alecaustin, posts by tag: complexity - LiveJournal

So I watched this video yesterday (hopefully it won't get taken down, as apparently previous versions have), and it reminded me of what I love about Star Wars.



Not the brand as a whole, mind you, but the first trilogy, and the toys I had as a kid, and the Timothy Zahn tie-in novels... even the horrible children's books I had, that Tor.com talked about at one point but I can't find the post for. I liked Karen Traviss's tie-ins too, but they were a very different sort of thing, trying to make something good in the shadow of the deeply flawed prequel trilogy.

One of the things that was great about Star Wars - and what's still great about the original trilogy, for all its flaws - was that it communicated a complex and exciting world with great economy, leaning on the viewer to fill in the gaps for themselves. You never see the Imperial Senate, and you don't need to - Leia's mention of it in her conversation with Darth Vader is enough. The Force is left mostly unexplained, as it should be, and the only faces we ever see emerge from beneath stormtrooper helmets are Luke and Han's. This lets the viewer focus on the movies' strengths, e.g. space dogfights, daring escapes, lightsaber duels, and the growing menace of the Death Star's approach, or the series of traps that close around the Rebels over the course of The Empire Strikes Back. (Side note: The Empire Strikes Back was the first movie I ever saw. It made quite an impression.)

There are lots of ways to sneer at space battles and pulpy adventure plots, and god knows, Joanna Russ certainly does in The Country You Have Never Seen... but the first two Star Wars films (and even Return of the Jedi, though to a lesser extent) still manage to convey a sense of joy when I watch or am reminded of them. I don't think this is the same thing as "sense of wonder" (a vapid, ungrounded phrase that I've increasingly come to detest), because what I feel isn't pleasure in newness, in novelty, in surprise. Nor is it just the deployment of familiar imagery, because the plethora of Star Wars games and shows that Lucas Film and Lucas Arts have been churning out for some time do basically nothing for me. (Let's not even get started on Star Wars: Detours, the trailer for which literally has the Emperor making Al Bundy-esque cracks about going on a singles cruise. No, I'm not kidding; I wish I could scrub the memory of that trailer from my brain.)

I think, on some level, that what the original Star Wars trilogy tapped into was a more elemental, less refined sense of what space adventure could or should look and feel like. It's a grab bag of pulp tropes - laser-sword fights, Asian-derived mysticism, secret bases, rescue attempts, villains who hide reptilian malice under superficial refinement - all delivered at high speed, with an utter sincerity, and backed up by set, prop, and sound design that sold the illusion that the future could be both dingy and Jerry-rigged as well as menacingly antiseptic. Its flaws are many and varied, just the flaws of the anime most obviously referenced in the video that began this post (Robotech/Macross, Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato, and Gundam) are myriad - but so were its strengths. It's easy to forget, in light of how ruthlessly the brand has been strip-mined since its resurgence in the '90s, how much fun Star Wars was, and still is, when all the cruft that's accumulated around it gets stripped away.

I'm not sure the same raw, unironic sincerity which powered Star Wars (and Robotech - I mean, seriously, Minmei defeats the Zentraedi with the power of love) is even possible today, in film or games or text. I suspect that part of the reason Steampunk has had as much of a draw as it has is because it allows authors to paint in the same sort of broad, enthusiastic strokes as space opera used to. I mean: Automatons! Mad Scientists! Aero-battleships! The trouble, though, is that Steampunk's links to a Victorian aesthetic are always threatening to drag it back to reality in uncomfortable ways, forcing more thoughtful authors to dilute the raw enthusiasm of their work with complications and irony. This isn't a bad thing, just like Zahn introducing sympathetic Imperials in the Thrawn trilogy wasn't a bad thing. Leaving our art unexamined and uncritized is a great way to absorb value systems we would never endorse in the cold light of day.

At the same time, though, I feel like it's incumbent on the creators and purveyors of art not to lose sight of the joy that can come from laser blasts lancing across the void of space, or from a hero crossing blades with a villain, or from a trickster outwitting an adversary, or from the looming descent of a dragon. Genre tropes have become tropes for a reason, however worn and tarnished they may have become in the hands of hacks. Redeeming and renewing them is far from the only serious work that can be done within the SFF genre, but abandoning and sneering at them (as the New Wave did its best to abandon coherence and adventure, and various other movements have attempted to do since) is not productive.

However high we aspire, and however complex the edifices we may build, we should not forget or renounce the simple joys on which our work is built, lest our towers and ziggurats crumble without their support.

So swan_tower picked up the ball from my information density post and ran with it in a post of her own. I'm curious what people's thoughts are on the specific sorts of examples she gives and questions she raises. Go forth and read!

So this is more of a half-formed thought than an actual argument, but I've been pondering the question of "invisibility" in Fantasy (using the 4th St. definition, which includes SF) lately, not just of classes of people, but also of concepts, economics, and other forms of political and historical complexity. The fact of the matter is that narrative and the desire to turn events and ideas into stories tend to be a simplifying, flattening force - see this recent post from Aliette De Bodard talking about how to include an element she wanted in her story, her depiction of it had to become a caricature because of space concerns.

The "culprit" here is the cold fact that fiction needs to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio in order to work for most readers, where 'signal' is immediately relevant story content and complicating or background details are classed as 'noise'. While there are people who would read Kim Stanley Robinson for his infodumps, there are lots of other readers who want immediacy, immersion, and tropes and patterns they can recognize. (A parallel problem crops up all the time in games if you try to front-load your tutorials. People want to play the game, even if that means you need to teach them on the fly.) Readers want story, and they want it now, and they don't want too many characters to confuse them, or a lecture about the history of kingdoms X & Y.

The trouble, of course, is that often "don't want too many characters" means the cast gets pruned down until there aren't any servants, or merchants, or people making the kingdom run. The trouble with only slipping in history through evocative details is that not every kind of history is amenable to being boiled down to easily referenced soundbites. And so on.

Also, when we write stories, we don't get to cover even a fraction of the issues that are relevant to a particular world or time period. We rarely get to delve deep into technological innovation in stories centered on court politics, for example, and when we're following an outlaw and his nemesis on a chase to a hidden tomb, questions of public health won't usually get much page space. That said, I feel like this creates an even greater responsibility for authors to think through the implications of the choices they make and the aspects of their world which they depict. I sympathize with the desire to cram more things in, and the temptation to make them simpler and easier for people to wrap their heads around, but... I guess I feel like the pressure to simplify and flatten complex issues is already massive? The standard narratives of our culture demand clear sympathy and easy answers, and sometimes that's okay. But it's not okay if it's all we produce, or all we promote, and I get uncomfortable when people make claims about story that implicitly or explicitly denigrate complexity, and exalt emotional appeals over intellectual ones.

Anyway, like I said, half-formed thought. I'd be curious to hear what other people think about these issues, as I feel like there are a whole knot of them in dynamic tension with each other.

Hey, everyone. Let's talk about complex systems.

Modern strategy games are deeply economic in nature. Simpler games, like Tic-Tac-Toe, lend themselves to naive optimization, which is why a game between two competent players will always end in a draw. My undergraduate thesis was written on the strategic analysis of the children's game dots & boxes, which while definitely not as trivial as Tic-Tac-Toe, had a single optimal strategy to control the endgame.

To avoid these kinds of naive and trivial optimizations, then, non-random strategy games have tended to move in one of two directions: Combinatorial complexity which resists mathematical analysis (Go, and until the advent of Big Blue, Chess), or presenting players with a series of choices that involve both short and long-term trade-offs (most computer-based strategy games). The latter, of course, also tends to involve a certain amount of combinatorial complexity and rock-paper-scissors guesswork to prevent players from concluding that one course of action is optimal. It's also a lot easier to do, for certain values of "easy" - it's nearly impossible to make a game that's as strategically robust as Go, much less one that is actually accessible to new players (which Go and chess really aren't - learning the moves doesn't mean that you can achieve competency without tons of practice & study, and if you want your game to sell, you want your players to feel as if they know what they're doing, even if they don't).

Anyway, the point I'm driving at is that RTS design is all about presenting players with choices - preferably real choices, rather than false dichotomies where only one or a handful of options is viable if you want to prevail. The way RTS designers do this is by creating complex economic systems where players have to juggle time, in-game resources, how much attention they can pay to each of their units, and requiring players to make decisions about how they should spend these limited resources in light of their game's rock-paper-scissors combat chain. The drawback of this complexity (which exists to obscure the game's underlying logic so it's harder to subject to naive analysis, as well as to pique the player's interest, prompting them to analyze it) is that it often makes it hard to anticipate the results of making changes to said system. Sometimes a butterfly will flap its wings in the Amazon and the housing market will collapse.

Essentially, that's what happened on Friday at work. I made a single change to the core of the game's economic system, which was intended to achieve effect A. Effect A was achieved! However, as a result of effect A, the Care Bears (note: not actual care bears) became overpowered, because the fact that they had the Care Bear Stare meant that they didn't lose their units as often as the Flutter Ponies did, which meant they could amass more moonbeams and rainbows to charge up the Caring Meter, which meant they lost even fewer Care Bears, which meant they could charge up the Caring Meter even more, and basically the whole thing spiraled out of control.

As a result, I'm being forced to re-examine how much health and damage the basic Care Bear unit should start with - it's probable that they were always a little OP, but it just wasn't as obvious before. It's also possible that the solution to this problem isn't to completely retune the basic Care Bear unit, but to restrict access to the Care Bear Stare until the Caring Meter is already partially charged. Oh, and because I'm working with a complex system, whatever I try will need to be tested extensively, to make sure that I don't break something else in the process of solving this particular balance problem.

Did I mention that I love my job?

Bullet Hell shooters (aka Danmaku, for the Japanophiles out there) are a game genre that I'm largely aware of by reputation - while I spent a fair amount of time in college hanging out and watching a pair of my friends play 19XX, I had no particular skill at the shoot-em-up genre or any real interest in the kind of obsessive pattern memorization and split-second maneuvering required even for games that don't blanket the entire screen in bullets.

As such, it came as a bit of a shock to find that the soundtracks for the Touhou Project games (the recent installments of which have been created by a team of one), like N.EX.T's soundtrack for the Korean version of Guilty Gear XX# Reload before them, sent a wave of pure joy down my auditory nerve(s). Some examples:

* Necrofantasia from Perfect Cherry Blossom (plus a metal remix!)
* A piano + synth version of the nonsensically titled 'UN Owen was her?' from Embodiment of the Scarlet Devil, plus another, more electronic and bombastic remix (the original kind of pales in comparison).

A former girlfriend once described the kind of music I tend to like as "Gothic J-pop", which isn't inaccurate, and I'll be the first to admit that the appeal of this kind of music isn't universal (not unlike the games that it comes from). Nonetheless, there's something about the combination of melodic intricacy with pure velocity and virtuosity of technique (even if that technique is sound editing rather than live performance) displayed by this kind of music that really does it for me, and tracks like Necrofantasia are pretty much the platonic form of the Alec-approved instrumental.

There's a larger point to be drawn here about how certain sub-genres (of music, games, books/stories - whatever) can have their discourse become about technique and virtuosity instead of popular appeal (again, this is definitely the case with Danmaku). It's not even necessarily unhealthy, as long as the aficionados of those sub-genres acknowledge that, yes, their appreciation for technique as technique *is* specialized, and most people won't share it (either because of a lack of sufficient background or just the vagaries of taste), and that's okay. Something being more intricate or harder to execute doesn't mean it's inherently better than other works in its field (though it certainly can be better!) - it just means that the hardcore/jaded segments of the audience are more likely to appreciate it. And if that's your audience? Go to.

So. I've recently had a series of rather frustrating conversations in which my interlocutors have asserted that because someone was the original mover behind an undertaking, or successfully navigated a series of obstacles which otherwise would have doomed a project to obscurity, that they deserve to be given full credit for its creation (e.g. "A film by Steven Spielberg!", "The city of Rapture, created by Andrew Ryan!"). As someone who (like my interlocutor) is daily engaged in the process of creating a game with the aid of dozens of other people, this strikes me as deeply disconnected from the reality of how collective projects actually work, particularly when they require the work (creative or otherwise) of many technically skilled individuals. It's certainly rhetorically convenient to claim that a single individual is responsible for a creative product, but the more complex the production of that product becomes, the more indefensible that rhetorical elision of everyone else who contributed to it is. This blind acceptance of auteur theory is much like uncritically buying into the great man theory of history - the will and the inspiration of the auteur/great man may be *necessary* for events to take a certain course (although this is often debatable), but they're certainly not *sufficient*.

The truth of this can be seen in a myriad of ways, even in creative pursuits as theoretically solitary as writing. Comparing J.K. Rowling's prose in The Prisoner of Azkaban to that of The Goblet of Fire suggests rather strongly that a silent collaborator (i.e. a proactive editor) was removed from the creative equation between the publication of those two books - and let's not start with the insane (and ubiquitous) "I've got a great idea for a book, why don't you write it for me" spiel that writers run into all the time. Not all creative inputs are equal, but that doesn't mean that they're as interchangeable as economic theory would have you believe; I'm sure that my readers who work in publishing know that editing makes a difference, and I guarantee you that the work of the assistant directors, DPs, and editors on any film you'd like to name had a significant impact on its audience's experience. Could you produce something similar with a different support staff? Probably, just like a writer could produce a similar book or comic with a different editor or artist. But that doesn't mean that the editor or artist's input is insignificant or negligible.

Of course, neither the great man theory of history nor auteur theory are going anywhere; reductionist and misleading as they often are, the vision of the heroic creator/leader and the simplicity of the narratives which they offer appeal to the ape in all of us. Furthermore, there are economic forces that drive the construction of creative brands like "Tom Clancy" (who hasn't written the books published under his name in years), "Joss Whedon", or, well, whoever. It's far easier and more appealing for us to attribute creativity or agency to a single individual, no matter how poorly that represents the reality on the ground, than it is to wrestle with the immense complexity of how the sausage (so to speak) gets made. Books and movies and games don't just spring out of someone's head perfectly formed, like Athena bursting out of Zeus's skull. We just pretend it works like that because it makes good marketing copy.