already had, especially since Singer set himself the task of getting a solid X-Men team together by the close of business but had only Beast, Professor X, and Havoc left in play at the end of Days of Future Past. (I’m not counting Mystique, whose role has been utterly transformed in the movie megatext from second string villain to full-on heroine through the sheer popularity of Jennifer Lawrence). There was no plausible way anything substantial could be done with Psylocke. So what to do?

The first play in circumventing this problem was a stroke of simplistic genius: Singer announced Munn’s casting on Instagram by saying:

Excited to welcome @oliviamunn as Betsy Braddock! #Psylocke #XmenApocalypse #XMEN

The key point here is that he announced that Munn would be playing Betsy Braddock, which was not strictly the case. The credits to Apocalypse report only that Munn’s role is Psylocke, which is also the only name that is ever used to address her on screen. So here we have a situation whereby if we take solely the movie as our source of canonicity, Singer’s announcement is either incorrect, or a lie. But of course, the ultimate source of all canonicity in anything licensed from the X-men comics are the comics themselves – these are always serving as subsidiary props in the background of the ‘games’ being played by those who are watching the movies whenever they possess the relevant background knowledge of the comics, a complex form of play I explored in “What are we playing with? Role-taking, role-play, and story-play with Tolkien’s legendarium”.

 

Playing with the Backgrounds

When creating high-profile derivative works from a corporate megatext, you have unusual choices. As long as nothing in the foreground narrative (the X-Men movies, in this case) contradicts an element of the subsidiary text (the comics in this case), the ‘players’ of the movie are free to establish the viable narrative connections in their own minds. So as long as Psylocke as presented as having plausible continuity with her comic progenitor, fans of Psylocke are free to inject her backstory into their experiences of the movies along whatever lines of imagined adaptation they want to apply. Movie-goers without the knowledge of the source megatext are excluded from this game, of course, but to them Psylocke is just another bit player in a film franchise that is packed with such throwaway extras – just look at first draft of movie-version Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Now whether through agreement with Singer or just brilliant PR instincts from Munn or her agent at EBA (most likely through Munn’s own well-developed geek-sense), Munn takes the gift that Singer provided the fans by publicly announcing she was playing Betsy (rather than just Psylocke) and spins it into a brilliant piece of extra-textual play. For through a single press interview that was picked up and run through dozens of nerd-leaning internet news sources like Screen Rant, Collider, and Nerdist, Munn takes the foundation Singer had provided and builds upon it every possibility that could be used to support just about every game of canonicity-alignment any sufficiently interested X-nerd might want to play. Here’s a great example:

If Psylocke had a chance to tell her story, it would be great to start with the genesis… I think maybe like right as she’s getting out of university and before her whole family… We jump in right before all of her family is taken out and we have an understanding of what she had to lose. Then her figuring out he powers and how powerful she is. It’s something that I always loved about her. That she came from a good family and lost everything. Yeah, I would just like to tell that story.

Yet of course, if the comics canonicity was to be held faithfully, it would be essentially impossible for Munn to tell that story – for Betsy at this point is a blonde Anglo-Saxon aristocrat. And cast your imagination around how you like, you’ll not find a viable way for the first part of Betsy’s backstory to be comfortably converted to the big screen, nor for that matter for something as offbeat as Mojo and Spiral to be part of the events, nor for that matter the Ninjas-R-Us craziness of the Lady Mandarin story, whether in Claremont’s original form or Nicieza’s retroactive adjustments. Betsy’s story, in its most canonical form, is simply unfilmable. But Fox never needed to offer it on the big screen, because Singer and Munn had managed to offer fans a chance to play this game themselves, without creating any complexities for the film franchise.

In no way am I impugning Munn’s honour in drawing out this strange and wonderful side story that hangs ethereally off both the comic and the movie megatexts, bridging the two without ever having to establish anything substantial. Even if it is taken that the above quote invites the inference that Munn is falsely claiming to have read the Marvel UK Captain Britain stories (which she could not have done directly as they were UK-only) no US nerd could viably indict her since they too, like Munn, must have picked up this backstory from secondary sources, of which there are an endless supply of options, from trade paperbacks to internet databases. Honestly, I admire the way Munn managed to generate such incredible publicity from nothing more than the appeal of canonicity and the faithfulness of X-fans. I challenge anyone to find such commitment to a frankly minor acting role in any other corporate megatext adaptation ever.

But because of Psylocke’s canonical history, it would have been impossible for Munn to ever portray Betsy’s backstory without transforming it to the point that it was no longer canonical, thus breaking with the faithful community that care about such matters. All that could be done was to hold out a hope, a carrot of possibility, that would enable fans to create their own bridging stories in their minds. Precisely because storytelling with corporate megatexts concerns a manifold of practices, a set of different ways of drawing connections across impossibly distinct continuities, the satisfaction of the fanbase has become a vital corporate practice whenever adaptation is in play.

The management of the kinds of possibilities I have outlined here are now absurdly big business – a billion dollar business, indeed – and the risks of a misstep cannot simply be ignored or taken for granted. We geeks have a strange kind of powerful powerlessness: we were essential to the initial commercial success of any and all comics that come into contention for adaptation, and we are equally central to the hype-making and cross-megatext story-weaving practices that accompany transitions into television and film. Yet, we are also expendable, in the sense that satisfying the punters in the cinema or the binging box-setter is vastly more important to on-going commercial success than placating fanboys, fangirls, or other kinds of fan-entities. While it’s true that the corporations need us more than we need them, for those of us whose imagination and loyalty is bound to contemporary megatexts, the dependencies are far harder to unravel.

More nonsense soon.