#well video games are kind of an interactive medium so people have different experiences and maybe even talk to different people

[zevranunderstander]

god i will be so mean but people who are really smug about how pathologic 1 is so much better than pathologic 2, and how hbomberguy's video on the games sucks, because he says that they are hard, and stuff and then just play the game with a guide and know what to do every day in advance and just play it for the plot (no shame in that by itself), but who then refuse to engage with the actual central conflict of survival, and not being able to save everyone, because they have like 5 schmowders hoarded by day 6 because they want to play the game as good as one can, without acknowledging that pathologic's intended experience is not to be played as omnicient and as good as one can, and then are mad that the story in 2 isn't as complex, because they aren't engaging with half of the game's experience, are soooo annoying god bless.

[remastered-feedback]

A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action: Don't Delay Player Agency

(You can also read this post on my blog/personal site!)

Recently I've been picking games I play not just because they seem like they'll be fun, but also as something to mine for ideas and inspiration. I've been teaching myself Godot, and while I'm a ways off from making any game that's ready for a market release, I'm approaching them more from the perspective I've always approached music with as a musician; not just a work in a medium that I enjoy, but as something to analyze for ideas and inspiration for my own work.

Consequently, I've been playing a lot of older, retro games, as well as a lot of handheld GBA games and indie games. Part of this is for their charm, but part of it is also because those are much closer to what I can accomplish singlehandedly; where modern AAA hits like Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring notch thousands of dev team credits, older NES/SNES games, as well as GBA games and indie titles, rarely have staffs above 50, and typically cap out just past 100 at their absolute largest. Those AAA hits are great games, but if I want something I can use as a reasonable estimation of the targets I can hit solo, they're not where to look.

Two of the games that I've been playing on this old-school kick are two highly touted JRPGs: Golden Sun for the GBA, and Chrono Trigger for the SNES. While both are very good and I'm enjoying both, there's a contrast that's hard not to notice, and it's one where Chrono Trigger is a clear winner. (Yes, I know comparing any JRPG to Chrono Trigger is totally unfair. I'm not using this to take shots at Golden Sun, I'm just using it to explain my point. Again, I'm enjoying both, please do not be unfair to Golden Sun and read "Chrono Trigger did it better" as "This is a bad game" because "Chrono Trigger did it better" applies to 90% of the genre!)

In Chrono Trigger, you almost immediately gain control of Crono. You are somewhat on-rails, the game is clearly directing you to the fairgrounds, but you have the control to decide where you go. Want to run off to the forest before you even know the game's mechanics? You can do that! Even once you go to the fairgrounds, you have control over what you do, where, and when. That's good! Giving the player immediate control is a good thing! Letting them immediately be in control of the player character, and immediately having a say over what happens, gives the player instant agency and engagement. You're not sitting and waiting for the game to start, the game has begun the moment you hit "New game."

Golden Sun, on the other hand, is extremely on-rails for the start of the game. Your home town is flooding, and every time you try to head in a different direction, your previously open pathway is immediately blocked by a falling rock. There's one way for you to go, and all other options are walled off. Even once the flood is over, you're still going down a linear path with no real say in what happens, because there are multiple conversations you need to have, multiple encounters and confrontations you're required to engage with no matter what, and while this is understandable for the very start, it's this way for well over 45 minutes. You're approaching an hour into the game before you can make any kind of meaningful decision, and that kills so much of the draw of RPGs. Story is a staple of the genre, but if I feel like I'm not actually getting any say in the story, I don't feel like I'm playing an RPG. I feel like I'm watching a TV show. And while I like TV shows, that's not what I play a video game to experience.

This isn't to say you can't have a tutorial or an opening cutscene to draw players in, but the sooner the player is making the decisions, the better. People play video games to experience something interactive, whether it's something story-heavy like a visual novel or something gameplay-intensive like a puzzle game. If you're giving the player a full 30-60 minute saga they have to sit and watch before they can make any choices, you've done it wrong. It doesn't need to be any big choice either; "Do you want to fight the combat cat bot or try to hit the bell at the faire?" is enough. "Do you want to go recover Harry's shoes or not?" is enough. "Do you want to check the Mind Flayer nursery for any clues or press onward?" is enough. It's not about immediately being in a position to change the world, it's about having agency and control as soon as possible. Being the active participant driving the events, not just a passive passenger.

You don't have to send the player into immediately engaging with life-or-death without any preparation or preamble. That would be almost as dangerous as giving them a feature film before they get to make any decisions. But as soon as you've established the basic fundamentals, get them engaged and making decisions. The sooner the player has agency and is able to make decisions, no matter how small they may be, the better for both your game and their experience.

[truthseekerthedragon]

Status Update + Thoughts on Media Analysis

Hi there, folks. For those of you wondering what I've been up to recently, my next big project is a thoughts post, kind of like the TFoH one, but instead of covering a Wings of Fire book I'm talking about a video game instead: SANABI, an excellent Korean indie game that came out recently. I'll be talking positively about it, which is a nice change of pace from the TFoH post where it was mostly me seething in rage at how awful it was.

The post is gearing up to be extremely long. Unlike for the TFoH post, where I only had to talk about the story and prose and such, in SANABI's case I need to talk about the animation, visual design, soundtrack, and gameplay on top of the story itself. After all, video games are a fundamentally different medium from literature (but still art). Honestly, I'll be lucky if I can get the post out in time for February 10th, Korean New Year's. Hello there to all my fellow Koreans, by the way.

Not only is this game absolutely fantastic—I can think of very few complaints I have about it, and the positives greatly outweigh the negatives—it's not very well known, at least not in the Anglosphere. One reason I'm typing up a thoughts post about this game is because I want more people to learn about it and check it out for themselves.

Spending time writing about SANABI while listening to the game's banger OST also means I've gotten contemplative thinking about the nature of media analysis. Analysis is always going to have a subjective element to it—there are definitely people out there who hate SANABI as much as I love it—and we might even have differing opinions on the same element.

Take cutscenes, for instance. SANABI has a lot of them, utilized to show character interactions and advance the story. While I love the story with all my heart, I'm sure there are people who don't give half an iota about the (excellent!) characters and hate cutscenes with all the wrath of a thousand stampeding buffalo since they interrupt gameplay. As a writer, I'll always be more inclined to see a video game as another medium for storytelling, as opposed to the interactive side of things, so there's always a personal element in these analyses.

We also have the good ol' industry wisdom: "Cutscenes are objectively bad, you should have as little of them in your game as possible!" And while I can see why cutscenes can be detrimental to gameplay, I don't see cutscenes as the spawn of Satan, but rather as a tool used to enhance the video game. They're a tool in the same way that tropes are; when used well, they can make for an excellent experience. Okay, lemme try and figure out what the point of my rambling was... um, tropes and elements are tools, and don't trust anyone who tells you that you should never use semicolons, period.

I've also thought about media comparisons, which I see a lot in the realm of analysis. While I really enjoy things like case studies where similar tropes or story beats in two different stories are examined (heck, I did this in my TFoH post), it's possible to take this a little too far, especially in the realm of expectations. For instance, I've heard about people criticizing Rain World because they played it expecting an experience similar to the Ori games. Well, guess what, Ori and the Blind Forest and Rain World are completely different games. Ori is a platformer and puzzle game, while Rain World has platforming elements but can be described much more accurately by the term "ecosystem simulator."

While digging around, I found out that people often compared SANABI to Katana Zero, another indie game. And the two games do have similarities, but every game offers a different experience, and if you boot up SANABI (a grappling hook platformer with action elements) thinking it'll give you the same experience as Katana Zero (a hack-and-slash game with platforming elements), then of course you'll be disappointed! So maybe don't walk into a game, or stories in general, expecting it to be exactly like another story you like. Every experience is different.

I think I'm done rambling, at least for now. SANABI is cool, go play it or watch a playthrough. (But please avoid spoilers! It's best to go in not knowing anything.) And happy winter holidays, everyone.

[nonbinarymlm]

Sometimes in relationships you'll do things that hurt each other. In a long term relationship these things are guaranteed. Hopefully it will be unintentional, but stuff will happen. This will especially happen if you're both marginalized or neurodivergent. What matters is that you deal with it with kindness.

I wanted to play a video game with my boyfriend. We're both gamers, but we hadn't played a game together in years, and playing games with other people can be a really fun time. I wanted to. I wanted to play Portal with him, which I hadn't played since High School and is a really clever game. Also, it meant we could work our way to co-op in Portal 2. I brought it up on weekends when we weren't doing anything. He was reluctant, but he agreed to set it up and give it a try. He made it five minutes in before he had to stop.

He didn't like puzzle games because doing puzzles in front of people tied in with bad childhood experiences, from being taught math in the way that involved a lot of yelling and judging and not a lot of actually learning. Also childhood memories of a traumatic autism evaluation (he's not autistic, some of adults in his life were just trying to fix/solve him). So we stopped. I gave a little apology.

Later that night, though, he had screaming nightmares. I talked to him about it in the morning and it turns out Portal was genuinely triggering to him. From the childhood trauma and from other experiences being (at different times consentually and not consentually) institutionalized for mental health reason. Portal mimics institutions in an exaggerated ways, white walls and formal language. It also traps your character and forces you to do puzzles while being watched, connecting to a lot of past trauma. Engaging with it as an interactive medium was particularly triggering.

And the thing is, I knew about these past traumatic experiences. They were all a long time before I met him, but he told me about them. Maybe I could have figured it out. Except he'd never been triggered by content like that before (not that there's a ton of other media like Portal that we'd consumed) and nothing that we'd consumed had been triggering like that because it hadn't been interactive first person. It was something even he didn't really know about, except for general reluctance. But maybe I could have done better.

I got permission and even encouragement from him to share this, because it demonstrates a lot about people and relationships. Sometimes you don't know what will trigger you and triggers can be really unexpected. Sometimes you'll end up pushing sensitive spots on people you love. We're okay, because we're kind to each other and communicate. Communication kind of needs kindness to facilitate, because communication requires vulnerability and that's not going to come naturally without kindness. Also, listening is important. If someone wants to stop something, even a video game, its important. Sometimes unexpected things can really get to people.

Relationships aren't always easy. There are complicated and tough times as well as the easy bits. This can be especially true for anyone who's neurodivergent or marginalized, because we can have more unexpected sensitive spots than others. But these complexities are part of relationships. They're part of what makes it real and they're okay to have, as long as you're respectful to each other about it.

[honourablejester]

D&D, Sunless Sea, and the Search for Exploration in Games

Okay. So, as a consequence of all the D&D OGL 1.1 things I’ve been reading and watching lately (I’m not going to touch it, but I’ve been following), I came across this video of The Real John Wick gleefully (but not meanly) recommending some other games and systems for people to explore:

And lots sounded interesting, so I had a browse around his channel seeing if he talked about any of them more. And he does. He has a series where he makes a character a day for different games for a month, and while doing so he also has some interesting things to say about the various systems. In particular, about game design, and the themes of games, and how (and how successfully) they express those themes through their mechanics, such as this video where he talks about the humanity mechanic in VtM and how it’s actually in many ways the central mechanic of the game, because the theme of VtM is how well a person could remain human when they’re forced suddenly to exist in a world designed by and for predators, (but then how that wasn’t necessarily the theme the actual player-base wanted to engage with, and so the game shifted in focus a bit).

And this made me think about a particular theme I’ve been looking for in games, mostly video games but also ttrpgs, and why I rarely feel like I’ve found it, and one place I kind of did.

One thing I have always looked for in games is a sense of exploration. Not as a side-note, but as the main focus of the experience. It’s a problem in video games and many of the tabletop games I’ve experienced, because the focus for so many of them has been combat, not exploration.

(Now, I will be the first to admit, this could well be because my experience of games of any kind has been somewhat limited).

And when I say exploration, I do mean something sort of specific. I don’t just mean wandering around finding and admiring the landscape, although that is fun for a while. This is something that you do feel in Minecraft, that exploring the world is fun, particularly with the new terrain generation, but past a certain point the emptiness of the world does begin to be felt, and you want to start building things and finding things, like the ancient cities, that sort of make the experience … more interactable? I don’t just want to look at things, I want to discover and interact with them.

And, for me personally, I don’t necessarily want to have to shoot and/or stab things constantly to manage it. A degree is fine, exploration doesn’t have to be easy, but I don’t want it to tip over into the combat being the point. This is a thing in certain open world video games, such as Fallout, where I do adore wandering around and discovering the map, but the constant deathclaws or legion assassins or supermutants or what have you shift the focus of the experience.

But this is hard to explain to people, and for ages I didn’t really have an example of what I was actually looking for in a game to kind of point to. Until I played Failbetter’s Sunless Sea.

(Warning: I am going to ramble about this for a bit)

Okay. So the thing in Sunless Sea is, you start with a completely blacked out map. The whole and main point of the early game is to fill in the map. I have never in a game felt anything like that first experience of Sunless Sea’s completely blank, darkness-shrouded square of emptiness. You get your dinky, fragile little starter boat, and you sail out into the abyss. The utter unknown. And you start puttering around and you start finding the islands. The lands along the edges. You start putting into foreign ports. And your map fills in. There are bright lines and discovered lands where your little boat has travelled. The experience is incomparable.

And the ports aren’t empty. They’re not just dots on a map. You dock with them. You interact with them. You complete their stories. Many of them have refreshable events where you can (through the text and description medium) continue to explore the interiors of the islands and lands the port represents. You risk things. You find things. Your presence changes things.

And then. Then. The most incredible thing of all. You die. There is combat in Sunless Sea, and your boat is bloody fragile, and it’s incredibly easy to die. So you die. And you start again on a new captain. And not only is the map black again, but the islands have changed location. They’re not in the same place. Because Sunless Sea is set in the ‘Neath, where the laws of reality are literally and in-universe kept away by the darkness, and the sea physically changes once you stop continuously observing it.

I don’t know how to describe to you the incredibleness of this experience for me. The idea of this. The mythology of the ‘Neath is something that I utterly adore, and so much for this reason. Once you break continuity, once it’s not the same in-game person doing the observing, reality shifts. And you have to explore everything from nearly scratch all over again.

And I know, this is one of the things that a lot of people didn’t like. To the extent that the sequel game, Sunless Skies, actually changed it. And I am going to talk about that a little bit.

In Sunless Skies, the map does not change, and you can pass your charts down from one captain to the next, so they also stay filled in. Once you discover something, in Sunless Skies, it stays discovered. And that … the reason I could pinpoint the experience of exploration in Sunless Sea as the thing I truly enjoyed and was looking for was because of this. Because they changed it for Sunless Skies.

They did try to keep the sense of exploration to a degree for Skies. Since the map didn’t change, they compensated to an extent by adding more of them. Skies has four maps, four areas to explore, to Sea’s singular one. There is a still a lot of exploration in Sunless Skies, at least the first time around. But that … that was the thing. The first time around. Only the first.

They wanted to reduce the grind of Sunless Sea, essentially, and the sense of futility a lot of people felt, having to going through essentially the entire early game all over again every single time your captain died (and your captain will die a lot). And I do get that. Skies is significantly more polished and easier to play and less grindy than Sea. But. I still felt an incredibly tangible sense of loss regardless.

And the thing of it is, the difference between the games also makes complete and perfect sense thematically in-universe. Because Skies is set in the High Wilderness, where the suns live. And the Suns, in the world of Fallen London/Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies, their light, is what provides the laws of reality. While the ‘Neath, explicitly, was beyond their rule. It lay in darkness. It literally lay beyond law, which includes physical law, the laws of time, the laws of physics, all of it. So of course it makes sense that the High Wilderness is more rigid and less inherently changeable and lawless than the ‘Neath, which is literally chaos incarnate.

It makes sense. It makes perfect sense. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Sunless Skies, it’s an incredible game. But I realised that I preferred the ‘Neath. I preferred Sunless Sea, grind and all.

And … thematically, too. Because the other thing of it is, in the games the central power you’re usually representing is Fallen London. It’s the Victorian British Empire, in strange gothic cosmic horror land. And to a large extent, Sunless Skies represented a victory for imperial London, where Sunless Sea defiantly did not.

Because, in Sunless Sea, the map always changed. Even explored, even colonised, the map resisted control and demanded continuous exploration. The ‘Neath refused imperial control on a fundamental, mechanical level. You cannot permanently map the ‘Neath. It physically changes. Fallen London had to perpetually keep sending out explorer captains just to keep updating where their ports and colonies now are. Several parts of the map resisted in other ways, too. Irem, which changes it’s location in time as well as space. The Iron Republic, where the laws of the reality are even more broken than they are in the general ‘Neath, and your armies can turn into a flock of ravenous mushrooms on disembarking, or walk off the gangplank only to see a different version of themselves walking back on, or other assorted weirdness.

The ‘Neath would not stay mapped. It would not stay colonised. It would not stay controlled.

Whereas the High Wilderness, by contrast, did. Because your maps stayed filled. The Wilderness stayed explored. In the High Wilderness, the thing stopping the expansion of Empire was the existence and control of other Empires, the Empires of the various Suns, where reality in several places was more rigidly controlled. Even on the map where their sun was dead, Fallen London just moved in. Even in the part of the map where everything is dark and reality has broken down, there’s still a Sun, it’s just allowing reality to break down to the degree it can. But the map stays filled. The world stays discovered.

Sunless Skies is not a game of exploration, it’s a game of Empire. But Sunless Sea …

Sunless Sea is the closest thing I’ve ever experienced in a game to a raw mechanical continuous sensation of discovery. Exploration. Now, it didn’t do so perfectly. It was clunky, and grindy, and for too many players it was grindy to the point that they couldn’t enjoy the sense of exploration, because the cost of restarting and retracing steps was just too high. And it also … the ‘Neath moved, yes, but it moved according to the limits of the system. The landmasses around the edges stayed the same every time, so you always knew where at least some ports were going to be, and even the islands moved in strips, kind of like a rubiks cube, so you did kind of have a sense of what ports would be in what quadrant, even if not in what particular order. It had limits.

But the sensation of that blank, shrouded map. The knowledge that no Empire could ever permanently fill it in. The knowledge that London would never fully control it. That the map would always have blank spots. That explorers would always be necessary. That there would always be something beyond our knowledge and possibly our comprehension.

That was, if you’ll pardon me, one hell of a thing.

And that’s … that’s what I’ve been looking for, on a mechanical level, in games. That sensation of a map to be filled in, a map that will resist being filled in, a map that will both reward and resist you attempting to fill it. The knowledge that there are things to be discovered and interacted with. That there are other places and other peoples and other wonders and other horrors out there to be discovered, and that the discovery of them will have consequences, and the knowledge that you cannot control what those consequences will be.

I want a world that exists not to be fought or controlled, but to be explored. I want a game about mapmakers. I want a game where exploration is the thing primarily and mechanically and thematically rewarded.

This was the thing I was most excited for, and most disappointed by, when it came to the Spelljammer books for D&D 5e. The Astral Sea was the most incredibly promising and exciting setting I’ve heard of in ages, a space for potentially limitless exploration, but there was nothing in those books about it. They offered nothing, no hints, no starting point, no setting. They gave you nothing to explore, nothing to interact with. Just a void with nothing in it. And, yes, I’ve been realising that D&D potentially isn’t a system that rewards exploration really in general. It’s a combat focused system, for all the wonders that various settings put forward. I am actually somewhat grateful for the OGL debate for prompting people like The Real John Wick above to show off some of the rest of what’s out there, so I can explore more options and see if there’s something …

Well. Something that feels like Sunless Sea out there. That black map, waiting to be uncovered, and secretly promising never to let you fully manage it.

I’ll be sure to browse his channel and others to see what I can see. Heh.

(Also, yes, I’m absolutely accepting recommendations for this)

[trentreznorfanboy]

part 2 of the cool interview, and some more pics :>

“Pro-file: Nailing a New Look” pt 2

Q&A with Trent Reznor and Rob Shriden about All That Could Have Been

By Mathew Honen for Macworld on February 1st, 2002

This is a continuation of my previous post, the rest of the interview, and some pictures to go along. I enjoyed reading this interview, they talk about something I don’t see a lot, I hope you enjoy.

Q: What was the experience of using DVD Studio Pro like?

Sheridan: At one point during the set, there are these three giant video screens that come down behind the band and project these incredible videos that Bill Viola [did for us]. During that portion of the set on the DVD, it's cutting between wide and tight shots and shots of Trent singing. But because these screens were so amazing looking, we thought it would be great to be able to switch between an angle where you could just watch the screen and then back to the cut showing the band playing.

Reznor: There some extra things in there that we shouldn't get into too much because over time they'll be revealed. But there are a lot of little hacks into the OS of the DVD, menus that you think pop up differently than they did the last time, to try and make the whole experience immersive. It was fun to be able to see what you could do with the medium and actually do it.

Q: Didn't you record Pretty Hate Machine on a Mac?

Reznor: Yeah, I've had a Mac since the very first one. I was also using a Commodore 64 for MIDI. At the time of Pretty Hate Machine, I had a Mac Plus. I did all the sequencing of that record on that. With Broken, Studio Vision had come out. That was the first marriage of MIDI and digital audio, and that forever changed the way I was going to record. Now that it's gone from recording everything on tape with a few things on the computer to recording everything on the computer, it's really changed the roles of a lot of people in the studio. The programmer's job is much more the engineer now. All the engineers now have to know Pro Tools.

Q: After providing the music for Quake, are you scoring any more games?

Reznor: I've been discussing things with Id Software for Doom III. It's not formalized at this point, but it's something I really want to do. When I did Quake, we were still questioning if the audio was going to be streamed off of CD, which if it wasn't was incredibly limiting. But with as interactive as things are now, and as immersive as the engine they've been working on is graphically, and some of the program is so moody; it's like scoring a film. Yet it's much more intense than a film because it doesn't always go the same way, it has to be interactive. Plus the mood of the game is so dark and evil, it's interesting to me.

Q: What kind of rig do you have in your studio?

Reznor: I set this up several years ago to Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar. It's an SSL analog big console, and we've moved away from two 48-track analog tape to everything being recorded on hard disk. We have 72 tracks of in-and-out ProTools hardware. The main computer in there right now is an 867MHz G4 with 1GB of RAM and several fast SCSI cards. We still use SCSI drives. We have a few of them laying around to always have at least two 36GBs online at all times, and we have a big tape backup system that backs us up every night. We have a secondary Mac in the control room as well that we use for software synthesis and running through plug-ins in real time. I think the coolest thing that's happened in the last few years is with synthesizers going virtual. That's why we have another Mac that's just up to run things in real time, running Reason or Reactor, or a number of software samplers like Battery or Absynth. Reason is from Propellerhead--it's spectacular. There's a lot of gear just being reduced to a PowerBook.

Q: Do you have a Titanium PowerBook?

Reznor: I'm about to as soon as I can get Apple to give me one. In the meantime I've got a gasoline-powered 500MHz G3.

[kkb385thurs1-3team1]

Week 5 Check in Video: Ideation, Empathy, Scenarios Transcript: Welcome back, this is the second check in video for Group 1, from the Thursday 3-5pm KKB385 class. In a follow up from last week's research, we will continue discussing our progress so far and reflect on our initial brainstorming session as we delve into the first stage of developing the project.

By using a flowchart found on the week 5 module on canvas, we rolled for a randomised variety of conditions for a scenario, in order to get our creative juices flowing and ascertain the direction in which we wanted to follow for the assessment piece.

In our first attempt at using the flowchart, we received a scenario that challenged us to conceptualise an idea of emotional engagement and physical interaction that would have a broad impact on an international audience. This prompted the idea of a MoB storytelling exhibit surrounding immigration in which the attendant would interact with physical stimuli, giving them the opportunity to walk in their footsteps and understand their story and struggle on a deeper level. The main idea is that this kind of story evokes such raw emotion from the storyteller and from the audience from a deeply sympathetic and universally human experience.

In our second scenario, we were presented again with a tangible idea, but one that incorporated digital elements and collaboration. We then came up with an AR based storytelling app that involves the attendant with props and prompts as well as collaborative painting and photo collaging. We also decided to incorporate gamification, encouraging the attendants to earn points from attending and interacting with Mob, as well as inviting friends and family through the application as well. 

Our third and final prompt gave us a family friendly, educational scenario that would engage attendants through visual mediums. We conceptualised a more child appeasing idea of connecting people to MoB, involving interactive puzzles and props, as well as art activities and family games to bring together different generations. We also discussed the ideas of school excursions and live exhibits such as music performances to represent history and evolution and how much we’ve developed through different time periods.

--End Transcript--

[lyd-jms-lwrs]

Heads and Three Tales - Foundation Art and Design Final Project 2022

This is the story of my journey with this art project and how I learned to love my art. Enjoy.

PROPOSAL

Something I can say with a lot of confidence about what I have learnt on this course is that art is not that scary. I had a pretty traumatic experience during my art a-level, so much so that I became utterly terrified of art. It was only during the 2020 lockdown when I, and like a lot of other people, started enjoying old passions again and started to rekindle old fires within us. I took a year out to let the fire keep growing, and it did very slowly. I would say at this point it has become a giant bonfire. My original plan was to take two years out but I have a feeling if I did that, then my fire would still be relatively small. This course definitely threw gas onto the flames and I am very grateful for it.

This course has helped me gain interests in mediums that I didn't even know that I had, for example like lino printing. I had only done lino printing once during my first year of a-level and it was taught very differently (they never mentioned the lino needed to be warm for it to work). I also realised how much I enjoy the interactive route with my work – the more interactive the better. In past projects, I have noticed that I stick to a medium that I am comfortable in, my GCSE was practically only digital art that I had printed out and stuck in a book. I did that because it was what I was most comfortable with at the time. I don’t like surprises and I don’t like not having control – that's why other mediums scared me. But now, the idea of using multiple mediums only fills me with excitement.

When brainstorming this project, my first thought was immediately interactive again. I think since I want to make interactive stories in the future, I am always drawn to the idea. However, instead of doing a story again, I took a step back and looked at my other interests, one of them being games, the digital kind and the not digital kind. Since one of my interests is character design and it is something I enjoy doing in my spare time as well, I wanted to design three characters for this game that I wanted to create. Obviously, I do not have enough time to create a fully playable video game but I thought back to games I enjoyed taking part in and one that kept coming up in my mind was the choose-your-own-adventure book Romeo and/or Juliet. In this book, you have to turn to pages depending on the options that you choose and it is one of the best books I own. But, again I ran into the problem of not having enough time to write a full length choose your own adventure book, so I went back to the drawing board. I went back to the drawing board many times and came to the conclusion that a book format would be the best option. The original plan was to do a big flow chart, but due to me not researching how much space I would get at this exhibition, I had to do an emergency change to a book format. Also, when I starting typing my stories, I realised that if I wanted to do a flow chart, I would have had to remove nearly all detail and that would have just made the whole thing underwhelming. So, book it is!

I got my format, but now I need to get my concept. What is it going to be this time? I thought back to my last project which has a fantasy and mystery aspect to it and knew that I would be safe should I decide to take that route again. I would be safe but I also think that I would be bored. I began thinking about stuff that had happened recently in the world, or what is going to happen to the world and came to the conclusion that I was going to make an apocalypse themed project. Three apocalypses, three stories, your choices. I wanted to add an aspect of reality to this project, so two of my apocalypses are based around events that could actually happen one day: a nuclear apocalypse and a plague apocalypse. The third apocalypse will be a fantasy themed one.

I felt the need to include a fantasy themed apocalypse to make sure that it is not taken completely seriously. It is just a game after all. And people like zombie games! Think to Last of Us (2013) by Naughty Dog games has won many awards. However, like Last of Us I did not only want to focus on the zombie aspect of it all – that would just be boring to me. So, that is where the idea of creating characters that would stick with you came into play. I wanted to focus on the relationship you build with these characters in this dire situations and how that can change people.

The artists that I will be researching would be down the war art path, like Langlands and Bell who created the House of bin Laden interactive piece. There is also the book Unofficial War Artist by Peter Kennard. That book is very interesting since it used collages as the medium – a very different medium to what I originally planned but am definitely interested in incorporating. I also looked at choose-your-own-adventure video games, specifically ones that had choices that could affect the whole story instead of one character. Games like Until Dawn and Life is Strange. I also liked the idea of having to drive readers into a corner like how they do in these games – they force you to make decisions you don’t really want to make and that’s what makes them stand out.

The problems that I encountered weren’t severe but they did cause a couple hours of extreme stress. My teacher’s reaction did not help but it’s ok because I did it. The first problem was that everyone I explained my idea to, did not really understand what this would look like. It was only until I stood up and used a wall to explain how this would look (which turned out to be pointless because I changed the way that I would format this project anyway but it was something to learn from)

One of the big problems was to do with my original format. I was drawn to do a flow chart because I had convinced myself that it would be easier – just a few bubbles of text and a simple story line, how hard could this possibly be? Well, it turns out, extremely hard. I had ran into a problem when I has been told how much space I was allowed for my project and it was a lot smaller than I would have wanted. I was then told that I could use some wall space and I thought that that had solved my problem and I went about my day. However, the problem came crashing down on me again when I had started writing later that evening. I already had 1,500+ words in my document and I had only just met Box (I wrote her story first). In that moment I knew that I had to change my plan. If I wanted to stick to a flow chart then I would have had to cut out about 99% of the details and it would be so disappointing. I had called my older sister in panic and asked what to do. I knew what I needed to do, I was just incredibly intimidated by it. Fortunately, I decided it would be best to do the book format instead.

All of the other problems I encountered I could easily fix such as time management and how to use inDesign. Luckily, I used to play around on the Adobe programs a lot so I can easily figure out how to use them. As for time management, I just decided to be more strict on myself. No social media, no video games, get up at a reasonable time and take breaks when necessary. It surprised me every time how much work I can actually do if I just don’t let myself get distracted.

Probably the most important skill that I need to learn to be able to complete this FMP is time keeping. Yes, I have to do a number of things for this project to work but I am confident that I can bring this to life, provided I use my time well. My project will be a mix of mediums since I want to show a variation of techniques that I have learned on this course. I will use my passion for character design to bring the three main characters into existence, but I will need to use a mix of mediums to fully bring them to life. My work will be displayed as a big wall piece, separated into three sections, each showing a different story. I want the viewer to feel like they can pick whichever story they want. I want them to experience the fun of the game but also acknowledge the reality of the stories – this could happen to our world. Around the three sections, I wanted to add objects to create a sort of environment for the viewer to step into. For example, in the fantasy apocalypse, the viewer might encounter the antagonist – a psycho killer who wears a big, vintage dress and wears a cardboard box on her head who also happens to have a fascination for knifes.The viewer will know that she is the antagonist because around the area where her game is, there will be printed wanted posters of her. This is to try and bring some of the world to the exhibition.To evaluate this project and to keep track of what I have done, I will keep a reflective journal. I noticed that this helped a lot during this course and I could see how my opinions changed on certain topics as the weeks went on. I think feedback from teachers and fellow students would also help me develop this project.

[interact-if]

Day 8 of the interviews! Introducing the lovely Silvia 💙

Silvia, author of Echoes

Latino Heritage Month Featured Author

What do you remember?

You wake up in a strange house, your mind a haze of confusion. You need  answers, and to find them, you must explore. But you don’t have much time, and there is more than one mystery waiting for you.

Can you find the answers you need? Can you uncover the house’s secrets, and your own?

Echoes Demo | Read more [here]

Tags: mystery, horror

(INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT UNDER THE CUT!)

Q1: So, tell us a little bit about the projects you’re working on!

My main project at the moment is Echoes, and I would describe it mainly as a mystery with a dash of horror. The main character wakes up in an unknown house with no memory of anything—how they got there, who they are. It’s up to the player to explore the house and find answers, though the answers they find might end up being different depending on what they do.The premise itself is quite simple and that’s on purpose—Echoes is kind of my way of dipping my toes into this medium, figuring out the mechanics and seeing how much I can do with it.

There are a few things I’m trying to achieve, though, leaning into an eerie sort of atmosphere. It’s (hopefully) got this kind of oppressive, overwhelming feeling that comes with not knowing, that comes when little things are just off enough that they’re unsettling but, at the same time, you question your perception of them. 

And it’s also a story about choosing what you want to know, and what you do with that knowledge. You might not be able to learn everything about everything in one go, or you might choose to refuse certain knowledge. You might also get to the end and decide not knowing would have been the better choice (or you might not). I think if I were to point to two main sources of inspiration for it that will hopefully give people an idea of the vibe I’m going for, then Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves and the video game The Stanley Parable are the big ones.

I also have a secondary project that is in the very early, brainstorming/planning stage right now, just a preliminary idea. It doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s a fantasy/romance story and far more driven by character interactions; the basic premise can be summarized as “soulmates but deconstructed”, because that’s a trope that I rarely see done the way I like.

Q2: What excites you most about using interactive fiction? What are some of the biggest challenges?

God, I love the variation. As a reader/player, I love going back to a game or story and seeing how different choices affect the outcome of things, and I love being able to do that as a writer as well. I like messing with the reader, too—I think that will become evident in Echoes—and interactive fiction has this quality where you have the expectations of a regular novel (plus the expectations of the genre) but there is absolutely nothing constraining you to them, you can do whatever you want. So that’s extremely exciting. I also really enjoy learning about the coding aspect of it, and honestly Echoes came to life as a coding experiment first, a story second.

In terms of challenges, I’m a very analytical thinker, and I think in details first. So, for me, a lot of that comes in that I usually think “oh, that would be a cool mechanic to implement” or “I wonder how I could add this specific interaction” and then I have to follow that train of thought back to how that fits into a story. Echoes is a little bit of that; the initial concept went through a few iterations until I settled on what it is right now (and it’s still evolving).

Insecurity is also a hurdle, as I think is the case for most people with any creative project. I think there are a few conventions in the IF scene in particular that people (both authors and readers) have internalized as rules, as the kind of thing you should do with your story because it’s what the community at large expects. To be candid for a moment, there is a part of me that desperately wants to play into that.

I think we all crave recognition in some form, and what easier way to get it? So it’s a constant push and pull of… will people hate this thing, will people simply ignore it, should I be doing something else? Do I want to be doing something else? Do I want to be doing this? But we move forward.

Q3: What has been something in your project you’ve had to do a weird amount of research for?

Libraries and filing systems. I won’t say why because it’s spoilers at the moment, but… yeah.

Q4: Which of your characters is most like you? How?

Echoes is interesting to me in this sense because it’s definitely a solitary experience for the player and the main character. The player character goes through the journey alone, and they are very much a set character rather than someone the reader can customize to their heart’s content—though the extent to which that is true only becomes clear later on.

I do have a couple of characters in my other project that definitely have more than a few traits I’ve lifted from myself—you won’t know them yet (for a while, probably), but there is a character whose name is Vila, a perfectionistic mage that I deeply relate to.

Q5: Does your heritage influence your characters as you create them? (How? Why or why not?)

I think, for me, it mostly influences the themes I like to write about. It’s not always intentional, but there are certain things that are very much recurring in my writing and for my characters: permanence and transience, belonging, the experience of leaving people and places behind.

Characters who deal with that sort of thing from all sorts of angles. I’m an immigrant; I’ve had to relocate several times, with all the uprooting that comes with that, and I’ve seen the experience happen over and over again in people around me. 

While I have never written explicitly about that experience, the consciousness of it permeates nearly everything I write. Echoes touches on that from a different angle, in an almost metaphorical way (though that wasn’t really the intent of it). The character I mentioned before, Vila, has a lot of that in them as well.

Another thing is that I am always, always thinking about language. I’m very intentional about it, because I deal with language and code-switching and the reality of being a non-native speaker of my main language, daily. I’ve honestly grown to think of my being a non-native speaker of English as a positive, a sort of added value when it comes to my writing, and I hope to convey that feeling to others too.

Q6: What is something you love to see in interactive fiction?

Mechanically? Playing around with the interface and how the story is presented to the reader, definitely. I think text-based interactive fiction is in a very privileged position in terms of how immersed the reader/player can become in the narrative—both in terms of character identification and in terms of not being constrained by the format in the way a physical/traditional book would be.

So I truly adore anything that integrates gameplay elements into the story and serves to heighten that immersion. I’m fascinated by the idea of having the reader directly experience (at least some of) what the character experiences; from little things like fake choices to convey the inevitability of an outcome, to glitching text, to anything that involves you as the player in a bigger capacity than just a reader. I just think it’s fun.

Mechanics aside, it’s wonderful to see how much interactive fiction can feel like a way to experience stories that just wouldn’t get told at all in more massive media. People, authors have the chance to incorporate their own experiences in the stories they’re telling and share that with others.

Q7: Any advice to give?

I do always feel a little weird giving advice, but let’s push through that feeling. If you’re writing, or thinking about writing, not just IF but for anything that has a dedicated community—I think taking a moment to self-reflect and figure out what you’re doing for yourself and what (if anything) you’re doing because you feel it’s expected of you can only be beneficial.

I do have something, though, specifically for writers who are non-native speakers of English: you don’t have to write like a native speaker. You really, really don’t. It’s so easy to feel insecure about it, I know that, but please believe me when I say we have a kind of perspective that adds to, not detracts from, our use of the language. Native speakers wouldn’t be able to do what we do, and that’s something to be proud of.

[screentones-webcomicresources]

Webcomics are roughly what it says on the tin: comics, which are posted on the web! So, are they just like comics in print, except online instead? Kind of! There are a lot of comics online which are formatted very similarly to print comics, and the reasons for this are varied. Sometimes it’s because the creator intends to print them later, and it makes this process easier if the pages are already laid out appropriately. Sometimes it’s just because that is the type of comic they enjoy reading, and which they’re inspired by.

So they’re like webtoons?

Yes and no. Webtoon is a brand name-- a very popular brand, but just as not every can of soda is a coke, not all webcomics are webtoons, although arguably all webtoons are webcomics. They are, after all, sequentially illustrated and use many narrative conventions associated with comics (speech bubbles, panels, etc), and are published online.

But that’s far from the only type of webcomic out there! In the earliest days of webcomics, formats tended to be constrained by users’ bandwidth and limited monitor sizes, so simple art and layouts were a must, as well as small file sizes. But as technology improved and more people started reading and creating webcomics, people started to experiment and play with some of the options that digital formats have to offer. (In particular, use of animation, or of interactive elements such as components of the page that appear or change when a user hovers their mouse over a part of the graphic.)

During the run of the popular webcomic Homestuck, there were a number of updates whose content consisted of full-on video games within the browser screen, which would allow readers to use keyboard commands and mouse movements to control a sprite character and interact with an environment within the browser window, including dialogue trees with other characters, events, and so on. These were mainly coded in Adobe Flash, which has since ceased to be supported, making these games difficult to archive in playable form, but similar effects can be achieved with Javascript, as the popular stick-figure strip comic XKCD has used.

What do webcomics look like? The style and format of many early webcomics were inspired by newspaper strips, and the daily posting schedule of a webcomic is a close approximation to the way in which newspaper serials were historically published, making it an easy fit. Some of the first webcomics to become widely read utilized this format, such as Penny Arcade. Many of these strip comics are comedy-centric, with each update being a new joke; sometimes, but not always, featuring a central cast of characters. Some comics used the format to branch out into longer ongoing stories, occasionally reaching beyond the comedy genre into fantasy or drama storylines, building dedicated and passionate fan bases as they went.

As the medium became more widely known, more and more different styles and approaches began to appear. For every genre or style of physical comic or graphic novel, there are now webcomics utilizing similar storytelling approaches. Some are inspired by western comic books; by bande dessinee or other European books; photo collages (fumetti), or by manga.

Some webcomics will release a single horizontal row of 3-4 panels in an update. Some may release a full page with 6-10 panels or more, filled with painstaking detail, Some may update with animations, or a single panel at a time almost like a storyboard. And still others use the infinite canvas of the digital screen to create a vertical scroll for the reader to read, which can contain the equivalent amount of content as 2-10 ‘standard’ comic book pages.

What kind of content or themes do webcomics contain? 

Hoo boy everything under the sun, huh

Because of the nature of webcomics being without the need of a traditional publisher, the content created has an enormous range in artistic freedom. Many webcomics are more intimate, passion projects that take advantage of the flexibility provided without boundaries, making it an excellent outlet for anyone to create to their heart's content. The stories vary from a traditional comic style approach with a long running cast and story, auto-bios from the artist's experience, gag strips, animated games, and much more!

So, ultimately:

They are what they are! Webcomics are in the name, comics published on the web. Varying in artistic quality, format, content, and style, this medium of comic has a diverse range of stories and possibilities. With a large majority free to read, webcomics are both accessible and abundant!

[lucemferto]

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT PH1LZA (or Why Philza is a Victim of Narrative Circumstance)

Heyo! Per request I am posting the script to my video of the same name here on tumblr. I must warn you that just reading the script will probably not give you the full experience, so I would encourage you to watch the video (linked above).

There might also still be a lot of grammatical errors in the text, because I don’t proofread.

Intro

LAST TIME ON LUCEM FERTO

Okay, so! I don’t want this to turn into a reaction channel OR a Dream SMP channel for that matter! [echo]

Well, I lied.

[Intro to “Luc is pretentious about the funny blockmen. Episode 2”]

I swear, I’m working on other stuff. It’s just that my dumb lizard brain has only capacity for one interest at a time!

So, something you might not know about me, is that I am on tumblr – who am I kidding, most of you will know me from tumblr. Before starting this whole YouTube thing, I thought that website died years ago – but as per usual reality proves me wrong. I’m also on Twitter and Reddit, but I get the most engagement on tumblr – by far! – and I need those sweet, sweet numbers for the serotonin!

Anyways, one of my favourite past-times on tumblr is to razz Philza Hardcore Minecraft – that’s his full name – for being a frankly awful father [clicking away] – wait, wait, no! Philza fans, this isn’t a hit piece on him, I promise! Please come back!

This is video is meant to be a companion piece to my previous video about Technoblade and the Doomsday event – you can tell by the shared nomenclature – so you should probably watch that one before you proceed. Unless you don’t want to, which is also perfectly understandable.

DISCLAIMER: This video is mostly about the character Philza plays on the Dream SMP. Whenever I talk about the content creator Philza, I will say so properly. Also, Spoiler Warning for Dream SMP Season 2.

… What is that? You’re wondering what the Dream SMP is? Well, if you had just watched the other video like I told you to do, you would know, because I explained it pretty well there. But in case you don’t know, here’s the cliff notes.

Dream SMP is the hottest New Media Series on Twitch right now! It has it all: gaslighting, child soldiers, Machiavellian political intrigue, Hamilton roleplay, desecration of the dead, shounen protagonists, SO! MUCH! AMNESIA! Filicide, furries, a red egg that’s definitely homophobic and teenagers inventing nuclear warfare. And it’s all done in Minecraft – yes, the funny block game where the only way to emote is to crouch.

And you say the perfect brief doesn’t exist!

Now, you might be wondering, why do I want to talk about this? Well, it’s because Content Creator Philza is one of least controversial internet personalities that I can think of. That man exudes pure comfort. So, it’s just very, very amusing to me that his character became one of the most controversial figures on the SMP, only outshone by Tommy and Technoblade.

And it’s not just amusing, it’s also extremely interesting! I want to dig deep to uncover and discuss the dynamics behind why that is. How did it come to this point? How did a man who appears genuinely so pleasant create a character that inspires so much discourse!

Now, if you watched that Technoblade video – like I told you to twice now! – you might know, that I am the resident character analyses hater of fandom! And that impression is false and slanderous! Don’t tell other people that I hate character analyses! I love them!

It’s just that, in the Dream SMP in particular, there is an abundance of character analyses! Every streamer has at least two very good essays written about them, exploring every possible angle to view their characters and backgrounds and everything. All I’m saying is: I don’t have anything to add on that front.

So, instead I want to pursue a different approach – something, that I feel is a bit underrepresented in the fandom! And I’m not just talking narrative analysis – that’s right, this episode we’re going even more pretentious! – I’m talking Transtextual Analysis!

Now, what is Transtextuality? Well, unfortunately it has very little to do with actual Trans people – #transrights, just in case that wasn’t obvious – but instead describes a mode of analysis with which to put – to quote French literary theorist Gérard Genette – “the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts”.

Basically, you know how the L’Manburg War of Independence heavily quotes and borrows from the hit musical Hamilton? That’s transtextuality! A lot of the analyses surrounding how Tommy mirrors the Greek hero Theseus, who was invoked by Technoblade multiple times in the series, are already doing transtextual analysis! So, it’s really not something that’s new to the Dream SMP fandom.

But how does this apply to Philza and how he is looked at and judged by his parental skills? Well, there are multiple forms of transtextuality, two of which we will discuss today.

But before we continue, I gotta do that annoying YouTuber thing. I know these videos don’t look like much, but I spend a really long time making them. I work fulltime and I try my best to keep up, but sometimes I can’t. So please, like, subscribe, comment to give me some algorithm juice – I really need it – and most importantly share it! Share it with your friends, share it with your family – I’m sure Grandma is very interested in what I have to say about Philza Minecraft.

And I’m trying to be better! If I sound at all different for this video, it’s because I finally bought a new pop filter, so I can hit my plosives without it sounding like there’s a thunderstorm in my room. I hope it makes a difference; it was a very cheap pop filter, so maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it sounds worse – that would be bad!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, CHILD NEGLEGT!

 Intertextuality: Why is Dadza?

You know what’s really interesting about the Dream SMP – aside from, you know, most things about it? Very few of the characters have concrete, fleshed-out backstories – and that’s pretty weird! In no other medium or genre could you get away with something like that – at least for long-form storytelling!

So, how does Dream SMP get away with this? Well, it’s because every character on the Dream SMP is basically a self-insert – and I don’t mean that in the “This character is based on me”-kinda way, but in the “This character, for all intents and purposes, is me!”-way. This, like many things that are fascinating about the Dream SMP, is owed to the fact that this series didn’t start off as a continuous drama – it started off as a Let’s Play.

And while we can talk about how someone’s on-camera/on-mic persona is in some ways a character, it’s still miles off of being an actual, fully-realized, separate character in a storyline.

This is where Intertextuality comes in.

Intertextuality is a subset of Transtextuality. It describes how the hypertext, which is the text, you’re currently engaged with, uses another text, the hypotext, to supplement itself. The interconnection the hypertext establishes with the hypotext, through stuff like allusion for example, uh-hum [Hamilton], can colour how an audience interprets the hypertext. Basically, Hamilton and Theseus are the hypotexts; the Dream SMP is the hypertext.

So, what does this have to do with backstory? Simple: The backstories of the characters in the Dream SMP consist basically of nothing but intertextual references. Through intertextuality their content effectively substitutes their character’s backstory.

You can see it everywhere. Wilbur’s and Schlatt’s relationship and rivalry is hugely enriched, if you are aware of their shared history like SMPLive, for example – I think anyway. I haven’t watched SMPLive, because … there’s only so many hours in the day and I cannot keep up with the Dream SMP and catch up on SMPLive and live a healthy life – which I already don’t do, so…

BadBoyHalo’s and Skeppy’s relationship, which has become the crux of the Crimson-Storyline of Seasons 2 and 3, is hugely supplemented if you know that they’re also very close as streamers and in real life.

Another great example of intertextuality is basically Technoblade’s entire deal. If you just look at him completely within the text of the Dream SMP and try to transplant his entrance to any other medium: It would be extremely weird! Like, he’s just this guy that comes in in the middle of a very climatic arc, no build-up, no explanation what his deal is, and he’s treated like he has always been there. In any other medium that just wouldn’t work – at least not without a flashback or some sort of exposition!

But because of stuff like Minecraft Mondays, the Potato Wars, his Duel against Dream and SMPEarth, we understand that he is a Big Deal!

Anyways, to bring all of this back to Philza Minecraft: What kind of hypotext informs how the audience sees his character? Well, this is where I will have to talk about SBI.

SBI is an acronym that stand for State Bank of India, the 43rd largest bank in the world and…

It also stands for Sleepy Bois Incorporated. Sleepy Bois Incorporated is a loose assembly of content creators, consisting of Philza, Wilbur Soot, TommyInnit and Technoblade. It is most well-known for its very endearing family dynamic – a dynamic that is frequently acknowledged and played up by the creators involved. Tommy is the youngest brother, Wilbur and Techno are the two older brothers and Philza is of course the dad. And when I say, it’s played up, I really mean it! Wilbur seems to be especially enamoured with the idea and leaves no opportunity untaken to bring it up – which we will come back to.

And I’m not saying that they’re faking this and this is somehow an act. While I know none of these people personally, it appears to me, that this is genuinely how they interact – if a little exaggerated for the streaming experience. Even when they’re not consciously playing into the family dynamic, their interactions still very much lend themselves to that interpretation by the viewers.

Philza especially just radiates Dad-Friend energy – so much so that it has become a huge part of his brand identity – yay, I can bring that back (check out my Christmas video if you want to hear me ramble about that). The nickname Dadza stuck even before SBI was a thing.

So, even if we completely disregard SBI – which we shouldn’t for reasons I’ll get back to – Philza has cultivated an image of strong paternal guidance. He is, in my opinion completely deservedly, regarded very positively. He is highly respected and in turn seen as a voice of reason.

All of this would eventually inform the hypotext of the character Philza within Dream SMP.

 Interlude: Before Dadza & November 16th

Okay, so now we have established that a) Dream SMP heavily hinges on intertextual readings by the audience to supplement character backstory and b) that Philza’s entire deal is that he’s the dad-friend – more specifically that he’s the dad of SBI (not the bank). I think you know where this is going.

So, yeah, ever since it was on the table that Philza could join the Dream SMP, it was immediately assumed that he would take on the paternal guardian role all these traumatized people on that server so desperately needed – and with good reason! Like I said before, the audience at this point was trained to take intertextual interpretations as basically canon or at the very least canon-adjacent.

I want to emphasize that this is most likely not done deliberately. I’m sure content creators Wilbur and Philza didn’t sit there and said: “Yes! We will rely entirely on the audience’s inclination to interpret our characters intertextually to define character Philza!”. Like, obviously that did not happen.

But it’s also important to remember that unlike with traditional media and the fanbases cultivated there, the separation between the Dream SMP and its audience is almost non-existent – and purposely so. The story events are streamed live, Chats are acknowledged in canon and even outside of livestreams creators are extremely involved with the fandom. So, the weight of fan-expectations is equally amplified and will more likely be incorporated into the writing process. Case in point:

[Wilbur “I miss Philza”/Philza about Wilbur]

During Wilbur’s villain arc, even before his official involvement, Philza became a prevalent point of discussion. The hope that he would be the one to snap Wilbur out of his downward spiral was not only wish-fulfilment on behalf of the fans; it also very much played off of the intertextual reading of the SBI-dynamic in relation to the Dream SMP.

Of course, this still doesn’t make Philza and Wilbur canonically blood-related – but it definitely used the “paternal”-dynamic of SBI to build-up tension and drama.

And that ultimately brings us to November 16th. The Grand Finale of Season 1 and Philza’s first canonical appearance on the SMP.

Now, for this I want to pull back from the transtextual analysis and talk about simply narrative analysis: What is Philza’s narrative purpose on November 16th?

Philza serves as the last threshold on Wilbur’s Villain’s Journey – to appropriate Vogler’s version of the monomyth for a minute here – he is what Vogler calls the “Threshold Guardian”. He is the last enemy the Hero faces before completing his quest – in this particular case Wilbur’s quest is to blow up L’Manberg. Multiple people have at this point tried to dissuade him from this course of action: Tommy, Quackity, Niki and others. So how come this Philza moment is not redundant in terms of dynamics compared to these prior scenes?

Well, it’s through our intertextual understanding of Wilbur’s and Phil’s relationship. Because Philza does not just occupy the role of the Threshold Guardian – he is also implicitly the Mentor. Before Phil there was no character in the storyline that held a higher position of moral authority than Wilbur – Dream and Schlatt, while at points more powerful in terms of actual authority, were never positioned by the narrative as Wilbur’s superiors in the same way as Wilbur was to Tommy, Tubbo or even Niki.

Before November 16th all challenges Wilbur faced were from people narratively subordinated to him. But that trend is broken with Phil. That is why he is the Threshold Guardian, why this confrontation is at the climax of Wilbur’s arc. Because Phil is the last thing tethering Wilbur to whatever morality he held before his villain arc; Phil is the last, moral obstacle Wilbur has to discard before gaining his reward.

And, just a quick sidenote, because I’ve seen it around the fandom a bunch: When I’m referring to Wilbur denouncing his morality, I’m using that in terms of narrative analysis. I’m mentioning it, because Wilbur’s character can very easily be read as mentally ill or neurodivergent and some people have – rightly! – pointed out that the excessive vilifying when talking about his character is … problematic, to say the least.

So, I just want to make clear, this isn’t a character analysis, I’m being purposely broad when talking about Wilbur and Phil.

In the end, Wilbur takes that final step and gets his “reward”: As his final request his mentor takes his life and vanquishes the evil – the dragon of Wilbur’s story slays the dragon of L’Manburg. It’s very Shakespearean in its tragedy – but beyond the larger theatrics it’s not really used to further characterize Phil – at least in the context of Season 1. There’s not a lot of focus on his characters internal conflict during November 16th.

Phil, like Techno, is very utilitarian in how content creator Wilbur writes him: He serves as a moment of hype; an obstacle Wilbur has to face; a participant in the tragic climax of Wilbur’s character and ultimately takes on his implicit and expected role of mentor and guiding figure to the rest of L’Manburg.

I think not a lot of people talk about how Philza does not join Technoblade during November 16th. He takes the side of L’Manburg – he fights against the withers and he joins Tommy, Tubbo and the others at the L’Mantree, thus framing him as loyal to the L’Manburg administration – even though Season 2 would make his loyalty to Techno central to his character. But more on that later.

What’s also important about November 16th is that this is the day when the general intertextual interpretation became canonized text.

[You’re my son!]

Wilbur is made Phil’s canonical, biological son. The intertextual interpretation of SBI as it pertains to these two characters on the SMP was completely reinforced by the narrative. Or to put it in Fandom terms: The headcanon became actual canon. At least when it came to Wilbur … but what about Philza’s “other” children?

Well, that leads to our second form of transtextual analysis:

 Paratextuality: Is Dadza?

These titles are just getting better and better.

The Paratext is defined as all those things in a published work that accompany the text. It comes in two forms: One of them is the Peritext, which are non-diegetic elements directly surrounding the text – like chapter titles, author’s notes, and stuff like that. Translated to the medium of the Dream SMP, it would be stuff like this:

[Examples]

And, trust me, I could make a whole separate video about how people on the SMP use their peritext as a tool for storytelling – I’m looking at you, Ranboo – but that’s not what we will talk about in the context of Dadza.

Instead, we will focus on the second form of Paratext, the Epitext, which consists of all authorial and editorial discussions taking place outside of the text. That’s stuff like interviews, private letters or J. K. Rowling’s Twitter Account – you know, before she decided to become a full-time asshole.

[Wilbur: Transrights]

After Season 1 ended, Wilbur indulged pretty heavily in providing epitext for the Dream SMP, something he had not done prior to November 16th. His paratextual additions ranged from the playful, like assigning DnD alignments to various SMP members, to the extremely impactful, like the whole three lives system!

You probably think, you know where this is going. Wilbur provided some epitext about how Tommy and Techno either are or are not biologically related to him … and I have to be honest I thought that too. But then I began looking into the impenetrable web that is the SBI-canon on the Dream SMP and found this!

[Ghostbur explains family]

So, it wasn’t paratext, it was just straight text. Said in character, in canon, without any implication that we the viewers should question this. The text of the SBI family dynamic was explicitly linked to Dream SMP-exclusive lore, namely Fundy being Wilbur’s and Sally the Salmon’s son. This is as clear as Philza’s anguished declaration on November 16th in establishing the intertext as text. And because Wilbur also had a very heavy hand in the discussion of paratext around that time, it gave his character’s words even more “canonical” weight. Metatextually speaking, this very much read like the author giving exposition through his character – exposition that we should understand as reliable.

And, by the way, before I continue, I need to give a huge, huge shoutout to kateis-cakeis on tumblr, I hope I pronounced that right, who was just so quick in providing me with these crucial clips. Without him I would have looked for days because these people don’t archive their shit! And the Dream SMP Wiki was NO help, by the way! I love what you guys do, but stuff like this belongs in the Trivia section on characters’ pages!

Anyways, basically during the entirety of early Season 2 the SBI family dynamic was basically canon to the SMP. Sometimes it was only alluded implicitly, again letting the intertext fill out the rest.

[Philza clips]

But just as often it was just explicitly talked about – both in the text and in the paratext.

[Fundy clip/Wilbur “Twins” clip/Tommy clip]

So, I know what you’re thinking: “Why is this part called paratext, if the entire family tree is just textual”. Well, that last clip might give you a hint, as to what I will talk about. Notice how Tommy, one of the people most directly impacted by the canonization of SBI lore, is both unaware of and seems generally unenthused about it, to put it nicely? Well, that would soon turn out to be a much bigger deal than anyone could have imagined as he wasn’t the only one.

[Technoblade decanonizes SBI]

Yeah …

This happened on 20th of December. Regular viewers of this channel will remember that I put out a 90-second joke video, where I complain about this very development. And while I was mostly kidding around, the core idea is still true. The paratext provided by Technoblade and established text were in direct contradiction with one another – and that brought a lot of confusion into the fandom. Confusion, that would soon be followed by frustration.

Because Techno only decanonized himself as part of the SBI family dynamic – but what about Tommy and Tubbo, the latter of which was incorporated into the dynamic exclusively within the lore of the Dream SMP. Was this still canon or wasn’t it?

What followed was a muddled mess of contradictions, intertextual implications, text and paratext in conflict with each another. It was for the most part inscrutable to figure out how Tommy and Philza related to one another. I’ll spare you every comment made about this – mostly because I want to spare myself from looking for all of them.

In the end, the current status is that their familial relationship is … unclear. Philza said, again in paratext, that it’s ultimately up to the writers to decide, whether or not Tommy is his son … which, I personally think he and Tommy should be the ones to establish that, but I’ll come back to that later.

But why is all of this important anyway? Why would this ambiguity create such an uproar, such controversy – especially when it comes to Tommy’s character? What makes Tommy’s and Philza’s relationship such a target for discussion in the fandom?

Well … this is where we will have to talk about the storyline of Season 2.

Interlude II: Tommy’s Exile and Dadza in Season 2

Okay, Season 2. This is where the spoilers are, so I will just sneakily drop this again. It took me five seconds to google this gif and I will milk it for every penny it’s worth!

At the beginning of Season 2, Philza’s narrative role has not changed much from where Season 1 ended. He is in L’Manburg dispensing earthly wisdom, being a paternal figure to Fundy, Ghostbur and Tubbo, helping with the nation’s rebuilding efforts; just generally occupying the role of the mentor.

[clips]

And then came … the Exile. The Exile Arc took place between December 3rd and December 15th during Season 2 of the Dream SMP. It revolves around TommyInnit getting exiled from L’Manburg and slowly getting psychologically tortured and broken down by Dream. It’s a really great arc, at least in my opinion, that explores and deepens a lot of Tommy’s character relationships, whether that be Tommy and Dream, Tommy and Tubbo or Tommy and Ranboo. One relationship, however, is noticeably missing.

So, yeah, Philza spends basically the entirety of the exile doing pretty much nothing of consequence. And that’s not a problem specific to him – One big criticism I would levy against the Exile Arc is that a lot of characters are left spinning their wheels. Which is why we get zany stuff like El Rapids, Drywaters, Eret’s Knights of the Roundtable, Boomerville – anyone remember Boomerville, that was a thing for 5 seconds, wasn’t it? – basically a lot of storylines are started and then unceremoniously dropped. Now, I will talk more about this, when I make a video about Season 2 of the Dream SMP … in ten years, look forward to it.

In the case of Philza, this inaction was especially damning, because at this point it was still a considered canon that he was Tommy’s dad. So, the fans were left with a situation, where just a few weeks prior Philza was occupying a paternal role for Fundy and Ghostbur … but now, that his youngest son was in a very concerning predicament – to put it lightly – he was nowhere to be found.

So why is that?

Well, the most obvious answer is that Dream and Tommy didn’t write him into the storyline. We’ve seen that Tommy wasn’t particularly interested in exploring a familial relationship to Philza, at least at the time. And it would just not fit in with what Dream and Tommy tried to do with the Exile Arc: they wanted to tell the story of Tommy being isolated, completely under Dream’s mercy, slowly worn down and manipulated. If Philza had been constant presence for Tommy during that time, it would have definitely shifted the narrative focus. That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have done that, it’s just a matter of fact that they didn’t.

This also reveals another truth about content creator Philza’s character work, that I think is extremely crucial: He takes what the writers give him. Outside of a few choice moments, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in expanding or even solidifying his character on the SMP.

What I’m saying is that he is very go-with-the-flow: Wilbur wants to enact a Shakespearean tragedy? Philza’s up for it. Fundy wants him as a parental figure and mentor? Philza’s here for him. Tommy, conversely, doesn’t want him as a paternal presence, even though it would make sense for Philza’s character, as it was established so far, to be there? Philza will oblige.

The reason I’m mentioning this is because, while Tommy and Dream were unwilling to utilise Philza in their storyline, someone else was more than happy to. Which leads us back, like it always does, to everyone’s favourite Porky Pig-kinnie in a crown: Technoblade.

Technoblade and Philza, from everything I’ve seen of them, seem to be very good friends – and they share a lot of history even outside SBI. So, it’s commendable that they would collaborate on a storyline together.

A consequence of that, however, is that Philza’s narrative purpose shifts completely with very little transition. His entire character changes from being the Mentor-figure of L’Manberg to being pretty much exclusively defined as Technoblade’s ally; his man on the inside. It is a very sharp turn from the end of Season 1. Their relationship is once again informed via intertext – this time the Antarctic Empire on SMPEarth serves as the hypotext – but there isn’t a huge effort made to smoothly integrate that aspect of Philza’s character into the larger narrative framing around him.

How much the narrative utilisation of Philza has shifted can be very easily observed through the Butcher Army event on December 16th, a story event that I like less and less the more I think about. Here Philza is used to show just how corrupt and violent Tubbo’s administration has becomes. He is no longer the respected mentor, he is now the stand-in for the oppressed populace, similar to Niki’s role in Season 1. On a narrative level, he is here to prove a point.

If you’ve seen my Technoblade video, you know how I feel about … just that entire storyline, so I will not reiterate too much on it. I just want to make clear that I’m not principally against this development – if they wanted to truly explore Tubbo going down a dark path and getting corrupted by power, so much so that he would even treat the person who effectively raised him like a prisoner, I would be extremely here for it, I cannot stress that enough.

The problem I have is that it’s just so sloppily done. It is not coherent with how these characters behaved and, more importantly, how they were narratively framed prior to the Butcher Army event. Fundy gets one token line about Phil being his Grandfather – a far cry from the very emotionally complex relationship they had established at the beginning of Season 2 – and Phil then callously disowns him.

The major problem simply is that we don’t see how Philza changes from Mentor-figure to embittered, oppressed citizen. And there was enough time to build to that. During the entirety of Tommy’s exile Tubbo was pretty much spinning his wheels and Quackity and Fundy were opening up plot cul-de-sacs that didn’t end up going anywhere. This is time they could have spent on developing their relationship to Philza and the dark path they were going down – but again, Season 2 video.

There is not much to say on Philza’s narrative purpose and framing beyond the Butcher Army event. He remains pretty much exclusively Techno’s consigliere with his role as Mentor to L’Manburg a distant memory. He has some cute character moments with Ranboo, because content creator Philza is just big dad-energy whether he wants to or not, and whenever he and Ghostbur share a scene suddenly the narrative remembers that there are people other than Technoblade that should exist in Philza’s inner world. But aside from that, Philza’s storyline in Season 2 remains … pretty definitive is the nicest way I can put it.

Most importantly his relationship with Tommy continues to be completely unexplored – whether by chance or choice – and that combined with ever vaguer paratext leaves “Dadza” in a very peculiar situation.

 Conclusion: Is Dadza a Good Dadza?

So, the question to end all questions. The big, obnoxious text, that I will probably have put in the thumbnail – I haven’t made it yet, but I know myself. The honest answer is: I couldn’t tell you.

I have, in the past, been expounding the virtues of narrative analysis. That is because I feel that Narrative Analysis and Textual Analysis, like in this video, can provide certain tools that Character Analysis lacks. Often times I see people trying to get at a writing problem or query and getting frustrated because they’re not using the toolset, they need to figure out what they want to figure out.

But I’d be a hypocrite if I pretended like everything could be solved through the modes of analysis I prefer. And I think the Dadza-issue is exactly such a case.

I set out to explore why the Philza-Tommy-“Dadza”-relationship has become so controversial. It’s a combination of expectations build up through intertextual readings, that were partly canonized – something that is very common for the Dream SMP – conflicting pieces of paratext, which only serve to muddle the issue further and a text that is not only completely uninterested in actually exploring Tommy’s and Philza’s relationship – as it stands right now they might as well be strangers, narratively speaking – but also completely changes Philza’s narrative purpose as it relates to characters like Fundy or Tubbo about half-way through with little to no transition.

That is why I say, that Philza’s character is a victim of narrative circumstance. Because unwittingly, through all of these factors and decisions, there is not coherent reading of Philza that frames his parental skills in a particularly kind light.

The question of how we can judge Phil as a paternal figure ultimately falls within the purview of the character analysis – and that’s a very multifaceted issue, highly dependent on which POV you focus on and how you interpret the other characters in that POV’s periphery.

To put my cards on the table, I think that Philza is a very flawed father/father-figure – and I find that absolutely okay. Flaws are the spice of character building. He is not Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother – but he’s also definitely not Mufasa. If we were to read Philza as a paternal figure, then he would have made a lot of mistakes and decisions to the detriment of his “children” – least of all everything that happened on Doomsday.

But I also have sympathies for Philza fans who are tired of the Dad-Debate and would like to have his character judged independent from his relationship to Ghostbur, Fundy, Tubbo and Tommy.

Ultimately, to bring it all to a point, I’d like to end with saying, that I think that Philza, out of all the characters on the SMP, has the potential to be on of the most intriguing, multifaceted ones. There are all of these different patches of story, character moments and narrative and transtextual implications, that, if brought together, could create a beautiful tapestry of the character Philza.

You have his relationship with Techno, which holds the potential for so much emotional conflict and vulnerabilities, you have his time as mentor of L’Manburg, which is just criminally underused; the complex relationship between him and Ghostbur/Wilbur; and – for me, personally – most intriguingly this weird, almost uncomfortably distant non-relationship with Tommy. That last one is intriguing to me, because it contrasts just so much with our intertextual understanding of the characters and streaming personas – and it just holds the potential for so much conflict, so much drama, so much angst. Which I live for!

And, yes, I do believe that most of this is narrative happenstance, that this was largely not intended by Philza or really any of the writers. It’s just what happens when hybrid-roleplay-improv a long-running, livestreamed storyline in Minecraft.

But I want them to realize the potential they have on their hands, because it could – with barely any adjustments – turn Philza from a victim of narrative circumstance to a champion of it!

 Outro

Thank you so much for watching this video. Usually, I don’t record outros this standard, but after this beast of a video I felt it necessary. I hope that whether you’re a Philza fan or a Philza critical or just completely uninvolved in the whole thing, there is at least a little entertainment you could get from this.

I want to take this opportunity to say that my next few videos will probably not be Dream SMP related – a sentence which undoubtedly lost me a bunch of subs – simply because I don’t want to burn out on it. I genuinely enjoy watching the SMP and being exhausted by it would be something I wouldn’t want to force on myself.

But who knows what will happen? The Karl Jacobs video was something I did spur of the moment because the idea just came to me – so I can’t guarantee that the next video won’t be a three-minute joke about Purpled or whatever.

Anyway, my concrete plans for future Dream SMP videos are essays on Season 1 and Season 2 as well as one for Tales from the SMP.

Before that I have a longer video in the works, which I’ve already teased a bunch, so I hope it will finally be finished sometime. And I also may be working on something … eboys-related? Maybe. I’m not making any promises!

[subfunctions]

Since you’re talking narrative themes, do you have any thoughts on games with a straight forward story (HZD, TLOU) versus games that let you make choices and affect the ending of the game (Until Dawn, Detroit Becoming Human)? When do you think one version works over the other? It’s interesting to see people say when they want choices simply because they don’t like the story (like people who wanted to chose whether or not to kill Abby in TLOU2) when choice has never factored into it before. If say HFW suddenly let you have huge choices like whether to reveal the truth of the Faro Plague and the birth of their world to everyone or to hide it and keep them in ignorance m, that would feel out of nowhere.

Sometimes I really enjoy games with choices, but at the same time, I think choice-based RPGs have warped people's perceptions of video games. So people will think that every game needs choices or romance options, or that a game is less without them, when many of them simply don't require those options. I'm very content to just go along for the ride with a fully-formed protagonist, and I think it's insanely jarring to suddenly have to make choices for an established character.

A game where this works is Ghost of Tsushima, which has only one big choice at the end, and it's a good one. I knew what my choice would be pretty quickly, but that's only because I was thinking in terms of one particular theme among many. If I had been thinking from the POV of the protagonist, I would have struggled a lot more, and I could honestly see either choice playing out without going against his characterization, which speaks volumes to the care and nuance put into the game. It's an emotionally devastating moment that is completely earned via characterization and the sweeping themes present in the game, and it's an example of how to factor choice into a narrative-based game. (If you watch reaction videos for the ending, that moment evokes a near-universal "oh god oh fuck oh no, don't make me choose" feeling in the best possible way.)

A game where choice works to make the narrative incredibly strong is Prey (2017). I can't really get into it without huge spoilers, but one of the core themes of the game is agency and the illusion of choice, and the struggle of making difficult choices, and the game is absolutely self-aware of the fact that choices in video games are manufactured and not true choices. It's good as hell, and the presence of choice in the game doesn’t undermine a coherent narrative focused on themes above all else.

Right now, I'd probably put Prey, Ghost of Tsushima, and Horizon Zero Dawn as my top three games, so that should tell you how I feel about them.

Except in special cases, I think every choice introduced into a game does undermine the cohesion, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I love a good choice-based RPG sometimes. Pillars of Eternity is one of my favorites, and I love building player characters from scratch based on the lore. I'm just not going to hold it up as a bastion of excellent writing. Enjoyable, yes, but not always thematically consistent. But games with a lot of choice allow for plenty of creativity and engagement on the part of the player, as well as the enjoyment of exploring different options and endings. These are valuable experiences, especially because video games are one of the few mediums that can create that experience for people.

But getting to experience a narrative-driven story without choice is just as good of an experience, and I kind of wish people would have more nuance when it comes to judging when choice is appropriate vs. when it's not, so that I don't have keep seeing stupid complaints. If Ghost of Tsushima had introduced choice earlier into the narrative, it would have totally undermined the themes of morality-as-control, blind devotion, familial duty, radical action, and breaking with tradition, and it would have done a HUGE disservice to the protagonist's characterization. Sometimes, choices are the worse option, and a narrative-driven story is superior, like experiencing an interactive novel in beautiful 3D color and sound.

And I agree with you, about a big choice like that feeling out of place for Horizon. There's a narrative in which being able to make or reject the same choice as a villainous figure from the past is a good path for a story to take, but that's for a much darker story with a protagonist very different from Aloy.

[evidence-based-activism]

Mass Media vs Porn

So, a series of comments made me interested in the relationship between sexualized mass media and pornography. My views on porn are already well fleshed out (I’ve made and reblogged a few posts about it, and have more I haven’t posted yet), so I decided to look through the literature and try and form some kind of an opinion about mass media.

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, considering “media” is far more broad than “porn” the data is less clear. 

For starters, while harm is inherent to the production of the porn (I and others have made/reblogged several posts about this but you can start here and here), production of movies or television shows (even when they contain horror or action scenes) does not usually cause harm to the actors/those involved in the creation. 

(Of course, there are exceptions and accidents where actors are hurt doing stunts or because of negligence. There’s also a very significant sexual harassment and assault problem in the entertainment industry. However, these problems are not, for lack of a better term, endemic to the entertainment industry, while rape and exposure to STDs (for example) are endemic to the porn industry.)

So, that’s a main difference between the two. But what about the consumption of mass media?

That’s where things got...fuzzier. 

Looking through the research, some studies concluded that there was no evidence at that time of a relationship between violent media and violent behavior:

A meta analysis in 2009 indicated their results “do not support the conclusion that media violence leads to aggressive behavior” [1]

Another meta analysis in 2008 concludes that “he evidence is not adequate to claim that exposure to violent TV is a significant source of violence in U.S. society” [2]

A meta analysis in 2004 concludes that there is “the body of published, empirical evidence on [media violence] does not establish that viewing violent portrayals causes crime” [3]

A review from 2007 indicates that “when integrated with other long-term studies on the development of crime, it is concluded that the link between media violence and crime is weak after other environmental factors are taken into account” [4]

Another study from 1986 finds no association between rates of violent crime and prevalence of violent media in a population based study** [5] 

Another study from 2009 found “television violence exposure was not predictive of any form of youth aggression” [6]

**This result should be interpreted with caution as attempts to isolate specific causes of crime or violence on a population level are generally full of confounding factors. I included this study because it helps complete a picture, not because it definitely determines any particular relationship. 

However, these were primarily concerned with violent behavior, which doesn’t necessarily give us the full picture, for example:

The studies complied in [1] either measured violent behavior or used unreliable scales for aggression

Studies [2] [3] [4] and [5] looks specifically at criminal aggression/violent crime

Only study [6] looked past overt criminally violent behavior

Note: This is another place where mass media effects diverge from effects of porn, as there is significant evidence linking porn use to criminal behavior (start here and here).

---

Other studies found some relationship between media violence and aggression:

One study found individuals with high trait aggression (a predisposition) were (1) more likely to select a violent film when given a choice, (2) reported a greater increase in anger than individuals with low trait aggression after viewing the violent film, and (3) displayed more aggressive behavior on a lab specific task [7]

Another study documents that there are short-term increases in negative emotions and subsequent behavior after viewing violent media, at least for younger children. Long term effects are harder to establish, but there does appear to be a trend that possibly emerges only in combination with other risk factors. [8]

Another study found modest affects of media violence on aggressive thoughts of behavior. This one found that only children displayed longer-term effects [9]

A study from 1986 found media violence in and of itself didn’t not predict violent behavior, but that heavy doses of violent media consumption in combination with parental violence did [10] 

A final study indicates that media violence is a risk factor for aggression, but is only one among many. This article mainly focuses on the need for a multivariate approach that considers interactions between consumption of violent media and a host of other factors [11]

Note: These results appear more similar (if more mild) to the effects of porn on violence and misogynistic beliefs. (Again see this post). They mirror how certain individuals are at a higher risk for maladaptive responses, and how the issue is multifactorial. However, they also indicate the effects are more limited (i.e. only to children) or less primary than the effects of porn.

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Another difference to porn is that the negative effects of violent media on children (the main “at risk” group) may potentially be alleviated by discussing and evaluating the media with them (i.e. helping them develop media literacy). [12]

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Despite this, I found a few compelling articles linking media violence to aggression:

One extensive meta analysis found a link between violent video game use and physical aggression. They suggest that other factors either moderate or facilitate this association. [13]

A report by the American Psychological Association confirms this effect of video games [14]

Another study found a significant connection between the exposure to violent content involving real people on the internet and seriously violent behavior. [15]

Note: I tentatively suggest that the connection between violent media and violence found in these studies may be stronger due to (1) the interactive nature of the mediums and (2) the exposure to real people. By this I mean, both video games and browsing/searching for content on the internet is more interactive than passively watching movies or television. Further, the effects found in [15] applied mainly when the observed violence was happening to real people. 

This has substantial implications for the effects of porn, as most pornography is  now sought out on the internet, closely engaged with (masturbation), and depicts real people (engaged in real violence).

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So what does this suggest?

Overall, this literature suggests to me that (1) there is a connection between violent media and aggression, (2) this connection is embedded within a framework of other risk factors, (3) certain groups are at higher risk which indicates we are right to limit children from accessing some forms of media**, (4) the negative effects of violent media may be alleviated through the development of media literacy, (5) pornography has an effect on cognitions and behaviors that violent media in general does not appear to have. 

**A report by the American Academy of Pediatrics discusses this more throughly. [16]

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What happens, however, if we introduce sexualized elements to the mix? 

One study found that sexually violent and sexually explicit mass media correlated with acceptance of domestic and sexual violence acts and myths, as well as actual perpetration and victimization. Preexisting attitudes moderate this relationship. [17]

Exposure to sexualized violence in mass media decreased sympathy to rape victims [18]

When women are shown as deserving or enjoying the sexualized violence aimed against them, men indicated more acceptance of violence against women [19]

Exposure to objectifying media later increased men’s self-reported likelihood to act as an acquaintance rapist [20]

As such, there is evidence of a correlation between exposure to media that affirms misogynistic attitudes (such as the endorsement of acquaintance rape) and belief in these attitudes. 

Therefore it is also important to note that some studies [19] [20] and [21] indicate that improving media literacy (i.e. critical examination of the media) could mitigate acceptance of rape myths and misogynistic attitudes. This potential to critically examine the material presented potentially separates sexualized violence in mass media from sexual violence in porn. 

On the other hand, other studies elaborate on the connection between objectifying media and self-objectification [22] and the damaging prevalence of sexualization of girls in various forms of media [23] and [24]*. This strongly suggests the sexualization of girls in media has far-reaching, negative, consequences. 

*there is evidence that girls exposed to sexualizing and objectifying media are more likely to experience body dissatisfaction, depression, and lower self- esteem ... [as well as affecting] girls’ sexual development. Furthermore, girls’ relationships with boys and men are affected in that exposure to sexualizing and objectifying media has been shown to relate to girls’ and boys’ views on dating, boys’ sexual harassment of girls, and attitudes toward sexual violence.

These, I think, provide compelling evidence that sexualization of women and girls in media still perpetuates sexism. In some cases, this may potentially be addressed via increasing media literacy. The prevalent sexualization of girls however, would likely require more approaches. 

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tl;dr Violence in mass media is not the same as in porn. It may still be harmful, and such effects should be addressed (potentially via media literacy). Some groups are more vulnerable to media violence, and some forms of media violence are more severe. In any case, media violence is one of many components in a complex web of factors leading to aggression, and should be addressed within said web. Sexualized violence may help perpetuate misogynistic myths in society and negatively impact women and girls. Some of these affects may be addressed though improving media literacy, others require different approaches. 

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[To deal with how tumblr handles links I’m going to reblog this post with the sources list.]

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[paullicino]

On the Internet

Taken from, and thus generously funded by, my Patreon. The above image via ExtraFabulousComics.

Do you have a flashlight nearby? A lamp, or other light source? Keep it to hand, it might become relevant for something, something I’d like to demonstrate later. The demonstration is simple and entirely voluntary, the flashlight is not essential. It works just as well as a thought experiment in your head.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write about the internet on the internet. Because that’s what we all do these days, isn’t it?

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I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. It was a kind of hidden, secret space of unknown dimensions when we found it as young adults. A weird sort of Narnia. A modem meant you could open this door to an entirely different place full of entirely different people obeying entirely different rules. You had to find ways of telling one another about what you’d found this week, either the next time you were together in person, via an email or, God forbid, by printing out a webpage. Twenty-five years ago, the internet was a collection of imperfect search engines (crawlers) taking you to out-of-the-way websites that were as likely to have been made by someone just like you as they were to belong to some major company or organisation. Its mess was egalitarian. It was a decentralised place full of curious corners and sudden surprises. It wasn’t somewhere we logged on to with an expectation of finding the familiar. It was a place of discovery.

It wasn’t simply that the tech wasn’t as good as it is nowadays. That much is obvious. It was the fumbling newness of the place. It was a primordial soup, we were all blobs and we blobbed around together, testing out the water.

It was a tremendously international space. It was easy to stumble across websites in other languages, to find places that weren’t for you, that were never created with you in mind, and at the very edges of these places their owners and their users might just blend together. Spill over, even. Everyone was from everywhere and they were all mingling, uncontrolled. It was liberating. It was mind-expanding.

The internet was exciting, it was new, it was unfamiliar. It was a place to learn. It was a place without an agenda.

It was also a place to be different. Niche interests found their audiences and young people could be united by what they enjoyed, not marginalised. There was no need to fit in when the place didn’t even fit together properly. For those of us bullied, bored, or worse in tiny homogenous hometowns, isolated or upset by the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school can create, it offered little judgement about what you should want or who you should be. It was a place to be genuine. 

I still remember the end of the 1990s, too. It was a decade of growth and change not just for a young generation, but for the wider world we were learning about. There was a peace deal in Northern Ireland, there was optimism in the media and there was a coming millennium that was supposed to be defined by technology and communication, the internet at its forefront. I was not a young man who could identify with very much of this optimism, but I was at least a young man looking forward to change, who could be accepted as who I was on the internet and who could be excited about what it represented. I’d never tried to be anyone else, even though being different rarely works out when you’re young, but now I knew for sure that I didn’t need to.

As my friends and I grew, so did the internet, and it became a place where we could share more about ourselves, where we could play together and where we found a bunch of ways of keeping in touch whenever we were apart. It became a tool to help me work, that kickstarted my career as a writer, as well as an ever-widening window on the world. It wasn’t yet too corporate, its websites and its tools not yet too monolithic.

I remember some of that early sharing. I remember talking to total strangers, a world away, about some part of my life or theirs. I remember talking to one internet friend of many years, who I never met, about British and American spelling. And about spelling in general. I remember they told me they weren’t sure how to spell a particular word and I said they could look it up in but a moment, since they were online there and then. “I can’t be bothered,” they replied, and that frustrated me so much.

The 90s passed and on September 11th 2001 whatever vision there was for the coming century was erased. The course of world events shifted immediately and dramatically. Never before had mass murder been so visible and so immediate. I remember talking not about how different the world was going to be, but that we had no idea how big a difference this would even make. In a very short space of time, it felt as if the world became not only so much more cruel and so much more cynical, but also so much more divided. I remember the weeks and months after those terror attacks as being my first experience of seeing people sharply divided in their politics, divided enough to be extremely angry, extremely offended, by the many suggestions of what should be done next. It set the scene.

As the decade continued, technology and communication certainly did change us. More of us were using the internet not only to talk, but for more and more of our everyday tasks. We were also sharing ourselves, too, in ways more personal and profound, and there was so much to know. I read a blog post by a Black woman from the American South describing the ways she had to bring up her son to interact with the wider world, how angry he was about it, how unfair it all was. I read updates from those caught in the civil war in Myanmar, talking about what they claimed the news didn’t show. I read about the realities of the rapid growth in Dubai, the working conditions and pollution. I read diary entries by people surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, weeks without power and wondering when help would come. I read about the world in a way I’d never been able to before.

More than ever, the internet was a library of lives.

The first trip overseas I took by myself was all planned, booked and executed with the help of the internet. I flew to Chicago, in the United States, and I stayed in the most average hotel in the most average neighbourhood and it was wonderful. I heard real cicadas for the first time and walked through concrete valleys between towering skyscrapers that my tiny mind couldn’t process. In the evenings, I watched a plethora of American news, which was only ever about America, and that frustrated me so much.

The first interview I ever conducted with someone who wasn’t making a video game was with the writer Mil Millington. The interviews I really wanted to do were about people, their experiences, what they liked and why they do the things they do. Mil Millington was the perfect subject because we had both written about games, we both understood the reach of the internet and we were both interested in what the future of this medium would be. He had recently scored a book deal and written his first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, based on his semi-autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek blog of the same name, listing comic domestic disagreements. I asked him what it was like to share all of his personal life online and he told me that, actually, he didn’t:

“I'm, honestly, almost obsessively private. It's just the way I write that, for some reason, if I say, 'Margret won't let me watch a film in peace,' causes people to think, 'My God! Mil's laying his whole life bare!'”

And then I realised that he had, of course, chosen to share all the things that he had. And carefully. It didn’t mean that those things were less honest, less real or less interesting, but he had been doing what all of us writers do: picking his words and his moments. We should all get to share on our own terms.

I liked his honesty. He wasn’t trying to prop up any persona.

---

A little after this time, I was asked on a date by a conservative American woman who I met in my first year at university in London. We saw each other a few times and stayed in touch when she returned to California. A couple of years later, the American Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin spoke about “death panels” run by Britain’s National Health Service. Online, I expressed my annoyance and anger both at Palin just making things up, as well as at the volume of people who seemed to simply accept her words. My former date said that Palin was allowed to “express her opinion” and I didn���t know how to begin to explain, to an adult in her mid 20s, the difference between fact and opinion, or that she could check such things in a moment, since she was online. That frustrated me so much.

This discussion played out over a relatively new website called Facebook, which had become an invaluable way to connect with my fellow students. I had feared being alone at university, lost in a big city, but the opposite had happened. As soon as we all finished our first year of studies and were hurried out of our student residences, we scattered across the capital and the closeness I had taken for granted was suddenly lost. But Facebook became a directory of friendship, another library of lives. In its early days, I made jokes about people oversharing, or using the site to attract attention, but this wasn’t any different to how some of us might behave anywhere else. It wasn’t such a big deal. That’s just humans.

And anyway, I like to share. My whole life, I’ve enjoyed sharing things I think are important because I feel like it helps me make genuine connections, express myself and feel useful. I saw the internet becoming another way of doing this, another way to be genuine. The younger me had played in bands and held dreams of reaching other people through music, in awe of those moments when an audience sings an artist’s lyrics back to them. I still wanted that, that connection, or some version of it.

On the ever-growing internet, we could all share ourselves more. It could become a new medium for acceptance and understanding. What a glorious future it promised.

---

In time, I adopted all of the social media platforms that I use because I enjoy human connection and I think one of the fundamental traits of people is that they can be so interesting. They do stuff, they make things, they go places, they inspire and they pull humour out of the most difficult of situations like a conjurer tugging an elephant from a beanie. I’d like to be able to do those things. Some days I can barely make a pancake.

Social media allowed me to make and share even more, and now I was sharing things with two people at dinner, ten people at a party or a hundred people online. The number mattered less than the creation’s ability to connect, because it all helped me figure people out and it helped me figure myself out. It helped me figure everything out so that, perhaps one day, I might also learn the trick that lets you tug an elephant out of a beanie. I would be able to say to people “Ah yes, you start with the trunk,” or “Surprisingly, you pull from the tail.” Then they could pass that on. Social media seemed particularly good for this, a way for us to all enrich one another.

In 2008, a series of devastating terrorist attacks erupted across Mumbai. Many of the events were documented in real-time by both journalists and locals using Twitter, which made the site seem to me to be an invaluable new perspective on current events. By the start of the next decade, the Arab Spring saw a broad uprising across North Africa, with thousands of people united in protest by the unifying power of social media. It felt like these tools could change our world forever.

Some other things happened as that decade wound down.

A woman on Twitter made a poor joke about AIDS and Africa before boarding a flight, only to find that, by the time she had landed, her words had been shared around the world many millions of times. A woman in England was caught on camera putting a cat in a bin, the footage of which went viral and received such an overwhelmingly furious reaction that one national newspaper asked, only half-joking, if she was the most evil woman in Britain. These events were shared, discussed and dissected with a comparable passion and level of investment as the terrorist attacks and the Arab Spring. On the internet, a cat in a bin was becoming as important as terrorists in a hotel.

I flexed some cynical opinions. We all had opinions by then (though still not the same as facts), because it was increasingly difficult not to get swept up in things like these as and when they happened. They were everywhere, echoed and repeated, with a kind of mentality of momentum. Countless people changed their profile pictures to something green in support of protesters in Iran, or added a flag to support victims of terror in France. They signed internet petitions demanding Something Be Done, though it wasn’t always clear where these petitions would be delivered or how they would compel someone to act. None of these protesters or victims were in any way saved, protected or enabled by a person on the other side of the planet clicking their mouse like this, but if a million other people did it, those metrics created a validity of their own.

I think I remember the late 2000s as the time that I really began to feel different about these things. But by then, I was too bought in. It had already gone from a habit to a dependency.

Year by year, the internet had become less egalitarian. Monolithic sites and spaces were increasingly the center of the experience, whether hubs like MSN and Yahoo, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or popular news outlets. We found ourselves in the same places, over and over, and we relied on these for our new discoveries. While social media in particular pitched itself as something that put us all on the same level, behind the scenes levers were already being pulled to shape and to manipulate what was shown and shared.

(That’s okay, people told me. Turn on this feature, or adjust these options, and you get to pull your own levers. That’ll undo everything. You still get to share on your own terms.)

These sites had swelled to envelop us, going from making themselves exciting to making themselves essential. We no longer went online, we were online, always, and we left more and more of ourselves there even when we were away from our screens. Social media allowed you to collect everything together, becoming a place where you could simultaneously read updates from your friends, your parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, your favourite newspaper and your favourite sports team. All in a moment and all competing for your attention. Sites like Google and YouTube started to track and understand the preferences of their users, delivering to them more of what they wanted, working hard to grab and to keep their attention. You liked that dog, that topic, that politician? Here’s another.

Here’s another, again.

I was pulling levers all the time, frantically now, like someone operating locks and gates to try and dam an ever more overwhelming flow. My social media sites had changed from something that I used to something I had to manage. Not only were we all carefully curating who we broadcast to and when, lest we offend an employer or shock a relative, we also found ourselves trying to coordinate and customise them, because if we didn’t they would do this for us. They began to choose what to show us, based on what they believed we cared about, they began to offer us things, based on who they believed we were. They even began to mess with time, giving us information and updates out of chronological order. All of these were changes we often had to undo or at least be mindful of, if we even knew about them. If we wanted to. And if we knew how.

If we didn’t, our reality might shift.

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. My first favourite website was Snopes, which was then a collection of myths and urban legends, most of them debunked. In the late 90s, bullshit chainletter emails would bounce around the internet with stories about how some Russian scientists had drilled their way to hell, or how a new computer virus had come out, or how Coca Cola dissolved human teeth. Sometimes, the strangest of stories really were true, or at least partially so, but most of them were trash. Thanks to Snopes, you could check such things in a moment. I loved that about the internet.

On September 11th 2001, almost twenty years ago now, it was difficult to disagree about what we saw happening right in front of our eyes. Nevertheless, there were a few people afterward who insisted that a plane had not hit the Pentagon, that the towers had been deliberately demolished, that some more mysterious sequence of events had transpired. They lurked in the darkest corners of the internet, much as they had always existed on any other margins in any other mediums. The rest of us could get on with our lives.

I grew up playing games and then, later, I became someone who analysed, critiqued and even designed them. One of the most powerful and important things I learned through games is that so much in life is based around systems and the longer a system is around for, the better we become at manipulating it. When a game has been around for a long time, we find many different ways to play it and sometimes we have to adjust the rules of the game to account for this. The rules for chess that we have today have seen many adjustments and revisions. The same is true for football. It is also true for our laws and for our systems of government. We have to modify these things in part because times change, but also in part because they are being abused and exploited, subverted in ways their designers never imagined.

Or simply used as optimally as possible.

It’s 2021 and the internet monoliths that we have begun to take for granted, that have surged like the rising oceans to engulf our lives and to carry us along their currents, are constantly being used in ways their designers never imagined. Two years ago, we thought the biggest problem we had with social media and internet monoliths was their subversion to manipulate elections, with great armies of bots and fake profiles being created and directed faster than the people who owned social media sites being able to prevent this. This presence could bring amplification and validity to anyone or to anything. “Learn the algorithm,” was the key to success online. Use a site or social media platform in a particular way and it will elevate you further. Elevate your work. Or your truth. Or just you.

Now, more than a year and a half into a pandemic that defines our generation, the areas of the internet with which we’ve become most familiar and most comfortable, those which we began to pour our lives and identity into, are not only places where elections were subverted, they’re places where the difference between life and death are considered a matter of opinion, where science and fact can be openly ridiculed, where conspiracies about September 11th are tiny in comparison. For some time now they’ve already been well-worn battlefields, public arenas within which opinion and force of will often carry more weight than evidence and reason, but now the consequences of doubling down on a belief are undeniably the difference between living and dying.

More important, for some people, is the difference between right and wrong. Not so much being right, but being seen being right, can give you validity, clout, value. I think we’ve reached the point where dying while being seen as right can matter more than living and admitting a mistake.

The flow of the internet, all those locks and gates opened by algorithms or AI or other people’s decisions that may simply have been motivated by a desire to give us what we like, have made it more difficult than ever to find things that go against the current, or to grasp something we can be sure is objective or straightforward.

One part of me believes that we can no longer look things up in a moment any more, because we have to second-guess every other thing we find. As a journalist and researcher, I never feel secure with what I find on the internet now and I dig, I verify and I compare, still coming away unsure, often worried I will publish something glaringly incorrect. A different part of me, a more dramatic part, sometimes wonders which things are even real.

I suppose anything is real if you can get away with it. If nobody ever notices.

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There’s another aspect to all this, the aspect that makes me the most uncomfortable. The aspect I least enjoy discussing, but which I have to if I can fully explain myself.

Living alongside the internet, I’ve watched as some of us pull all those levers simply to control the flow as best we can, to keep ourselves afloat, but others have viewed this experience differently. They’ve seen it as a challenge, as another system they can manipulate. It’s an opportunity for them to choose how they present themselves. The more levers they pull, the greater their ability to do so. The more time they invest, the greater the result.

If you take your flashlight, lamp or light source and point it toward an object, you can easily affect the size and the shape of the shadows it will cast. Under your control, those shadows can lengthen or deepen, they can sweep and distort. A light up close can cast a gigantic shadow across a far wall, perhaps a sharp one or perhaps one fuzzy and undefined. Try it. See what you can make. The more you do it, the more tricks you can learn.

All of us try to present our best selves and all of us have our different selves, too. Forty years before I ever went online, the sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a book about how we behave differently in different contexts. It’s natural for us to speak to our family in a different way to how we speak to our best friend, or to our colleagues, or to a crowd we might be addressing in a speech. It’s not necessarily disingenuous, it’s merely a part of the human experience. But impression management, as Goffman called it, is also a matter of degrees. Some people are more invested than others. If given the tools to perform more effective impression management, more levers they can pull, they will engage even further.

I have flexed a few cynical opinions in my life (at least as many as three, the stats suggest) but, at the same time, I think I have to admit that I have also been very naïve about people. I tend to take many of them on face value and assume they are genuine. Many of us are, perhaps even most of us. But I’ve come to know both that this isn’t always the case and that, given the opportunity, some people will use every tool at their disposal to shape a false version of themselves. We’ve found ourselves in an era where this is more possible than ever. It’s no longer simply within the purview of politicians and PR firms, it’s within reach of every one of us and all we need to do is put in the time and energy. The reward can be ever greater popularity, ever more validation

And I’m so tired of seeing this.

Over the past half decade or so, I have seen the internet and its many systems gamed more than ever. Gamed for political gain, gamed for personal gain and gamed to create images, personalities and that god-awful golem of hollow and lifeless artifice that is brand. Now a person can be a product, a new kind of commodity in this ever more opaque ecosystem.

The nausea and unhappiness I feel from all this is more than the simple declaration that I’m not a brand, I’m a person. It’s the discovery that other people, sometimes people I’ve known, really are a brand now. Their time, their energy, their life is now invested in shaping and maintaining that image, that brand, perhaps even at the expense of other pursuits. And with the right manipulations, the right tugging of the correct levers, they can perpetuate that, build that and further gain the affirmations and validations they need to prove to themselves that what they have created is as solid and as true and as real as anything else. And how would we know any different?

The ocean is not so far from my home. It’s not unusual to walk the beach or the seawall and see people engaged in impromptu photoshoots, dressed in their very best, expertly presented and shot with long lenses. A friend told me that most of these shoots are for the purpose of enriching dating profiles, that there’s an increasing feeling of expectation, a sense that everyone must present their very best selves, simply because everyone else now does so. To be on a dating site is to feel engaged in an ever-escalating competition for time and attention, to need to package oneself as the best possible product.

I don’t at all object to the idea of dating sites, but I could never get comfortable with them and I used to feel like I was browsing a human meat market, that it was all too easy for me to make judgements about people I didn’t know and then cast them aside. I felt, again, like people had become products and this was a system and a process I did not want to be part of. You can game it, people tried to tell me. There are ways to make it work better for you, it just takes a little time. I didn’t want to know.

The more time you spend trying to engage with things that aren’t genuine, the less you have for what is real.

When I use the internet these days it’s with an increasing sense of discomfort and disquiet. I find myself already on the lookout for the artificial. I second-guess people as much as I do information. I’m all too aware of the constructed persona and the deliberate framing, of that angling of a light to cast a particular shadow. In a few cases, this isn’t an abstract concern and social media in particular can be a place where I watch people I know are starkly different to the image they project be celebrated for the false façade they maintain, a façade that can be further reinforced by popularity and prominence. I see harmful and unhealthy people championed even in spite of their actions, because they have managed to engineer support and validation, or using the popularity and affirmation they have gained to push opinion over fact. The disingenuous and the distorted tie together like a greasy braid, each one reinforcing the other, and it’s no wonder falsehoods can spread so far, whether false representations or false information. I would say that sometimes I almost feel like I’m back at school, amongst the same gossip and garbage, but this is far worse than any of the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school ever created, and now it comes with measurable metrics in the form of likes, follows, retweets or subscriptions.

I’m sure, at this point, this is a common experience and common concern for most of us, and we are each finding our own ways to handle it.

Or not. For me, the experience is deeply unpleasant.

While drafting this I idly wondered if we could somehow develop a new version of Snopes for human beings. A demystifier of people, something that reveals each person’s private Picture of Dorian Gray, which grows ever more warped as they reinforce their persona ever more. But I’m sure even that would be gamed and subverted before too long.

I'm so, so tired of trying to work out who is real.

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The internet monoliths I move between in my daily life all have one thing in common. Google, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Patreon and so many others are all based in the same place: the United States. They are towering. They overwhelm the rest of the internet. The levers that many of these pull, controlling currents and flow, are being operated in the United States. The politics, existential crises and cultural interests of that country are disproportionately represented and, while I care very much about the United States, I also want to hear about the rest of the world. I want to hear about where I live, and yet even that feels like it comes second. Yes, I am pulling all the levers that are supposed to make this happen. No, it isn’t entirely successful. I am using a paddle against a tsunami.

Once the bias is there, the snowball effect perpetuates. So often, whether I choose to or not, I am in that motel room watching a plethora of American news again, or its modern equivalent. It frustrates me so much. Most of us Westerners essentially live in America some of the time now, if we spend any period online. That’s where our presence and our attention are pointed.

Before publishing this essay, I changed every mention of “torch” to “flashlight” because I felt I had to cater to an internet that sees the first word only as a burning chunk of wood, not as a British battery-powered light source.

The internet doesn’t feel like the world any more. It hasn’t for a long time.

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I can’t abandon the internet of today. I need it for work. I need it to promote the things I create. I need it to keep in touch with people. I’m not different or special, only someone too bought in as well, my use also going from a habit to a dependency. But it has almost entirely stopped being a place of delight and discovery. It has lost any sense of being egalitarian. So much less is new, so much less is unfamiliar. So much more has an agenda.

Algorithms, metrics and social media have quantified and gamified everything, encouraging competitiveness and narcissism. Public spaces have become arenas and arenas encourage performance. In an attention economy, the outrageous and the overblown mean a cat in a bin can have the same profile and presence as terrorists in a hotel. In spaces that now mix our friends, our parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, our favourite newspapers and our favourite sports teams, people we know and love are elevated or relegated according to how interesting an algorithm has decided they are, pushing them to the fore or pulling them from your view. “People on Twitter are the first to know,” says the social network that prides itself on immediacy more than integrity or fact-checking. Misinformation abounds. As the line between person and brand has smudged between all recognition, corporations insert themselves into and between everything else we try to examine. Surrounded by banner ads, the conflicts of polarised culture generate enormous revenue for monolithic American tech companies. As we fight, push our narratives, construct our personas or compete in the race to prove we are the most woke, we all make @Jack richer, or provide Zuck with more of our personal data.

I also find myself reminded of what Octavia Butler called “simple peck-order bullying,” the hierarchical behaviour where people want to, and now can, elevate themselves above others, according to identities they've built for themselves, to push their ideas, push their image, push their sense of superiority or push their opinions so hard that they can reshape them into facts. Anything is possible with enough pulling of enough levers. And now more people have more of those levers. And some of them love to pull and then push, pull and then push.

I don’t like what the internet has turned into, nor what it has turned people into.

So what now?

---

This was an essay inspired by an essay, inspired by an essay, which is always how it goes. Creativity is theft and anyone who says otherwise is only trying to distract you as they secretly shake you down. The eternal question that writers (or anyone creative) is supposed to dread is “Where do you get your ideas?” Because we aren’t supposed to know. But we do know. We get them from everyone else. We thieve them.

Ideas are pickpocketed from the people we pass in twisting evening alleyways, during the briefest moments of darkness and distraction. They’re caught with nets as they flutter with all the freedom of sweet springtime naivete. They’re spied upon from tremendous distances through the jealous lenses of sparkling telescopes. Nothing is truly ours and anyone wringing their words into a desperate defence of some unique capacity for originality ex nihilo is either deceptive or deluded.

(Avoid them. You’re likely their next target.)

This essay was heavily inspired by Lucy Bellwood reflecting on Nicole Brinkley. Both have written nuanced examinations of social media (focusing on Twitter) that I think you should make the time to read, but I’ll try and sum up the main thing I have taken from their writing in one line:

Social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it.

This is in so small part my interpretation, coloured by a particular belief I hold, that being that social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it. You can probably see why I approve.

There’s more to it than that. Brinkley talks about Twitter essentially breaking the way the Young Adult literature scene works, which to me is one facet of a dangerously seductive diamond that repeats many different stories of damage done by how we’ve used and gamed the internet. Her wonderful conclusion is that “These days it’s okay to not be sure what Twitter is for. We can stop going there until we figure it out.” And I so desperately wish I could stop going on the internet until I could figure out what it is for now, too. I wish it wasn’t essential. But it is, broken as it may be, breaking things as it may be.

While I don’t think leaving it is an option for me, I am using so much of it less. I have to. Social media, a place where I am shown arguments and controversy over the lives of people I care about, has become somewhere for me to hurriedly hurl out a quick update or two before I flee, escaping before I come across something, or even someone, that will make me sad. Any search box is a cause for scepticism, prompting me to analyse the results it gives and try a dozen different ways to find the same thing, just in case. Even Snopes is now a running commentary on the (American) news cycle. The best I can do whenever I think something fundamental to our society is unhealthy is to participate in that thing as little as possible. I know this limits my reach, limits my relevance and limits my success, but I also know that this makes me less unhappy and allows me to continue to feel genuine. Like I am still myself. Like I am still real. It may be apparent that my mental health has taken a few hits over the last couple of years. It doesn’t need to take any more.

I am not only unsure what Twitter is for, I am unsure what the whole internet is for.

---

There is no conclusion to this essay. It is supposed to be six thousand words of open-ended reflection. The past year or so has sometimes been a huge struggle for me and it really is true that some days I can barely make a pancake. Work has been difficult, writing has been difficult and maintaining regular Patreon updates has been difficult, with this piece being a huge challenge to finish. I think I’ve tried to make the best of things, as well as present an honest but still positive face to the world. I have piles of tasks to get through and I tackle what I can, with what feels like so much competing for my attention. At the same time, I can’t opt out of the systems I live and work inside of, much as I can’t stop paying rent or putting food in my mouth, because individuals can't kick a habit society has become dependent upon. I think the best thing I can do right now is be truthful about all that, try to remain as genuine as I can and continue to step away from what makes me uncomfortable, giving myself some distance from the things that make me unhappy.

That doesn’t mean I’m disappearing (I’m still checking in on social media, streaming on Twitch and so on), nor does it mean this change or this philosophy is forever, nor does it mean that things can’t improve. But it does mean I’m changing a few things about myself, my habits and my preferences. And it does mean I have a working, temporary, if unsatisfactory answer to the question “So what now?”

It is: “We’ll see.”

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A big thanks to my Patreon community for the links I’m adding here, post-publication.

The first is How sex censorship killed the internet we love, on Endgadget, about controlling the internet in all sorts of ways and about what might be considered explicit (apparently a condom might be explicit).

Then there’s The internet Is Rotting, from the Atlantic, about bits of the internet that are disappearing and the loss of information that comes with it, as well as information that is overwritten and altered. We are keeping less than you might think.

Finally, The web began dying in 2014, here’s how, by André Staltz, talks about the growing prominence of big corporations (all American), what their priorities are, and what online things (services) they may bring to you.

[thearkhound]

Hideo Kojima x Mamoru Oshi interview (August 8, 1996)

The following interview was translated from the Policenauts Kōshiki Guide published in 1996 by NTT. You can read the original at the following link.

Source: https://archive.org/details/policenauts-official-guide-konami-official-giudes/page/118/mode/2up

At first I thought it was just a detective game from the packaging art

Kojima: How was the game?

Oshii: The truth is that I’ve just finished it last night. I thought I would be in trouble if I didn’t finish the game before meeting you.

Kojima: Were there any parts that gave you trouble?

Oshii: I failed the bomb disposing sequence around 15 times. Cutting the wires gave me trouble. I also didn’t know that you could auto-aim either until the final shooting sequence. Since it was impossible to win due to so many enemies, I was wondering if there was a way to make it easier. (laughs) I also had a bit of stress when I was unable to shoot the final bad guy.

Kojima: Yeah, Ed ends up killing him for you. A part of me wanted to make Policenauts into a sort of buddy cop game, since I was part of the generation that was raised on shows like Starsky & Hutch. As a result, I was always aware of American culture whenever I turned on the TV. Therefore, I wanted to make something like that. Is there any particular game that do you like?

Oshii: I used to like adventure games and played them a lot, so I already knew about Snatcher. Policenauts, which I was able to play for this occasion, has a very clear world building. It felt a bit nostalgic, like the PC games that I used to play.

Kojima: What about buddy cop movies?

Oshii: When you speak of buddy cop movies to someone of my age, really old stuff comes up. It ends up becoming the world of something like The French Connection. 

Kojima: That’s another movie that I like. However, I believe Lethal Weapon is the movie most appropriate for the younger generation to understand what buddy cop movies are. Because that’s what it really is (laughs).

Oshii: Having an astronaut as a protagonist is unusual. Maybe not so much around the time when space exploration started, which around back when I was in grade school, but nowadays astronauts aren’t really that looked up to anymore.

Kojima: Astronauts were really admired in my generation. Even the astronauts that appeared in movies like Planet of the Apes knew things that weren’t usually known. It created the impression that you had to be smart to become an astronaut.

Oshii: The buddy cop genre seems to be really suitable for an adventure game, but it wouldn’t had occurred to me to have the story set it in a space colony.

Kojima: A cylinder-type colony doesn’t have much of a reality to it, does it? Originally I was thinking of setting the game in a torus-type colony or even in a sphere-like colony, but visually for today’s generation [a cylinder-type] is what they recognize as a space colony from a glance. When you think about that, all you see nowadays are Gundam-type space colonies.

Oshii: The cylinder-type colonies that appear in the Gundam franchise are really nostalgic for people like me. The whole thing has that kind of atmosphere. It’s really calming.

Kojima: It seems to be a common trend in games to have the player character replaced during the middle of the story. I usually can’t emphasize with that. But in the case of Policenauts it was very difficult to tell such a subjective story until the end.

Oshii: That’s certainly true for video games. When it comes to simultaneous proceedings, all you can do is watch when you’re shown something that isn’t from the hero’s perspective.

Kojima: Moreover, the original concept was to have no distinction between the movie parts and the gameplay visuals, but due to scheduling issues [it wasn’t feasible].

Oshii: The pre-rendered movies are treated as a single cluster, with no interactivity.

Kojima: That’s right. The pre-rendered movies are just loaded as clusters. As for the text portion, they’re cut into units of sentences while the program checks for flags. There was actually supposed to be a U.S. version made, but a translation wasn’t feasible. We talked about it on three occasions and each time the idea was ultimately abandoned.

Oshii: If the translated sentence is out of alignment, then it ruins the timing of the video. But if you end up forcibly changing the sentence, then it completely changes the meaning of the story. I think it must’ve been pretty difficult to have scenes where there are text messages, but no voice acting.

Kojima: What do you think about the voice actors?

Oshii: Since there were many actors that I recognized, it was easy to get used to them. Hideyuki Tanaka, who plays Jonathan Ingram, actually appeared in one of my movies, but it’s been a while since I’ve heard his voice.

Kojima: With Policenauts I wanted the actors to act as if they were dubbing an American movie, so I picked out people who had experience with movies. When we did the recordings we started with the NEC PC-9821 version. Since there were no video files for that version, we had them act out while we explained their scenes showing cuts of the visuals. The voice recording took quite a while, with the recording for the PC-9821 version in particular lasting six days.

Oshii: That’s quite a while. Did you do the casting yourself?

Kojima: That’s right. On top of that, I wanted to record the dramatic parts with 4 or 5 actors at the same time but such a thing seems to be rarely done in the game industry. If you record the actors one by one in isolation then there won’t be as much tension.

Kojima: What are you plannign to do after Ghost in the Shell?

Oshii: There are many things I want to do, but I want to take a break from animation for a while, since I’m really tired. I really want to do live-action, since it’s fun. But then the problem would be that I wouldn’t be able to eat when I want to.

The moment we decided on making a Saturn version, I was thinking of utilizing the Virtua Gun

Oshii: I still find the old text adventure games to be interesting. Maybe it’s because they stimulate my imagination. But when it comes to games released in this age, I think players expect them to have pictures, sounds and even moving images. Moreover, many recent RPGs and such are filled with mini-games in addition to pursuing a story.

Kojima: In case of Policenauts, if the player gets involved in a minigame, there’s a possibility that they might end up forgetting the plot. That’s why a recap mode was added.

Oshii: It’s pretty interesting to play with the Virtua Gun, whether it’s a main game or a mini-game.

Kojima: I was already thinking of adding Virtua Gun support the moment we decided on a Saturn version. We didn’t have a light gun peripheral until now. However, there are some difficulties with using the gun. It’s not really suitable in places like the moon surface, where it is difficult to keep your aim in one place. It has its pros and its cons.

Oshii: I actually fired real guns on my spare time, but I find the Virtua Gun difficult to use. I can fire a real gun all day long, but I get tired holding a light gun for two hours.

Kojima: I also underwent actual gun training during development. The shooting booth I went to was quite scary. There were no security guards or cameras, and you had to buy your own guns and ammo before bringing them to the booth. I once read a novel about a female FBI agent who hated gun training because of the smell it left on her and I never understood that until I started my own gun training. I realized what it was like when the smell of gunpowder tainted my clothes.

Oshii: Ah, that’s the smoke of the gunpowder. It turns your hands black. I wonder if there will ever be something as interesting as video games again. It’s the ultimate toy for boys. I don’t think there’s ever been such an interesting toy to such an extent. When it comes to video games, what is stimulating about them is the fact it takes you to a completely different world. Or should I say, it’s a completely naked product.

What does it mean to be interesting? Something we must think about once again.

Oshii: I think we’re talking whether it is important for games to have interactivity. Starting from the fact that these two things are different, I wonder if it’s better to go back to something that is simple and fun. I don’t know much about such matters, since I don’t play that many games.

Kojima: I don’t play games that much at home either. I shouldn’t had said that loudly. (laughs)

Oshii: I don’t think there are that many people who play games and couldn’t live without them. A game is a medium where you not only receive information, but send it as well while feeling the engine on the side. With that said, I believe the amount of people who want to be entertained up to that point are very few.

Kojima: I don’t think people who play games were originally common. Game development is also an interactive world. It’s a workflow, and at the same time it isn’t. If anything in the story, events or music becomes twists, then the whole thing will become uninteresting, so you need to excavate the raw elements and then reshape them. The finished product will differ depending how much you adjust it.

Oshii: Normally I work only with movies, but in the end ,whether it’s a game or a movie, it can only harvest either, its worldview or the drama. When it comes to harvesting the worldview, having a kind of promise would better for the story. But when it comes to harvesting the drama, the worldview must be adjusted to a certain degree before it can hold up. I think Policenauts harvested the worldview. If you harvest both, you will certainly fail.

Kojima: I probably picked the worldview without thinking about it. if anything, you are often told about the story because it is an adventure game. When it comes to making a game, it is completely different from writing a novel. We make the contents first, then we add the mini-games and such afterward, and if there is a good scene i come up with, we fit it into the time frame.

Oshii: In the old days there was many easy ways out such as lack of technology, primitive specs or minimal storage space, but now there’s no such excuses. When I started thinking about what makes video games interesting, I was wondering if there was a way to make things like they were in the old days one more time. I think such problems will emerge once 3D and polygons started to emerge. In other words, I think that will be the true place for people who make games.

Interview conducted on August 8, 1996 inside Konami Headquarters in Ebisu.