Formerly: What is the nature of irreality?
UPDATE: I recommend starting with Reply/post #6. It is the final word on this topic.This is something I actually think about an awful lot considering the relative obscurity of the subject.
I constantly find myself thinking about fantasy in literary terms. Is good and evil really the ultimate dichotomy? What about reality vs. irreality? That seems far heavier and potent to me. And more interesting.
More and more this distinction seems to be the ultimate obsession of mankind. You think nowadays sure, the educated lot of us seem to gravitate towards a lifestyle that is split between these modes of being. Sometimes reality almost seems to be purely in the service of irreality. We live thousands of lives via artistic media, and we get actual life where we mostly keep ourselves alive, the more astute of our kind allocate a good portion of our free time expanding the frontiers that we have to thank for the relative safety of our day to day existence. The safety to enjoy all forms of irreality.
But that is a modern perspective. What about in ancient times. What about religions, superstitions, folklore, theatre, literature? It seems like irreality has always been with us. Even more so perhaps the further back that you go. At least that is until the recent advent of interactive video game virtual realities.
I think about Seath and Guyra in King's Field (forget about Dark Souls for a second) what is the relationship there? It seems to me like Guyra is reality, and Seath is irreality. It seems to me like the Moonlight sword is irreality and the Dark Slayer is reality. Seath is a deception, and Seath is nature, Seath is loved, Seath is adored. Guyra is Seath's opposite. Guyra is the ugly truth no one wants to acknowledge. Guyra is not a beautiful deception. Guyra is unnatural. Guyra is physical, the stuff of light and shadow, scientific. Guyra is despised, Guyra is hated. Like I say I think in literary terms.
What is moonlight? It's a kind of false light. It's a reflection. And what does it mean to slay darkness? It means to let the light in, to see things more clearly.
These are powerful metaphors anyway. And to my mind it's really great to think of Sword of Moonlight as a tool of irreality. I think you can if nothing else have a lot of fun with games where the swords are creators of worlds and exist like a weird hologram in the worlds they create... perhaps instruments of undoing. Not unlike Stormbringer in Michael Moorcock's many interwoven tales.
Moorcocks fiction intersects with the modern day world, or at least a fictional version of it. There's no reason the Moonlight Sword can't do the same. In fact there is ample evidence that the Moonlight is based on Stormbringer. You can easily hypothesize that the Moonlight sword is Stormbringer only by another name (as is so often the case) and if you really want to have fun, you can go as far as to declare Sword of Moonlight itself to be a facet of Stormbringer in the flesh in the here and now
Which brings about the question. Another name that has been attributed to Stormbringer is a familiar one to us in the west. We know it better than Osama Binladen. It's a name with a literary cachet. You guessed it, none other than old
Satan himself
Did I just say Sword of Moonlight is satanic? Yeah I did, but not knee-jerk satanic. Satanic in a far richer literary tradition. Now hear me out. Satan is a concept we just can't let go to waste.... there's a lot of value there. And fundamentalist religious people won't be around forever.
So the back story for Seath and Guyra goes. I've read this on very authoritative looking Japanese websites anyway. I can't exactly quote the games themselves yet. A god, Valad I think, could be wrong, thought that the elves and dwarves had gotten lazy, and mankind was at endless war among themselves. Valad I think is an earth god, one of a trio, who was left to do everything, because the sea and sky gods got bored went to sleep or something. Valad decides the best thing to do is to split himself up into two dragons, Seath and Guyra. I like to think that Valad is something like Abraxas... Wikipedia says:
"The Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung wrote a short Gnostic treatise in 1916 called The Seven Sermons to the Dead, which called Abraxas a God higher than the Christian God and Devil, that combines all opposites into one Being."
Usually Abraxas has two serpents instead of legs. You can think of each serpent as being our friends Seath and Guyra. And so the back story goes Seath is designed to be a figure of worship, and Guyra is designed to be a figure of hatred. Through the synthesis of the two mankind would reunite as Valad saw in his wisdom that nothing brings men together better than worship and hatred.
Speaking of Jung. I also think a Jungian approach to games would work really well for SOM. I call it extreme first person. And I like to think of the worlds of King's Field really being virtual reality worlds that are a cross between Total Recall (PKD) and Jungian like psychotherapy... which apparently equals something like The Wizard of Oz. IOW: what if the NPCs in the game looked like your friends and family? It's like the screen where you get to name your party characters taken to the Nth power! And what are ancient myths, why do we still remember them, why because they are all psycho (-logical) dramas that's why! If you want to make a good story you have to structure it around psychological phenomenon that is personal. But that is another thread.
Again, why satanic?? Well like I said, I am firmly of the conclusion that good/evil is not it. In fact good/evil might even not be something that can even be teased apart. What I think is the ticket though is reality vs. irreality, and there is no good guy or bad guy there, it's relative, just like the taijitu structure of King's Field 2. And one reality can be another man's irreality.
It's turtles all the way down in other words...
The word Satan is Hebrew if I am not mistaken. It means something like "the other team" so to speak. Or the opposition. If you have two competing realities they are each other's Satans so to speak. But we recognize that video games are not reality. That's pretty obvious to sort out from our perspective. Sword of Moonlight is a tool used to make virtual worlds. And a tool to destroy those worlds; from inside the game that is; think about it. You can even compare the Moonlight sword to Shiva at this point... the creator and destroyer of worlds
Now I want to quickly unify SOM and Megaten (another personal obsession of mine) real quick. The thing about gods and demigods, deities and devils in general. Their names are always simple things. They don't have proper names, and they don't have alien names, no they are named after their very nature. It's like Earthsea, the thing is its name, and can't be otherwise...
Christians have been conflating two of their favorite devils for a long time. They've almost succeeded in making Lucifer and Satan synonymous. But from a literary standpoint these are different figures for the most part. Lucifer-cum-Satan is a fairly contemporary invention. Now I have no clue the basis for these two in Christianity. I am not a religious person though I have my private fantasies that are not entirely divorced from traditions here on Earth. I tend to prefer religion that is good for the arts. I'm into anything with a Hell too, because I'm kind of keen on justice, and I like to think that any half decent god(s) would see the utility of a hell
The word Lucifer is Latin (Rome) and it just means light. Period. In the west we usually think of light as being the stuff of the good guys. Only christians would think to denounce light. Of course they've worked out that somehow a demigod can be transmuted, perverted, by their god, but what is the literary value in that?? We already have a Satan don't we? Yes we do. Maybe its just uncomfortable to have other godlike figures taking up space in the pantheon.
In fact christians never really liked the idea of angels or devils in the first place. It was a concession to a very popular religion of antiquity that now goes by the name of Zoroastrianism. It was dualist. It has two supreme deities at odds with one another. Not unlike Seath and Guyra and loads of other popular fiction. Wikipedia/Zoraster says:
The religion states that active participation in life through good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay. This active participation is a central element in Zoroaster's concept of free will, and Zoroastrianism rejects all forms of monasticism. Ahura Mazda will ultimately prevail over the evil Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, at which point the universe will undergo a cosmic renovation and time will end. In the final renovation, all of creation—even the souls of the dead that were initially banished to "darkness"—will be reunited in Ahura Mazda, returning to life in the undead form. At the end of time, a savior-figure (a Saoshyant) will bring about a final renovation of the world (frasho.kereti), in which the dead will be revived.
Sound familiar? Of course christians would not accept Ahura Mazda as their mono-god. So to placate the Zorastrians we get two angels instead. One of light and one of dark, and you can guess which is Lucifer, and which is Satan. In fact angels are pre-Abrahamic religions. You guessed it, they are Zorastrian inventions. They are like the many gods of Hinduism, splinters of two root deities in this case. I'm not positive but I think most modern Hindus assume a single root deity.
EDITED: For the record, I am pretty sure that there are still adherents of Zoroastrianism around, and they probably do take it seriously. Wikipedia says they number in the tens of thousands.
Of course we all agree that once upon a time Lucifer was #1 angel in heaven, but that he had a falling out with
the god. First of all angels don't have free will. They are like programs. Whether people do or not is beside the point. So this falling out could've been expected. And it is pretty easy to see why. If Lucifier is the embodiment of sugar spice and everything nice, then he's going to find fault in a god of all things sooner or later. Because a god of all things can't be 100% just all of the time. Sooner or later you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. So Lucifer ends up in hell as the story goes. Not put there, he chooses to make his home in hell. From hell Lucifer gets to be the executioner of enlightened justice that he always imagined himself to be. And that gives Lucifer a bad image. Does that remind you of anyone? *cough* *Guyra*
And what about god then? That statue of a maiden in KF2? Do many of god's followers ever start to look like satanists? Worshiping a maiden that turns out to be a serpent wearing a dress??? Many traditions believe nature itself is a deception. Gnostics, Buddhists. Statistically speaking they are probably right on the money. We live in a strange reality that by all rights should probably not exist. Did two Escher like realities simultaneously erect one another? And if so what the hell was the firmament for that process?? If you can't meditate long enough on that to cut your fellow man some slack then maybe that is the definition of evil that we are looking for...
Anyway, I bet this has been a long post. And I bet you are wondering what the hell conjured this up out of me. It's actually this...
For a long time people have been thinking. Video games are becoming more than just games. We need a new word to describe this nascent phenomenon that will soon begin consuming all of the arts and if we are not careful, reality as we know it.
I've always thought we should just ditch the goggles concept of 90s "virtual reality" and call it all VR. Because that's what it is. Even Tetris is a reality, goggles or no goggles, or piped directly into your brainpan. Its a reality. But it occurred to me this afternoon that we have a better word, if only for its brevity, in "irreality"...
And an abbreviation does not a word make. So I vote, as the art of video games matures, and as we begin to see all forms of storytelling media being developed with the same tools used to develop video games, because make no bones about it, it will just be a thousand times more economical to do so, and there will be a thousands times more people who will therefore be able to afford to do so...
We slowly begin to refer to this stuff as "irreality". The word itself is already strictly limited to the subject of fantasy, fantasy fiction almost exclusively. So there is no ambiguity in terms of terms like hallucination or surreality to be had
The End (of this post; please discuss)
PS: Why are movies etc. not irreality? Well they are. But they are not interactive. I think something has to be interactive and intuitive to strictly qualify as a(n) (ir)reality.
Aren't video games games? For the most part yes. But a game usually has a win condition. And its not appropriate to describe something as fine art and a game in the same breath. We are not at fine art yet, but we do have open ended games with no obvious win condition... and there is certainly no shortage of players who would seem to want their favorite games to go on forever and ever.
Can something be commercial and fine art at the same time? No not really, but in essence certainly yes. This website is squarely a non-commercial enterprise. So non-commercial games are not that hard to imagine. Free software itself is about as immaterial as things get.
Are "fine artists" allowed to take their audience into consideration?