I am writing an essay on narratives in games and I keep struggling with What Remains of Edith Finch. I have blogged about it before, but I keep getting caught in notions of how I think Edith wants to rewrite her family’s history, making her ancestors as human and complex as possible. That idea keeps clashing with my own sense of the appropriate ways to talk about cultural artifacts (which these are not), and I in turn return to the house.
The dark grey mist of the Pacific Northwest, gamified
If the game marks the move from analog to digital culture, with the attendant nostalgia and hoopla, then the house helps with that transition. In some ways it represents the early days of radio, with the impossibly twisty towers reaching to the sky, and lots of flotsam and jetsam surrounding the site itself. In others, the journey we take through it, the way the game leads us (with a couple of stops to repackage the disparate parts of text that have slipped away), feels like the early days of the Internet, as token ring and ethernet compete for primacy, only to give way to the protocols that shape wifi.
Game text as semaphores from lonely digital voices…
With the early days out of the way, though, my main impression is that the way that the house fits neatly into the landscape – not so much organic as it is not engineered, a product of artifice and tinkering more than planning – feels 100 percent digital. Our digital world is laden with self-proclaimed masters of the universe, mostly white straight tech-alpha males who could imagine a thousand TED talks springing from the image I have taken from the game above, and all of whom speak glowingly of the magical intersection of tech and culture. They would see metaphor after metaphor I’m guessing, and they wouldn’t be wrong (just full of themselves) – digital culture seems in many ways to defy its own antecedents, as assholes like Steve Jobs get hagiographies and decent people like Steve Wozniak forgotten.
What Remains of Edith Finch, of course, offers us another way out of this mess, but that other way will need to be the subject of another post…
Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others was not an easy read. These stories made me work, albeit not in the ways I work when reading the Malazan or Song of Ice and Fire series (so. many. characters). Chiang’s stories (and they’re more like novellas) are dense with ideas and science and math, in ways that made me think about both the genre of science fiction and the ideas themselves…
More thoughts below:
I thought that the first story – “Tower of Babylon” – sounded familiar, and I’m guessing that I read it in the late, lamented Omni many many years ago. I find it interesting that it still sounded fresh…
His stories break generic expectations neatly – very little violence, not much in terms of space opera, and way more discussion of God than ever appears in science fiction.
I will read some interviews to confirm, but I’m guessing this approach is intentional. In particular, the alien story is perfect – we never find out why they’re here, and they leave suddenly, without either offering us new technology or destroying our civilization. It’s not Independence Day.
The fascination with math is pretty cool – his stories don’t speak down to us about the ways in which math is both foundational and dynamic. He has a character in his ubermensch story (“Understand”) rework our mathematical understandings of how the body works to make himself hyper-efficient, for instance, and fer crissakes this collection even features a story entitled “Division by Zero” in which a mathematician drives herself sort of crazy by working out permutations to prove almost anything through math.
Heh – I just wish I was better at math…
His emphasis on questions of identity in the future is fascinating as well. The last story in this collection – “Liking What You See: A Documentary” posits the creation of a type of gene therapy that invokes a form of the inability to recognize faces – prosopagnosia, for those keeping score at home – in children so that they grow up less concerned with physical beauty. The story takes the form of a documentary transcript, and it features all different kinds of viewpoints as folks try to understand the ramifications of doing this.
Spoiler alert – I think Chiang himself comes out on the side of trying to make us less beauty-conscious.
Finally, the idea of there being one god is omnipresent in this collection as well. The story that deals most directly with our religious connection to a supreme being is called “Hell is the Absence of God,” and it features angels as natural disasters who appear on earth for not-very-clear reasons and by doing so create fissures and storms and all kinds of destructive events.
The story is particularly fascinating in that it never shows hell as being a bad place *except* for the absence of a supreme being – at one point we are told that you can look down into and see people just existing down there, with no fire or brimstone. As the title suggests, hell is simply a lack, and the implication is that heaven is a cipher, a construct of an imagined type of human happiness that actually may be just that, a creation of the cultural mind…
The dilemmas the characters face then are all centered on what to do with this knowledge, exacerbated by the fact that the few people who have actually seen heaven’s light while on earth instantly went blind, and can now only talk about how transcendent that experience was.
And living a devout life does not guarantee you getting into heaven…so there’s that…
I’m glad I revisited these stories, and I look forward to reading his next collection.
There was a belief for a while that cyberpunk was dead, with Gwyneth Jones its perhaps last practitioner. After all, the epiphany that William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy invoked shook up scifi in all the right ways, and produced a subgenre that moved the main genre away from its fascination with deep space and its flirtation with post-apocalypses to an engagement with the reality that networked computers and the systems that connect them. But the implications of what Gibson (and Sterling and Cadigan and all the rest) had played out, and the resulting weak revisions of the original cyberpunk vision were at best boring.
At the time I hoped that the death of cyberpunk was not true, but there wasn’t a lot of forward movement in the genre. Since then, it’s been reawakened and re-envisioned. I’ve already posted acouple of times about Richard K. Morgan’s Kovac series, and Morgan’s update of the genre is compelling and fascinating, with Kovacs’s first-person narrative simultaneously infuriating, energizing, and powerful.
Even acknowledging the power of that series, I’m particularly happy to have stumbled upon Nicky Drayden’s The Prey of Gods, an interesting new take on the movement. Drayden adds a whole new realm of inquiry to the genre in part by locating the material action in South Africa while maintaining cyberpunk’s reliance on far-flung systems. The fact that cyberpunk can go global (following Gibson’s good-guy Rastafarians in space and Morgan’s intentional opening up of the ethnic make up of human attempts to explore the universe) is a heartening one.
Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story made me question a lot of the things I think I know about story-telling and narration. There is almost no dialogue in this novel, very little description, and it takes place entirely in our unknown narrator’s head. In fact, it’s a story about writing a story, and I’m sad to admit that I rarely enjoy that type of novel because they often feel like exercises in ego.
This novel is anything but that.
Thoughts:
In some ways this novel feels like Davis is sort of revealing some of the narrative tricks that novelists use, perhaps because as a short story writer she’s messing with a form that she’s not invested in…
More likely, she’s carefully identifying the lens through which she both reads and writes, being transparent in a way that feels somewhat deliciously uncomfortable…
This narrator thinks herself brutally honest…but she’s also not all that self-aware.
It’s not like she’s an unreliable narrator, exactly, but we get clues as to why she’s not necessarily seeing the world as it is…
And I think that she also *knows* that she’s missing cues she should be picking up on, and that knowledge drives her obsession (or is driven by it)…
A quick thought or two on What Remains of Edith Finch:
Perhaps the most interesting and subversive part of the game is the fact that moving to the USA does *not* remove the curse. The setup is there for a yay-for-the-USA game, but instead it returns to a time of economic anxiety and global disruption, with pressure to leave Europe before the shit goes down, and then has them get to the shores of the USA and wreck.
I’m also very curious about the ways in which the Finches try to deal with the curse. Barbara thinks celebrity will save her, the twins decide to live their lives as if it didn’t exist, Walter tries to ignore it, and yet none of that works. Only Edith decides to leave her remains (see what I did there) for the next generation, mostly, as she says, to understand for her unborn son.
A curse, especially one invoked in a magically realist world that deals directly iwth the uncanny, should have no implications in the USA…and yet…
Finally, the language that reinforces the spoken narrative and that flashes briefly on the screen reminds me of the fetishization among certain communities of signals and code…how they’re received, how they’re written, what subtexts they hint at, and what they mean for the move from analog to digital culture…
I have often found the theories of cultural anxiety and cultural work developed by John Cawelti and Jane Tompkins (respectively) to be useful ways to look at narratives. Tompkins’s and Cawelti’s desires to understand the cultural relevance of all types of narrative helped formulate my own thoughts about why some texts resonate in cultures while others do not, and their abilities to locate texts – even ones considered to be high canon and thus impervious to cultural ‘taint’ – in their immediate surroundings and to identify the reasons why fiction and narrative are cultural meaning-making exercises enabled me to better understand why some pop culture artifacts sell a lot of copies and others sit in their own subcultures.
Plus, Tompkins introduced me to Hawthorne’s what feels like misogynistic disgust for those ‘scribbling women’ (author Jenny McPhee writing for bookslut has a particularly useful look at Hawthorne’s dickitude in her review of Phillip Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge). That in and of itself made the argument worth hearing.
As we piece together the power of genre in understanding games, the number of games that rely on the generic conventions of magical realism is sort of absurd. I thought, perhaps, that a breakdown of what the conventions of magical realism are might be useful in understanding the cultural meaning-making that happens in the narrative portion of games. The ludological meaning-making is another story, of course, and one that I will try to avoid here, although I’m not intentionally at least trying to dive into the ludonarrative harmony/dissonance debate.
Let’s start with realism
When I think of realism, I think specifically of two of the novelists who first steered away from the science fiction and fantasy that I loved as as nerdy teenager, Dickens and Zola. Each saw their novels as affective attempts to portray social contexts that they saw as so destructive of ordinary people’s lives that they needed change. Their interventions were mostly novelistic – neither was a political figure, but both authors successfully recreated social horrors in ways that spurred others to action.
Realism becomes frustrating in its limitations. Some social justice movement can be made by creating texts that evoke such strong reactions from readers that they are inspired to action, but for authors who can create entire worlds perhaps the sort of glacial movement that Dr. King (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”) envisions is not fast enough.
Realism has its limits
Realism thus has limits, even in a medium as intensively immersive as video games. Even games that allow a player to completely roam the sandbox that the game world immerses them in still is confined by its code and algorithms and developer imagination.
These worlds also are limited by the emotional involvement that the medium can evoke from players. While games undeniably elicit responses that reek of total engagement, until they hook directly into player’s cerebral cortexes they can only go so far in eliciting the type of bodily emotional responses that lived experience engage us in. I agree that games have gone (much) farther than any other medium in enabling us to attempt to see the world through another set of eyes, but at this moment they cannot go the next step and immerse us physically.
This step will come.
Magically re-imagining the real
Enter magic.
The supernatural is often juxtaposed as the opposite of the natural, and with a bit of logistical wizardry we can quickly equate the natural with the real, and the supernatural with magic. Both equations hint at an element of control – authors portray the real with increasingly less confidence, while the magicians among us conjure the supernatural out of perfectly normal materiel.
In the genre of magical realism this juxtaposition is accomplished narratively. The narrator does not privilege the natural over the supernatural, or vice versa – it simply describes the scene and assumes that the natural and supernatural coexist as equivalent forces in the world. A realistic portrayal would attempt to explain the supernatural, and a fantastic one would probably emphasize the power of the magic to melt natural, realistic boundaries in some sort of homage to the power of the human mind, but in the genre of magical realism the convention is for the narrator to simply describe and let the reader decide what where the boundaries exist.
The first example that comes to my mind occurs in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Remedios the Beauty, completely unaware of the power of her beauty to drive men insane, simply floats into heaven halfway through the novel, an event that is described as if it happens all the time. The narrator does not attempt to explain the mechanics of the process, or to comment on how perhaps we as readers should not believe it; instead, it simply happens. Seemingly solid natural boundaries of life and death do not exist.
If only it was really this simple…
These neat distinctions are not this obvious or clear, of course, leading me to my next concern – the cultural anxieties that magical realism reveals, and the cultural work that it does.
Ah, Salman Rushdie, bringing back memories of fatwas and Scotland Yard protecting an Indian-born writer from folks trying to get to heaven by killing just one writer…makes me almost nostalgic.
Thoughts:
I read this novel in my quest to read as much magical realism as I can, but I hadn’t guessed that Rushdie uses magical realism to create an allegory of the struggles India has gone through since obtaining independence from the British. In that sense he follows Marquez beautifully.
Saleem Sinai, his muslim protagonist gifted with an extreme sense of smell, experiences all the joys and horrors of elections, independence, post-colonialism, and the split of Pakistan and India. Indira Gandhi is a particularly loathsome figure in her use of power, and the viciousness of the various wars and ethnic cleansings are also powerfully evoked.
Rushdie uses women as ciphers in ways that occasionally make me queasy. His narrator is telling the story to Padma, his latest partner, and her impatience feels sort of uncomfortably shrewish. The sacrifice of the witch who gives birth to Sinai’s son also felt sort of yeah, once again the woman dies for the man’s sins-type story. My guess is that I’m selling Rushdie very short here.
The widespread ethnic diversity of India becomes a part of the story-telling context in MC, and while I struggled to keep up (so many ancestors of mercenaries and emperors) the overall effect made me hope that India can continue to maintain its identity, while fearing for its very ability to do so.
The move from the naivete of a radio contest for the child born closest to midnight to civil war and totalitarianism and ethnic cleansing struck me upon reading as sort of beautiful in a pen-and-ink sketch type of way. In this rendition India feels both like a hopeful vision of a future multicultural world and a descent into the worst that we can do to each other.
I re-read The Master and Margarita as a way to better understand the possibilities of KRZ, and wow…it brings back memories…
I first read it at the insistence of a guy I met working as a coder for EDS in Dayton. He had brought his family out of the Soviet Union, through a lot of risk and danger that I can barely comprehend, and he and I became friends, so much so that I learned how to drink pepper vodka (straight from the bottle, peel that foil cap off and enjoy!). He didn’t necessarily give me the keys to reading it, as there are so many layers that such a key would be as long as the book, but he gave me a firm sense of how important something like literature (and literary resistance) could be in a culture where the biggest lies were simply told as if they were truth.
This drawing is not of the cover, but it’s so gangster…
I’m sure there are no resemblances to the current moment.
And that brings me to the thoughts section of this post: Continue Reading
I probably will not have time to finish Quadrilateral Cowboy, which makes me a bit sad, so I decided to post on it before my memories of the game fade. It was released in 2016 by Blendo Games, and feels like a beautiful blend of an alternate cyberpunk universe, the one that Gibson might have written post Pattern Recognition.
My thoughts on it follow:
The game is 2D, sort of, and these screen shots show, and I have not played a game where my avatar looks so unusual. Blendo Games, which is really just Brendan Chung, has developed some off-the-wall shtuff, but this one has an aesthetic that is about as close to what I imagine the dataverse looked like to those of us who survived cyberpunk in the 1980s as is possible. The game goes out of his way to show the player-character when at least I was least suspecting it, through blocky shadows and sudden reflections in mirrors.
The game’s landscape also felt very dataversian in its complete lack of other people, except for those in your hacker hangout. I robbed houses, stole courier packets from trains, and entered ventilation ducts, and all the time I saw no one. When I died, I was killed by a stationary sentry gun set in the ceiling, or by running out of air on one mission in space.
Even the houses of the folks whose stuff I took were clean, corporately-sterile, with no sign of habitation aside from furniture that looked as if it could still be in its plastic wrap.
Even though the player can die, there is no other violence. I was excited to get a gun, even if I couldn’t pick it up and shoot it like a hand cannon, only to find out that it shot bean bags that could be used to trip levers. Damn – no body count here.
Chung has said in interviews (consult the wikipedia page for direct sources) that he wanted to make a game that helped people understand what it takes to be a hacker without having to code. I picked up on that, and I found that I had to think about the puzzles in very different ways than other games required me to think. I don’t usually enjoy puzzle solving games, but this one had me hooked because the puzzles were ingenious but somehow useful.
Perhaps they felt useful because we as hackers got paid. By who was never made clear.
I did feel a bit off put by the linearity of the narrative. The game is absolutely not a sandbox – there’s no place to go, a function I am guessing of both the lack of programmers to add more space and an adherence to the dataverse, full of heavily protected data in the cyberpunk ecosystem.
This linearity reminded me a bit of the game I’m trying to finish now, What Remains of Edith Finch, which is just as linear from a narrative standpoint but restricted in different ways.
At some point I will need to think about what these sorts of borderless boundaries mean for game worlds…
As a fan of the Sprawl trilogy, I enjoyed how this game invoked the Gibsonian conception of cyberspace. It felt intensively machine-drawn, with clean shadows and no dirt whatsoever (even in the air ducts the player crawls around in).
Again, it felt all very intentionally machine-drawn, a beautiful contrast to the nastiness of the outside world in Gibson’s Sprawl. It almost felt as if the machines that drew it were trying to either make humans feel comfortable or ignoring them completely.
The only messy spaces were ones players share with their fellow hackers, all of whom look vaguely Japanese and none of whom really interacted with the player-character.
And the player-character is definitely in the machine – you simply appear and disappear as if you hooked a ride in a Star Trek transporter.
Unfortunately, there were no malevolent AIs. Even the corporations we rob didn’t seem evil, just sort of negligent for leaving all these holes in their security. I’m not sure what styles of security the game is designed to present for circumvention – it’s clearly set in 1980, as a banner tells us early on, but there are space stations that we have to hack as well.
The aesthetic also felt vaguely as if I was an analog remnant of an increasingly digital world, but that might be other work of mine bleeding into this one.