The Ingenious Gentleman

I think it’s important to point out that capitalism was a rational system responding to rational need. For all of human history we had faced the problem of scarcity, and the greatest social threat had been that of landowners—emperors, kings, wealthy merchants—exploiting limited labour to their own ends. To break this, capitalism required that in order to maintain wealth you had to produce goods to meet social needs rather than for your own accumulation.

Capitalism broke the last of the feudal bonds, it prompted large scale industrialization, it brought very real, very powerful labour saving devices into the price range where the majority of citizens, at least in industrialized nations, could afford them.

But somewhere along the line, something went wrong.

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I read this Rebecca Solnit article on app money in SF and the gold rush on the bus this morning.

(During my lunch, I read this Kirk Hamilton response, which is also good.)

I find it a little surprising that while the Solnit piece talked a fair bit about the events surrounding the gold rush, it didn’t really talk too much about the gold rush itself, and missed what I think is the obvious point of comparison.

What’s the meaning of gold?

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What’s The Lord of the Rings about?

As a kid, I used to read The Lord of the Rings just about every summer (lonely, nerdy kids, you know?). I’ve probably read it cover to cover four or five times. Like many other friendless, awkward children, I was enchanted by its tales of high adventure, of epic conflicts between good and evil that felt more real and more significant than my actual life.

But I grew up.

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Excuse me, Industry here. We hear you’re doing this “indie” thing now, and honestly it’s got us a little nervous. What’s it all about, anyway?

Easy, basically indie means you’re independent of major publishers.

Sure, OK, but what does that mean? Independent how?

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So mcc says that Liz Ryerson says that all games are domination fantasies. OH NO SHE DIDN’T.

Anyway, the challenge was to write out all the games you’ve made and their plots/themes/what you do. I am going to do this while drinking vanilla tea and eating an entire bag of dried mangoes. Here goes!

Porta Lucis—You are obsessed with a nondescript door in the city. One day you discover it is unlocked. Passing through, you enter an endless, nightmarish basement where you must use your wits and pocket knife to survive against much more powerful monsters. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative you are an inmate in a shadowy, dreamlike asylum. Can you escape? What is real? Domination fantasy? It’s hard to tell what this might be a fantasy of.

Famous Authors—Three games surrounding two brilliant, troubled writers and one exceptionally exhausted game developer. Biographical/Semi-autobiographical. You have to press X repeatedly. Domination fantasy? Probably not. Unfortunately no one ever really got the takeaway for this, which is that producing almost any piece of work, whether mundane or genius, basically boils down to a lot of pressing X repeatedly.

Merlin, Build Me a Castle—You play as either King Arthur or his brother King Brothur. Destroy your brother’s flying castle! The person with the tallest castle after fifteen seconds is declared the winner. Domination fantasy? Absolutely and without a doubt.

Run—A small, isolated farming village is struck by a three-year plague of darkness. A stranger, who does not appear in the game (and some speculate to be the player), tries to save the villagers by bringing light from the future through a series of meditations. Speculation on tools and the body, digital representation and the uncanny nature of city life. Domination fantasy? Possibly, in the sense that it’s definitely about using tools to dominate depersonalized, “natural” forces. On the other hand, it’s mostly about how the struggle to overcome something at all costs changes you irrevocably into something else, something defined and delimited by that struggle.

The Story of the Cat—Follow the humble house cat through its evolution from a single-celled cat, to an ancient cat-fish, to a modern day cat, struggling for survival against its natural enemies (vacuum cleaners). A meditation on the possible future of cats. Domination Fantasy? Yes, but that’s cats for you.

??? (Unreleased, very heavily WIP)—Domination Fantasy? Yes. The inverse of Run, in a sense. How an obsession with preserving the past ultimately changes the past, how all justifications, when gripped tightly enough, grow brittle and meaningless, how the will to dominate ultimately destroys the thing being dominated.

Here are some games I’ve worked on for other people.

Glitch— (R.I.P.) Explore the minds of seven giants in this off-beat, non-violent MMO built in the spirit of cooperation. Domination Fantasy? Pretty much intentionally the opposite.

Dungeons of Dredmor—The evil Lord Dredmor has returned from his n years slumber or whatever. Descend into the Dungeons of Dredmor, eat cheese, read funny item descriptions and try not to die. Domination Fantasy? Ostensibly yes, but really more like a masochistic fantasy. The game is almost impossibly hard. You are congratulated for dying.

There are, in fact, three reasons.

The term “hipster” hit its contemporary revival probably around 2005, in a general trend of city gentrification, typified by the rezoning of Williamsburg from mostly industrial to mostly residential, when previously poor areas were flooded with young, hip kids, generally pretty wealthy, who were into music and fashion and such.

A lot of this was, as the story goes, because like many rich, young people, they fetishized the trappings of poverty and general bohemianism, so of course they all became quote-starving-unquote artists and played the keyboards in bands while collecting cheques from their parents to support that lifestyle.

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The year is 2142 and many things have changed. We live under a society that was once called late capitalism, then post-late capitalism, followed by post-post-late capitalism by a few hangers-on, and which is now called nothing at all. The social sciences, normally in charge of such determinations, are a shrinking field, and our small number of remaining academics have become little more than vestigial appendages of their primary shareholders.

My route to work takes me past the site of the former university, so I still see them sometimes, if the weather’s been cool enough, oscillating gently in the early-morning breeze, their dew-dappled, sallow flesh spilling listlessly over threadbare sport coats, out of old loafers with peeling soles. Occasionally one of them will produce a paper—a small, accidental packet of bile-stained pages, covered in a tight, indecipherable scrawl—but mostly they just sort of wobble and mumble.

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“The game’s certainly worth it. If I had to calculate my hours played per dollar spent, it’d probably be something like $0.10/hour.” — Forum quote

It’s hard to avoid this discussion in games. There’s an obsession with duration running through player reviews, publisher ad copy, and the games press. Short isn’t a measure of a game’s length relative to its content (a novel or a movie is judged as short when it feels clipped, when its length fails to encompass the promise of its own materials); rather, it’s an objective measure, stating that a game has failed to take up a sufficient chunk of your life. Certainly good, we say, but a little short at only ten hours, even for something that contains a complete story arc, that exhausts its gameplay premise, that explores all its options and concludes leaving no open questions.

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So it’s 5:40 a.m.

I woke up earlier in the night and had some issues getting back to sleep, etc etc. When I did get back to sleep, I had this intensely vivid dream that made me wish I hadn’t. I’m currently sitting up with all the lights on, but I figured maybe I should document this horror for posterity. I know other people’s dreams can be kind of boring, and they’re hard to really document, but I’ll do my best!

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