The Crawling Man
Multiple worlds, multiple perspectives. Yet, maybe we should have some chasms and divisions between worlds....
The Crawling Man.
Recently, I’ve been going through a seminar course and the backlog over at The New Centre. This was shortly after my round with the coof and off the back of writing The Tree Man.
I found myself completely mad with it! I could’ve had an entire article on the perspectivism interaction with the prometheanism of Etrian Odyssey; which would’ve allowed me to bore you with more details in The Tree Man about the rhino mafia, or the way magic-space fascism is shown in the later Wizardry series!!!
Etrian Odyssey sets the “worldmaking” question that we were looking at, towards prometheanism, in a world in which humans did get almost get above the destruction of the climate! Where one’s love of death means that they too have to go into the necrophiliac arms of mother death to truly go beyond, oh but then at the end---! Oh, how I could’ve written in my undergrad dissertation about perspectivism in regards to cartesian dualism in western medical ethics, oh, oh! Oh, how much of a tree of thought I’ve missed!
For all of the soft-nodding of “Yes I thought of this too!” as we go through the assigned reading, “but this type of cosmology already existed.” I whisper…Then it washes away. In the dreams of the labour of the inhuman, in dreams of dust and water. In the nihilism that turns indifferent to death and life itself. Out of it, a little series called Phantasy Star ends up grounding me, after finding out I can now play Portable 2 Infinity in English.
Yet I smile when in Phantasy Star Portable, a robot talks about exchanging knowledge with the Kasch tribe (who both have extreme technology and despise the overuse of it). For in the world in which The Terraforming has been done, where centralised but also spreading systems have been modelled to the true unification of all, where people are happy across this completely shared technology; this tribe that are considered culturally to be protected are in fact, rather modernist. The entire thing was a superficial line, a little generic line, a throw away in a bonus mission. It’s not particularly deep and anyone who actually has an academic career would eyeroll at it.
Yet, I cannot help but find myself quite swayed by it.
Nobody plays anything post the Genesis Phantasy Star games for their textual output – half of it is lost media and the other half is split between 144p nico nico recordings or an anime OVA. Nobody plays it for its graphics, unless you count modern nostalgia addicts (and people who miss when the restrictions of tech required creative responses). Perhaps you can say it’s the socialness of the console eras that gave it an appeal. Hell the PS2 did get a Phantasy Star Universe keyboard, but most of the time you’re gonna be using set phases or auto dialogue. All in the gameplay the meat lies, which isn’t particularly deep. A 3D Diablo but with gameplay a little more close to a Monster Hunter that’s been washed down with a little bit of Mousou games. □□□△△△
Phantasy Star is purified by gameplay; It’s purified by the ritual of auto-play responses, emotes, weapons, trading and with Infinite, mission creating. No wonder why the actual full open MMO is considered boring to bad. What the MMO has in its DNA is a toxin that adds the impurities of the social, of the sign, of the outside, of temporality. This dilutes the world-gameplay-social into segments with in walls away from each other, exchanging notes underneath prison doors.
After all, it’d be easy to just write the Kasch tribe as some indigenous stereotypes in the woods, not a reflection of the trepidation around technology we see now. Hell they share their photon work with everyone anyway, while Polluting the environment with mechanical tribes and causing earthquakes as they edit their own small Gaia – all for gameplay reasons because solving riddles with no punishment would be silly!
What is interesting from this, regarding with what I opened with; concerning the seminar on perspectivism and prometheanism. One shared reality, with different cultures interacting, or multiple shared realities with one culture. Phantasy Star deliberately takes the latter, while an example I will go into later uses the former.
What gives me unease then, is that there is a fine line between the layers of perspectivism -what we consider “reality” is not universal but varies according to the viewpoint of each being. - and oversocialisation – the destruction of the individual by pressures and the shaping of wider society. One may say that a universal culture, a reversal of traditional western ontologies does not impose a vertical downward model, replicated in the political structure. That’s a dangerous line to walk. See, when you make encounters loop around, the plane of interconnectivity is fed unto itself, so what becomes the nature of reality and perception across different beings and cultures become pushed out of other encounters, diverse perspectives enriching the understanding of multiple worlds[1]
As an example of this, before I bore you about MMOs. I’ve talked about the death of teleology of the internet (lowercase) before and I have an article forthcoming about perspectivism on the (uppercase) Internet and the so called memetic “digital nomads”. Who all used bricolage restart the monoculture of Americana, via code of conduct rulesets engraved into the standard of silicon valley programming, with overly package managed world-erasing sites. All this pushing down on a hardware/software level all goes and rubs up uncomfortably close to a mono-ethical-multi-cultural-multi-perspective push-down, while still retraining itself as a model-of of the world it’s being pushed onto. For the sake of multiple perspectives, other’s realities, and the layers of the game, they have to peeled, regulated into “encounters” but encounters slot separate lanes along the guise of an overwhelming diagram (game).
See, now that’s where we get to the opposite of the perspective-prometheanism of Phantasy Star to prometheanism-perspectivism; World of Warcraft. Perhaps a testament its long lasting appeal is that it has always been a bastion of “multinaturalism”. Older WoW had this in several ways: Each server or “realm” had different reputations, different styles, different leaders. All players and economies were mixed in with broader meta-styles: Either Player vs Player (so it was always open PvP) or Player vs Environment (PVP could be toggled) or RP of either kins (Roleplaying). Resulting in certain servers like Moonglade having a distinct identity. In later expansions, “staging” and “instancing” became a thing were depending on how far you were in the world, difference NPCs would be somewhere else. So two people in the same party could enter an area and it would be different in their perspective. In later WoW however, when the universality started happening, everything is instanced liked this but in totality with people from all servers being instanced together in chunks. This means you get way more funny webms of a lone undead ganking a gnome in Ironforge, but a lot less Goldshire ERP. This is goes further with ever player from around the world having a different reality, a different ontology of the world itself – the most obvious being the nature of the undead faction in the Chinese editions (which is only for one region) – but then begins to be layered by other perspectives. Other naturalities, other worlds, end up recreating a forced shared culture. No more realm identity, no more group identities, we all share one culture despite our different worlds 😊
So consider my amusement when my mother sends me a screenshot of an NPC and says “it doesn’t look as cool as yours.” What was it? Well it so happens that in the world of healing, attachments, stumps, gnomes, and endless resurrection of whatever NPC the writers pull out for wankery[2] you end up with a dragon NPC in a plain rather normal looking wooden wheelchair. Now I am disabled, and use a wheelchair, and this representation is supposed to speak to me – as my Mother’s intentions were. Yet I cannot find anything but distance from it; not disgust, just a weird “oh” unease. The dragon wheelchair is not the naturalism of the world; It’s my naturalism, imposed on a different naturalism. I see this trend a lot with fantasy wheelchairs, but I want a more dakka Ork wheelchair in Warhammer, or the goblins of the horde to make me a bike-copter-chair. Of all of Kalecos’s magic, of all of the Dreamer’s dreams, all of Chromie’s time powers, none of the dragon aspects could pull out of their ass some sort of mecha-dragon legs, or have an elemental be his beanbag or graft onto him his previous selves working legs? You almost want to drink from the forbidden prometheanism cup then, at this sheer lack of in-world natures. Perhaps proponents of perspectivism would say that this is merely the same model-for programming that no matter what the West does cannot shake out off. Perhaps they would argue that trying to do metaphysical ethnographies with videogames is stupid – but I say that the jaguar will not understand if you try to share culture him via Jesus’s blood. That I suppose is the fine line between colonialism and the West’s futile attempts, but again I disagree. In an MMORPG, we are to combine, meld and play inside a grand ritual. We give ourselves up to the “role”. I don’t think this has been just a contagion in MMOs either[3].
To show you this melding within World of Warcraft, let us go back to the China censorship I mentioned earlier. There is a well-known area underneath a raid called Karazhan, that one could jump out of bounds and reach. One of the halls in this unfinished/canned area was called “The hall of upside down sinners”, which is a bunch of people chained upside down underwater, if the name didn’t already imply that. Except in the Chinese version, these bodies are removed, despite being in an area not “natural” to the world, and whose only remnants are our world’s perspective and the ontology of this cut world is different to ours. The shared culture is then pushed down, but not from the shared culture of the same world inside. So, the different Chinese version specifically editing something that exists only in one perspective[4] – one nature – for the purpose of censoring something in-world to align with the real-world is not just a tacit implication of the nature of imperialistic perspectivism, but also the way the oversocialisation leads even down to things that are social-curiosities or separate from the ontology. The social then is pulled in between the two, what is cosmological becomes social and vice versa, hence my entire itch with the nature of oversocialisation within perspectivism, or at least my probable strawman version of it.
A game asks of you to meet in between the two, to become as one, not to entirely give yourself up but to have an encounter too. Hell Viveiros de Castro stumbles into this by accident when trying to cope out the differences between the game of football (western) and ritual of football (Amerindian). When in fact these are both diagramming their encounters, their cultures within in diagram of the “game” – there’s a reason why football is split between different styles and the World Cup is always fraught with complaints at the different styles. My father often laments that the universal culture in football has been pushed down and chiselled away at the individual worlds of football – and I guess that explains why betting/gambling types prefer the Turkish football league, for an assumed ‘purity’ of world-perspective. I’m always so dearly enamoured with Huizinga’s Homo Ludens because underneath all of the extra ontology has there is this fundamental “thing” that in direct (not anthropological) destruction (i.e fascism in Europe) is destroyed first and foremost. The same flattening and “seriousness” or what Viveiros de Castro equates to social-studies way of understanding, as with the Blairites in England destroying the ritual and “play” of the government to make it more “serious”, and akin to the capital-monoculture and the oversocialisation even down to the connection of the role and person. The thin line between a person playing a role, being private and assuming a part in the game (i.e. a judge with a wig) is near always being destroyed. Be it for for social sensibilities or as simple as the person’s perspective-ontology (i.e. A shaman’s communication between the animate and inanimate) getting overwritten by someone else’s ontology by way of transformation. As noted in lectures given by Viveiros de Castro, several groups outlaw the use of metaphor because of the way metaphors sublate meanings. The ritual of the wig is what allows him to talk to lady justice and the lay men, the ritual of the shaman gives up himself to ask the animals if they can hunt.
That there is the difference between World of Warcraft as a projected metaphor—the invisible transformation of a world into another world to the point it no longer shares perspective with its original world, “endo-cannibalism” as a introduction to the Viveiros de Castro lecture I mentioned above remarks, and Phantasy Star is then in reverse works as a transformation. As an introduction to one of his lectures goes: “it takes a metaphor to put a word into perspective, and also a perspective to put a word into the dictionary.” And to play with this introduction further; In which the responsible player is obliged to resist the temptation to turn a sudden connection into immersion, and instead fold it back into their larger thoughts until it becomes a memory—to remember the faces of the real people.
In Phantasy Star your pre-conditions are skewed with in order to help cleanse you for their world. Any prefiguration is thrown out. Any strange “savages” or “primitives” notions are thrown out as the nomadic tribes just happily go with a CAST and have their own cosmology with her perspective. The “myth” in these games are not exactly a monomyth, just a shared type of animism that is never really connected upon, except by the way of technology. It is worth noting that in Phantasy Star 0, the game is different with a different mythology – a different perspective - depending what race you play (noting that the Universe races do not “exist” yet.) and Phantasy Star Portable both push together a same type of story; a girl is given over to the predominant need for a production of something tech-related and in which everyone involves learns something about friendship, but the girl is freed from this duty and Dark Falz gets his design ruined a little more to tie up the cosmology. This sounds superficial but it’s because the story in Phantasy Star is always done by transformation into transference. A new myth, a new gift is given, and then it is transformed; curated and transferred into the harmony of the world. Dark Falz is always the triumph of mental design over matter and as such is always defeated by transformation; In exchanging he wishes to create and produce a new world, the main casts seek to transfer a new perspective to be gathered inside of the overarching culture. An exchange event is always a transformation of a prior exchange event, there is no absolute beginning, no absolute initial act of exchange. Now, creation-production is the doing action, in World of Warcraft this is the “champions” who are then woven into the lore then history and myth that then gets suddenly edited because they updated a model or three. Things aren’t exchanged, they are deleted or thrown out or produced more of – what Dark Falz wants to do with Mother Trinity in Phantasy Star 0, what Dark Falz wants to do with Sunking Kumhan in Phantasy Star Portable. The design and destiny of “creating” their world, or their original world – their original projected myth over the world’s cosmology. In this transformation, every player in Phantasy Star edits and world-makes but does so in exchanges: after all, in Infinity, is that not the point of the mission codes? One transforms by exchange – not action – their mission codes into something unique to them and how they wish to do it. Bricolage by way of purified ritualistic gameplay.
There’s a reason why Phantasy Star’s “language” is a distortion of a real font and a truly real blended world of tech and Gaia for which one plays and roles with. And World of Warcraft’s is a engineered,, modelled text parser to mimic a language. And now we have real life people saying “kek”.
[1] I think this thin line, that probably deserves its own article, is where we find Mark Fisher’s snap change against the very working class people he lived with in the article: “If I Trust You”.
[2] (EXCEPT ROHAN REDHAIR YOU PIECES OF SHIT. I DON’T WANT KHADGAR. RETURN THE GINGER)
[3] Tabletop games have replicated this with the curse of crit-role character LARPers instead of just player character LARPers found within DnD horror stories. But I believe that is a little different. It’s walking the fine line of perspectivism and narcissism, not really oversocialisation.
[4] Most skeletons and such in the Chinese version are replaced with strawmen, and most of the edits in Kara become strawmen so this direct deletion/non-loading seems just too specific to be a bulk edit. Perhaps I am wrong, but it’s interesting none the less, because it’s where the natures, the perspectives as well as the social layer on top flatten, more than “encounter”.