The Screaming Man

YIIK: A Post Modern RPG became post-modern in it's own special way. So let's look at some buzzwords!

Part 1: Rebuilding Lego Towers

Gaming is filled with buzzwords, but also likes to turn things into buzzwords. Yet all buzzwords did once have some meaning. The same could be said for “Post-Modernism” it is a buzzword – but underneath is an actual philosophy. Cutting through this, is ironically very modernist. So let’s dig through some buzzwords surrounding YIIk: A Post Modern RPG.

When something has the blind faith in its product to call itself a “Post-Modern RPG”, you’re probably going to see a lot of knee-jerk reactions to it. The Foucauldian chewing gum spat out by tumblr will probably shriek with pointed fingers about the bizarre levels of male-feminism in the game. Perhaps some enlightened Marxist sitting on his branch of twitter might talk of it betraying it’s concept by being on Steam. Or perhaps the powerful plebian who spits in the eyes of anyone trying to see games as art and says that the mechanics are just the same and bland. Yet none of these capture the grand power of YIIK: A Post Modern RPG in how it did reach its target of being a “post modern game” but in a much more post-modern way, than perhaps it meant itself to be. 

Let me first put a lynchpin on what do we mean by “post-modern” in this case. Luckily, we have a couple videogames to try sample this flavour. You have Cruelty Squad, which is the quintessential. The controls are post-structuralist, breaking down to the core actions of buttons and all their associated meanings and throws them out of the window for a new control scheme that becomes surprisingly intuitive. The story is a barely woven, semi-poetical exploration of Georges Bataille’s concept of an economy of consumption (a quote from The Accursed Share even appears at the ‘good end’). With some side NPCs vaguely nodding towards the Deleuze/Jameson/Lacan trickle of capitalism and schizophrenia. All with a soundtrack that would probably give some nineties Marxist some flashbacks. It presents a much different Post-Modernism than YIIK does. Characterised by an all-pervading 'depthlessness' - beneath the swirl of surface styles and images, and so the textures are a mix, faces are distorted and human only in surface elements. A world engulfed in cultural obsession with 'instant' fixes and the next big trend, rather than long-term solutions as resurrection can come for a couple hundred bucks. Cruelty Squad even portrays multi-culturalism in a way that capitalised, and twists on national identities; with a concern for surface 'image' beneath which everything and everyone fades to grey. There’s no lore or ‘history’ or complex essays for Cruelty Squad because everything is in this short-term bubble. Where its own 'history' and 'future' have been collapsed, providing material for the mission-targets and stock market to re-invent. It is a game in which you must navigate a society that is pervaded with a sense of going nowhere, which is at its core, the polar opposite of the world in YIIK. So where does YIIK stand against a post-modern demonstration game like this? That philosophy which is woven from its core mechanics, to its coding (inside Cruelty Squad there is a novel anti-cheat system in which memory values for health/ammo are constantly shifted, meaning a trainer or lua script can only hit the value once per load of mission/menu).

YIIK is great because we can actually see the modernist philosophy very transparently. The developer has written extensively on their blog about each of their rational choices. Of all the rationalisations of novels they’ve read, of how these complex things can be cooked down into rational parts and rebuilt into their main character. An unlikable 90s college grad that thinks of himself as an intellectual, he’s designed to be a unlikeable, the anti-thesis to the striving heroes of traditional RPGS (Something, that was aimed at Dragon Quest as it was mentioned in the Dev Blog in comparison to Earthbound. Despite the series subverting this with in multiple entries). Every classic is pulled apart into meat and bones. He deconstructs the Legend of Zelda’s colours and monster design, only to re-put them back together in the exact same style. This is modernism’s failings – claiming they are taking the Derridean deconstruction and critique, tearing apart and restructuring into something allegedly new. While missing that raw creativity one gets by doing the opposite of rationalism.  

YIIK in its battle system does superficially- expound the post-modern idea of a multiplicity of selves which somehow give rise to a sense of individual identity. Reflecting the cooperate-cultural obsession with schizoid fragmentation, dragging together all hairball leftovers puked out by the cats of the earthbound-like indie-RPGS. Yet what remains in YIIK is exactly what happens when the AAA machine puts out the claim that to be 'many selves' can be seen to be superior to the feeling of being a single concentrated concept. The special attack minigames, its dodging system, its way of using items. So many things that are all good, but does not do anything beyond repeating them for it’s rational ‘goodness’.

Cruelty Squad has a simple gameplay loop, a single core individual that is capable of doing many things even if it doesn’t have the Paper Mario micro-games for every attack of YIIK. As it is, this multiple (self) part concept seems to provide a neat get-out clause for those who wish to avoid responsibility for their own failures and dysfunctions (as we’ve seen with the dev’s blaming gamers and relenting on many quality of life updates while still adding in random quirky popular things…). It’s this rationale going into the pot, if you know what I mean. Cruelty Squad abuses the post-modern capitalist technomancy to maximise all parts of it’s simplistic gameplay. YIIK frolics in wild reductionist simplistic gameplay loops, devoid of context. And like all such obsessions, leads to absurdity.

This gameplay structure is also of interest to us, because while the Dev did do a sort of Derridean deconstructionism on classical games, it never quite in its base reaches post-modern. While much of post-modern theory has its foundation in post-structuralism, they do depart from each other in the exact same way that YIIK and Cruelty Squad does. We gonna go a little hard into philosophy terms, but it’s all stuff you encounter in videogames anyway. Post-Structural and Post-Modern both emphasise the interplay of truth and subjectivity; hence the general split between “post-modern” artists and their cultural Earthbound-like cliques and video essays; then “post-modernity” the process of social, political, cultural and economic fragmentation which is your eYe: Divine Cybermancy friends who don’t seem to know what’s going on but they are having a swell time with their fine legs. A sort of difference between games that deconstruct what a videogame narrative is to vibe around that, and the game that you can’t quite grasp but ultimately vibe with.  

In this sense YIIK: A Post Modern RPG did become a “Post-Modern RPG” but didn’t start in the former category, and that was within the memes and upper discourse (read: social) layer. Foucault, the granddaddy of everything that journalists think are pissing off gamers, use discourse as a link to the idea of context; or, to take YIIK as an example, one may post a picture of Alex crudely photoshopped onto Death Grip’s Guillotine cover. You can’t get to that point without knowing Alex’s (and Death Grip’s) shared context (which is autism).

Not just because it’s a meme in a raw sense – it goes beyond say Díaz’s definition of a meme where it requires some degree of identification. A cat ‘meme’ can go beyond languages or context, it can hit just a raw sentiment; hence why the European Union struggles to say anything other than “dogwhistle” about pepe in a clown wig. Alex “yikking” out represents something fragmented, social, almost magical that has (almost) nothing to do with videogames. Foucault’s discourse helps to navigate what has been said by fitting it onto an historical matrix with associated conditions of existence – but the historical context is so thin, so fragmented that Alex “YIIKING” out can almost be unrelated to the game. To remove any sort of person/body in the discourse, take the 4chan /v/ (Videogames) board’s takes on the two games. YIIK has more threads over the years than most indie FOTM games but it’s all memes, disconnected “I’m YIIKING out” posts; References beyond the game, only a minute few are about the gameplay, or story or even the indie-darling-made music. Even if there is a post of the Alex plushie and how the Devs are in on “it”, they aren’t really because they are not really monetising this social, floating concept of YIIK. That plushie is Alex the rationalism built character – locked in a Foucauldian battle between being post-structuralist but also rebuilding the same structure. This split, where it transcends the discourse, historical context, beyond any discourse on the game/gameplay level is beautiful. This is why those big 4-6 hour long video essays trying to explain/review YIIK get swept up and struggle. A game like eYe or Cruelty Squad are depthless in an abyss sense, YIIK is depthless like a puddle. YIIK is only post-modern, in the  sense that it has become a cult classic with staying power with less people playing the game. Fragmenting itself even from its discourse; it is its own subjective discourse,

It is perhaps a very post-modern situation to be in, a cult classic that was not merely just a viral event or a great cancellation (Silent Hills/PT for example). There is another angle we can take when poking about this case. YIIK: A Post Modern RPG represents a type of authority-based-post-modernism that probably needs a real name, but it’s the same straw that the IBS-adjacent commentators used chase to make strawmans out of. The type of rationalism that Saint Newman feared was erasing the beauty out of church services, but also of science and poetry. It is deconstruction, but then only one way. It is you, the man in the middle. The Heidegger Objective-Subjective switch at which man in the centre projects his ideas and you must validate them, live them. Maybe Laschian Narcissism but narcissism is too strong of a personality disorder here.

Part 2: I command thee, to pick up my Lego bricks

The strange ultra-empirical, ultra-rationalist deconstructionism that when disagreed with is met with “you’re wrong” or “you have a cognitive bias” or as the developer of YIIK said; “My problem was I saw videogames as art”. It’s not quite looking down-upon, it’s not quite trying to educate the unenlightened masses because as we’ve seen with Cruelty Squad, the masses can just look upon something ugly, vile and yet still vibe with the game’s world. No, it’s a view point you must see. You must see all of the developer’s machinations, expansive world and the characterisation of Sammy. Have the experience in a way the developer intended, in a straight straight-sense. In academia, it is the stalwart motivated reasoning new-sceptic repeatedly saying “It’s simpler than that” as they smugly show off their range of dodgy psychological evidence. YIIk’s monologues are not a symptom of poor game design per se, but a straight soft-authoritarianism that was once considered in sociology by Mary Matossian as the ‘assaulted intellectual”. In Sociology, it’s more of the west-eastern colonisation sphere, but we can apply it here to games. It’s been applied to the Internet, in very much a parallel as with here.

Take Alex. Alex went to university, he did computer science, a bit of game development, he’s done his politics and scored good grades. He danced around the academic sphere, he’s read the journals, he’s a cool slick intellectual from a higher plane. He settles down to see what slop is on Steam and sees gameplay-focused FPSs, JRPGs with panty-shot controversies, and a weird hankering of clones of nostalgia-bait games. He sees the greats, the classics, he holds them up from glorious Nintendo 64 days, and looks at the slop his “people” are playing. “Games are art!” he says, but refuses to acknowledge programming as craft in itself. “Games are art he says, and I will prove it!”. So he brings his academic knowledge. He brings all of his writing classes and famous Japanese novel series and writes blogposts about how he’s empirically broken down why people like these games and how he’ll improve upon them. There’s nothing but wonderful ambition, nothing but love for the medium. He is still a gamer. He doesn’t want to make David Cage or Neil Druckman movie-games. He doesn’t want to make a cinematic thing because he’s a gamer. Yet when he makes this wonderful empirically-driven-pure-rationalism-of-the-modern-age-designed-wonderful-enlightened-academic-stained game; the reaction is mockery, negativity, confusion.

Gamers are fools. He says. Gamers weren’t ready. He decries. Gamers aren’t ready for art. He puts in interviews.

He pathologizes the scope of his gamers and ultimately rejects his own people.

The main guy behind YIIk: A Post-Modern RPG eventually realised this - the mistake of the assaulted intellectual; Too late to really salvage it from becoming the YIIKING OUT meme game where control over the title of the game was lost. Early enough however, to launch some good will, to embrace some transcendental shit-cringe with the golden-llama. Embracing the weird cult classic status as a meme, as a weird off shoot. With Alex fumos, and quality of life updates backtracking on some of the earlier developer blogs we still get the ultimate post-modern-post-modern experience that is YIIK. From its post-structuralist controls, from it’s social-post-modern-cult-classic status but then even later on to the loss of authorship over to the capital machine. Not to be too continental, but YIIK un-apologetically plugged itself into the gamer-capitalist-machine, raking back the social-value and made money, more good will out of it. It’s post-modern all the way down, baby!

Last year, a game called moon: A Remix RPG was republished on a lot of platforms, and what is so amusing is that it is also so quintessentially YIIK, but made during the actual y2k era. It deconstructed, de-structuralised the notion of “hero”,  or “player-developer” or of “RPG-Controls” and bits of “Dragon Quest”; even insofar to having a distinct line where the hero (but not protagonist), is unlikeable. The ‘music’ in moon, was even done in same vein as YIIk, with known-musicians producing interesting music but moon locks it behind CDs to find because you’re supposed to listen to the sounds of the world instead of the “BGM”. There’s are no long monologues by the player character, moon wants you to listen to it’s world, the heartbeat of a world ravaged by the “hero” saving the world. Do not project your “hero”. Do not project your narcissism here. You are a guest. “Bits” of the world and the quests to restore “love” is randomised, esoteric meaning you have to find it yourself by being one with the world. It has deconstructed all bits of an RPG world and distilled it so tightly down. It is deconstruction, but it isn’t entirely rationalism. They’ve built something new, they want the metaphysical (of their world) to touch with the reality (of the player), it’s closer to Newman.

It is, and should be in the same position as YIIK, but moon doesn’t entirely leash you to its creators whims. It doesn’t demand 100%, it doesn’t demand you know obscure bits about the soundtrack, and mini-games are tied to the world not forced-constantly like YIIk. Moon doesn’t have that soft-authoritarian forcefulness of the assaulted intellectual. You can say ‘soul’ or ‘authentic’ but it's a little more intimate and a little more concise than a more general ontology of experience. Moon creates an atmosphere mixture of dreams and melancholy. Of comfort of home, and the pleasantness of love and community. Entirely dream-like, entirely video-game like, but breathing like a real world. YIIK  forces the surrealness with the pandas, whacky colours and themed personal “dungeons” like Persona, yet never feels like a lived-in world. One of the reasons why I preferred Megami Tensei 2 over Persona 5 is not because I hate teenagers, but I want to see the humans in it dropped in horrible situations with demons. I want to feel the alien, uncharted territory in Strange Journey and the way people resort to power, faith, or strength. Moon, blends this entirely together – you are an alien to their world but now you are a part of it. You are not the JRPG protagonist steamrolling through pillaging, killing and some side quests. You are not Alex monologuing how to solve people’s mental illness and then also taking out sign-post enemies and grinding experience of healing. YIIK, in all it’s de-constructive, assaulted intellectual glory, creates nothing, not trash (as I wrote on before) but serial shallowness. Depth has to be, in some way accessible – which feels kinda obvious to say – not just lucidly like The Remains of Edith Finch because they requires engagement, exploration and thinking. The expressions and different angles in moon are not replicated in YIIK, because someone might just interpret it differently, might take a different lesson, but YIIK wants you to take one thing. The RPG version of the “slight wider rails” shooter phenomenon that came out when the developers wanted to make the player-made Bad Company set pieces controlled and to be seen by all. In the aid of “accessibility” to these cool frostbite engine moments, made them less accessible. Moon and YIIK should gently occupy the same space, more so than Cruelty Squad, but their idea of a post-modern, remix, deconstructed, structuralised RPG come out in completely different ways. Both rip and tear at Dragon Quest’s throat but only one of them creates what could loosely be called ‘art’ of the medium on its own standing.

Placing YIIK, between moon and Cruelty Squad, in terms of both world and gameplay really highlights not only how drab the sheer exuberance of YIIK is, but the forcefulness at which YIIK wants you to experience it. At least David Cage forces you on rails with choices or flow charts. At least you take Neil Druckmann’s spunk directly to the face. There’s something not “inauthentic” but also “authentic” of YIIK, that makes it so unbelievably post-modern in every single way but being an Post-Modern-RPG. Now that’s some post-modern irony for you.