Dr Johnson's Sore Toe: Touch, Naturalism and Kingdom Hearts

(Originally published 9/9/16 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

In 1710, George Berkeley published Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in which he argued that everything that exists is just perceptions in the mind of God. The Principles made quite a splash, though were not taken very seriously. Some years later, when asked his opinion on Berkeley's theory, Samuel Johnson is reputed to have declaimed 'I refute it thus' and kicked a large stone at the side of the path.

Berkeley is sometimes credited as the founder of what in philosophy is known as idealism[1], a group of ontological positions which hold that there is no such thing as 'matter' (physical, or mind-independent, substance). As such, the ontological claims of idealism have usually been received with Johnson's derision, whatever respect has been paid to their arguments (and in some cases the respect is substantial; Kant and Hegel, for example, are both idealists).

This scorn has much to do with the dominance of the opposing view. Materialism, the ontological position that there is such a thing as matter (or more recently, that there is only matter), is the prevailing ideology of global-capitalist/anglo- or euro-centric/'western' culture. It is materialists, generally, who write our histories of ideas and who set the terms under which they are taught.

And this is important, because the contention between idealist and materialist is not really so ephemeral or absurd as it seems. Materialist histories frame the issue as one of obscure metaphysical curiosity, but the debate about what exists serves, and always has, as a proxy for a debate about what has value.

Berkeley himself understood his idealism to be fundamentally political. A cleric who would later become Bishop of Cloyne, he saw the turmoil of the seventeenth century as a result of the rise of mercantile and imperialist materialism[2]. For Berkeley, materialism placed matter between humans and God and interrupted our spiritual connection to the divine. Berkeley's project was to reassert God's immanent involvement in everything that happens or exists.

One need not buy into Berkeley's religion to understand the point, though. Idealism holds that value and worth depend for their existence on human (or human-like) experiences, thoughts and/or judgements. Material objects have no intrinsic value, and are only valuable insofar as they sustain valuable experiences. In this sense, idealism is potentially quite radical[3].

In video games, materialism becomes (what we tend to call) 'realism'. I'm not sure anyone has ever explicitly put it this way, but the thesis is roughly that, since it is material objects that have value, virtual objects can only have value to the extent that they are like material objects.

So a key element of video game materialism is simulation – specifically, I think, the simulation of space, time and physics. We see this in the specific cachet afforded to games with fully contiguous spaces ('metroidvanias', Dark Souls), games that 'take place in real time' (Majora's Mask, Lightning Returns) and games with detailed physics engines (Half Life, Portal and the many other children of Havok)[4].

There is something else, though, too, that is more difficult to pin down in words. If value is mind-independent, human-independent, then it cannot have the appearance of being man-made. So materialism in games also involves concealing the hand of the designer. For this reason, I prefer the term 'naturalism' to 'realism'.

Naturalism is the aspiration of any piece of art or media to seem 'found' rather than created. It is how we can debate the 'realism' of the visual effects representing Godzilla in a film, and the source of mysticism about the poetic muse. It's a particular vice among fantasy authors; we like to pretend that our stories are not crafted, that instead we merely document events in other realities, which arrive in our minds by transdimensional magic.

In games it is the dream of the virtual world that is a perfect, comprehensive equivalent of our own, constructed by algorithms that do more than a human designer ever could[5]. A lot of the excitement around No Man's Sky came from the suggestion it would generate a whole universe from a set of elegant, computable rules. Something similar underpinned Spore's hype, and contributes to the sense of infinite promise associated with Minecraft.

Discussion of naturalism – of realism-in-fantasy - usually crops up when someone is using 'realism' to excuse lazy, regressive or harmful worldbuilding; the infamous 'it wouldn't be realistic to have black people in The Witcher III'. This assertion is obviously nonsense, but it's not the only pernicious product of video game naturalism.

'Kinaesthetics' is a slightly controversial term, and 'gamefeel' much worse, but Dr Johnson's sore toe does suggest that, in some way, tangibility – the capacity to be (or seem to be) touched – is more important to our perception of materiality than visibility or appearance. One of the major reasons that mainstream games discourse fetishizes 'interactivity' so centrally is the sense of tactile contact that games (commonly) provide but other screenbound art forms (generally) do not.

Of course, we cannot literally touch virtual objects (in the sense of applying force to them with our bodies to stimulate pressure-sensitive nerves in our skin). But we do touch things as we play, and in response to that, virtual objects that we can see touch other virtual objects, and some very deep neural wiring involved in our ordinary hand-eye coordination is activated. The metaphor of touch is often useful to describe the phenomenal (experiential) effects of this process.

Software input/output loops which are not presented in such a way as to be interpreted as touch-centric often invite scorn for 'not really being games'. This is evident in the response to 'walking simulators', which generally deny the player any touching except through the out-of-sight-out-of-mind soles of their virtual feet. It was evident, too, in the 'excel spreadsheet' jokes I and many others used to make about football manager games; and it persists especially in criticisms of JRPGs for their heavy reliance on menus and statistics.

It's worth noting that our vocabulary for describing tactile sensation is not as rich nor as heavily theorised as our visual vocabulary. I struggle, as have many philosophers before me, to avoid my talk of perception slipping into talk exclusively of visual perception. So it isn't a surprise that the discussion of kinaesthetics has often been burdened with ill-defined use of words like 'sharp', 'precise', 'sluggish' or 'heavy'. We may each have some feeling about what these words mean, but they are frequently opaque without direct experiential context.

Still, because of the capacity to suggest tangibility, it might be thought that video games naturally favour materialism. Indeed, there's a very plausible argument that the emphasis placed on realism/naturalism in mainstream gaming has helped create the overwhelmingly conservative climate in the big-money parts of the industry and audience. But I don't think it has to be this way.

Precisely because of the kinaesthetic element, games are perhaps better-placed to challenge materialism than other screen-bound artforms. Games don't have to valorise simulation; they don't have to feel kinaesthetically 'right' or like our world. It's not just that we can experience different kinds of motion and physics, though this is valuable in its own right. Games can challenge our assumptions about the place of materiality in our value schemes.

'Dreamlike' isn't much better than 'sharp' or 'heavy' as a kinaesthetic term, but it was the best I could come up with when talking about Kingdom Hearts. It's not just the kinaesthetics - the game's wonderful opening movie is rife with the cinematic language of dream sequences, too – but they're a big part of why the game feels so ethereal.

In the interest of being specific, here's the things I identified as contributing to this feeling:

• How much time Sora spends with his feet off the ground. Jumping lasts a long time, and the amount of horizontal steering you can do while airborne has nothing to do with 'real-world' physics. To add to that, Sora will jump when you attack enemies that are over a certain height above the ground; the threshold for this is arbitrary and difficult to judge. It's easy to find yourself floating in an aerial combo almost without realising.
• Enemy movement. Many enemies in Kingdom Hearts evade damage by moving out of reach or range. This is true right from the very earliest heartless, whose gimmick is their ability to sink into the floor as shadows. This means that often you will reach for an enemy and find it not there. Amid the frenetic visual noise of combat, this can feel like your keyblade passes straight through an enemy's body.
• Camerawork. More specifically, the way the camera behaviour interacts with locking on to enemies. The camera follows the wild movements of targeted enemies pretty much one-to-one, so your perspective swings around a lot in ways you can't control. A lot of things you need to keep track of only happen in your peripheral vision, and you can't always direct visual attention to them when needed.
• Topology. The game's environments are generally small, and lead into one another in awkward, difficult-to-follow ways. It's very easy to get lost, or to feel like you've turned back on yourself but ended up in a different place from where you started. You couldn't build spaces like this; they'd collapse. They can exist only because they are not material, but virtual.

I leapt to understanding these phenomena as dreamlike, I think, because I don't have many other conventions to apply to a world and physics this different. There's nothing in Kingdom Hearts' narrative, though, to suggest that its events are to be understood as sleeping hallucinations. Sora never wakes up. The game's world is his world.

It might feel solipsistic, as so many games do, as if only Sora is real, the game's environments sustained purely for his experiencing. But Kingdom Hearts' story includes at least one character as real as Sora: Riku. Not for nothing are all the game's most compelling boss fights duels against Sora's closest friend.

Kingdom Hearts isn't really about Heartless, or Maleficent and the Disney Princesses, or even defeating Ansem(/Xemnas/Xehanort). Those are part of its iconography, they add meaning, but the heart of the game is the relationship between Sora and Riku. Everything that happens matters mainly because of how it affects the two boys' understanding of each other.

All the ways in which the world is made to feel intangible, insubstantial, materially impossible, serve to prioritise this emotional and social core. Yes, one can take an interest in other elements of the story, as subsequent games have done, but Kingdom Hearts itself lives and dies by how it engages you in Sora's effort to understand Riku, how their conflict, the slight desynchronisation of their goals as they begin to mature, moves you.

Idealists do not deny that the tangible, physical world exists; Doctor Johnson's sore toe proves nothing. Instead, for the idealist, the things we commonly take to be material exist only insofar as they facilitate relationships among human experiences.

It is not that there is no rock for Johnson to kick; the rock is the relationship between the brown, irregular shape you see and the stinging pain in the good doctor's toe. We use the expression and concept 'the rock' to communicate about the pain he felt; to explain how it came about, how it might be ameliorated, and crucially whether you can empathise with him over it.

Something similar can be said of scientific 'reality'. We (take ourselves to) know that atoms exist because they are the most effective way of relating many different experimental results. To the idealist, those experiments are ultimately experiences, and atoms are nothing over and above the explanatory relationship between those experiences.

If this seems trivial or silly, consider that exactly the same goes for 'big' concepts like justice. Justice is a concept we must agree on, that we must negotiate from a position of equality. Just as Dr Johnson may invoke the rock as an explanation for the pain in his toe, you may invoke injustice for the pain of how you have been treated by an organisation, culture or individual.

This appeal asks me to recognise not only the negative experience you have had but also your moral sense, your capacity to make judgements about your experiences. It asks me to acknowledge your humanity, your personhood.

A materialist treatment of justice (and here, to add another loaded word to the mix, 'materialist' starts to line up with 'essentialist') holds that justice – like the table – is a thing that exists independently of us, above us. It is not a thing we create and live, but a thing we discover.

And 'discoveries', of course, are more a matter of who gets to claim them than of who does the actual finding. So it is that Columbus could 'discover' the Americas, a landmass settled thousands of years earlier and even visited from Europe many times before him. To get credit for a discovery, you must have a platform of influence and power from which to make your claim.

You can see where I'm going with this. Materialism enables those with a platform to ignore or dismiss counterclaims, to bypass the process of negotiation that would otherwise humanise the marginalised. Appeals to 'nature', 'realism', 'objectivity' and so on all serve this purpose, to excuse the powerful from negotiating on even terms with the disempowered.

Kingdom Hearts shows one way that video games can challenge these assertions. Free of our-world physics, the game conveys thoroughly how intangible its objects are. Things matter only insofar as they matter to people.

[1] Like any history, the history of ideas is more complicated than this. Berkeley's is the first comprehensive, unequivocally idealist work of the modern period, but other things that might legitimately be called idealism predate him by up to a couple of millennia.

[2] The hypocrisy should not be overlooked, that this came from a man of noble birth who would rise to Bishop of an Anglican congregation in Ireland.

[3] Etymologically, the consonance of metaphysical idealism with political 'idealism' (naive optimism) is barely more than a coincidence, but it is not entirely inappropriate.

[4] None of these games draws its sole appeal from its approach to simulation, but the highlighted features are prominent in responses to and discussion of them.

[5] Of course, a human designer did achieve everything the algorithm achieves, by creating the algorithm, but naturalism insists or at least pretends otherwise.

Some Thoughts upon the Occasion of the Announcement of Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

(Originally published on Jun 9, 2016, at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

1. I'd genuinely given up on this ever happening.

Until Zodiac Age launches, Final Fantasy XII is the only 'main line' Final Fantasy game to be completely unported. It exists in only two versions, the original release and the paradoxically Japan-only International Zodiac Job System edition, both limited to the PS2. The PS2 is a hardy console – my second-hand one is probably a decade old and still happily functional – but no electronic device lasts forever, and FFXII's original graphics are decidedly difficult to look at on modern LED TVs.

Square have been denying any murmur of an FFXII update for some time now, too. It was even possible to believe them; the game's development was famously troubled. Perhaps some legal complication between the company and departed (and apparently still disgruntled) director Yasumi Matsuno prevented a rework. Even if there were no hard barrier, perhaps the development difficulties made key Square personnel unwilling to revisit it.

But no, apparently everything's fine and Japanese game development is still inscrutable to the West. That's probably for the best.

2. My First Final Fantasy

I played about the first disc of each of FFVII and FFVIII – the original PC versions with the legendarily bad music, borrowed from a friend – in about 2003/4, and most of the DS port of FFIII in late 2007, all well before I ever touched FFXII. But FFXII is My First Final Fantasy in the sense that people talk about their First.

I don't say that to be judgemental, either of myself or others. It's more a comment on the extraordinary phenomenon of this series of games – the capacity of one specific instalment to make converts of particular players while maintaining just enough brand integrity to alienate so many of those converted by previous instalments.

FFXII is the game that converted me, and that means that, whatever depth or merit I've subsequently found in it, I'm also bound to the game by nostalgia (or at least sentiment). That makes me sensitive to The Discourse in a way I'm not with most other games, means I have to be careful not to overreact. Monday was a day of trying not to chew too much furniture at people having different views of my precious treasure.

3. This shot still gives me chills.

On the PS2, this is the first thing you see after Square's logo when the game loads up; Balthier's airship, the Strahl, emerging from the clouds over the floating continent of Dorstonis and sky city of Bhujerba. The 'new game/load game' menu doesn't even appear until the cloudbank clears. I've played a lot of FFXII. I've seen this shot hundreds of times.

I still love it. It is wonder and beauty, the kind of impossible, nonsensical landscape I crave from any fantasy game. On some level I can recognise that even in 2006, floating continents were hardly original, but with the opening harp-ripple of the Final Fantasy theme flowing up to greet this vista, Bhujerba feels like the best possible example.

And there's another side to loving this shot, because it's completely at odds with the areas you can actually visit and explore on Dorstonis. After landing in Bhujerba and navigating the local politics, you're freed to explore the only other playable region of the floating continent. It's a mine.

Yup, you spend most of your time on this fantastical landmass in a series of murky caves. Put like that, it sounds like any other disappointing, formulaic JRPG dungeon. It's certainly a stark contrast to the promise of the cutscene.

Here's the thing, though: the Lhusu mines are one of my favourite JRPG dungeons. The level designers took the idea of a mine on a floating continent and went all the way. If you dig far enough through a lump of rock in the sky, you're eventually going to dig right out the bottom or side.

The Lhusu mines not only open to the sky below and around in several places, but the dungeon also crosses back and forth along bridges between distinct sky islands. The fissures and drops are harmless – you can't leap out – but violently abrupt, completely unexpected in their genre context. There's even a minor sidequest at one point to find a man who did fall from the mines, taking with him the only key to the final area.

The double contrast – spectacular promise of the initial cutscene to tedious level design trope to earnest and effective commitment to a concept – goes a long way to summarising not just FFXII but also much of the critical response it has received.

4. What really happened with Matsuno and/or Vaan?

I mean, we'll probably never know. I've yet to find an unambiguous source for the common claim that Vaan was added after Matsuno's departure as a result of marketing pressures. That Matsuno struggled against other forces within Square to make the game he wanted to make, and struggled badly enough to seriously impact his health, is pretty clear (though, again, find me unambiguous sources if you can).

There is definitely an assumption, though, that the identity of Final Fantasy XII changed when Matsuno, the genius auteur, was replaced by Akitoshi Kawazu, who's often made out to be the villain of the piece. This background has encouraged readings that divide the game in two, though which elements end up on which side varies a bit.

Kawazu usually gets 'blamed' for Vaan, though, and for the game's story allegedly fraying into incoherent fantasy nonsense in the final act. Matsuno gets credit for the political intrigue of the initial scenario and the thwarted promise of Basch's character arc. Attribution of the mechanics is murkier (and it's important to remember that the father of ATB himself, Hiroyuki Ito, shares directorial credit with Kawazu and Matsuno), but I've seen both people praising Matsuno and damning Kawazu for them.

5. Why haven't they fixed Vaan's skin texture for the HD version?

 Seriously, he looks like he's rushed a cheap fake tan job.

(there's a lot more to be said about skin colour and the designers' deliberate use of Indian and Middle-Eastern visual style, but it's out of my lane)

6. Final Fantasy Tactics

If Matsuno is celebrated for one thing above all others, it's for Final Fantasy Tactics. The PS1 game has a reputation for nuance, depth and artistic merit that very few games enjoy. Alongside Vagrant Story, FF Tactics is why many people were so excited for Matsuno to helm a 'main line' Final Fantasy, and so disappointed or angered when it didn't work out.            

We covered FF Tactics on the podcast recently. The results would make a great study in video game hagiography. FF Tactics plays out, narratively and mechanically, like a prototype of FFXII. It has the same political intrigue, eventually blurring away into basic fantasy tropes. The same feeling that the mechanics were developed by committing hard to every idea rather than trying to make them coherent.

To me, FF Tactics was an enjoyable but incoherent mess. The plot abdicated all its truly interesting ideas about privilege and social hierarchy after the first chapter, trading them for a competent but cynical conspiracy thriller. Combat systems ground against each other like stuck gears; difficulty emerged sporadically, with little respect for pacing or drama.

The game's biggest problem is that, once Ramza is forced to confront the corruption of his noble family, he is allowed to solve his moral quandary by just walking away from them. From that point forward, he is a dauntless, cherubic hero; his scant personal goals consistently align with the Good, and everyone who opposes him turns out to be Evil.

FF Tactics' final villain has neither nuance nor motivation; Ultima is just the queen of demons, out to... subjugate the world? Spread suffering? Destroy everything? The game takes little time to make this clear. Ramza leaves the material world and its difficult political questions behind to kill her, and is declared a hero by narrative fiat.

If FF Tactics is Matsuno's fingerprint, it becomes possible to draw a quite different picture of his role in FFXII. FFXII, too, is characterised by mechanical sprawl, and many people have condemned the second half of its story for rambling off into traditional, tropey fantasy territory. It is where FFXII goes beyond FF Tactics – the grandiose visual spectacle, the smoothing-off of rough mechanical edges, a few key narrative differences – that it pulls together.

7. The Zodiac Age

The new version of FFXII is to be based on the International Zodiac Job System version, currently only available for Japanese PS2s. IZJS features a number of 'quality-of-life improvements', most notably a button that allows the game to run at double speed, but the main change is to the character development system.

Where the original FFXII gave every character exactly the same development options, through a shared License Board, in IZJS each character must be assigned one of twelve jobs, which they keep for the rest of the game. In the original, all characters can eventually learn all abilities (except summons and quickenings). In IZJS, each character is restricted to one career path, and you just have to guess what you'll need from the get-go.

I haven't played IZJS, but it's hard to believe this change won't significantly alter the feel of the mechanics. Not for the worse, necessarily (though my nostalgia dreads it), but I suspect it will shift the thematic emphasis of the game a bit.

The original's license board was an open, indifferent space. You could take your characters anywhere provided you were prepared to put in the work of earning enough license points. Few individual choices made much difference, though, since the demands of balance led the developers to nerf all the quirky options to the point of ineffectuality. In this, it mirrored the world of Ivalice and the game's environments – vast, sprawling, but largely unaffected by anything the characters do or try.

IZJS is (in a peculiarly video-gamey sense of the word) oppressive; it forces you down narrow paths, bound to simple initial decisions for which you cannot have enough information. Rather than making all choices meaningless, it takes the choices away altogether. This suggests more the narrative and political situation of life under Archadian Imperial rule.

Both approaches force a kind of humility, and humility is at the heart of FFXII. They are different flavours of humility, though, and one of the things I most like about the original version of FFXII is its empty openness. If you choose to exist in its space at all, you can only do so by accepting how little that space cares about you. IZJS' restrictiveness is more specific; I expect to feel the game pressing on me more, responding to my presence at least in an equal-and-opposite-reaction sort of way.

8. So, FFXII then.

I get frustrated with people talking about FFXII mostly because it's My First Final Fantasy, of course. But there's also a pattern to what people say about the game even when being positive: nobody seems to like FFXII as a complete work. Some people like the combat but not the characters. Some like the start of the story but not the end. Some enjoy exploring the world but find the combat trivial. Everyone seems to agree that FFXII is conflicted, its components acting against one another.

I've tried before, and will almost certainly try again, to explain the coherence I've found in the game. I've characterised it as a story about the insignificance of traditional fantasy heroism and as a response to the peculiar demands of the Final Fantasy fanbase and target market. Playing another Matsuno game, and seeing the very clear similarities between the two, has helped clarify my thoughts on this.

I said that Final Fantasy Tactics' biggest problem was that the presence of an Ultimate Evil trivialised the game's attempt at nuanced politics. So long as Ramza fought against Ultima and her minions or their plots, he was in the right. FFXII rips this certainty away by pitching its heroine into a struggle between unknowable gods and cruelly ambitious men whose rationale is the liberation of mankind from what they see as divine tyranny.

On top of that, the majority of Ashe's actions come to nothing. The player characters are far from Ivalice's centres of power, constantly reminded of their insignificance. Combat that can feel trivial or unsatisfying supports this, as do the environments and architecture that loom over and dwarf you. The sheer time it takes to travel anywhere, or grind out the gil and license points to try out a new combat tactic, works to this end too.

FFXII isn't the most fun game to play. It's drawn out, labour-intensive and opaque. Whether deliberate or not, though, the results work. All these disparate elements converge on the idea that if you do ever have the opportunity to change the world, the choice will be unclear, and it will not give you everything you want. If nothing else, this deserves praise for being so profoundly at odds with the ideology running through so much of game design that the aim should be to reward or satisfy the player.

The game's complex development makes it very easy to argue that FFXII can't have been the product of a coherent vision. Indeed, it almost certainly wasn't. But there are two reasons why this doesn't matter. The first is that, quite simply, it's more interesting to talk about how the different elements of the game work together (or don't, if you disagree with my reading) than it is to dismiss the possibility of coherence at all.

The second is that the focus on Matsuno's departure feeds an auteurism which has no place in discussion of a game developed by hundreds of people over a five-year period. If Final Fantasy XII is flawed, it is flawed regardless of whether the flaws are departures from Matsuno's vision or parts of it. If Final Fantasy XII holds together, that is the achievement of everyone who worked on it.

There are surely interesting stories to be told about the development of FFXII, and interesting discussions to be had about the content of the game. But the former require more than transpacific speculation, and the latter need not wait on that. Every piece of the FFXII puzzle does more work than it is given credit for, and I hope that the rerelease gives more people the opportunity to dig into that.