J.C. always +1

On Sub Specie I don’t write about linguistic matters all that much. I’m not entirely sure why, but perhaps it’s because I spend most of my research time on the main subject of my PhD thesis: analogy and verbs, and I just didn’t feel like tackling that and other linguistic issues in my free time as well. Maybe that should change. At one point, I’ll probably summarise some of my findings on my main subject here in the future. In the mean time, I intend to rectify this glaring oversight in my blogging. There’s a lot to be said about language that’s suited to blogs as a medium; stuff that doesn’t warrant a whole journal article with a peer review process of two years, but that’s a bit bigger than what you can fit into a couple of tweets.

To kick off, I’d like to start with what is a relatively obscure phenomenon in the Dutch linguistic landscape: the use of +1 (or as a pronounced phrase plus één) as an adjective in predicative position. Basically, it’s used to signify approval or that something is better than something else, as might be expected.

Some evidence:

Heel goed, eigen broek ophouden is altijd plus één *

Very good, to support yourself [financially] is always plus one

Argumenteren met gelovigen, altijd +1 *

Arguing with religious people, always +1

aangezien straaljagers altijd +1 zijn schotelen wij ‘m lekker aan je voor *

Since jet fighters are always +1, we’ll dish it out to you

Deze tent is echt plus één! *

This joint is totally plus one!

There’s probably a lot to say about the sociolinguistic specificity of this phrase. Based on a gut feeling, I would say it’s mostly used by men, the type that’s a bit boastful, trying to be masculine and cool. Apparently that includes frat boys and atheist windbags, but I digress.

Though not exclusively, +1 or plus één is mostly used as a phrase combined with altijd ‘always’, which you can use to signify that something is pretty much categorically +1. Other options include the abovementioned echt plus één ‘really +1’. Although theoretically I suppose you could use +1 without an additional intensifier, in practice I think it is less often used bare. Honestly, though, doing a web search for attestations of a bare use of +1 — or plus één, for that matter — is not really practical. An interesting elaboration on the phrase is its negative counterpart min één (found in the source for echt plus één above), which can of course be used to signify that something is, well, decidedly less awesome.

As the examples show, the phrase occupies the position usually filled by a predicative adjective. Jet fighters are always cool, always awesome, always +1. As such, it’s best analysed as an instance of grammaticalisation, though one of a special kind. The original +1 is not that straightforward to categorise as a linguistic sign. It’s a mathematical operator with its own verbal form that can be analysed as conjunction + numeral.* In terms of word classes then, it’s a two-word phrase turned into an adjective. Since I’ve seen no evidence of the phrase being used attributively (i.e. before the noun), I’d say it’s of roughly the same status as phrase like the bomb, as in that shit is da bomb! (also in Dutch: die shit is de bom!) That phrases can also grammaticalise into adjectives that can be used attributively is shown by something like off the hook, which can be used in both ways. Just google “an off the hook X” if you don’t believe me. A Dutch equivalent would be niet te filmen, which means roughly ‘unbelievable’, but which sounds a bit fogey-ish to me.

Last question, then, where does +1 come from? When I started thinking about the phrase today my mind as immediately pulled into the ever-expanding realm of Google. Of course, Google’s social networking platform is called Plus (or +), and the +1 button is Google+’ equivalent of the like button on Facebook. However, I had a nagging suspicion that the usage of +1 in Dutch predated Google’s use of the button. This seems to be more or less correct. The oldest attestation of altijd +1 that I could find was from late 2009, whereas Google+ didn’t launch until mid 2011.* Of course, lots of forum and comment systems on the web have been using + and – buttons for years to allow users to rate posts. I knew this, it’s just that Google almost successfully colonised my memory there. Very clever. In any case, it seems that Dutch people started using +1 and its related forms as a way to emphasise that they liked a certain post or comment, and from there the usage extend to being usable to signify the plus oneness of any concept.

+1, like many instances of grammaticalisation, illustrates that people can be creative and flexible with phrases and word classes. It’s doubtful whether something like this will ever make it into mainstream language, but that is the fate of many innovations originating in youth and subcultural language. If you know where to look, there’s a veritable goldmine of linguistic innovation and language change. Which is always +1.

Those Bloody Networks [source unknown]

This is a reply to Chris Bateman‘s post “The Extinction of Blogs”.

I remember how Chris and I first ‘met’. It was on Twitter (I’m @qwallath, he’s @SpiralChris), and as these things go, I was planning to embed the original tweets below this paragraph, nice and easy. However, since the conversation happened at least a year ago, if not two, I’m having difficulties locating them. Scrolling through my list of Twitter mentions is a hellish task, and besides, they don’t seem to go back more than a few months. In other words, let’s not bother with the historical sources.

Through the haze of memory, then, allow me to paraphrase. Chris said something to the effect of “Applying evolution to cultural phenomena is a dead-end street”. I didn’t know or follow him at the time, but the tweet was retweeted by @taleoftales, who I did follow, so it ended up in my timeline. Since I deal with evolutionary approaches to language (a cultural phenomenon in my book) in my research, I replied that I didn’t agree. Since this was Twitter, I’m pretty sure we didn’t end up in a very convenient conversation, but at that point I did find out that Chris was writing a book about the pitfalls of evolutionary myths in science, religion, and so forth; that book is the commendable The Mythology of Evolution, which I discussed earlier on this blog. Since then, Chris and I have had more regular conversations, often on Twitter, sometimes over on his blog, Only a Game.

This anecdote illustrates a few points about the nature of online communication and conversation. I’ve found that Twitter is a good place for getting in touch with people you don’t know yet. Retweeting someone to your followers is sort of like introducing them to your friends. In other words, there is something of a surprise factor involved, which can lead to nice discoveries and new acquaintances. At the same time, the difficulties of Twitter conversation show that the real action (or ‘content’, if you like) is usually elsewhere; it’s in the place you link to using a tweet.*

As Chris illustrates, things have changed in the past ten years or so when it comes to online conversation. I would say it has evolved in a certain way, if only to be a pest. I remember roughly ten years ago, when nearly all my online conversation took place on forums. They were generally organised around a theme (music, scene, interest), and while they theoretically allowed for long articles and expositions, most of the conversations began abruptly. Someone introduces a topic, other people weigh in. All the conversations were neatly organised by topic/thread, and it was relatively easy to look up older threads, to see the chronological order of the conversation, etc.

It feels almost too banal to describe a forum structure, but comparing it to the organisation of most social media nowadays, the difference is significant. I’m having difficulty expressing that difference, but I feel that Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and the like are far more ephemeral, or rather, what you post on it is. Other people need to read it soon, or it’s lost in an ocean of digital shouts from other people. If you do get replies to your post, it’s a bit easier to keep track of it (notifications and all), but this won’t generally expose the post to new people. Again, the retweet/share/reblog is an exception, and it may prolong the shelf life of a post. Of course, extremely busy forums are a competitive environment for a post as well, but for me it is telling that its main unit of organisation seems to be the thread/conversation, rather than the individual posts that they are composed of.

I should actually be comparing social media to blogs, since that is what Chris’ post revolved around, but I couldn’t help dragging in forums, since I didn’t start blogging long after I has started writing on forums. Anyway, blogs are still a very relevant medium, in my opinion. They can occupy a sort of sweet spot between the popularity of magazine articles, the seriousness of a scientific paper, the privacy of a diary, and the familiarity of a conversation over tea or coffee. This alone makes them unique. However, as Chris indicated, the function of a blog as a conversation medium seems to be on the decline. Since I came late to the blogging party, I can’t really speak from personal experience, but I do agree that for some reason, conversation and interactivity is shifting away from “visiting someone’s page and responding” to “seeing everything in one place (i.e. a social networking site) and replying there, if at all”.

This shift towards reliance on social media for new things to read on the internet has made it harder for individual blog posts to get noticed, even if they are explicitly shared on a networking site, since they have to compete with so many other posts. In addition, because blog posts are generally longer, they are more likely to be relegated to the perilous read-it-later pile. How many of those ever end up actually read?

Speaking from my own experience, I think there is a good reason for that, and that is convenience, surely one of the most powerful selection criteria in human cultural evolution (sorry). I’m the kind of person that likes to stay in touch with many different kinds of people and for some reason many of those people have gravitated towards different online presences. If I want to keep in touch with all of them, I need: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Livejournal, RSS, Google+ (though perhaps this one is redundant), and old-fashioned e-mail — there may be more. Obviously, going through each of these individually is pretty much undoable if you also want to get something of your own done during the day. Ideally, RSS would be able to tie all of these channels together into one convenient collection of things to read. However, some of the social media probably happen too fast (i.e. the posting frequency might be too high) to really make RSS convenient, and crucially, Twitter doesn’t seem to have an RSS connection at all anymore.

For the moment, then, we will have to jury-rig solutions. RSS works fine for keeping track of the ‘slower’ media. I generally use it whenever possible, as long as there are no more than ~10 posts a day per account I am following. Of course, most individual blogs only post a few articles a week or less, so RSS is perfect for making sure you aren’t missing any of those. Still, the bigger your RSS collection gets, the more likely it is for competition to set in there as well. Maybe there just is no way of having your cake and eating it?

As a final thought, perhaps it will be useful to take a more historical perspective, and compare our plight to that of the prolific letter writer. Broadly speaking, a (say, 19th century) letter writer has two networks: the local one, relying on face-to-face contact, and the paper one, relying on back-and-forth letter writing. The easiest way to make contact is to hang out in the local pub and see what conversations emerge over a tankard or two with the people who happen te be there. You won’t have time or opportunity to develop longer conversations with everyone though, and of course if someone doesn’t live near you, face-to-face isn’t an option at all. Both longer face-to-face and longer paper conversation require selection on your part; they force you to ask yourself the admittedly harsh question: who among all these people is worth a larger investment of my time? You can only spend so much time each day writing letters, and if you want to maintain deeper conversations with some people, you will have to be short with others, or even push them aside for a while.

The advent of social networking sites has mainly made it easier to maintain short, superficial conversations with many different people, and the requirement of face-to-face communication is gone. Twitter and Facebook are the virtual pub, if you will. They can lead to some wonderful acquaintances, and these have the potential to develop into deeper friendships. But again, if we want to maintain more in-depth conversations with some people, we will have to make a conscious effort, and allocate our time and attention accordingly. New technologies haven’t changed that basic principle.

The Lady

This April was a religion-themed month over at videogame blog The Ontological Geek. I wrote the final article in the series, and mused a little on how concepts of religion, God, and particularly The Holy, can be incorporated into videogames. For perhaps obvious reasons, it’s easy for games to tackle and represent the more mundane sides of religion and faith, but they seem to struggle somewhat when it comes to matters more transcendent. In “Sanctifying Games”, I try to explore why that might be.

“Sanctifying Games” on The Ontological Geek

vital_error

It’s been a while since I wrote anything serious about literature, but recently I was reminded of an essay I wrote in 2008, about the question of authorship in the cyberpunk works of Kenji Siratori. I never did anything with the piece at the time, but felt it was interesting enough to brush it up and give it another chance.

In short, I question how we should apply the “death of the author” as proclaimed by Roland Barthes to literature that  provokes strong questions about the nature of its own author.

I’m honoured to be able to publish the piece on CultureRamp. Read on:

“Living Through Our Errors” on CultureRamp

‘Proteus’ has caused some people to see red, and spots.

It is a discussion that crops up from time to time: what is a game? This would be a fairly academic definition question, were it not that it finds a much larger battleground mostly outside academia, where consumers and critics of video games are the participants.

The direct catalyst for the most recent iteration of this discussion was the release two days ago of Proteus, a game developed by Ed Key and David Kanaga. This work, as I briefly explained in my piece on Noctis, is all about free exploration of an island and its flora and fauna, about building a soundtrack by moving around. It is limited in its interactivity compared to many other video games, and this has sparked the discussion on whether or not Key and Kanaga are right to refer to Proteus as a game. The three main locales for this recent discussion, as far as I could see, are the game’s user forum on Steam, this opinion piece on Gamasutra, and this reply by Key. There are reasons why this discussion — is this (not) a game? — is (not) important to the evaluation of Proteus as a work, but I’ll return to that later. First a purely linguistic excursion, if I may.

Etymologies

Though it is not my specialism, etymology fascinates me endlessly. Please note that I am not in the camp that believes that the original meaning of a word (as reconstructed through etymology) is the true meaning of a word. This is a kind of linguistic essentialism that doesn’t resonate with me. However, the way the meaning of word (semantics) changes through time sheds an interesting light on how it has been used by people.

The word game in English can be traced back to Old English gamen, which has a meaning spectrum that encompasses what we today would call “GAME, joy, pleasure, mirth, sport, pastime”.¹ The Old English word seems to be part of a group of terms common to the Germanic languages, and can be traced back to Proto-Germanic “*ga- collective prefix + *mann ‘person’, giving a sense of ‘people together’.”² As an aside, the words Spiel and spel — the German and Dutch/Frisian equivalents of game — have a similar history, with the Old Dutch, Old Frisian, and Old High German words all having meanings involving play, movement, amusement, entertainment and music. It is likely that the original meaning was tied to dancing.³

I am ignoring the etymologies of Romance words jeu, juego, and the like, as well as the Latin and Greek words often used in game studies (ludus, agôn, etc.) in this essay, because I believe the discussion should focus on the use of English game, particularly as used in daily language.

If anything, the etymologies show that throughout their 2000+ year history, words for game have been open in meaning, being used to refer to a set of activities that all involve one or more of playfulness, mirth, joy, competition, sport. Doubtlessly, as rules for some of these activities were becoming more codified, the word game would continue to be applied to those activities as well. When games could be played using screens, consoles, and controllers, the compound video game was an obvious choice to refer to these activities. The end result is more or less the same: the word game is used to refer to many activities, some of which have relatively little in common, but which are all tied together by history or some of their aspects.

Definitions

If you’re involved in the science/philosophy of game studies, this linguistic ambiguity can be an obstacle, which is why many scholars have struggled to come up with a more precise and logically bounded definition of what a game is. I don’t want to rehash the academic discussion over a definition of games, and I certainly wouldn’t be the right person to do so. However, if you’re interested, I would definitely recommend a few texts that tackle this topic. In chronological order, as they also respond to the previous texts:

• (2005) Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, chapter 2, and his A Dictionary of Video Game Theory.
• (2009) Ian Bogost’s keynote “Videogames are a Mess”.
• (2010) Chris Bateman’s Imaginary Games, chapter 1.

As interesting as I find these academic discussions, I think we have to realise that their relationship to the discussion that sparked this article is tenuous. Surely, there are overlaps, and some participants in the discussion are influenced by academic definitions of what a game is. However, that is only part of the story. Language, unlike definition-seeking science, is not necessarily logical in structure. Rather, I believe it is based on the more open-ended principle of analogy.

It’s time for some necromancy.

Zombie Wittgenstein

Polansky hit the nail on the head last night when she tweeted the above. Wittgenstein has a few famous passages in his Philosophical Investigations, where he argues that different types of games (Spiele) don’t necessarily all have something in common, but that there are family resemblances between them:

Und so können wir durch die vielen, vielen anderen Gruppen von Spielen gehen. Ähnlichkeiten auftauchen und verschwinden sehen.

Und das Ergebnis dieses Betrachtung lautet nun: Wir sehen ein kompliziertes Netz von Ähnlichkeiten, die einander übergreifen und kreuzen. Ähnlichkeiten im Großen und Kleinen.

(And so we go through the many, many other groups of games. We can see similarities appear and disappear.

And the result of this observation is merely this: we see a complicated network of similarities that overlap and cross. Similarities on a large and small scale.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §66-67. My translation.

While Wittgenstein is speaking about games, it doesn’t really matter if his assessment of the similarities between different kinds of games is correct. It is just an example he uses anyway. Far more important is the point he makes about language. What Wittgenstein shows is that the meaning of a word does not arise from reference to any specific real object, but rather through many such references to many objects, and analogical inference:

Wie würden wir denn jemandem erklären, was ein Spiel ist? Ich glaube, wir werden ihm Spiele beschreiben, und wir könnten der Beschreibung hinzufügen: »das, und Ähnliches, nennt man ›Spiele‹«. Und wissen wir selbst denn mehr? Können wir etwa nur dem Andern nicht genau sagen, was ein Spiel ist? – Aber das ist nicht Unwissenheit. Wir kennen die Grenzen nicht, weil keine gezogen sind. Wie gesagt, wir können – für einen besondern Zweck – eine Grenze ziehen. Machen wir dadurch den Begriff erst brauchbar? Durchaus nicht! Es sei denn, fur diesen besondern Zweck.

(How would we explain to someone what a game is? I think we would describe games to him, and we could add to the description: “that, and the like, we call ‘games’”. And do we know more than that ourselves? Why can’t we just explain to the other exactly what a game is? – But this is not ignorance. We don’t know the boundaries, because none have been set. As said, we can – for a specific purpose – set a boundary. Does the concept only then become useful? Not at all! Unless it is for that specific purpose.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §69. My translation.

The way we use language in practice, and that includes the term game, is analogical in nature. This means we observe similarities between things, and if we think two things are similar enough, we lump them together in a mental category, such as game. We can expand this categorical concept in ways that suit our practical purposes of reference, as the etymologies above show. Because analogy is not strictly logical in nature, meanings differ from use to use, and from person to person. This makes communication possible and difficult at the same time.

Sometimes, as in the case of Proteus, we witness a particularly tangible clash of meanings. A situation where one person’s use of a word appears to conflict with someone else’s. This is a problem that is ultimately unsolvable by referring back to definitions hashed out for the specific goal of science. It can only be solved by understanding where everyone is coming from, and understanding the social aspect of meaning.

A Social Game

Now, there are a couple of positions when it comes to Proteus. First of all, that taken by the creators. Ed Key thinks along the same lines as I do when he writes:

I don’t call Proteus an antigame* or a notgame. I call it a game, but obviously I am at pains to make it clear that it doesn’t have explicit challenge or “winning.” [...]

If you want to narrow your definition of “game” for purposes of academic study or personal taste, then that’s fine, but the vagueness of the term itself has been around as long as things that we call games. “Snakes and Ladders” is my favourite example of this inconsistency: it involves no decision making and therefore is well outside of many of the stricter definitions, but clearly is a boardgame as far as society is concerned. More recently, videogames like The Sims and SimCity are also “not games” according to some.

The stricter the definition of an inherently nebulous concept, the more absurd the implications. Should Dear Esther and Proteus be excluded from stores that sell games? Not covered in the games press?

Key uses linguistic history and Wittgenstein’s ideas as arguments for why we might as well refer to Proteus as a game. I would argue that he sells himself short when he excludes ‘winning’ from the game’s aspects, as I personally feel a sense of victory or achievement when I get to explore new areas of a game I like, such as Proteus.

More importantly, he refers to stores and journalism. Presenting something as a game is a signal that a program belongs in a particular category, even if it is as vague as “art/entertainment in a digital format”. Obviously, stores like Steam and many video game publications agree, because Proteus has been warmly received by many video game critics, and is sold and marketed by sellers as a video game. If, for some reason, you don’t present your digital work as a game, you run the risk of being excluded from these channels.

In other words, game is very important as a word that connects a work to a larger body of works, an industry, sales channels, target audiences, subcultures, etc. Even if you would sell a digital work through these channels but insist as creator on not calling it a game, many people would still refer to it as a video game out of linguistic convenience.

Not only that, but also out of analogy. Whatever your personal definition of a game might be, there is no doubt that Proteus has many things in common with many other video games. There is the control scheme, the simple fact of interactivity: being able to walk around in a virtual world, the response of the world to your movements, etc. And, referring to Bogost’s piece above, there is the more implicit but no less important analogical connection of format and medium. Proteus has in common with (other) video games that it is something you play on your PC.

Enough about the similarities. Those aren’t the problem. The problem is the differences. Some people have argued that because Proteus lacks overt rules and goals, as well as more complicated levels of interactivity between the player and the game world, it is not a game. These people make use of strict definitions such as those posited by Juul, and argue that these should be applied in practice to see whether a particular work may be referred to as a game. Given the discussion above, I obviously do not agree with that sentiment literally. However, I think that the problem these people may have with Proteus is real.

They argue that because Proteus is presented as a game, and it lacks certain aspects that they believe essential to the concept of (video) game, they are being misled in some way. To me, it seems this has to do with the power of the word game — and by extension, gamer — as a cultural and social signifier. Many people consider video games a central part of their identity, and as such attach great (positive) value to the word game and their personal definition of that word’s meaning. If this meaning is challenged in some way, not by ‘bad’ games, but by ‘notgames’, this can be perceived as a very real challenge to that identity, by the breaking of certain linguistic ‘rules’. In response, some people will cling to formal definitions of the term game in order to set the ‘boundaries for a specific purpose’ as outlined by Wittgenstein above, namely the purpose of creating an identity with firm conceptual boundaries.

In addition, there is the perspective of the gamer as consumer. Proteus normally costs $10 on Steam, and some people question the value of Proteus if it is not a game. The argument goes that since Proteus is not a game (according to the definition), people might buy it by accident, expecting a game, but getting something else entirely, again being misled in some way. Alternatively, since a playthrough of Proteus lasts for about an hour usually, some people find it is not worth the $10, because one can get many dozens of hours of play from many other games. Similar criticism had been levelled at Dear Esther earlier, and many other games that have found themselves in the center of a the ‘is this a game?’ discussion. Again, this whole argument is based on the same ‘formal definition’ position which is supposedly factual, but really subjective in nature because it revolves around language.

That all this is a very social matter also becomes clear in the Gamasutra piece by Mike Rose mentioned at the start. Rose accepts the existence of games like Proteus, and he enjoyed it to a certain degree, but feels that some games have become symbols for a certain kind of game snobbery.

It’s pretty easy to gush about Proteus and sound intellectual — the imagery, the integration of sound and exploration, the sheer bliss of it all! — and, in turn, dismissing the “I found it boring” argument is a piece of cake too. “You just don’t get video games like I do!”

[...]

But what right do I, or does anyone else, have to tell someone who doesn’t like it, or doesn’t want to play it, that they are wrong and/or stupid?

To me, this position (“You just don’t get it”) seems a sign of social positioning more than an attempt to say anything about Proteus as such. Rose is correct in pointing this out, but I think it applies equally to the people who deny Proteus the label of game simply because it does not fit the definition set by them personally. Might it be that some people think Proteus is a game because they like it, and others think it isn’t because they don’t like it? Both might be losing the actual object out of sight, and be arguing about something as intangible and arbitrary as a word, simply because they’ve invested it with symbolic value.

Ludus Linguarum

The social competition between these positions is, though not strictly a game according to the Juulian definition, an interesting rhetorical tug of war, but ultimately one that has little to do with concrete games in question, and more with wanting to seem intellectual, down-to-earth, logical, sophisticated, skeptic, and whatever other positive character traits you can project onto yourself by liking or not liking a game.

In the end we all have to deal with the fact that game in daily life is used as a convenient category for a great many cultural artifacts. We can restrict the definition of the word temporarily for a specific scientific discussion, but we have nothing to gain from trying to extend this definition to daily use. In fact, it is precisely this fuzziness, this indefiniteness that is the lubricant of practical communication. Because people are not logical beings most of the time, they are analogical beings.

Let me end with a few observations, stated in a spirit of freedom, play, mirth, and joy.

• I think Proteus is a very cool game. You should definitely see if it fits your personal definition of a game.
  
• Language can’t be fenced in. It responds to formal logic only in very specific situations. In practice, it is analogical and free. There are only languages, plural. These must always be negotiated in a social context, together with other people. Gamann.
• This negotiation can be like a game itself, a game of languages, depending on your definition of a game. It can sometimes be hostile, like any competition, but it doesn’t have to be.
  
• When all else fails:

In video games, communication as a central theme—rather than just something that happens—is a rare thing; however, in a recent article I’ve highlighted two games that do focus on the possibilities and impossibilities of communication. Surprise, surprise… it’s two works by Tale of Tales. First of all, The Endless Forest, about which I’ve written before here, and secondly Bientôt l’été, their latest title.

The article was my first published piece on Nightmare Mode, and was featured in Critical Distance‘s “This Week in Videogame Blogging”.

This article was originally published as Communication Impossibilities on Nightmare Mode, but is now printed below due to the downtime of the magazine.

Communication is the weirdest thing. It just kinda works, unless it doesn’t. In practice, it works not because the connection between thought, intention, and language is perfect. It isn’t. It works because we usually share large parts of our worldview and knowledge with the people we’re speaking with, and because our minds are really good at filling in conceptual gaps wherever we see them. In cases where there are minor hitches in communication, we’re also very good at pretending there aren’t any. We ignore them, or we aren’t even aware that someone else might not understand exactly what we’re saying in the same way that we do.

When communication breakdown reaches a certain point, though, we become painfully aware of it. We cannot express ourselves in a way that will make the other understand what we want to say. There are no words, no gestures, to bridge that chasm between us that suddenly looms very wide and deep.

Not a lot of games seem to tackle this problem head-on, and it’s perhaps easy to see why. A lot of single player games have practically no dialogue at all, and those that do have more often feature it in a straightforward manner. Sure, there’s plenty of lies and deceit in games, but the meaning of words is rarely put into question. Either someone’s telling the truth or they’re not, but it’s usually clear what they’re talking about.

However, it is certainly possible for games to shift their attention to a different level, and start to question the fabric of communication. The best way to put communication forward as subject of your game is to introduce non-standard limitations to the communication on the one hand, and to create an environment that stimulates communication on the other. A perfect example is Tale of Tales’ multiplayer title The Endless Forest.

All players in The Endless Forest incarnate as slightly anthropomorphised deer in the game’s forest. There is no chat function in the game, but instead, the deer avatars can use a range of emotes and gestures. As can be easily observed, this forces players to devise a way of communicating that uses no words as such, but that instils meaning into gestures, like a primitive sign language.

Players will eventually want to find some way of coming to grips with this form of communication, because one of the central aspects of The Endless Forest requires cooperation with others: appearance customisation. There’s a broad selection of decorations and colours for your deer’s coat and antlers, a range of masks for your face, and even a few full-body transformations. The thing is, you can only get those if another deer casts the appropriate forest magic spell on you. Consequently, a lot of deer interaction will involve getting others to cast the right spells on you, and somehow signifying to them that you’re content with the results.

Thankfully, the gestures available to the deer aren’t too difficult to link to our own conventions of communication. There are clear yes/no headshakes, you can bow or curtsy to thank someone, rub flanks to show affection, etc. Tale of Tales themselves suggest a basic vocabulary on their website, and some players, such as Flyra, have written short guides on their own deer’s language, combining individual gestures into more complex ‘phrases’ in a process that mirrors one way in which human language might have evolved at some point from one-word to multiple-word sentences.

Looking at communication in The Endless Forest, I would say that Tale of Tales have stripped down the options available to us, first of all to take us out of our comfort zone and ensure that we take relatively little of the ‘real world’ into the game, but secondly to show the possibilities of communicating using such a small set of options, and still be able to get by in the context of the game. Although I personally don’t believe the system does or is even meant to represent actual animal communication, it does show us part of such a form of communication might work.

This minimalistic approach is echoed in Thatgamecompany’s Journey, where the player is limited to ‘chirps’ and the basic movements to signal intent to other players. While this approach was inspired by The Endless Forest, Journey goes a bit further, to the point where it becomes extremely difficult to construct any form of unambiguous communication between players. In this Gamespot article, the interviewed UC Berkeley linguistics students take a look at the game, and argue that the lack of slightly more nuanced calls or gestures hampers the game’s ability to let communication grow. For example, at least a way of distinguishing positive/negative would be needed in order for players to clearly communicate their intent. That said, since Journey is more goal-oriented than The Endless Forest, players will eventually gravitate towards particular actions that further those goals, whereas in the relatively goal-less The Endless Forest, less ambiguous communication might be essential for any sort of meaningful cooperation to arise at all.

Fast forward seven years, and it seems Tale of Tales have returned to the same theme again, though from a different angle. Their latest title Bientôt l’été is about communication as much or even more than The Endless Forest is, but to me it seems it approaches the theme from a much more pessimistic and wistful angle. Instead of focusing on how we could get a workable system of communication from minimal means, the game shows us how despite our elaborate languages and other technologies, communication can still fail utterly and leave us feeling empty.

In Bientôt, the studio’s second multiplayer title, our avatars are future humans, plugged into a holodeckish system on which an abstracted representation of a North Sea beach with a French café is projected. We walk across the beach, picking up phrases that have washed ashore, and remembering them for later use. Here and there, apparitions appear: a tree, a pier, a dead dog. If we approach them, they disappear and are replaced with a chess piece. These, too, we tuck away for later use.

In the café, we meet our partner, plugged into another holodeck somewhere, but of course actually just another player behind a PC. Seated across a chess board, the players can use their pieces to bring forth the sentences found earlier on the beach. Again, there is no regular chat channel, no easy way of communicating. Just the prescribed sentences, the silences you let fall. An occasional sip of wine or drag of a cigarette. The sentences are snippets from slightly awkward café meetings taking place somewhere in the past, in Marguerite Duras novels, and they deal with love, attraction, repulsion, losing oneself.

As in The Endless Forest, Tale of Tales places us in a situation where communication is constrained. Of course, this too offers possibilities. There is potential meaning in the positioning and movement of chess pieces, and the sentences have an obvious and direct verbal meaning. The question is: can they express what I want to say to the person that is sitting opposite me?

One of the game-like possibilities in Bientot l’été is to pick the ‘right’ sentences, those that feel like logical and/or surprising replies to what your partner has just said or done. There are echoes of collaborative storytelling and poetry to be found here. However, eventually you will always run out of things to say, and this again highlights the problems inherent in communication. Ultimately, in Bientot l’été there is nothing that can be gained from a conversation except that conversation itself, which is doomed to be imprecise and imperfect.

In a way, this part of Bientot l’été is not that different from some conversations in real life. Particularly when dealing with love and relationships, it can be really difficult to even realise what exactly it is you want to say to someone, let alone find the right words. The café situation in the game is merely a dramatic exaggeration of that problem, and not really essentially different from it.

At the same time, the game also comments on the additional problems of communication over a distance, with the internet being the obvious reference point. By choosing a futuristic setting depicting a historical setting, and allowing the settings themselves to bleed into each other at some points, the game blatantly points towards its own artificiality, and that of all conversation. It says: “look at what you’re doing here: you’re having a broken conversation of borrowed sentences with someone you don’t know, probably sitting at the other end of the table/world/universe. How can you be sure the messages you send each other aren’t even more distorted than you think they are? Do you know what ends up at the other end?” No, we don’t. We can only make an educated guess, and fill in the gaps ourselves.

To make matters worse, Bientot l’été questions the reality of your conversation partner. They’re represented as ghost images, mere holograms, and there’s no sure way to tell the difference between an actual conversation partner and the computer simulation that’s also available in the game. Sure, the game says there’s a difference, and ‘talking’ to a person feels different – there’s more of a connection, especially in the way your sentences are replied to. But there’s always a distance, that nagging feeling that makes you wonder, like Joe Dassin does in the game’s spectral jukebox: “Et si tu n’existais pas”. What if you didn’t exist?

These are, on some level, silly questions. If we’d continually pose them we’d go mad, and would be unable to communicate at all. But there’s definitely something to be said for looking at them through the window of a game, to re-examine what we take for granted. The Endless Forest shows that if we really want to, we can make do with even a tiny set of linguistic tools to eke out some form of basic communication needed to cooperate. It is an ode to the pragmatism that underlies all animal and human language from the very basic to the highly complex. At the other end of the spectrum, Bientot l’été laments the absence of an essence of truth and reliability in communication. It sings wistfully about how when a bridge is built from both sides of that vast chasm, it ultimately fails to meet in the middle, crumbling at both ends, the other side always just out of reach.

‘sup, Phils?

Remember Groundhog Day? It’s that 1993 film about Bill Murray’s character, Phil, who keeps reliving the same day, February 2nd, in the Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney, where on that day, the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil will predict when winter’s going to end. No matter what he does during the day, the human Phil keeps waking up the next morning to the same song playing on the radio, the calendar having reverted back one day, and landing on February 2nd again. Evidently, he is doing something wrong, failing to overcome some challenge that will allow him to progress, to move on with his life.

It’s an awful lot like the way we tend to play video games these days. Faced with challenges in a game, we have the quicksave and quickload buttons close at hand, ready to revert to an earlier point in the game to try again. If you get to replay a section of a story over and over again, any challenge inherent in the original situation quickly morphs into a matter of trial and error. Like Phil in Groundhog Day, we get to try out every interaction, every conversation option the world allows us. More importantly, in a typical collapsing together of character and player, Phil – like us – retains (meta)knowledge of everything he did earlier.

What’s left becomes more and more like a puzzle, an exploration of which succession of steps leads to the result desired by the player or dictated by the game. Failure is ultimately out of the picture, unless it is the failure of becoming bored and frustrated with the complexity of combined options available and/or the opacity of what it takes to ‘win’. Get frustrated enough, and you fail by ragequitting. For Phil, of course, this wasn’t an option. Being player and character at the same time, his only way of quitting was suicide, which merely led to another reload.

What Phil wanted, ultimately, was the affection of his colleague Rita, played by Andie MacDowell. During most of the movie, he tries to impress her with his wit and arrogance, but that doesn’t get him far. Only after a multitude of reloads and trials does he try, as per Rita’s suggestion, to start working on himself as a person. In the end, he uses his metaknowledge not to directly further his own goals (e.g. scoring with women), but to help the other people in Punxsutawney out in whatever way he can. And lo! and behold, suddenly Rita likes him a whole lot better too. The reload loop is finally broken as Phil wakes up on February 3rd, Rita next to him in bed.

This is all well and good – a puzzle is a challenge in its own right – but sometimes the discrepancy between the problems represented in-game and their real-life equivalents can be glaring. In life, there are no takebacks, and certainly no magical reloads where everyone except you forgets what happened.  In other words, real life is, in this respect, much more of a challenge, or at the very least a different kind of challenge. Of course, games are not obligated to present challenges that accurately reflect real-world ones. On the other hand, many designers strive towards a high-level of verisimilitude. Perhaps, then, it is worth thinking about how we could achieve such life-likeness in games when it comes to challenges of communication and interpersonal relations.

CRPGs tend to feature such challenges heavily in their quests and storylines. As Alexandra Geraets pointed out, these games play with our expectations of the other characters – or at least they try to. We base our moral decisions on what we have to go on, on the impressions characters make. Sometimes, those characters can deceive and betray us, leading to outcomes in the game’s story that are unexpected, and morally unwanted. It’s usually possible to move on with the game regardless of these consequences. Sure, your relationship with the character(s) in question might change, and if the game is particularly well-written and responsive to its own branching storylines, other characters and the society around you will take into account what happened earlier and change their disposition towards your party. All the same, there’s usually no reason why you couldn’t move on with the game. Cause or allow a genocide to happen in the game, and there are no massive armies to hunt you down and stop you. And if there are, it’s the game’s way of saying: “You screwed up. Time to reload.”

The same goes for romantic relationships in RPGs. Kim Moss argues that many romantic interests in games are dressed-up dispensers: you put ‘kindness’ in, or whatever the right conversation options are, and romance (sex) comes out. In addition, I would say that combined with the practice of reloading savegames, figuring out what to say and do is again reduced to a puzzle, more than a meaningful representation of a relationship between two persons. Try enough times, and you know exactly what buttons to press in order to bring a romance to a successful conclusion.

This leads me to wonder where the real challenge in character interactions and conflicts is if you can redo them. If you have an eternity to figure things out, like Phil, eventually you will end up with the right approach, because the world never seems to change. No matter how many evolving iterations of Punxsutawney Phil we get, everyone else is still the same, enigmas at first, but ultimately predictable bundles of cause and effect. Is there any valuable moral lesson at all that we can take away from this? If the real world doesn’t work this way, why then should games?

Are there ways of breaking out of this mould? The issue of ‘no takebacks’ – within one iteration of a whole game – has been amply addressed by many games in history, from Chess to Super Mario Bros. You fail, you have to start over. Recent games like Dark Souls and FTL play on the ‘old school’ and ‘hardcore’ connotations of this permadeath feature. Of course, player metaknowledge remains and is a crucial factor in beating such games, but there is at least a distance from the small-scale quicksave/load loops of many other games. For obvious reasons, however, such hardcore modes work best in games with little roleplaying and character development. Or rather, in cases where a long-standing character is lost to permadeath, the dissonance between “It’s just a game” and “Damn! I’ve invested so much in this character” may severely challenge the fun factor of a game for all but the most masochistic of players. It becomes it bit too much like failing in real life, in other words.

In real-world challenges, where permafail (and permadeath) are givens and we (or most of us) have no past-iteration metaknowledge to go on, if we want to succeed we really have to do things right the first time. You have to be able to think on your feet and stay cool in unexpected and complex situations between people. Ironically enough, a practically representation-less game like Super Hexagon might train us to do just that, on a very abstract level. The only way to succeed at Super Hexagon is to attune yourself completely to the motions and rhythms of the game’s rapid patterns.  Of course, you ‘fail’ many, many times in the game, so what am I talking about? What I mean is that perhaps Super Hexagon stimulates us, in a safe environment, to become more in tune with the rhythm of the universe, and subconsciously process knowledge and observations so that we can respond fast enough to meet the challenge posed.

Let’s go out on a limb then, and imagine how we could do something like what Super Hexagon does for ‘pure’ gameplay, but with a focus on character interaction and story. A game that pushes you to weigh all options and make the right decision the first time around, because there are no second chances. It would have to be a game, possibly RPG/adventure-like in its conversation design. It would have to contain permafail, at least when it comes to the choices made in social interactions and conversation; no takebacks. If the game, in addition to deep character and story development, features violence and combat challenges as well, as most RPGs do, then perhaps permadeath is not ideal for most players, for reasons outlined above. What we need then, is a hybrid system where you can redo battles that go wrong without having to start the game from scratch, but which holds you to the character interaction choices you make. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yeah, this sounds quite a bit like The Walking Dead, and I can only commend the game for taking significant steps in this direction.

Of course, like Super Hexagon, but on a vastly longer timeframe, you could replay this hypothetical game in a new iteration, in order to try out different options. In the end, you’d be ‘gaming’ the whole system again, and we’d be back to the puzzle model. In order to counter this, the game has to introduce more unpredictability, like the semi-random wall patterns in Super Hexagon, but for characters and conflicts. Perhaps character X will respond differently to your same acts in a different iteration of the game. Well-written characters, like real people, will act according to their general personality, but still be unpredictable to some degree. You can’t take them for granted, just like real people.

This results in a game where every choice has a meaningful consequence. Things can go wrong, and players may fail in their intentions, but if this failure is presented as a natural result of their choices, they might be less inclined to interpret this in a gaming state of mind as not having found the right solution to a problem yet. Sometimes in life, there are no right solutions to particular situations, and you have to move on. If the game presents enough meaningful alternative goals to strive for, these failures can be taken in stride, as we try to do in real life.

These ideas were explored to some degree in Moss’ article above and the responses to it, and I think exploring these issues will be extremely valuable to the future of game design. Permit me this cheesy sign-off: one of the biggest challenges facing designers is to go beyond the Punxsutawney Phil-model of static iterations, and towards more dynamic character challenges that allow video games to represent real-world challenges even better.

This article was written for the January 2013 edition of Blogs of the Round Table – theme: “challenge” – over at Critical Distance.

Lori Nix – ‘Library’ (2007)

What did I read in 2012? I’ve found that looking back at my last year in books helps me chart some themes and developments in my (mental) life, so I decided to do it again this year. I read 92 books in 2012, a little fewer than in 2011, but they were longer books on average, and my page total ended up higher. This doesn’t count all the articles I’ve read, but we’ve got to draw the reading nerdage line somewhere. It’s all slightly arbitrary anyway.

London & China, Fictions & Fantasies

The year pretty much started in earnest with us going to London for a small week; I was attending a conference over the weekend, and obviously we took the chance to (re-)explore the city a little. If you know us a little, you won’t be surprised that we filled our suitcase with books up to just under the airline’s weight limit (lucky guess).

The City & The City

In London, I had already started on China Miéville’s The City & The City, a book that had been on my list for quite a while. Miéville’s genre experiments generally seem to work well for readers, and my first impression with the author was certainly positive. In this detective novel, the eponymous city/cities are mentally divided into two realities mapped onto one physical space. The inhabitants of either city usually ‘pretend’ the inhabitants of the other are not there, even if they’re in the same space. However, when an investigator is forced to violate these conceptual boundaries in pursuit of a killer, this peculiar bipartition of mental space is severely challenged. A smart and highly original novel.

Later in the year, I descended upon Miéville’s newer novel Embassytown. Since it is sci-fi novel about alien contact with a strong linguistic theme, it was right up my alley. The future humans of Embassytown are living on the frontier of knowledge and are forced to communicate with an alien race and to learn their language of double inflections and living metaphors. Obviously, miscommunication and its consequences are a major theme of this novel. Again, conceptually very strong, but the plot was a bit confusing to me, and not as strong as that in The City & The City.

The very first book I finished in 2012, before going to London, was Marcel Proust’s first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way. A classic, of course, and I can see why. It’s so easy to get lost in the strangely nostalgic world he paints. I think I might be ready for part two this year. Another lovely piece of nostalgia writing was Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, which I read in early summer, the perfect season for it. Lots of magical moments and memorable characters in Bradbury’s sense-tingling youth portrait.

Particular mention must go to De Stille Kracht by Louis Couperus (translated as The Silent Force), a very strong novel about the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia, and how mundane and supernatural fears fester in the constant tension between the indigenous population and the colonists. Strong characterisations, and a powerful blurring of realities.

The First Book of Lankhmar

I went through a few fantasy works as well throughout the year. I finished Ship of Destiny, the last part of Robin Hobb’s Liveship Trilogy, in London, and it fell a bit flat. I enjoyed the trilogy as a whole for its focus on women, seafaring, economics, and social issues, but in the end it was a bit like a soap opera in that it’s only fun as long as you don’t have to wrap the story up. I picked up a collection of Lankhmar stories by Fritz Leiber in London, and I was anxious to see what this classic series was all about. Sure enough, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are two highly likeable heroes and they have some awesome adventures, so that’s all good fun. Leiber does have some peculiar gender issues boiling under the surface. His women are certainly not weak, but there is a strange and constant tension between the sexes that makes for awkward situations. As I recall reading in a comment somewhere, in Leiber’s universe male heroes are ultimately much closer to each other than to any women. Bromance, in other words. This makes me curious about Conjure Wife, which apparently maps a form of the science versus magic controversy onto a married couple. I must look that one up for sure this year.

In June/July, I had a brief but intense fling with the MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online. I’ve learned a bit about the type of game and discovered what I suspected all along: it’s highly addictive at first, but in the end can’t hold my interest in its current forms. It did provide me with a good excuse to whip out old J.R.R. again: I reread both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I dug into Jim Allan’s slightly outdated but still quite thorough Introduction to Elvish and other languages of Middle-Earth.

I also read the eponymous second part of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy this year. My opinion remains the same: Peake’s world surrounding the castle Gormenghast is strange and unique. The initial weirdness wears off by part two, although the characters remain inscrutable as ever. As the book progresses, the plotting becomes a bit stronger, with the neurotic Irma Prunesquallor’s search for a husband providing much of the humour, and the chase after the ever more murderous Steerpike supplying the action.

Cloud Atlas

In preparation for the movie, I started David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in summer, and what a read it was. The structure and genre-experiments made this a very dynamic book, while each of the six stories contained enough charm of its own, much of it deriving from Mitchell’s excellent handling of dialogue language. In November, we finally got to see the film, and it lived up to my expectations, perhaps strangely enough. I found it to be an excellent film adaptation precisely because they went with a strong interpretative voice. Cutting and interlacing the stories more so than in the book highlights thematic parallels, as did the heavy make-up choices. Unlike some critics, I wasn’t bothered by those at all. Both the book and the film are curious things, not as profound as some other works, but way more experimental and original than many.

History, Identity, Revolution, Persecution

A Most Dangerous Book

In the beginning of the year, I got going with a reading group with a few colleagues and friends, centered around the cultural history of northwestern Europe. We focus mostly on the classical and mediaeval periods, Viking Age, history of the Germanic peoples, etc. Probably not a big surprise. We started by reading A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by German/American historian Christopher Krebs. While we found his suggestion that Tacitus was somehow indirectly responsible for Third Reich Germanic ideology a bit overstated – granted, you have to attract readers somehow – the book does a fine job of showing how a text’s reception can lead a life of its own. Most interesting was to see how German nationalism arose as a reaction to Italian nationalism in the Renaissance, and how the Germania wouldn’t even have been known without the latter; a nice historical irony.

We continued our reading with the theme of nationalism and national identity, also as a reaction to nationalistic tendencies in the Dutch public sphere. We read The Symbolic Construction of Community by Anthony P. Cohen for a bit of theoretical background. The most valuable thing I took away from the book and our discussion was that it makes little sense to look at the truth behind claims that people make to forge (group) identity. More interesting and important is to see how symbols function in creating and maintaining that identity, and how people relate to it.

Spurred by an article in De Groene Amsterdammer I looked into René Girard’s work The Scapegoat. It’s a curious theological and sociological work on how (Girard claims) the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ can be found in human society in practice, as well as ritualised and codified in religion and mythology. Basically, the idea is that a scapegoat figure can be sacrificed by a community in a magical effort to stave off danger and violence, even pretending that the scapegoat causes the danger in order to justify the ritual killing. Indeed, we often see such scapegoat patterns in the historical accounts of the murder of Jews and other minorities. Girard’s effort to trace the same pattern in mythology is interesting, but not always convincing. His reading of the New Testament was quite exciting, but a bit too complex to reproduce here. I found his reference to the death of Baldr in Nordic mythology less convincing; somehow his murder must originally have been a communal sacrifice according to Girard, but it had later been projected on Höðr as the innocent killer, and particularly on Loki as the evil mastermind behind it. This is certainly possible, but impossible to prove in the absence of older mythological sources.

The Pursuit of the Millennium

In the end, this did tie in nicely with some other books I read this year. Norman Cohn’s study on the persecution of Jews in the 19th and early 20th century, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders Of Zion, was a fascinating look on the textual lineage that led to the publication of The Protocols. An essential history in this age when gruesome conspiracy stories like The Protocols are still being actively circulated in the world. Cohn’s book on the millenarianism of the Middle Ages, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, was equally interesting, showing how all sorts of religious concerns and social injustice can lead to the creation of violent mobs, sects, and revolutionary movements. Incidentally, Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, was also about the history of The Protocols. Eco got his history down well, but the novel wasn’t as compelling as some of his classics.

Related to the theme of persecution is Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii, an impressionistic and anecdotal (necessarily so), but extremely astute study of the political language of Nazi Germany. It was sobering to read how systematically the Nazi regime used subtle changes and emphases in language to facilitate the desired cultural change in the German people on the one hand, and the subdual of minorities on the other.

A Fictional History of Religious Science… No wait, a Scientific Fiction of the History of Religion. No, that’s not right either… Oh sod it.

Star Maker

Allow me to introduce a new ‘section’ with one of my final London purchases: Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. It’s generally marketed as science fiction, and I suppose that’s sort of appropriate since it deals for the most part with outer space. However, as I’ve hinted at in an earlier post, the book is more of a mythology, a wild flight of imagination about how the Universe might have been created, and what part evolution and our species might play in the grand scheme of things. Writing in the late 1930s, Stapledon takes the science of his time as the point of departure, but dares to dream about what kinds of sentient being there might be in the universe, ‘above’ and ‘below’ the level of mankind, about galactic civilisations, and ultimately about the Star Maker, who is of course in any meaningful sense of the word, God.

Stapledon created, even if it was eighty years ago, what I often feel a longing for a in my life: some sort of cosmic spirituality that speaks to me directly. This is something that traditional religions and secularism both, in general, don’t seem to readily offer, and that’s a pity. I was raised secular, and science is, in general, my basis for knowledge of the world, but I’d be lying if I said that popular secularism covers all bases of what a human psyche (or at least mine) is in need of. Besides, there tends to be some sort of general and, to me, worrying tendency to elevate ‘science’ and materialism to a position of sanctity: the only institutions that have access to absolute truth. Well, I think a history lesson is in order, because we all love scepticism as well, right?

The thing is, science as it is popularised nowadays often seems like some sort of bastion of rigorous truth-seeking. As any insider will know, in practice there is a big discrepancy between scientific ideals and what actually happens. When it comes to writing the history of science, especially science as opposed to religion, some nuancing is in order. One of the first books to join me on this course was Chris Bateman’s The Mythology of Evolution. I’ve written in detail about the book earlier, but I’d like to reiterate that it’s a lovely, balanced, and very accessible read on fiction, myth, and truth in religion and science.

Esotericism and the Academy

I finally got around to reading Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture in its entirety as well. Though I am no expert, this seems a vastly important book to me, as it looks critically at the way the history of philosophy, science, and religion (a curious trinity of concepts in the first place) has been written throughout the centuries. He shows, among other things, that the philosophical canon as it is today and as it arose from 18th century protestantism, has all sorts of biases, much like any other history or worldview. These biases have led to artificial partitionings in the history of philosophy, and the exclusion of various alternative ways of thinking. Of course, we may debate the value and validity of any philosophical current from a personal perspective, but if we want to write history, we must not let those value judgments get in the way of honestly depicting philosophical landscapes.

Tangentially related to Hanegraaff’s evaluation of history is Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, a bold attack on materialism in modern society and thought. Roszak’s approach is quite fiery and driven by a sort of poetic desire as well. Particularly inspiring was his discussion of William Blake’s personal mythology, which I intend to dive into somewhere this year. Roszak’s book is more creative and moral in its style than it is historical, but this fits his drive to be critical of some of the common ‘truths’ in Western society, which are nothing more than mythologies in disguise, as Bateman would surely agree.

Mutants & Mystics

Finally, in the ‘series’ on alternative perspectives on religion, we turn to Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal by Jeffrey J. Kripal. This book must be one of the ‘grooviest’ religious studies book I’ve ever read, and it fits quite well into a sort of sweet spot that marries popular science to great scholarship. I suppose that’s natural when you’re writing about the intersection of comics, science, occult religion, and paranormal fiction. Kripal shows that all kinds of paranormal, esoteric, and (pseudo-)scientific thinking have gone ‘underground’, and found expression in the pop culture of the 20th century. He writes an often very personal history around seven “mythemes” like e.g. radiation, alienation, and emanation. The book reminded me of a somewhat similar study that I read a few years ago, the lovely The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson, who argues along similar lines that a great deal of our conceptual relations with the ‘supernatural’ have found refuge in ‘harmless’ popular entertainment culture, because mainstream ideological currents generally dismiss the supernatural as something nonexistent and not worth discussing.

Along with Kripal’s book, I read Alan Moore’s Promethea series, which is a perfect example of what he is talking about. Even more ‘out there’ than most comics, this series is full of superheroes, the power of imagination, tarot, (pop) kabbalah, and (sex) magic. Rather ambitious, and often rather focused on shapely females, but I guess that is to be expected from a personality like Moore’s. An impressive and highly original work all the same, particularly the masterful issue #12 in which the history of the world is distilled into the Great Arcana of the tarot.

The Games We Play

The final theme will be ‘video games’. At the end of the year, I decided I wanted to see if I could take writing about games a bit more seriously – I’ve written posts on games here occasionally, but I decided to see if I could get some new writings published elsewhere on the web. So far, I’ve had success with three pieces, which you can find among the older posts here, and my experience with the editorial input was very positive, so I intend to try my hand at a lot more articles in games criticism in 2013.

I’d already been reading the occasional book and article on the study of games for a few years, however, and I continued that trend this year. Quickly after I worked through Chris Bateman’s The Mythology of Evolution, I turned to his previous book, Imaginary Games. I had become quite fond of his (blog) writing, and a book about games and art was too tempting not to buy. I enjoyed Imaginary Games a great deal, and it is interesting in particular in that it further explores the relation between art, fiction, and play from a philosophical perspective. Turning the question “are games art?” on its head, Bateman argues along with some other philosophers that art itself, fiction, imagination, and make-believe, all involve some form of play, an acceptance of arbitrary boundaries in order to be able to interpret art in a meaningful way.

The Game Design Reader

A big tome that I’ve had in my collection for around three years was Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s anthology The Game Design Reader. I read individual articles from this book in between other reading activities, and it’s a hugely valuable collection of essays on game studies. The entries range from cultural history (Johan Huizinga of course) to gender perspectives, game design reflections, social interaction studies, (economic) game theory, walkthroughs, games journalism, etc. Though you have to be fond of theory to enjoy this book, I’d say it’s a great companion piece for anyone involved in the study of games.

Returning to monographs, I read Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, which was a clear and thorough introduction to game studies, and in particular a solid theoretical approach to a definition of games as a concept. In the end, he arrives at this summary definition: “A game is a rule-based system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels emotionally attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” Of course, this admits for borderline cases in the de facto ‘game’ landscape, but as a point of departure for future discussions it’s quite strong. Juul continues in the rest of his book to explore how this ‘gameness’ interacts with fiction and player experience.

A more recent study that I read was Gordon Calleja’s In-Game, which focuses mainly on that latter theme: ‘immersion’ and how players interact with games. His theoretical framework approaches game studies not with games themselves as a point of departure, but interaction and experience instead. This results in a book that supplements Juul’s quite nicely, providing interesting perspectives on the various ways (intellectual, emotional, social, etc.) players can be involved with games.

Finally, from the burgeoning world of games criticism came Brendan Keogh’s e-book Killing Is Harmless, which is a very in-depth critical study of the game Spec Ops: The Line. Walking us through the game, Keogh shows with excellent writing how the game comments on the genre of the ‘military shooter’ through its plot, gameplay design choices, visual presentation, and music. The book proves both that elaborate critical studies of games as cultural objects are possible and valuable, and that self-publishing such books online is a viable strategy.

This is all for now. Of course, all these books don’t quite add up to 92, and I haven’t mentioned many books I did read (and enjoy) this year. However, I think I’ve covered the major themes. If you’re interested in seeing what else I read, have a look at my Goodreads profile and/or become friends with me there.

A showcase of some of the characters in ‘Torment’

Videogames can sometimes be a very arcane medium, and it can often be difficult to comprehend what they’re all about for people who never or seldom play them. Of course entertainment is often the main ‘use’ of a video game, but many of them have elaborate themes and stories, and the way in which video games deliver those narratives and themes is often unique to the medium.

In an effort to reach out to the ‘non-gamers’, the excellent media blog CultureRamp publishes a series on this topic in December, entitled What It’s Like to Play. The two first instalments focused on the sci-fi ecosystem management game Waking Mars and the shooter-turned-competitive-sport Team Fortress II.

Today my own piece on Planescape: Torment was published, and I try to explain how the game uses exploration and conversation to allow you to reconstruct the protagonist’s tortured past. Part of the charm of the game is in its unique Planescape setting, which I’ve written about before in connection with the novel Pages of Pain.

Whether you’re a ‘non-gamer’ or someone who gobbles these things up like magic candies, I recommend you take a look at the article series:

“What It’s Like to Play Planescape Torment” on CultureRamp

The start screen in ‘The Path’.

Despite writing more or less in-depth about many of the digital works of Belgian studio Tale of Tales – see my posts on The Endless Forest, The Graveyard, and FATALE – I had been avoiding writing about what is arguably their best work to date: The Path. In any case, it is the one I felt the most personal connection with, and I’ve tried to express why that is in a retrospective piece I wrote for Gaming Daily.

So if you’re interested in why a game about Little Red Riding Hood, disobedience, violence, sexuality, and trauma made me feel empathetic with some typically feminine psychological experiences, read on:

“Walking the Path” on Gaming Daily

Note: the ‘mystery’ was solved this week. People with knowledge in the area of Asian languages quickly recognised the script as being a member of a South-Asian family of writing systems. Sinhalese was a first hypothesis, and I cast in my lot with a guess of Dhives Akuru, but it turned out to be Telugu. Experts were sought, and one of them confirmed the document was written in the late 18th century in the Andhra Pradesh region of India. It’s apparently a financial document about a loan. How it ended up in a Frisian archive is anyone’s guess! [OS, 23 december 2012]

This week, a call went out from the provincial library of Fryslân, Tresoar, announcing the start of a ‘cold case’ program. Selected pieces from the archives are to be shared with the public, to see if they can shed more light on some unsolved mysteries. The first one is a manuscript from the 17th century, and it’s a corker!

The Sminia Letter

The manuscript is thought to be a letter, as it is only a single page and appears to be signed in some way, so I will refer to it as the Sminia Letter, for that’s the Frisian family out of whose archives the piece comes. The letter is written in a hitherto unknown script, and as such the language of the letter is unknown as well.

I’ve called together some colleagues and friends – historians and linguists all – into an impromptu Facebook group to see if we can get anywhere by applying our collective expertise to the letter. So far, we’re still in the early stages, brainstorming about possible angles, and generally applying logic and instinct to see how we can bootstrap an analysis and eventual translation of the text.

One of the first steps is to identify recurring patterns in the text. We’ve been using a sort of colour coding to quickly tie together identical passages in a visual manner. These passages will perhaps be able to help us identify the nature of the document, as well as aid in deciphering what words and letters are used in the manuscript.

We had to ruin the manuscript with coloured ink in the process, but it’s all in the name of science, right? (Just kidding, thank you, Photoshop)

There appear to be a surprising number of such identical passages in the letter, indicating that parts of it might be highly formulaic in nature. Is it some form of contract, perhaps? Also, note the ‘signatures’ at the bottom. They are in different hands, so we think it must have been signed by more then a dozen different people. Was it a circular letter, or some form of pact? In any case, multiple people must have been ‘in’ on this secret script, even though some of them weren’t very fluent at it, as the shakiness of some of the hands seems to indicate.

We don’t have a full inventory of the glyphs – or letters, if you will – used in the manuscript, so we can’t really start analysing the meaning of the letter yet. I would guess there are roughly two dozen different glyphs, as well as a number of flourishes that might be abbreviation marks, so my guess is that this alphabet would correspond to the latin alphabet.

Consequently, we don’t know the language the manuscript is written in either. However, the historical context suggests a few options. If this is a letter from an educated, higher class, it might have been written in French or Latin, as these were common correspondence languages in early modern Europe. It also might have been Dutch. Even though the letter is from Fryslân, Frisian seems less obvious as a language, because it was barely used as a written language at that time. That said, we don’t have a clue yet.

So far, the Sminia Letter is still a mystery, but perhaps our little team will be able to shed some light on it this winter in our free time. One thing is sure: the internet has made it a lot easier to work together on this matter. If we find out anything, I will definitely write a new post here with our conclusions.

Though I won’t be neglecting my other activites, I expect I will be spending some time on this letter. Please indulge me, but I do feel the tiniest bit like Indiana Jones in an Umberto Eco novel.

‘La Roue de Fortune’, from the Payen Tarot of Marseille

Throughout human history, in art and religion, we find a longing for deliverance, the view of a promised land just out of our current reach, whether somewhere else on some part of (mythologised) Earth, or in a world beyond. Such a longing is in one way easy to understand if we look at human psychology. Faced with dire adversity, our minds sometimes have the strength to maintain a powerful vision of a brighter future, a profound emotion that we call hope. Often, we hope that things will turn to the better somewhere in our lifetime, as the Wheel of Fortune revolves. Strengthened by this promise of future happiness, we can endure more hardship than we might have been able to otherwise.

Sometimes, if things are looking particularly bleak, we may start pushing our expectations for deliverance further into the future, even beyond this life. A very familiar example will be the belief in heaven as expressed in christian faith. True deliverance takes place after we die, and we are released from the woes of earthly life.

I was reminded of this powerful feeling recently when listening to “I’m Going Home”, a song from the Sacred Harp tradition of choral singing from the southern US. Two of my musical friends, David Colohan and Casey Edward Denman, recorded a duet version of this song, in what is part of a growing Sacred Harp revival in Ireland and the UK. You’ll find it here, along with the lyrics:

Farewell, vain world! I’m going home!
My Savior smiles and bids me come,
And I don’t care to stay here long!

Sweet angels beckon me away,
To sing God’s praise in endless day,
And I don’t care to stay here long!

Chorus:

Right up yonder, Christians, away up yonder;
Oh, yes, my Lord, for I don’t care to stay here long.

I’m glad that I am born to die,
From grief and woe my soul shall fly,
And I don’t care to stay here long!

Bright angels shall convey me home,
Away to New Jerusalem,
And I don’t care to stay here long!

(Chorus)

One of Södergran’s self-portraits.

Going back further in my memory, my mind quickly latches onto the beautiful writings of Finnish-born Swedish poetess Edith Södergran. In her short life, destroyed by tuberculosis, she wrote quite a number of poems in which a longing for a carefree existence is expressed; not hard to imagine for someone whose young life was constantly overshadowed by the fatal illness that would claim her life at age 31.

One of my favourite poems in this category is “Landet some icke är”, which was published in Södergran’s (final) collection of the same name from 1925. I give it here in the original Swedish, and my attempt at a translation:

“Landet some icke är”

Jag längtar till landet som icke är,
ty allting som är, är jag trött att begära.
Månen berättar mig i silverne runor
om landet som icke är.
Landet, där all vår önskan blir underbart uppfylld,
landet, där alla våra kedjor falla,
landet, där vi svalka vår sargade panna
i månens dagg.
Mitt liv var en het villa.
Men ett har jag funnit och ett har jag verkligen vunnit -
vägen till landet som icke är.

I landet som icke är
där går min älskade med gnistrande krona.
Vem är min älskade? Natten är mörk
och stjärnorna dallra till svar.
Vem är min älskade? Vad är hans namn?
Himlarna välva sig högre och högre,
och ett människobarn drunknar i ändlösa dimmor
och vet intet svar.
Men ett människobarn är ingenting annat än visshet.
Och det sträcker ut sina armar högre än alla himlar.
Och det kommer ett svar: Jag är den du älskar och alltid skall älska.

“The Land That Is Not”

I long for the land that is not,
for everything that is I am tired of longing for.
The moon tells in runes of silver
about the land that is not.
The land where all our wishes will be wondrously fulfilled,
the land where all our chains will fall,
the land where we cool our cut brow
in the moon’s dew.
My life was a hot illusion.
But one thing I have found and one thing I have truly gained -
the way to the land that is not.

In the land that is not
my lover is walking with sparkling crown.
Who is my lover? The night is dark
and the stars quiver in answer.
Who is my lover? What is his name?
The heavens whirl higher and higher,
and a man-child drowns in endless mist
and knows no answer.
But a man-child is nothing but certainty.
And it stretches out its arms higher than all heavens.
And there comes an answer: I am the one you love and will always love.

In my relatively careless life, I have little need for burning hopes like these, that cut through our entire being. But I feel them all the same, and they are capable up sharing a bit of their essence with me at times, so that I too may draw upon them when times are rough.

An updated version of this article was published in Dutch on frnkfrt.net magazine.

A rainy, plant-inhabited world at night.

If there is one thing astronomy has taught us, it is the realisation that a planet like Earth, with its abundance of life, is incredibly rare in the vastness of the universe. We do know that there are billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, so it is probable that life is to be found somewhere else in space; yet we are lonely all the same. We could – in a manner of speaking – travel for an eternity in any direction without encountering any sign of life. That overwhelming sense of loneliness on a cosmic scale is what strikes me the most while playing Noctis.

This game is the brainchild of Italian programmer Alessandro ‘Alex’ Ghignola, who has been working on the project since 1996. The current version, Noctis IV, has been the most recent one for over ten years, and while Ghignola is allegedly still working on version V, it is not clear when this is due to be released. Until that time, we have to make do with IV.

A red star up close.

The main perspective in Noctis is that of a space explorer in a Stardrifter, a ship made of quartz that is capable of bridging the vast distances between stars in an instant. In this way, the player can explore the more than 78 billion stars that make up the Noctis galaxy. These stars fall into eleven categories, each with its own characteristics, including an indication of how likely it is to harbour planets capable of sustaining life. For example, we can find brown dwarf stars, binary or ternary star systems, but also blue giants: huge bright stars that often sport an expansive system of planets and moons. Obviously, it’s quite impossible for any one player to see even a fraction of all the stars in the Noctis universe. For that reason there is the nice extra feature of naming and describing stars and planets. The personal star maps containing these notes can be sent to Ghignola, who periodically combines all these charts into a downloadable update.

This hopping land creature resembled a cross between an elephant and a kangaroo more than anything.

Every celestial body in the game has its own character and charm, mainly expressed through colour, light, and shape. Some planets are flat, others are cratered or mountainous; some have no atmosphere and allow an unobstructed view into the blackness of space, like our own Moon, while some planets are hidden under a thick blanket of clouds, like Venus. Very rarely, after a thorough search, you can find a planet with lifeforms; often just a species of grass, or ‘trees’, but sometimes a ‘bird’ over an ocean, or a land creature. Manipulating worlds or violating the ‘prime directive’ [wikipedia] is impossible: the player can only be a traveller and an observer.

A dark world.

All this content is generated procedurally, which makes the size of the program quite manageable: the core files fit on a 1,4 MB floppy disk! The game runs on DOS in a resolution of 320×200 pixels and a 256 colour palette – in a certain respect Ghignola preempted the current retromania in the world of gaming. It is precisely this approach that allows Noctis to contain so many worlds. However, the consequence of this is that everything you see in the game remains grainy and abstract. What stands out are the colours, the way the starlight hits the surface, the broad shapes of the landscape. In short, this design and the technical limitations create a sober visual language. Through this visual and narrative abstraction Noctis leaves practically everything to our own imagination, and if you’re open to that, it is the great strength of the game. Precisely by not investing in a story or extensive world building, Noctis is able to be so immensely big, and the sense of exploration so boundless.

A view from the planet Klensal in ‘Mass Effect’. Source: http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/File:KlensalScreenshot.jpg

This contrasts with the – equally logical – approach in many other games, that sacrifice freedom of movement to detail. My thoughts were drawn to the first instalment of Mass Effect, for example, in which the exploration of a few dozen planets and moons was possible using the MAKO, a ground vehicle. These free-form exploration trips offered some incredibly beautiful vistas and different environments, but at the same time, it stood out all the more clearly that there wasn’t all that much to do on these planets – apart from collecting a few items or defeating a few enemies – precisely because Mass Effect is a game primarily driven by story and combat, and less by exploration. Only a few places in the game which can be visited optionally, outside of the main storyline, offer any story content or world design that is more than skin deep.

In this sense, Noctis is more like Proteus [official website], an upcoming game by Ed Key and David Kanaga. It, too, is a game reliant on pixelly art in which exploration is the only goal. The landscapes – and soundscapes – of the islands in Proteus are mostly just there, ready to be discovered at whatever pace suits you. The amount of interactivity with the environment is highly limited – at least in the current beta version, but I expect that the final version will be similar – but that is precisely the point. A world like that of Proteus is a colourful audiovisual work that can be viewed from many angles, but not manipulated.

The universe of Noctis, then,  seems empty and without inherent meaning, but it does offer a space for meditation where you can explore in silence – or accompanied by your own choice of music – and allow yourself to be surprised by new constellations of colour and form. Ghignola admitted in a recent interview that he sees himself to a certain degree as an expressionistic programmer, and this seems to fit. Noctis is a piece of digital expressionist art: an endless variation of abstract landscapes, explored with a spaceship, expressed in a piece of code small enough to fit on a floppy disk.

Noctis can be downloaded from free from the official website: <http://anynowhere.com>. The modified version Noctis IV Plus is recommended. It runs without problems on Windows XP and earlier versions. To run the game on Windows Vista and later versions, you will need a DOS emulator, a special boot disk, or a similar solution.

Further Reading:

• Chris Bateman. “Noctis”. Published 2012-oct-10 on International Hobo. <http://blog.ihobo.com/2012/10/noctis.html>.
• Jefequeso. “Interview with Alessandro Ghignola (aka ‘Alex’)”. Published 2012-may-09 on Videogame Potpourri. <http://videogamepotpourri.blogspot.gr/2012/05/interview-with-alessandro-ghignola-aka.html>.

A clouded world.

Beautiful constrast of sky and soil.

More beauty in darkness [brightness enhanced].

A very bright star up close.

Some video captures from the game by Youtube user Momotombos, with music by Xela:

I’ve been raised as a non-believer in a country where there are quite a few such people. My parents’ generation, or my grandparents’, or some generation in the not too distant past, gave up belief in christianity to a significant degree, supplanting it with worldviews that are often either inarticulate, or founded on political and social ideologies. Of course, there are still many christians in the Netherlands, as well as muslims, jews, and a plethora of other belief systems. However, my own upbringing as a non-christian and my further development as a student and junior scholar make me a perfect candidate for movements that combine this non-belief in a christian god with a trust in science as a worldview.

That said, I feel little connection with the forms of atheism, secular humanism, etc. that are so visible in the current intellectual climate. Having been taught that one of the core principles of science as a method of constructing an understanding of the world is skepticism, I can’t help but feel that this principle is severely underapplied by many people who flock to the banners of atheism to provide a counterweight against the forces of organised religion in this world, particularly when it comes to understanding the nature of religion, religious people, and most importantly of all, science itself.

The Mythology of Evolution

As such, I am always on the lookout for people who are prepared to think out of the box and provide accounts of this philosophical struggle of our times that is fair and even-handed. Enter Chris Bateman and his latest book The Mythology of Evolution.

An independent philosopher and game designer, Bateman has dedicated much of his written work to issues such as fictionality, games and play, ethics, and belief. This includes most of the excellent articles on his blog, Only a Game. His previous book, Imaginary Games, dealt mostly with the first three and investigated the way in which make-believe and fictionality plays a role in many aspects of culture, including art, play, language, metaphor, and science. The reader is referred to this review by Allen Zhang for more information on that book.

In his latest book, Bateman turns his attention wholly to science and religion, and the role of myth in the way worldviews are built and framed. First of all, I should clarify that Bateman uses the word myth not in the pejorative sense of ‘untrue story’, but as stories that can not be directly tested or proven. As such, they “can be understood as metaphors, imaginative fictions, or as metaphysical stories” (p. 14). Myths in this sense of the word are used to clarify statements about understanding the world, for example. In particular, Bateman applies this concept of myth to the theory of evolution:

[...] when I talk about ‘myths of evolution’ I am not necessarily accusing various ideas of being unscientific, I am talking about stories that are spun out of the scientific theories in circulation. [...] When I, for instance, call ‘the selfish gene‘ a myth of evolution, I do not mean that what is termed ‘the gene-centered view’ is not a valid scientific perspective, but rather that the idea of a ‘selfish gene’ is an abstract metaphorical embellishment that puts a particular spin onto an otherwise neutral concept. This is what I mean by ‘myth’ in this context: a metaphorical image used to present the facts in a particular way, or (synonymously) a metaphysical story that expresses a particular interpretative bias. These myths can be criticized or replaced but they can never be entirely eliminated, since there is no science without mythology in this sense. (p. 15)

As Bateman explains in his first chapter, mythmaking in this sense of the world is an integral part of doing and explaining science. This does mean, however, that there is no science without some measure of metaphysical conjecture. This in itself is not a bad thing, just something we all have to deal with. In order to do so, however, we need to be aware of it, and that awareness is often ignored by scientists and not present in the general public, because science is often presented by its practitioners as truth.

To this end, Bateman distinguishes and discusses seven myths concerning evolution (with the last applying to science in general), and supplements these with alternative myths or viewpoints. I will not address all of these, but I want to name them anyway, as they are central to the structure of the book: 1) the ladder of progress; 2) survival of the fittest; 3) the selfish gene; 4) kin selection; 5) intelligent design; 6) adaptationism; 7) science as truth.

Over the course of the book, Bateman addresses these myths and the way they relate to empirical fact in a systematic manner that is at the same time quite easy and enjoyable to read. Starting with chapter two, he presents a discussion of some of the basic principles of evolutionary theory, starting with Darwin and his contemporaries, all the way to today’s biology. Besides addressing technical issues of biological evolution, Bateman illustrates some of the mythology surrounding evolution as a theory, such as the origin and spreading of the phrase “survival of the fittest” and its social-Darwinist connotations – better called Spencerism, as Bateman indicates, for the phrase does not originate in Darwin’s works.

These chapters are illuminating, particularly because they do a good job – as far as I can judge – of explaining much of the science behind evolution. Of course, this is necessary in a book that seeks to point out what is not scientific in matters of evolution, but it is an approach that I’ve rarely encountered and one that I can only describe as fair.

The final chapter of the book, “True Myths”, cuts to the heart of the matter: the relationship between fact and fiction. Bateman argues – correctly in my view – that fact and fiction are supplementary rather than oppositional concepts. Building on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe theory of representation’, he explores the interplay between the two concepts, and shows that all representations are fictional, and that some of them can also be true in an ontological sense. In practice, we base our assessment of which stories are true mostly on authority, as the following example illustrates:

This idea of an authorized story is relevant to the case of the hurricane footage. When this appears in the movie, we imagine that there is a hurricane since it is fictional in the world of the film that there is a hurricane. If the same footage is presented as news it gains the authority to be believed as true as well as imagined. The images we see and the sounds we hear are the same in both cases – the only difference is whether there is any source of authority that supports its claim to being considered fact. Walton says “what is true is to be believed, what is fictional is to be imagined” but I would say “whether it is fact or fiction, it is to be imagined; if it is authorized as fact, it is also to be believed true”. (p. 190)

Metaphor is a very important type of fiction, and one that is used widely not only in our daily language, but also in science and religion. In fact, science and religion have in common the tendency to use metaphor, fiction, and mythology (an overarching narrative or megatext) to build up a more or less coherent world view. The major difference would be, and now I am generalising, that science tries to do more justice to the facts behind the fictions, whereas (organised) religions tend to place less value on factual basis than on the overall world view. But then again, doing justice to fact is the raison d’être of science, whereas the aims of religion are usually more spiritual, ethical, and social in nature.

In the last chapter, Bateman presents a sharp analysis of these issues, arguing among other things for a more subtle view of what constitutes religion, and what constitutes science. This sounds like something too obvious to mention, but it is surprising how narrow-minded the views are that people hold of both science and religion. Religion is a very broad concept, and popular secularist discourse generally focuses on very narrow parts of the religious spectrum, and neither do we often find that religious groups have a particularly subtle view of other religions. Conversely, it is not always clear where the borders of science are: is it a method, a body of accumulated knowledge, or a practice?

What then, of the ‘war’ between the two? As Bateman argues, in order for there to be a war, there must be some form of common ground over which to do battle. First of all, the relation between science and religion can be analysed in a number of ways, often grouped into four types, such as Ian Barbour‘s typology: 1) conflict; 2) independence; 3) dialogue; 4) integration. Bateman reanalyses this and comes up with a categorisation based on truth assertions:

If my conceptual analysis is accepted, then we are back to four categories in the relationship between religion and science – but they are not quite the same as those proposed by Barbour and Haught. There are two positions based on belief in absolute truth, the absolute disjunction of ‘conflict atheism‘ and the absolute intersection of ‘conflict theism‘. There are also two positions based on belief in indirect access to truth, the perspectival disjunction of Gould‘s NOMA and its equivalents and the perspectival intersection of theology of nature and other forms of dialogue. But as Orr suggests, Gould‘s position begins outside of religion, whereas Barbour, Haught and other advocates of dialogue hold positions that begin inside of religion. (p. 206)

The first two groups believe in the absolute truth of their own assertions, either that religion is false, or that only science that conforms to religion is true. The latter two groups believe in perspectival truth, but differ in their belief in the possibility of interaction between science and religion.

Bateman ultimately chooses the middle road in arguing that each of these four approaches is partly right. More importantly, he turns to how we can solve the conflicts between science and religion in our societies. Starting from the human right of freedom of belief, he argues that all sides will have to learn to live together if this right is to be respected. To do this, the intellectual needs of all sides need to be taken into account. The belief in, need for and assertion of absolute truth is one of the most difficult ones to tackle, and one that is found in both sides of the discussions. Indeed, it seems that you don’t have to be religious to hold truth as sacred. Instead, Bateman sees it as a necessity that we all tolerate the fact that other people might have different mythologies.

In practice, this means that the areas that have to be shared in a society – for example, schools – should not be the territory of one mythology or another. Some people do not want creationism taught as fact in school, just as others don’t want evolution taught as fact. Perhaps it is indeed better, as Bateman seems to argue, to stick to the facts as much as possible in school. It is perfectly doable to teach children about nature without resorting to creationist or evolutionary myth. If a child asks “where does everything come from”, perhaps our teachers should be trained to say: “ask your parents” and/or explain that there exist multiple belief systems in this regard. I must say that Bateman offers few suggestions as to how such issues should be tackled in practice, though to be fair, that is not the aim of his book.

The value of The Mythology of Evolution rests in the philosophical underpinning of why this is the way to go. If we do not want metaphysical discussions to continue to sow conflict and mutual misunderstanding in our societies – or god forbid, even worse – we need to be able to turn a fair and scrutinising eye to all aspects of these discussions concerning science, knowledge, truth, etc. Striving to be fair towards our own worldviews as well as those of others is the first step in this process, and in my opinion a self-critical view is paramount in this. As someone who de facto is mostly on the science side of things, for me this means acknowledging the role fiction and mythmaking play not only within science, but perhaps more importantly in secular culture and the history of science.

This is corroborated by research into the history of science, philosophy, and various religious currents. For example, the work of Norwegian researcher Egil Asprem (working at the University of Amsterdam and owner of the excellent Heterodoxology blog) is focused among other things on the relation between science and religion in the early 20th century. A good introduction is his two-part lecture “Religion and Scientific Change: The Case of the New Natural Theologies between the World Wars ” [1, 2]. Like Bateman, Asprem explains the ways the relationship between religion and science can be and has been represented. In addition, he argues that different camps within science and religion have at times purposefully pushed away from each other, giving rise to the conflict model outlined above. His final point in the  lecture is that we should approach all claims about science and religion skeptically, taking into account the cultural and personal contexts surrounding such claims – again, a sensible argument, but one which is rarely applied in practice by many people.

Another work that supplies information in this direction is Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture by professor Wouter Hanegraaff, also of the University of Amsterdam. I’ve yet to read the book in its entirety, but based on lectures surrounding the book, it is a thoroughgoing study into how particular philosophical currents and traditions were at different points in history disqualified as false or heretical, leading to their exclusion in the traditional histories of science and philosophy, even though many have played important roles in the development of scientific and philosophical paradigms. A more well-known example is the artificial disentanglement of early chemistry from alchemy, leading to lots surprised faces of people who learn that Isaac Newton, of all people, left behind a great deal of alchemical writings. This isn’t what many people would expect from one of the great heroes of scientific mythology.

Summing up, there are many reasons why The Mythology of Evolution is a commendable book. It is an accessible read, but with a firm basis in science and philosophy, and a vision of current and future intellectual struggles that seems fair and hopeful. I believe the book will be most appealing to those people (religious or not) who already value freedom and peace above the authority to proclaim truth. I hope that these people are more numerous than at first appears.

As a final illustration of why this book is an enlightening read for anyone who has a vested interest in debates of worldview, I want to leave you with an image (supporters of a sporting match) and a quote that illustrate perfectly my own views on the matter:

Discussion of almost all of the myths under consideration tends to be dominated by partisan camps, each holding firmly entrenched beliefs. To some extent, this situation is inevitable – it is as impossible to exist without beliefs as it is to live without drawing breath. However, the flaws in what others believe cannot serve as endorsement for our own beliefs: the establishment of truth is not a sporting match in which one team wins and another loses. Rather, truth is glimpsed when an issue is viewed from many diverse perspectives, and even then we can never be sure that there is not some unseen angle as yet unrevealed. If we want to really understand the truth about any topic, we may first have to find a way to draw a line between discernible facts and inscrutable metaphysics. (p. 18f)

References:

• Asprem, Egil (2012). “Religion and Scientific Change: The Case of the New Natural Theologies between the World Wars”. [1, 2]
• Bateman, Chris. Only a Game. [1]
• Bateman, Chris (2011). Imaginary Games. Winchester / Washington: Zero Books.
• Bateman, Chris (2012, in press). The Mythology of Evolution. Winchester / Washington: Zero Books.
• Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (2012). Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge [etc.]: Cambridge University Press.

(Image: ESA)

If news reports from earlier this year are to be believed, asteroids are high on the list of celestial bodies to be explored – and manipulated. On May 13th, The Telegraph revealed that British astronaut Tim Peake was going to be trained by NASA for an asteroid surface mission. Only weeks earlier, on April 24th, the American company Planetary Resources announced its plans to invest in asteroid mining technology. In the background the impressive exploration data from NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroid belt trickles in, mainly concerning protoplanets Vesta and Ceres.

It’s clear that at least some of the professional and public focus concerning space exploration has shifted away from Mars and the Moon towards the (mostly) smaller objects in the solar system. Space between Mars and Jupiter, for example, is filled – relatively speaking – with asteroids, coalesced matter that was prevented by Jupiter’s gravitational influences from ever forming anything resembling a real planet. It’s easy to see why asteroids would be prone to a surge in interest as well: they represent something of a hidden side to the Solar System in the public eye, which has for centuries been focused mainly on the Planets proper. That these latter have some sort of mythological status even among secular people was evidenced by the outrage over Pluto’s downgrading to ‘dwarf planet’ status in 2006.

As the plans presented by Planetary Resources indicate, asteroids – and in this case particularly those ~9000 that are close to Earth, rather than in the main belt –  can be considered a source of untapped resources that can be harvested, particularly for use in space missions. In terms of profit, it seems obvious that the company is interested in rare metals such as platinum, as put forward in WIRED. One other precious resource that will be less obvious to most Earth-dwellers is water. It takes tremendous amounts of energy to launch large quantities of water from Earth into space, so if long-term manned space missions could make a pit stop for water somewhere in Earth orbit at a station filled with asteroid water, that would save a lot of effort. Not to mention the fact that water can be used to make rocket fuel.

More deeply rooted in public consciousness is perhaps the concept of the asteroid as something that can potentially crash into the Earth, with apocalyptic consequences. Indeed, this has happened before (e.g. the dinosaur extinction), and it is likely to happen again at some point in the future, though it is difficult to indicate when – I will return to this point below. This idea has been picked up in fiction as well, such as in Arthur C. Clarke‘s 1993 novel The Hammer of God, which I’ve yet to read, and more famously in the 1998 films Deep Impact and Armageddon. Why both movies about exactly the same occurrence were made simultaneously is somewhat of a mystery, but both of them firmly settled the idea of the potential dangers of asteroids in our minds.

Part of the future training missions concerning asteroids may focus on developing the technology to deflect asteroids from their trajectories, either to prevent them from hitting Earth, or instead to bring them closer to Earth for easier mining. Granted that it will be possible to do this reasonably accurately in the future, this raises some ethical issues that we, mankind, would do well to consider.

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan devotes a chapter to asteroids. Based on geological data, we may surmise that roughly once every million years, Earth is hit by an asteroid large enough to cause global catastrophe. Smaller impacts that can devastate smaller areas of the planet like cities or countries happen much more frequently, and Sagan estimates that the world is hit by an asteroid with the impact force equivalent to that of a large nuclear bomb once every few hundred years. Reason enough to start thinking of ways to prepare for such an event, he says, and judging by what has happened since his plea has not fallen on deaf ears.

The problem, however, is that the technology we can use to protect the earth from asteroids could also be used as a weapon:

The problem, Steven Ostro of JPL and I have suggested, is that if you can reliably deflect a threatening worldlet so it does not collide with the Earth, you can also reliably deflect a harmless worldlet so it does collide with the Earth. [...] The technology required [...] all exist today. (p. 255-257)

Sagan is on to something here, applying his trademark skepticism to asteroid-deflection technology, and wondering if this technology will be safe in our hands. Can we be sure that this technology won’t be used by some nation or other group (a corporation?) to inflict targeted devastation on some other? It is not unthinkable that this technology could spark a new Cold War, or worse:

If we develop and deploy this technology, it may do us in. If we don’t, some asteroid or comet may do us in. The resolution of the dilemma hinges, I think, on the fact that the likely timescales of the two dangers are very different – short for the former, long for the latter.
[...]
Since the danger of misusing deflection technology seems so much greater than the danger of imminent impact, we can afford to wait, take precautions, rebuild political institutions – for decades certainly, probably centuries. If we play our cards right and are not unlucky, we can pace what we do up there by what progress we’re making down here. The two are in any case deeply connected. (p. 262-264)

Whether one agrees with Sagan’s assessment of the human proclivity to violence or not is a matter of debate. Personally, I’m inclined to agree, and regardless, it might not be a risk we want to take. Surely it couldn’t hurt to take his advice into account, and make sure that there are political institutions and treaties in place that ensure the non-violent use of deflection technology and the monitoring of this use, before we start making serious work of it. It would be a damn shame if mankind proves its critics right be destroying itself before something else gets the chance to do so.

Finally, I wish to briefly remark on what is perhaps a less pressing ethical issue, but an interesting one nonetheless. It concerns our attitude towards what lies beyond our own planet. Though I see little practical harm in extracting resources from asteroids, we must be mindful of what it means to start exploiting (in the relatively neutral sense of the word) outer space, so soon after we’ve started exploring. Matters of sustainability come to mind, but it’s also interesting to daydream about contact with other lifeforms that might be out there. Once we encounter them, can we still go on exploiting the resources that lie within their sphere of influence? This, of course, leads us to another blockbuster movie, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), which tackles precisely these moral dilemmas. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Cameron is one of the consultants on the board of Planetary Resources, Inc. – so he can keep an eye on them.

References:

• Carl Sagan (1994 [1997]). Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Ballantine.

FATALE promotional art

This is the third time I’m writing about a digital work by Flemish duo Tale of Tales, and that alone says something about the capacity of their releases to inspire discussion. I started with the peaceful MMO The Endless Forest, and also did a short bit on The Graveyard. Continuing the chronological trend would leave The Path as my next subject – arguably their best and most game-like work – but writing about that fascinating psychological horror piece still seems rather daunting. Instead, I’m sticking to the slightly more manageable FATALE and exploring a bit of what it has to say about the figure of Salomé and how she’s been treated throughout history.

FATALE is best described as a digital art vignette, with an explorable 3D scene at its centre, taking Oscar Wilde’s version of the story as its main inspiration. The first scene is short and simple, and presented from the perspective of John the Baptist or Jokanaan, as Wilde has it. John is stuck in the cistern, while aboveground, Salomé is performing her dance of the seven veils for Herod. While waiting for the dance to end, John is free to roam the cistern, and words he has prophesied float around his head. After the dance ends, and Salomé has made her famous request – though John doesn’t hear it – the executioner comes in, slays John, and the screen goes black.

The main part of FATALE starts here. The scene is now outside, the courtyard, at night, with the moon looming largely overhead, as in Wilde’s play. It is not immediately clear whose perspective the ‘player’ has in this scene – I’ll return to this issue later. The purpose of this scene is to allow the player to explore the three-dimensional picture Tale of Tales have made, with ambient music, sound effects and eerie voices provided by Jarboe and Kris Force, the duo that so successfully scored The Path. It is something of a symbolist piece, with props relating to the story scattered around the courtyard: the musical instruments used during the dance, the executioner standing guard, Salomé scattered veils, Salomé herself looking out over the courtyard, the head of Jokanaan next to her on a plate, listening to her iPod. There is a limited form of progress in the scene, in the form of snuffing out and stealing the different lights on the scene: candles and lamps. Each captured light can be used to revisit and explore parts of the scene, each more static, painting-like snapshots of the whole. When all lights are out, dawn breaks, and with the moon in sight, the view dissipates and the scene is over.

This ends the program, but upon restarting it, the ‘final’ scene is playable. Again, it is the dance of the seven veils, but this time from the perspective of king Herod, for whom Salomé dances. This scene, set to music by Gerry de Mol, is brilliantly done using rotoscoping of an actual dancer (Eléonore Valere Lachky), animated by Laura Raines Smith, and it is most likely one of the best instances of dance art in a digital medium; you can view the making of the dance here: https://vimeo.com/7491839. At the end of the dance, Salomé gracefully gestures towards the cistern, indicating to the viewer the gruesome payment she demands for her performance.

Before I return to some more thoughts on FATALE, first a little background. As many readers will know, the story of Salomé is best known from the New Testament, and it is included in many retellings of the life of Jesus. With the weight of two thousand years of cultural adaptations weighing down on us, it came as a surprise to me that the story is actually very marginal in the Bible. In fact, it is found only in Matthew (14:1-12) and Marc (6:14-29), and as a brief reference in Luke (9:7-9), who only refers to the beheading of John the Baptist. Salomé is not even named in the Bible; she is known only as Herodias’ daughter. Both Matthew and Marc agree on the basics of the tale, which I reproduce here in the version of Marc:

14 And king Herod heard of him; (for his name was spread abroad:) and he said, That John the Baptist was risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him.
15 Others said, That it is Elias. And others said, That it is a prophet, or as one of the prophets.
16 But when Herod heard thereof, he said, It is John, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead.
17 For Herod himself had sent forth and laid hold upon John, and bound him in prison for Herodias’ sake, his brother Philip’s wife: for he had married her.
18 For John had said unto Herod, It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.
19 Therefore Herodias had a quarrel against him, and would have killed him; but she could not:
20 For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.
21 And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee;
22 And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee.
23 And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.
24 And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist.
25 And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist.
26 And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath’s sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her.
27 And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison,
28 And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother.
29 And when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his corpse, and laid it in a tomb.

[Marc 6:14-29, King James Version]

It seems rather clear to me that in the biblical account, the plot revolves around Herodias. Herod is not particularly fond of John, but he fears the outrage he will cause should the prophet be put to death. Herodias apparently has no such reservations, and she opportunistically uses Herod’s oath to her daughter to have John executed, thereby taking revenge for his condemnation of their marriage. The motivations of the unnamed Salomé are not explored, and for all the verses tell us, she is merely a girl or a young woman (innocently?) performing a dance routine.

However, two millennia is a long time for a character to evolve. That period sees the general depiction of Salomé transform from a relatively inconspicuous player in a political conflict to a sensual seductress, a player in a far more complicated marital struggle, and a madwoman.

In renaissance art, Salomé was already a favourite subject of artists, though at this point, she was still presented as a chaste young woman, often dressed according to the fashion of the time. I’ve selected four examples, which are viewable below. Though of course biblical themes were obvious choices for painters, it seems this scene spoke to the imagination in particular, which is a testament to the power of the story, even in its summary biblical form. The ‘shot’ where Salomé presents John’s head on a plate is indeed a powerful image.

Titian – Salome (~1515)

Caravaggio – Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (~1607)

Peter Paul Rubens – Feast of Herod (17th century, 1st half)

Lucas Cranach the Elder – Feast of Herod (1531)

Thus far, using only the web as a resource, I have been unable to accurately trace the history of the Salomé figure in visual art, particularly in the period following the renaissance. It seems, however, that after a hiatus in popularity, the visual and thematic interpretation of Salomé changed, starting in the 19th century. Her appearance (as well as the setting) is more explicitly orientalised, and her behaviour and presentation are now more and more laden with sexuality and seduction, conforming to the upcoming archetype of the femme fatale. Again, a small selection of works are presented here to illustrate this:

Gustave Moreau – Salome in the Garden (1878)

Alphonse Mucha – Salome (1897)

Gustave Moreau – Salome Dancing Before Herod (~1875)

Gaston Bussière – La danse de Salome ou les papillon d’or (1923)

Franz von Stuck – Salome (1906)

According to Wikipedia, Christian traditions “depict her as an icon of dangerous female seductiveness”; however, this observation is unsourced, and to me not directly visible in the paintings predating the 19th century. As far as I can see at the moment, her iconisation and sexualisation only really took off with a renewed interest in her character in the second half of that century. In 1877, Gustave Flaubert, around the time of Moreau‘s paintings, published a short story entitled “Herodias”. This is one of the first elaborations on the story, and of great influence on later works. In it, the political machinations of Herod’s court are depicted in much more detail, as well as Herodias’ motivations for wanting the death of John. More importantly for the analysis here, in Flaubert’s version Herodias actively grooms Salomé to be seductive, as part of her scheme to move Herod to have John executed. Salomé herself is still more of an accomplice than an independent actor, though this is one of the first sources where she is explicitly sexualised.

Crucial for the further development of the figure of Salomé, as already mentioned, was Oscar Wilde’s one-act play. Originally written in French and published in 1891, it is no doubt the most famous modern interpretation of the story, not in the least because of the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, which accompany many editions. As Nancy Thuleen points out in her essay on the play, Wilde drew heavily on earlier 19th century versions of the story, as well as Moreau’s paintings, but one of the things that makes his version special is that he makes Salomé, rather than her mother or someone else, central to the plot.

Wilde’s Salomé is a plagued young woman, obsessed by the idea of chastity. It seems to me that she feels tainted by the lascivious advances of her stepfather Herod, as well as the aspersions cast on her mother’s marriage by John, and perhaps by extension on herself. She looks to the Moon, that central symbol of the play, as a virgin:

How good to see the moon! She is like a little piece of money. You would think she was a little silver flower. The moon is cold and chaste. I am sure she is a virgin, she has a virgin’s beauty. Yes, she is a virgin. She has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men, like the other goddesses.

Her attraction to John, often seen as sexualised in nature, seems to me merely an aspect of this same desire to be free of her family’s sins. One of the things that attracts her to him is that she is very much aware that her mother hates him and her stepfather fears him. Upon meeting him, she notices his pallor, and compares him to the Moon:

How wasted he is! He is like a thin ivory statue. He is like an image of silver. I am sure he is chaste as the moon is. He is like a moonbeam, like a shaft of silver. His flesh must be cool like ivory. I would look closer at him.

She continues to observe his body, discovering hideous aspects in him as well, but ultimately she desires a kiss of him, which he of course does not grant her, spurning her for being a “daughter of adultery”.

The rest of the story is clear: Herod lusts after Salomé and she rebuffs his advances. Only when Herod promises her whatever she wishes does she consent to dance for him. After the dance, she asks for John’s head, this time without her mother’s urging, though of course Herodias approves of her daughter’s choice. In the climax of the play, before she is killed by mad Herod’s guards, Salomé gets her kiss from the severed head of John the Baptist.

Beardsley’s illustration of the play’s climax

Since Wilde’s play and the Richard Strauss opera adaptation, I don’t think there have been any radical changes to the Salomé story, at least not in ways that have transformed the general view as much as the 19th century artistic currents have.

Back to FATALE. It’s a remarkable work of art how the relatively static scene created by Tale of Tales posits many of the questions I have addressed in this article. Its Salomé is inscrutable, the way she leans over the wall, listening to her music. She stares directly at the empty throne of Herod, as if daring her absent stepfather to react. Herodias stand statuesquely to the side, watching her daughter.

The whole family together?

At this point I’m inclined to say that the player’s perspective in the main part of FATALE is above all that of Herod. Unlike the other main figures in the story (Salomé, Herodias, John, the executioner), he is nowhere present in the scene. In addition, the task of snuffing out the lights corresponds directly to his words in Wilde’s play:

Surely some terrible thing will befall. Manasseh, Issachar, Ozias, put out the torches. I will not look at things. I will not suffer things to look at me. Put out the torches! Hide the moon! Hide the stars! Let us hide ourselves in our palace, Herodias. I begin to be afraid.

Many of the vantage points in the scene are centered around the figure of Salomé, allowing the disembodied viewer to study her form in detail, much like the desire of Herod. In one of the final tableaux, a gust of wind can even draw off Salomé’s final veil, which she has lazily drawn about herself. At the same time, John’s bloody head is always close at hand to remind one of the price of Herod’s desire. A picture glimpsed through the heavy door behind Salomé perhaps reveals another clue: a king’s portrait, head averted in shame.

Without at least a basic knowledge of the story of Salomé, FATALE will perhaps be a bit obtuse to play. However, with the proper background – this article is more than enough – you will be able to enjoy the interesting perspectives that this digital art piece offers. Unlike films or many proper video games which rely heavily on narrative drive, a piece such as this allows for a calmer contemplation of a narrative already vaguely known, but seen from a new perspective. As the older paintings seek to invite the audience to think back to the biblical story, so does FATALE draw the player into thinking about the history of Salomé, while exploring its visual and musical language.

Further reading:

• http://www.edge-online.com/reviews/review-fatale-exploring-salome
• Nancy Thuleen – “Salome: A Wildean Symbolist Drama”

The schema illustrates the iterations of creation undertaken by the Star Maker, creator of the universe in which we live. Each creation or cosmos has its own local time, but the Star Maker itself is outside of his creations’ time. He has the timeless creator’s perspective, the viewpoint of eternity.

What follows is Stapledon’s own subscript to this schema:

The circle represents the time proper to the Star Maker as creative. Its uppermost point is the beginning and the end of the Star Maker’s time. The passage of time is clockwise. Each ‘broken spoke’ of the wheel represents a cosmical time. The cosmical times are, of course, incommensurable; but the progress in the Star Maker’s creative activity is represented by making the cosmical lines increasingly long as the creation becomes more mature. The increase of length represents the increasing complexity and subtlety of successive creations. The ‘View Point of Eternity’ represents the Star Maker’s  ’timeless’ apprehension of all existence, in his capacity of eternal and absolute spirit. The goal of the creative spirit is the complete fulfilment of its capacity, and the attainment of the eternal view through the climax of the ultimate cosmos. Earlier creations approach, but do not reach, this climax. Each cosmical history is represented as lying in a dimension at right angles to the Star Maker’s own time. He can, of course, ‘live through’ a cosmical history, but he can also apprehend it all at once. Some of the cosmical histories might have been represented by circles, since the times of some are cyclic. Other might have been areas, since the have more than one temporal dimension. I have only represented a few of the infinite number of creations.

Though I didn’t know it when I originally wrote the description of this blog, Stapledon’s conception of sub specie æternitatis seems remarkably close to my own. I got the idea from the book that the communal spirit inside creation, through the aggregation of a myriad of individual consciousnesses, could approach that viewpoint of the Star Maker, and perhaps in the ultimate cosmos, they coincide.

Most likely, it is no accident that a thoroughly pantheistic myth like Star Maker is inspired by a turn of phrase coined by perhaps the most famous pantheist of all time, Spinoza.

Hauntology is one of those buzzwords that get thrown around in an attempt to put a finger on certain cultural trends. Deriving ultimately from Jacques Derrida, in reference to the opening sentence of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto, the term nowadays is used to refer to the ‘ghosts’ haunting our culture; the intangible spectres of (imagined) past and (unrealised) futures that inform our ways of thinking and creating. More than the possible futures, it seems to me that it is in particular the ghosts of culture past that leave their mark on our culture today.

Instagram

In a time when Instagram and other retro cameras are some of the most popular smartphone apps I often wonder where this global (i.e. Western) tendency towards nostalgia and retro comes from. It is a tendency we see in various domains of popular culture, and I think it’s interesting to briefly touch upon a couple of those.

I’ll start with music, as I’ve noticed – and I’m not the only one – that pop music has been stuck in a bit of a rut lately. First of all, in my view, the last truly meaningful musical revolutions happened roughly twenty years ago. Among these, we could highlight grunge and the revival of rock, house music leading to dance, mainstream hiphop, or even the sub-branching of heavy metal into quite variegated new styles. These revolutions were based on several developments. Some involved a much-needed re-invigoration of an old idiom, such as grunge. Other were based on a fresh influx of ideas from (ethnic) subcultures, such as rap and hiphop, or on new instrumental possibilities: house and dance music were the final mainstream currents in a series of electronica-based styles beginning with pioneers in the middle of the 20th century.

Amy

Since then, the days of my youth, I’ve seen relatively little in the way of innovation. The vast majority of popular music is building on these and other idioms developed at least two decades before, and those artists that do manage to sound relatively fresh, e.g. Amy Winehouse, do so mainly because they represent a revival of even older idioms, in her case the jazz and soul music of the sixties, not to mention the hair.

It's time to keep your appointment with the Wicker Man

The underground fares little better. Truly revolutionary styles such as industrial, new wave, punk, metal, and ambient all appeared before I was born, most of what has followed since is based on the groundbreaking work made back then. Ironically enough, here too the recent styles that sound quite ‘new’ take their inspiration from older periods. The evanescent witchhouse boom was a case in point, with its use of retro synths and ghostly æsthetics. More profound to me seems the (re-re-)revival of folk music, starting with the (post-industrial) neofolk of the early nineties, and joined in the new millennium by freefolk, new weird, and what have you. Many artists from this movement combine influences from traditional folk with modern (and other retro!) influences to great effect, but at its heart, it is another revival. Is it a coincidence that the term ‘hauntological’ rears its head in many attempts to describe some of these new musical currents?

The reasons for this apparent stagnation in pop music elude me. A part of it may be the decline of subcultures in the sense that we used to know: relatively isolated cultural areas that had the opportunity and spirit to develop a (musical) style of its own without influence (or co-optation) from the rest of the world. In a world that is ever more connected by digital media, subcultures are changing shape or disappearing, and their artistic fruits are shared, reshared, and forgotten before they get the chance of a longer independent maturation towards their own voice.

Another area where we see the retromania pop up is video games. On the one hand, this seems to be a result of two generations of gamers ‘growing up’ and thinking back with nostalgia to the games of their youth. Nintendo iconography is more popular than ever, and some of their most popular recent games are evolutions of NES classics from the eighties. An ‘old school’ æsthetic also flourishes in the indie games scene, where small developers solve the problem of small budgets by adopting the more limited but more affordable graphical styles of games from two decades ago.

A pirate walks into a bar...

But the game nostalgia is not limited to visuals alone. More and more gamers clamour for a return to styles of gameplay and narrative design of a (recently) bygone period. A “golden era of computer games, when creativity was king”, as game designer Brian Fargo recently stated in his recruiting video for the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter campaign. It seems retro-minded gamers are going to get what they want, with Kickstarters like this one, and the one that will allow Tim Schafer to return to the adventure game genre. These projects involve established and celebrated designers who’ve created some of the canonised classics of the medium, but they also signal something else: an industry that’s moved to a point where some gamers’ demands for great stories and great design aren’t being met (enough), as well as a look towards the past for inspiration and gratification. No doubt these campaigns will result in quality video games – I trust in them enough to invest in the Kickstarter – but they will be explicitly retro in outlook.

Apparently, that’s what we want. But isn’t it ironic that we want games and music in a style that used to be  innovative? Perhaps it is because we feel that anything older is better than what passes for new these days.

Vintage Harry

As far as contemporary literature is concerned, I’m not too sure whether it participates all that much in this retromaniac trend. Literary currents seem to operate on a different timescale than those of other media, and if anything, the image is a bit vague to me. On the one hand, that is because of my limited perspective; my reading tends to focus on older works, library and second-hand books, and genre fiction. Besides, it is not immediately obvious to me how literature could be retro, apart from jacket design, which does show such ‘vintage’ tendencies from time to time. A substantial retro feature could be use of older language - outside of dialogues – when writing historical fiction, but I’m not sure if this is done often.

Wasteland Max

A possible retromania can be detected in the popularity of post-apocalyptic settings and steampunk in recent fantastic fiction. The latter example is the most direct, thriving on a nostalgia for fantastical victoriana, though one could argue this has more to do with a fascination for history and fantasy than with retro æsthetic per se. The case of post-apocalyptic settings might be different. It seems to me that the current fascination with the concept of the post-apocalyptic wasteland could in part be a throwback to the themes of the eighties and nineties, in which the setting was given form by films and videogames like Mad Max, the first instalment of abovementioned Wasteland, Fallout, etc. You don’t have to look too hard to trace the influences of that era to more recent works like The Road and The Hunger Games. In yet another instance of irony, we envision the future according to a retrospective idiom.

Of course, this isn’t all bad. Some things simply were better in the past, as some of the above examples illustrate, and practically all forms of popular culture build on the visions of the past to some degree. To take some of the better aspects of yesterday’s culture and use them to reinvigorate today’s is a good thing. At the same time, something seems to be missing. Whereas the revolutionary cultural currents of the nineties and earlier built on the past and reached for new heights, today’s culture seems mostly content just to dwell on the past. Why could that be?

What follows is mere conjecture, but perhaps I will strike a right note here and there. Retromania and hauntology are, to me, conspicuous in particular because they seem to lack a counterpart. Where are the artistic movements that, for better or worse, radically reject the forms of the past, and try to build the future from the ground up? Isn’t that how many of the idioms we nostalgically love today were created in the first place?

The Internet is basically the Jedi Archives

It almost seems as if we radically do not want to even think about the future. On one level, for many people in the West, the present is pretty cosy, and we now have (digital) access to so much past culture that the need to innovate is less urgent. If something is missing in today’s cultural landscape, we can simply resurrect some campy element of the (recent) past, and if we present it ironically enough, we can be cool to boot. Some revolutionary currents of the past were born as a protest against poverty, isolation, and repression, and obviously that has little relevance to today’s middle class youth.

At the same time, just beyond the veil of the future, things are clawing at us. It often seems as if more than anything, we are all seeing the first signs of our modern welfare under siege, and fear that we might lose our way of living. There may be some truth to that. Economic developments and increasing financial insecurity, social mobility, globalisation, the rise of (domestic and global) terrorism and tribalism, these are all issues that put strain on sense of community and security, and perhaps this is why we have an extra incentive to hold on to the present and (imagined) glorious past for dear life?

SUPER Dutch

The longing for a better past is mirrored in many more sociocultural trends than the few I’ve mentioned here. In the Netherlands at least, people are frantically trying to (re)construct a national identity, based on perceived traditional values and symbols thereof, and this is reflected in the visuals and language of our politicians and media. Symbols like cheese, wind, water, level-headedness, as well as linguistic labels of ‘ur-Dutchness’ [Oerhollands] are utilised to a great degree to instil some sense of community into the citizens, whether it is to sell a product or secure a vote. To me, all this seems like trying to catch water in a net.

Shouldn’t we rather be facing the future, and secure a place in it? The eighties were an era of cold war angst, yet that didn’t stop artists from looking forward. So how do we lift the fog of tomorrow today? Perhaps we should reinstate the future utopia alongside the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the sepia-toned meadows of the past. First in our imaginations, and then in our plans. And create things that help us get there, or that allow us to escape if we can’t get there in our lifetime.

Ghosts will keep haunting us, but that doesn’t mean we should always acknowledge them. We can ignore them and look ahead, or even attempt to exorcise them.

Further reading:

• http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/12/the-faux-vintage-photo-part-iii-nostalgia-for-the-present/
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jun/17/hauntology-critical
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/29/retromania-simon-reynolds-review
• http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/content/59/3/373.full

Pages of Pain

Review of Troy Denning - Pages of Pain (1996)

What a chimera of a book this is. It has one foot in plain old fantasy, with quite a few battles, some spell-slinging, and a hero on a quest. The other foot is deep in myth. When I first read this book, around seven years ago, I didn’t quite get it. I was already quite familiar with Planescape, the Dungeons & Dragons setting that forms the backdrop for this novel. However, in the novel, I found little of the vast vistas and wide-eyed wonder that typified the setting for me. Instead, the book’s narrative is almost completely confined to a labyrinth, which offers only a few passing glimpses of all the imaginative places that make up the Planescape multiverse. However, upon a second reading and some brief reflection, I think I now see what Denning tried to do here.

There are two protagonists in Pages of Pain. The active one is the Amnesian Hero, a warrior chosen by Poseidon to deliver an amphora to the Lady of Pain, mystery-shrouded ruler of Sigil, the City of Doors, the place at the centre of the multiverse. The hero has no memories of his past life, except waking up at the shore of a river one day, and doing a bunch of awesome heroic deeds: i.e. slaying mythic beasts. However, the task imposed upon him isn’t as easy as it sounds. The Lady of Pain does not grant audiences, and getting to her to deliver the amphora is a heroic task for which the hero isn’t prepared.

The story is told from the perspective of that other protagonist: the Lady herself. In the Planescape setting, she is that all-important mystery, the divine-like force that guards the City of Doors, and prevents it from becoming the umpteenth battleground for gods, demons, and devils. In this book, though still a mystery, she is much more personal, revealing an obsession with physical and mental pains of different kinds, and also revealing that she might be an incarnation or avatar of the City itself.

As the story progresses, the Amnesian Hero is gradually exposed to the contents of the amphora he is tasked to deliver, but these contents seem more meant for him than for the Lady. Whilst seeking a path through the Lady’s mazes with several unfortunate companions, he regains snatches of his memory, and the pains that come with it.

In a strange, almost anti-climactic way, the book ties up many strands in the end: the hero finds his path through the mazes, and defeats the monster of the labyrinth, but at the cost of death of some others and pain for all, to the strange sadomasochistic delight of the Lady, of whom we never become sure if she is personally tied to the Amnesian Hero and the amphora’s memories or not.

As for the hero, his tale is retold in a different form by Morte in Planescape: Torment, that other brilliant piece of (digital) fiction based on the setting, also featuring an amnesic protagonist. In a trading-of-tales, Morte, the sarcastic floating skull with hidden pains and depths tells the story of a man with no memory at all waking up in an alley. An old woman asks him what his third wish is to be. The man does not understand, but she tells him he has already had two wishes. The man says: “I wish to know who I am”. The woman chuckles sardonically and replies: “Funny, that was your first wish.”

So, what is this book? In the end, it is much like the Planescape setting itself: an admixture of epic fantasy and mythic fiction, but at a level of imagination that surpasses most other settings of the Dungeons & Dragons tradition. The setting is based on the idea that all mortal beliefs have power and reality on certain levels (planes) of existence, and as such it can encompass all other mythologies. In the case of Pages of Pain, the story of Greek hero Theseus is grafted onto a fantasy setting, a tale of regret, pain, memory, and amnesia in a way that is weird and estranging as it is effective.

After waking, this got me thinking about that strange wedding of attraction and repulsion that is sometimes symbolically personified, be it in dreams or in fiction. It wasn’t the first time I had been confronted with these feelings on a subconscious level. About five years ago, for example, I had written a short story in which the protagonist returns to his countryside home from a long journey. Upon his return, the surroundings invigorate him and he is filled with life, looking forward to spending time in these old new rural surroundings. However, after a night and the beginnings of morning, he realises something is wrong, and that his home has been violated somehow. He steps outside only to find the landscape around it changed to some surreal misty state. Upon investigating, he spies a faint female figure somewhere in the fog the lies over his lands. They meet and speak briefly, and he is torn between the calm life he had just envisioned, and the strange myterious pull of this woman. Eventually, he joins her and they disappear into the mist, becoming “a red stain on the grey horizon”. End of story.

This was in a period where I taken up anyway by the idea that many literary works were focused on spiritual climaxes where a character somehow achieved a sort of mystical union in death and/or with the divine, which might be the same depending on your particular viewpoint. To me, an unio mystica suggests the death of the self and a new life in the divine, so it’s both. Particularly cases where characters can be said to experience a tumultuous emotional state at the moment of death fit into this category, such as the endings of two of Henrik Ibsen‘s late plays, The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken. In both cases, the male protagonist of the play achieves a form of conquest – life, creation, love – and is literally elevated to a high position – a tower, a mountain – only to fall to his death at the same time.

Though exploring a related connection between creation, life, and death, such action-filled scenes form a stark contrast with more smouldering motifs like that in my own dream and story. Rather, I was reminded of another play by Ibsen, namely The Lady from the Sea, in which the female protagonist Ellida encounters a mysterious man from her past. Tellingly, this man also seems to carry the double symbolic value of the lady from my dream. At a physical level, he is just a sailor, and one with which Ellida has a romantic history. At the same time, the figure is ambiguous: in Ellida’s emotional world, he symbolises not only past love, but also the unknown and fathomless powers of the sea, or even death. In his person, love and mortal danger are united. In the end, Ellida chooses to stay with her husband, and a life on shore, but not before going through a major emotional struggle in which she battles her subconscious desire or drive towards the sea, her past love, and the danger or death that might be represented by them.

For more on this interpretation of The Lady from the Sea, the reader is referred to an article by Ellen Hartman, entitled “The Lady from the Sea in a Mythologic and Psychoanalytic Perspective” [see the references at the end]. In it, she explores the possible links of the play with the mythical symbolism of Persephone being abducted by Hades into the underworld, as well as the purported psychoanalytical archetye of the Harlequin.

So, a bit more about Harlequin. A basic internet investigation will reveal that he is one of the stock characters of the Commedia dell’arte, a lover, striving to earn the love of his Colombina. His main aspects include agility and grudging servitude to a master, generally the innamorato of the play.

The Harlequin, by Gerald Brom

Apart from this Italian stage history, and subsequent cultural adaptations such as the British harlequinade, some trace a deeper history for the character. Hartmann, in her article above, introduced to me the idea of Harlequin as a symbolic figure signifying death as a lover. She, in turn, refers to a 1963 paper by psychoanalyst James McClelland, entitled “The Harlequin Complex”. In it, he explores the theme of (mostly) women not being afraid of death, but somehow looking forward to it with a form of excitement, and using love-related or erotic symbolism to express this. McClelland picks the term harlequin complex for this psychological state on account of a relatively unknown history of the Harlequin figure. It is presented in its fullest form, as far as I know, in Otto Driesen‘s study from 1904, and briefly summarising (I’ve yet to read the whole book), he argues that Harlequin goes back to a family of demonic figures from French folkore named herlekin, hellequin, dating back to around 1100.

More speculatively, McClelland goes on to make the link from here to the Hades/Persephone myth, who can be said to form a primeval death/lover pair. As informative as these links are to students of symbolic or fictional archetypes, McClelland sadly continues his article with quite weakly argumented psychoanalytical conjectures based on psychotherapeutical anecdotes, ultimately linking the harlequin complex to schizophrenia in women.

I prefer to treat the concept more in the abstract, though perhaps a brief mention of Sigmund Freud will be pardoned. A concept that also struck me quite soon after dreaming the dream that formed the inspiration for this post, was that of Todestrieb or death drive. At one point, Freud postulated two basic desires for human psychology, one geared towards the other, towards life, and towards procreation (Lustprinzip), and one towards the self, towards destruction, and towards death (Todestrieb). On some level, Freud sought to explain a great many contradictions in human behaviour through the interaction of these two principles.

Though Freud’s principles have met with negative critical reception as regards application in psychological practice, to me they do seem to have some resonance when it comes to literary and oneiric themes such as those presented above. On the one hand, if humans have a psychological drive towards death, this would explain why death is not always unambiguously seen as something to fear and abhor, as seems to be the cultural standard in modern times. Instead, a certain attraction to death would then be natural, as the completion and eclipse of life.

We could take it one step further, though, and say that the symbolical motif of the Harlequin paradoxically unites the two drives. He appears as a lover, and as such appeals to the pleasure principle, but he is at the same time death. If, in some mysterious way, as is possible in dreams and fiction, we can somehow sense the true nature of the figure, he subconsciously appeals to our death drive at the same time. This seemingly paradoxical mixture of drives may also explain the ambigousness of feeling that accompanies such a figure, as we’ve seen in the doubting Ellida in Ibsen’s play, or indeed in my own short story and dream. There is a strong emotional battle between living moderate life by rejecting Harlequin and perhaps a powerful fulfilment of both Freud’s drives on the one hand, and on the other hand to completely give in to him, satisfying both drives at once, annihilating yourself in the process.

This is as much as I have to say on the topic at present, though I’d like to sign off with two further cultural references from recent times.

First, we find a musical link to the theme in Coil‘s wonderful track “The Golden Section” from their seminal 1986 album Horse Rotorvator. Apart from being a precursor track to later martial industrial music, on account of its marching snare drum rhythm and brass melodies, the track features a spoken word piece from a book by Hakim Bey [see this interview for more background on the album and themes]:

The angel of death stands between heaven and earth, holding a poison-dripping sword. Identified with Satan, he is full of eyes, a diligent reaper, an old fugitive and wanderer like Cain, a beggar, a pedlar, an Arab nomad, a skeleton, capering with sinners and misers in a jugglers’ dance.

But the nightmarish angel presents a different face to the one who has died before death, who has attained some measure of the apathea of a saint.

We are told that Azrael, Death, appears to our spirit in a form determined by our beliefs, actions, and dispositions during life. He may even manifest invisibly so the man may die of a rose, a rheumatic pain, or of a rotting stench.

When the soul sees Azrael, it falls in love, and its gaze is thus withdrawn from the body as if by a seduction. Great prophets and saints may even be politely invited by Death, who appears to them in corporeal form. Thus it was with Moses and with Mohammed.

When the Persian poet Rumi lay on his deathbed, Azrael appeared as a beautiful youth and said, “I am come by divine command to enquire what commission the Master may have to entrust in you.”

In fact, a strange connection becomes apparent between mors and amor, love and death. The moment of extinction in the pleasure of love resembles that of death, and thus, that of the mystical. In mythic terms, Eros and Thanatos are almost twins, for in some cases Death appears as a lovely youth and Eros as a withered starveling.

Both love and death are gateways, hence their eternal adolescence and their fixation in the midst of the rite of passage.

Here too, the connection between death and love is made apparent, and at the same time the relative unimportance of gender in this respect. That death appears to Rumi as a young male fits perfectly into Coil’s homosexual thematics, and the important part is probably that death will appear in a form most attractive to the subject. Harlequin may be a sexless, more abstract symbol, perhaps invisible, who incarnates as a sexualy appealing young man or woman.

Finally, there’s a short story by Neil Gaiman, one of those writers who eminently bridges the worlds of popular literature, myth, folkore, and fantasy fiction. His story “Harlequin Valentine” centers around an invisible Harlequin who literally pins his heart to the door of his Colombina, named Missy, on Valentine’s Day.

She is intrigued and disgusted at the same time by the strange gift, thinking it a practical joke at first. After taking into a pathologist friend, and confirming it is a human heart, as well as not a joke from said doctor, she doesn’t know what to do with the strange ‘gift’. In the end, she decides to eat it with a hefty dollop of ketchup, and in the process, she becomes the Harlequin herself, while the old Harlequin is transformed back into his old self.

This funny and wry story, which has references to a number of commedia dell’arte characters, can be found in Gaiman’s story collection Fragile Things, as well as in the form of a stand-alone graphic novel, illustrated by John Bolton.

All that’s left now is to wish you a happy Valentine’s Day!

References:

The three works, in chronological order, are: Toward the Tower (1961), Embroidering Earth’s Mantle (1961), and The Escape (1962).

Instead of giving my own view, I will reproduce Janet A. Kaplan‘s analysis here, taken from her excellent biography Unexpected Journeys:

Toward the Tower

In the first of the series, Toward the Tower of 1961 [...], Varo shows her self-portrait character as one of a group of identical uniformed girls bicycling away from a beehive tower in which they were being held captive, led by a “Mother Superior” figure and by an ominous man from whose bag fly birds that hover overhead as a guardian cordon. [...]

In the central panel of the autobiographical triptych, Embroidering Earth’s Mantle [...], Varo offered a closer look at the life of a convent student. The same young girls, here captive in a tower, work as in a medieval scriptorium, embroidering the mantle of the world according to the dictates of a “Great Master.” This hooded figure reads from the catechism of instructions while stirring a broth boiling in the same alchemical vessel from which the girls draw their embroidery thread. Each girl works alone, embroidering images onto a continuous fabric that spills out from table-height battlements around the facets of the tower. Together they create a landscape with houses, ponds, streams, boats, animals, and humans, all nestled within the folds of the fabric. Theirs is the traditional work of the convent, where needlework was deemed a skill appropriate for cultured young women.

Embroidering Earth's Mantle

Characteristically, Varo treated such tradition with irony. Among the girls working diligently, each at her own table, guarded by a comical veiled figure who lurks in the background playing a flute, Varo’s rebellious heroine has “embroidered a trick in which one can see her together with her lover” [...], their rendezvous subtly visible in a rendering hidden upside-down within the folds that flow from her table. In a masterful variant on the myth of creation, she has used this most genteel of domestic handicrafts to create her own hoped-for escape. Unlike Rapunzel and the Lady of Shalott, Varo’s young heroine imprisoned in the tower is not merely a metaphor for confinement, but also an agent of her own liberation. [...]

The Escape

The title of the third panel, The Escape [...], attests to her success. Here she is shown with her lover fleeing to the mountains. [...] In Varo’s fanciful depiction, the couple flees in a magical vehicle that looks like a furry inverted umbrella floating on a foggy mist. Their capes billow out behind them, catching the wind and acting as sails. 

[Janet A. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, p. 18ff]

I might be posting more by and about Varo here, or on my tumblr, but for now, I hope you’ve enjoyed these.

~

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

One of the classics of utopian/dystopian fiction, of course, and deserving of the status. Many apt analyses of the novel have been written before, so I will not go into too much detail. Suffice to say that Brave New World ask many relevant questions about the efficacy and moral implications of extensive control of individuals by collectives. Whereas in Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four control of the masses was mainly achieved by linguistics and journalistic means, the people in Brave New World are manipulated by subliminal indoctrination during youth, and by indulgence in entertainment, drugs, and sex in adulthood. Essentially, the question posed these novels, and related ones like Zamyatin‘s We (also read in 2011) and Rand‘s Anthem, is whether a degree of collective control is warranted at all, and if so, in what form. As in most things, I personally believe in a balance and middle road regarding this issue, but novels like this one help challenge all kinds of assumptions and ideas.

~

Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Sagan has been an inspirational figure to for quite a few years, but there are a couple of books by him that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. Pale Blue Dot is another commendable popular science book, where he explores issues surrounding space travel and colonisation. The treatment of subject matter such as lunar and martian exploration and settlement, manipulation of asteroids, etc. is accessible and clear, as well as well-argumented. It really challenges the reader to take a long-term view of the ecosystem on Earth, possible changes in climate (man-induced or not) that may prove fatal to our species, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial expansion to ensure the future of mankind, without looking away from the dangers involved in that grand quest.

~

Titus Groan

Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan

Titus Groan is the first part of Peake’s Gormenghast series, one of those strange fantastic names that buzzes through your mind for years as something that’s somehow part of the literary landscape, without really giving a clear idea of what’s it all about. That’s what second-hand books are for, though: blind buys. It turns out that the series (thus far) is a unique piece of literature, that is generally seen as a classic of fantasy, which is a bit misleading when you get down to it. Titus Groan is rather fantastic, in the sense that it is set in a gothicy castle, gloomy and dusty, a features characters that are as grotesque as they are fascinating. However, unlike most fantastic works, there is little room for the magical in Titus Groan, at most a touch of the uncanny. Instead, the work’s brilliance rests in its entirety on those characters, the strange, meaningless rituals performed in the castle, the intrigue and attempts at murder, and the general sense of weirdness that pervades the events in the book. I get the idea that the series is somewhat of an author’s favourite, and quite inspirational to many artistic folk, and judging by the first volume, I can see why, as Peake has created a thoroughly original and lively work.

~

Early Color

Saul Leiter - Early Color

I was thoroughly impressed by Leiter’s exposition in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam late 2011. I’m normally not that into most art photography, but Leiter proved to be an exception. Particularly his 1950s colour work, which makes brilliant use of reflections and cadres was stunning. The book Early Color was reprinted for this exhibition tour, and that will be good news to those who’ve sought it for a longer time. I’ve read that earlier editions went for up to $200 second-hand before this one was available. The book itself has a lot going for it, containing all the pictures at the exhibition I found most stimulating, and more beside.

~

Language Evolution

Salikoko Mufwene – Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change

This is me cheating a bit, as I actually read this in December 2010. However, as I didn’t post a reading overview of that year at all, the fact that this book sparked my interest in evolutionary linguistics, and the fact that I took classes with Mufwene in January 2011, where we treated this book, I think I can get away with it. I will probably argue for the merits of the cultural evolutionary perspective on language variation and change in posts here in the future, as I will certainly do so in my research. However, what I want to mention here in particular is how enlightening Mufwene’s approach is to me when it comes to so-called creole [wiki] languages. These languages are generally seen as “mixture” languages, put together from elements taken from their “parent” languages, and there is discussion within the linguistic world on whether such languages are fundamentally different (in terms of grammatical complexity, for example) from non-creoles. I would agree with Mufwene that they are not, and that they are a product of the same processes (language contact and change) that shape all other languages. The difference is in degree, due to historical ecology (many languages spoken in one community in creole areas such as colonies), and not in kind. The term creole, then, refers to languages that have arisen in particular areas (e.g. the Caribbean), and are spoken by certain people (e.g. the descendants of African slaves and contracted workers), but not to a particular class of languages that is somehow fundamentally different from others. There is a lot more to this book, to this issue, and to evolution in language in general, but that is a topic for another day.

~

The Rest

I’m not quite up to reviewing in detail all the books I’ve read, but there are a couple I want to mention anyway. In the area of literature, lots of enjoyment went into Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, a massive book that would be a pain to summarise, but let me just say that it is vastly entertaining literature and a commentary on entertainment at the same time.

Also rewarding was Dante Alighieri‘s Divina Commedia, which I read in an excellently translated and gorgeously published Dutch edition. Lots of engravings by Gustave Doré (that is: his studio) illuminate the classic tale that has been so inspirational in world literature.

I read the final two parts [3, 4] of John Crowley‘s Ægypt tetralogy, as well as his classic Little, Big this year. I find it difficult to characterise these works, and particularly why I liked them as much as I did. His weaving of magic, religious issues, and historical esotericism into contemporary American fiction is quite unique and works well, staying far away from the usual fantasy genre trappings. At the same time, the books lack a sense of urgency or plot that make them difficult to approach in some ways, and I imagine that people who don’t have a broad historical knowledge of magical, folkloric and religious history might have additional difficulties with the books. Not very useful, I know. I’ll read them again some time, and perhaps I’ll be more articulate.

See an earlier post for a more in-depth discussion of two evolution-related books I read in 2011.

Another topic that interested me this year was conceptions of gender and honour in mediaeval Iceland and the sagas, and both The Unmanly Man and Bloodtaking and Peacemaking are recommended reads for the historically-minded.

A quite comprehensive overview of the history of the humanities (or cultural sciences, if you like) was Rens Bod‘s excellent De Vergeten Wetenschappen, which covers the development of history, musicology, linguistics, literary studies, and so forth in a number of different ‘civilisations’ or traditions (e.g. The West, India, China). Perhaps a tad dry for the general public, but  - and I can’t stress this enough – essential reading for all serious students everywhere, particularly those in arts faculties. An English translation is one of those things I hope will be realised in the future.

]]> http://www.eveningoflight.nl/subspecie/2012/01/04/2011-inspirational-reading/feed/ 0 http://www.eveningoflight.nl/subspecie/2011/12/06/magic-and-technology/ http://www.eveningoflight.nl/subspecie/2011/12/06/magic-and-technology/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 16:56:03 +0000 Oscar Strik http://www.eveningoflight.nl/subspecie/?p=232 A statement often repeated in discussions of technology, whether within the realm of science fiction (and literary criticism of the genre) or without, is Arthur C. Clarke‘s so-called “Third Law”, which states that

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The reader may refer to Wikipedia for a bit of background surrounding Clarke’s three laws and possible precedents for the third one mentioned here. While the law obviously makes predictions about the perception of technology in real life, it is equally relevant to fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy, where magic and/or technology occupy prominent places as plot devices, motifs, etc.

What interests me in particular are the assumptions lying behind Clarke’s third law, and how the law and its assumptions can help (or hinder) us to understand the interplay between technology and magic as concepts of activity -  indeed, I was tempted to write “human activity” for a moment, but since neither technology nor magic are necessarily limited to the human species, it did not seem appropriate.

Firstly, the law appears to assume that both technology and magic are concepts that can be observed to function in practice by the person who “distinguishes”. More particularly, it is likely that it is the result of the application of either magic or technology that is considered to be most important. Obtaining tangible results is, after all, an important purpose of both technology and magic in the common understanding of the terms.

Clarke also seems to assert that the two are in fact separate concepts, that is, technology and magic can be indistinguishable but not identical.

What remains then, is that technology (in a certain “advanced” form) can be indistinguishable from magic (in general, or in a specific form) for someone: a person, a society. The ‘distinguisher’ or observer here, whether it be an individual or group, is also implied to possess a certain degree of ‘advancement’, because the technology must be advanced as compared to something else, in this case, the level of technology known to the observer.

In other words, if a technology is advanced beyond a certain point in relation to that of the observer, such as that the observer cannot understand its functioning, that technology is like magic, implying that magic by its very definition is something that produces results (or is believed to do so), while the underlying functioning of it remains obscure to the observer.

This leaves us with a bit of a conundrum in terms of interpretation of the third law. Assuming that there is a second observer – e.g. the creator of the advanced technology – who is able to distinguish between said technology and magic (otherwise the law could never be verified), there must be a fundamental difference between technology and magic. I will have to make a guess here, for I haven’t read Clarke’s essay, so am unable to put the law in its proper context at the moment. Perhaps the reader will forgive me, as the law is repeated so often out of that very context that it may have a life of its own anyway.

My guess is that for Clarke, the fundamental difference is that technology works, and magic doesn’t, by which I am placing him firmly within a tradition of popular scientific discourse which generally works with the same division between science that works, and magic that doesn’t (to which some might add: unless one believes in it).

This is my interpretation of Clarke (and popular usage: see for example the entry on magic on dictionary.com, and note particularly the word “presumably” under definition 2), and if it is correct, this use of the concept of magic can be placed in another discursive area, namely that which employs the term magic to cast doubt on the truth value (or moral value) of whatever is subsumed under it. In fact, the term magic and related ones have for the greater part of history been used in precisely that manner, and in opposition to, e.g. true Christian faith, science. It is therefore most often a purely polemic term, as comes forward clearly in Wouter Hanegraaff’s article on the subject:

In the post-colonial period Western scholars have become more sensitive about issues of ethnocentrism and Eurocentric arrogance, but the logical step of discarding the category of “magic” has not been taken. Many authors opt for half-way solutions such as speaking about “magic” while admitting that is a form of “religion”, but without explaining in what then relies its specificity. Others use adjectives such as “magico-religious”, but again without specifying in what respect this category is different from “religion” pure and simple. A more consistent and historically more fruitful approach would be to start by recognizing the religious pluralism that has in fact always characterized Western culture, and analyze magic as a largely polemical concept that has been used by various religious interest groups either to describe their own religious beliefs and practices or – more frequently – to discredit those of others. If any etic concept of magic is still considered necessary at all, it might be used as the common denominator of ‘a discursive field, in which different Occidentalist definitions of deluded or illusory beliefs were accompanied by doubts about the extent to which they were deluded, illusory, backward, or irrational’ (Pels 2003, 16). [Hanegraaff 2006, p. 718]

With that out of the way, I would like to turn away from Clarke’s law and the polemic use of the term magic, and focus a bit more on the relationship between technology and what has been called magic. If we accept that magic is a systematic activity geared towards obtaining a result, I see no essential difference between magic and technology where it concerns intention or purpose. Both encompass a system of knowledge and/or activities that are believed/known to produce results (see also the etymology for ‘technology’). In common usage, technology is generally associated with relatively complex physical objects, but essentially, it refers to any systematic interaction with the environment. Among the main things I would include in technology are language and tools, both of which range from the simple (calls, cracking nuts with a stone) to the highly complex (long texts, poems, computers, airplanes, etc.).

Following this, we might just as well consider magic to be an offshoot of technology. It too is based on systems that use technology (language and/or tools) to influence the environment in some way. Among the ways in which different kinds of magic does this, we can notice the following:

• Many forms of magic are based on communication with a being that is in some way more powerful than humans. Through the use of language in the form of prayer, binding spells, or negotiation, the magician seeks to compel or convince that higher being to produce some effect that is desirable to the magician.
• In certain belief systems (as Foucault would have it: the whole Classical view of the world), knowing the ‘true name’ of something imparts true reference and thereby true knowledge of an object. This knowledge can prove instrumental in manipulating an object in other ways. More importantly, this allows knowledge to be discovered by indirect means (e.g. divination), as empirical observation is not necessary if the ‘true name’ can be obtained otherwise.
• Alchemy is an example of  a system of knowledge where the terms technology and magic are entwined to such a degree that it becomes pointless: “One cannot simply speak of “alchemy”, but must distinguish its practical, theoretical, naturephilosophical, mystical and medical aspects. Among alchemists there are, correspondingly, scientists, medical men and mystical seekers after truth, and even charlatans.” [Principe 2006: p. 15]

The practice of any form of magic is, in any case, based upon a certain matter of conjecture, i.e. we expect/believe/hope the system we use to produce a desired effect. To me, this does not seem essentially different from using technology one does not fully understand (which we do daily). If it functions, it is technology, if it does not, it might still be, but we may just be applying the system wrongly. One has to learn to create a car, just as one must learn to combine molten metals into alloys.

We can use (and have used) magic as a term for all the forms of conjecture that don’t pay off. Alchemists, as far as we know, have never been able to create gold from base metal, so that practice has been discounted as magic. Creating bronze from copper and tin hasn’t, because it works. The only difference is that the systematic approach happens to be wrong in one case, and right in the other. Both, however, are systematic and by my definition technological.

Strangely enough, in fiction things are even more confusing! ‘Magic’ is a staple motif in fantasy literature, as is well known, but there it works! Sorcerers use spells to create fire, move stones, bewitch minds, etc. In the sense of producing tangible results, in the fictional world magic functions if the system is correctly applied. Different authors may be more or less thorough in making the supposed system explicit, but a system is always implied: some people know how to do magic properly, while others do not.

In science fiction, on the other hand, the term magic is less readily applied, at least to my knowledge. That however, does not withhold authors of the genre from including motifs that can be considered, indeed, conjectural technology. Especially when such technology is not explained in detail, it can be difficult for the reader to distinguish it from magic ( – that last sentence probably sounds familiar by now). Precisely this theme is discussed in the entry on “Magic” in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Shippey & Nicholls 1993), which lays particular emphasis on how the juxtaposition of technology and magic in fiction is heavily dependent on contrasting the familiar and the uncanny.

Lt. Kaidan Alenko using a biotic ability in Mass Effect

Video games are another case in point, where the terminological distinction is particularly difficult in cases where magic and (conjectural) technology perform more or less the same in-game function. The only distinction may then be the idiom of the genre in which the game is set. As an example, consider the use of a skill called “biotics” in the Mass Effect series of games. In the science fictional setting of the game, biotics have a scientific underpinning, its users being able to manipulate force or mass through amplified thought. In the game, this is basically only used in combat, to throw or lift enemies, or similar effects. In what way is such a technology functionally different from telekinetic powers or magical control of the wind in a fantasy game? Which is technology and which is magic, and why?

To conclude, I believe Clarke’s third law holds up to scrutiny in one respect, since technology is indeed in many cases indistinguishable from magic. What I’ve hoped to show, however, is that this has less to do with the actual real-world referential characteristics of both terms, than with the use of the terms itself. If a system works, it is functional technology. If it doesn’t, it’s non-functional technology. The term magic can be used for both:

• for functional technology by the observer if he/she does not understand it and because the two are therefore indistinguishable (this is where Clarke’s law applies), and in fiction because the idiom demands it: magic that doesn’t work in the real world, but does in fiction is still called magic.
• for functional technology if the user of the term does believe it works, but seeks to make a moral distinction between forbidden magic and other practice (see below).
• for non-functional technology if the user of the term doesn’t believe it could function anyway. This is the polemical use that distinguishes non-functional magic from supposedly functional prayer or belief, and/or from functional technology or science.

Obviously, all these uses are highly subjective, which might make one think twice before describing anything as ‘magical’.

References:

• Hanegraaff, Wouter. 2006. “Magic I: Introduction”. In: Hanegraaf, Wouter (et al., ed.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden / Boston: Brill. pp. 716-719.
• Principe, Lawrence M. 2006. “Alchemy I: Introduction”. In: Hanegraaf, Wouter (et al., ed.). Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden / Boston: Brill. pp. 12-16.
• Shippey, Tom & Nicholls, Peter. 1993. “Magic”. In: Clute, John & Nicholls, Peter. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Orbit. pp. 765-767.

Ruins, developed by Cardboard Computer is a new digital art piece – or go ahead, call it a game – in which you control a dog, Agatha, who chases a number of white rabbits in a dreamlike landscape which is dominated by ruins, trees, fog, and piano. The dog can speak with the rabbits, who convey a narrative from the perspective of one of the dog’s owners. Through these dialogues, about a dozen in total before the play session ends, we can catch glimpses of Agatha’s life with her owners and the relationship between the three. There is an emotional charge in these understated short conversations between Agatha and the rabbits, and combined with the sadness inherent in the dreamscape, music softly playing in the background, this makes Ruins a rich emotional experience.

Agatha explores the ruins of her dreams

The emotional weight of the work is enhanced by the resonances of Caspar David Friedrich’s moody paintings of ruins in the visual design, as well as the link between the music playing (two of Chopin’s Preludes) and the same music featuring literally and symbolically in the narrative, that is, the link between preludes and ruins as ‘unwhole’ states of thoughts and creations.

Perhaps most touching is the ambiguity of the whole situation. Is Agatha the dog merely dreaming she is chasing rabbits? If so, it seems a rather weighted and dark setting for such an upbeat doggy activity. Or could it be that she has died, and is living through retrospective remnants of her life, sharing her thoughts with her owner for a final time? Like many good works of art, the interpretation is left to the viewer, reader, player, listener, or whatever you want to be in this case. Regardless, Ruins is another testament, if a short and small one, to the fascinating works that are produced at the forefront of digital art.

You can download Ruins for free (Windows and Mac) here.

A longer (and recommended) impression of Ruins can be read on Rock Paper Shotgun.

The Abbey in the Oakwood by Caspar David Friedrich

A dramatic landscape

The player of this game, which the gaming press aptly pigeonholes as a god game and sandbox game, controls “The Breath”, a tiny sphere of divine force which was called into being by the music of a small tribe of people at the start of the game. This very short section already makes explicit a point that so often is implicit in the description of the relationship between deities and their people. Here, the people themselves strengthen their Breath (spiritus). And for what reason? To exert through their deity a modicum of control over a hostile environment: “First we must learn to speak with the world.”

If there is an enemy in From Dust, it is the Earth itself. For humans, particularly ones with little technological advances, such as those portrayed in this game, a single flood or volcanic eruption can spell disaster for a whole people. Your job playing The Breath is to protect your tribe from such hazards by manipulating the natural environment. The divine force The Breath possesses is the ability to move elements around, creating land bridges by dumping soil into a river, throwing up hills and mountains by slathering lava over the world, or dousing wildfires with a well-placed blob of water.

The Breath scoops up sand into a sphere

In addition, the tribe in the game can be guided to totems, remains of a civilisation of “ancient ones”. The tribe in the game is described is amnesiac, and unaware for some reason of their history, which is somehow tied to these totems. The totems are essential to the prosperity of the tribe, because they grant special temporary powers to The Breath. In other words, the power of The Breath rises and falls with the fateful journey of its tribe, a peculiar symbiotic relationship that in a way is a statement about the nature of religion.

In the context of the tribal society in From Dust, religion is about exerting power (magic) over one’s environment in order to ensure survival. The core of the tribe’s belief seems to be that the communal breath and music of the tribe’s people can grow into an entity that has power greater than the human individuals that make up the tribe. By further infusing The Breath with lost knowledge, or at least the feeling of connectedness with ancient forebears (the operation of the knowledge is never made concrete, only the resulting power), the power is enhanced. Of course, in the game, unlike in the real world, this belief is well-founded, because in the what-if universe presented in the game, The Breath is quite adept at helping its tribe overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Indeed, were it not for The Breath, the tribe would surely perish in this world where destructive forces like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are frequent occurrences.

A village built around an ancient totem

Apart from the religious (procedural) rhetoric of the game, it’s also a lot of fun to play and educational in other ways. The way the displacement of elements is handled by the game engine is pleasant and fluent, and reshaping the Earth is about as intuitive as you imagine it would be for a powerful albeit it not all-powerful deity. All the same, you have to be constantly paying attention to the consequences of your actions. Diverting a river might keep one village dry, but it may flood another one if you’re not careful. Packaged in the form of a game, this is a very important lesson on the way geology, and even ecology, works. There are no static situations, ever, and every action has a reaction.

Replacing the religious magic of From Dust with the actual river-diverting and mountain-moving technologies humankind has today, we can apply the same lessons to our own manipulations of the Earth, forcing us to think about the possible consequences of every action for flora, fauna, weather, and climate. The raw forces of the Earth are relatively permanent, but the ecosystems created by them are fragile.

From Dust is available for XBOX360, PlayStation 3, and PC through digital distribution for ~15 euros.