flesh to plush

I wasn't particularly interested in Murata Sayaka until last week, when I read this New Yorker profile on her that spends a good deal of time positioning her work in relation to the super-genre of science fiction. Previously I'd assumed that she was just another Quirky Alienated Japanese Woman (something that I think even Murata plays with, titling her stories things like “Breastfeeding” and “Boyfriends”) that the Anglophone litfic establishment seems to enjoy so much; but Batuman paints a picture of someone far more interesting and far more deranged.
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I thought that Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (1963) was going to be a pulpy, paint-by-numbers space opera. I was wrong, and quite delighted by what I got instead: a contemplative look at the nature of civilizations and the arbitrariness of human social organization.
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(This is the third part of a three-part entry; read Part One here and Part Two here)

A Spirited Defense of Metagaming

An astute reader may have noticed that this entire post is flirting with one of the gravest and most unforgivable sins in roleplaying: thinking about the game from a mechanics-first perspective, or what is sometimes known by the pejorative of "metagaming." And yet here, it not only works (in my most humbled of opinions), but the game arguably functions better when players are thinking about the game mechanics and how best to use them as tools to achieve the goals of play.
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"[I]n order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a 'presentiment' of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of its existence." -Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

This article is going to talk about is the process of creating an RPG character. In this case I'm going to be using Shinobigami as the game in question, for a couple of reasons:
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I once saw somebody describe combat in Tunnels and Trolls thusly (more or less):

Each side gathers up a bunch of dice, rolls them, and compares them to each other. After a couple rounds of this, hopefully you see the monsters' side is taking damage; their dice pool is decreasing, the advantage is comfortably on your side, everything is good. But if the monsters aren't taking hits, that's a sign that you need to be doing more. Start busting out the fictional positioning, start spitting out those stunts, etc... That's when combat gets nervous and tactical, or maybe you even decide to retreat.

Essentially, the highly abstract nature of T&T combat allows it to provide more immediately understandable feedback.( Read more... )

(copied from a reply I made to someone somewhere)

Historically the classical European languages (like Greek and Latin) have been taught (and since they're effectively dead languages, preserved) using a textual grammar-translation approach, and the texts that are usually highlighted have "proper" understandings that are in many cases tied strongly to systems of power that don't want people coming up with alternate interpretations. Translating the text the same as other people have translated it is used as a sign to confirm that you understand the language (and the important ideas of the text) properly. The historical value attributed to those texts is based in large part on a rigid and repeated understanding of what they mean; I've seen some people try to break with this tradition, but they're pushing back against centuries of people for whom rote repetition was literally the point.

Genji, by contrast, is mostly important for its aesthetics, and even modern Japanese has dozens(?) of translations that have taken different approaches to the text. That's not to say that it's not also political; in many ways Genji is tied to nebulous concepts about Japanese national identity, for example, but it's precisely because those ideas are nebulous and changing (and probably also because of the nature and our understanding of the Heian court language it was written in) that it is necessarily more open to interpretation than The Republic or whatever. Imagine a world where the ancient Greek or Roman states continued for centuries longer, and how that might have impacted their transmission and our understanding of their texts. Works like Genji and The Journey West are still part of living textual traditions and the bequeathal of cultures that are constantly changing and which possess a need to reincorporate their pasts into the narratives they create to explain their presents.

Before I can talk about Saturday Night Shadows, I need to talk about Satasupe.

Satasupe, short for "Saturday Night Special", is a scenario-driven procedural sandbox RPG designed by Kawashima Touichirou and Hayami Rasenjin and about a dozen other people. Inspired by Iwai Shunji's 1996 film Swallowtail specifically, and by an entire zeitgeist of late 20th century Asian crimesploitation dramas more generally, players take on the role of "Asianpunks," petty criminals who band together and do what they can to get by in the slums of a multi-ethnic, alternate-history Osaka.

So what is Saturday Night Shadows, then? If you haven't already guessed, it's a port of Shadowrun's setting over to Satasupe's ruleset. There are two main reasons (plus one, special, hidden reason!) why I would want to do such a thing, and like basically every attempt ever to play Shadowrun using anything other than one of Shadowrun's seven different official rules editions, it's because of a fundamental dissatisfaction with those rules.( Read more... )

This is a rhetorical question about the extent to which one media paradigm's assemblage of various traits into identifiable patterns is ever going to map comfortably onto a different media paradigm, and how the attempts to do so can potentially reveal unexamined assumptions about less obvious aspects of how we orient ourselves towards that medium in the first place. And also, I'm going to answer the rhetorical question anyway.

I mean, all four Xs do appear in one part of the game's major procedural structures or another. But even a lot of relatively popular ways of playing D&D contain some degree of at least three of the four Xs, and yet I doubt many people would jump to claiming that D&D has much in common with, for example, Masters of Orion.

Which is to say, I suspect that very few people really interact with games on a psychological level directly vis a vis the fictional activities we engage in while playing (this is also a backhanded critique of the supposed "Three Pillars" of D&D play, but that's a whole different rant). The way we view those activities is heavily influenced by the rhetorical interface of the game; for example, the role of "overseer" that we generally play in 4X games, compared to the rhetorical interface of the individual actor common to most RPGs.

But that's what makes the label of "4X" potentially more applicable to Meikyuu Kingdom than it is to other tabletop RPGs where the players/characters explore, exploit, expand, and/or exterminate. The core gimmick of Meikyuu Kingdom is the eponymous Kingdom, a communal character played by all of the players (and to which their individual characters belong), and which provides the necessary "overseer" framework that conceptualises the activities the individual characters take part in as part of the traditional 4X "loop."( Read more... )