Saturday 8 August 2020

The Machine is also an Audience

It gets hot, when you do something intense
Sometimes it chatters for no reason
Mine recently broke a fan,
from clutching too hard at its bearings

Sometimes it literally grades you,

Or reports you to some higher power
Sometimes it cheers or jeers you;

The machine is a master of sarcasm

It's easy to say 'that's ridiculous,

machines are not agents, only people are agents'
But if that's your thought then consider:

  1. We have no idea what agency is
  2. If we did we still wouldn't know how to spot it
  3. Our classifications are bullshit meant to shore up injustice 
  4. Things can be more than one thing at once

A tree is a machine,

A massive, intricate structure
Industrially framed in cellulose,

Billions on billions of moving parts

pumping nutrients, water, light and air

between earth and sky as needed

A tree is also a crowd,

Each seed a child, each branch
A delicate communion of leaves,

A constellation of insects

Microbes, birds, and small mammals,

Garnished with lichens and moss.

No tree

Could ever be void of life

And if you don't think a tree

Can be an agent then
You need to pay more attention.

Stand quietly, patiently, with one for a while,

Touching and listening and watching.

And remember how old they can be,

What, and how much, they have breathed

Of course, this is just an excuse to tell you about some of my favourite trees

Like a rich woman showing you photos of her pets
Or a schoolboy describing his crush 

 He is a poplar, probably as old
As the Victorian park he stands in,

But playful like a puppy, endless with joy,
So to sit or stand near him is to be wrapped

In every twist of his leaves,

One's attention always demanded.

She is an ash, perhaps even older,

With a stern straight spine, downy with lichens,
That draws all the knots out of my yearning back

when I visit to lean it against her,

And one vast old hand, low to the ground,

Shielding her dell from the road by the school

So the insects that tend her can dance there in peace,

And I can bury my face in her leaves,

And receive their fluttering kisses.

Look

What I'm saying is
If I can date a tree,

Then the play in your station makes your TV a stage

And you act as a thespian, not out of will,

And it's theatre that you perform,

And your body, too, is an audience

A machine and an agent,
More than just you,

Multiple, listening, and reactive.

Saturday 28 December 2019

Thematic Index


I've done some rearranging of things on here lately and thought it would be a good opportunity to pull links to all my critical work together in one place. There's an introduction to my old podcast about JRPGs here, and I want to highlight my enormous Twine essay about Persona 3, Boogiepop, gender transition and death, Empty Halls//Don't Laugh. For the rest, here's a breakdown of the blog posts:

JRPGs

These are a collection of writings about 'JRPG' as a genre label, the sorts of common features found under this label and the appearance of a 'gender crisis'. Some of these are fairly early efforts, and I need to revisit many of the claims, but I still think the underlying ideas have some merit.

A personal reflection on my own experiences of the 'death of the JRPG', from which I developed a (currently-stalled) project on the first JRPGs to appear on the Xbox 360, between 2006 and 2009; the first JRPGs developed directly for a US-made console and a predominantly US audience.

This was my first attempt at collaboration with Val Carter and LeeRoy Lewin, a collaboration that would eventually lead to the Dead Genre Chronicles podcast. Over the almost five years since, we haven't really found anything to overturn the fundamental insight that we were nosing at here, that JRPGs are characterised by a particular non-representative kind of abstraction and a particular use thereof in narrative pacing.

A brief attempt to characterise the abstraction of time and duration in JRPGs.

Time again, this time the expression of time within narratives.

Using a contrast with the Legend of Zelda series to clarify (hopefully, a little) the kind of abstraction we take to typify JRPGs.

A direct investigation of the 'death of the JRPG' and the role in it of a particular kind of youtube-centric rhetoric from the late 00s, via an analysis of the reception of The World Ends With You.

Mostly a joke, but there's a serious point at the end of this one.

A detailed analysis, of a kind I'd like to do more of, of what it means for a game to be 'turn-based', and whether there's any period of JRPG history in which one stable concept of 'turn-basis' was ubiquitous.

Final Fantasy

I have spent way too much of my life writing and thinking about the Final Fantasy franchise, especially the entries since the turn of the century. Several of these are personal reflections on individual games, but others are substantive engagements with the franchise's history and contemporary status.

Originally a mini-episode for Dead Genre Chronicles, in this essay I dug into the critical reception of FFXII and identifying a turning point in the western reception of JRPGs attendant in part on its troubled development.

Written before the release of FFXV, in this essay I wondered about why the FF games of the 21st century turned their attention so heavily towards female heroes and lead characters.

A critical review of World of Final Fantasy, a game which uses an unexpectedly sophisticated bait-and-switch narrative to call into question the habitual expectations JRPG fans have of an FF-branded game.

The marketing campaign for FFXV was a bizarre, extravagant spectacle. Here, I did my best to dig into why.

My review of FFXV, in which I grappled with the question of why so few western critics had paid any attention to the fact that the game was clearly, for all its flaws, a pointed critique of America at the end of the American Century

And the personal reflections:
On my loyalty to FFXII at a time when it seemed largely forgotten even by its corporate owners.
On FFVII and its fans, shortly after the remake was announced.
Why FFXIII's Lightning resonates so much for me.
I was genuinely surprised to hear a port and remaster of FFXII announced in 2016, and did my best to put words to why it was important to me.
There's a lot more in this than personal reflection, including a fairly deep read of the narrative structure of FFXIII, but ultimately it's about home, family, and the hostility of both to queerness, a theme I plan to revisit more analytically in other work.

Realism

These five pieces are a gradual and inconsistent evolution of an idea I'm still struggling to express, about what exactly 'realism' means in a videogame context. The first few are really ropey, and all are heavily steeped in my philosophical background, but I've tried to offer introductory-level explanations throughout.

I start here with a classic philosophical problem of the truth of fictional claims (did Sherlock Holmes live at 221B Baker Street?), and a brief foray into Kantian metaphysics.

This time I turn to the debate between Newton and Leibniz about the nature of space and the question of videogames contain or merely simulate spaces.

There's less explicit philosophy in this one, where I focus on emotional impact as a ground of reality.

Here it's George Berkeley's turn to take centre stage (though really I was using his theories all along); this is probably the most detailed metaphysical engagement I've made with this topic so far.

This is the best of these five pieces, and digs much more directly into what people are actually expressing care about when they talk about realism in videogames; it's a product of an ongoing shift in my philosophy from analytic to critical methods, and there's a substantial engagement with John Locke towards the end, which I plan on developing further in the future.

Tales

In 2015 I made an effort to play all the Tales of games, from Tales of Symphonia onwards, as part of a project on Tales of Vesperia and JRPGs on the Xbox 360 (see above). That project is on the shelf at the moment but I did some writing about each of the games.

On how Tales of Symphonia 2's combat reflects its central themes of fragility and isolation.
On the more subversive elements of Tales of Vesperia's sidequest design.
On toxic masculinity in Tales of Graces.
More on Vesperia, and how its deeper meaning emerges from surface absurdities.
How Tales of Vesperia challenges conventional ideas of heroism.
On the relationship between masculinity and the idea of 'uncharted territory' as manifested in the map-making sidequests in Vesperia.
Another sidequest in Vesperia, and how it affects the temporality of the game.
On silent protagonists and dialogue choices – a theme that would come up repeatedly on the Dead Genre Chronicles podcasts – in reference to Tales of Xillia 2's Ludger Kresnik.
My attempt to put a capstone on my love for this franchise, unfortunately written too early to include the most recent instalment, Tales of Berseria, about which I might have been even more powerfully moved.