the ramble dump
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Postcyberfunk
[This is about Cyberfunk, which I just finished writing. You can read it in its entirety either here on the site or by downloading the PDF. There are no spoilers below.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk
In the vaguest, not-very-definitive terms, 'cyberpunk' is what started out as the label applied to a new wave of science fiction that, in the early 1980s, mixed a focus on the technological effects on society, above all computers and information technology, with society's lowlifes for whom this technology is an everyday reality: rebellious hackers and con-artists, drug users and mercenaries. These people were the principal players in cyberpunk stories, the 'heroes' trying to eke out their existence and keep their head above the surface in a fast-moving world of corrupt, ruthless capitalism.
The word didn't stay so specific. Works like William Gibson's Neuromancer or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, two of the progenitors of the genre, dealt with a lot of different things in the context described above, and codified and packaged it all in a very distinctive way. These days, to identify something as 'cyberpunk' is often a retrograde, and not always meaningful, process--to recognise, or to deliberately reflect, in films or books, music, fashion or everyday society, some aspect that evokes the cyberpunk genre as it has come to be known through convention, as much as it has anything to do with the actual meaning of 'cyber+punk'.
So we can point at The Matrix, a film released fifteen years after Neuromancer, and call that cyberpunk, and the label still makes a lot of sense because the film draws heavily on a lot of the same stuff and captures a similar spirit, attitude, sense of zeitgeist, etc, even if it does its own things with it or updates it for the late '90s or whatever. (The game Deus Ex: Human Revolution arguably did the same again this year, in some ways.) But we can call a bunch of other derivative novels or games or films that emulate these works 'cyberpunk', too, and it may only signify how clichéd they are.
We can also point to a news story about the real-life hacker collective Anonymous and call that cyberpunk, or give the label to the developments of Augmented Reality or prosthetic limbs. Or to the city of Tokyo. Or the music of Nine Inch Nails, which buries and distorts a human voice amongst harsh electronic and industrial soundscapes. Or to shades and leather trenchcoats, or the practice of putting neon in your hair. I wouldn't be surprised if the word has even been used for a clothing range put out by some billion dollar fashion house.
It gets to a point where it's an almost, but not quite, meaningless label. It's always evoking something, and something fairly specific, but it can reach the stage of flavours and echoes where whatever was 'cyber+punk', if it's even that direct, only informs something in the most vague and shallow of ways. Things can easily be 'cyberpunk' while having nothing to do with the attitudes and sentiments that defined the original cyberpunk works, even contradicting them, or being co-opted by the kind of capitalist entities they viewed negatively.
It's not unlike punk itself, or the related music genre grunge, which is comparable for being about as vital and now completely over as cyberpunk (and similarly never all that beholden to its label anyway). The word 'grunge' has been used ever since to mean straggly hair and flannel shirts, and people who dress like that to 'be grunge', as much as reflecting the original substance of the term.
When I decided to write Cyberfunk, a little over two years ago, I'd been pursuing an interest in all things 'cyberpunk' for a long time already. I approached it as a light-hearted parody, a break from some other stuff, and a way of maybe getting it out of my system. But it grew beyond my expectations, getting a lot more attention than I'd originally planned.
Of course, at the time I didn't know I'd also be writing, right in the middle of it, a 15,000-word dissertation on William Gibson for an MA, which I completed earlier this year. Surprisingly, though, the cyberpunk burn-out never really happened. In fact, getting a better theoretical handle on (historical) cyberpunk turned out to be pretty useful.
I read a lot about what cyberpunk is, and what it isn't, but ultimately, trying to decide what counts as cyberpunk and what doesn't, and trying to make things fit the label, becomes a futile exercise.
What made cyberpunk so important and interesting in the first place, and the things that continue to attract people like me who have found themselves seeking it out, is huge and sprawling and touches on a lot of different and interconnected things. I could relate it to being a literary nerd, or a fan of rock music, or of action cinema; someone who finds the philosophy interesting, the questions of humanity, the patterns of society it reflects. Maybe it's how it brings out the weird and surreal. Or I could relate it to the strange sense of nostalgia I get when I watch Hackers, or the appreciation I have for aesthetic grunge. Maybe I could say it's about the thrills; the way it attends to the cerebral and the visceral and everything in between. Or maybe I just like the pretty lights.
Cyberfunk explores some of these things, but by no means is it an attempt at a complete account of cyberpunk. Instead, it's about making cyberpunk out of cyberpunk, according to its best and worst definitions (though I'll admit I didn't know this at the start). Sound pretentious? Great! I could spend hours gleefully pointing out, like a self-indulgent asshole, all the references I make in this story, but I'll settle for simply acknowledging that pretty much everything is lifted from other cyberpunk sources, in bits great and small, and then all mixed together to whatever the hell effect there is in the end.
I've come this far without mentioning Jesnails, a character, or should I say entity, who has in this story finally found her perfect fit. I can't claim full credit for her either, but I hope I've finally done justice to her potential after a long, trying search for the appropriate pulpit. What started out as a Jesnails story with cyberpunk, and then became a cyberpunk story with Jesnails, eventually arrived at the realisation that they are, in many ways, one and the same thing.
Labels: cyberpunk, deus ex, jesnails, neuromancer, the matrix
Saturday, October 01, 2011
Deus Ex (Part 1)
Deus Ex, the 2000 first-person action role-playing 'cyberpunk' game, does not make a stellar first impression. The first thing that greets you is a menu screen with a very simple spinning logo, accompanied by a somewhat pompous little synthy theme-tune (let it get going) that does its best to hammer at any 'I am not totally lame for playing this video game or video games generally' thesis you might have been attempting to construct over the years.
Coming at it as a cyberpunk fan, as I did, stumbling across mention of it as a highly-rated cyberpunk experience with the likes of Neuromancer and The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell in mind, aghast would not be too far off the mark to describe how I reacted. At this, the menu screen.
It's no slick William Gibson ride, that's for sure.
This is J.C. Denton, the cyborg character you play as. You can make him blond, or black, or give him a goatee. I think the sunglasses are mandatory. It is my opinion that there is something inherently funny and weird about sunglasses that's always just about equal to how cool they look. It's the way they dehumanise the possessor, or convey, as Gibson states of his character Molly Millions, 'an insect calm'. When a character is never not wearing shades, it really does something to how we perceive them, humanity-wise.
J.C. Denton may look cooler to some than he does to others. He does suffer from some rather chunky, squared graphics, and a rigid impassivity bordering on paralysis that gives him the bearing of an augmented lamppost. He may or may not have a double chin in the picture above; it's hard to tell. This pretty much sums up how Deus Ex wears the stylish aspects of its cyberpunk heritage--like a nerd attending a convention, dressing up for the part, maybe for the fun of it, but not necessarily pulling it off. It's maybe even a little embarrassing.
On top of this is his voice: a deadpan monotone that strains badly when forced to inflect. And he's far from the only character you might struggle to take seriously at first glance. Among the many others, two significant characters you're introduced to early on are Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann, two cyborgs working for the same government agency as you do, each with questionable degrees of ruthlessness and bloodlust (and you earn their approval or disapproval depending on how similarly to them you act, out in the field).
Gunther has an awful German accent like a Terminator parody, and the appearance to match. Anna is a similarly cartoonish Russian (I think). Neither would be out of place as campy Bond villains. And while they thankfully remain among the most outlandish characters, and you do kind of get used to them, the accents don't get any better from here on out--far from it.
More than one character in the game makes a quip about Denton's dress sense, and Gunther is treated as the butt of jokes about as much as he is a force to be reckoned with. Deus Ex is a game that by no means sets out to be a comedy, but it comes with a healthy dose of (often self-referential) humour. These characters, though, and the quality of the voice-acting in general, sometimes make it very hard to tell when it's being intentionally funny and when it's not. The world of Deus Ex is pretty goofy at times.
But J.C. Denton's impenetrable, vaguely comical persona is actually highly effective. Denton feels like he has a narrative presence, but his personality is minimal and inscrutable enough that a whole range of behaviour open to the player feels credible. His are sunglasses of possibility. When it comes to the player's dialogue options during conversations, there's almost a sense of mischief in some of the things you get to say, the outrageousness of certain options emphasised by having it said in such indifferent tones--like he might kill a homeless person or two and then go for a beer. And you can do that.
Choice is Deus Ex's Big Thing, as anyone who's ever heard anything about it will know. As an action role-playing game, you can choose to approach missions in certain ways--guns blazing, hacking, being stealthy (read: crawling through air vents), or most likely a combination of all three depending on your resources--spending experience points and selecting the right augmentations and inventory items accordingly. You have to decide when it's wise to use up your disposable lockpicks and multitools to get at the stuff that lies behind closed doors or booby traps, which weapons are worth lugging around, and which abilities--strength, swimming, advanced jumping, etc--will allow you to get to places or take alternate paths that wouldn't be available to you otherwise.
It's part of the role-playing side to things that you choose your own style of gameplay, and different people will tend to default to certain things given the choice. But things are rarely so straightforward. The first level, Liberty Island, where your mission is to capture a supposed terrorist leader hiding in the Statue of Liberty, and, if you like, to free an imprisoned Gunther Hermann along the way, serves as something of a crash course for this realisation. Taking a sniper rifle from three options Denton's brother gives you at the start, I figured I was being a pre-emptive genius by electing to take out all the terrorists from a distance. But this plan fell apart after about two seconds when I ran out of ammo. Then I had to get creative with what remained in my inventory and how I was going to use it... only, I wasn't very good at doing this at first.
Liberty Island forced me along the Deus Ex learning curve, rearranging my brain to think differently than it had had to for the ammo-strewn likes of Halo even at that game's most strategic. My first playthrough was pretty desperate, fought tooth and nail using the few items I hadn't already wasted. But a well-thumbed inventory is one of Deus Ex's greatest pleasures. While daunting at first, and I didn't really get to grips with most of it until some time after Liberty Island, the items I carried became the most considered aspect of my game. It was about knowing my tools, experimenting with them, and using them with a little imagination as I puzzled out different scenarios.
I have to admit that I often forgot about the XP I'd earned or the maps and photos I'd been given, squirrelled away as they were in the many inventory screens without many reminders for their use, but poring over communications--previously read emails and recordings of past conversations, with hints and tips from other characters and passwords and passcodes that I would have to figure out where to use--was another oft-used part of this inventory-focused gameplay, which really added some thought and depth.
Importantly, this choice all takes place within a controlled narrative, a series of levels each with its primary objectives, which change depending on your actions, and its optional secondary objectives, rewarding on both the level of experience points and immersive narrative detail, often with consequences of their own. You choose who to help and who not to help, picking allegiances that may or may not last, the stakes getting higher as you proceed.
The best of these levels are the city hubs--namely New York, Hong Kong, and Paris--central places that can be explored and revisited during sections of the game, with missions that branch off in and around them taking place in warehouses, labs, sewers, corporate office spaces, and so on. Deus Ex is not completely open-ended like a sandbox game, but as a person whose completist impulses tend to drive him crazy in such games and the endless piddly little things they give you to do, I appreciate the focus. No making Denton fat on hamburgers, getting him married, or having him wear leotards in all the 332,345,565 colours you can collect scattered around the globe. Everything is meaningful and somehow relevant to the main story.
The story of Deus Ex is a thousand cyberpunk/sci-fi ideas and tropes you've seen or heard before, integrated with an A-Z of conspiracy theories and a small library of references to literature, movies, and probably other stuff too. It makes for a complex plot and a world with a fairly rich backdrop, with a particularly civic-minded approach to the usual CP themes of technosocial fallout, mapping as it does the various political ideologies and realities of the people involved. You encounter a lot of people living in miserable conditions, and though the missions are not always about saving them, you are forced to confront them.
With choices, of course, come consequences. But in Deus Ex, nobody's out to lecture you--or if they are, there's at least one person around lecturing the opposite. Deus Ex works with shades of grey. The majority of decisions aren't clearly marked as 'good' or 'bad', and it generally doesn't encourage such a simplistic dichotomy, instead getting you caught up in the sticky details and the problems of a bunch of people who are themselves rarely clear-cut on the morality front either. There's no karma metre like there is in, say, Fable or Fallout, which designates clearly your position between good and evil on a spectrum.
In Deus Ex, in most civilian areas, disturbing the peace will usually get local security painting a target on your back, and if Anna Navarre approves of mass slaughter during missions, your brother Paul will berate you or Sam Carter of the armoury will stubbornly withhold ammunition. Options will open and close. But consequence in terms of how the general population relates to your actions is implemented on a mostly individual- or scenario-oriented basis, at least until the higher levels of the conspiracy where the effects of your actions are more far-reaching. Thus you can shoot some civilians in one place, and the denizens of another will not automatically run away screaming at the sight of the horns that have grown on your head.
In fact, you can even kill a homeless child in Battery Park and, as long as there's no-one else around to see it, there are zero repercussions--though the game does not particularly encourage or even advertise this possibility, and the scripted conversational moral choice simply pertains to whether or not to give him food. (He rewards you with a passcode for being nice and giving him a candy bar, though you can still kill him after and take the candy bar back.)
The game doesn't exactly treat such an act of murder as morally grey--there aren't really very many shades of grey to an act like that--but neither is the game afraid of making it a possibility, and it doesn't feel the need to assert moral arbitration in an unrealistic, inauthentic way just to assure you that the developers know such an act is a bad one. The near-universal vulnerability of the population simply raises the stakes of your actions.
It's also not wrong to play it the 'this is why we can't have nice things' way--the world is there to be an emptier, even more brutal and miserable place should that be how you want to play it. In games such as this, there is always a sense of engaging a narrative to see how such a narrative might play out, just as much as there is a sense of actually condoning Denton's actions. Though for me, at least, the desire to play out the happiest, most utilitarian outcome is always pretty strong, more so the more believable the characters, there are plenty of times I've done bad things just to see what happens--and while this is admittedly as much to test the possibilities of the game, to see what it would let me do, as to weigh any emotional or intellectual response, ultimately these things converge, because we're testing what we dare do to a world and whether or not we like how it turns out. A sense of responsibility is inevitable, at least to some extent, even when we simply do something out of curiosity--because we're still making it happen.
As stated, though, the impact of all of this obviously depends largely on believability. But Deus Ex is, in a lot of ways, extremely gamey. In addition to the variable voice acting, character skins can also be pretty unsightly at times, even when they're not Anna Navarre, stretched over blocky models and of a limited number noticeably repeated throughout the game. The grunting AI behaviour, too, is sometimes simplistic, very robotic and occasionally downright stupid. That retro-synthy soundtrack plays throughout--sometimes, during its more excitable moments, like someone's not even aiming for specific keys on the keyboard. How, then, does the world of Deus Ex still manage to be one of the most engrossing and immersive game worlds you're likely to experience? Might all this weirdness actually, somehow, work in its favour?
Read on in Part 2.
Coming at it as a cyberpunk fan, as I did, stumbling across mention of it as a highly-rated cyberpunk experience with the likes of Neuromancer and The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell in mind, aghast would not be too far off the mark to describe how I reacted. At this, the menu screen.
It's no slick William Gibson ride, that's for sure.
This is J.C. Denton, the cyborg character you play as. You can make him blond, or black, or give him a goatee. I think the sunglasses are mandatory. It is my opinion that there is something inherently funny and weird about sunglasses that's always just about equal to how cool they look. It's the way they dehumanise the possessor, or convey, as Gibson states of his character Molly Millions, 'an insect calm'. When a character is never not wearing shades, it really does something to how we perceive them, humanity-wise.
J.C. Denton may look cooler to some than he does to others. He does suffer from some rather chunky, squared graphics, and a rigid impassivity bordering on paralysis that gives him the bearing of an augmented lamppost. He may or may not have a double chin in the picture above; it's hard to tell. This pretty much sums up how Deus Ex wears the stylish aspects of its cyberpunk heritage--like a nerd attending a convention, dressing up for the part, maybe for the fun of it, but not necessarily pulling it off. It's maybe even a little embarrassing.
On top of this is his voice: a deadpan monotone that strains badly when forced to inflect. And he's far from the only character you might struggle to take seriously at first glance. Among the many others, two significant characters you're introduced to early on are Anna Navarre and Gunther Hermann, two cyborgs working for the same government agency as you do, each with questionable degrees of ruthlessness and bloodlust (and you earn their approval or disapproval depending on how similarly to them you act, out in the field).
Gunther has an awful German accent like a Terminator parody, and the appearance to match. Anna is a similarly cartoonish Russian (I think). Neither would be out of place as campy Bond villains. And while they thankfully remain among the most outlandish characters, and you do kind of get used to them, the accents don't get any better from here on out--far from it.
More than one character in the game makes a quip about Denton's dress sense, and Gunther is treated as the butt of jokes about as much as he is a force to be reckoned with. Deus Ex is a game that by no means sets out to be a comedy, but it comes with a healthy dose of (often self-referential) humour. These characters, though, and the quality of the voice-acting in general, sometimes make it very hard to tell when it's being intentionally funny and when it's not. The world of Deus Ex is pretty goofy at times.
But J.C. Denton's impenetrable, vaguely comical persona is actually highly effective. Denton feels like he has a narrative presence, but his personality is minimal and inscrutable enough that a whole range of behaviour open to the player feels credible. His are sunglasses of possibility. When it comes to the player's dialogue options during conversations, there's almost a sense of mischief in some of the things you get to say, the outrageousness of certain options emphasised by having it said in such indifferent tones--like he might kill a homeless person or two and then go for a beer. And you can do that.
Choice is Deus Ex's Big Thing, as anyone who's ever heard anything about it will know. As an action role-playing game, you can choose to approach missions in certain ways--guns blazing, hacking, being stealthy (read: crawling through air vents), or most likely a combination of all three depending on your resources--spending experience points and selecting the right augmentations and inventory items accordingly. You have to decide when it's wise to use up your disposable lockpicks and multitools to get at the stuff that lies behind closed doors or booby traps, which weapons are worth lugging around, and which abilities--strength, swimming, advanced jumping, etc--will allow you to get to places or take alternate paths that wouldn't be available to you otherwise.
It's part of the role-playing side to things that you choose your own style of gameplay, and different people will tend to default to certain things given the choice. But things are rarely so straightforward. The first level, Liberty Island, where your mission is to capture a supposed terrorist leader hiding in the Statue of Liberty, and, if you like, to free an imprisoned Gunther Hermann along the way, serves as something of a crash course for this realisation. Taking a sniper rifle from three options Denton's brother gives you at the start, I figured I was being a pre-emptive genius by electing to take out all the terrorists from a distance. But this plan fell apart after about two seconds when I ran out of ammo. Then I had to get creative with what remained in my inventory and how I was going to use it... only, I wasn't very good at doing this at first.
Liberty Island forced me along the Deus Ex learning curve, rearranging my brain to think differently than it had had to for the ammo-strewn likes of Halo even at that game's most strategic. My first playthrough was pretty desperate, fought tooth and nail using the few items I hadn't already wasted. But a well-thumbed inventory is one of Deus Ex's greatest pleasures. While daunting at first, and I didn't really get to grips with most of it until some time after Liberty Island, the items I carried became the most considered aspect of my game. It was about knowing my tools, experimenting with them, and using them with a little imagination as I puzzled out different scenarios.
I have to admit that I often forgot about the XP I'd earned or the maps and photos I'd been given, squirrelled away as they were in the many inventory screens without many reminders for their use, but poring over communications--previously read emails and recordings of past conversations, with hints and tips from other characters and passwords and passcodes that I would have to figure out where to use--was another oft-used part of this inventory-focused gameplay, which really added some thought and depth.
Importantly, this choice all takes place within a controlled narrative, a series of levels each with its primary objectives, which change depending on your actions, and its optional secondary objectives, rewarding on both the level of experience points and immersive narrative detail, often with consequences of their own. You choose who to help and who not to help, picking allegiances that may or may not last, the stakes getting higher as you proceed.
The best of these levels are the city hubs--namely New York, Hong Kong, and Paris--central places that can be explored and revisited during sections of the game, with missions that branch off in and around them taking place in warehouses, labs, sewers, corporate office spaces, and so on. Deus Ex is not completely open-ended like a sandbox game, but as a person whose completist impulses tend to drive him crazy in such games and the endless piddly little things they give you to do, I appreciate the focus. No making Denton fat on hamburgers, getting him married, or having him wear leotards in all the 332,345,565 colours you can collect scattered around the globe. Everything is meaningful and somehow relevant to the main story.
The story of Deus Ex is a thousand cyberpunk/sci-fi ideas and tropes you've seen or heard before, integrated with an A-Z of conspiracy theories and a small library of references to literature, movies, and probably other stuff too. It makes for a complex plot and a world with a fairly rich backdrop, with a particularly civic-minded approach to the usual CP themes of technosocial fallout, mapping as it does the various political ideologies and realities of the people involved. You encounter a lot of people living in miserable conditions, and though the missions are not always about saving them, you are forced to confront them.
With choices, of course, come consequences. But in Deus Ex, nobody's out to lecture you--or if they are, there's at least one person around lecturing the opposite. Deus Ex works with shades of grey. The majority of decisions aren't clearly marked as 'good' or 'bad', and it generally doesn't encourage such a simplistic dichotomy, instead getting you caught up in the sticky details and the problems of a bunch of people who are themselves rarely clear-cut on the morality front either. There's no karma metre like there is in, say, Fable or Fallout, which designates clearly your position between good and evil on a spectrum.
In Deus Ex, in most civilian areas, disturbing the peace will usually get local security painting a target on your back, and if Anna Navarre approves of mass slaughter during missions, your brother Paul will berate you or Sam Carter of the armoury will stubbornly withhold ammunition. Options will open and close. But consequence in terms of how the general population relates to your actions is implemented on a mostly individual- or scenario-oriented basis, at least until the higher levels of the conspiracy where the effects of your actions are more far-reaching. Thus you can shoot some civilians in one place, and the denizens of another will not automatically run away screaming at the sight of the horns that have grown on your head.
In fact, you can even kill a homeless child in Battery Park and, as long as there's no-one else around to see it, there are zero repercussions--though the game does not particularly encourage or even advertise this possibility, and the scripted conversational moral choice simply pertains to whether or not to give him food. (He rewards you with a passcode for being nice and giving him a candy bar, though you can still kill him after and take the candy bar back.)
The game doesn't exactly treat such an act of murder as morally grey--there aren't really very many shades of grey to an act like that--but neither is the game afraid of making it a possibility, and it doesn't feel the need to assert moral arbitration in an unrealistic, inauthentic way just to assure you that the developers know such an act is a bad one. The near-universal vulnerability of the population simply raises the stakes of your actions.
It's also not wrong to play it the 'this is why we can't have nice things' way--the world is there to be an emptier, even more brutal and miserable place should that be how you want to play it. In games such as this, there is always a sense of engaging a narrative to see how such a narrative might play out, just as much as there is a sense of actually condoning Denton's actions. Though for me, at least, the desire to play out the happiest, most utilitarian outcome is always pretty strong, more so the more believable the characters, there are plenty of times I've done bad things just to see what happens--and while this is admittedly as much to test the possibilities of the game, to see what it would let me do, as to weigh any emotional or intellectual response, ultimately these things converge, because we're testing what we dare do to a world and whether or not we like how it turns out. A sense of responsibility is inevitable, at least to some extent, even when we simply do something out of curiosity--because we're still making it happen.
As stated, though, the impact of all of this obviously depends largely on believability. But Deus Ex is, in a lot of ways, extremely gamey. In addition to the variable voice acting, character skins can also be pretty unsightly at times, even when they're not Anna Navarre, stretched over blocky models and of a limited number noticeably repeated throughout the game. The grunting AI behaviour, too, is sometimes simplistic, very robotic and occasionally downright stupid. That retro-synthy soundtrack plays throughout--sometimes, during its more excitable moments, like someone's not even aiming for specific keys on the keyboard. How, then, does the world of Deus Ex still manage to be one of the most engrossing and immersive game worlds you're likely to experience? Might all this weirdness actually, somehow, work in its favour?
Read on in Part 2.
Labels: deus ex, music, videogames
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Paradigm Playground
"Urban reclamation" is simply the idea that by creating an urban landscape around us, society has robbed us of something dear to us. In the vein of the Situationalists in France (or psycho-geographers), graffiti artists, skateboarders, and the like, Parkour is a movement of reclaiming the urban landscape. As such, it is a cultural movement to break the monotony of the urban lifestyle. [...] We re-imagine the concrete and architecture as we see fit, and are no longer bound by the rules of "stairs" and "barriers" and "fences." We reclaim all land to what it was meant for: movement.--Andy Tran, 'Two Theories on Parkour Philosophy'
"3. A system of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality."--wiktionary.org, definition of paradigm.
Parkour is everywhere these days. It was conceived fairly recently and took off as people realised that it's actually a pretty cool concept, with some interesting underlying philosophy. The main idea revolves around getting from one place to another, usually in an urban environment, and traversing with ease and fluidity all the obstacles that might get in your way--be they fences, walls, or entire buildings. Everything is done with the human body: jumping, vaulting, scaling, swinging, rolling, sliding, and whatever else it takes to keep yourself moving. It's about reclaiming a kind of freedom over the domineering architecture of urban spaces. I've never tried it myself, but I do find it interesting.
These days, alongside its rise in popularity, it's featured in a lot of action movies and games. One of these games is Mirror's Edge (2008), a relatively realistic first-person platformer with a focus on movement and speed across a very clean, sun-bleached city, all stark white and primary colours. You have to figure out the best route and strategy for traversal, scaling rooftops, climbing ladders and drainpipes, using ziplines, balancing on ropewalks, or wall-running to reach harder-to-grab ledges--as well as avoiding armed SWAT teams. You can engage them in combat if you take them one at a time, but it's not easy--the focus is on the running.
While it's obviously not the same physical experience as real parkour, the game is very good at conveying a sense of physicality and effort on the part of Faith, the player character, as well as a sense of dizzying heights that would probably make most traceurs pause to reconsider. The game lets you experience its city with the kind of freedom that parkour affords, but with a heightened sense of action and urgency that comes from being on a mission and having bullets flying your way.
Parkour, though, is not the only novel way to interact with the city in video games. Just one other example is in Jet Set Radio Future (2002), which jettisons realism in favour of a more expressive urban reality that has you improbably moving through the city by grinding along telephone wires and tearing across billboards in a quite impressive pair of rollerskates--as well as spraying graffiti powerful enough to take down helicopters, robots and swathes of armed forces. It's crazy but a lot of fun, and all the more fun because you're doing it in a very artistically rendered but recognisable urban space where you get to enjoy impossible kinds of freedom.
But while these games offer you these new kinds of freedom, they take just as much freedom, if not more, away. The urban spaces in these games are noticeably superficial--we are mostly denied interaction with the city beyond the level required for the games' main activities: parkour, grinding or graffiti-spraying. There's little or no interaction with members of the public, who are reduced to responsive scenery, and conventional paths that everyone else seems to use are largely made unavailable to us.
The same could be said for parkour, to which these things are not relevant, or they're antithetical, to what parkour is about. Insofar as traceurs treat their movements philosophically, that philosophy tends not to incorporate every little thing an urban space can be used for. Conventional paths are deliberately rejected, and there is a refusal to engage with the public insofar as they are by definition 'the public' by using public spaces as intended.
Additionally, Andy Tran, who I quoted at the start, argues against the use of gloves or other protective gear because they interfere with what he believes is the philosophical point of parkour. Likewise, I doubt most traceurs would approve of the use of, say, jetpacks, as much as they might aid freedom of movement. Only a certain kind of freedom is the point. Maybe parkour is about freedom from technology, too, but that's to bring the focus back to where it belongs--and in these two games, the lack of freedom to interact with the city how you choose is to bring the focus of these games back to where it belongs.
It's interesting to note that both Mirror's Edge and Jet Set Radio Future frame their gameplay as actions against oppressive authorities or regimes that don't abide by your behaviour. Narratively, you're up against forces that resist the redefinition exhibited by your characters and would seek to bully you back into the pedestrian mould as shaped by the urban spaces' intended use. In Mirror's Edge, you're a Runner, a rooftop courier of intelligence working under the radar of the totalitarian government. In JSRF, you're any one of a number of street kids whose skating and graffiti spraying is elevated to the status of expressive combat against the chronically uncool authority figures and corporations that are trying to squeeze you out of the city.
However purely hypothetical these regimes' attempted coercion is in terms of gameplay, given that neither game gives you the option to submit in any way other than death (or blackout), it nevertheless renders your actions in the game--even when simply playing it in the only way you can--even more significant for being placed within a particular narrative context.
How effective these contexts are is another matter. A criticism that can be levelled at both Mirror's Edge and JSRF is the superficiality of their narratives. The framing narrative of Mirror's Edge is not totally ineffective as context, but it's mostly unoriginal, simplistic and paper-thin in execution, by far the game's weakest aspect. And while it's easy to overlook the substance in the style of JSRF, there's no denying the two-dimensionality of its various personalities. In tune with the pure arty ecstasy of this game, that stylish expression is what defines these kids may be the whole point, so I'm not going to pass judgement too hastily--but nonetheless, there's a lot that seems about as thin as literal paint.
Still, points are made, and new perspectives are offered by city spaces redefined to do the job--being fun, sometimes exhilarating experiences in the deal. Above all, we play these games because we want to do what these characters do; to experience the novelty of being able to traverse these urban landscapes in the ways that the games let us. The narrative contexts that frame them just go to show how this redefinition can also, and connectedly, be used to more significant ends.
The analogy with real-life parkour ends where, on the one hand, a city is exploited in ways it was not intended to be used, and on the other hand, a city is designed to be exploited, however supposedly conventional it is on a theoretical story level. But the underlying expression is the same, only it's engineered by the game designers, and executed by the fact of you playing. Either way, the end result is that you come to view the city, and your relation to the city, in a different way--but the games make you do this without the conscious mental action real parkour requires.
It's the agency of parkour meets traditional narrative, yet different from both. By playing the game, you are put in a position of action in a narrative constructed to give that action meaning.
And besides that, who wouldn't rather grind along the telephone wires than use the footpath anyway?
BONUS CONTENT!!! (more on that substance in the style):
Michelle Baldwin has an awesome write-up of Jet Set Radio Future's story and themes over at Pioneer Project.
And Edge magazine, as part of their Time Extend series, did a really cool article on how JSRF achieves such a vibrant and convincing urban playground.
Anyone has any good stuff on Mirror's Edge, I'd be happy to read/watch it.
Labels: jet set radio future, mirror's edge, parkour, videogames
Friday, May 27, 2011
Rabbit-Hole Theory (Part 4: Jittery as a June Apocalypse)
[This is part of a convoluted series looking at the Matrix trilogy of films from the perspective of immersive storytelling--where they worked, where they didn't, and how this might have affected their success as films. Fair warning: I am making it my mission to be mind-numbingly specific. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.]
One of the best scenes in The Matrix, probably the best scene for dialogue, is Neo's conversation with the Oracle. Neo finds himself ushered into a cramped little apartment kitchen where an oldish, chainsmoking African American woman with a triangular bob haircut is preoccupied baking cookies. 1930s jazz music plays quietly from an old radio in the background. Despite all the mystery surrounding her, she's unaffected and down-to-earth, a knowing smile ready because she's about to do Neo's brain over with the whole vase thing. She says to him, removing her oven mitts, 'Not quite what you were expecting, right?'
She subsequently trips Neo through a conversation that leaves him with his head on backwards, ready to inadvertently do the right thing and prove to everyone that he's the One.
We don't find out that the Oracle's a program until the sequels, and had they never been made, we might never have known for sure. But I don't remember the ambiguity over her foresight being a problem. I guess it's because the whole prophecy thing never seems to be based on more than a kind of religious belief amongst the rebels anyway, and at that point we're just like Neo, not sure how much of all this crazy Matrix stuff is actually soaking through our blank expressions to our brains.
In any case, it certainly helped in terms of believability to have the Oracle so grounded in this unpretentiously charming, apartment-dwelling context. She even ostensibly checks for Oneness by having Neo stick his tongue out and makes an ironic show of reading his palms. It's brilliant, because we leave the encounter not sure quite what just happened but prepared to take her warnings seriously. She doesn't seem completely off her head, and even suggests ever so lightly that the fanatical Morpheus might be. We feel we can rest assured that she knows more than anyone else, whether that's because she can really see into the future or not.
Everything she says is sleight of hand and designed to be selectively interpreted, which may seem more ridiculous the more you watch the scene, but she never sounds outright prophetic. Even her ominous statements regarding Morpheus sound merely like fears about the inevitability of his character rather than foresight of the actual plot, however much the latter might turn out to be true.
Then you have the sequels. In Reloaded, Neo meets her for the first time since they introduced themselves, after a quick kung-fu session with her bodyguard. He finds her sitting on a bench in a tenement park, feeding the pigeons. From this point on, the Wachowskis awkwardly try to replicate the charm of that first scene. It starts with an exchange about Neo trying to refuse the invitation to sit down, which is cute but feels stiff and hamfisted in making a point of Neo's resistance to fate and in its reminder that the Oracle knows best. It continues in this vein without subtlety, and the Oracle offers candy just so they can use it for some really clunky philosophical discussion about choice.
It's natural that Neo is more demanding of her in the sequels, having become wary of her manipulation after the last time, so all the clever sleight of hand isn't going to fly so well this time and she has to be more direct. But when she starts talking about the Matrix in its naked technical terms, about deletion or assimilation or stuff like that, already she's losing some of that former normality--she's becoming just another talking head in a whole world full of people throwing high concepts about, rather than serving as an anchor in the currents of disbelief.
Additionally, when she's done with the blatant philosophy seminar, they do an awkward job of trying to wrap her mannerisms around several of Reloaded's more unseemly plot aspects. The two discuss Neo's dream visions, which in the first place robs the whole foresight thing of any subtlety and quite possibly any logic it might have had (on which more later), and she sounds almost like a hypnotherapist when she asks stuff such as, 'Do you see a door of light?' and 'What happens when you go through the door?' Then she informs him, 'You have the sight now, Neo. You are looking at a world without time.' Oh, OK then.
And then she talks offhandedly about all the vampires and angels and aliens people might have seen and how these are actually exile programs (on which more later), before giving him instructions to go see a French guy with a ridiculous name (on which more later).
Not quite what you were expecting, right?
In Revolutions, in addition to the actress switch, she enters full prophetess-of-doom mode. 'Everything that has a beginning has an end,' she intones. 'I see the end coming. I see the darkness spreading. I see death.' All she lacks is a crystal ball.
She basically drops fortune bricks on Neo's head, and yet is frustratingly unspecific about things when there seems to be no reason for it, quite possibly because the Wachowskis' logic just doesn't go any deeper with that whole balanced equations, yin-to-Smith's-yang thing anyway.
In down-the-rabbit-hole terms, the Oracle has simply lost her touch. Rather than giving the fantastical a grounded texture and dealing with it subtly and unmelodramatically, she winds up doing the exact opposite, becoming abstract and overliteral and undermining all the little ironies that made her first scene so effective. The very thing that originally made her a compelling, convincing character--not playing the whole Oracle fortune-teller thing straight--is mostly swept aside in favour of someone who sits there doing much of the convoluted plot's heavylifting.
Labels: cyberpunk, rabbit-hole theory, the matrix
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Rabbit-Hole Theory (Part 3: The Trenchcoat Club)
[This is part of a convoluted series looking at the Matrix trilogy of films from the perspective of immersive storytelling--where they worked, where they didn't, and how this might have affected their success as films. Fair warning: I am making it my mission to be mind-numbingly specific. Part 1 | Part 2.]
SCENE 16 INT. SEWERS
The captains have assembled for a meeting. They are all, along with their crew members, wearing trenchcoats and/or shades.CAPTAIN #1Look, everybody! We're a glitch in the Matrix!
In the last part, I mentioned how stylistic elements of the first Matrix film had a tendency in the sequels to fall out of their original stylistic context so that they became too literalised, distracting, or even parodic. In some cases, it seems that certain elements just aren't as effective once supplanted into a larger context or required on a larger scale, because something goes wrong in the scaling process.
Take the leather-and-shades look. It's effective in the first film as part of the noirish, cyberpunk aesthetic and in portraying the tough attitudes of the rebels. When applied to a handful of operatives, the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, it looks quirky but cool, with a vaguely utilitarian (and admittedly leather-fetishist) edge. They're basically just snappy dressers in a modern, grungy update of the best noir traditions.
The group is small enough that there's room for each character to have their own idiosyncratic style, too. Morpheus has the biggest, heaviest trenchcoat and his circular pince-nez; Neo looks the least sharp, and so on. In a move of inexplicable visual genius, they put Switch in white and it offsets the whole black-clad thing. Basically, they look like they all dress how they want to dress, while implicitly all conforming to their role in the film as stylish rebel tough guys.
But then compare this to the gathering of Zion operatives in the Matrix underground at the start of Reloaded. It's a meeting of a fairly large group of people--at least half a dozen captains and their crews. They're all wearing the shades and the leather, but somehow, it doesn't look quite as cool. In fact, it looks a bit ridiculous. Like maybe they're attending some kind of bizarre convention.
It makes that whole aesthetic, which in the original film seemed mostly governed by stylistic imperatives, now seem increasingly like an unusual dress code consciously instated by the Zionites as some weird culty uniform.
Attempts at idiosyncrasy on such a large group don't fare too well, either. You can tell the wardrobe department tried to work in as much variation as they could, but between the Morpheus cosplayers and headmistresses who look like they're into S&M, the net result isn't too pretty. The aesthetic is simply stretched too thin, and instead of being stylish, a few look like they've come off the worse for some sadistic Zionification process.
(In a way, it's the usual lot of extras in sci-fi, where everyone is the owner of some half-baked costume quirk that's supposed to distinguish them. This is usually in a bid to be other-civilisationy, which isn't quite the same thing--but for some of that cheap other-civilisationy magic, go watch the scene with the panel of old Zion councillors. I believe at least one of them has a bird's nest on her head.)
Not to mention Neo runs around in a cassock. Not a bad choice, I guess, if you feel like making a point of the whole messianic thing, but again it's just a push too far away from the distinctive but grounded contemporary dress sense of the original film's rebels. Or maybe I just think it looks dumb. To quote a character from the Path of Neo game, 'Are you sure you should be running in that dress?'
And again, there's that kind of 'pop out' phenomenon like there was with the colour grading, maybe because once again the sequels are just less consistent with the whole grungy look. Sat down in the Merovingian's restaurant, Neo, Morpheus and Trinity look comically awkward. Scuffling their way down those white corridors, they look like loonies set loose in a lab.
Sometimes it's hard to tell how much the Wachowskis' own sense of humour plays into it, just like it surely does with the Agents and their suits (or former Agents, in the eventual case of Smith). For instance, when Neo has his second conversation with the Oracle, stiff and awkward as it might be for other reasons, the sight of Mr Cassock sat on a park bench with this old lady seems like it's supposed to make him look a little bit daft, as part of a humbling experience. But for the most part, there's no denying that the Zionites are supposed to look cool. Instead, they often look out of their depth in ways that probably weren't intentional.
In the same vein as all this is the naming of the rebel characters. In the first film, we learn that the rebels take for their names what used to be their hacker aliases, and Neo does this too. Some names are vaguely computer-related (like Cypher, Switch and Mouse); others are not. Again, the hacker alias premise works convincingly for this small crew, but when it's applied to a larger Zionite population, with many names to be assigned, it starts feeling a little absurd. Names like Corrupt, Binary and Vector turn up, like they were spat out of an unimaginative Matrix name generator, with Keyboard, Megabyte and Printout next on the list. Once again, the effect is almost self-parodying.
[Part 4.]
Labels: cyberpunk, rabbit-hole theory, the matrix
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