Phenomenology For Fun And Profit

I have a vague feeling I once posted something about fictional bands here but if I did I never made a tag for it and the search function can't find it either so it's lost now. Whether I've mentioned it before or not, I have a particular interest in things that exist at a fractional remove from reality, somewhere in that liminal space between the extant and the imagined, the subjective and the objective, the internal and the external.

Imaginary friends, guardian angels, spirit animals, your characters in World of Warcraft... all those entities that feel at least as real as that kid who sat two desks behind you in fourth grade... what was his name? If you can't remember that or visualise his face, how is he any more real than that character in that series of novels you went on to name three game characters after? You know more about any of them than you ever knew about that guy, right? 

There are two kinds of fictional bands: ones you can hear and ones you can't. Then it splits again. Among the bands you can actually listen to there used to be two main sorts. There were the ones made up of flesh-and-blood people, who played (or pretended to play) musical instruments while appearing on stage and then there were the ones you only saw on screen, a strand that subdivided yet again into live action or animation. 

Examples of the first type would be Spinal Tap, Bad News or the Blues Brothers. They're all "fictional" in that they're mostly actors playing a part. Other than that, they're just bands, I suppose. They all made albums and toured. 

Does recording and touring make it real, anyway? The Monkees did both and I'd certainly call them a real band. They'd be a special case, though. They started out very fictional but ended up very real. How often has that happened?

These days there are at least two more categories of fictional bands you can listen to and they're so close to the fiction/fact line it's hard to call. Gorillaz are "the world's most successful virtual band" but not the only one, although most of the supposed lists of "virtual" bands are just fictional bands of a different stripe. Genuine virtuality requires more than four actors in costume or a catchy, animated video. It needs magic, too. Technological magic.

Virtual bands are subtly different again from the latest fork on the fictional rock tree - AI performers, writers and artists.

Artificial Intelligence, it's becoming impossible to deny, is going to bring the next, great wave of social, economic and cultural change. It promises - or threatens, depending on your optimism/pessimism duality - to re-write the very definition of humanity itself but even if you don't buy all that singularity malarkey, it's going to put a lot of people to the trouble of finding new ways to keep themselves busy, when the machines intelligences are doing all the jobs people used to do.

It may help creative artists like Nick Cave to feel better, believing AI songwriting "will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque". He may even be right. A more telling question than "could people tell the difference?" might be "would they care?" Do the pop charts from the last half century or so suggest audiences are only happy with songs that are "predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation."? I wouldn't think so.

As time moves forward, as it subjectively if not objectively must, then fictionality becomes ever harder to define. Naevis is booked to appear at this year's SXSW, the music festival for "new, developing, and established... Artists." Nothing remarkable about that. Only Naevis doesn't exist. 

Who - or what - is Naevis, then? That's not so easy to explain, or understand, but it's fun to try.

As far as I can unpick it, Naevis is a fictional AI who "connects" a real band to that band's virtual doppelgangers. If you'd like an extra layer of confusion, the real band in question is a product of the KPop hot-housing system, which presumably makes them at least as real as the Monkees when they began but probably not as real as Westlife, when they did.

The band's name is Aespa, which "combines the English initials of "avatar" and "experience" (Avatar X Experience) with the English word "aspect" ", suggesting an initial intention to push towards something beyond mere physicality. And so it was. Aespa are part of what is apparently a growing trend in KPop (and probably elsewhere) to integrate a number of performers within something calling itself a "Universe". I blame Stan Lee.

In this case, responsibility falls squarely on their management company, SM, whose Culture Universe could, according to the NME, be "K-pop’s most ambitious alternative universe yet". It's certainly bidding fair to be the most self-reflexive. In the lore, data that was collected online in our reality was used to create counterparts of all the band members in a world known as Kwangya. So far, so batshit insane but that's just the set-up.

These other-world counterparts will be playing a virtual reality concert premiering at SXSW. Not the band; their other-world avatars. Naevis, the AI from that reality, who somehow connects the virtual counterparts to the real band-members and who was "previously thought to have sacrificed herself to help aespa, following the events that transpired in the music video and lyrics of ‘Savage’" (Look up - it's the embed you just skipped.) will make her own musical debut at the same time.

This, you can be absolutely certain, is just the beginning. The boundaries between the real and the irreal are already blurring. Soon you won't be able to see them at all.

The same could be said about my plans for this post. At the top, I mentioned two basic categories of fictional bands. I've ended up writing about the ones you can hear; I meant to write about the other kind, the ones you can't. Until, suddenly, you can.

That's going to have to wait for a post of it's own, now. This one's disorientating enough already.

A Window On The World : Ninelives, EQNext

In the comments on yesterday's post Dahakha mentioned the proposed inclusion of the  Storybricks AI in EQNext. It was one of the many things that got a lot of people very excited around the time of the big EQN reveal. Can you believe that was two and a half years ago?

Since then a lot has changed. Okay, no it hasn't. The Storybricks team has been jettisoned from the project after, supposedly, having contributed as much as needed to allow the work to continue in house. Along with all the other invisible work being carried out by invisible people, invisibly, one assumes.

I'd forgotten about Storybricks. Indeed, the degree to which it had vanished from my memory can be measured by the fact that, even though ex-Storybricks developer Brian "Psychochild" Green was the very person to bring Ninelives to my attention, I still didn't connect the two until Dahakha reminded me.

There's a connection? Well, yes, in a way. Conceptually. Potentially. It has something to do with the discussion on single player RPGs, virtual worlds, immersion and authenticity.

It occurred to me while I was playing and enjoying and feeling part of and yet strangely isolated from the compelling world of Ninelives that we don't seem to have any virtual worlds that aren't games or gamelike simulations. We could.

A very long time ago, most likely in a Philip K Dick novel, I remember coming across the concept of living pictures. Art that hangs on the wall of your house but which shows not the same static picture but a moving image.

At the time something of the kind could have been contrived in the way video installation became a gallery staple in the 1980s. Today the technology is cheap and available enough to make moving pictures on the walls of your home an everyday reality. The most it appears to be used for thus far, however, is as a rather tacky replacement for photo albums and the old home movie projector.

What if, instead of photos of your dog and videos of the grandchildren, a screen on your wall opened onto an ever-changing vista of another world? How would it be if a roving camera panned across fields and plains, followed strange creatures through towering forests, swooped above the bustling streets of cities?

How would it be to watch them carrying on their imaginary lives without intervention or interruption? With the procedural techniques currently being employed to build vast enterprises like No Man's Sky and the artificial intelligence codices promised by Storybricks, could we not have something far closer to virtual worlds than anything we've yet seen?

What's more, freed from the costs and constraints of having to provide either gameplay or narrative, all of the development funding and effort could be directed at world-building. Sitting squarely within the visual arts rather than storytelling or gaming the result could be something designed to give pleasure, provoke thought and stir emotion simply by being observed and experienced, not by being played.

I'd Kickstart a project like that.

Why I'm Not Playing Fallout 4 Like Everyone Else

My absolute favorite thing in Fallout 4 so far, and perhaps will remain so forever, is the base building. I spend hours scrapping crap, planting crops, making water collectors, decorating houses, etc. This is just SO COOL that I can take parts of the world and make them my bases.

Keen&Graev 

One thing I’m not looking forward to is the sub-game of base building. I don’t know what it is about single-player RPGs these days and the need to cram in a base building system, but I do not care about such things outside of persistent worlds. I’m not going to spend 30 hours building up a base in a game that has a “Game Over” screen, and it’s not important to me here.

Bio Break

Many of the blogs and reviews I've read make Fallout 4 seem like something I'd really enjoy. The descriptions and screenshots of the autumnal New England setting were almost enough in themselves to trigger a purchase. And then, when I first read Syp's observation on the sheer futility of base building, diametrically opposed to Keen's gushing delight in the exact same game system, it was as though the clouds had opened and ray of pure light was shining directly into my mind. Here, in a nutshell, is why I can only play MMOs. 

All these long years, going all the way back to that fateful late November day in 1999 when I first installed EverQuest and increasing strongly the further away from that watershed I travel, I've struggled to express just why it is that I find even the best solo RPGs a bleak and unconvincing an experience. By comparison the prospect of even a poorly-translated, unimaginative piece of MMO shovelware positively glimmers with possibilities. 

Well, there's the answer: persistence.

The widely offered and even more widely accepted rationale for the grip MMORPGs exert on us is that we become reliant on the social ties they foster. Supposedly, it's the communities that coalesce around and within them that bind us: our Guilds, our friends, the people we meet and the people we have met. 

Well, that explanation has never flown for me. In sixteen years I have remained in touch with precisely one person that I met while playing MMOs. With the exception of a short period when WoW was trending outside of the MMO niche I have never met a single person in real life who plays them or even recognizes the acronym. I have very few ties to any people who play the games I play.

It wasn't always so. Yes, there was a prolonged period, more than five years, when my MMO play was intensely socialized and most sessions were as much about conversation as they were about gameplay. That, however, had at least as many downsides as up and the succeeding years in which those social connections have atrophied and fallen away, far from leading to disengagement and dissatisfaction, have, by and large, brought a deeper and more satisfying enthrallment with the hobby.

The explanation I usually end up with for the deep and often irrational sense of commitment I feel toward certain MMOs is that I care about my characters. This is true. I care about them in the way I care about characters in books or, more precisely, about characters I have created and written and imagined for myself. Nevertheless it's equally true that I am fickle in my affections and unsteady in fidelity when it comes to those characters.

There are characters that were important, vital, to me scattered across a dozen, a score and more of the MMORPGs I've played in a decade and a half. Many I lived with and through for hundreds, thousands of hours of real time. I can name them and describe them in detail, their looks and their adventures, their likes and dislikes. But I don't play them.

The characters are key to the unbroken connection to the games, it's true, but the real cord is that persistence Syp finds so lacking in Fallout 4 and which Keen doesn't need at all. It's a particular kind of persistence because aren't all computer games "persistent"? Assuming you have the hardware to run it and the saved game files, could you not fire up a game you left half-finished in 1997 and find your character still standing exactly where you left her, fresh and ready to begin where you left off?

Before I found MMOs I played a lot of offline RPGs and loved them. I didn't stop immediately either. It always throws me that Baldur's Gate, which both Mrs Bhagpuss and I played intensely and which is the only RPG I have ever played all the way through twice, came out after we'd been playing EQ for over a year. 

I went on to play BG2 and finish that as well, although just the once. On and off, I picked away at a few others across the years, but by the time we got to Dragon Age: Origins a decade later it was apparent that the magic had flown. The explanation for the change of heart has proven elusive but now Syp has nailed it for me at last.

What matters is not that the worlds are still there, waiting, when I come back to them. No, what matters is that they won't wait. With me or without me these worlds move on. Even my characters change in my absence. Those infuriating flurries of pop-ups and tool-tips that greet the prodigal player, informing him of the myriad changes to systems and processes and items and expectations that have happened behind his back are evidence of history, of existence, of a kind of ethereal solidity that mirrors life.

The persistence of the worlds in which our characters exist, its malleability, its flux, represent a quality of conviction that, for me, no offline RPG can offer. What's more, the mere understanding that this is a persistence shared with thousands, even millions of other players around the world, compounds and magnifies that conviction to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from the sense of sharing our actual world itself. 

Persistent, virtual worlds, no matter how trivial or baldly realized, have an innate existence denied to the discrete, unconnected islands of offline RPGs. Actions, even inaction, in them matter, somehow, in a way no action in an isolated, unshared instance that ends with powering down can match or hope to match.

In a way it gives substance to my unshakable, if whimsical, feeling that all my characters carry on with their lives whether I'm there to guide them or not. They do, measurably, change and alter, even while I'm away. Much, much more vividly and unarguably do their worlds grow and change. 

Norrath, Azeroth, Tyria, Telara, Eorzea - none of them wait on my word. Dragons shake the cliffs into the sea, new continents open up to trade and discovery, caves to the underworld yawn wide. These worlds don't just persist, they live. And whenever I return, while I may have missed the events, I'll yet live with the consequences.

That's why, to me anyway, making a mark in any one of them seems to matter in a way that building a base that only I can see in a world that only I can change cannot. And why it's such a true loss when any of these worlds comes to an end.

Explorer Archetype

Stupid noobs can't even spell noobs

Mrs Bhagpuss and I are just back from yet another trip to Spain. Spain and France, in fact, since we flew to Bordeaux and drove down into Northern Spain through Aquitaine, the flattest place I have ever seen.

We did a lot of driving, as we always do. Well, I did a lot of driving and Mrs Bhagpuss did a lot of looking out the window. Sometimes when we go traveling we don't talk about gaming at all, but this time it came up quite a lot. After more than a decade of MMOs it seems we're still both pretty keen on them, still ready for more.

That's gnomish technology or I'm a dutchman

We observed once again how blurred the line is between what we do in MMOs and "real" life. When we go away we find it very hard to go to one place and stay there. We're always moving on, looking to see what's over the next hill, what the next town has to show us. It's quite astonishing how radically landscape and environment can change in just a few miles, a few minutes. Almost as though you crossed a zone line.

Three hour quest to find this place half an hour from where we started

Then there are the repeatable quests. We don't kill ten goats (although when you're stuck behind a herd of them meandering along the road for half an hour it's a quest you might willingly accept) but since we rarely book any accommodation in advance every day ends in a quest to find somewhere to stay. Occasionally that turns into an epic.

We see plenty of evidence of non-human races, too.

There's trolls in them thar hills

Parts of Aquitaine were clearly settled by halflings although the endless forests suggest the continuing, elusive presence of elves.

Who might live in a castle like this?

And then there are the castles. So many castles.







I subscribe strongly to the philosophy that we only have one life and all of it is real. I try not to differentiate qualitatively between virtual and physical experiences. In the end, they all happen inside my head. If I had the time and the resources to travel all the time, I'd travel all the time. Wait a moment...that's what I do!