May as well use this thing
OK, so my friend and gaming compadre Stuart has taken the time to read way too much into the Feng Shui games 2056 setting. His post can be found at: http://faustusnotes.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/feng-shuis-strange-future-dystopia/ and I’m responding here in an attempt to avoid the long walls of text that the reply format on his blog was leading me into. Frankly I think this cross-blog approach is leading to some funny phrasing (arguing against a 3rd person) but we’ll see how it works as an experiment.
Having engaged with Stuart’s post, and being a hopeless pedant, I clearly can't rest until I crush him, see him driven before me and hear Emma lamenting. You know, Conan’s advice sounds even nastier when applied to an identified person... To implement this destruction I’m going to take quotes of Stuart's response comment out of order, because doing so will amuse me and is easier than building an argument first then selecting quotes.
“given that all the pronouncements of the buro are presented as clear cases of egregious propaganda”
Given this is an RPG, one solution could be to have the ghost character hang around for 60 years from 1996 and then we’ll pick her up again in 2056. She can then give us a factual history of the world free of any propaganda. Given the player of the ghost, I predict that this history of the elapsed time would focus on cool movies released and changes in the pr0n industry (and that I’d laugh through the entire description). Given that, I’m going to take what the book says on face value, including the fact that the book says that in character portions are biased.
1. Trolling for Great Justice
“[T]hey decided that one form of hellish future is better than another. Typically, people who think that cyberpunk is a bad future tend to be social democrats.”
To start, I love that I have a statistician making broad statements with nothing other than hearsay to back it up.
I’ll come back to this, but remember that the central argument Stuart is advancing is that dystopian (and utopian) settings give us an insight into the writer’s politics. I stand by my assertion that his analysis of the Feng Shui 2056 setting this tells us more about Stuart than the author.
2. 2056 is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live then
As easy as it is to say that Feng Shui’s 2056 is a dystopia, this overlooks some of the facts about the game world that we have. These are that 1. There are multiple time settings in the game, 2. There are multiple factions in the game, and 3. One of the factions is based in 2056. I assume that all factions in the game are meant to have some attractive angle to view them from, because this tends to lead to more interesting role-playing.
From these facts and the assumption I surmise that 1. Each of the factions and their associated time period will have pros and cons to them and 2. The pros and cons of each will be different [1], and 3. None of the time periods can be a total dystopia. That would mean that multiple semi-dystopia time periods would each show different elements that make them (to some extent) dystopian. This runs totally counter to Stuart’s belief that examining one of these (2056) would allow you to understand the author more as they will have chosen dystopian themes for each time period [2].
To better understand why 2056 is not a dystopia, but instead a setting with dystopian elements we need to examine some of the points Stuart identifies as the time periods downsides. I’ll focus on Stuart’s reply to my comment, as I’m too lazy to go back to the original post where he listed elements he considered dystopian.
“The hint is in the food - grey tasteless food is not a morally ambiguous choice of setting!”
But everyone gets enough food. This is morally ambiguous because the setting also has hunger wiped out from the world, at the cost of food that makes McDonalds look tasty. Because of this, the food is a subverted utopian element, not a dystopian one.
“I’ve got to say, I am completely mystified by the decision to represent the upper wage limit in so much detail. Why bother?”
The reason I saw in it was to contrast the gleaming ideals of the future (reasonable wage restraint) with the actual implementation (all the good stuff is still owned by elites). Again a utopian element is presented and then subverted.
3. The story this tells us
Clearly Stuart and I have different ways of engaging with the setting. And given my anti-post-modern approach to reading I am therefore forced to conclude that he’s doing it wrong :-). But in an attempt to demonstrate this we should look at Stuart’s comments:
“[T]he first thing one should do in a dystopia (or a utopia) is start scrabbling around for what it tells you about the authors”
What? Are we playing the same game? The first thing the characters should do is buy the biggest bomb we can fit in a keg, dress up as show girls, and then show up at the bad guys lair claiming to be girl scouts lost on the way to a frat party!
“Again, choices have been made about the setting, and unless you pretend they were all accidental or all products of good game design, you have to conclude they have some relationship to the writers’ idea of what is a good or a bad world.”
Not in this case as the writer is writing multiple time settings with an aim of having (assumed) morally grey conflict between them. Absences from the overall cross time period themes may give an insight into the author, but biased samples will just return meaningless results.
“I don’t think their dsytopia is intended to be morally ambiguous.” and
“As soon as a writer decides to vary their dystopic setting from someone else’s (by retaining money, for example; or by inventing slidewalks) then they are depicting a vision of what they think is bad.”
This is the core of where the argument fails. This assumes that a dystopia must be written as if everything is bad. There’s no reason a writer can’t create a dystopia then add in elements they like to make it less dystopian. And in fact doing so will increase the moral ambiguity of the setting, which increases game playability.
“Every utopia or dystopia contains the political views of the author.”
I disagree with this as it’s too all-encompassing. By default it would, but any reasonable amount of work will allow an author to drown their bias in the appropriate biases for other political views - unless you want to argue that a social democrat is totally incapable of writing 1984?[3]
Furthermore, given that dystopian is a label applied by someone, a more interesting viewpoint would be: The scenarios you call dystopian contain a summary of your political views. An example of this is “in London at least, large slabs of this 2056 dystopia have already arrived.” This is Stuart labelling life in 2009 London as dystopian, from this we can assume he doesn’t support the current government’s results. On the other hand, we can assume that same government regards this state as the closest to utopia they can manage (which means either means they’re incompetent or their utopia would be a nightmare of societal collapse). The key point is that while London's state doesn't conclusiviely say anything about the bunch of muppets who run this country, the labelling of London as a dystopia does allow us to make firm conclusions on Stuart.
4. Racing to conclusions
The primary conclusion I’d have to make is that I need to get better at structuring long rebuttal pieces, but the key points from this post are:
1. That the game is broader than we’ve seen,
2. Stuart assumes all elements of 2056 must be taken as dystopian
Given these points, the basis for his argument is flawed as 2056 is not a total dystopia and, even if it was, it doesn’t demonstrate a sufficient range of the authors published setting for a decision on the author’s politics to be made.
PS
Regarding the comment that “some american futurists didn’t seem to get that cyberpunk is meant to be bad.” I suspect their dreaming of “living outside the law” as a “lone rebel”. It’s a basic wish fulfilment fantasy. Or alternatively they have correctly worked out that sticking wires into your head to get better World of Warcraft access would be the coolest thing ever.
[1] This actually suggests an interesting test of my theory. If we compared the described elements of each time setting I would expect little to no overlap of described elements in each time period due to the desire to cover a range of themes and elements. If this wasn’t an attempt to cover a range of utopian and dystopian elements then there should a higher degree of overlap cross-time.
[2] Interestingly I’d tend to assume that utopias and dystopias are set in the future or alternate worlds, but I can’t find anything to suggest that Feng Shui past time periods would not qualify as dystopian too (if written that way).
[3] And that we’d expect Orwell to have written both Neuromancer and 1984.
Having engaged with Stuart’s post, and being a hopeless pedant, I clearly can't rest until I crush him, see him driven before me and hear Emma lamenting. You know, Conan’s advice sounds even nastier when applied to an identified person... To implement this destruction I’m going to take quotes of Stuart's response comment out of order, because doing so will amuse me and is easier than building an argument first then selecting quotes.
“given that all the pronouncements of the buro are presented as clear cases of egregious propaganda”
Given this is an RPG, one solution could be to have the ghost character hang around for 60 years from 1996 and then we’ll pick her up again in 2056. She can then give us a factual history of the world free of any propaganda. Given the player of the ghost, I predict that this history of the elapsed time would focus on cool movies released and changes in the pr0n industry (and that I’d laugh through the entire description). Given that, I’m going to take what the book says on face value, including the fact that the book says that in character portions are biased.
1. Trolling for Great Justice
“[T]hey decided that one form of hellish future is better than another. Typically, people who think that cyberpunk is a bad future tend to be social democrats.”
To start, I love that I have a statistician making broad statements with nothing other than hearsay to back it up.
I’ll come back to this, but remember that the central argument Stuart is advancing is that dystopian (and utopian) settings give us an insight into the writer’s politics. I stand by my assertion that his analysis of the Feng Shui 2056 setting this tells us more about Stuart than the author.
2. 2056 is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live then
As easy as it is to say that Feng Shui’s 2056 is a dystopia, this overlooks some of the facts about the game world that we have. These are that 1. There are multiple time settings in the game, 2. There are multiple factions in the game, and 3. One of the factions is based in 2056. I assume that all factions in the game are meant to have some attractive angle to view them from, because this tends to lead to more interesting role-playing.
From these facts and the assumption I surmise that 1. Each of the factions and their associated time period will have pros and cons to them and 2. The pros and cons of each will be different [1], and 3. None of the time periods can be a total dystopia. That would mean that multiple semi-dystopia time periods would each show different elements that make them (to some extent) dystopian. This runs totally counter to Stuart’s belief that examining one of these (2056) would allow you to understand the author more as they will have chosen dystopian themes for each time period [2].
To better understand why 2056 is not a dystopia, but instead a setting with dystopian elements we need to examine some of the points Stuart identifies as the time periods downsides. I’ll focus on Stuart’s reply to my comment, as I’m too lazy to go back to the original post where he listed elements he considered dystopian.
“The hint is in the food - grey tasteless food is not a morally ambiguous choice of setting!”
But everyone gets enough food. This is morally ambiguous because the setting also has hunger wiped out from the world, at the cost of food that makes McDonalds look tasty. Because of this, the food is a subverted utopian element, not a dystopian one.
“I’ve got to say, I am completely mystified by the decision to represent the upper wage limit in so much detail. Why bother?”
The reason I saw in it was to contrast the gleaming ideals of the future (reasonable wage restraint) with the actual implementation (all the good stuff is still owned by elites). Again a utopian element is presented and then subverted.
3. The story this tells us
Clearly Stuart and I have different ways of engaging with the setting. And given my anti-post-modern approach to reading I am therefore forced to conclude that he’s doing it wrong :-). But in an attempt to demonstrate this we should look at Stuart’s comments:
“[T]he first thing one should do in a dystopia (or a utopia) is start scrabbling around for what it tells you about the authors”
What? Are we playing the same game? The first thing the characters should do is buy the biggest bomb we can fit in a keg, dress up as show girls, and then show up at the bad guys lair claiming to be girl scouts lost on the way to a frat party!
“Again, choices have been made about the setting, and unless you pretend they were all accidental or all products of good game design, you have to conclude they have some relationship to the writers’ idea of what is a good or a bad world.”
Not in this case as the writer is writing multiple time settings with an aim of having (assumed) morally grey conflict between them. Absences from the overall cross time period themes may give an insight into the author, but biased samples will just return meaningless results.
“I don’t think their dsytopia is intended to be morally ambiguous.” and
“As soon as a writer decides to vary their dystopic setting from someone else’s (by retaining money, for example; or by inventing slidewalks) then they are depicting a vision of what they think is bad.”
This is the core of where the argument fails. This assumes that a dystopia must be written as if everything is bad. There’s no reason a writer can’t create a dystopia then add in elements they like to make it less dystopian. And in fact doing so will increase the moral ambiguity of the setting, which increases game playability.
“Every utopia or dystopia contains the political views of the author.”
I disagree with this as it’s too all-encompassing. By default it would, but any reasonable amount of work will allow an author to drown their bias in the appropriate biases for other political views - unless you want to argue that a social democrat is totally incapable of writing 1984?[3]
Furthermore, given that dystopian is a label applied by someone, a more interesting viewpoint would be: The scenarios you call dystopian contain a summary of your political views. An example of this is “in London at least, large slabs of this 2056 dystopia have already arrived.” This is Stuart labelling life in 2009 London as dystopian, from this we can assume he doesn’t support the current government’s results. On the other hand, we can assume that same government regards this state as the closest to utopia they can manage (which means either means they’re incompetent or their utopia would be a nightmare of societal collapse). The key point is that while London's state doesn't conclusiviely say anything about the bunch of muppets who run this country, the labelling of London as a dystopia does allow us to make firm conclusions on Stuart.
4. Racing to conclusions
The primary conclusion I’d have to make is that I need to get better at structuring long rebuttal pieces, but the key points from this post are:
1. That the game is broader than we’ve seen,
2. Stuart assumes all elements of 2056 must be taken as dystopian
Given these points, the basis for his argument is flawed as 2056 is not a total dystopia and, even if it was, it doesn’t demonstrate a sufficient range of the authors published setting for a decision on the author’s politics to be made.
PS
Regarding the comment that “some american futurists didn’t seem to get that cyberpunk is meant to be bad.” I suspect their dreaming of “living outside the law” as a “lone rebel”. It’s a basic wish fulfilment fantasy. Or alternatively they have correctly worked out that sticking wires into your head to get better World of Warcraft access would be the coolest thing ever.
[1] This actually suggests an interesting test of my theory. If we compared the described elements of each time setting I would expect little to no overlap of described elements in each time period due to the desire to cover a range of themes and elements. If this wasn’t an attempt to cover a range of utopian and dystopian elements then there should a higher degree of overlap cross-time.
[2] Interestingly I’d tend to assume that utopias and dystopias are set in the future or alternate worlds, but I can’t find anything to suggest that Feng Shui past time periods would not qualify as dystopian too (if written that way).
[3] And that we’d expect Orwell to have written both Neuromancer and 1984.
posted by Paul at 3:50 AM
1 Comments:
Goddamn! The things one has to do just to get an argument these days!
I'm going to try and respond to all your points in order because I can see them right next to what I'm writing... let's see how it goes...
(also I'm cross-posting at my blog. Traffic, baby!)
I'm going to take what the book says at face value .... why would anyone do that? Kind of kills my review right there doesn't it? so we'll just pass right by that...
the central argument Stuart is advancing is that dystopian (and utopian) settings give us an insight into the writer's politics and yes, criticism of those settings also gives an insight into the reviewer. This is not a shock. But if anyone wants to read 1984, Brave New World, The Dispossessed and any of those weird anarchist tracts from the 19th century as anything but transparent screeds, they're really pushing it[1]. In fact, we know they're pushing it because everyone who ever wrote a utopia or a dystopia has identified their political reasons for so doing, and then gone on to write about it (or, in Orwell's case, gone to war for it). That should count as a bit of a hint.
I assume that all factions in the game are meant to have some attractive angle to view them fromThis has got to be arguing for the sake of it, right? We are talking about role-playing here, a sordid little corner of the world whose central focus for the last 30 years has been developing worlds where the bad guys are so relentlessly and completely evil that you are morally justified in exterminating their entire race. The only games which don't do that have tended to be based on morally grey novels. There is no sense in taking "the benefit of the doubt" as your point of departure for rpg criticism because chances are that the kung fu game you are playing - you know, the one where you are self-consciously playing a good superhero in battle with the supervillains - isn't planning on showing any uncertainty about the moral fibre of its participants.
In short, there is no reason to assume that 2056 under the Architects is anything but the Mordor of our world. They stole my god (and my virginity, to boot![2]) so they could destroy the world. They're made of poison, folks. Also, they're called "the Architects of the Flesh". I recommend taking this as a hint that you don't want them shagging your sister.
Given this, I think it's reasonable to assume that this world is designed and presented as a dystopia.
But everyone gets enough food. This is morally ambiguous because the setting also has hunger wiped out from the world, at the cost of food that makes McDonalds look tasty. Because of this, the food is a subverted utopian element, not a dystopian one.Despite living in one, I'm no expert on dystopias, but I don't think they are intended to be the same as "untopias" (or whatever). I think they are meant to represent a world corrupted by good intentions, which is why no-one in 1984 goes without food, and everyone in Soylent Green is happy. So a world you look at and don't like, full of subverted utopian elements, is a dystopia. (This is why a lot of people refer to The Dispossessed as an anarchist dystopia).
The reason I saw in it was to contrast the gleaming ideals of the future (reasonable wage restraint) with the actual implementation (all the good stuff is still owned by elites). Again a utopian element is presented and then subverted.I'm thinking of coming back to this on my blog, because it occurs to me now that if a bunch of hard-core (hah!) social democrats living in 1996 wanted to imagine a dystopia caused by social democracy gone wrong they could well have written this Feng Shui world. Alternatively, they could have waited until 1997, voted for Tony Blair, and sat back to enjoy the ride...
What? Are we playing the same game? The first thing the characters should do is buy the biggest bomb we can fit in a keg, dress up as show girls, and then show up at the bad guys lair claiming to be girl scouts lost on the way to a frat party!I thought we did that before we got there?
Not in this case as the writer is writing multiple time settings with an aim of having (assumed) morally grey conflict between them.See above - this 2056 world is not morally grey. And the Architects wanting to take over all the other settings implies that they are the bad guys of the movie.
This assumes that a dystopia must be written as if everything is bad.I think more one assumes that a dystopia is written as if everything is failed. The central tenet of good dystopian writing is that the human traits of the characters give hope for the future (which should be crushed, obviously) despite the huge power advantages of the world they are in. Hence Vincent finds true love (briefly), Shevek and Takver struggle to reclaim the revolution, etc. Part of the beauty of The Dispossessed, and the reason it is a genuinely "morally grey" dystopia (if it is a dystopia at all) is that Shevek and Takver do offer hope to reclaim the revolution at the end, in a triumph of human will (and love!) over systemic oppression. So adding a few elements of playability doesn't render something dystopian[3]. Having a social system based on good intentions gone horribly wrong does, however.
By default it would, but any reasonable amount of work will allow an author to drown their bias in the appropriate biases for other political views - unless you want to argue that a social democrat is totally incapable of writing 1984?I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a Social Democrat did write 1984. We're talking here about a man who cashed in his commie mates to MI5 (with quite nasty comments about their intellect too) yet wrote a very nasty book about pre-war Imperialism (Burmese Days, where the protagonist passes the moral event horizon at the end of the book by literally kicking the dog), as well as a viciously bitter attack on communism (Homage to Catalonia) whose final chapter is a clear intimation of 1984's genesis. He is a hero of the so-called Decent Left. I don't think we need to assume he was anything else, even if he briefly flirted with anarchism in the 30s[5].
The scenarios you call dystopian contain a summary of your political views.Certainly. If I say something is dystopic and you disagree, we might as well be arguing about politics. But there are some clear signals of dystopian writing, tropes if you will, and "grey food", "no cars" and an all-powerful time-travelling government who want to control your thoughts are usually a big giveaway. Also, yes, when I claim London looks like a dystopia, I am making a claim which reflects my politics. I am, in effect, writing a text (shudder) and by inferring my politics/morality from that text you are engaging in literary criticism (though I don't think either of us are being post-modern here except in the cliched sense).
Regarding London, we can safely assume that the govt doesn't intend to create a dystopia. It's their failed "good intentions" which make it so. My labelling it so enables you to (rightly) infer things about me politically - that I dislike high rents, police violence and cctv would be a good guess, because that's what people generally criticise about this government. Alternatively you could infer I spend a lot of money at cheap brothels.
But if you did either you would be critiquing the text and before you know it, you'll be having post-modern gay abortions, and snorting cocaine from baby's bottoms. Also, you would be conceding my argument - unless you want to argue that FS 2056 has any good points strong enough to redeem it from the claim it is dystopic?
PS I really really ought to look up the definition of dystopia. But I don't think that's going to get us anywhere, is it?
---
fn 1: I have an excellent one about pirates, btw.
fn 2: Not that it was doing me any good at the time
fn 3: consider The Culture, who you can't help but sympathise with, and who are clearly a good place to live, but who also seem somehow fundamentally rotten[4]. And the process of viewing them as rotten - inevitable for most readers - is, I think, intended to cause one to question one's own assumptions about how the world could be. This makes the Culture a morally ambiguous dystopia in a really subtle way. I think Iain Banks has written about this aspect of the dystopia himself.
fn 4: Interestingly, Iain Banks is a strong opponent of the Iraq war, even though The Culture are the apotheosis of Decent Liberalism.
fn 5: which at the time didn't count for much anyway. Social Democratic unions were pro-anarchist until the Central Committee called them off (a central criticism of the Stalinists in homage to catalonia), and if that's not enough proof: my Grandfather fought for the POUM, but voted Thatcher 40 years later.
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