Slender post

Bonus Post: Much of what we have read this semester can help to explain this game and the phenomenon it is part of. Using at least two readings from the semester, describe your reactions while playing Slender and how the mythos does or does not affect the gameplay.

So, I'm going to go ahead and make an effort to work my way through at least one of the bonus posts. It's truly a shame that I haven't done any of this yet, and have procrastinated just about everything all semester long. I might as well give a crack at at least one of these, so I'll take a look at the one I'm more familiar with. A response to the game "Slender"

I think that in order to understand the phenomenon of Slenderman, one has to keep in mind its history. One of the biggest and most important things about Slenderman is that no one owns him. The idea of Slenderman belongs to just about anyone in a way that goes farther than every story in history that isn't a religion. Just about every concept of a race or creature has a specific origin, and a specific author that can be pointed out as the one who first came up with the idea. Urban myths and legends are a bit harder to find the origins of, and they may be lost in time, but at some point a single author, or a very small group of authors created the idea. Most fairy tales can be traced back the Grimm Brothers. Many of the mythical creatures that Tolkien and others like him used can be traced back to various mythologies across the world. Slenderman has an origin, but does not have an original author. Its existence is a paragon of what Roland Barthes was getting at in his work "The Death of the Author."

I believe that what "The Death of the Author" was getting at was not just that all trends in literature are becoming recycled inspiration, but that as a result of this, we will see the rise of more and more collective and collaborative efforts, and an ever-expanding list of authors to our literary stories. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In some ways, it has already happened. In both the film and game industries we often see credits that go on for miles. Most of them consist of actors, and background work, but even the list of directors, writers, and similar roles is often drawn out to a dozen or more people. In the film industry, the actors are even authorial, in that they develop the character that they're playing just as much as the writers and the directors.

Another key element in the Slenderman lore is where its ideas come from. There is no specific reason to any of it other than "it's creepy." The list of possible inspirations for Slenderman goes on and on, and in that way, Slenderman is also superflat. Slenderman is, as his name suggests, a tall, slender man. He wears a suit, no reason, he just does. He has no face, also no real reason. He has tentacles or tendrils, depending on which version your reading about, and those, likewise, serve no real purpose (except perhaps to make him blend in better with his natural habitat, a forest, which also doesn't have any reason).

One of the earliest psychologists, Carl Jung, talked about something called "Archetypes." Its almost a universally known word now, but basically, it refers to something that fits into a certain category. Slenderman, I think, is an archetype of human fear: 1st, that the human presence itself is daunting (scarecrows, statues, etc.); 2nd, that the lack of expression, or perhaps identity itself, signifies the lack of a soul (and that which does not have a soul is of course inhuman by its very nature); and 3rd, basic fears of the dark, and the unknown.

Even though Slenderman is as much mine as it is anyone else's, there is still a very basic "canon" to what makes Slenderman Slenderman, and those are the things that I've already stated. He's a tall, thin man who has no face, wears a suit, is often adorned with black, stalky tendrils/tentacles, causing memory loss/amnesia, and lastly, the appearance of Slenderman leads to distorted audio and video recording. So... that being said, of course the mythos affects the game. It wouldn't be Slenderman without it. With no author, no complex canon to speak of, and no official storyline, the mythos is all Slenderman has. Nothing else matters. Some other things are a common occurrence, though: Slenderman appearing a forest, the circle with an x over it, appearing in abandoned buildings. Those things are in the game, and the game also includes a few landmarks that were seen in various Slenderman stories- the tunnel from Marble Hornets for example. There is another thing that the game captures very well, that is hard to imitate in any other mediums, that feeling of being watched, seeing something follow you, often there when you turn around, and more often something you see off in the distance, right out of the corner of your eye (which is another superflat aspect, reminiscent particularly of Doctor Who).

Other superflat things I've noticed:
-The main character: unknown, unnamed. Is it meant to be the player's voice and footsteps? Is the player the main character? Lost, doesn't know what's going on.
-Slenderman stories even reference back to itself and to each other in a way that could be considered somewhat superflat. They more or less acknowledge other writers' presence and validity.
-The bathroom could have been inspired by things like the original Saw movie.
-The entire game is reminiscent of Most Dangerous Game.
-Strange rock and tree formations seem to be inspired by real life formations like Stonehenge.
-While there's nothing particularly scary about it, suits can be seen as a representation of power or wealth. Height can also be seen this way. The Egyptians, for example, drew more important figures bigger in their hieroglyphs.
-There are some myths involving faceless creatures, or creatures that steal human faces. Doctor Who has an episode about a face eating alien.
-Doctor Who seems to reference Slenderman with the Silence, a religious order consisting primarily of these odd, stalky aliens whom you forget all about unless you're looking at them. Guess what else, they all wear suits. Aside from that, everything about the Silence is super creepy.

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Is Time Fcuk Superflat? I don't know, both superflat and that game make my head a splode.
Has Superflat spread to the west?

Well, I guess it has...

Japanese Games

They're cool, I guess. I recently read some of Takashi Murikami’s "Little Boy" and learned quite a bit about Japanese culture and how it comes to light through Japanese movies, manga, television shows, and video games. Quite a lot of information to think about.

It's almost kind of depressing, the way that they think about the human condition. Lots of death and desperation. There's a very very bleak outlook on the future, wish just a hint of optimism.

Could this become a trend in Western cultures. I don't think so. Japan and eastern culture in general is vastly different from western society. It is likely that we will evolve our cultures into two, totally separate ways.

Notes on Convergence Culture

Chapter 3: Searching for the Origami Unicorn

So, I read the chapter, and afterwards, did a search for the Origami Unicorn... on a hunch, really, and I found Henry Jenkins's web blog.

This chapter is all about The Matrix series as an example of franchises that tell a story across multiple forms of media. Very abbreviated (because I'm unfortunately short on time), The Matrix story arc is not restricted to the films. The Wachowski Brothers went after animators, comic book writers, etc. that already had a cult following- people that they admired for their work- and didn't go after people with less experience that they could order around. As a result, people who were experienced with what they were doing were collaborating together so that each of them could create a piece of the Matrix universe through their own medium (comics, animation, video games, etc.). This drew more fans into the series, because they followed the authors and developers who were making the different parts. Each of the different developers of those different Matrix mediums all worked in tandem with the Wachowski Brothers, which made sure that the entire series followed the same continuity.

Long story short: The Matrix franchise is an ideal example of good collaborative work in the professional world.

internet flaming

Normally, I just shake my head and continue on with my life when I run across situations in which hundreds of internet plebeians hurl thousands of hateful, ill-conceived comments at someone. But now I've been assigned to comment on this stuff for homework.

When it comes to matters such as this, I pretty much always come to the conclusion that this is the internet, and this is what happens when people are allowed to hide their identity when they say things. On one hand, it's the epitome of free speech... but on the other hand, we see many people use their free speech to do stupid things, insult others, and complain about things that have no relevance to themselves, or that they know very little about. Here's the thought processes I see:

"No one knows who I am, so I'm just as qualified as anyone is."

"I can get away with it, so I don't see the problem with doing it."

"The more obnoxious I am, the more people will notice me."

"I am the customer, and I'm always right."

I don't think this is a gaming problem, I think this is an internet problem... and I think that this is an inherent, moral integrity problem among human beings. It's as the old saying goes "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In short, the internet allows people to get away with saying things that would cause others to look at them in a very negative light, and deservedly so. My concern is what happens when the majority of people see and act this way so much when they aren't accountable become desensitized, and acting the same way in real life, or seeing such behavior as acceptable. I've seen it start to happen before with my friends... they're used to the ill-mannered, offensive behavior that they see online, and so they back each other when they start exhibiting the same behavior in a real life setting.

It's bad enough on the internet as it is. The harassment for some people never ends, and the only way to beat it seems to be embracing it with a "come at me, bro'" attitude. Personally, I think that in this sense, there does need to be some sort of policing going on. I don't mean for the usual bantering cases, but I do mean for the serious cases involving threats of violent crimes, viral attacks, and distribution of personal information. I feel that some of these people need a hard reminder that making a death threat against a child over the events of a game show is not only an enormous over-reaction, and a massive abuse of the freedom of speech, but also a felony.

Naw, there's nothing wrong with politics now adays...

(I couldn't find a video of the hearings themselves.)

Personally, I think congress is still full of a bunch of old, mostly white, pretty much conservative, predominantly Christian, bigots. I really think that our government is doomed as is, it's policies are lagging behind American culture in support of squelching... basically what they think of as lesser class citizens. Not to mention the fact that most of legislature is based on who can throw the most money at congress, which more often than not is companies like Monsanto and Tyson, or groups of media companies working together in favor of more censorship. Way back when the country was founded, Thomas Jefferson said that he believed that a government needs an up in arms revolution every 20 years, which make us about 150 years overdue (marking the Civil War as the last such revolution).

Anyways... as a result of congress, the entire country is slowly starting to drag behind in terms of social and cultural progressiveness. Today, we live in a progressive society, but I really don't expect the US to be called by that 50 years down the road. I'm not going to go into detail about games, because it's not just games in this argument. It's all forms of media, everything that helps to make the nation a progressive one is suffering. Sub-cultures are suffering, civil rights movements are suffering, individuality is dying, minorities are suffocated whenever possible.

Covering Your Ass

I read a thing by this guy called Yoshino called "The New Civil Rights Movement." It posed a lot of interesting points and ideas about equality and liberty. The idea behind it is that we need to move into a new age of civil rights... create a new "paradigm" of it that doesn't make minorities equal, but makes all practices, activities, and ideas the liberty of all people. It's simple and interesting concept, that the focus shouldn't be on assimilating everyone into one group, or completely diversifying everything for the purpose of equality, but that we should celebrate what we already have in common and each be and act as our own, unique person.

What's that got to do with video games, crazy person? A lot! Video games, as well as any form of media, often prove to be the driving force of creating and celebrating culture. As video games become a bigger and bigger industry, designers need to focus more and more on making them diverse when and if they can. As Extra Credits puts it, adding diversity into a game can add to its value, but not all games need to put a focus on it.

So... in the text, Yoshino talks about "Covering." Covering is basically putting on a veil for society and others to see, to make yourself seem more like everyone else, in order to fit in. It's formed by a most basic human desire to be social. It's not necessarily good or bad, but it can be. Covering, in an of itself, is amoral. Everyone does it at some point or another. It can be good because sometimes being able to fit in is pretty important, say, if you're a spy- I'm sure there's more realistic reasons too. But it can be bad too, if say, we cover ourselves to the point that our real self doesn't ever come out; then we're leading a secret life, or force ourselves into an identity crisis- which, if you've ever had one, is actually really scary.

Naturally, this ties pretty well into the LGBTQ community, and into gender roles. We live in a society (in the US, at least) where homosexuality is viewed, for the most part, taboo, ungodly, or just wrong. Lately things are getting better, but relatively speaking, compared to straight and/or "normal" people, members of the LGBTQ community and people who naturally defy certain gender roles lead a fairly challenging life. One of the biggest "covers" is the straight(gay) cover. Video game designers can reflect that in games to represent a more realistic world, create more believable characters, and ultimately, show players a part of the world that they may not have seen otherwise. How many games so far have had a character that's gay or transgender, or even just a character that defies modern gender roles? Not a lot.

Personally, I haven't seen this in any of the games I've played, except for maybe Red Dead Redemption which I talked about in my last post, though I've heard about a few that do include that topic, and even fewer that include it as a part of the game outside of a main character's personal and romantic options. I think it's a shame how little games manage to include on this topic, especially considering its importance in modern times as we try to become a more open society.

Video games is just one industry too. If you look into movies, music, and other forms of media, the issue doesn't come up a whole lot in there either. Maybe it says more about developers and publishers that shy away from the issue, and sweep it under the rug because of how it could negatively affect their reputation.