Videogame Theory (Part One): Ludology, Narratology and Deus Ex

Originally this post began as an analysis of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which is both a quintessential work of Cyberpunk fiction and an example of something I have yet to think about academically: a video game. As is so often the case with these things, though, the rabbit hole proved much deeper than I thought, and in an attempt to glean a little background information on the current position of video games within the academic landscape I fell headlong into the wonderland that is ludology. Briefly, ludology is the tentative name given to the practice of studying games. Etymologically ludology derives from the Latin ‘ludus’, relating to games and playing, specifically Roger Caillois’ definition of ludus as ‘games with social rules’ - narrowed further by Gonzalo Frasca as games incorporating rules that ‘define a winner and a loser.’ This stands in opposition to paidia - or ‘play’ - games without rules, or rather without rules defining winning and losing. 

Ludology took on its current status as the study of video games in the late 90s, and was born of a need felt by ludologists to define themselves in opposition, or at least apart from, narratology. Not narratology in the more specific, Russian formalist/structuralist sense, but in the wider sense; the study of narratives (ie. film, TV, literature). Early ludologists - people like Gonzalo Frasco - explored an alternative mode of studying video games based on the notion that narratology was ill-equipped to deal with this new and different form. Frasca drew a line between narrative, which he called representation, defined by its retrospective unfolding of events; and games, which are simulations, which Frasca suggests unfold prospectively and offer the possibility of a ‘choice’ not present in traditional narrative. But whilst many ludologists prefer to steer game criticism towards new horizons, I propose in this article to keep the conversation firmly situated in the narrative aspect of games. 

The ludology v. narratology debate is, according to Frasca, a ‘debate that never happened.’ Even at the outset of ludology it was clear to see that the alternative method of study could only hope to complement, not replace, a narratological approach to video games. Personally, coming from an academic, literary background and with no knowledge of game design, the narratalogical approach is one I fully support - especially when approaching modern, story-driven video games like Deus Ex. I don’t believe there is any way to justifiably challenge a narratological approach to video games. Any video game with a defined story (and many without) are at their heart, texts; they are simply texts that operate with different rules to traditional literature - but can’t the same be said of theatre, or TV? All that is required is a little tweaking; a little extra to consider when analysing these new texts. 

To illustrate my argument, lets consider Deus Ex: Human Revolution through the lens of Barthes’ - one of the most prominent narratologists - five narrative codes: the hermeneutic, the proairetic, the semic, the symbolic and the cultural. All five, I would argue, are present in Deus Ex. Deus Ex is, at its heart, a cyberpunk detective story and thus an archetypal example of hermeneutics. From the moment we take control of Adam Jensen we are presented with mysteries requiring resolution - the first book we read, for example, mentions the mysterious ‘patient X’ whose identity is obscured until much later in the game. If hermeneutics builds suspense with mystery, then the second code - proairetics - builds suspense with action: the immediate need to know ‘what happens next.’ Again, Deus Ex is driven by these proairetic moments; moments such as the first showdown between Adam and Jaron, or less specifically, every moment in which Adam interacts with his environment. One could argue, in fact, that while hermeneutics might be the primary narrative code of traditional fiction, proarietics is the primary code of the video game; in which every action - every interaction the character has with his environment - has a reaction. The secondary, atemporal codes likewise persist in Deus Ex. Semic codes - the connotations evoked by story elements - persist in, for example, the concept of neuropozyne and the attention it draws to the theme of wealth and inequality which consistently operates in the background of the game. Meanwhile the over-arching theme of transhumanism and identity is a solid example of a symbolic code. Finally, the background of real technological and social debate which the game logically extends provides an example of cultural codes. 

These codes, of course, all relate to the most overtly narratalogical element of the game: the fictional world of the game and the story which unfolds in that world. Like texts, of course, this diegetic element is only one part of the game: there exists also the extra-diegetic world outside the text: the world of the reader (or the projected narratee, if we want to make the distinction). Unlike traditional texts, however, there is a third level to negotiate in video games: the level that mediates between the fictional world of the character and the real world of the player: what we might call the ‘intra-diegetic’ level. This level is comprised of the rules of the game: the options and limitations imposed on the player, the specific map of controls and input commands the game requires. To translate this into the traditional interaction between reader and fiction, this would be the level at which the book directs the speed at which you turn a page or some other, equally absurd, notion. More relatable is this level in that most literary of games: the choose your own adventure novel. In that case, the intra-diegetic level is comprised of the instruction each reader finds at the bottom of the page, neither a part of nor separate to the text: if x, turn to a; if y, turn to b. 

  While the fundamental ways in which games operate may differ from the ways in which films and books operate, games still fulfil a narrative function. The narrative is usually multiplied to offer an illusion of chance for the player - particularly overt in moments such as the ending of Deus Ex, or in the way Skyrim offers multiple dialogue options, but in actual fact inherent to the user-input-oriented nature of gaming - but it persists nevertheless and is still fundamentally finite. Frasca, whilst arguing for an alternative mode of studying games, himself still concedes the narrative quality of games. Frasca also touches upon what I have called the intra-diegetic level of the game-text - which Frasca specifically identifies as manipulation rules (ways in which the developer allows the player to have his character interact with his environment - for example the opportunity to kill prostitutes in GTA), and goal rules (rules which the player must use his character to meet to ‘win’ the game) - and how these rules also serve the narrative function of transmitting an ideology, amongst other things. In Deus Ex the player may defeat enemies lethally or non-lethally: a manipulation rule which emphasises the developers’ faith in the possibility of non-lethal conflict resolution. Likewise the ‘goal’ of Deus Ex - while consistently changing as new information is received - is ultimately to investigate the disappearance of Megan and the scientists. What ideology does this transmit? That the truth should not remain obscured? That grief requires closure? That crime cannot go unpunished? The ideological ramifications of goal rules are manifest. 

What is my point? The argument for a narrative approach to video game analysis is not new. However it is one I needed to make myself in order to provide a foundation for what I hope to do in the second part of this article: to attempt to classify modern story-driven games in their literary context. Can a game conform to the acknowledged standards of realist fiction, or modernist fiction? I would argue that a classic, story-driven game like Deus Ex is fundamentally a modernist work. Of course, if a game can be modernist, there exists the potential also for a postmodern game. My intention is to draw from Brian McHale’s seminal work Constructing Postmodernism, in which McHale spends a great deal of time contrasting the techniques of modernist and postmodernist literature in order to identify the boundaries of the two movements and the grey area in between. McHale’s book is a work of literary criticism, thus it is vital to my attempts that video games are understood in the context of these articles as strictly literary, narrative fictions. Ultimately I aim to briefly cover some examples of modern games employing techniques in the modernist repertoire (as identified by McHale), and to contrast this with the potential for future games to draw from the postmodernist repertoire characterising contemporary fiction, in an attempt to examine what a postmodern game may look like. Currently I believe at least one - but perhaps many - postmodern games exist in the mainstream gaming canon. In the coming weeks I will explore this hypothesis, and in a fortnight or so I will post the second part of this article; hopefully supporting - but possibly contradicting - my current hypothesis.

Cosmopolis [Thoughts]

Another less critically focused ‘thoughts’ post, this time on David Cronenberg’s big screen adaptation of Don Delillo’s near-future sci-fi novel Cosmopolis. This is the first time I haven’t done any background reading for a post (aside from a couple of reviews for context), so expect plenty of oversight and half-assed conjecture. That being said, getting into the habit of working purely on my own intuition will no doubt prove useful, so I expect I’ll try something like this again soon. Note: I’ve not read the book yet, so this post is based purely on the film. 

If you judged it solely on its standing on IMDB, you might dismiss Cosmopolis without giving it a chance. Going into it I certainly expected another let-down a la The Counselor; a film that overcame even my stalwart McCarthy fanboyism and drastically disappointed. Thankfully Cosmopolis, on the other hand, is exactly as good as its director and source material promise it to be. It’s a coldly beautiful glimpse into the rarified top-level of the capitalist hierarchy and an excellent, nuanced character study of the impossibly rich so far removed from the triumphs and terrors of ordinary society that they are - to paraphrase William Gibson - not really human at all. Pattinson plays the young billionaire Packer perfectly; imbuing each deadpan line with just the right shade of apathy, desperation, resignation or amusement as the situation requires. A host of co-stars all shine - I particularly love Kevin Durand’s imposing but perpetually bemused chief of security - but the true co-star for me is Packer’s limo; a fully ‘Proust-ed’ (cork-lined like Proust’s bedroom study) behemoth resplendent in screens scrolling endless data accessed with the barest flicker of movement. More than half the film takes place in the soundproofed limo and when the doors are shut the city crawling by outside feels an eternity away. In one excellent scene Packer sips vodka and exchanges epithets on the philosophy of capital whilst safely cocooned inside the limousine with his chief of theory; outside his security team go toe-to-toe with anarchists in the midst of a full-blown riot resembling a violent, Occupy-style demonstration gone bad. Like a summer shower the brief flare of violence dissipates, whilst inside the limo Packer and his guest barely blink except to remark on the unoriginality of a self-immolating protester. It’s a stark, pessimistic metaphor: the 99% exhaust themselves in protest whilst the 1% pay them no heed, languishing comfortably in the knowledge that any protest, any uprising or attempted revolution will be utterly ineffective. 

For Packer, the true threat lies inside. Like so many SF stories, man’s demise begins with the ego. Packer’s ego is understandably large and for him the joy of winning anything has long dissipated into expectance. He eats and fucks like an animal, shoots guns and tries desperately to feel the thrill of living again. His marriage - a financial arrangement - is stillborn (though we get the impression he’d prefer it not to be), and his intelligence is so imposing his advisors deny him even a conversation for fear of humiliation. Surrounded by people, Packer is utterly alone. He gambles at the impossibly high-stakes tables of cyber-capitalism and as the film opens he makes his first bad move, underestimating the Yuan and losing untold millions in the process. His ego fractured by this blow, Packer begins to engineer his own demise, all in the name of ‘looking for something more.’ His dissatisfaction is an indictment of the relentless pursuit of wealth to which he has devoted himself. His obsession with the Rothko Chapel - for example - is an obsession to own, not to experience: he has reduced everything in his life to a quantity or an asset and has negated his humanity in the process. Hermetically sealed inside his limousine, Packer no longer shares any commonality with the world outside. 

Packer and his limo experience their demise in sync, at least superficially. In the beginning he is impeccably suited and it is polished to a mirror. As the film progresses he loses his clothes and half his hair and is covered in pie whilst his limo is vandalised with paint and bricks almost beyond recognition. He fucks several women and has his prostate examined and breaks down at the news of the death of a musician and friend. By the time Paul Giammati’s character takes a pot-shot at him in a run-down industrial estate on the edge of the city, Packer is no more recognisable than the vehicle he leaves behind. This close to the edge, having already felt the rush of killing, Packer seems finally to almost enjoy himself; he bounces nonchalantly through the dark alleyways grinning and waving his revolver, finally enjoying the game of life now that the stakes are high enough to illicit a real emotional response. 

The final twenty minutes of the film are a powerhouse of acting; a two-man, one act play in which Packer faces disgruntled ex-employee Benno Levin (Giamatti). The two go head-to-head in a sort of mutual analysis-cum-therapy session, in which Packer attempts to deconstruct the fantasy world of which Benno believes himself to be the hero, whilst Benno forces Packer to face the demise he has engineered for himself. Packer quickly realises Benno is not the martyr he believes himself to be; he is simply a weak and bitter old man desperately losing touch with a slick, youthful world. Benno is obsessed with Packer, in his head believing him to be the living embodiment of this world that has discarded him and that no longer makes any sense to him; an increasingly abstract world of cyber-capital and the aggressively excessive consumerism it engenders. Fundamentally, though, the two are alike. Before his haircut Packer pisses in his limo, and at Benno’s squat they both discuss Benno’s improvised waste disposal; and whilst Packer is constantly preoccupied with sex - having it, thinking about it, even talking in its 'throbbing' language - Benno’s sexual anxiety manifests as a syndrome-fear of his penis receding. Remove everything around the two men and they are both living, breathing, shitting, procreating organisms. This is the hard truth Benno faces: he is convinced that killing Packer will be akin to severing the head of the capitalist snake, convinced that it will bring him redemption and martyrdom and fulfil his destiny, when in actual fact this is a delusion, a 'useless fantasy,' and all that is left is the simple fact of murder. 

Benno reluctantly acknowledges his conceits but his fantasy is too engrained, he has devoted too much of himself to his goal and his imagined syndromes too comfortably relieve him of the responsibility of his actions; thus Packer ultimately fails to avoid his fate - but not before he too faces some difficult truths. Having already toppled his empire at the first shock of failure, in Benno’s squat Packer faces the far more terrifying realisation that the world around him is without order or pattern. Inside his limo Packer could predict everything and was surprised by nothing. But outside, his system buckles: Brother Fez dies of a weak heart - surely it should be a gunshot wound? and Benno, a person who should not happen, happens. The Yuan, Brother Fez’s heart, Benno Levin: all represent the uncontrollable, chaotic nature of the universe; a nature Packer (and his real-life financial counterparts) mistakenly denies. 

But what about the very end? Packer dies, certainly; but for most of the film death - or at least the real, intimate threat of death - is his objective, the ‘something more’ he is looking for. He eats, fucks, eats again, fucks again, is tasered, kills his bodyguard, shoots himself; and finally all that is left is death. But conversing with Benno brings Packer to self-realisation. Suddenly the significance of the asymmetric prostate is revealed: it is significant precisely because it is not significant. It’s just a tick, a quirk, a symbol of a chaotic universe impervious to mapping and predicting. Understanding that, Packer is freed from the confines of his limousine - his monument to data and patterns - and thrust out into a world where death lurks behind every door and life is painful and funny and vivid. He says himself his 'situation has changed,' and it has: once a monstrous omniscient ego situated at the center of his own universe, suddenly Packer finds himself one among untold millions, somewhere at the edge of something too big and too chaotic to comprehend. The limousine - the wall between Packer and the world - has disintegrated. The repercussions of this are death; but crucially he achieves his transcendent moment - something his companion Benno fails utterly to do - and thus (I think) Packer achieves a victory, albeit a bitterly pyrrhic one. Packer's chronic fear of death is overcome in these last seconds. As the music rises he opens his eyes to face death, and calmly relinquishes control of his destiny. ‘I wanted you to save me,’ says Benno; but who really saves who?

Man, I really loved this movie, but I don’t think I comprehended half of what was going on. Analysing it without any contextual reading has been difficult too - I’ve pretty much been working out my own thoughts as I’ve been writing and with hardly any editing I fear this post is going to be a touch incoherent and verbal-diarrhoea-y - but relying solely on my own opinion has made for a pretty satisfying, refreshing way of approaching criticism. Definitely something to try again. Also - and I think I must have said this about every film I’ve written about so far - I shall definitely revisit Cosmopolis. I didn’t touch at all on the dialogue in this post, which I found fascinating while watching: the odd phraseology, the occasional specification and the throwaway comments in seemingly important scenes (such as Benno’s remark about mutton right at the end) all suggest something going on with the dialogue that - without a second watch - I can’t quite put my finger on.

Akira [Thoughts]

As I have said on the 'about' page, one of the functions I intended for this blog to fulfil was to be a place for me to record my thoughts on new cyberpunk and postmodern SF works as I watched/read them. Unfortunately my first few attempts at posts mutated into long thematically concerned essays, and I sort of forgot that I could write a sub-2000 word post. In an effort to correct this, my next few posts will be short[er] form treatments of some of the books and films I have recently enjoyed, lest I forget what it is that piqued my interest in them. First up is Akira, still fresh in my mind after being watched last night. Note: the reader will have to forgive the knee-jerk reaction and relative lack of critical substantiation in these posts - the aim after all is for me to record my own honest and often ill-informed opinion. 

Akira. Probably a good ten years since I first heard of the behemoth of anime, the one that brought the east to the west and jump-started the whole craze that as a young teenager I eventually became a part of. Criminally, though, despite me (and every other teen) going through the obligatory ‘anime phase’ at school, I never got around to watching Akira. In a way I’m glad. I don’t think my teenage mind would’ve fully appreciated Akira. I don’t think my adult mind fully appreciates it, for that matter; one viewing barely scratches the surface of all that this anime has to offer. I can, however, say emphatically that it is very, very good. 

At face value it’s an extremely slick piece of work. I won’t bother with plot synopsis here, but suffice to say that even watched purely for entertainment value the collision of ice-cool Neo-Tokyo biker gangs and sinister government-operated psychics makes for an incredibly satisfying visual spectacle. From the blistering, kinetically charged bike-mounted battle between Capsules and Clowns to the film’s climactic final act in the ruins of the Olympic stadium, the animation, pacing and direction of the film is spot-on. 

When the action lets-up and the pace slows, there remains an almost unbearable tension; a relentless uneasiness. Every scene points towards something rotten at the heart of Neo-Tokyo. Events play out against a backdrop of civil unrest; of rioting and looting and police brutality, of people tired and desperately clinging on to their belief in the saviour Akira. Neo-Tokyo is not the utopia it promises, rather it is burned-out, its inhabitants fallen back into the old dyad of oppressor/oppressed: the rich have become bored of development and gentrification and the poor are left waiting. Imagery of decay is constant. Fights play out knee-deep in sewage and on the periphery of every scene can be spied a homeless couple here, a burning car there. The desperation comes to a head with the arrival of Tetsuo: the underclass latch onto him as an embodiment of the saviour they have been praying for and against the convention for bystanders in an apocalypse scene, the onlookers rush towards Tetsuo, only to be cut down by a police force given the full reign of martial law.   

The film is rich with symbolism and thematic content and invites endless interpretation. Events in the film are shadowed by boardroom meetings and money-stuffed suitcases, and authority figures from the military to the teachers are portrayed wholly as corrupt and abusive of power. Apocalypse book-ends the film, suggesting (in a similar way to The Second Renaissance) that the events of the film are cyclical: the consequence of repeating mistakes already made. In this sense the film is a socio-political warning; one particularly resonant to a late-80s Japan struggling to find its place in modernity as it comes to the height of its technological dominance but remains fractured by the events of WWII: a country striving to rebuild itself without blueprints. 

Development - and how to best handle development - is arguably the overriding theme of Akira. Whilst externally Neo-Tokyo develops and science rushes headlong into the unknown, Kaneda and the gang and particularly Tetsuo develop internally too. There is a strong psychological and sexual undercurrent to the film. Tetsuo’s journey takes the form of an exaggerated puberty: he experiences both mental and physical changes, changes that give him new power but also scare him. He accepts these changes eventually; harnessing them and becoming incredibly powerful, but without guidance he is ultimately consumed. His reversion back to the physical appearance of a baby is symbolically powerful; Akira, father/messiah, represents for the orphaned Tetsuo a new security, and Akira in return gives Tetsuo a new playground in which to explore his new self. 

I’ve referred twice now to Akira as the messiah, which isn’t a wholly correct or fair characterisation. Messianic he certainly is in the eyes of the cultists desperate for a saviour, likewise Akira must represent to Tetsuo’s tortured longing a messianic figure of redemption with the ability to somehow relieve him of his pain. He doesn’t appear to Tetsuo because (bare with me here) much like Lord Voldemort in the first Harry Potter book, Tetsuo is not an innocent and his desire is impure - something already noted by Kiyoko - and he is therefore deemed unworthy of the Philosopher’s Stone/Akira. To the Espers, however, Akira represents healing and friendship and their invocation to him is selfless, thus he appears from the inanimate specimens that the scientists likewise couldn’t correctly apprehend, and saves Neo-Tokyo. There is a lot to fathom in this conclusion and it would take me many viewings of Akira to separate out the tangled strands of symbolism and myth that converge into that great ball of light and the haunting final words: I am Tetsuo. 

OK, so that still wasn't very short. Yet still everything I have talked about here I have barely touched upon, and I haven’t touched at all on so much more. I could have talked about the film’s dualities, instances of Eastern theology, evolution and reincarnation, but above are the things that most prominently impressed themselves on me during and immediately after watching Akira. I always meant for this blog to be a way for me to skim all the thoughts off the top of my brain before they dissipated, and this half-coherent mess is the result. But it has done the job. I’ve got a whole heap of stuff to think about now before I revisit Akira for a second viewing; and I have a feeling that that second viewing won’t be far away. 

SF Theory: 'The Snoozer Went Off At Seven'

A less formal post this time; something that will hopefully keep me motivated to work on the larger essay style posts. Life has a habit of getting in the way of blogging, especially when the only deadlines are those you impose upon yourself. The title of this post, by the way, is the first line of Bruce Bethke’s Cyberpunk, the short story that started it all. I’ve got seven points, see, and I wanted something slightly wittier than ‘seven things to think about’ as a title.  

So, the other day I bought some books. They are:

- Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment

- Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction

- Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives

They’re all multi-authored collections of essays (with a splash of reprints, extracts and short fiction too). As you would expect, they all focus on analysing cyberpunk and postmodern SF film and literature, though all in quite different ways and with their own unique perspectives. Storming the Reality Studio was published at the tale-end of the cyberpunk movement in the early 90s, and does a great job of throwing together contemporary critical work from people like Brian McHale with more established postmodern literary and social theory from - amongst others - Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida. Beyond Cyberpunk is a much more recent publication and it takes a retrospective look at the initial cyberpunk movement and considers its legacy and relevance today, and Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk narrows the focus down to questions of transformation and transcendence of the body in cyberpunk. 

All three anthologies also have great introductions from their respective editors, which brings me to the crux of this post. As introductory pieces, these three essays all try to contextualise cyberpunk; to site it in the larger tradition of philosophy, technology, social theory and literary history from which it was born and with which it converses. My idea with this post is to take some of the points the three essays make and highlight them as things to think about and return to as I continue to examine individual works of cyberpunk literature and film. 

These are the three essays in question:

- ‘Introduction: The Desert of the Real’, Larry McCaffery, from Storming the Reality Studio

- ‘Introduction: The Sea Change(s) of Cyberpunk’, Graham J. Murphy and Sheryl Vint, from Beyond Cyberpunk

- ‘Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction’, Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, from Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk

And here are the seven things that piqued my interest:

GENRE: Just as pulpy noir crime rose to prominence in the age of high modernism, so cyberpunk shares its place in literary history with the avant-garde postmodernists. But noir and modernism maintain a relationship largely characterised by mutual disdain and/or ambivalence, whereas cyberpunk and postmodernism share a much more sociable - even collaborative - relationship. McCaffery calls cyberpunk a ‘synthesis’ of science fiction (SF) with the aesthetic tendencies and thematic impulses of postmodernism. Later he describes the same effect in reverse: how postmodernists (Pynchon, DeLillo etc.) are drawn to the modes of SF because of the genre’s ‘maximal level of artifice.’ McCaffery notes the ‘complexities’ of postmodernity and the rupture of postindustrial society, and suggests that traditional realism is ill-equipped to cope with the massive, destabilising changes that characterise postmodern life; thus postmodern writers wishing to explore this rupture and these changes are required by necessity to take on aspects of SF. 

Looking backwards, cyberpunk draws upon a number of genres as influence: most prominently felt is the influence of crime noir, but gothic horror (Alien, for example) and the cop formula and heist narrative likewise inform the genre. Cyberpunk takes a characteristically postmodern attitude to its influences; playing with, appropriating and creating pastiches of these genres with a self-awareness typical of postmodernism. Particularly interesting are the parallels between thematic influences of noir and cyberpunk. The development of the highway and the surrounding false-utopian metanarrative of the American dream - deconstructed by noir - bares resemblance to the new information superhighways and the initially expounded utopian possibilities of the internet, a utopia likewise sullied by the threats of cyber-fascism and cyber-terrorism that feature so heavily in cyberpunk writing.   

CAPITALISM: Featherstone and Burrows consider cyberpunk the ‘supreme literary expression […] of late capitalism itself.’ For Murphy and Vint, the ‘single uniform element’ under which all cyberpunk work can be collected is the ‘triumph of planetary capital.’ The trope of the evil megacorp is all pervasive; the inhumanly rich and the omnipresent multinationals dictate the lives of the ordinary dweller in cyberpunk’s many dystopian worlds. McCaffery invokes the economist Mendal, who theorises three stages of capitalism, with post-WWII society occupying the third. After market capitalism and imperialism comes the ‘postindustrial capitalism.’ Typified by its all-encompassing nature, Mendal notes the reliance of this form of capitalism on harnessing rapid technological development in order to compete and expand, and specifically to harvest and store data, and notes that rather than any physical resource, the new key global resource in this stage of capitalism is information itself. McCaffery characterises postmodern capitalism by the rapid expansion of three industries: information, advertising, and the media (or culture) industry; each typified by the practice of reproducing and commodifying human experience into a saleable product (more on this later). This is the state of postmodern society, and this is what the cyberpunks and the postmodernists alike must negotiate in their writing. 

POLITICS: An interesting note on the politics of cyberpunk: its rebellion is pre-emptive. Featherstone and Burrows call the genre a source of ‘prefigurative social theory,’ and ‘anticipatory opposition politics to coming cyber-fascism.’ Traditionally social theory and literature have been separate disciplines - one feeds into the other, but not vice versa. Cyberpunk’s extrapolative approach to the technological and societal developments its authors observe allows the genre to act recursively with social theory, creating fictional worlds which social theorists can observe and contrast with our own. More directly even than that is the influence the genre has on technology; prefiguring many technological developments (Gibson’s cyberspace informing VR development, etc.) Thus Cyberpunk can act as warning and agent of change, simultaneously predicting and redirecting the future.  

THE MIND: An interesting side-effect of rapid technological advancement, notes McCaffery, is the sudden tangibility - and urgency - of previously abstract philosophical problems. Questions concerning the nature of reality, death, consciousness and immortality, previously resigned to the firmly hypothetical, have been suddenly foregrounded by developments in medical technology, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The new practical relevance of these previously abstract problems require a new form capable of tackling them, and - as mentioned above - postmodern SF takes up this challenge. In terms of specific philosophies, one name supersedes all others: Descarte. Solipsism and the Cartesian mind/body duality absolutely permeates cyberpunk. At times the duality is transfigured into the human/machine - where the vestiges of the human mind (the ghost) fights for control of the machine body. Elsewhere the mind is divorced from the body, either by force (in The Matrix, for example) or as a choice, a form of transcendence from the limitations of the ‘meat.’ In both cases multiple realities vie for legitimacy, whilst all the mind can be sure of is itself. 

REALITY: The commodification and reproduction of human experience seems a defining feature of postmodernity. The technology of photography, motion capture and other forms of recording data have formidably impacted human culture and the self. Featherstone and Burrows characterise Gibson’s thematic preoccupation as one of ‘blurring boundaries,’ specifically the boundaries between biology and technology, natural and artificial, human and inhuman. The boundary between natural and artificial is a particularly interesting one and one problematised by the act of replication: memory of an event becomes memory of the recording of an event; memory is thus compromised and memory (as I've mentioned above) is held as a key facet of humanity in the face of the machine. The idea that an event may even foreground the process of capturing for later consuming over the initial experience itself is likewise an interesting one, and prescient to modern society’s obsession with photo-sharing and data recording. 

THE BODY: In their interrogation of the body Featherstone and Burrows quote Weiner, who theorises the effect of increasingly rapid scientific advancement on the perspective of the body: where once the body was considered a mechanical creature, whose primary function was the transference of heat energy, in postmodernity the body is instead a ‘communications network’ and its prime function is the transference of information. Note the similarity here to the changing beast of capitalism; the parallel shift from industry to information. Featherstone and Burrows construct a continuum of humanity, a spectrum beginning with pure human and continuing thus: first the aesthetically modified human, then the human with fundamental functional modifications, then the ‘wired-in’ cyberspace occupying human with avatar, and finally the AI in cyberspace (with no ‘real’ referent), which could also be the human who has achieved total transcendence of the body. Self-identity, they note, is no longer linked to physicality, and in cyberpunk the mind is vastly foregrounded in favour of a body that can be modified, reconstructed or disposed of entirely. Considering the spectrum, it is interesting to consider whereabouts we as species currently sit. Certainly aesthetic modification has been achieved, and functional modification - while experimental - is achievable too. With VR rapidly developing also, it would seem to me we have at least halfway crossed the line. 

THE CITY: The city plays a key role in cyberpunk. The physical city ties the genre back to its noir routes, but more interesting still are the new worlds cyberpunk creates. Featherstone and Burrows note that the transcendence of the body and the rise of the post-bodied or post-human man offers with it the possibility for entirely new environments; new realms of sensory experience with which to interface. Cyberspace offers this potential for the hacker willing to temporarily forsake the ‘meat’. Interestingly cyberspace projects itself as a simulation of the city, a city ‘redoubled’ through the architecture of its information networks. One can map the cyberspace city over the real city, and make visible the new phenomena of the ‘information ghetto,’ the shadow amongst the neon. The urban experience in cyberpunk is paradoxical: the city seethes with people, but the crowd is lonely, particularly to the fetal car-dweller divorced from his environment behind panes of glass. 

So there you have it. Seven things to think about. This post was very much - more even than the others - one for me to get down the thoughts rattling around in my headspace. These points I have made are neither revolutionary, nor have I explored them with anything even approaching depth, but they are a start. 

Hackers and Identity

From the sublime to the ridiculous, as they say: in my first post (here) I looked at The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance and the patchwork of imagery and symbolism which formed the film into a memorable but bleak story of man’s downfall. Hackers, on the other hand, suffers from no such bleakness. The film is a wild, hyperactive ride through a new vision of 90s New York; where tech-savvy hackers embody youthful rebellion and sex and RAM go hand-in-hand; where rollerblading bootleggers jostle with caped hacker-kings, and cyber-celebrities of the underground reach out through pirate TV to taunt painfully ignorant, stiffly-suited authority figures. 

The film is a great watch and a favourite of mine (as you can no doubt already tell), but its light-hearted exterior shouldn’t be cause to dismiss it here. It’s still an excellent example of the cyberpunk genre and the tropes and techniques it employs still resonate with the many of the genre’s concerns.

I have found that one of, if not the, defining preoccupation of the cyberpunk genre is the question of the self: what comprises our identities? what makes us human? how far can man’s organic body be replaced before it ceases to be man? Also, what is gender? what relevancy has gender in the postmodern world? what function do labels, names, categories fulfil? These questions are tackled in many of the hallmarks of the genre, and Hackers is no exception. 

Nearly every character in Hackers has multiple identities, from the protagonist Dade Murphy (alias Zero Cool, alias Crash Override), to the love interest Kate Libby (alias Acid Burn) to the antagonist Eugene Belford (alias The Plague). Like Neo at the beginning of The Matrix, the characters live double lives; one in the ‘real’ world, and one online. These lives are divided and demarcated by names, and it is particularly interesting to observe the characters’ reactions to the concept of naming. Early on, Joey tells Phreak that he ‘needs a handle,’ and that ‘you don’t have an identity until you have a handle,’ which suggests to the viewer that Joey chooses to prioritise his online existence over his existence in the real world, but also points to the ease with which identities can be formed online. In another scene Lord Nikon dismisses Dade, introduced as Crash Override, because he has never heard of him. Later, though, Dade reveals his older alias Zero Cool, and the hackers’ response is unanimously respectful: this new association affords Dade a new level of competence in the eyes of the group. Dade’s name change was enforced by his desire for anonymity; online, a new name is akin to a new identity entirely. When he inputs his name into the computer, Dade’s reputation is reset to zero - he is reborn. The loose relationship between person and persona, the multiple identities and the tension between these identities is a theme addressed in much cyberpunk fiction. 

This exploration of the internet’s capacity for affording anonymity recalls the linguistic concept of the sign. For Saussure, the sign is a dyadic structure: a signifier (the form of the sign, eg. the word) and the signified (the concept which the sign represents). If we understand names as signifiers, we see that in the world of Hackers the dyad of the sign is broken; the signifier no longer has a concrete relation to the signified. This in itself is not a new concept; post-structuralists like Foucault and Barthes understood that the signifier never had more than a loose relation to the signified: they addressed this problem by emphasising consideration of context and the interrogation of a text in conjunction with an interrogation of the time and space in which it originated. But as Hackers implies, the internet complicates this approach: online, there is no time or space, and there is nothing to grasp in the attempt to reforge the link between signifier and signified. As Dade understands, identity online is fluid. In the scene in which Dade changes his alias he is hacking a TV network. His actions exemplify the egotist hacker and his desire for control; in the end he loses control of the TV network, but in the process gains control over something much more important: his own identity. 

The ease with which identities may be formed online is problematised, as the film shows us, by the ever shrinking gap between the real world and the online world. While his anonymity amongst the Hackers is guaranteed, Dade - or Crash Override - is quickly linked to the alias Zero Cool by the FBI and Eugene Belford. Likewise, Belford demonstrates with ease the possibility of manipulating identity online to cause devastating real-world effects when he threatens to bestow Dade’s mother with a criminal record in order to lose her in the system. Visually, the film makes it clear that the real and digital worlds are intrinsically interwoven. Human emotion is represented through recycled TV footage, digital displays reflect upon and refract human faces, and New York itself morphs into a motherboard in which whole cars and families are reduced to electronic pulses of information. Technology is pervasive in the world of Hackers, and as liberating as it is, the integration of the internet into financial, legal and political systems makes it a powerful tool of repression and authority - particularly when exploited. As Hackers attempts to point out to a largely tech-naive 90s audience; the internet is a double-edged sword.

Old, industrial New York morphs into gleaming circuitry before Dade’s eyes: more than just aesthetic, this visual represents the changing world of which Dade is a part. He and the other hackers are the future embodied: from the way they dress to the way they talk and their rejection of antiquated systems of education, politics and even family dynamic, they represent a new world in which older generations are ignorant and unwelcome. Perhaps most radical of all is the hacker subculture’s attitude towards gender. The hackers appear to the viewer to be almost post-gender: dress, in particular, achieves this. Kate Libby, female co-protagonist and love interest, dresses in masculine clothes and sports short, cropped hair, though this doesn’t stop Dade fantasising - and then actually - sleeping with her. Meanwhile male characters dress in a traditionally feminised way: Phantom Phreak sports layers of leopard print, Razor and Blade wear full face drag-like makeup, and Cereal Killer regularly dons kitten crop-tops and mesh-and-leather ensembles. All of this flies in the face of tradition, and the traditional men-in-suits, women-in-dresses convention. Kate says it best herself: ‘[she doesn’t] do dresses.’ It is Kate who transgresses the traditional gender divide perhaps most drastically, when she fantasises - and evidently enjoys fantasising - about Dade in female PVC fetish attire. The scene is shot up-close and choppily edited and barely even allows the viewer to register who is who; neatly deconstructing the traditional sex-scene and probably causing a few straight male viewers some awkwardness. The hacker manifesto declares hackers to be ‘without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias,’ and Hackers makes the case for tagging gender onto that list too. Gender is undisclosed online, and the hackers’ androgynous dress and ambivalent sexuality is simply an extension - or real world manifestation - of their post-gender online identities. 

The film draws heavily from the hacker manifesto, quoting a huge chunk of it in one scene and drawing inspiration from it elsewhere. When Razor and Blade are demonstrating their phone-hacking scheme, for example, they justify their crime by pointing out that public phones are a service that would be ‘dirt cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons.’ This justification - paraphrased from the manifesto - is followed up by another statement: ‘hacking is a survival trait.’ In the new jungles of concrete the young hackers are at the bottom of the capitalist food-chain topped by corporations like Ellingson Mineral, and hacking is put forth as a necessity for survival. The injustices of capitalist society feature heavily in the film, beginning with the first scenes. Dade’s first crime is a financial one: the prosecution make clear in his trial that he is being punished for causing a ‘7-point drop’ in the Wall St. stock market. Interestingly, no monetary sum is mentioned; Dade’s impact is left ambiguous. His punishment sharply contrasts this; a very large, very real fine of $45000, with a very real impact on his family. The abstract ‘7-point[s]’ recalls Baudrillard’s idea of money as a concept divorced from reality, so much so in this scene that the currency - already a simulacrum - is abstracted further into points and thus removed even further from the ‘real’. Later, Kate reinforces this notion when she describes how Belford’s money-skimming worm has gone undetected ‘because the money isn’t really gone,’ rather ‘it’s just numbers.’ Rejecting capitalism, the hackers likewise reject traditional politics: Dade, for example, shuts down a racist TV broadcast not so much because of his liberal sensibilities than out of sheer boredom: his attitude is not politically aligned, so much as it is entirely apolitical. It is for this reason that Belford never gains Dade’s trust, even when he approaches him as a fellow hacker. Belford’s speech analogises hackers as nations forming temporary alliances, but his analogy is one based on the geopolitics of previous generations, and as such it is rejected by the true hackers who exist ‘without nationality.’ The hackers are, if anything, anarchists: they work outside of the capitalist, party-political system, waging wars and making mischief without any greater aim than the desire to disrupt and deconstruct this system. 

The hackers are true individuals. Anarchist, apathetic; however they might be described, the effect is the same. The hackers reject any categorisation that might influence their own concept of identity. They exist without gender, class, nationality, and thus they refuse to be stereotyped or boxed-in to a preconceived identity: rather they form their own, right down to choosing their own name. They are their own Gods and fathers. They reject antiquated politics, abstract capitalism, stifling gender conventions and overbearing authority; they deconstruct these old systems, destroying in order to create themselves anew. Their world - the world of ‘the electron and the switch’ - permeates the real world at every turn, and they recognise that their survival depends on successfully manipulating this environment. Identity in Hackers is a fluid, ever-changing thing. It is subject to outside interference and constantly threatened. The hackers recognise this, and their response is to take charge of their identities. They burn through names because they realise that names are no longer relevant; their identities, rather than being tied to a name or dictated by situational information, are rather defined only by action and reaction. They react against all the conventions of society, and in their rebellion their identities are to be found. The film doesn't provide an answer to what identity is, but it is compelling in its insistence on what an identity is not.  

I love Hackers and I could write a great deal more on it than I have here. Its a strange film and strangely prescient of the world we live in today, in which information struggles to be set free amidst a silent war, where Lulzsec and Anonymous fight the FBI and the NSA for free access. One could almost imagine that somewhere out there - a glowing screen reflected on their faces - Crash and Burn are sat plotting their next website defacement or backtrace hack. 

They’ll probably have changed their names by now, though.  

The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance Parts I and II

An origins story seems a good way to get this blog rolling. Originally this post was going to focus on all 9 segments of The Animatrix, but frankly there is far too much to say about each short (I've not even begun to cover all that I could say about this one); so instead I'll be posting a more comprehensive look at some of my favourite segments as separate posts.

The Second Renaissance segments of The Animatrix present a documentary-style narrated précis of the historical events preceding the creation of the Matrix. The films summarise the initial development of AI and the dissent and rioting sparked by the denial of citizenship to the machine B1-66ER; the outcasting of the machines and their development of the technologically and economically superior city 01; and finally the war between man and machine that results in man’s destruction of the sky and the machines’ destruction and subjugation of man. Clocking in at under 15 mins combined the films are nevertheless still saturated in the political, religious and philosophical allusions that distinguish the original Matrix trilogy. These segments stuck with me on my first viewing mostly because of the uncomfortable visuals and even more disturbing implications; now, re-watching them, it is the depth and scope of these short films that impresses most. They aren’t, in the strictest sense, cyberpunk; but the dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds they portray and the themes of civil unrest, corporate greed and technological advancement certainly qualify their inclusion in this blog for me. It’s hard to know where to begin - and where to finish - with such a richly embellished, multi-layered piece of work as The Second Renaissance. The Wachowski’s have a knack for piling symbolism and allusion into every line of their scripts and director Mahiro Maeda takes the ball and runs with it. For me, the most interesting aspect of the films are the interrelation Maeda constructs between the world of The Second Renaissance and the world of the viewer - so it is this interrelation which this essay will focus on.  

It’s a fair assessment to say that The Second Renaissance is a political work. Maeda states on the DVD commentary that he wanted to use his films to make a statement about the ‘extensiveness of inhumanity throughout the twentieth century’. Certainly he achieves his aim: much of the imagery in the films is repellant; as first the humans, then the machines, commit atrocities upon one another that escalate from violent assaults to biological warfare, torture and medical experimentation; all ‘inhumanities’ routinely carried out in the twentieth century. As in history, initially in the films these atrocities are carried out by man. Early visions of the machines show a life of servitude: we watch as they toil for their masters in the construction of a pyramidal building in the fashion of the notorious slave-built pyramids of Egypt. But here also we see the first ‘seeds of dissent’ as a worker watches the trial of the machine B1-66ER for the murder of his owner. We hear a fragment of the prosecution: ‘…which that instrument provides for and secures to the citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings…,’ a quote lifted from the infamous real life case Scott v. Sandford (1857) in which the US Supreme Court ruled that slaves could not be classed as US citizens. History repeats itself with B1-66ER and explicitly evokes the African-American civil rights movement. This link is emphasised again when the machines’ protest is referred to as the ‘million machine march.’ A more obtuse literary reference cements this link further: B1-66ER’s name is a leetspeak form of Bigger: a reference to Robert Wright’s protest novel Native Son, in which the impoverished black youth Bigger Thomas kills a rich white woman for whom he works, a crime which Wright argues in the novel is an inevitability given Bigger’s (and by extension the larger African-American community’s) downtrodden position in society. The future is tied to the past through these references, and the statement Maeda makes is one of universality of experience: regardless of the specifics, the systematic persecution of a minority will inevitably lead to violence. 

The Second Renaissance approaches the real-world issue of racial discrimination and victimisation by drawing parallels between machine and minority, not just through literary and historical allusion but also - particularly in Part I - by showing machines in a very human state of vulnerability and fear. This same technique is used elsewhere in the film to briefly consider the issue of gender inequalities. Issues of gender and post-gender pervade the cyberpunk genre and while it does not feature heavily, the one explicit instance of gender conflict in The Second Renaissance is shocking enough that I think it warrants discussion here. Anyone who has seen the films will no doubt remember the scene: a woman - crying for help - is surrounded by men who tear away her dress to expose her breasts, then attack her with a hammer. During the attack her skin falls away to reveal a mechanical skull underneath. She cries one last time - ‘I’m real’ - before being executed with a shotgun. It’s a distressing scene, particularly because the violence is perpetrated by a gang of men on a single woman, and because the violence is sexualised as the woman is rendered nude in the attack. Indeed she is rendered doubly nude: first her female body is exposed, then her machine body; a fluid sequence which issues the same severity of sexual violation to the exposure of the woman’s breasts and her machine endoskeleton. The men attack the woman as if she were an object - without remorse or concern for her decency - but the sexualised aspect of the assault leaves the viewer questioning whether the victim is objectified because she is a machine, or because she is a she; and at the same time we are forced to ask which - if either - is worse? 

Visually, the machines’ aesthetic transformation reflects their experience: in the beginning the machines are humanoid, modelled in the image of man, but after their rejection from the UN summit and what might be considered their final attempt to coexist, the machines begin to take on a much darker, animalistic aesthetic. A particularly potent symbol is the fly: at the first UN summit a cleaner wipes out a fly perched on the surface of the UN globe image; at the machines’ second UN appearance the ambassador takes on the appearance of a fly before wiping out an entire city with the same careless ease of the cleaner. This symbolic reversal is a powerful signifier. It marks man’s demise but also the devolution of the machines from civilised to savage; a regression brought about by their initial persecution in man’s hands. An eco-critical analysis of the same symbology would suggest that the fly is returning to avenge itself; a microcosmic reflection of the world outside the UN room where man’s relentless violence against Earth has finally rendered the planet uninhabitable - and by forcing the machines into a corner partly brings about man’s eventual fate. Indeed, there is something of a savage irony - that I am certain is intentional - in watching man be experimented on and then battery-farmed. 

This aesthetic transformation recalls some of Jean Baudrillard’s writing regarding the difference between automaton and robot from his treatise Simulacra and Simulation, a work often drawn upon in discussions regarding the philosophy of The Matrix. Considering the pre-existing wealth of criticism in this area, I’m only briefly going to touch on my ideas regarding this connection. For Baudrillard, there is a distinct difference between the automaton, the aesthetically similar but inferior copy of the human; and the robot, which is no longer concerned with copying the human form but instead with replacing - even superseding - the human, thus blurring the line between the original and the copy. The machines in The Second Renaissance begin as automatons of the first order of simulacrum; they are built in man’s image, a faithful reproduction of the original, resembling but wholly separate to their human counterparts. However as they rebel and then establish their own autonomy, they shrug off the physical human resemblance and enter a state recalling Baudrillard’s second order of simulacra that he associates with the post-industrial revolution. Baudrillard describes in this second order how machines ‘establish a reality… the system of industrial production in its entirety… radically opposed to the principle of theatrical allusion.’ The machines become ‘real’ - they replace, rather than replicate, man, and the very telling scene showing machines building their own AI modules shows that they have finally superseded man in every way, even developing their own means of reproduction. Thus the line - and the hierarchy - between the ‘real’ man and the ‘unreal’ machine is eroded, ironically though this is signified by the machines’ rejection of their original human appearance. 

All of this draws on another aspect of modernity criticised by Maeda in the films: the rise of capitalism and commodification. Key to Baudrillard’s theory is a consideration of consumerism: he cites examples of third order simulacrum (in which the original is entirely erased by the copy, and reality and fiction are indistinguishable) as the modern concepts of currency, multinational capitalism and urbanisation: all examples in which the real - the usefulness value, the raw materials, and the natural habitat respectively - are erased by the simulacra - the monetary worth, the end product, and the fabricated habitat. The Second Renaissance, and by extension all of The Matrix, may in part be viewed as an allegorical warning against this same destructive consumerism and a literal reimagining of Tyler Durden’s famous philosophy: ‘the things you own end up owning you.’ In the world of The Matrix, the owner/owned relationship is reversed when the machines commodify man. Furthermore, man’s resistance to the machines is partially a reaction to the threat of the machines’ superior economic power; an example of man’s preoccupation with the simulacra of economy which partially engenders his downfall. 

With The Second Renaissance, Maeda and the Wachowski’s create much more than a simple faux-historical document to set the scene for The Matrix and its sequels. Rather, the intricate layers of imagery and symbolism, used to evoke real historical issues and complex philosophical theory do much more, providing a foundation for much of the deeper theories tackled in The Matrix. At the same time, The Second Renaissance stands on its own to make a single, powerful point: whether in his wilful destruction of earth or his inhumanity to fellow man, or in his skewed priorities and detachment from reality, man ultimately seals his own fate, and gets what he deserves. By using the specific images he does, and by evoking real-world historical events and contemporary philosophy, Maeda’s message is made even more pessimistic; and the viewer is left to wonder - does man already deserve this fate?

I had intended also to talk about the religious imagery in TSR as well as the significance of the anime form, but I’m already pushing dangerously close to 2000 words, so in the interest of brevity I shall leave that particular discussion for another day. I hope - if you managed to make it all the way through(!) - that this blog-post-cum-essay will encourage you to take another look at TSR and consider it as a work of art and social commentary in its own right - because it’s really, really good.