R.A. Salvatore claimed that he wrote something like ten thousand years of backstory for Kingdoms of Amalamadooda. This number should not impress you; that sort of work can be done over a weekend. Instead of weeping for the loss ten thousand years of history which took considerably less than ten thousand years to write, instead reflect on just how disposable and insignificant that lore is. Notice too that the PR release is supposed to impress you with its volume—“ten thousand years”—without actually giving a reason why reading that history might be interesting or relevant or what it even has to do with the game itself.

What Kingdoms of Amalamdingdong and other modern content farms seem intent on is creating on purpose what The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars did organically. In publisher fantasy dreamland, IP is king, so spending millions to creating an amorphous blob of character designs and history and monsters that looks nearly indistinguishable from any random paperback fantasy novel at Barnes and Noble seems like a solid investment in an universe that will continue to reap bounteous fruit far into the future, as if nerds can’t stop themselves from caring about something as long as elves are in it.

Kingdoms of Llamalor and its contemporaries are imitating the salient features of successful IPs—their reams of history and lore, their thousands of fantasy species and continents and locations—because that’s what successful world IPs like Star Wars look like, but in practice that’s the opposite of how Star Wars was actually created. The original films had none of this history. Star Wars explained its lore organically as the story progressed, gave viewers characters to make the conflict and history relevant and relatable at a human level, and hinted at far more than it ever actually cares to go out and say.

Star Wars now has an encyclopedic backstory and I’m sure you can watch the moves frame by frame with a library of books on your shelf to explain the history and culture of every funny looking monster that comes on the screen, but when that movie came out it was just some dude in a bug mask, and he was there to make you feel like this was a lawless wild west world where aliens were normal. A backstory for Greedo’s species history has nothing at all to do with his function in the story and is totally unnecessary for it; the crew on Star Wars didn’t need a R.A. Salvatore in a closet somewhere writing ten thousand years of history to make Star Wars.

Star Wars isn’t a “compelling IP” because it has ten thousand years of history, it is a “compelling IP” because it inspired millions of nerds to want to write and read ten thousand years of history about it. The history came from the fascination with the universe, not the other way around. Kingdoms of MORE LIKE YAWN-alur instead assumes that any ten thousand years of backstory about anything is something that nerds will fall all over themselves to read, just because it is there, while it actually robs them of the chance to actively participate in that universe, which Star War’s minimalist backstory encouraged.

This post is tagged #terrifyingmachineangle to distinguish it from posts that concern human beings. This post is valueless because it’s essentially about why a certain cynical marketing decision is also non-functional instead of just manipulative. A #humanangle post would examine instead what actually makes a fictional universe meaningful or valuable to humans. I’m doing this to teach myself to write about humans more.

It’s hard to talk about how much I like Valkyrie Profile’s wrenching melodrama without talking about how utterly indefensible my love for it is. As the Norse death goddess, you’re looking for noble warriors to ferry off to Valhalla to fight in the war at the end of the world, and that means that every single person you want to recruit has to die first, preferably in a way that is as tragic as possible. The asshole mercenary forms a reluctant attachment to the Princess, then kills himself after avenging her death. The battle-maiden stops singing her troops into a berserker rage when the village mothers blame her for their children’s deaths and she’s beaten by her own soldiers and killed by the enemy. She’s blind, of course, there’s never a lost opportunity to make their deaths more wrenching or saccarine; all the women are sickly and self-sacrificing and all the men are killed defending their honor, betrayed by their own nobility.

But there are a lot of characters in Valkyrie Profile and not all of them fit so neatly in the boxes. There’s a mermaid who wants to see her mother and father together and the boy who manages through a twist of dramatic irony to wish for her own death so she can be reunited with them. There’s a crusty old mercenary loser without the slightest shred of moral compass, who in pleading to Valkyrie to not send him to Hel, tells the story of saving a girl from slavery for purely selfish, spiteful reasons after his employers go back on their bargain, and ends up shedding real tears—too proud to admit it, it’s the Valkyrie who lets the player know by chiding him for it.

He’s the sort of person who I hate the most, arrogant and ignorant bully, devoid of redeeming qualities, and maybe I should retch about him getting his moment of redemption. But he’s so sincerely pathetic, so weak, so wretchedly human, even his one moment of redemption is unrepentantly selfish, I can’t look away. He cries at the end, but as overdramatic as the reveal is made by letting the Valkyrie say it for him, it’s the only way I’d actually believe his shame at his own weakness and fear. He’s a broken, empty old man with only the tiniest shred of something worth saving, and that is something that is hard to believe, but I would like to. Valkyrie Profile is pulling at me in ways I think are silly and manipulative but it’s telling me everything I want to hear.

Valkyrie Profile never fails to make me cry lol I am a loser.

It’s easy to roll eyes every time a game with a two on the end gets announced (or, increasingly: “Revelations,” “Origins,” “Revelorigins”) but though sequels certainly symbolize the video game industry’s stunning lack of imagination they aren’t really the cause of it. The problem is not Infinity Ward making a sequel to Call of Duty, it is that half of the industry is making sequels to Call of Duty, and they are not so much sequels as they are faded copies of the original.

Maybe sequels aren’t bad. Right now I’m playing Valkyrie Profile, and it’s a JRPG that radically rearranges the entire formula of a 16 bit RPG and ends up looking like no other game before or since. It is a game that has a clear legacy within an established genre but refreshes it completely. It’s a sequel of a kind, and it’s so fresh and brilliant it’s hard to believe Square-Enix’s half-hearted sequel is the only attempt anyone’s made to copy it.

Sequels aren’t just the province of Hollywood and Video Games. I love Haruki Murakami, but his novels tend to repeat many of the same things and have similar characters in similar circumstances, and I could say as much for a great deal of my favorite creators. A woman will always vanish, strange quests will be given that never are fulfilled, and there will usually be a cat. Variations on a theme. Some of Murakami’s novels I find better than others but I appreciate the ways they explore the themes of his interest.

And it’s not like, in general, artists aren’t always making sequels. Cyberqueen (which I will NEVER shut up about) is one of my favorite games ever, and it’s a”sequel” to System Shock 2. It’s a sequel because it retains the same premise but instead focuses on the player’s relationship to this evil AI instead of leveling up cyborg powers. It explores in detail what the creators mostly hinted at.

Many of Anna Anthropy’s games (Mighty Jill Off, Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars) are direct descendants of older arcade games that explore thosesimple but incredibly rich mechanics in new and exciting ways, as well as queering their mechanics and characters. In Anna’s work, history is a tool, both a way of exploring and reimagining the past of video games while reintroducing them to a culture that quickly forgets its past. It’s a very different relationship than the nostalgia that seems to drive so many other retro games. Anna’s teach a past that’s forgotten, rather than evoke a nostalgia that was never real.

Valkyrie Profile has one of the most fascinating puzzle platformer gimmicks I’ve ever seen and it’s barely used, at least in easy. Valkyrie can shoot a crystal that freezes enemies, allowing them to be dragged and used as platforms a la Metroid’s Ice Beam. But then, you can shoot crystals to create ledges, and shoot them again to create bigger ledges, or a third time for an explosive rocket jump launch, but that also creates a shimmering temporary platform of falling crystals as well as a shard that will fall to the ground and ALL of this is controlled with a single button. You could design levels with just this ability forever. I would like to see another game’s worth.

Games never need sequels, but I don’t think I’d be wrong if I said any game at all could have a good sequel. Sometimes a single person runs out of ideas, but a series of artists building on each other in succession will never run out (and that might be exactly what the whole history of art actually is). Creating a sequel is not easy, because it means not just repeating but advancing the ideas of the previous game. Authors often have more to say, or successive artists find something new to say within the form of what has come before them.

Middens is the only JRPG to actually not care about how much time you spend playing it. You can beat it in a couple of hours; I beat it in around five. It’s Yume Nikki with JRPG combat. It’s Yellow Submarine body horror. Mostly, though, it’s a JRPG that doesn’t hate you.

My favorite part about the game is that you can enter combat with any NPC by shooting them. Correlated: there are very few aggressive enemies in the game. Unlike any other JRPG, you, the player, is the one who decides when fights occur 90% of the time. The goal of the game is to kill thirty enemies, which gives you an ability that teleports you to the end game. I like this game a lot for that; play enough and you’re done. You decide what parts you want to play.

For a game made in RPG maker that contains RPG combat, this is nothing less than a total reversal of the JRPG’s central design trope: a meticulously paced adventure dozens of hours long. The game is based around giving time for money, a loop of economics that ensures anyone will be able to beat it given the proper investment of time, a worthy predecessor of today’s Facebook games, which differ only in their automation of trivial tasks like walking and fighting and their “monetization strategy.”

Middens doesn’t have any sort of loyalty to this design which, among other things, means the combat can be much more interesting. Most JRPGs contain spells that cause unique and interesting negative effects that never, ever work on enemies because they’re intended primarily to be challenges for the player. If you’re cut off from physical attacks because you’re blinded and will miss most attacks that creates an interesting decision for the player, but against an enemy which has nothing but physical attacks, the ailment is so crippling that blind might be the most powerful attack in the game, and, critically, would allow an underleveled player to defeat a much stronger foe. As this would leave the delicately paced math in ruins, ailments are mostly decorative and few games allow them to actually work against serious foes.

But since middens is nonlinear and does not care a wit for pacing, it freely bestows the player with abilities any other game would consider overpowered. Combat actually becomes vaguely strategic. Enemies in other games function only as time gatekeepers: has the player invested the appropriate amount of time killing enemies to progress to this next stage of the game so that we can confidently write “over 60 hours of gameplay on the back of the box?”

Middens contains few truly revolutionary ideas in terms of its combat, but by not actively disrespecting the time of its players it became open to new ideas that are actually fun.

cyborgmemoirs:

OK I WANT TO KNOW I REALLY WANT TO KNOW

DID THEY ACTUALLY LIVE IT? WERE THEY IN THOSE CYBERSPACES? WERE THEY THOSE PRE/TEENS ACTING AS VIDEO GAME CHARACTERS AS VAMPIRE VERSIONS OF THEIR FAVORITE DRAGON BALL Z CHARACTER, ROLE PLAYING AT ELITE CHATROOM POOLS WITH DEPRESSED BOYS N GIRLS LIVING IN IRL ISOLATION?

THE TEXT BASED INTERNET WHEN A SINGLE SCANNED IMAGE OF YOURSELF WAS ALL YOU NEEDED TO SETTLE AN OCCASIONAL TRIFLE, WHICH ON A CATHOLIC SCHOOLYARD WOULD BE SETTLED WITH ‘I SWEAR ON THE CROSS’

THE TEXT BASED INTERNET WHERE YOU GOT REALLY EMOTIONALLY TIED UP AND HAD REAL RELATIONSHIP OBLIGATIONS THAT WERE FUCKING YOUR IRL LIFE UP SO MUCH THAT WHEN YOUR IC (IN CHARACTER) SELF ATTEMPTED TO KILL HERSELF IN A BLAZE OF WORLD-ENDING GLORY (SO YOU COULD LEAVE THE GAME AND RECLAIM YOUR IRL SELFHOOD), THE GOD EMPEROR PULLED OUT ALL THE FREEZA-STYLE STOPS & SHAMING WARRIOR RHETORIC TO STAY YOUR HAND AND THEN HIS MUN (CHARACTER PLAYER) ACCUSED YOU OF ACTING OOC (OUT OF CHARACTER).

CYBERFEMINISM?

CYBORG THEORY?

WHAT IS ACADEMIC JARGON COMPARED TO A LIFE IN THE CHATROOM, THE WOMB? THE VIRTUAL STOOP, THE AGGRESSIVE VIOLENCE OF THE BLOCK, THE PROVE YOURSELF TO ME SURVIVAL LIFESTYLE CONTINUED

BUT WITH A STORYLIKE PROFILE, WITH A 99WPM TYPING SPEED FOR BATTLE, WITH A COMMAND OF VOCABULARY TO DESCRIBE THE MAGNIFICENCE OF YOUR VIRTUAL SELF AS IT ENTERED THE TAVERN

WHAT IS 90S CYBERSPACE TO SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER HAD CYBERSEX WITH A STRANGER WITH THE RIGHT PROFILE? A BORING PEDOFILE CREEP? WHILE PRETENDING TO HAVE LIMBS AND EROGENOUS ZONES UNKNOWN TO YOUR PHYSICAL BODY?

WHAT WERE THESE CYBERFEMINIST ACADEMICS DOING ON THE 1990S INTERNET? 

WHY GLAZE OVER THE BASE? THE EMBARRASSING INTERNAL SEXUAL WORLD WHICH WAS THE NET? THE PREDECESSOR TO NOW? WHY FORGET THE MICRO GOVERNANCES & TRIBE LAWS OF AOL GUILDS? OF BULLETIN BOARDS AND FORUMS? OF MIRC? ::WONDERS WHY THEY NEVER MENTION ALL THE UNDERSTOOD RULES OF MARKING ACTION:: OR HOW THE CHATROOM COMMANDS DICTATED OUR BEHAVIORS? THE IMPORTANCE OF A FONT AND COLOR, THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE 10 CHARACTER AND 16 CHARACTER SCREENAMES? THE MALICIOUS TOS BOOT?  

THE LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAG?

[MUST BE THE LAG]

THE IRL LONG DISTANCE PHONE CALLS TO YOUR MUN FRIENDS…

ACADEMIA RECOUNTS NONE OF THIS BECAUSE ACADEMIA IS NOT ABLE TO COUNT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE

“THE NET IS VAST AND INFINITE” YET ONE CAN ONLY BUILD ARGUMENTS OFF OF WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN PROVEN, THE LARGE MAJORITY OF WHICH HAVING BEEN CONSTRUCTED BY STRAIGHT/CIS WHITE MEN, BENEFICIARIES OF ANGLOCENTRIC, COLONIALIST, PATRIARCHAL POWER DYNAMICS

AND NOW THEY WANT TO FOCUS ON WHAT IT IS TO BE A GIRL?

SO I WONDER WHERE ARE ALL MY FORMER SAIYAN WARRIORS, MY ANDROID COMRADES, MY VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE BRUJA FRIENDS, MY PUNK DORMITORY SAILOR SCOUTS AND ALT REALITY NINJA GOTHS, MY HALFLING SPACESHIP OPERATING BBOYS AND 6 FOOT TALL ELVEN DIVAS? 

RIGHT. THEY’RE EVERYWHERE. LIVING THEIR LIVES. OUTSIDE OF THE IVORY TOWER.

WE HAVE TO SPEAK WITH NEW SYNTAXES TO TELL OUR STORIES.

companion essay to super sexagon