review: soon it will be cold enough

After most of the tracks on Emancipator's Soon It Will Be Cold Enough came up on my downtempo electronica station, I felt like I had to review it sooner or later. I trust Pandora enough that when it feels I'll like something that much, I give it a chance. It's usually right, and in this case it is, though not without reservations.

Emancipator is Douglas Appling, an artist out of Portland who seems to have burst self-formed out of the Zeus of that culture's music scene. He released Soon and within a few years and one more album release formed his own label, Loci Records. He's now touring solo and has also toured with Pretty Lights, a true titan of the genre. Since Soon he's put out four other studio albums that I haven't yet had the pleasure of hearing, and though his first offering might fall short in a few places, it shows enough thought, depth and craft that I'm anxious to finish out this review so that I can go listen to his more recent releases.

Soon starts with "Eve", one of its strongest tracks, a melancholy number that mixes piano, assorted rhythm samples, and a soothing but also haunting female voice. "Eve" holds together very well and guides us through heights and valleys without forcing the point. Its blisteringly fast beats don't conflict with the twinkling of the piano melody and the ghostly character of the voice that we want to hear more of, but never quite do.  Moreover, they combine and weave together nicely. It's this weaving and smooth combination on "Eve" that makes "First Snow", two tracks later, easily the strongest song on the album and the one that I keep coming back to week after week. "First Snow" also plays with samples of speech appropriated from other sources, a technique that comes all the way from Dark Side of the Moon, but its holistic use in Soon reminds me most of the way speech samples were used so expertly in Endtroducing..... by DJ Shadow. I can't help but be reminded of "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt", despite the differences between the two tracks.

Other parts of Soon are appealing as well. "Maps" has a well textured background to contrast against its piercing piano, and the inclusion of audio from Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the southern polar regions are a masterstroke in how they are placed as an epilogue to that track. Ultimately, though, the concept that I keep coming back to in trying to describe the experience is texture, and it's here that Soon leaves me with a yearning I can't quite place. Trip hop is largely about different kinds of sounds with very different timbral qualities bumping around in the same staff space, and sometimes the album achieves this well. Some tracks, especially in the meandering middle of the album, seem to rely on unique sounds too much in lieu of complexity of notes and phrases.

The greatest failing of Soon is that I seem to want ten percent more of something that I can't articulate. Ten percent more kinds of sounds, ten percent more interplay of notes, ten percent more background texture. "Smoke Signals" is a good example of this, as is the title track, "Soon It Will Be Cold Enough To Start Fires". Many tracks feel like they want to build to something, some musical exclamation point or question mark, but never do. Small and minimalist can work, of course; see Boards of Canada. But many of Soon's tracks seem just a bit too fast paced and rhythmic to really work as quiet meditations, even though they seem to want to. That they're also too slow and thoughtful to work as upbeat dancy tracks is beside the point, though a few ("Father King") feel like they're leaning in that direction.

For a first release, however, Soon has plenty to recommend it. What it needs is not polish around the edges, but expansion and elaboration at its core. And, as I mentioned before, enough tracks really do hit the mark in a solid and memorable way that I'm excited to hear the rest of Emancipator's work, which is probably the best thing to take away from an artist's first album.

from aphrodite to athena

Weirdly, there are no male angels in the Magic: the Gathering cosmology, at least in recent years. This is confusing to me. The game has of late been criticized for having a particularly regressive set of tones, themes, and artwork especially as compared to its early days. In particular, art before the Weatherlight block was much more open and accepting of a variety of artistic styles, whereas contemporary card art is essentially neoclassical painting. But the angels are weird conceptually. Why do we have an entire race of good looking women when no other fantasy trope is so gender biased? And why angels specifically? Why not goblins or orcs or vampires?

But it's not just the art, and it's not just M:tG. You could argue that the Asari from Mass Effect fulfill the same trope considering their affinity for space magic, though I think there is more sex at play there. Can we just chalk this up to something as basic as the male gaze--the sexualization of women for an assumed-to-be-male audience? While I don't doubt it's a contributor, I don't think it's the whole story. It still doesn't explain why a race of characters that are literally a messianic symbol are gendered female. Consider the Innistrad set.

Avacyn is specifically referred to as the angel of hope, and her return from exile names the final expansion of the block as a coming out from darkness. Until this point, the themes of the set can basically be said to be "We're all going to die." She is implied and seen in narrative to be extremely powerful, and in gameplay she actually prevents every card you control on the field--including herself!--from being destroyed. On top of this she is barely sexualized, perhaps less than any other female in M:tG.

This isn't the male gaze, or, at least, this is a different kind of male gaze than the sexualized one which has characterized the history of fantasy pop culture. This isn't your girlfriend; this is mom.

Although this is but one example, it's a representative one. This is a different kind of "troping" of characters, and females in particular, than I've grown up knowing and reading about in the context of gender, but I feel that it speaks to a change in the way that games, especially high fantasy games, create superheroic characters. The male fantasy is no longer the submissive, biddable woman that serves his every desire but has no agency of her own 1. It is the powerful, sheltering mother-warrior-goddess woman that can protect him from the terrifying world and, most of all, save the day in the nick of time. Men don't want Aphrodite anymore; they want Athena.

To some degree, this is understandable and not even that problematic. When we fantasize about an ideal partner, we want someone who is strong enough to help us when we are in trouble and kind enough to act as a balm to soothe our wounds. Furthermore, when you look at forms of media that are at least perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be created for a female audience, you find that the same kinds of power figures there are weighted male. Supernatural? Twilight?

If this is what we think of when we think of a perfect woman, I say bring it on. This allows women to be idealized in a way that has nothing to do with their sexuality. Athena burst forth fully formed from her father's head. She never lost a battle, ever, marking her as perfect in the traditionally male dominated sphere of war. Her wisdom and compassion were legendary.

Is the mere presence of the Athena character empowering to real women, though? Doubtful, but I'm not convinced it's oppressive either. I think it's less that the standard portrayal of an ideal female is changing and that that's bad, but that we get more idealized females than we get idealized males, and that we have fewer non-idealized females than non-idealized males. Non-sexist writing doesn't mean we can't have Wonder Woman and Black Widow. It means every woman shouldn't be one or the other.

And more controversially, I think if we want to be fair and equal about the presence of some characters being idealized hero-goddesses that we can unconsciously fantasize about saving us, then maybe we need some male counterparts? Sometimes people talk about the muscled super-hulk being a male power fantasy rather than a female sexual fantasy, and I buy that to a degree, though I'd speculate it's probably more a matter of creators who imagine that's what women want. But there are a few examples of powerful male gendered characters representing both male power and female sexual desire.

More Thor? As a guy, I could live with that.

1 - Ironically, Avacyn is an artificial creature created by the wizard-vampire Sorin to protect his home from falling too far into darkness. This might say volumes itself, but this aspect of the character isn't emphasized on any card and is buried in the backstory, and by the time the set occurs, Avacyn is an independent character with her own agency.

civilization and ludic eurocentrism

Sid Meier's Civilization is a eurocentric game.

Now, I know what you're going to say to me. You're going to say to me "No way, Jake! You're full of crap! Look at the balance of western vs. non-western leaders and civilizations portrayed in the game. Look at the fact that those leaders speak their accurate native languages (or close approximations thereof), and that the units you control do also! Raargh, I'm angry that you're wrong!"

Well, hopefully you won't say that last part. But you're right! Civilization as a series does have a very good track record of representing traditionally marginalized societies and groups. It uses as a measure of who should be included not only expansionist success and historical fame, but also internal political achievement and successful defense against colonialism, as well as making an effort to include nations that might have been great had they not been outright exterminated.

But centrism is about more than that. It's not merely the erasure of certain peoples' contributions to history, which Civilization laudably doesn't do. It's instead a totalizing system of values that emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes others. It tells us--in the case of Civilization, through gameplay--what is important and what is not important. Civilization is Eurocentric not because it whitewashes history or under-represents certain groups, but because of what it is about: expansion, conquest, and technology.

As I see it, these have been the things that seem to have been viewed as important to western powers, at least in our understanding of them. What do we study in Western Civ 101? The expansion and conquest of the Roman Empire. The wars of the middle ages. Colonialism. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. The Napoleonic wars. The world wars. The cold war. Granted, we do hit religion, industrialization, the rising middle class, and the change in theories of government, but I feel that the balance lies on the side of foreign policy and the Idea of Progress over the social.

For any historians who take issue with this, I am willing to concede that this might be a historiographical problem on my part. But if it is, it is a history that the designers have also bought into and that informs their decision making. Expanding your territory and researching new technologies are the two things that are absolutely critical to success in the games. Later entries have allowed a more peaceful and less expansionist approach, but even these are either dependent on earlier expansion (economic, cultural) or also easily facilitate the militaristic path (diplomatic, scientific).

This type of centrism is necessary, and we shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in it. In fact, that's such an important point that I'm going to repeat it. We shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in eurocentrism to the degree that they have. Because of game mechanical concerns (what some scholars have taken to calling Ludic elements), you could not have a non-centric game, or at least not a successful one. A game that attempted to give equal weight to all of the things that nations, states and societies have viewed as most important and have focused on would be terrible. It would be a nightmare for the player to micromanage and contain so many interconnected systems that it would collapse under it's own weight. Because Civilization is a game series and not a historical analysis, it must necessarily emphasize some things at the expense of others.

But...what would a different Civilization game look like? What if we made a conscious effort to emphasize the traditional concerns of East Asian civilization, for example? I am not a historian or an East Asian studies major, so my understanding is limited, but I'll speculate.

Given collectivist tendencies, a sinocentric game might focus a great deal more on internal rather than external strife. Your empire could have a "harmony" value that represents your overall social cohesion. Let it fall too low and face the risk that groups of your cities could attempt to break away into independent empires, or that pretender armies might try to seize power. You could be forced to balance the competing demands of accumulating technologies from foreign trade and preventing foreign cultural influence. If ahead in tech, you could play the cultural colonialist role and sell your advances for influence or exotic resources. Expansion and warfare would still be a big part of your strategy, as these are things that every state has struggled with, but they might have an impact on your harmony stat or your foreign cultural influence. It's a matter of what's emphasized.

This is obviously a cursory speculation, and if anyone with more knowledge about both East Asian culture/history and strategy games wants to fill out my ideas, or call me out on where I'm wrong, I'd look forward to hearing from you.

waking nightmare on west st. germain

Hypersomnia, a gallery show by Anna Ault, just opened at The Gallery Vault, and it's a terrifying beauty to behold. Although the physical gallery space itself remains the faux cheerfulness of the white gallery cube, but nothing beyond that has even the slightest inkling of cheer, simplicity or even sanity. Rather than visiting a gallery show, the experience of Hypersomnia is more akin to falling into a version of Alice's Wonderland written by Wes Craven with the Mad Hatter played by Heath Ledger's Joker.

Anna's work is a chaotic mess, but that's a credit to it on even the worst of days. When it's great, like in Hypersomnia, you end up with either a visual or conceptual call to madness, a controlled chaos that evokes Hitchcock's Birds and Lévi's Baphomet in equal measure. This makes sense considering both the title and the artist's own struggles with the specter of death at an early age. In these contexts, the works take on a somnolent quality that brings to mind the twisted worlds of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and the feeling of being trapped in a world of imagination, longing for a return to real life. Chaos reigns here.

The formal quality of the work is predominantly linear, but is balanced by these well known animal images, which draw you out of the visual as soon as it begins to become overwhelming. Birds and goat-demons are simultaneously a threat and a friend for Anna, like an alternatively abusive and loving relationship that one cannot escape from. Fish and snakes are more humorous and playful, to the degree that anything can be in Anna's warped world. Once you have a moment to ponder the meaning of a bizarre image like that of a purple rat in a full hazmat suit devouring the neck of a human man, the tangle of lines and overlapping shapes draw you back in.

This Matisse-like push and pull of image and concept continues as you pass each of the exactingly worked 204 pieces in the show. By the end you're dizzy and profoundly disturbed, and in my case, profoundly affected with a desire for more. Perhaps hearkening just a touch back to the cacophony and speed of the Italian futurists (though without their juvenile love of war and the machine), lines and shapes and collide with printed and drawn matter in a way I'd hesitate to call controlled chaos. A better metaphor, if I'm not overloading you with enough comparisons already, would be to the kaleidoscopic nature of David Lynch's films had he worked with H. R. Giger. One thing leads to another that it shouldn't naturally lead to, but the connections seem to be implied nonetheless.

Anna's work pushes against the Duchampian trend toward minimalism and high concept that characterized the art of the second half of the twentieth century. But it also proves that a formalism of exacting detail need not neglect a gut-punching emotional character. Anna's going places. I'd recommend you get to the show and grab onto her coattails (or, rather, tail feathers).

Hypersomnia is open 12 pm to 3 pm October 16th, 17th and 18th, and The Gallery Vault is located at 708 West St. Germain Street in St. Cloud.

Most of the works in the show are for sale, and the artist can be contacted for price and availability at annaault@yahoo.com

the happy dog problem

I originally posted this to Facebook, and I hesitated to post it here because it's not strictly related to the topics of this blog and I'm worried about having to great a diversity of topics. I decided to go ahead anyway. If you have no interest in philosophy, go ahead and skip down to the next post.

You are sitting in a dog park when you notice a dog in the distance. This is a happy therapy dog that lives in the park and whose job is to cheer people up by playing with them. The dog is very good at this job. People always seem very happy after interacting with him, and more than one person has remarked that playing with the dog turned a bad day into a good one.

You’re about to go play with the dog when he dashes away toward another person, barking and wagging his tail. This other person is clearly extremely sad. You’ve never met this person but he or she has clearly suffered a devastating tragedy of some sort, and is on the verge of tears. The dog is currently running toward the sad person at full speed.

Closer to you than the sad person is a group of five people who also look extremely sad. You’re not sure if they know each other or not, but you’re guessing that they probably don’t since they’re not interacting. In an astonishing coincidence, they each seem just as sad as the individual sad person.

You know this dog well. You’ve interacted with him before and have built a rapport. You can reasonably expect that if you call him, he will come. Furthermore, you’re close enough to the group of five sad people that you could easily use your calls to steer the dog toward them.

However, the sad individual looks as if he or she is about to leave the park. If you call the dog now, the sad person will leave the park before you have time to get to them and cheer them up yourself.

Two questions:

First, do you call the dog over to cheer up the five sad people instead of the one?

Second, if you are familiar with the question known as “the trolley problem”, do you believe that your answer to the happy dog problem is fundamentally or essentially different from your answer to the trolley problem? Why or why not?

at the crossroads of GIFT and teamwork

So, I'm reading Playable Pedagogy, specifically Alex's comment on being a noob in Dota 2.

I hesitate to play any real matches against real opponents because my teammates warned me that if I play with others, I will be verbally torn apart if I can’t play decently. This is the main reason I stay away from collaborative gaming.

As a friendly gamer who regularly joins pick-up groups in MMOs, this is incredibly disheartening to hear. I know what she means; Gaming in multiplayer for nearly twenty years has given me my fair share of interactions with the slime and human detritus that lie waiting in the gutter of the gaming community. What I mean is that it's incredibly disheartening to hear that yet another person has been turned off from gaming with strangers because of this. I hear it all the time and, unless it subsides or we can change the conversation, it's going to continue to damage the reputation of the hobby and turn away the more thoughtful people who might help make great games and great multiplayer experiences.

Maybe I'm different in not being as bothered by these things. I grew up in Quake II, where trash talking was simply one of the rules of the road. You didn't have to instigate—I never did—but you at least had to tolerate it. There was also respect there if you could bite back sharply and cleverly after you were bitten—but only once; making a big deal out of it was seen as getting emotional and thus embarrassing. I'd liken it to the way stand-up comics are expected to deal with hecklers by making a joke at their expense and then moving on.

But trash-talking is probably the least disquieting form of internet abuse in most cases, especially because you expect it coming from the other team and because it has a long history in competitive activity outside gaming. It's another thing entirely to hear your own teammates rip you open and tear out your entrails.

This is a phenomenon that's fairly unique to internet competition. For example, can you imagine what the reaction would be if, during a post-game interview, an NFL quarterback blamed his offensive line for folding up and his receivers for dropping clean throws and also refused to address what he could have done differently? He'd be canned before they could get him off the air. There's no place for this in athletic competition, so I don't buy the often stated argument that people playing Dota or other MOBA games are more aggressive because they're more competitive.

One of the things at work here is clearly GIFT. In 2004, Mike Krahulik, who draws and sometimes writes for Penny Arcade, articulated in a simple formula what internet veterans had unconsciously known on some level for years: why people are jerks on the internet.

Fig 1. John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

This is, of course, comedy, but it's important because it articulates in an extremely accessible way a foundation for further understanding. Personally, I think it's an oversimplification that is essentially true nonetheless. On the academic side, psychologist John Suler was writing contemporary to Krahulik and published a well-cited paper on what he termed the Online Disinhibition Effect, citing six primary factors for the change. Whatever the specific reasons, it is well documented that online interactions do cause people who otherwise might be reasonably helpful, or at least neutral, to become hostile.

So how does this influence Alex's concerns about being a noob and the particular brand of hostility directed at new players? She has a point there:

I think what experienced gamers get out of noob-shaming is more self-serving than that. I think experienced gamers reinforce their experienced-gamer-culture in part through noob-shaming.

Maaaaaaybe. I'd need to know in more detail what she means by "experienced-gamer-culture," but I'm skeptical. I know many experienced gamers across many different games and in many different communities and only very rarely is a part of that culture an exclusion of outsiders. A preference for insiders and a respect for knowledge and expertise, possibly, but not a closing of the culture.

What makes more sense to me is to explain it as a form of blaming the thing. There's a video of a chimpanzee eating a lemon, clearly disliking the sour taste, and then attempting to smash the lemon in apparent punishment for the foul flavor. You can see this in humans too sometimes; people who stub their toes very hard on an object will sometimes kick the object out of a reflexive anger that comes from a wholly irrational place. By shifting blame onto others, we can avoid the shame of our own failure.

I mentioned that I wasn't as bothered by these things; I game with strangers in spite of their occasional hostility to me. For a long time I felt like getting used to this was a process that everyone had to and would go through, a forging-in-fire that resulted in stronger people and the ability to shrug off trolls. But if the number of friends who have vocally expressed their aversion to gaming collaboratively is any indication, I'm clearly wrong on this.

We need more thinking and scholarship on the issue as it relates to gaming if we want to create a more welcoming environment for people who aren't willing to go through that fire. Playable Pedagogy, "tag you're it."

dispatch from a dead man

So I just read this essay written by a terminally ill advertising executive. Wow. Stunned would be a pretty good description of my feelings at the moment. It's a truly sobering feeling to watch someone wretch out their feelings on the realization that they, by their standards anyway, had wasted their life.

The other thing I did, I now discover, was to convince myself that there was nothing else, absolutely nothing, I would rather be doing. That I had found my true calling in life, and that I was unbelievably lucky to be getting paid – most of the time – for something that I was passionate about, and would probably be doing in some form or other anyway. It turns out that my training and experience had equipped me perfectly for this epic act of self-deceit.

This hits far too close to home for me, and I suspect it will for some of you as well. Read the whole damn thing.

on self-concept and change

Fixed...

Around about twenty-four or so years ago, when I first started to have fully formed thoughts and memories, I began to develop an idea in my head of what my future would look like. At some point, I stopped conceiving of it as a disconnected set of attributes and started envisioning a complete person. Psychologists call this an Ideal Self-concept, the person you imagine when you imagine your most successful, most actualized self. For me at least, this concept has been pretty resistant to change, even in it's most superficial elements.

I was a writer in this fantasy, and always a successful one. I had achieved enough success that I could engage with writing fiction as my full-time job. Oddly, the actual act of writing featured very little; usually I saw myself giving a speech to a small group of fans or doing a book signing. I almost always lived in New York City, and in the few instances when I did not, I lived in downtown Minneapolis. I traveled often. I wasn't overly wealthy, but had enough money in the bank and lived a spartan enough lifestyle that I never, ever had to be concerned about running out of money or not being able to make monthly expenses. I was intelligent, theoretical and academic, but could also abandon those attributes when I wanted to so I could play beer pong with people who didn't have them.

What surprises me is that the oddly specific superficial elements have been the ones that I've clung most closely to and resisted questioning, especially when I was willing to consider alternative possibilities for myself. For example, in every version of the fantasy—whether I am a writer or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher—I am always wearing an overcoat like this one. Always. Occasionally it's black; usually it's a foot longer than the one in the photo, and if I am not wearing it, then it's close at hand. That this sartorial element refuses to leave is highly curious. In all of the potential futures in which I am successful, my vision of success always includes that minuscule detail as what is essentially a uniform of success. Even now, to attempt to construct a future without it feels, on some level, fundamentally wrong. Why? Am I the Barney Stinson of the overcoat?

I have a similar relationship to cities. Although for school I moved out to what, to me, is a small town, I can't remember any imagined version of myself that was happy and successful and lived further out than a second-ring suburb. I've never seriously considered staying in St. Cloud longer than I have to, and I have an inkling that it has less to do with the town itself than with it not fitting my self-concept. I don't know why I cling to these superficialities, and I don't know whether or not I should. After all, isn't it the more holistic parts of yourself that you ought to draw strength from and anchor other things to?

It took an enormous effort of will to permit myself to change majors from creative writing to fine art. I had to convince myself that I could do the same sorts of things with drawing and painting that I could do with fiction writing, and that the world of art was broader than Duchamp and Pollock, who I couldn't imagine emulating. The resistance to doing something else was and is so strong that just now I had to exert some willpower to change "art" to "fine art" in that first sentence, probably because I conceive of the more specific field as too different from the writerly self-concept I still have. Even in changing majors, I had to prove I wasn't changing my self-concept.

...and Fluid. 

For as long as I have had a self-concept, it has included the idea that the successful me will have found the One True Calling, the thing that keeps a person awake at 3 AM thinking about it and that makes them excited to begin work on Monday morning. The job from which they do not wish to retire.[1]  I've always believed that once I found this thing, doing it would never be hard. If it was writing, I would never resist sitting down in front of the page. If it was art, I would draw constantly. If it was being a teacher, I would stay with students until 10 PM to help them get the most out of their education. And that I would want to do those things.

This is why I would harangue myself about not finishing projects. I viewed my inability to finish a complete novel as a wound to my self-concept of the successful author persona. I wasn't just failing to complete a goal, I was failing to live up to my ideal self.

As I've grown up and matured I've realized that even the most prolific and voluminous writers feel lazy and don't want to write a lot of the time, and even great teachers get frustrated and need to go home. One of the greatest things I've done for my mental health was to stop attributing a kind of legendary willpower to people who have found their calling and started to view "not wanting to write" or "not wanting to draw" as a natural human impulse instead of a moral failing.

But now I'm starting to take that revelation a step further. Maybe that calling doesn't exist as one thing. Maybe the thing that I'm supposed to do in life is to constantly discover new things. If that's the case, it makes sense that I'm not the kind of person who can see a long, arduous project through to completion. "Getting bored with something" isn't about a lack of willpower and isn't a form of giving up, but is my natural impulse to discover as much as I can.

Does this mean my self-concept has changed from "author" to "author/artist" to "creative person of all stripes/adventurer/discoverer"? I don't know. That's one solution to feeling better about your choices and making them fit with who you are. I think it's more likely, though, that my schema for what a-self concept is has changed, from something that is set in stone and that you build your life around into something that can change and that your goals can change to adapt to.

I'm still never getting rid of the coat, though.

[1] For reasons I can't entirely articulate, the value of the search for this thing has been seared into me at the deepest level. It probably has to do with a combination of the values of the broader culture and growing up with a mother who would come home from work sobbing 50% of the days of the week.

review: and the moon was hungry

Morgan is weird. It's hard to describe in exactly what way her music is weird. I mean, I could say that she sounds like dark symphonic pop-metal mixed with nightmare cabaret mixed with 1950s lounge singers mixed with Amy Winehouse, but that doesn't actually mean anything unless you're intimately familiar with all those genres and performers AND have a good musical imagination. And if that's the case, then you've probably already heard of the Album and are getting some tracks off YouTube as you read. For the rest of us, I'll have to do a whole damn article.

I first discovered "...and the moon was hungry...", her album with The Romanovs (which she fronts), through Pandora. Honestly, I discover most music through Pandora these days, and I'm usually impressed and heartened to discover the degree to which tiny and otherwise totally unknown performers have penetrated the medium. "King" was the song that got me to create a new station based on it, which is always a good sign when that happens. This track sounded a lot like half the tracks on Fallen by Evanescence, and yet despite what you might think that's actually a compliment coming from me. I really liked the album and still do.

I expected more of that kind of heavy and layered harmonic sound from the other tracks, but was pleasantly disappointed on hearing tracks like "China Shop". This is where the piano comes to the front, and her strategic use of expletives and silent spaces speaks to Amy Winehouse. Sometimes that silence can seem a little jarring when it comes in the midst of that heavy layering, like on "Kiss", but maybe that's the point. Kiss is actually the weirdest track, the one that convinced me to write this review rather than a short paragraph as an incitation to listen. I can't place it. At one point it descends into a folk-carnival dance that seems appropriately out of place, as though we've been trained to expect the unexpected. Nevertheless, the album seems to always return to the dark layering reminiscent of the best of Evanescence, but with beautifully obtuse lyrics.

It's no coincidence that the most common artist to come up on my Pandora station inspired by her is Florence + The Machine. This might be the best way to describe The Romanovs. But if Florence is the sun, burning bright in majesty, then Morgan is the moon, covering us in milky shadows. She's the glorious and sickly negative of Florence. Morgan is quiet when Florence is loud, loud when she's quiet; Morgan inspires doubt where Florence gives us confidence. Florence lifts us up; Morgan drags us down to drown in her aural swamp. And what a sweet drowning it is. To borrow a phrase: 10/10; would drown again.

giving up on compromise

(This post assumes a basic amount of familiarity with some of the terms of tabletop role-playing, more commonly known by its most popular variant Dungeons and Dragons. If you've got no experience or knowledge at all, please bear with me! Google or Wiki terms that you don't understand.)

So, I've been reading a fair amount of Deeper in the Game this past little while (thanks, /r/rpg!) and I've found some incisive gems. This section on flag framing, for example, is just about the most useful idea I've ever heard for the setup of a role-playing game, and is basically a formalization of what groups composed of players with a decent amount of experience under their belts tend to do informally. However, I've got to take issue with A Way Out (a post intrinsically connected to The Same Page tool, which Bankuei's blog is probably most known for) because, at least as written, it seems to imply that everyone must have the same goals for the game and want to have the same kinds of experiences at the table.

Bankuei's central thesis seems to be that most problems come from players wanting different things out of the game, which are in some way impossible to merge. That is,

"Most of your 'problem players' are just people who want to play a different game and are either under the illusion that you were playing a different game to begin with, or that different games could be mixed."

This idea relies on GNS Theory [1]. Click that link and read through if you haven't already; it's basically required reading for a person who wants to GM a successful game with new players whose play-styles she isn't familiar with. To give it a woefully inadequate summary, basically, we either want to win, we want to experience a story, or we want to build a world.

I don't see any reason why a single game, or even a single session, can't encompass all these goals. Many different events will happen in an average session. There will be descriptions of the environs. Characters will be attacked. Skill challenges will need to be passed. The characters could be betrayed. The characters could betray an NPC. The characters could betray each other! The 4E DMG does a really, really good job at hitting this point home hard, in a way that should have been front and center when 3E first came out (Onyx Path could take a hint from here too.) There's a "The Players" chapter that further breaks down gamists, narrativists and simulationists into more categories, explaining what they probably want from the game and giving suggestions on how to engage them.

The problem comes—and yes it does come often—when players or the GM can't expressly [2] agree to let some things be in service to some player's goals while letting go of others. And this is where I'm in greatest disagreement with Bankuei. To suggest that different styles of gaming can't be mixed is tantamount to suggesting that, as gamers, we're too narcissistic to brook even a momentary breach of our expectations, even when we know it's in service to someone else's fun. That we're so entrenched in the sacrosanctity of our idea of how the rules of the game should function that it would be impossible to negotiate a compromise.

If I'm a narrativist and want to experience a good story, and I'm sitting down on a Friday night with my friends, some of whom are gamists and love the kick-in-the-door and fight to win style, I should know that the story might be derailed by a really good or really bad dice roll, and it's up to me and the GM to get it back on an interesting path. Railroads aren't necessary for a great story. Conversely, if there's something that would make for an exceptionally interesting twist and would make me jump out of my seat and exclaim "No way!", the gamists should know and be prepared for the possibility that the GM might fudge a die roll once in a while to make it happen. Failing once because because the GM needed something to happen doesn't negate the three or four other times you kicked the werewolf so hard he fell off the cliff.

The key is trust and being on the same page [3], though. If I expect that every good plot twist is being thrown out the window because the player on my left has an optimized character that is chewing through everything the GM planned, I'm probably not happy. And if the player on my right assumes that every enemy is unreasonably strong because they need to survive for a plot, she's not happy.

To be fair, I'm probably not giving Bankuei enough credit, considering the quality and depth of analysis found on the rest of his site. He probably understands this well, given his focus on understanding what players want out of a game. But it's way too important a point to be glossed over: we can and should accommodate (and ourselves be accommodating of) multiple reasons for coming to the table, even in the same group. If we can't compromise, how can we game together?

[1] GNS Theory was later expanded into The Big Model, which I'm much less familiar with, so I won't address it here. But yes, I know it exists.
[2] Experienced groups sometimes do this implicitly, but that's a poor substitute.
[3] See what I did there?

quiet minimalism in vogue

(This post was written in 2014, a year before this blog began in earnest. I considered throwing it out, but a lot of the concerns and ideas in it are still accurate to my opinions. Consider it a sample of my less developed writing style.)

A pair of gallery openings sponsored by the SCSU art department happened this week. Each was quite well done, and together they're emblematic of the personality and approach to art that the school promotes.

Night String Story, an exhibition of quiet, formalist works by Tetsuya Yamada, who teaches ceramics at the U of M, opened on Tuesday. As is usually the case, the opening and artist's talk were attended by professors from the department, students who had classes at 4:30 on Tuesday, and a smattering of individuals with some connection to the artist. There's something to be said for this more intimate and close gathering, as it provides each individual more face time with the artist. Still, I had hoped to see the gallery make a stronger effort to reach out to the greater campus community. Nevertheless, I believe the talk was a success, as it helped to illuminate Yamada's process and product a bit more. For example, the works showed dealt primarily with line, and the artist's talk revealed that he was thinking about Ayatori (the Japanese version of the game Cat's Cradle) when developing many of  them, which explained this linear focus.

Yamada's work is difficult to grasp upon first viewing, an attribute common to works in this style. Oftentimes one's first, visceral reaction to minimalism is nothing, which for the informed viewer is a good sign that one should sit and wait with the work, considering it and letting one's mind think "in the background", so to speak. The idea is that eventually, you'll alight on something interesting. The more I sat with Yamada's work, however, the more I was filled with a sense of emptiness, a feeling something like the absence of communication, as though I was looking at nothing at all. Perhaps this is the content of the work. Perhaps the simplicity of a few lines and their unwillingness to communicate anything which does not come from the viewer themselves was what Yamada found interesting.

Whimsey, an open call exhibition curated by the department's own BriAnna Lundquist, opened Thursday evening. Humor is difficult to communicate in art, but a few fine artists have made entire careers attempting to be funny--David Shrigley and Wayne White come to mind. Whimsey seemed to be more about the quiet chuckle than the belly laugh, though. Odd, quirky and fun are all attributes that could very easily be used to describe Lundquist's own work, and this clearly shows through in the pieces selected here. One work, "Brohemian Rhapsody", shows a man cleaning a pool with the lyrics "I'm just a pool boy, nobody loves me / He's just a pool boy from a pool family." Another is a Guy Fawkes eggplant high in the corner of the space titled "V is for Vegetable." Whimsy is the perfect title for this awkward collection, a kind of artistic curiosity shoppe.

It's refreshing to see humor in the gallery space, and I hope to see it pushed further. Both exhibitions come highly recommended. Yet there's a relationship between the minimalism of Night String Story and the quiet chuckles of Whimsey. Both express an art that is small and whispers its ideas. An art that meekly requests attention from the viewer. An art that says "Hey, I'm, um, here and stuff. If you, like, want to look at me."

I'm all for art which requires engagement from the viewer, and quiet and meditative images that don't show too much too early seem to have a resonance with artists and art viewers. My only hope is that we can make space in the world of the modern fine art gallery for art that proposes an opposite view: art that is big and loud and demands to be heard. Art that is raw and emotional and energetic. Art that exudes power and declares "I am here! Contend with me!" I think both statements are necessary.