Sword of Moonlight > Beginner and other Nonsense

The elusive/illusive ones (Seath & Guyra?)

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Holey Moley:
Because I listed Julian Assange on my recently prepared Patreon profile (http://www.patreon.com/swordofmoonlight) and because I caught the Underground fantasy biopic of him on Netflix, I've been on a little bit of an Assange tear of late.

I first wanted to know what the basis for Underground the movie was, since its more than a little fantastical on the face. That led me naturally to the book Underground (http://suelette.home.xs4all.nl/underground/justin/contents.html) and because Mr. Assange apparently did all but write the book his email address at the time was listed there, that led curiously to a choice two-letter domain name (iq.org) which struck me just for what it is (he must have grabbed that during the earliest days of the Internet.)


His blog is even better reading than his televised appearances. There is a genuine no nonsense human being at the top of their game in there. The blog is pretty much just a collection of creative writings and musing...

His much celebrated OkCupid dating service profile sums up the contents of the blog: "I spend a lot of time thinking about Changing the world through passion, inspiration and trickery. Travel (33 countries). Structure of reality. Birth and death of the universe (physics background) Ontology. Chopping up human brains (neuroscience background)".


I've been reading the blog a post or two every day or so from beginning (oldest) to end. The post I just happened to read I wanted to share, because I think it truly captures the struggle I want to represent between Guyra and Seath:


--- Quote from: http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/ ---Mon 17 Jul 2006 : Arrows for false gods

Disagreement is a good spur for conversation, but I don't know where to begin with your claim. People gain pleasure and power in spreading certain beliefs and certain beliefs are easy to spread. They don't look for the truth because they want to preserve this pleasure. Truth is rarely important in human affairs and if you want to shift your definition the only truth is power over reality. But it was the will to truth pouring its acid over the false beauty of gods and kings that guided us out of the miasma of the dark ages. You are not stupid. You are perfectly capable of piercing your claim, but you choose not to, since, like most people, you'd prefer to please and deceive.

By 'you' I mean the entire ensemble, not merely that part which processes words. To be human is to deceive. All human beings are great self deceivers, but this is not the innocent charm of the naively hopeful. They deceive themselves so that they may deceive others and having tasted this pleasure return to lap at its fountain. See Gregory Bateman. Your belief in various kinds of unsubstantiated newage hokey that you could easily shoot down is a reflection of this underlaying tendency. How many times have you read "But if we believe X then we'll have to...", or "If we believe X it will lead to...". This has no reflection on the veracity of X and so we see that outcomes are more important to most people than truth, which should not be as a surprise, because natural selection selects on physically realised existence, not on platonic ideals.

But then as we fall back into the miasma, the shadow world of ghosts and distortions a miracle rises; everywhere before self interest is known, people yearn to know where its compass points and then people hunger for the truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then the truth can set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, to remove the ring from their noses, to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over guilt. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, the liberators and martyrs of truth, those Voltairs, Galileo's, and Principia's of truth, those brutal driven obsessed miners of reality, those serial killers of delusion smashing the whole rotten edifice till all ruins and the seeds of the new.
--- End quote ---

Buried in there Guyra is the long game, the great project of the universe, the arc of the moral universe as it is often expressed. And Seath, it is the "only truth is power over reality". In other words, the manipulation of reality. You can understand this as machines like computers that manipulate the laws of reality to an end, but I don't think that is the true intent here in this haphazard posting.... my surface reading anyway is this is about the twisting of actors' perception of reality to some end. In other words, the manipulation of people, not reality.

People vs. reality, or consciousness vs. the necessarily arbitrary rules governing the universe that it participates in. Even in the title of this posting, the "False Gods" I think there is something else to consider. If Seath is a false god, deceiving, then what is Guyra but a second order false god? in so far as the reality it seeks out, like physicists seek out, is secondary. Its true it can be immensely useful business, but to invest yourself in the arrogance of the business, as so many public figures like Steven Hawkings do, is no less delusions than Seath's strange pleasures are illusions.

In any event, as grand narratives go, this is as good as it gets IMO.


PS: In case this sounds too far out, know that It's pretty much the same arrangement as in Milias' Conan The Barbarian. Seath/Set is like Jones' character, Thulsa Doom I think, and Conan's nihilistic down to earth god "Crom" is straight up Guyra's alley (the riddle of steel and so on)

Holey Moley:
Once more unto the breach.

This thread is rather becoming a companion to the New Hope game thread in the project subforum/board. What it represents is the formulation of a suitable dialectic between Guyra and Seath. IOW: a scaffolding onto which the most interesting stories can be wove for centuries and even millennia...


This time I have something that truly approaches a kind of formalism. It comes courtesy a chapter from an art book (it's a small book with brief chapters interspersed with personal hand illustrations) about David Bowie, prepared by Simon Critchley, a kind of pop-philosopher ("The most powerful and provocative philosopher now writing" -Cornel West--from the back of the book) or rather David's impact on Simon, published by ORbooks.com a little while back (like a month ago)

I put this book on my ticket when I grabbed up Julian Assange's new book, "When Google Met Wikileaks" not knowing what to expect, but thinking it was worth a gamble. I don't usually buy new things.


Here I am about to layout the basis for Guyra/Seath, the firmament of the universe if you will, according to the third chapter from this book. Because it is so formal, I think this is the final word on the subject. And will be the final post for this thread I believe.


SPOILER ALERT


Simon puts forth with emphasis the exact word that this thread is looking for a I believe. It is called irreality in the subject, but other things throughout. Simon's word is inauthenticity; which is a wonderful word, which for some reason doesn't pass the spell checker I am using right now. I have to look the word up in the book and check it letter for letter to be sure I wrote it down right.


It is used to describe the work of David Bowie's career and Andy Warhol who prefigured it. I think I've read when David was introduced to Andy, Andy was afraid, afraid David was an unhinged stalker. I'm guessing this was before David's meteoric rise to fame, or it could be Andy was too isolated or did not want to internalize being second rung to David... I'm guessing the former, but I'm not willing to do the research right now. What I remember is when they met, there is video footage, and David is wearing a weird hat like Vampire Hunter D, and b/w stills from this footage look most like Vampire Hunter D, the kind with blonde/white hair often depicted by the cover art done by Yoshitaka Amano (of Final Fantasy fame; the good generation), than anything I can possibly imagine (edited: adding attachment...)


Specifically the sense held by the men that their entire life was a movie, a movie they are not directing, or experiencing, but merely watching. Andy has stated as much, David perhaps is only as much in the form of his staged alter-egos, one only knows.


But Simon goes on to explain that it is this thread that runs throughout all of David's lyrical compositions. The sense of acting out a movie that is, detached, and knowing how it all ends from the offset. Simon concludes the title of this movie would be Melancholia. Never mind Lars Von Trier already made that movie. In a sense it is the nature of the universe that through repetition it gains this quality, because repetition is the trope Simon says used in staged productions to create the sense of melancholia. Repetition as if nothing matters that is.

Either this chapter or excerpts from it were part of the promotional material that made me bite this book. But I think if the whole thing was there intact I would've written this post after reading said materials that day. It's that grabbing.


Simon goes on (I meant to say this before, but I opted for some flavoring) to say this: Art's filthy lesson (a play on The Heart's Filthy Lesson and the name of the chapter) is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetition and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion.

Inauthenticity, illusion, it's another way of saying the same thing. And I want to be clear, my goal here in this thread, is not and never has been to create some kind of "Cnut" like theory of everything. My goal is to encapsulate a theory of art, literature, the thing that I value most (in games/etc) that can be readily "game-ified" or stripped down to something that can represent a nugget of order amid the largest conceivable world of fiction. In other words, the underpinnings of a fictional universe that celebrates and revels in art at its very center.


And it's here, in this delicious dichotomy, the "illusion of reality" and the "reality of illusion" that speaks volumes in so few words, and comes back around full circle perfectly embodying the Guyra/Seath complex that I've struggled here until now to put into precise words.


Okay then, so which is which? We're talking Guyra and Seath after all...

Well if it isn't obvious, for me it is: clearly Guyra is the "illusion of reality" and Seath is the "reality of illusion". The easiest way to think about this if you are finding it difficult is that there really is ultimately neither, no reality, no illusion, they are two sides of the same coin--but still the view of a coin depends on which side you approach it from--or rather perhaps if you push either to its extreme you come out on the other side... you've stepped over the edge of the coin so to speak. What is reality, what is illusion, you can never truly know for a fact...

And that is in fact what the two tricky dragons conspire to communicate to anyone who'll listen. For this reason they are each given an epithet that are together in the English language homonyms. In the tradition of word play and deception that I find often integral to understanding the KF series:

Guyra the elusive one. And Seath the illusive one. These are not common names, they are occult names. They represent the elusiveness of truth in Guyra's case, and the illusory nature of art and power in Seath's case. Or as Simon puts it, the illusion of reality (reality escapes us as if it is an illusion, and try as we might we can't get at it anyway) and the reality of illusion (illusions affect us in very real ways, even if we buy into them knowing what to expect, or are deluded into accepting them as real)

In this way Seath represents everything that is seductive about reality/illusion, and Guyra everything that is repulsive yet simultaneously attractive. Freud calls it the shadow. Or the truth. The thing you cannot bear to look at. IOW the reality, or as close as you can get without realizing that it isn't that much different from the illusion. It's only through synthesis that the universe is made whole (we often say universe to mean outer-space, but there is inner-space too, and it is just as infinite)


PS/EDITED: Also in the book somewhere in this chapter of the two before it, a quote of David's is trotted out. "Hitler was the world's first pop-star." I am probably paraphrasing. But to be clear, Seath is Hitler. He represents art/power and its seductiveness, or something very close to that. Guyra is the countervailing force whatever that is. The enlightenment, the search for knowledge that belies that which bewitches the men of the age. The only trouble is if you follow Guyra to its logical conclusion the land is stripped of all meaning and reality is revealed to ultimately be meaningless. Such is the quest for the meaning of life. So this way we come to understand that there needs to be a healthy balance. Both within the zeitgeist and within the individual psyche...

And that's what the Moonlight represents, the healthy balance. It's made of Hitler stuff (Seath/art/power) but use it wisely and use it well it is a force for undoing harm of all kind. Neither dragon is in and of themself good or bad/evil (to be clear we can say just or unjust) just as neither "reality" nor "illusion" is, and neither are the swords Moonlight and Dark Slayer (Guyra/truth/wisdom) that's up to you. But I personally believe that the player is always good. It's the NPCs that are the bad guys. It's just a question of how good is the player? Can they overcome the bad guys? Or will they succumb to them? And how many times will they have to Continue? That question can only be answered on the field, the King's Field. Dun dun dun.

Holey Moley:
Oh and one more thing I meant to say.


My personal feelings towards video games and art in general, as an artist, for a while have been very much leaning in the direction of what is called "naturalism". Which you might think, well splendid, that's like hobbits and stuff right? Trees, bird, bees ... well no, not really.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_%28arts%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28literature%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28theatre%29

It happens that this is kind of becoming vogue right now in the independent film scene, and I think probably the reason is because of a backlash against current trends in commercial media that have been heading in the polar opposite direction for such a long time that it's making a lot of people really sick.

But also naturalistic art tends to just be the best art. It's not the only kind, but I think if you don't try to be naturalistic then there is a ceiling on how far you can go with a work of art in terms of sheer brilliance. Video games and art for nerds/geeks in general is probably the furthest thing from naturalism that is humanly conceivable. That's part of the reason no new games attract my gaze anymore. And it's not just that they are so damn "unnatural" ... it's the uniformity of it all, the monoculture (and the bizarre oneupsmanship to be more mono than the next in search of the almighty-dollar) that I find most tiresome.


Simon says something about this too, in defense of the so-called cut-up technique employed by David uniformly throughout his career. Simon says this technique is superior to naturalism because it more closely resembles the way identities are formed and retained in memory. I don't doubt that at all. But try to make a cut-up video game. Or anything that is feature length, and you're going to have an interesting time I think. It's actually this mention by Simon that made me feel inspired to reveal this aspect of myself at this time.


Anyway, I believe that naturalism is the proper esthetic for King's Field. I believe the original trilogy are all pretty "natural" shall we say for video games. KFIV is not natural in its esthetic. It goes off in the direction that video games have continued to drift ever since and had begun to even before KVIV and the trilogy.


Naturalism in representing the world means not having magical elements. But if the world being presented actually has things like magic as part of its makeup then that is not the same. But naturalism goes much deeper than what kinds of things exist in the world. It means that language flows naturally, how people actually speak. It is terse and haphazard, not written like an essay. The scenery is natural, the world is lived in, its occupants are not made to appear ever more weird so to attract the consumer's attention... just the opposite, their artifice is constructed carefully so not to draw attention to them, or anything within their world for that matter...

There are no outlandish outfits (except for perhaps costumes worn by royal/eccentric personages) or weaponry and the beasts be they animal or monster all have their place and appear to have come about through a process of natural selection (or least exist within a delicate ecosystem) which often can appear much more creative than some altogether too standard monster the product of an impoverished mind.

Neither are there staged events or center pieces. No obligatory boss fights, and no grand spectacles confined to the game itself. Which is to say if something memorable happens in the game, there may be one such episode, or two such episodes, or no such episodes, for if something memorable happens it shall be an episode in the life of the person playing the game instead of merely something that happens (and is expected to happen) in a game.


This isn't so much a manifesto, as it is a declaration of how I intend to do right by King's Field in the future. Neither does naturalism or realism mean photo-realism. It places constraints on design and concepts but not on how they are rendered, be it low-polygon (also something that is becoming a bit of a fad) or high-contrast, or cell-shaded, cartoon, or abstract, or any myriad or art styles, but it does say leave your comical design elements at the door: be they impractical/implausible monsters or weapons or clothing or monologues or landscapes et cetera et cetera et cetera.


In a word, don't seek attention--desperately--eschew it. Give audiences what the commercial milieu cannot.



PS: I forgot to say that in cinema be it film or game there is one element that is never natural. That's the score or soundtrack or background music, whatever. There is no such thing in the natural world as this. So if you choose to include music as part of your presentational style, this is where I encourage artists to inject their element of magic into their otherwise perfectly natural creations. Indeed music is at its finest when paired with natural scenery because the contrast between the two cannot be more distinct. Music can be an incredibly powerful force for expression. It's the closest thing to magic we have really. And nothing brings out the magic in music better than the naturalistic mode.


PPS: Naturalism also has something to say about the "uncanny valley". In trying to make people and things in games more and more "realistic" games have managed to make them appear less and less realistic, less lifelike and therefore lifeless. In contrast SOM's simple NPCs appear more lifelike than the malfunctioning skin draped robots of contemporary video games. Naturalism says if you can't make something appear realistic with the level of complexity that you desire then you must then reduce your desire and therein reduce the complexity involved to the point where the lack of realism becomes unnoticeable. In some places this is called "Ludonarrative Dissonance" but it's easier to just say "unnaturalism" if you ask me.

Holey Moley:
Addendum:

Here is an example of naturalism I came across reading things online today. It's disembodied for sure, but you can easily see (I hope) how just doing things in a natural/straightforward way yields so much better results. Never mind the artistry on display, nothing on the market today looks anything like this.

Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/gallery/view/35/12248/3147.3

EDITED: Not recommending the game, just the general esthetic of the boxart here.

Holey Moley:
Here is the Critchley book. ORbooks.com is having a $1 e-sale of its book catalog, so I got a copy for easy reference/copying out of. I don't understand e-things myself. I don't know why anyone would pay more than $1 for any e-book, or $0.20 for any song tops. Please don't publish a link to this thread in order to give people easy access to this book in digital format (if all digital sales worked like this one, the people really getting rich off of e-books would be the credit card companies, as I'm sure they got a sizable portion of that $1)

If I notice its download numbers growing much higher than other things around here I'll take it down. Please post if you notice its numbers are high, or if someone directed you here to download it. Unless you are sincerely interested in King's Field and Sword of Moonlight please don't download this attachment.

Please feel free to discuss this book in this thread. I'm thinking about using it as a kind of template for the KF universe, kind of like how Brian Eno just uses random things to structure artworks around in a search for artistic constraint/novelty.

Checking back in 1yr later (34 downloads) I want to also add. If you download this book, and you read it, and you are not dirt poor, please just buy a copy of the book. I am not too concerned because O/R is pretty cool and I don't think they'd freak the **** out too much about one of their books being downloadable somewhere. That's a subject that itself would likely be an O/R book if someone wrote a book about it.

1/1/2017: I'm pulling the Book link because it's at 134 downloads or so. I think that might account for the new most people online concurrently stat from back in November. 149. Sorry.

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