Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 10:08 pm
end of the world wrote:
huh. linguistics x metal gear. how about that, James? personally i feel as if i'm being parodied, having always thought myself the only supervillainous linguist.
Oh man am I glad I've distanced myself from whatever this thing is doing thematically.
I imagine that the "educational" conceits in MGS have been like nails on a chalkboard to anyone who knows anything about their vehicles. (See the screw up in understanding basic genetics on which the thematic gravitas of MGS1 relied.) A few times during the trailer, I thought, "Well that's wrong." Or "Maybe, if you ignore some counterarguments."
And I take this to mean that something I actually know about will be used for a platitude of hysterics -- the same comic book version of knowledge that MGS uses overall.
I don't want to be a Negative Nancy about it, and comic book versions of knowledge are fun! It will be the funnelling of 40 hours of name-dropping linguists and theories into an explosive climax of anime, which is all I expect.
My prediction: something something language parasite meme something we pass it on and it passes through us something something REMEMBER GENE FROM MPO IT'S LIKE THAT something who's really the bad guy now?
I really like that they're not just cracking their MGS knuckles but actually breaking their hands in half. That segue of Liquid hopping into a cockpit into Big Boss running away from a proto-Rex? The implied doppel-presence of Liquid and Snake? Big Boss driving away from a 2D fighting character's ground-range attack? It looks super absurd and super fun. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 1:05 am
Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote:
I figured all the talk of language control is meant as a kind of setup for the Patriots' platform of information/media control via covert censorship in MGS2
It might be, but jesus god is this dumb
Being raised multilingual made me EEEEEEEVIL.
Y'all I think this explains the darkness in my heart after living in a dual English-German environment until I was 10. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 4:26 am
Ni Go Zero Ichi wrote:
I'm with Dracko
I think you're being a tad harsh Adi
No one's expecting mind-blowing intellectual sophistication from MGS but I don't think even the trailer was that reductive
Most of what I heard is correct in another context. They're playing up the language theme, and they're attaching it as consequential to the same childhood trauma story that afflicts every MGS villain. It is non-essential, and they're making it essential.
We are not expecting mind-blowing intellectual sophistication from MGS.
A shitload of others are.
And this is what linguistics is going to look like -- the true parasite in the mind of maaaaaaaaaan
I mean I am pretty familiar with how MGS does things so I give myself more freedom to be dismissive here than I would elsewhere. Something I love is going to be churned into sausage, which is not itself a problem because that would be silly to run around and fight about -- but the sausage will be mistaken for the hog because the audience slavishly wants to feed confirmation bias about genius in a cult of personality. It's going to be held up as an intellectual take on something, and I wince knowing the discourse that's coming in about four months.
I'm allowing myself this day to roll my eyes like a slot machine. I will forcibly not care soon.
ADDENDUM: Dawkins is so terrible god _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 5:25 am
Dracko wrote:
Adilegian wrote:
I mean I am pretty familiar with how MGS does things so I give myself more freedom to be dismissive here than I would elsewhere. Something I love is going to be churned into sausage, which is not itself a problem because that would be silly to run around and fight about -- but the sausage will be mistaken for the hog because the audience slavishly wants to feed confirmation bias about genius in a cult of personality. It's going to be held up as an intellectual take on something, and I wince knowing the discourse that's coming in about four months.
Fair, I just figured they were tying this into the evils of colonialism (erasure of language and cultures are 101) but maybe that's giving them too much credit.
They may well do just that. And that would be pretty neat!
I'm bitching about a game I've never played. I'm posting on SelectButton. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 4:36 pm
Rei wrote:
In the beginning of the trailer, Skullface seems to be talking about the evils of colonialism. But then we see the game's writers aren't coming from a sensible place when Skullface blurts out the catchphrase "WORDS CAN KILL". It's a non sequitur; it comes out of nowhere.
This is my sense of it too.
MGS rhetoric begins with a thematic conclusion, and then it takes whatever road it thinks can reach that conclusion. MGS2 is the only time this has really worked, largely, I think, because postmodernism is a very flexible concept. The "meme" idea makes it look intellectual without basing that info on credible sources.
Dawkins's "meme" idea doesn't really require knowing about cultural transmission. It just requires knowing some vagaries about genetics -- which the first game shows they don't actually care to know about since high school knowledge destroys the fulcrum of the entire plot -- and then making up possibilities based on what they assume might be true on the authority of a man who isn't an expert in the field. Applying genetic ideas to culture passes as knowledge, I think, because its audience prefers philosophical materialism to the more fluid (and, I think, more useful) epistemologies of other disciplines. Its goal is to advance genetics, not cultural studies, and the boost in science (rather than anthropological) funding because of The Selfish Gene seems like evidence of this.
It also removes the conversation about cultural transmission from anthropology, which is rife with a variety of methods and analysis. MGS stories need something easy. Talking about cultural transmission from the vantage point of a field that doesn't actively study cultural transmission is a low-ball way of broaching the topic.
This isn't really a problem, if we understand that MGS's intellectualism is a garnish for its narrative purpose: fun superspy manlove angst illuminati conspiracy stories, excuses to revisit characters that fans have come to love.
But that's being smarter than the game, and it's being smarter than an audience that very much wants the game to be substantively intellectual. It's the narrative equivalent of talking about nuclear proliferation and AI research in broad strokes for 2 hours to introduce a giant walking robot that looks like a dinosaur and, for some reason, screams at people.
MGS begins with its conclusions, and it picks and chooses from the game's chosen thematic discipline to support those conclusions. The reasoning process is fun because the conclusions are fun; there's pleasure to be found in the grotesque. The craft works when the graft lines are less visible, such as connecting memes and machine intelligence to sublimated consciousness in MGS2. When done well, the use of disciplinary studies to support anime funtimes seems airtight precisely because the subjects are hacked up for a reasoning process that must end in the conclusion.
The craft doesn't work when the lines are evident, as in the heartbeat jump to WORDS CAN KILL. It's flashing its hand. It has nothing substantial to say about colonialism, race, or language, and I am pretty sure that its menagerie of linguistics buzzwords will be the least of its problems.
To be clear: you don't need to be an expert on a topic to incorporate it into your story. You need to know enough about it and execute it with enough craft so that your non-expert status is not a problem.
And that better damn well be Kid Solid Snake at the end. For as much as I'm going to have to overlook in the story and thematic presentation, I want this game to rock the fanservice hard.
I want to say that the games don't know what their strengths are, but they actually do. One of the games' greatest strengths is their audience's willingness to believe the in-game treatment of complex topics is essentially reliable. I find this dynamic repulsive, an exploitation of knowledge and an exploitation of ignorance for the sake of cultivating misplaced accolades. MGS5 will be praised for "elevating games" with profound approaches to linguistics, which denigrates the subjects -- one of which I care about quite a lot -- and also erodes the credibility of videogames' ability to tell a story with any shred of intellectual integrity. Both of these are personal concerns, which is why this troubles me.
And I am also pretty sure %.5 of the gaming population even gives a shit. Critical parsing is secondary to cool eye patches, even when cool eye patches are taken as critical discourse.
These are anticipations and prognostications, of course, and I would like my pessimism to be misplaced. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 8:51 pm
And Dracko's right about the GG associations, which is one of the benefits of my having tanked that contingency of my former audience. PUNISHED SNAKE was a mascot adopted by GG before it got kicked off 4chan, I believe, because it took the "V" idea and decided it was badass enough to represent /v/.
The fact that BB is becoming consummate evil did not strike them as ironic. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2015 3:37 pm
end of the world wrote:
i don't have a resource, per se; if you found a unified thesis of Japanese aesthetics i'd be interested to read it, but as far as i know that hasn't been attempted— this is just my personal observation across a wide range of texts, but one which will be evident from the start of any excursion into Japanese literature.
OK, cool! I will check around.
Quote:
to my mind, this still must begin from 源氏物語 (genji monogatari) (or from 古事記 (kojiki) or 万葉集 (manyoushuu), which are probably too boring for most modern readers but which your background might condition you to enjoy, James). it vulgarizes genji to make this comparison, but what you called recombination and defragmentation, the recurrence in metal gear, is a device that goes back to genji, as in the recurring paralells between the Emperor & Kiritsubo, Kiritsubo & Genji, Fujitsubo & Genji, Genji & Murasaki, Murasaki & Kaworu, Oigimi & Kaworu, Ukifune & Kaworu, and on and on . . . if there's a term for this, it's part of 物の哀れ (mono no aware), which indeed was originally coined to discuss genji. in Japanese essays it'll also be mentioned as simply 連続 (renzoku, 'repetition').
(1) Yes, I have trained myself to read through stuff I don't care about for a broader purpose. Fun is for nerds.
(2) I am super interested in a broader precedent for that recombination pattern. Can you recommend an English translation?
i seriously doubt mgs5 will show a meaningful understanding of any of the topics therein— however, Kojima (and the staff) grew up absorbing that context discourse, rather than the American one, and there are some substantial differences in ideology at even the most ambiguous, 'cultural consciousness' sort of level.
This is super useful, in part because I suspect I might need to formulate a response on the topic at some point, and I'd like to be as well informed as possible when I do-- and because I'm interested in the relationships between language and power anyway. Language/power studies have been peripheral to my main interests, and I am not prepared to engage in a serious discussion of it based on what I know, so more info is super useful. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2015 5:02 pm
Checked out a preview of that book, EOTW, and saw that it has children's books and legal tracts.
Day one purchase.
EDIT:
Quote:
The explicit inclusion of Hokkaido and Okinawa in Japan’s colonial history in this volume functions to challenge the Meiji elite’s self-interested characterization of the exploitation of these lands as “development” of “Japanese territory” and their subjugation of the indigenous inhabitants as “protection.”
lolllllllllll protection
The inclusion of Hokkaido's colonization is relevant to some other work I'm doing, so this is serendipitous. _________________
Last edited by Adilegian on Wed Jun 17, 2015 5:27 pm; edited 2 times in total
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2015 9:45 pm
Grant Dempsey wrote:
I like the thought that enemies'll not only wise up and change their formation and equipment in response to the player's style, but also start to imitate the player's tactics and even duplicate Snake's gadgets. That little moment in the demo with the guard-decoy promises a lot of fun. If it's a serious enough element of the game, maybe that'll counterbalance the immensity of the player's arsenal a bit. Maybe the player's consistent use of some of the weapons/gadgets that originate in Mother Base's R&D unit will always raise sort of a background risk that enemies will acquire and reverse-engineer them.
I thought the same thing when I saw the dummy. I thought also that it's interesting how the "awareness" interface tags the dummy as though it were an actual person, with the silhouette and everything.
Which, actually, also resembles Solidus's high collar suit, which I think was a stylistic reference to Snake's MGS1 look (since Solidus was posing as Snake in MGS2). _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2015 1:51 am
IIRC from PW, The Boss was innately moral because radiation exposure screwed up half her brain. I wonder if they're doing an inversion of that by destroying Good Big Boss's brainhalf.
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Sun Jul 12, 2015 5:07 pm
please mgsv take your linguistics theme and apply it to sign language so that big boss's flying hand can symbolize weaponized language. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2015 12:26 am
So far 5 seems to be kicking Snake into place with the narrative much like 4 did. That little bit at the beginning does bring up the question of who the player's controlling, so maybe that's of a piece.
I'm going to want to check the phrasing of that race/Russians/asians line again. It seems really sloppily constructed. _________________
Joined: 05 Dec 2006 Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2015 12:31 am
Felix wrote:
oh thank fuck adi is playing it, at least I know I'll get some feedback now
I've got some hard hitting critical takes coming up tonight that'll blow yr mind off
(It is literally one truck running into another with a dumb voiceover joke and I am looking forward to how many people will call this the same thing as the criticism that I said I wasn't going to do anymore.) _________________
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