[Right. I am determined. This is not about RPGs. This is about a different kind of game altogether.]
I happened to remember that Maurice Dodd, who wrote The Perishers for most of its life, wrote in an omnibus that he'd tried to invent a quite absurd event, and come up with rhubarb thrashing—then, the world being what it is, he'd found (too late) that it already existed. (Moreover, apparently a band called Stackridge had a fan club called 'The Stackridge Rhubarb Thrashing Society'.) The rules? I managed to find one line:
Rhubarb Thrashing pits two blindfolded contestants against each other, who stand in dustbins and do battle with rhubarb.
Nintendo now owns 80% of Monolith. Which means that the company currently going in for stylus sweeping and remote pointer waving now controls the makers of... Xenosaga.
Maybe they're diversifying. Kotaku has ideas (not involving RPGs) about what we might see from Monolith next. Well... more like wild speculation—but why not?
It's sometimes interesting to hear how things stand out to the specialist's eye. I stumbled upon this rumination on pixel art:
One thing that's always baffled me about many of Squaresoft's later 2D RPGs is the cliffs. Looking something like a combination of a beautiful painting and actual pixel art, to me they've always stood out as probably (and this is just a guess) being one of the most painstaking set of tiles the graphic artists at Square have done. I might even go as far as speculating that perhaps there was a specific team of particularly disobedient yet extremely talented pixel artists working for the company, who had an annoying habit of causing trouble around the office and were punished for this by being locked up in the basement for a month to work on 'the cliffs'.
Now, of course, every time I wander around cliffs in Square's late-16-bit-era games I'm going to be squinting at them, wondering what it is that I'd be awestruck by if I were a pixel artist.
[The next post will be something to reduce the danger of this becoming a pure philosophy-and-RPGs blog. Probably.]
I like debug rooms, and FFVII has some fine ones. It's been known for some time that outtake cutscenes could be accessed thereby, tantalisingly hinting at what might have been in the same manner as the lost Northern Cave area and unused key items. Trouble is, the stage of the plot you're at on entering the debug rooms can alter the results of some options in such striking ways that one person may see an outtake and another not. (In each of the first two video sets, the first recording is from the Japanese PlayStation version of the game, the second from the English PC version.)
Point of access: the train guard in the 3 o'clock debug room (Toriyama's); select 'Cargo', but see below...
I have never seen this particular scene before. It plays the 'nightmare' music, and turns the screen red (similar to when Cloud hears the 'Stop! This isn't just a reactor!' message in the Number 1 Mako Reactor). Afterwards, the screen fades to black and never loads back in... (From Matt Hobbs's FFVII FAQ, v. 9.0)
Begins after you've met with Barret in the train cargo carriage, then leaps to the conversation with Jessie about the train ID system. (From Andrew Dean's FFVII Debug Guide v. 1.7)
What's shown here answers the first description, except that on the PC version the screen fades to black rather than red. (The reddening effect works elsewhere in the game, though...) Which scene you get seems to depend on what stage of the plot you're at before entering the debug rooms; the following is correct as far as I can tell:
If you haven't viewed it yet, or use the 'reset flag' button in the debug room: Cloud's grand entrance after jumping onto the train, just as in the game proper.
If you've played through that scene, but haven't yet played through the Seventh Heaven events: what Andrew Dean describes.
Else: what Matt Hobbs describes.
[A note on the 'reset flag' buttons: in the 3 o'clock debug room, some buttons have special functions, among them a 'reset flag' function that undoes changes brought about by your progress through the game, e.g. resetting the flag that tells the game you've already seen the cutscene with Cloud entering the freight carriage. I experience an odd side-effect using the PC version: the first time I try to access the menu after resetting the flags, I get half a disc change screen. Ejecting the disc gets rid of this, but the game may crash when one tries to change location; also, the ejection trick seems not to work on menu tutorials, and again crashes the game. Note: I've tested this only with the Standard install, not Maximum.]
My first thought was that this would have happened in the freight carriage once Cloud was left alone; Tifa's 'Mou!' ('Again!') as Cloud wakes up at the beginning of the 'Materia' outtake (see below) may support this. (She could also be referring to the state Cloud was in when she found him at the station, but that would be plain confusing on a first play-through.) However, the fact that this scene becomes available only after the Seventh Heaven scenes suggests that it might instead have been intended for the second bombing mission, with the freight carriage, like the one with the rail system map, being reused. Perhaps originally the party would have jumped from this carriage, and 'It's not ready yet' should have been something like 'We're not ready yet'. ('Mada dekite nai n da...' doesn't have an explicit subject.) A disadvantage with this hypothesis is that it doesn't explain why Cloud appears to be alone in the carriage.
Point of access: Sephiroth in the 2 o'clock debug room (Nojima's); select 'From pinball'.
Scene on the back of a dark truck. Someone is explaining how materia is made... Game hangs afterwards. (I've never seen this scene before...) (From Matt Hobbs's FFVII FAQ, v. 9.0)
'From pinball' suggests a possible association with Seventh Heaven and the lift that looks like a pinball machine or similar. [Update: definitely a pinball machine. I checked the Perfect Guide disc.] I suspect this would have been followed by the video below, which starts with Cloud waking up by the pinball machine (see screenshot). The fact that what's presumably Sephiroth's speech is displayed without an associated name may be an indication that Square wasn't intending to reveal who the character in black was, which would be consistent with its being intended for the early stages of the game (before reaching Kalm).
Point of access: Barret in the 3 o'clock debug room (Toriyama's). (Use the 'reset flag' button if you've played as far as the Sector Seven scenes.) Select 'Materia'. For the second outtake, keep going until you can walk outside.
The results you get when using the collapsed Barret's menu tend to vary depending on whether you've played through the Seventh Heaven scenes before entering the debug rooms; and if you've played even as far as Sector Seven, you'll get an empty room instead of the outtake. Worse, on the PC, I get a usable but stubbornly uncancellable menu popping up where the Materia tutorial should be. (I was later to discover that there's an invisible option to decline the tutorial: when you see a small, square text box, as in the screenshot below, press Down before continuing.) Having read about this scene in an article at Platypus Comix I knew there was more, and initially I thought I might be accessing the scene in the wrong way; however, after getting in touch with the person who runs Platypus Comix and being told that 'start of new game' conditions should work I decided that this probably was a problem with the PC version. The innards of FFVII are fairly well understood by now considering the circumstances [PDF], but not by me, so...
Cue Plan B: I obtained a copy of FFVII International, the improved version of the Japanese PlayStation release. This comes with a 'Perfect Guide' special features disc, and a video on that disc includes some footage of in-development versions of the game—including the 'Materia' outtake. Note the news anchor (more realistic than in the final version) and the beta Save Point model (bottom right).
Charles MacDonald's debug room code for the Japanese version of the game seems not to work on International; I accessed the debug rooms with the code 800996B0 0041. (I was using CEP with ePSXe, but that shouldn't have altered the required code.) Once there I got a minor surprise: compared to what I'm used to (top), Barret's menu was a bit different (bottom). The '7th Street' option has been replaced with an unselectable header using the Limit Break colour effect, and someone has added a bracketed 'debug' after several options.
Luckily the outtake is still accessible, and as you can see, unlike the footage of the translated game featured in the Platypus Comix article, the Japanese version still has text. (The tutorial is also fully scripted and different from the one in the game proper, but I thought it would make a dull video.)
Based on this evidence, I think we can tentatively reconstruct some of what the early stages were going to look like before some mid-development alteration. In Seventh Heaven Cloud would have collapsed on the lift and had a flashback to Sephiroth's account of Materia manufacture; this would have been followed by a conversation about Materia, in which Cloud can give his tutorial. Either before or after this, on the train, Cloud would have had another fit: the combined effect would have been to give a much stronger impression of his fragile psyche in the initial stages of the story.
Following news a few days ago that the BBFC is considering changes regarding how it rates interactive versus non-interactive media, I've been drawn back to one of the many aspects of the media effects debate which puzzle me: the way in which talk of realism sometimes gets used. Here's a great example from Barbara Krahé & Ingrid Möller, 'Playing Violent Electronic Games, Hostile Attributional Style, and Aggression-Related Norms In German Adolescents', in Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004), pp. 53–69:
To establish the extent to which the electronic games included violent contents, experts from two groups were asked to rate each game in terms of violent content... They were given the following instructions: 'For each of the following games, please rate the level of violent content. In making your judgment, please consider the following aspects: (a) How realistic are the scenes in which characters are injured and killed (e.g. groaning noises, blood splashing, body parts flying around); (b) How realistic is the presentation of opponents (monsters, aliens vs. human-shape characters); (c) How realistic is the presentation of scenes in which one’s own character gets injured or killed?' Raters classified each game on a five-point scale that ranged from "free of violent content" (1) to "high level of violent content" (5).
I haven't read the BBFC's report yet, but I did find this quotation from the news article quite interesting:
We have traditionally taken the view that because a game is interactive, by definition we need to be more careful. But when you watch a film you actually have less control than when you play games. It’s easier for you to lose that sense of reality.
I wonder whether this 'sense of reality' plays any role related to 'realism'. The basic grounds for my finding talk of realism weird in the context of media effects is that it suggests some sort of relation between a representation and some actually or possibly real state(s) of affairs: realistic physics involves objects moving 'like the real thing', realistic visual styles bear a fairly strong resemblance (to put it simply) to how things actually look (with 'photorealism' as the culmination), etc. Two problems arise. Firstly, there's no obvious connection between realism about states of affairs and normative realism (whatever that might look like) or normative truths: no reason, for example, why a parable can't be effectively communicated with heavily stylised illustrations. Moreover, if there were such a connection, I'd have thought the obvious expectation would be that the more realistic the representation of states of affairs, the more reliable the representation of moral facts. (Certainly that seems to follow from moral naturalism and supervenience.)
Secondly, the sort of link between representation and reality which 'realism' involves is a matter of fact quite independent of impressions on the viewer. So what presumably is being talked about is actually verisimilitude, i.e. consistency with beliefs about real states of affairs. (Not that I'm sure I have very precise beliefs about the appearance of 'body parts flying around'.) What isn't clear to me is whether this kind of belief-based analysis differs from the 'sense of reality' mentioned by the BBFC's spokeswoman.
Phenomenologically the notion of a 'sense of reality' is interesting. Do I have one? I'm not sure there's 'anything it's like' for an experience to feel real: 'As I bite into an apple, I experience the taste as sharp, pleasant... and real.' Qua experience, of course it was real (and once we get into waking vs. dreaming vs. brain-in-a-vat questions a sense of reality isn't going to do us any good, since it too would be part of the experiences whose representation of an objective reality we were calling into question). On the other hand, we ordinarily can and do distinguish between real events, fictional events, possible events, dreamt events, etc. (Just what role beliefs about the status of fictional events play in structuring reactions to them is a thorny question, if the debate about the paradox of emotional response to fiction is anything to go by.)
I'm inclined to suspect that the 'sense of reality' is best construed as part of the taken-for-granted background structure of experience—which leaves me wondering how it could be lost, since presumably we're not supposed to be dealing with the kind of experiences sometimes associated with schizophrenia:
Sass... attempts to describe the experiential changes that occur in some cases of schizophrenia, focusing on the well known autobiographical account of Schreber in his Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. Drawing on Schreber's elaborate descriptions of his own experiences, Sass argues that schizophrenic delusions are not a matter of mistaking the unreal for the real. Such an interpretation presupposes that the usual space of experiential possibilities remains intact. Instead, Sass suggests, it is the whole structure of experience that is transformed. It is not that schizophrenic persons claim reality for their delusions but, rather, that their entire experience is structured by a sense of unreality... Schizophrenic patients, according to Sass, experience 'unworlding'; it is the form of the real that is warped, as opposed to the specific contents of the real.... The result is a kind of solipsistic experiential realm, where the sense of 'an object independent of me' has been removed from the space of experiential possibilities. (Matthew Ratcliffe, 'The Feeling of Being', in Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005), No. 8–10, pp. 45–63)
By this point I'm pretty mystified about what role a 'sense of reality' might play. If it does amount to an ability to 'distance reality from adult experiences in games' and other fictional works, then it starts to sound more like a skill than a component of experience. Some sort of skill may be involved in judgments of realism: appraising the historical authenticity of all those WWII-based works, or the psychological credibility of characterisation, etc.; maybe what the spokeswoman has in mind is something like the 'mean world' associated with George Gerbner, the idea that frequent depictions of criminal acts in the media give rise to mistaken beliefs that the world is a more dangerous place than it really is. Which brings us back to my old friend the is/ought distinction: that's an error about matters of fact, not about whether a given state of affairs is right/wrong/other.
I've wondered on occasion whether Kierkegaard might ever have read anything alchemical: it's a vague notion, but something in his conception of distinct, totalising existential orientations (to put it very loosely), and the question it raises of what would be required for a person to shift from one to another (Wilhelm wanting to persuade A that he should abandon the Aesthetic for the Ethical), put me in mind of the alchemical notion of transmutation of substances, especially where purification is involved. I've never given much actual credence to the idea, but it was quite striking to see that the question of a possible alchemical influence on Hegel (Kierkegaard's frequent target) has been getting some attention recently on the mailing list of the Society for the Academic Study of Magic. If that influence is historically real, it's possible that what I've been sensing is its reflection in Kierkegaard's anti-Hegelian outlook. (Okay, not terribly likely, but I'm quite enamoured of the idea.)
Having previously posted a video of one of the best error screens ever in a game, it seemed to make sense to look for videos of this, and happily I found one: here then is the legendary piece of attention to detail that is the Chi no Rondo Stage X (the result of failing to use a System Card 3 with the game).
I've finally got around to looking through Huygens's Cosmotheoros (which I'd been intending to read for some three years or so). Truth be told, though, the way in which he tries so hard to show that extraterrestrials are probably a lot like us strikes me as a bit disappointing. Digging through my old notes I found that at least one historian (Michael Crowe) seems to agree: 'One wonders whether an excess or deficiency of imagination is shown when Huygens argues that their geometry and music must be nearly identical with ours.' Maybe for entertaining speculations I'd have been better off trying to find a copy of another book of the era on my list of desirables: Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des Mondes, with its references to masques and tournaments on Venus and Jovians who 'take a day's time to answer the least question'. What I do find interesting about the Cosmotheoros is the way in which methodologically it mingles empirical observation and theologico-metaphysically grounded speculation so readily. (Fontenelle wasn't a straightforward fiction writer either: if I remember rightly his stated aim was to explain the Cartesian Vortex theory so clearly that even women would be able to understand it. This was in the 1680s, you understand.) It all looks quite alien (no pun intended) from a modern perspective, yet I've seen it suggested that the extraterrestrial life/plurality of worlds debate actually helped to highlight the limitations of and thereby discredit and surpass the Baconian understanding of science.
I notice that Huygens openly hasn't much to say about the moon, and I'm not sure how to interpret that in the context of the wider debate about lunar inhabitants. Actually I'd forgotten quite how fierce that debate got until I looked over my notes: I knew Johannes 'If you direct your mind to the towns on the moon, I shall prove to you that I see them' Kepler was wildly keen on the idea, and I dimly remembered the differences of opinion between lunar cartographers – with impressive clarity Giovanni Battisa Riccioli wrote on one map, 'No Men Dwell on the Moon' and 'No Souls Migrate to the Moon' – but I'd quite forgotten about Gerhard de Vries and his own speech for the opposition: 'There are indeed many and weighty authors who would stand in the battle line for the lunar inhabitants. Nevertheless, victory is certainly ours, for they are not easily armed by faith or reason. And both are fighting for me.' (Meow!)
I've just come across a delightfully Socratic (or maybe Zen-like) insinuation to the effect that it's a loss to philosophy that one of its long-standing problems may have been solved. Such worrying is surely premature – if anyone can be relied upon to keep arguing the point, it's philosophers – but I do enjoy the idea that the actual worth of a piece of philosophy may depend on a lack of solutions.
Which problems are of this sort might be an interesting problem, but there's always the risk that the solution would prove self-referential...
(I don't worry about whether philosophy is useful in the real world, since I suspect that one would have to do a great deal of philosophy to know what the 'real world' is. Now I just have to construct a version of this argument that can be safely employed in job interviews.)
Above is the interface from the BS-X Satellaview, showcasing character creation (well, name entry and a choice of PC gender) and the 'town'. I wonder how long the novelty lasted. Below is someone's recording of the boot sequence from another Japan-only Nintendo console add-on:
There's something about the sight of mismatched characters standing around in RPG debug rooms, press-ganged into service behind the scenes, that's even more appealing than test levels are generally. The earliest example I know of is that in Square's penultimate 16-bit era game, Super Mario RPG. [Update: I should have checked more thoroughly: Seiken Densetsu 3 has some.] Unfortunately not much actually happens therein; mostly it's for quick transportation. (A separate debug menu takes most of the strain.) Still, it was a start, with some subtly warped scenery and a brace of NPCs.
Like Escher's aimless ascenders and descenders, seemingly lost in contemplation, debug room NPCs add a perversely human touch: they blur the boundary between a merely functional test area and a piece of game world. Below are short clips showcasing the oddest architecture to be found in the Xenogears debug rooms.
As a bonus, this seems a suitable place to post the strangely unused 'Stars of Tears' video from the game. ("Um, Mr. Takahashi... You remember that song 'Stars of Tears' that was written, and recorded, and used to make a music video? You remember we told you we'd included the video in the game data...? Well, that was true, but we, er, forgot to use it anywhere in the actual game.")
This seems to be an error screen: the result of booting Legend of Mana in AdriPSX. (The disc works fine in ePSXe.) I wish more error screens were this much fun.
On the positive side, Blogger lets one adjust the fine detail of the template markup (and I've already had to fiddle with it to stop embedded videos getting truncated); on the negative side, it sometimes seems to expect one to. 'Modifying this feature is left as an exercise for the reader' makes a striking conclusion to a Help page. I do prefer my JavaScript toggle version – if the text's there in the page source anyway, sending people to post pages needn't be necessary – but nevertheless, (a) it's a hack to add pretty basic functionality, and (b) the very fact that the text of full posts is still in the source means that things are going to get unnecessarily precached. Over 56k it could get fairly painful. So...
Plan B: if I'm going to be adding scripts anyway, I may as well employ slideshows for series of images. I've applied one retrospectively to the Blue Sphere post. Come back next week, when I'll be grumbling about the overuse of px measurements in the Minima template default...
The direct follow-up to Star Ocean: The Second Story has, alas, never been translated – an amateur translation project has reached about 10% completion – and the GBC's screen really isn't suited to Japanese script. Blue Sphere has got a selection of eight playable characters from the beginning, and the most interactive scenery in the series (including Zelda-style breakable objects); this was also the first Star Ocean game to replace random battles with wandering enemies.
Look carefully at the first screenshot: there's a black dot on the left. That's the corpse of an Assassin Ant; I wonder what the concept artwork looked like.
A quick search throws up a couple of videos. The first shows the introduction and initial gameplay; the second is an advert.
'But is there anything wrong with it, technically?' I pleaded. This question abruptly altered the attitude of my audience. The signalmen studied the work in sombre silence, then, 'Look!' said one, in horror, 'He's got a light engine on the same road as the down Portsmouth express will be in a couple o' minutes! Lumme, that won't do, now will it?'
That was just the start of it. They certainly went to work on me and I retired from the box in the gloomy knowledge that all but two of my trains must be painted out and replaced in positions which would not jeopardise the lives of the travelling public. (The Railway Painting of Terence Cuneo, p. 43)
As a child I used to gaze enthralled at what was probably a TerenceCuneo print (the combination of steam engine and mouse being a definite clue) in the clinic where my father went to give blood. (This was in the days before people with Marfan Syndrome were disqualified for their own safety from donating; by the time I reached seventeen the rules had changed.) The reproductions available on the Web aren't often congenial to a mouse hunt, but the story of 'the mouse that nearly caused an international incident' (ibid, p. 59) is too good not to repeat, so take my word for it that 'Evening Star' has a particularly cunning rodent concealing itself on a telegraph pole. When a visitor to a ship docked in Cape Town saw a print of the picture hanging in a cabin, and told his hosts that Cuneo tended to hide mice in his paintings, a subsequent search ended not only in failure but in a telegram to the firm that produced the print, asking for the solution. 'Up telegraph pole first right' came what was intended to be a 'clear and inexpensive reply'; this ended up being directed 'to the South African equivalent of MI5, as a highly suspicious message, probably in code.'
Whatever the visibility problems besetting hidden mice, the man could certainly paint trains.
Update: instantsunshine.co.uk has been redesigned since I wrote this post—good news.
That Instant Sunshine's site seemingly hasn't been updated since 2003 doesn't inspire confidence in the safety of buying from it (except that as I recall a couple of years ago there was a link to a dead forum; that, at least, seems to have been removed at some point). There's also an overabundance of Flash. No wonder they're not well known these days; luckily the sample downloads still work in Flash, although the MP3s are missing.
It turns out that Googling for 'Instant Sunshine' isn't very good for relevant results, but 'Instant Sunshine Christie' provesitselfmuchmoreeffective.
A thought about the 'media of type T will cause viewers to believe that p' school of media effects theorising: suppose we actually accept the implied reductionism.
A non-normative sample message: 'crime pays', or with more specific detail, 'robbery is an effective means of material self-enrichment'. Now plug in some Dancy-esque holism of reasons: it could be a reason for lots of actions. 'Crime pays, so I shall become a criminal.' 'Crime pays, and I shall rectify the situation by joining the police and championing justice.' On its own it isn't a reason for anything. (So to reinforce the argument one might point to narrative roles – 'Hector, seeing that crime pays, accepts this as a valid reason to become a bank-robber...' – but that moves very much away from reduction to one straightforward message.)
A normative sample message: 'violence is acceptable'. What if this is inconsistent with other beliefs held by the same person? (For example: violence is acceptable; causing harm without just cause is not acceptable; violence causes harm. An inconsistent triad.) The greater the inconsistency, the lesser the plausibility of the sample's just being unthinkingly accepted and believed. (A related point: live a while in a sophisticated and liberal culture and you'll encounter lots of messages, often conflicting, so what should be the object of interest are the 'effects' of the cumulative influx.) Yes, of course you can add complementary messages and assert that T-media cause them all to be believed; the point is, unless you can identify a small basic set of propositions, you're going to be postulating a large conjunction as p—so where did the reduction to one simple message go?
This isn't a decisive criticism of belief in the efficacy of media effects, of course: it's the basis of genuine puzzlement about why p seems commonly to be treated as simple and straightforward (also opening the way for the criticism that this ridiculously oversimplifies the process of interpretation, e.g. in Andrew Koppelman's 'Does Obscenity Cause Moral Harm?' pp. 32-33). At a guess: because 'What message does such violent material send out to our young people?' is rhetorically effective (and simplifying for the sake of exposition is in itself no wrongdoing).
I'm a little confused about how Doctorow sees intellectual property as an aspect (or not) of the story, given his comments in the introduction. One possible interpretation: this is an imagined police action against a trademark/patent/design right infringer, a violent version of today's actions against bootleggers. Another: this is a story about reverse Luddism, in which the aim is not preservation of intellectual property (and thereby of industries that rely on it) but, directly, one of propping up moribund industries. I think the story is vague enough to support either interpretation.
Maybe that's a point in itself: that where political power and individual freedom are concerned the concept of intellectual property makes no real difference. (If one wanted to fit this story into a politico-philosophical framework, the obvious choice would be Marxism: control of the means of production.)
Partly because this AMV fits so neatly given the title of the weblog, and partly because it's just beautiful... (I actually prefer djpretzel's '7YearsBroken' remix slightly to the original.)
