Indie game dev Christine Love is a Trekker. I know this because half our conversations on Twitter seem to revolve around Lt. Worf, but also because part of Digital: A Love Story consists of a snarky retrospective in which a BBS poster named “Tiberius” (strangely not one of the Shakespearean AIs the game revolves around– or is he?) waxes nostalgic for Captain Kirk’s, um… unique brand of diplomacy.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone, then, that Love’s latest work, Analogue: A Hate Story (sequel to Digital), bears no small similarity to the TOS episode “For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, about a generation ship which has reverted back to a superstitious and hierarchical society. In this episode, Kirk, Spock and McCoy stumble upon the Yonada, whose captive population are controlled by “obedience devices” to prevent them from learning of or discussing the true nature of the ship. Why is never really explained, although the AI in question (“the Oracle”, another name which reappears in Digital) seems to have driven the ship off course as well, so we can probably project a little about its reasons.

Granted, the fashion of the Yonada is a great deal worse, and the culture is nowhere as openly misogynist as we find among Love’s characters (thankfully, TOS as a whole has enough sexism to compensate). But the implicit message of both stories –that left without an imperative to progress, society will stagnate and eventually putrefy– remains quite consistent. In a way, this is what science fiction should be more often: a thoughtful extrapolation on current conditions into a hypothetical future.

Framed as an epistolary novel, Analogue concerns a far-future tragedy amid the isolated patriarchal society of the generation ship Mugunghwa. An ailing girl of thirteen, who has been in cryogenic suspension for centuries with the promise that the science of the future could cure her, is forcibly awakened into a society with no memory of the progressive culture she came from. Instead, the ship’s inhabitants have reorganized themselves into a feudal society with little understanding of the technology which surrounds them, and they have dubbed the reawakened girl “the Pale Bride,” a marriageable chess piece between the royal family and competitive nobles.

I don’t purport to know a great deal about Korean history, nor do I suppose the Joseon dynasty (on which Analogue is modeled) is in any way singular. To give you an idea, the day after I finished playing, Jezebel ran this headline: “Afghan Man Murders His Wife for Giving Birth to a Girl”. It’s just as brutal as you think it is, and it makes an efficient reminder that everything Love is talking about in Analogue is neither exaggerated nor confined to some dark period of remote history. The game’s historical notes, available from the Bonus Content screen, also go a long way to place Analogue in a historical context– in particular, to bring home Love’s remarks that the brutality and subjugation she describes is downplayed from reality.

Consequently I wouldn’t really call Analogue a game, despite all the character interaction and multiple endings. I would call it a feminist essay with an interactive interface, something which despite its cartoon characters and references to cosplay would fit in quite well with some of the projects at Vectors. If, then, you’re the sort of person who wonders why she’s charging US $15 for it, well… shame on you. Go look up the texts she lists in her references and see what that would run you.

It’s really quite a shame that we’ve built up these expectations that interactive media must be a) harmless and b) fun. Analogue is neither. It’s not even a very pleasurable interface, and I suppose I could gripe about that, but I’m not going to. Why would I? If I leveled that criticism at a project like “Public Secrets,” it could rightly be called out as disrespectful and entirely missing the point of scholarship. And that is exactly what Analogue constitutes: scholarship, and a damned good example of it, at that. I wish some academics had even a fraction of her clarity or vision.

On the subject of Analogue as scholarship, it might be pointed to ask whether using a fictional setting diminishes the potential impact. I considered this at first, but decided it’d be similarly alienating to reconstruct real historical documents using a digital database, a system they were not intended for. Even though it might overcome a few critics who wish to believe Love is creating a “strawman” (of all the shamelessly ignorant things to suggest), it would be an unnatural reconfiguration, shoving a bunch of historical artifacts into a database structure. (Not to mention the practical problems since, as Love notes, very few letters from women authors survived this period.) We would spend all our time instead on whether or not the decision was an effective one.

Analogue hits harder by inventing an original scenario in which history viciously repeats itself, this time in the trappings of high technology, like the Star Trek episode. It lets the user reflect that even the electronic paradigm, that of electromagnetic storage and augmented navigation, of space travel and interplanetary colonization, which we hold up as such a symbol of human progress, can be made into yet another structure by which oppression flourishes. All of our technology is just one regime change away from becoming the backbone of a new dark age.

My recommendation would be to think of Analogue as a book, albeit a nonlinear one. It certainly ranks up there with A Handmaid’s Tale in how it extrapolates on contemporary anti-feminist pushback, which is certainly not limited to the Middle East. It uses Korean history as an (ahem) analogue to model the worldwide, persistent, systemic, culturally reinforced issues Love is talking about here. It is not pleasant. Nor should it be. After all, it’s not 60s television, where every problem can be recapitulated and contained within 50 minutes. There are no Kirks here.

(Not that you’d want there to be. I mean, Kirk was kind of a condescending asshole around women.)

No analysis here. Just a long page of my favorite Rin Tezuka quotes, from Katawa Shoujo. Spoilers, probably.

There are many things Katawa Shoujo could be accused of, but cynicism is not one of them. It is in fact the most uncynical, unironic, utterly earnest thing I’ve played in years, and it should be lauded for that, I think. Everything in Katawa Shoujo is borne out of love: love for the genre, love for the style, and most importantly love for the characters. Gosh, how it loves its characters, even if you don’t.

It should likewise not be a matter of dispute that Katawa Shoujo exoticizes and in some cases fetishizes disability. This is explicitly in the title of the game, which translates to “Disabled Girls”. The game not only lumps a bunch of disabilities together under a tenuous premise but it makes them objects of desire. And there are generic constraints: this isn’t a game about coming to cope with a disability and to see to the core of people in spite of their appearances; it’s about building a heterosexual relationship with a girl, and with a particular sense of urgency.

I followed Rin Tezuka’s route, largely because her writing was the quirkiest. By the end of it I was pretty well over her, even if she had stomped on my heart about a hundred times. I’m just confused by what has happened here. Rin and the male protagonist seem utterly incompatible and, as even the protagonist points out, they seem to actively hurt one another. They both have a backlog of emotional issues that make me wonder just who has hurt them in the past, moreso than how they can complete each other in the present. Because they don’t. They’re two struggling teenagers, fumbling desperately through messes of hormones and fast-approaching real life. And that, really, is where they become sympathetic to me. I may be cynical, but everyone was young and inadvertently hurting the one they loved once.

Moreover it becomes apparent that what Rin’s “disability” is (not in the sense of living with disability as many PWD do, but to be hampered with incomprehensible difficulty, the way abled people tend to view the disabled) lies not with what’s on the outside but inward. She was born with her condition and says explicitly that she doesn’t think of it as a difficulty. What does become a barrier for her is the emotional sabotage she’s been cultured into reproducing, believing she cannot express her feelings and that no one is able to either understand or be kind to her. So, in that respect, I felt like the game was trading fetishization of her external differences for a more conventional, emotional set, very similar to what Mattie Brice observed with her playthrough of Hanako’s path.

I think Brice’s analysis is a worthwhile one, because I do believe Katawa Shoujo, for all its hidden strengths, is also deeply problematic. Which is not to say it’s a game that only eroticizes disability, at least not dramatically moreso than any other love sim which sexualizes emotional vulnerability (that is, pretty much all of them). At some point, it becomes part of the form: see weakness, heal it with heterosexual norms. What separates Katawa Shoujo from straight pornography, aside from the shyness of its erotic scenes, is a lack of sociopathy. Part of this was set down by the omake sketch which inspired the game, asserting that “gigolo play” was a quick way to end up with no one, but moreover I think it’s the methodology of the game’s structure itself. You can be as flirtatious as you want in the first act but after that you are essentially locked in with one girl, after which you deepen that particular relationship and ignore the others. In a sense, it commands commitment from you. And it is nothing if not deliberate in how it wrecks your heart and plays upon your sentimentality once you start down that path.

If you didn’t know going in that this was a game written and developed by Westerners, you could easily be fooled into thinking it an authentic Japanese visual novel. The art seems right, the tone is right, and consciously or unconsciously, the tropes are right. This is not a game which critiques or subverts generic cliches: it plays everything straight without much apparent self-awareness (just enough to avoid mixing in norms from other literary traditions). The language is even slightly stilted in the way you might expect from a deliberately literal translation. The only departure from this is typically the overwrought prose of the male protagonist’s narration, which will just have to be forgiven– for as much as the script is weighed down by too many adjectives and awkward alliteration, there are a few moments where the writing is so evocative, so sincere, and so raw that it genuinely pulls at the heart strings. I, too, chuckled a little in cynical agreement when other bloggers suggested its fans were being suckered in by bad melodrama. But as I’ve already said, nothing about Katawa Shoujo is cynical.

Everything in Rin’s path –from the uncommon innocence of the scene in which she and the protagonist share cigarettes while watching the stars, to her lamentations of not being able to articulate her thoughts into words, to the gradual way in which Hisao normalizes his new environment largely through Rin’s eyes– feels just so authentically adolescent in the best possible way that it really did seem to be written from the heart. Sappy, overwrought, cliched, yes– because they’re teenagers. At one point I fully expected this arc to end in a double suicide, so dramatic were the emotions involved, so tragic was the way they reacted to everything. Again, teenagers.

In a way I envy the writing of this game. Not the excessive adjectives perhaps, but the youthful way it looks at life. It’s so spirited.

Like those tiny seeds scattered into the wind, I’m sure that Rin too can take her place in this world without the need to create her own inside of it.

Maybe she believes it too, and standing as close to heaven as possible, she is giving the world a big hug.

To me it seems like the entire world really could fit there, between those small arms of hers, inside of her all-encompassing embrace.

(the game’s last monologue)

So there you go, John Rook (don’t take it personally babe) and [winter]moot (Digital: A Love Story), in a love only the virtual could bring together. Add another notch to “things I never thought I would draw.”

(art credit: thegalen)

OK after today’s This Week in Game Blogging I really have to know. How many of you guys over there at CD are bronies?

-anon

Hmmm, two of us, I think? I’m not sure if Eric actually considers himself a brony, though he has watched the entire series (thanks to my incessant prodding) and seems to enjoy quoting it whenever he gets the chance. The others, they haven’t really come forward with their Thoughts On Ponies one way or another. If they hate them they’re being very patient with the 1/3 of the crew that loves them.

Now– before you start clicking away, this isn’t your usual recounting of some bemusingly vivid decoupage of pop culture and personal psychology that usually accompanies someone’s desire to tell you their dream.

It’s more about a certain tendency I’ve noticed within media studies. Something that started itching in the back of my brain when I was writing my thesis in 2008, and which emerged from my head fully formed a couple weeks ago during my MA exams.

In the dream I was browsing through a website that was participating in yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA blackout web protests. The website had left up most of its text articles but taken down most of its multimedia, such as embedded video, replacing them with a brief encyclopedic description of their function, development history, and appearance. Each format was given a Latin name with genus and species.

It was the perfect illustration of an argument I had made repeatedly in my MA exams, which is that we have a tendency to imagine all the various media -especially new media, but any time texts speak about media “in transition”- as on its way to becoming some particular thing, as if we know its destiny. On the contrary, history is full of examples of divergent yet coexisting media “species,” each adapted to the specific habitat in which it developed.

My favorite example of this are the benshi, the in-person narrators who would stand to the side of the projection screen of silent movie theaters in Japan. These benshi would narrate the events for the audience, crack jokes, assume character voices, and so on. The benshi developed a strong fan following in their own right as regional performers and are cited as a chief reason for the Japanese cinema industry’s reluctant, much-delayed embrace of sound technologies.

[The benshi] seem to have acquired a considerable say in the actual production of films. If the finished work seemed in some way unsuitable to their talents, they demanded cuts, the shooting of new scenes; they wanted existing scenes lengthened to allow for development of their discourse (e.g. touching farewells). Above all, they fought bitterly against the introduction of new narrative structures such as the flashback.

[...]

We may, in fact, consider the benshi‘s entire discourse as a reading of the diegesis which as thereby designated as such and which thereby ceased to function as diegesis and became what it had in fact never ceased to be, a field of signs. The most ‘transparently’ representational* film, whether Western or Japanese, could not be read as transparent by Japanese spectators, because it was already being read as such before them, and had irrevocably lost its pristine transparency.

(Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer, 1979.)

I like using the benshi for illustration because they offer a useful little window into an alternate world of film most have forgotten or never realized could have existed. Here was a branching species of the moving image that was developing to more resemble performance art, before being unceremoniously wiped out by sound technologies.**

Yet despite case studies like the benshi, and despite the fact that media scholars should really know better, there seems to be a persistent belief in academia that film was designed to be “read” in a specific fashion. But what became known as the Hollywood style -continuity cutting, eyeline matching, certain ways of composing the frame- did not come to dominate cinema because it “naturally” subsumed the ways we were already seeing things; it managed this because it was the most pervasively effective in re-training us to read the moving image how it wanted us to. Because Hollywood movies had the big budgets, the slick production standards, the beautiful clothes, the glowing starlets. Are we at all surprised that one national cinema after another imposed import quotas, some of which remained on the books for decades, so their domestic cinemas wouldn’t become completely overrun by that seductive Hollywood style?

So the Hollywood film became the global way of doing film. We can agree that, to extend our evolution analogy, it was a uniquely successful species able to dominate multiple environments. But that still, under no circumstances, means film was meant to turn out that way. Evolution does not have a plan. If the Hollywood style had not taken root, perhaps another effective style would have predominated instead. Or perhaps cinema would continue to diverge into smaller subspecies, flourishing in particular climates but practically unheard of outside their respective ecological niches.

Pressures of capitalist imperialism aside, there is no reason all these subspecies could not co-exist.

What galls me most is when this naive notion of media creationism makes its way into my corner of academic interests, interactive media. Without reproducing either the exam question or my 18-page essay of a response here, the final portion of my MA exam posed, essentially: “Story and interactivity are diametrically opposed. Discuss various attempts to fit this square peg and round hole together.”

To which I almost replied, “Screw you. I paid $100,000 for this?”

Because no, “story and gaming” (as the question put it) are not opposites, nor should they be erected as such for the purposes of education. How dangerously irresponsible of any academic institution to do so. I don’t care if you consider yourself a staunch proceduralist or a narratologist; I think we can all agree that the last thing videogames need is for Hollywood to decide what makes a story and how we can shove more of that into interactive media, which clearly all behave in the same way and can accommodate such a worldly deposit of the collected wisdom of a century of filmmaking, right?

How shortsighted and egotistical. As though print media, visual and performance art don’t have much longer histories and as much to offer, if not more. And how disgustingly superior one must be, to assume new media need develop along any prescribed path.

My point here with describing my exam is to illustrate how pervasive this sort of cultural imperialism really is, that rhetorics of “stories and gaming” really mean “how can Hollywood shove what it knows best into a new market?” In the question my department posed, “story” is not “story.” “Story” is the Campbellian hero’s journey monomyth dreck we think of when we hear “story.” And that is at best a very small fraction of what stories are and can be.

You should hate this guy and all screenwriting departments who teach him.

My dream was one in which the web’s diverging ecology of media formats and practices all were allowed to coexist in the absence of some presumptuous “higher power” imposing a lockdown. This is how technology wants to be, because technology is the child of the human mind and humans are endlessly innovative. There is never only one of anything, nor are any two the same, and to assume that there should be is pretty frightening and dangerous.

The best article I read during the blackout was John Walker’s “Why People Are Still Failing to Accept the True Horror of SOPA/PIPA”. In it, he criticizes Stephen Totilo -who is generally a very forward-thinking guy- for not only refusing to darken Kotaku during the protest but to write an editorial suggesting we’re all worrying our silly little heads for nothing. On the contrary, Walker reminds us that this is a very familiar tactic of old media, and it’s one they’re keen to keep playing right up until the Sun dies or capitalism implodes.

Convergence (the idea that all technology and media will eventually flow through a single channel) is a mythological revision of history, a fantasy propagated by the richest assholes in the world who want to control everything they can and, if possible, more than even that. This is not the hysterical whine of the academic leftist in a smog-stained ivory tower. This is what we’re dealing with. No media executive is ever going to say “Eh… that’s enough.” They’d stamp brands into our skin cells if they could get away with it.

(Wait, wasn’t that the premise of Metal Gear Solid 4?)

Look, I love the Internet. Every grubby inch of it, even if I gripe about it constantly. Just a few years ago when I was in high school I tended to think of it as the new Wild West. Well, now we’re living in a West that’s in the process of being settled, and the new management is quite keen to run all the current residents out. There go the wood bison. There goes the California condor. There go the Sioux. How long before the American capitalist empire’s manifest destiny to cover the Web from server to shining server wipes out any actual ingenuity we have left? Because that’s what’s at stake here. SOPA/PIPA aren’t the real problem. The real problem is that even if we kill these two bills, there will be a thousand more just like it tomorrow.

In my dream I understood that the multimedia were only temporarily gone and would all be back up the next day. But what if they weren’t? What if it was a taxonomy of a hundred formats all wiped out in a sudden mass extinction? What will it say under the headings for Encyclopedia wikipedia or Videoshare youtube for the reasons for their abrupt and tragic disappearance from the archeological record? Did a comet hit them? Or was it just the dying American empire, which was on its way out itself?

Excuse me while I quote Walker at length:

[Media corporations] are so desperate for control in a world that is increasingly recognising their irrelevance that they are attempting to shut down and dominate everything they can. To believe that the RIAA, BPI, etc would not charge you for humming as you drive if they could is to idiotically misunderstand the sheer bat-shit lunatic desperation we’re dealing with here. Yes, ha ha, what a silly notion. But to think it any more silly than their attempts to sue the creators of the first mp3 players, or huge efforts to ban the home VCR, is to woefully miss the point. These are the same people who bullied the world into accepting ridiculous crippling region codes on DVDs, and are able to force manufacturers to not allow customers to skip their nonsensical threatening messages at the beginning of every legally purchased film. They are the people asking us to spy on our fellow cinema goers, and turn them in if we see them filming. They are the reason your HDMI cable is capable of stopping you from watching content they decide they don’t want shown.

We’re dealing with archaic industries that were built around the impossibility of that which is now possible. Their time is up, and they know it. But they are so massive, so enormously powerful, that they are going to do everything imaginable to defend their fortunes. And that’s why we have SOPA and PIPA. They know it won’t beat piracy, because it’s immediately obvious to anyone with half a clue that it cannot. But it will give them power over the internet, that all history shows they will abuse to the most ludicrous degree.

This right here is 100% rock-solid truth and anyone who writes it off as improbable doesn’t know their history.

*Burch is here using theatrical terminology for stagey (“presentational”) and realistic (“representational”) conventions of production and performance. His argument is that the Hollywood style of replicating reality is opposed to the more deliberately abstract and stylized approach of Japanese performance art and cinema. In game reviewer parlance, we could potentially pose this as “gamey” and “immersive.”

**There are modern-day benshi, in the same way that in major cities in the US you can find silent movie theaters with live accompaniment. But they are not the dominant form they once were.

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