The Tree Man
On "Blobbers" and why survival, narrative and videogames don't always need realism.
1) AnNIHILation
One of my favourite pass-times in philosophy, is reading people’s writings about things that they personally give a shit about. Whether it’s someone complaining about why they don’t like a novel or even Jameson ranting about the movie Speed for a few pages. Consider the joy then, when not only I found a paper of interesting videogame philosophy, but also of philosophers I’ve been recently reading through! Only to find that the piece is not only mired in the traps of many a videogame philosophy paper, but also gives me an opportunity to talk about a genre I love alongside his own. Near the start of his paper, Survival and Ontology: A Tentative Genealogy of Survival in Gaming and Contemporary Philosophy, Václav Janoščík opens with commentary on the survival open world crafting genre:
“In this respect the game not only fits the paradigm of dystopian realism, but also that of current ontological demand, an urge to redefine the fabric of what we consider to be our world according to our contemporary condition, which so strongly inheres a sense of environmental crisis, individualism and survival itself.”1
His paper, drawing from the Landian Bataille reading, poetic materialists and other pessimistic capitalism commentators; he draws a complete void in regards to humanity and their games. Within the talk of domination, violence against NPC monsters and of the apocalypse, a rather sad reading of Bataille is folded into it, almost unscathed by the author. Revealing a genealogy that is closer to that of the thinkers and the nihil human than of the videogames themselves.
I wish to propose here, not that he is entirely wrong with his own genealogy, but I wish to tell of a different tree, with almost the same thinkers. One not of nihilism per se, nor one of extinction straight, but one of love – real condemned love. The story of the deep labyrinths and annoyed wizards. Stories of trees grown over the top of the end of humanity. There are hints of this in his writings on hyperstition and a little bit of late Mark Fisher’s hope of getting through capitalism, yet the genealogy of survival games crushes this, and crushes it into coal, not the diamond that it truly is.
2) Dungeons’n’Death
12 years before Wolfenstein 3D was released, a dungeon crawler named Wizardry was. Pure labyrinth, with unfair traps, monsters that de-levelled you, a fractal challenge to get lost in. This was a birth of what is known as the “blobber” genre – where one moves a “blob” of characters all sort of together on a square. Dressed in the hallmarks of Dungeons’n’Dragons, yet Wizardry abandoned the historical realism of 20+ sizes of halberd for different purposes for more abstract survival in situations and cartography. Differentiating between the single-multiple character choice of a player versus a party of independent thinkers around a D’n’D table. As such, characters could die of old age at best, or at worst a random trap because you draw a square wrong, there’s no “unconscious” state as in D’n’D or miracle “saves”; one must drag the body back before it becomes ash or a reaper takes it. I mention this difference between what formed Wizardry and DnD because both of which are much more different than their modern incarnations – even if certain mechanics and state distributions are the same – and this is a common mistake when tracing the ontology of certain genres. Janoščík calls upon Svelch’s Players vs Monsters book on the role of monsters in videogames, and this influence of D’n’D on early FPS and RTS games – of which “the navigation through the gamespace and the pleasure from playing is derived almost solely from killing, domination and survival.”2. Yet, this is perhaps much more close to the sanitised, Critical Role era of D’n’D more than what was analogous at the time; one had to exist in a reconstruction of medieval fantasy – hence the difference of the polearm of a guard and that of a knight, it was layering of one’s wits and cohesion in the world. A far cry from an anime-inspired Tiefling who has their entire overdramatic backstory thrown onto the DM’s world as a Halfling throws its shoes because one broke the game with their meta-knowledge. Domination by the individual is, at least in my regards, different than domination by the world.
This split is a foundational difference between our genealogies; the difference between Wizardry and the true-human-world-love found within the bleakness of survival versus the domination-individual-survival-nihilism found against the world in Wolfenstein 3D. Blobbers play with this with their created characters; long running Wizardry clone series Etrian Odyssey deliberately caps the player at 5 party members, burdening the player with the feeling of always missing something from their party but in exchange a better love and bond is formed in the covering of the missing role. Just as the Japanese Megami Tensei games turned the original novel into a blobber-style of game; a fractal labyrinth which one has to fight through, layered with the theme of love and not just love from the original Izanagi-Izanami myth. The protagonist throw their human shell away for the cold cybernetic embrace, but does so for love of humanity directly. They communicate with the demons, with the other side, but choosing the outside to love the inside. Quite the reflection compared the nature of the Doom guy, who through his transitions through various ID engines becomes the outside but is always quite firmly locked into his humanity. In Megami Tensei 2, the chaos-hero is in essence the Nick Land that Janoščík writes in regards to Wolfenstein. He is cold, he is one with the other-side, he abandons humanity at the quickest drop and shows nothing but domination of the other, of the end of the world – only to be so cruelly eaten and pulled apart by his own patron. Your game is even softlocked if you turn down the Witch’s offer for a humanistic love. There are choices for you, just like later games, but you must first offer humanity out of love, for domination is to immolate. Bataille states that one must be condemned to truly love oneself, domination into ash is only destruction of the body not a condemned love. The Wizardry lineage is the love behind Bataille, it is the condemnation of the self, it is the wasted energy, it is consumption, not conquering, always internal to the system of the “blob”. In Wolfenstein, your health goes down, you know when you are clawing for survival then you die and respawn. Landian, but not Bataille. As Bataille notes about the Aztec sacrifices, it is done internally, snap and quick. Of course Wizardry has health bars, but it has instant death. A wrong trap, and a healthy face is snapped in half and gone permanently. Perhaps one could say crushers, or drops or telefraggin’ is the same for the boomer shooters, but one must be active in activating these, one must do inputs to have it happen or even carelessness. In Wizardry you are the prey in the labyrinths and domination is usually meant as a bittersweet victory.
In Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land, published in 2003, which is bang in the middle of the Fisher Capitalist Realism chapter of the Janoščík article where the good old’ Jameson quote of “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” is thrown around, and the techno-RTS fantasy of Dune 2. Against this, the Blobber genre and Tale of The Forsaken Land is rather closer to the origin of the Jameson quote, from Franklin’s critique of J.G Ballard; “What could Ballard create if he were able to envision the end of capitalism as not the end, but the beginning, of a human world?” The Forsaken Land asks this of the player, there is pointlessness, nihilism of everyone involved, there is no domination and survival. The goal of the game, and the plot twist, is to let the town and last remaining humans pass on. Lasting black wizards and puppet Queens and the status quos and all ideologies that lived before are asked to be put down. You come to the labyrinth because you love humanity and must say goodbye to them. Even the human-concept of measuring time fades away with the endless winter, all that is wrought is humanity distilled. To let the human world start, what pins people down into classes, or duty or social realms are simply gone. This, at the core is pretty much present throughout Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Etrian Odyssey, so we shall approach the love-based apocalypse alongside the Plants vs Zombies and Fisherism chapter of Janoščík’s paper. (Did you know that the forgotten civilisation in Etrian Odyssey: Nexus, are the lemurians…)
3) Burn the Bridge – The Failure of “Realism”
Allow me to divert for a second. There is a Japanese Manga called “Houseki No Kuni” or “Land of the Lustrous”. A Buddhist treatise on the end of humanity, where humanity been split between bone, flesh and spirit. One of the last humans, one of the only ones to ever appear, creates a shepherd robot to help bring about the Buddha; during the last days of humanity, the human says to the robot:
"Once the bridge has been crossed, it has to be burned".
Humans could not come together to find their own salvation. They merged more and more of their bodies with inorganic parts and the only wish now is cut the attachment to the human. When said with an aggressive face, it reads like this; Abort the human race! Done out of love we must transcend into the cyberspace, out of love for humans they must be accelerated into techno-fascism and perhaps the cyber-Buddha will come.
Yet when said with a soft face, to the child that is the bridge between the Anthropocene and what is to come, there is love, salvation and condemnation. Not to simply eradicate all traces of humanity, and move in a violent annihilation but to cross, lead and grant the world meaning for what happens afterwards. This inorganic robot and his brother-robot are to burn the bridge out of love. The difference is subtle, almost, but in the death-rejecting, digital-immortality seeking future; to die violently, to grieve with all one’s energy and fade into the earth is just as violent of a consumption, but is it not done out of transhumanism or “aborting”.
I draw this distinction because there is a blobber series that works on this distinction. Etrian Odyssey, also known as Labyrinth of the World Tree, is a Wizardry clone from 2007. Having all of the brutal hallmarks of the Wizardry series, also Etrian Odyssey inherits this theme of love and bittersweetness. Halfway down the labyrinth of the original game, one finds the Forest Folk. A Post-Human race who go to war with the Etrians and serve as the penultimate antagonists, citing an ancient pact that must not be broken. Now what is that pact? The pact is that the bridge cannot be crossed again. For underneath their land, where the world tree touches the earth, is Lost Shinjuku. Here at the end of the human-world, there are small broken clues that humanity had tried to come together, but in the end chose the earth over themselves. The “humans” you have played are new species, evolved from those who do not know what a “human” is. Burn the bridge. Two Etrians tell you that if you find the secrets of Lost Shinjuku then adventurers will no longer come to town, will no longer expend their energy and die, will no longer provide all the economics of the bridge. This is where the (early) Fisherisms leave the train. So the two towers must burn. So you fight the final boss, the leader of this town, the maker of the pact, the lead researcher who turned himself into immortal inorganic-botanic, leeching off of the very tree made to save the earth to protect this “bridge”. He’ll even go into the tree, and you must kill him. He left his wife and children to die out of love for humanity and to shepherd in what may grow out of the tree. Yet the Etrians do not understand fully what humanity did, or their power of science, or even “climate change” but there is a resolve, to simply move on. Humanity is an empty shell of flesh at their feet. The labyrinth was a challenge, a goal, a war, a consumption but ultimately a rebirth for themselves with the bridge to past cut.
I give you this context, because I do not believe in Janoščík’s point that multiplayer survival games for example, echo how Mark Fisher’s infamous quote is represented in games or as he also described the apocalypse presented in the BBC show Years and Years (2019) as: “…a laboratory for our affectivity, resilience, relationality and sense of community.” Perhaps one could say these adjectives apply to the Blobber parties, but your guild is not a community. Still, it’s a nostalgia for what the human soul has lost! That individuality may be burned in the post-apocalypse into the happy relational tribes. This, is not what the main antagonist, Vasil, of Etrian Odyssey gave the people of Etria. The town mourns his death but never knows the truth of his role, for that must be put down and burned. There’s no historicism, or faux pastiches of the good tribe and borderline sociopathic ecologist with their ~those wonderful magical indigenous people~ worship. The Forest Folk and their open lands are the harshest, most violent, most consumption part of the war for it is those who are not wonderful in their ways, but hold onto a feeling that for temporality to be upheld, for history to be history, then the bridge must burn. The malaise in Janoščík’s writing on Plants vs Zombies, of endless capitalism, of an Anthropocene and all other rationalization that drip out of this pessimism forgets that videogames – just like architecture is for Jameson and film for Deleuze – are not a vehicle for a philosophy it simply is philosophy, for videogames have their own way of “thinking”. Pinning this down to decrepit survival, domination-filled fetish for realism, slavering the human drips over the top, trying to “real” the concept of a “blob” is nothing but anti-love, neglect and outright abandonment of the medium.
“Dystopian realism” as Janoščík writes, has no place in the Wizardry or EO lineage. There are no lessons to be learned here, there’s no vision of the end or capitalism. Capitalism, science and humanity ends with the Etrian Odyssey’s epilogue stating that the last human is an empty corpse at the adventurers’ feet. Perhaps one could read a lesson about climate change from it, but that lesson too, dies at the corpse of the last human. That is the world of what Bataille called "the stagnation of isolated ideas" a world that eventually returns to the flowers that the forest folk will decorate their Armor with, or Etrian’s decorating the tree. For the adventurers, the idea of a "peaceful world true to its calculations," which, as Piel says, in his essay on the notion of expenditure and intimate time with Bataille himself: “would be ordered by the primordial necessity of acquiring, of producing, and of conserving, is only a "useful illusion,”. This illusion is shattered by the adventurers who open the door. Who pushed past the twin towers, who have squandered their items, their materials or even themselves. Who burn the bridge. And so Vasil, who even lost his children and wife to be the only human refuses the final “love” for this illusion. And so, it is the adventurers in the light of love, who burn the bridge.
That is perhaps the love at the core of the original EO. To wager the voluntarily squandering of Etria, sending people to die down in the labyrinth. To wager the "societies based on enterprise" of the forest people. To wager the consumption of false-growth in Humans. And what is the player to take from that? You have no domination. You have not rejected modern society. This adventure has had death, petrification and violence. It is catastrophic that we have led to this war. No. It is filled with hope. Perfection (completeness) in weakness; as Piel speculates, on talking of how unfinished Bataille’s work was, how sensitive he was to every little movement in the world that:
“We will never know what would have become of this new Accursed Share or the work that would have been its continuation, but we do know what this book, such as Bataille left it, has brought us, and it is thanks to it that we can better respond to our anguished interrogation vis-a-vis the history of the world such as it is unfolding before our eyes.”3
And thus the ending of the original Etrian Odyssey comes to fruition. At the adventurer’s feet, a corpse of work that was completed, all the way to the point of catastrophe, war with the Forest Folk and now even “humanity” cannot expend itself anymore. The pact the adventurers made that day, as the epilogue says, is to save the earth and spread Yggdrasil’s truth, never appears in the epilogue dialogue during the credits. They interrogate themselves for what to do, and everyone moves forward, mourning the loss of the “bridge” who loved both them and humanity.
In absurdity, the human form is stretched and desiccated, but also wholly loved.
4) What it means to go “Blobbing”
Wizardry clones or Might and Magic clones are oft referred to as “blobbers”, it’s pretty damn important to understand why this term is not only unique to genre, but almost precisely a type of narrativeness within videogames. If Jameson can write a chapter on the video-text-tape and artistic simulacrum of logos, perhaps “blobbers” would be the videogame style of interaction in the same vein. Here me out. This narrative style is often completely neglected in terms of videogames. Somewhere between 1st and 2nd person narrative, you are a group combined and walk together as a “blob.” In EO, this manifests as random events being written in both 1st and 3rd person “You come across some water” then into “[Character name] investigates the water”. Random NPCs call you by your guild name and almost refer to the guild like a person or, well, “blob”. There’s no self-insert in the direction of an FPS. There’s no avatarism in a typical direct RPG, perhaps one could self-insert you and your friends as the party members but it ends rather at that. The narrative description puts you more as a head of the TTRPG table but not quite the DM. A dreaming, wandering figure of not quite directness and looking at the characters going about their time. You can set things up, you can make choices, the dice aren’t entirely out of one’s hands and it won’t always be entirely mutually reflected by the game if that makes a lick of sense. A D’n’D DM, but only in such a way of one type of active narrative; not the mechanics, world or certain other things that the world has to challenge you on. You must dream in a sense, to grab something out of the framework given. EO’s producer even says about the minimalist style of the games as part of appeal:
“With Etrian Odyssey's characters, you only give them a name and a portrait, so no matter how you think of the character, it's technically just your imagination. But even in that case, without your imagination, the character is nothing.
For example, a landsknecht who uses an axe might eat his meat with his bare hands and no utensils, but one who wields a sword might prefer a knife and fork at dinner. You might think differently, but... If you can imagine small details like that, you might find that you enjoy this kind of RPG even more.”
Even the encounter design, and the way of calculating movements is up to the player’s imagination, there’s a melding here of mechanic and world but never domination, never of the individual. There is a line here, debatably, that individualism as complained about in the FPS or survival genre is countered within this personalized subjective imagination. Perhaps someone may self-insert as one of the party members of the blobbers? Perhaps they get off on being a military general controlling the guild? However this is not universal from one subjective experience to everyone else’s, it’s interactive, unlike the role of the doom guy or a player in Raft. A player must interact – or even choose not to and play it fully rationally – in a way that unites them as stitches into the narrative. Thus is born the confusion in discussion of narrative, walking sims and other various “art games” that are more textual-video than game; this mistake of narrative (textual), narrative (world) and narrative (player driven action) is a common one amongst videogame and philosophy people. I’ve tried to split it in a sense with Buckshot Roulette in The Joy Man but I certainly do not think one could boil down videogame challenge or player vs environment (PvE) to what Janoščík says: “By contrast, in gaming the fetish of control, the firm grip of the player over the game-world is still challenged only by few indie games.”4
The Wizardry lineage of blobbers perfect for expanding on this; let us go through the three types of narrative again and express the notion of control within blobbers:
Narrative (textual): To take control of the narrative of the blobbers would require every player to have replicated experiences, (Which one could possibly have if modern gamers all watch the same let’s play or follows the exact same walkthrough). Yet to the first, watching a played game is not the narrative of the video per se, an “All Cutscenes” cut, closer to a movie, is still closer to our next kind of narrative 2) than 1). To the second point, the great thing about Blobbers is that the RNG seeds are usually set based on hardware, often too hard for a player to directly control. Things that happen in game such as a thief failing to open a chest or a failed resurrection, cause permanent changes completely out of the hands of the player. Multiple extra pathways or interactions require certain party classes to be present and many adventure-log scenarios are not just a player test of wits, but the characters inside the game. Blobbers intrinsically have a woven narrative between the player, the created characters and the narrative of the world. The textual narrative, beyond the story of the game can be controlled (In a sense like an e-celeb making a youtuber-based custom-portrait run of Wizardry 7) or simply left to their own devices (with certain blobbers allowing characters from a roster to be picked or have named NPCs if one does not want to create the character themselves) or have total minute advance control over of them, with several created characters being sent to the gulag for incorrect stat growth[1]
Narrative (World): A player and their relationship to the world narrative is always either over-done or neglected, and a middle ground is oft lost. Blobbers tend to be rather different on this matter: the one hand you have the Elminage series, who tends to play the narrative of the world with a very minimal story but great depth in monster interactions, racial traits of the characters and player-led discovery. Oppositely, sits Undernaughts. Where the straight-laced, digging-underground-dungeon-crawling world is placed as a meta-story inside a smaller story-narrative of Luci and the Mad King whose story is already partially over and now conjoined with ours. The plot almost laughing at virtual-capitalism-realism and survival-neoliberalism-notion with the Mad King himself revealed to be the CEO of the same mining company and it having no bearing on the actual characters in the story. The ontology of survival and domination as expressed through the ontology of survival-crafting games, begins to struggle when a genre older than Janoščík’s lineage seems to maintain a world-narrative that exceeds mere real-world equivalents.
Narrative (Player Driven Action): A thing that is oft criticised of games and their narratives (and I went to a lecture on the very thing, amusingly) are player led choices are only ever in dialogue, usually only by three choices: good, bad or “neutral”. And sure, this is videogames if you think videogames are just BioWare and what was popular in 360 era and ignore the decades of CRPGs with arguing back and forth with a character. The thing is, there are lots of little ways in which games have interactive narrative drawn completely by the character’s actions – hell it’s even a genre of YouTube which is to find the rarest weird interaction you can make. Blobbers have a beautiful relationship here in a twofold way: The choice of character, the RNG background and then one’s choice in the game. The friendship mechanic in Wizardry: Forsaken Land, means that even in basic turns, dividing up of resources or the use of a heal slot all makes the narrative of your characters dependant on your strategic choices. An interesting aside to this is the alignment system of the older S/MT games, where one’s alignment was down to what demons you talked to, what ones you kill etc, all by player active choice.[2]
The uniqueness of blobbers in being able to direct a layered narrative and take advantage of both the player-developer-game thunderdome as I’ve described in earlier articles, with the player-character care and interaction and taking actions as being a core part of interaction between player and series. Not just within world, not just within the slaughter of monsters.
5) Eroticism In Stone.
This narrative world within blobbers, in an ultimate act of Bataille’s love, has spawned a unique subset of erotica. Etrian Odyssey, for example, has a version of “petrification” porn, where a beloved character is permanently shattered or petrified in an erotic-tragic way. Once more the love, the true love-annihilation of Bataille shines through in blobbers, where the constant proximity of death heightens eroticism by transgressing boundaries and intensifying the experience of the “forbidden”. Not just peril-porn or violent “ero-guro” but the sense of loss within the party, the failure to protect a loved one as they shatter and suffer. Bataille’s eroticism as a profound encounter with the limits of human experience, where the annihilation of the self is paradoxically connected to the ecstatic and the sublime.
Of course, Janoščík does reference this in only soft-passing from Nick Land’s mouth, but never the deeper touching of these narratives. Never how each of these strands fuse the player with the world, the narrative, to the RNG itself. You are condemned to RNG, the roll of a dice, the whims of a level-down monster and out of this blooms a true love. Hell, it’s no wonder why one of the most popular genres of non-RPG maker H-Games are blobbers. Turning to the most contemporary of Indies, Cryptmaster, a typing blobber that deliberately has the cryptmaster (who is voiced by the game dev himself) openly interact with you. Your discovery of the main party is via the words and typing you do, the solving of the riddles you work as a trio (Character-Player-DevMaster). No, you are not exactly a “character” in the story, for you are the “blob”; some unfamiliar to the genre may calll this fourth wall breaking but it’s this 2.5 narrative of a blobber that means you can join all three together, blended, discover and experiment. Blobbers are filled with love, and antithetical to the realism nature of the modern survival crafting game. And the fact this has continued to current year with a much more strict lineage, is more interesting than the nature of Rust clones and spectacle bait multiplayer streamer games.
6) Conclusion
At some point, one most become bulimic to capitalism. At some point, one most not simply walk through the various philosophies of capitalism. At one point, one must vomit up the anti-human, machine-supplanting, word salad declarations. At some point, we must reject even the “attempt to move beyond the now almost (in critical literature) omnipresent critique of capitalism” for that itself, is still a lazy top-down way of handwaving the acknowledgement of capitalism, by capitalism even if one has gently moved beyond on it itself. I throw out the high art notions of survivalism, or the logic of survival. For “survival” in a blobber does not just end at the ecstasy of death – it ends at ash. To live or to die or to become ash or stone. No logic is found here, everything about the blobber is too abstract, too absurd for that. You want your machines, you want your coupling, you and your rhizomatic connections coming and going, but instead you choose to feast upon the low hanging fruits of capitalism realism. You feast on a cherry picked ontology for yourself, you sell death and humanity for a farcical genre which one could sum up with the word “spectacle”. We remember here. that narratives are not supposed to be contractual – you pay me and a narrative feeds you – but a coupling, a meeting on the outside. A nomadic trip hand-in-hand. Any complaints of pastiches in genre or music (especially in Etrian Odyssey which famously uses a PC-98 soundfont) fall to the fact that none of it is replicating the past, but gives you jumper cables for your heart. Famously it avoids Jameson’s ”historicist” argument where, in architecture, the new and old are smashed together, overlapping is not history itself but an explanation of history as an historicist might. No, blobbers are unique in their methods of this invoking, such as the alien soundfont to the DS, everything is taken out of context. Kidnapped from the past but you are to create a narrative, a world, a party and why they are alongside you. Yet you remember that there’s always a missing slot, always another class you could have, always missing something in your Etrian Odyssey team and that lack, almost so blatantly Lacanian and lazy is because it is desire, it is love. Your favourite thief crumbles to dust in the hands of your bishop who now walks forward to a chest knowing that he must risk the ecstasy of becoming mincemeat on the chest. Torture, but out of love, the gamble, the hunt, the fail, the guess, it is not annihilation in a Landian way, but the survival of one’s very energy in a Bataille way. Blobbers are love, and the love lesson an FoE imparts on a new player is a suffering most heavenly.
[1] A testament to this, and why it’s rather unique to blobbers is that in the Shi’en clones (a variant, top-down, one to four person dungeon crawler in which each character can move separately.) there is an Etrian Odyssey one named Etrian Mystery Dungeon and in it you can skip a lot of the character customisation and autopilot the skill points. The portraits and character models are almost as limited at the original EO and this narrative-side of the Blobbers is sublated with much more direct control over the world (such as choosing what to build up in the city). While these are both survival (in a sense) dungeon crawlers, blobbers hold a distinct player-game relationship in their narrative, where Shi’en/Wanderer/Mystery Dungeon have more randomness, set characters and survival.
[2] What’s interesting is I’ve seen modern players – and persona hangers on who played SMT:V which removed the alignment system more to the realm of 2) – is that this limitation is disliked by modern players and there is resentment against the “limitations” the alignment puts against the player. However, this is exactly why 3) is different than 2) or 1), those limitations are there because you must believe in your reason, your alignment, and the player must align their actions with their beliefs. The blob must unified in a sense, within the world. You cannot just dominate or kill indiscriminately and walk away being the lamb of order, for example.
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P.105 of “On Bataille: Critical essays”
(J) P.171