The New Prose
by Zen
Posted on Sunday, August 23, 2009Building on my previous post about game designers as the new existentialists, I found these words by Rorty rather stirring:
... deconstruction ... needs a clear distinction between philosophy and literature. For the kind of reading which has come to be called "deconstructionist" requires two different straight persons: a macho professional philosopher who is insulted by the suggestion that he has submitted to a textual exigency, and a naive producer of literature whose jaw drops when she learns that her work has been suppported by philosophical oppositions. The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that her unmediated woodnotes might please. Both reel back in horror when the deconstructionist reveals that each has been making use of complex idioms to which the other has contributed. Both go all to pieces at this news. A wild disorder overtakes their words. Their whimpers blend into interminable androgynous keening. Once again, deconstructionist intervention has produced a splendidly diffuse irresolution.
There is something suspiciously old-fashioned about this way of setting up one's subjects. It is a long time since we have had writers who considered themselves in the business of providing pleasure. ... [Essays on Heidegger and Others, p.86]
Many will tell you of the harm Derrida (inadvertently I think) caused to literary analysis, and that phenomenon is the specific target of that passage. Rorty was concerned with the assumptions Derrida's criticisms of philosophical thinking made about both fields, but this came on the heels of his own significant bias toward prose:
As a way of counteracting Heidegger and, more generally, the kind of post-Heideggerian thinking which refuses to see the West as a continuing adventure, I want to put forward Charles Dickens as a sort of anti-Heidegger. If [archaeologists of the future] were, for some reason, unable to preserve the works of both men, I should much prefer that they preserve Dickens's. For Dickens could help them grasp a complex of attitudes which was important to the West, and perhaps unique to the West, in a way that neither Heidegger nor any other philosopher could. The example of Dickens could help them think of the novel, and particularly the novel of moral protest, as the genre in which the West excelled. From this point of view, the interaction of West and East is better exemplified by the playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by the students in Tienanmen Square than by the steel mills of Korea or the influence of Japanese prints on European painters of the nineteenth century. [Essays on Heidegger and Others, pp.67-68]
Heidegger famously elevated "the poetical" in his later years, and Rorty seems hellbent on elevating the morality play instead. Heidegger's distaste for Western metaphysics and its insistence on objective fact appears, to Rorty, to be a distaste for the considerable social and political strides that have been made in the West. This essay was published in 1991, and I would love for Rorty to have been able to draw on the considerable cross-pollenation of Eastern and Western game development instead of century-old paintings inspired by still older Japanese prints. That said, it makes little difference to his point: instead of trying to express some transcendent quality through poetry, one should instead concern oneself with tackling moral and social problems by connecting them with people, with characters.
Still, it's not as though there haven't been games that tried to address these issues within a narrative. Whatever you think of the results, there can be no denying that Hideo Kojima's impenetrable oeuvre makes various comments on (post-)modern lifestyles and political attitudes. I encourage anyone who plays his games to forgive the failure at achieving the impossible task of tying all his games together into a single narrative, and to those of us who started playing Metal Gear games at the outset his turn to the dissonant and absurd is jarring and sometimes revolting. In spite of all this, one can discern a few central threads that he's been struggling to follow to their conclusion, possibly without even realizing it.You can disagree, and claim that Kojima has always been playing the philosopher/poetess game. People seem to think that he's always been courting some kind of recognition from the world of acknowledged intellectuals, or that he really still wants to be a film director. I say that he's failed spectacularly at both, to his benefit. I'm not one for Dickens, but what Rorty claims Dickens can accomplish is something that video games can accomplish tenfold. I don't think anybody can play a Kojima game without being bothered by him. Some people criticize the game, thinking they're bothered by it, but it's always Kojima. It's always Kojima making you look at what you're doing, what you're not doing, what you're ever doing. And he always considers himself to be in the business of providing pleasure.
Sometimes Kojima just seems to be a guy stuck in Metal Gear, but if you go back to his other work you'll find that Metal Gear is simply stuck in the broader narrative of Kojima himself. There's never been a better time to find this out, either: Policenauts, his legendary follow-up to Snatcher, has finally been translated by dedicated fans. I urge everyone to find out firsthand what Hideo Kojima has really been up to all these years. METAL GEAR?!
by alzabo
Posted on Friday, June 13, 2008
I Have Metal Geat Solid 4, but the PS3 I was hoping to use to play it is 500 miles away.
Until I can play the game I'm trying to avoid spoilers by playing Persona 3: FES. I must admit I bought the game on a lark, using a gift card that had been languishing for 3+ months in my gift card pile. However, it's turned out to be the best RPG I've played in a decade.
Yes, this is the best RPG I've played since Final Fantasy Tactics. Having never played a Persona game before, I find the battle system and dynamic rogue-like dungeons entertaining and surprisingly grind free. The non-dungeon portion of the game plays like a dating game without being lame. However I must admit that I would be embarrassed to play this game in front of other people while walking around the in-game high school flirting with animu women.
The game's art direction and music are excellent, the art direction in Persona 3 is distinct and in-game environments are vibrant; the game's menus themselves are quite a sight to behold, I spent 15 minutes in the menus during the first 90 minutes of the game simply using them to watch them unfold and explode with color and art. The music is a Japanese ambient hip-hop blend that never overpowers the player, accentuating the action in dungeons and adding a sorely needed rhythm to the school life sections of the game.
While I am obviously gushing and have not completed the game yet, I do feel that Persona 3 is worth a look if you've got the time. I suppose my temporary lack of PS3 is a blessing in disguise, it's allowed me to give my undivided attention to a game that had previously been assigned to my disturbingly large "unplayed games" pile. Article Permalink
You heard it here first.
by Zen
Posted on Saturday, May 31, 2008
We've only seen Snake tooling around the Middle East because that's the game's prologue. The rest of the game you play as Johnny Sasaki while Otacon tries to make love bloom with Big Mama.
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More like "Puns of the Gaytriots"!
by Zen
Posted on Friday, August 24, 2007
It's like Megaman bosses, but they're... ladies.
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