#metanarratives

[manorinthewoods]

You will never catch me making a video game where the NPCs are sentient. Them's fictional characters. Them's not real. Also true for all other forms of media. The protagonist of my self-aware webcomic cannot climb out of the screen.

[bellshazes]

this close to writing myself into the argument that AFK farms constitute virtual reality in the sense that your non-game actions and time are now mediated by the game world. like, unironically.

[qpjianghu]

My galaxy brained MLC meta-narrative take of the day comes from my rewatch of ep 39, when Li Lianhua smiles sadly and says "the Wangchuan (styx) flower is indeed a miracle cure," because what if it actually doesn't exist. Which is why he has that extra sad look in his eye whenever someone (Fang Duobing or Di Feisheng) mentions it, or bestows it upon him. He knows it's not real. It is a "miracle" cure in the same way he is a "miracle" doctor. Miracles don't exist. The Wangchuan flower doesn't exist. It is a literalized MacGuffin manifested by the meta-narrative to force Li Lianhua towards his Normative Happy Ending.

Because it makes no sense. Whenever it appears in the show, it appears sooo conveniently. We know Di Feisheng has people searching for it the whole time, but we never see how / where they found it. We see Shan Gudao emerge with it, but we don't know how either. And in 38, the drawer just happens to pop open during Di Feisheng's fight, revealing the flower... just in the nick of time. And then, later, Di Feisheng literally just walks over out of nowhere to put the box on the table where Li Lianhua and Fang Duobing are drinking outside Lotus Tower.

And we don't even see eventually Li Lianhua deliver it to the Emperor. All of that happens off-screen, which is totally wack. Unless... it never. actually. existed. (Btw, saving the emperor to preserve the status quo of his hierarchical / hegemonic rule.....I'm just saying!!! Classic normative narrative!!)

Li Lianhua knows this. And giving it away is his one final (succussful) attempt to break away from the narrative and forge his own life (...and death), and story, off the page.

[myrskytuuli]

I stumbled upon one of those characters react to their own books/movies/series fics again, and was lead on journey of contemplation about metanarratives so let me guide you to the same journey.

So, I’m genuinely fascinated with the concept, even if (as anyone who has ever bit the bullet and gonw to read these fics knows) they are almost all garbage. I think I can remember one or two fics in my history of fic reading that did anything interesting with the premise and the other was a fic that circulated as a torrentable pdf and nothing else, but I digress. Usually these stories start with the avatar author being some kind of meta-god and kidnapping the characters to show them their future and I always think what a huge shame it is that the most interesting part of the idea is never utilised, which is that the characters could find out about a parallel universe where their world is fictional and get to experience the media about them as...you know...media. In a way that they could complain about bad directors, why somebody gets the bad-ass theme song and others don’t, whether the bad cgi resembles the real thing at all or why the author decided to include this thing in the book but not something else. Just...the media they are interacting with being actual media that has been created in our world to tell the story of those characters, sometimes more or less succesfully.

But. Then I got hit with another thought that derailed me completely, and made me fell down a unhinged idea rabbit hole. If for example star wars characters found our parallel universe where they are fictional, what if this world was fictional in the star wars universe?

Just, you know. Everyone complaining how convoluted the WW1 prequel series was compared to the original WW2 series. Half of the runtime is spent on politics, almost all the action happens in one trench, and even the director doesn’t seem to understand why the war even started. Compared to the clear-cut heroes and villains of the WW2 series, it’s no wonder the original fans were frustrated. Even though the World War series has always been very anti-war and the original series wasn’t as simplistic as everyone makes it out to be, the allies were shown stooping to worse and worse war-crimes near the end, and that was the point, to show that there can be no good sides in war, Padmé rants angrily after seeing some dudebros miss the entire point of the series on message boards again.

Obi-Wan thinks the franchise has its moments, but on the whole relies way too much on the shock value of mass slaughter and sensless deaths. Ahsoka is always trying to rope people into reading the tie-in novel series the Cold War, which actually deviates from the open battlefield format and tries to engage with the loose plot threads and the implications that the original WW2 series and especially the divisive decision of pulling out deus ex nuclear weapons at the last minute left behind.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth about how uninclusive the series is, with only human characters, but it has also been pointed out that there is a valid metaphor being made about how irrational speciesim is, because even in a world that human-supremacists are always harping about, their utopia of a world with only humans existing, people would find other arbitary ways to be prejudiced against each other.

On the whole, there’s a shiton of complicated lore about how all these nations were formed and some of the ideas are really good and some really stupid, but what everybody agrees is that when the galaxy+ bought the franchise and started churning out soulless mini-series about the future of the World Wars universe, nobody was impressed. The Cold War novels at least tried to tell a story about grey morals and paranoia, the New Millenium sequels are just stupid. Suddenly people just want to be nazis? again? Every villain is simply the dumbest character you’ve ever met? Most of the conflicts rely on the leaders making the dumbest decisions possible? There’s plague and environmental catastrophies and new nazis? At the same time? What a cash-grab.

[magicfeatherspecialist]

Welp I have inhaled all the webcomic chapters available of Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint. The only thing stopping me from kirby-eating the novel as well is the fact that a) my eyes hurt I have been reading for hours and b) the novel is...so long apparently

[justselfloathingthings-blog]

One of Bloom’s greatest strengths is its ability to turn a plot point since episode 4, and slowly build it into an incredibly smoothly written meta-narrative that not only has a pretty decent conceptualization of character dynamics, it also smoothly manages to discuss the stories thematics as well as continually drive the plot and character conflict forward. 

[tinaysabella]

Brilliant Analysis.

[bellshazes]

my first two jobs ever, in order, were "board game teacher" and "university library assistant," so tho I've never formally studied games (I have been dropping out of college on and off since 2015, and was a freshman in 2012 lmao) I've been casually exposed to games and the people who make and play them in a professional context, as well as having the research skills to help close the gaps. i actually kind of hate playing board games but i loved GM-ing the coop arkham horror and watching my players, which i did for seven years straight.

my current fixation is the result of several years' fucking around on YT watching all kinds of game content, from LPs to specific game dissection to video essayists. jacob geller and folding ideas are kind of gold standards, but this week I've been really enjoying errant signals in particular. Sometimes I'm introduced to concepts this way - ludonarrative dissonance, ergodic literature, the magic circle, etc. that, and getting recommendations from friends or accidentally stumbling into game studies via other research (such as the paper i wrote a few years ago on theater-as-games in prison contexts). most of it though is having thoughts and opinions on things and letting it percolate until i am dangerous enough to find someone who's already explained a concept better than I could, and then running with that. find something that cites its sources, and then chase the ones that seem interesting.

my syllabus post is very much not a reclist, though i do in varying ways recommend everything on that list and it might be of use. here's some stuff I think would be great starting points:

Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals, Salen and Zimmerman. This book is an excellent resource, as it introduces a wide variety of scholars who you can dive into as it is relevant to your interests as well as providing tons of useful frameworks and vocabulary to go hunting. It's an easy read with concise bullet-point summaries after each chapter, and the PDF is hyperlinked for easy navigation. I might have found this via Wikipedia, honestly.

A Play of Bodies: A Phenomenology of Video Game Experience, Keogh. What I'm currently liveblogging - it is firmly a literary/philosophical work, rather than by/for designers, and correspondingly it's a little more difficult without at least passing familiarity with cyborg theory or any brand or offshoot of post-modernism, but still fairly digestible and a great read so far.

My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, Nardi. Found this during my theater-and-games paper, and MMO anthropology is not really my thing, but it's a nice complement to the other books as an explicitly player-theorist perspective. Also provides a more approachable introduction to a variety of theorists and sources. (Open access on JSTOR!)

Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles. I'm biased because I discovered this book by accidentally attending an author event at my local museum, and the games portion is incidental, but if you can find it I think this analysis of the relationship between depictions of violence and violence itself is worth your time. Memorable re: games for its discussion of Press F To Pay Respects.

here are some videos which I offer as examples of channels you might enjoy diving into, looking for additional jumping-off points:

Playing as Anyone in Watch Dogs Legion, Errant Signal. I really appreciate Errant Signal's thoughtful, personal approach to analysis and especially his highlighting of buried gems in his Blips series as well as his non-self-deprecating reevaluation of some of his older analyses over his decade plus career making videos.

Controllers Control Everything, Game Makers Toolkit. Discovered via the Boss Keys series highlighting the souls games, and although I think his channel is (increasingly) geared toward devs, these are well-constructed, thoughtful videos about many aspects of game design. Even when I don't personally get what makes him enjoy Zelda dungeons in that specific way (I'm an outlier), I appreciate his analysis.

Mega Microvideos 2, Matthewmatosis. Perhaps better known for his extremely long-form essays, I love Matthewmatosis' series of microessays framed like Wario Ware minigames. They are brief but don't pull punches, and the format is uniquely delightful. (See also this microessay mixtape.)

Making Sense of Catherine Full Body, SuperButterBuns. She doesn't do much essay content, I guess, but I she loves Catherine and the Persona series, and this dissection of Catherine Full Body is an absolute treat.

Jon Bois. Okay, mostly not about games, but like - come on. 17776 and Breaking Madden, alongside everything else he's ever done, fit because I feel like they do. If nothing else, I think Pretty Good and his general use of Google Earth as a medium for storytelling have a lot of utility in talking about digital media. He's good for the soul.

The Future of Writing About Games, Jacob Geller. One of the gold standards for a reason - and especially if you're looking for further solid recommendations for other writing/creating about games. This video in particular discusses & links to some really great pieces, but his Big List of Other People's Video Essays is also a great way to spend the next month of your life. (You might notice some crossover between this list and his, only some of which is coincidental.)

if i have any conclusion, it's that my current fixation on digital literalism is me finally finding an outlet/academic match-up with a fascination i developed in 2015 when studying gonzo lit. i think the utility of academia and the long history of scholarship on a given topic, as a non-academic, is to help you express ideas or reinterpret beliefs or experiences you've had to others without having to reinvent the wheel. i always become most energized when i stop worrying about knowing all the bg and chase whatever is useful and affirming or enlightening to me. and you can get pretty far if you think about why you like what you do, and just - enthusiastically also consume non-academic stuff. maybe this is a note more for myself! but thank you for the opportunity to monologue.