Sons of Loki

Minecraft. In the words of its creator, Minecraft is…

…a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens.

It tickles the same part of the brain for adults as Lego does for kids. You build. Put up walls. Dig out a foundation. Add a glass facade. Build a chest to keep your stuff in. Make paintings for the walls. Dig down to an underground cavern with rivers of lava and water. Sail across the ocean and hike through an enormous canyon.

You aren’t alone in this world. There are clucking chickens, oinking pigs, squids that dart across the surface of the ocean. There are giant spiders that climb on to the ceiling and stare at you. There are mindless zombies and bloodthirsty skeletons armed with bows. There are giant hellspawn jellyfish that scream as they shoot fireballs at you from above.

They are nothing. Death is an illusion in Minecraft. Only one enemy can truly kill your soul. Creepers.

Creepers are weird green blobs with four legs that are based on a failed attempt to model a pig. They are the only enemy that can survive in the daytime. They are silent, roving about until they spot you. Sometimes they run straight towards you, a mad gleam in their black eyes, a terrified stare from their frowny faces as if tormented by some kind of deep existential dread. Sometimes – and this is even scarier – they run away from you, to hide somewhere where they can jump out and surprise you later.

Either way, the result is the same. That sound. That “sssssSSSSS…” A brief look of anguish on their faces, as if to say your life is meaningless your everything is meaningless it all turns to dust as their bodies swell … and then BOOM. If you’re lucky, they just kill you outright. If you’re unlucky, they take down your house. All that mining. All that hard work, collecting sand to forge into glass, placing sandstone into pretty patterns. Gone. They’re cruel, vicious, vile. They’re the ultimate griefers, sacrificing themselves just to ruin your fun.

So why, in a game about building stuff, are creepers – the only thing in the game dedicated to destroying the things you build – so cherished? So respected? Why are they, in my opinion, the best video game villain ever?

Because they force you to take stock of what really matters. It’s not your possessions – if you die, you can pick up your stuff when you respawn. You can always craft more picks, or forge more iron. It’s what you leave behind – the buildings, the towers, the mad follies you construct across the landscape. You’ll fight to protect them – you’ll lure the creeper away and sacrifice yourself to save what you have built. They are totally unfair and basically pointless, but you respect them all the more for that. There is no reasoning with the creeper. They alone have the power to take away everything you hold dear. You have to respect them.

And because they teach you a valuable lesson. When a creeper explodes – when your grand stairway lies in ruins, when your lavish entrance hall is smashed to pieces – you only have one option. Rebuild. You pick up what you can, and you put it back like it was. Sometimes it’s even better, because now you’re older and wiser and don’t make the same mistakes as you did the first time. Eventually you come to understand the cycle of destruction and rebirth. You come to see the creeper as neither enemy, nor friend, but merely a force of nature. Everything you do is transitory – from your existence to the things you leave behind. You let go of materialist things, and ascend to something higher.

It’s my last day alone in the house and I’m basically just clearing up my mess before the guys get here and thinking about my interview/assessment tomorrow. Removed a big hairy Tegenaria domestica from the sink all by myself. Got Ken Bruce on, at least until he’s replaced by the sneery Jeremy Vine in five minutes. (“Is there actually anything to object to here?” he asks of the latest controversial non-story, but I’m sure callers will provide.) Coffee in the pot. Funny how it’s sort of nice to be alone in the mornings, but it’s terrifying at night.

I didn’t have time to play Red Faction Guerrilla last year, so I’ve been wasting my September days here on it. It’s certainly full of fun – the building-destruco-tech is a remarkable if flawed gimmick. Can there be anything better than planting explosive charges on a chimneystack, Fred Dibnah-stylee, and watching it tumble to the ground, crushing flimsy shacks as the pipe rolls down a hill? Well, yes. It would be better if the buildings weren’t often just held up by a single bit of wood after all the other walls were taken out, but it’s still satisfying when you take out the last bit and the whole thing tumbles down.

There was something really bothering me, though, but I didn’t realise what it was until Yahtzee pointed it out. You can’t play as a guerrilla. There’s no stealth whatsoever. The second you turn up anywhere, you get gunned down mercilessly. No sneaking around enemy bases, planting charges before retiring to a nearby hill and watching the fireworks – you have to go in guns blazing, throwing explosives aimlessly, which kind of takes the fun out of carefully demolishing buildings.
The game encourages you to ambush convoys, which would be really cool – planting mines on the road and hiding behind a rock – if not for the fact that the second the convoy gets within a hundred metres of you, they drive off the road and try to run you over while your carefully placed mines lie fallow. And you can only carry about six bullets and you die really quickly. And the AI guerrillas who spontaneously rise up to aid you in your one-man revolution die very, very quickly. I felt like shouting at them, Life of Brian style, that I wasn’t the messiah, that they should stop following me around because they’re just going to die horribly. (Although nothing’s more amusing than when you get involved in a minor road accident and knock over a wall, and a crowd of wannabe Ches turn up in a truck assuming the great uprising against your oppressors has begun.)

It also got me thinking about something that bothers me in just about every work of fiction where killing people is presented as entertainment. It’s the way heroes can do no wrong when they’re gunning down legions of faceless enemies. The villain is demonised for massacring thousands of peasants, but the hero slices through thousands of rank-and-file soldiers whose only crime was accepting the king’s shilling, and no one stops to complain. I mean, obviously the end goal is good, but it would be a better story if you introduced some depth to it. I mean, Red Faction is basically a big Iraq War allegory, with an insurgency fighting an occupying force there to grab all the natural resources, but the guerrillas/terrorists (depending on your view, of course) are presented as noble freedom fighters fighting an evil totalitarian empire. It would be a lot more interesting if your side was doing some morally questionable stuff, because that’s how war works.

The old James Bond killed plenty of people and was still a hero. The new guy, and the one in the books, is basically a cold-blooded murderer, and it’s a lot more interesting that way. There’s the bit in Metal Gear Solid 2 (I think) where the Colonel calls you out if you kill a certain number of enemies, saying “You seem to get a real thrill out of slaughtering the enemy. Are you frustrated about something?”, and in the sequel one of the bosses taunts you by making you face the ghosts of every single person you’ve killed in the game so far. And then there’s that Ultima game (?) where in an act of genius, it turns out that the faceless monsters you’ve been killing in all the other games in the series were actually intelligent and harmless all along. (Something along those lines.)

And there was this bit in Modern Warfare 2 that made me think. Now, I hesitate to attribute artistic merit to such a by-the-numbers blockbuster as MW2, but Call of Duty 4 did have that clever AC-130 level which quite subtly (subtly for video gaming, anyway) compares modern warfare to a video game, all point-and-click and detached from the actual slaughter.
It comes after the first half of the infamous “No Russian” level when you’re shooting Russian FSB troops as an undercover CIA operative. You have to shoot them to finish the level, whereas in the first half, the game wisely doesn’t force you to shoot any civilians in the controversy-inducing terrorist attack. And I thought why is it killing civilians is presented as wrong, but killing FSB police is just treated as part of the mission? Aren’t they just civilians behind their riot shields? And that’s when I realised I’d been killing plenty of Russian soldiers in the previous mission without batting an eyelid. I had an epiphany. If killing civilians was wrong, then killing police was wrong, then killing soldiers – even if they were the enemy – was wrong, surely.

But, then, this is Call of Duty we’re talking about, so I doubt it was the intended message. I’m probably thinking about this too much, and I doubt we want a world where every hero is tortured by the horrible things he has done to protect his family and way of life and stuff, but it would be more interesting, is all I’m sayin’.

I think most of my problems in life stem from being a determinist at heart. I’m not completely sure free will exists. I feel like innate personality (determined by biological and external social factors) determines your actions, not your consciousness and not free will.

This raises big, scary questions. Like, is it fair to punish criminals if they had no control over their actions anyway? Can a leopard truly change its spots? If I simply put my mind to something, can I do it?

More specifically, if I decide to work hard at Japanese, would I get better? Yes, but can I actually decide to work hard at Japanese? It’s like sleep paralysis; you’re awake and fully conscious and trying so desperately to move your legs, feeling like you’re suffocating, but it’s impossible. It’s physically impossible. I sit down to study Japanese, I get bored and do something else.

Is this an error on my part? Should I try really, really, really hard instead of merely quite hard? Or is it blind deterministic mechanics, that I am a product of my upbringing, that I will always pick the easy path, that I have no patience, that I get easily distracted?

I don’t know. It’s a philosophical question, anyway. The main thing is, do I want to keep doing Japanese?

I don’t know!

I think my honest feelings are: I’d like to do Japanese if I could just coast through like I always do, turning up to most lessons and doing enough of the homework and doing sorta okay. But it’s a damned hard degree, and I apparently just won’t do all the work that’s necessary to pass.

I think my honest feelings are: I don’t want to do Japanese. I know enough to get by, and I basically only took this degree because I wanted to live here for a year for free. I can read Yotsuba-to and that’s enough for me. I’d much rather do English or Graphic Design or something like that. I don’t really have any desire to learn the language.

I think my honest feelings are: I love Japanese. I want to become impeccably fluent. I want to watch films and read books and talk to interesting people. I want to learn all the kanji and all the words. It’s just the teaching style here I can’t get on with. When I think about it, I really miss the Leeds department. Somehow everything was easier there, more fun.

Indecision. What’s made my day is that I emailed Leeds to let them know of my possible intentions, and I just got a reply to say that I can put a request in to the English department in May if I want to switch to Single Honours, and they’ll decide in June by the earliest. Meanwhile, I get to finish my year here whatever happens.

That’s the best news I could get. (Well, realistically winning the lottery isn’t going to happen, especially since I don’t play.) I’d hate so much to go home early, to encounter enormous visa and financial wrangles, to possibly have to pay back all my JASSO (god that would ruin me) and generally ruin my year. I get to stay.

Kinda makes me want to start studying again…

In other news, I’ve put up the teaser page for Yoshida, my work-in-progress visual novel salaryman simulator. Demo someday. I worry I made the titular Yoshida rather too stylish, rather than the chubby sweaty salaryman I envisioned him as.

In the last two days I’ve watched two very different movies.
Forbidden Planet is a classic, of course, and having watched it I can now see the inspiration behind roughly a quarter of all Star Trek scripts (crew beam down to mysterious planet/space station where mad scientist lives in solitude with his wife/daughter but a mysterious monster/alien/force keeps killing people/redshirts) (the other 75% of scripts are of course “Enterprise trapped in energy bubble” and “Troi suffers mysterious, whiny visions”).

It’s enjoyable to watch, mostly because we’ve come to dig the whole retro-futurism aesthetic. It’s hard not to love the valve-tastic design of Robby the Robot, or the old-fashioned ray guns, or the C-57D flying saucer. The captain (Leslie Nielsen, pre-Airplane!) has a little portable communicator thingy, and his executive officer carries around a distant forerunner of the PDA with all the mission information on it, which is pretty forward-thinking.

But the big thing they failed to predict? Feminism. The crew joke that Robby the Robot’s ability to generate food instantly is “a housewife’s dream”. When beautiful Altaira makes her first appearance everyone’s drooling over her in the most lecherous way in front of her father. And in one of the most disturbing scenes for modern sensibilities, the captain basically calls her a slut for wearing such skimpy clothing (having known only her father her entire life, she obviously doesn’t understand what she’s doing wrong anyway) and says that since his all-male crew have been locked up in their ship for the best part of a year’s travel, they can’t be held responsible for what they might do if they happen to see her, you know, walking around and other highly provocative stuff. Broads! Obviously she then falls in love with him because he shouted at her. Dames!

It’s the one downfall of SF: it’s easy to imagine the technological advances in ten years or fifty or a hundred, but it’s a lot more difficult to think about what might happen socially. I know there’s a lot of great SF written more than thirty years ago, but I fear I’ll never read the early stuff because it’s all about teenagers on the moon drinking at soda fountains and the kind of no-nonsense squares who just don’t exist any more doing all their calculations on slide rules, in space.
Of course, with the best stuff (like Asimov) you can just fill in the gaps – “oh, when he says “I’ll check the magnetic tapes” he means to say “I’ll access the holographic memory core” – but the older the SF the more difficult this becomes, and things like changing social mindsets are impossible to explain. (I think the best stab at predicting the future from a sociological viewpoint is Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, where the future is essentially like today’s pop culture only more vapid, more pornographic, and more pointless by a factor of a hundred. It is a joy to read.)

Before Sunrise is a film that has been recommended to me countless times over the years, so I finally decided to watch it. I had a feeling I’d enjoy it: it’s basically a proto-Lost in Translation, and from what I knew about it the film sounded like the kind of arty movie full of those deep pretentious philosophical conversations which I love so much from Murakami’s work.
Imagine my surprise, then, when for the first fifteen minutes I hated it. Lordy. An annoying Yank chats up an annoying French girl on a train. There’s another hour and a half of this? But then it suddenly all changed, at the point where Ethan Hawke asks Julie Delpy to get off the train and spend the night wandering around Vienna. I couldn’t help but be strangely charmed by Hawke: I guess that’s acting.
And then it turns into a rather beautiful love story. I am, at heart, a hopeless romantic and a sucker for this kind of thing, but who wouldn’t want to meet the love of their life on a train in Austria one strange day? It plays out in a heartbreaking and heartwarming fashion, and anyone who’s ever been in love will recognise all the tiny touches of detail in this film. And both actors are just fantastic.
It occurred to me a little way through that as well as Lost In Translation, this film served as the model for another film I watched a year or two back, Quiet City. It’s essentially the same film, only set in New York City and more “mumblecore“. Then it occurred to me that this sub-genre of romances are films where guy meets girl meets city, be it Tokyo, Vienna, or NYC.

Luckily I didn’t have to wait nine years for the sequel. I had heard that Before Sunset wasn’t as good as the original, but then I read a lot of people saying it was their favourite, so I went in with an open mind. And it was fascinating to see how the characters had evolved, but even more fascinating to see it from the point of view of assessing the art of storytelling. To go back to a movie nine years later and make an (entirely unplanned) sequel in real-time is quite an interesting trick to pull. The actors are nine years older, the director and screenwriter are nine years older, and consequently it increases the verisimilitude of the piece in a way that would be very hard to pull off otherwise. When we see the brief flashbacks to the earlier film the characters look so young, because they are, and nine years later they look appropriately old, weathered, battered by time.

I don’t know if I would say Before Sunset is not as good as the original. Certainly I don’t think it’s better, but I love finding out what happens to characters in films after the credits roll, even if it’s rarely as satisfying as conjecture. I think it might be a case of: I love Sunrise more right now, but ask me again in nine years.

How many games quote Voltaire, Milton, and Kahlil Gibran without breaking a sweat?

There’s this perennial debate in video gaming as to when games will finally be at the level of “art” rather than “entertainment”. I’d say that Deus Ex was art when it came out way back in 2000, and it was so ahead of its time that I struggle to think of a single game that has lived up to its legacy (Vampire: Bloodlines in 2004, and that’s it).

Consider the big blockbusters like Modern Warfare 2 and Gears of War and the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII, and then consider a game where you can have the following conversation:

Morpheus: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
JC Denton: Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.
Morpheus: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.
JC Denton: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.
Morpheus: The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.
JC Denton: You underestimate humankind’s love of freedom.
Morpheus: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.

And all that takes place in a small room hidden away in the corner of one level behind a locked door that the player doesn’t even need to bother opening.

I guess you could criticise the kitchen-sink plot, where the writers threw in every conspiracy theory they could think of (and then some new ones), or JC Denton’s tendency to launch into extended philosophical debates with complete strangers, or the derivative nature (full of standard cyberpunk stuff, with liberal amounts of nanotech applied to any problem), or even the occasionally dodgy voice acting (although JC’s stilted monotone fits the character perfectly, if you ignore the hilariously deadpan “A bomb!”). But it’s as gripping as any cyberpunk thriller, the plot is epic in scale (postdating Dan Brown’s obsession with secret societies by mere months but pulling it off far better), there are some truly novel ideas (Aliens at Area 51? Pfft. It’s far more interesting than that) and it’s a bloody long game: in contrast to today’s six-hour-athons, this is a game that takes you around the world and spends a decent couple of hours in each place, to the point that I can look back now after finishing it for the umpteenth time and have the beginning of the game seem suitably distant.
The locations are beautifully realised. There’s detail worked into every pore, from small talk with strangers to little notes hidden around the place to the design of the buildings; the detailed descriptions behind every piece of technology, the justification for every plot point, no matter how minor; the choices you can make throughout the game, the truly non-linear paths to every objective; the way Gunther holds a grudge against you for the rest of the game if you forget to rescue him in the very beginning; the way your brother praises you for avoiding lethal force while the grunts scoff at your namby-pamby attitude; the little hints of a grander plot hidden throughout the game: I could go on, and on. I haven’t even mentioned just how sharp and perfect the actual gameplay is.

And the endings! There are three endings, in which your choice literally determines the fate of the world; it’s remarkable how the writers managed to concoct such a situation from which three very different outcomes could emerge. And it’s genuinely difficult to choose, when the time comes (and unlike a lot of games I could mention, the conditions for each ending are very clear-cut). I went with my gut feeling just as I did the first time I finished the game all those years ago, picking a kind of benevolent dictatorship, which meant turning my back on an old friend. And I felt genuinely bad for betraying him, for derailing his most worthy intentions. When a game can elicit that kind of emotion for a character who is a few lines of code, some sound files and a 3D model, that’s probably about when you’re hitting the magic criteria of art.