transdemihuman

In a lot of RPGs, a higher-quality item is indicated by the amount it adds to the numerical representation of base statistics, such as the usual strength/agility/stamina/etc. set or the more JRPG-esque attack/defense/etc. Thus, either way, a superior item is considered better because it makes you a better person somehow: there's something woven into the item that actually makes you stronger, faster, smarter, wiser, or what-have-you.

In most games, by their end point, the character's base stats are dwarfed by those which are given by what they happen to be wearing or using. (There are exceptions--you could probably make a fairly decent "naked" character in Final Fantasy X, and games based on the old D&D ruleset will improve gear by metrics other than raw stat gain--but this still applies more often than not.) Thus, the individual's physical or mental qualities almost do not matter in the face of what they've been able to acquire. A man with weak knees or a ninety-pound woman would be just as dangerous as a hulking seven-foot-tall monster. All that is required is the persistence to get the items and the will to use them.

What got me thinking about this was a conversation about how silly it was for gnomes--which are usually about three feet tall--to be protection-spec warriors in World of Warcraft. The joke was that even the strongest gnome would likely be punched into the ground like a tent spike as soon as a raid boss looked at him or her. Looking at the way stats work in WoW, though, said gnome's getting a solid 95% or more of his or her stats from their equipment. By the time you're at the endgame, it's not just some dude with a sword and shield anymore; you're inside a tiny little magical suit of power armor. If Voltron was three feet tall, it'd still be Voltron.

Which raises the question: in a setting that's drenched with magic to such an extent that it's that easy to make weapons and armor that actively improve the wearer, how difficult would it be to make things that added to creativity or empathy? Could you put on a hat that made you more diplomatic or sensitive? Is every possible (demi-)human quality subject to improvement, and if so, what does that mean for individual achievement? Would people act to shut that kind of thing down, or deliberately eschew them because their "core" is damaged by resorting to them, or would widespread personal self-programming via magical enhancement just be a thing you did now?

a place that people can't be bothered with

Dan Dare #7, Virgin Comics, July 2008. Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine.

This is one of the reasons I'll always have time for Garth Ennis; he has an odd ability to articulate things that I hadn't quite found the words for yet.

There's a tendency in left-wing/social justice circles to accentuate the negative. This is not to say that the negative does not exist, or that it's at all outweighed by the positive; issues such as the death of Mike Brown, both the act itself and the reactions to it (i.e. the orbital fracture myth), prove that we still have a long way left to go as a culture. In my darker moments, I think it'll require an external enemy or a mass extinction before we stop clinging to old tribal allegiances.

That aside, it's easy for modern-day liberals to forget that it's only been fifty years since the civil rights movement. Many people who worked to begin it are still with us, and many of those who actively opposed it are still here as well. Colored-only water fountains and Rosa Parks are still within living memory.

And yeah, there are a lot of ways in which things still suck, but turn it around and it's actually kind of amazing how much progress we've made. A mixed-race man got elected President (and in so doing seems to have driven large parts of the country insane, but that's neither here nor there), Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty much the current face of American science, and if you're a kid into sports, there's probably a poster of a black guy on your wall, no matter what your personal racial background is.

We've backslid in some serious ways, but we're still moving forward, despite the best attempts of a lot of the retrograde elements of the larger culture. Pop culture right now is weirdly regressive, yeah, but one of the big takeaway points from the 2012 election is that that regressive tendency is a death rattle: it's a product of fear in the face of a coming massive demographic shift.

This shouldn't shut anyone down, but there's a bizarre tendency among progressives of all stripes to wallow in guilt and shame, to sit around and bemoan the state of culture while ignoring the ways in which it has gotten and is getting better. Wallowing doesn't help. Acknowledge the good along with the bad, improve on the good, and keep moving.

dead man's party

I'm the guy for whom the zombie craze continues to exist. Whenever some would-be wag in a forum thread says "Who's still buying these things?" he's talking about me. As long as it's not a god damn found-footage movie, you mention zombies and/or an apocalypse and you at least have my attention.

I cordoned off this weekend to play Dead Rising 3 on Steam, since it finally became available, and it reminds me of my chief criticism of DR2 as compared to the original, which is mostly a matter of tone.

The original Dead Rising was an in-house project at Capcom by Keiji Inafune, before he left the company to make Mighty No. 9, and the next two were made by the former Blue Castle Games, which is now Capcom Vancouver. Both are reasonably worthy sequels, although the engine is and will apparently remain surprisingly janky for what's ostensibly a triple-A game; a lot of sacrifices have clearly been made in order to serve the task of keeping a few hundred zombies onscreen at once.

The odd genius of the original Dead Rising, in retrospect, was that it played itself completely straight from start to finish. Frank West was a meme generator from the word go and you could easily torpedo even the most dramatic scene in the game by showing up to it in a frilly sundress and Servbot mask, but the characters all acted as if they were serious people in a serious situation. One or two of the survivors were idiots (Ronald comes to mind here, or Burt), but almost all of them were stock characters for the genre at worst. The psychopaths you fought--a shellshocked Vietnam veteran in the middle of the world's worst flashback, a drunk hoarder with a shotgun, a survivalist family out to save themselves at the expense of everyone else--were memorable because most of them were believably ordinary people who were pushed too far by the associated stresses of a zombie outbreak. There were certainly exceptions, like Adam the clown, but they could be taken in stride.

DR2 carried that theme forward in its main plot, but the world outside of Chuck's personal storyline was unapologetically ridiculous. Survivors required cash bribes or irrelevant sidequests before they'd join you, several had to be saved from their own stupidity, a few somehow hadn't noticed the zombie outbreak around them, and one required you to strip down to your underwear before she'd allow you to take her to safety. The psychopaths were more random than anything else, such as a postal worker, a dude in a giant mascot costume, and a furry with a chainsaw. It abandons the just-vaguely-plausible atmosphere of the first game in favor of sheer forced wackiness, and it weakens the product as a whole.

Dead Rising 3 has a few improvements overall, but it's a lot easier than the two previous games. Guns are actually effective, much moreso than even the best melee weapons, and survivors can easily be made to inflict so much damage that any fight you can bring them to is over almost as soon as they arrive. Nightmare Mode likely fixes these problems, which I've yet to play, but the main mode feels underwhelming compared to the heavy emphasis the first two games placed on racing the clock.

More to the point, DR3 once again emphasizes the wacky. Los Perdidos apparently had the world's largest high school football team and they were all zombified at once while wearing full uniforms and protective gear, so now you have to deal with football zombies all over the place. The bosses include a cringing Chinese stereotype, a binge-eater who attacks you with her own puke and a sharpened fork, a depraved bisexual wearing chaps and a crotch-mounted flamethrower, and a professional female bodybuilder who's willing to kill Nick because he initially mistakes her for a man. It's just random nonsense masquerading as character design or, I suspect, attempts at cultural satire.

There are a few characters I like, such as an old woman with terminal cancer who asks you to take her to a few places in the city before she dies, but all in all, DR3's narrative design is a hot mess. I can't hate the game--I can't hate any game that encourages me to load Roman candles into a hunting crossbow and use them against zombies--but it's structurally weaker than the first two.

sanctuary

I shouldn't have started my day by reading about current developments in the Zoe Quinn fallout. Didn't mean to, but there it was, and the odd bit of post-article Googling led me further down a dark rabbit hole.

One of the usual comment-section anonymice posted a response to one of the articles, that the "goal"--and I get the feeling these goalposts have shifted somewhat, if they are not in fact actually mobile, like they're glue-gunned to the backs of turtles--was to expose the incestuous connections between games industry professionals and the people who are there to write about them.

Which it isn't. That's a discussion that's worth having, but it's not this one.

This particular conversation is far too mixed up in Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian's perceived, imaginary transgressions for it to be worthwhile; it's about scared boys trying to punish grown-ass women for things that aren't crimes, because they're nerds, gamer culture is their sanctuary, and anything that endangers that sanctuary is something to be taken down with all the tools they can bring to hand; and they're young men, burning with the need to be angry about something, and there's an entire culture built around the generation of acceptable targets.

(If some of these assholes would target white-collar criminals or corrupt politicians, they'd be on the verge of solving actual problems. I've half-written the screenplay already: a couple of hundred script kiddies, driven beyond madness by their balls not being regularly emptied in the manner in which they'd prefer, deliberately targeting someone like Eric Cantor, a man whose entire sense of style seems to be built around imitating the preppy frat assholes from PCU. Where's a Fagin when you need him?)

This urge towards sanctuary is inherently toxic, and it's one of a few ways in which it's manifesting all throughout nerd culture as a whole: the movies are remakes, the books are retreads, the comics are all stuck on sixty-year-old mined-out characters, and the people who want to move forward--including the women who have the temerity to want to participate--get shouted down for whatever reasons can be manufactured.

In point of fact, I wonder if the nostalgia/sanctuary wave isn't why the culture feels vaguely as if it's moving backward. Sarkeesian made a decent point in one of her videos, that the indie games that deliberately ape past titles are also imitating certain unfortunate story trends thereof, like how Super Meat Boy and, more recently, Shovel Knight both deal with a rescue-the-princess plot that was hackneyed even back in the day. We've gone from the female action-hero trend that "Buffy" started in the '90s to a surfeit of square-jawed white manly-ass protagonists and it appears to be entirely on the basis of what marketing would prefer to deal with.

I get sanctuary, and I certainly understand recreational anger. Both of them were pretty much my jam when I was in my 20s. Sooner or later, though, you either need to break out from those or they bury you, and I still haven't quite managed to get away. Once you start using either of them to invent reasons for personal attacks--not even attacking somebody like Sarkeesian's arguments, but her--you've gone around the twist.

You're a nerd; you should intuitively understand when someone has to be stopped, even when it's you. Especially when it's you.

momcore

John Rogers calls it "momcore": that particular genre of mainstream entertainment that encourages its consumers to live in constant fear. The example Warren Ellis uses, when he's in rant mode, is the "CSI" episode where someone gets sodomized with a violin bow; Rogers talks about The Bone Collector, where a woman's boiled alive; and I always think of the episode of "Castle" where the murder of the week is a woman found dead on a children's playground, wearing some S&M gear and covered in a thin coat of caramel.

Last time I was at my own mom's house, she watched an episode of "The Blacklist," where James Spader watched from inside a bulletproof panic room as his friends and associates were executed one by one. I came to a bizarre realization: she's more into horror than I am, and I am really into horror. It's just in a format that's more acceptable to her.

Basically, momcore's set when the credits are rolling. The cops have shown up, somebody's picking up the body parts, and the killer's either escaped or is ostensibly dead. Terrible things have happened and now it's down to our new protagonist--the profiler or detective--to figure out what.

It doesn't map onto horror exactly, but one of the other things about momcore is that in order for it to exist, it needs to portray the "normal" world as a much worse place than it actually is. If you look at the raw stats, the crime rate's falling, violence is down, and we as a species are actually doing okay, but the news and momcore insist that Earth's atmosphere is made up 20% oxygen, 40% nitrogen, and 40% Scary People Who Want You Dead. It's actually worse than the typical horror setting.

There's also an element of randomness in parts of momcore that's truly disturbing when you compare it to horror. One of the things that's always leapt out at me about slasher movies in particular, at least ones that use the classic formula, is that it's all about consequences: you can often tell who's going to live to the credits by what they're doing when they're introduced, and a fair few of them begin with a group of people who do something really stupid. The Hatchet series spends the first ten minutes of each movie establishing why you should not go into the swamp, and then the rest of the movie is what happens when you go into the fucking swamp. (Spoiler: dismemberment, usually.)

Momcore, on the other hand, doesn't establish that sense of due consequence. Part of momcore, in fact, is the fear of a capricious and uncaring universe smacking you down for no reason other than that you're there. The Jack Reacher movie, for example, involves a mystery where a sniper kills an extra few people besides his target simply to confuse the investigation. They have nothing to do with the issue at hand and they're just outside on the wrong day.

There's an intersection between these that someone--hopefully me--could figure out how to exploit and in so doing make fighter-jet money. I need to figure this out.