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Author Topic: The elusive/illusive ones (Seath & Guyra?)  (Read 18034 times)

Holey Moley

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Holey Moley says,
« on: January 11, 2013, 12:21:12 AM »

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 :drool:

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 :evil:

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 :rainbow:

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 :evil:

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 :evils:


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? :censored:
« Last Edit: September 13, 2014, 09:14:23 AM by Holy Diver »
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Wolf

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Wolf says,
« Reply #1 on: February 09, 2013, 09:24:48 PM »

Would you believe I was actually so bored I read through this while I drank my coffee?? You've got some wild stuff in there. Irreality has other names "fake, counterfeit, unreal, lie." Lemmings can believe the "irreality" that they are heading to a safe place when they jump off a cliff and swim out to sea, but that will not change the reality that their bloated carcasses will be fish food shortly.

The Sword of Moonlight, Guyra, Seath etc are silly half-baked clichés thrown together by some programmers who didn't really care. This fact is evidenced by the gaping plot holes and glaring inconsistencies throughout the KF trilogy. Any effort to make it meaningful, is just you projecting what you wish the world was onto a cheap set of meaningless drivel.

You've got some way off untruths... pardon me, irrealities about Christianity in there too. Christianity is not about Good vs Evil- that is ignorance spread by modern video game, atheist fantasy fiction and anime slop. It is about truth vs untruth. Why good is good is because it's TRUE. Evil is bad because its logic is based in untruths. The Latin "light" root in Lucifer is to remind how alluring a false light (evil) can be. False light that draws people away from truth - just like your arguments' logic, bent and distorted half truths that slowly lead to believing a monstrously distorted lie.

Satan is not a Hebrew term, but a generic arab term for the "prosecutor" who accused defendants in a legal trial. All the rubbish and hype that has been piled on the term through the years is not part of the original message of Christ. You see, when you call yourself a "Christian" you don't get plugged into a communal brain that makes you like every other Christian. Christians have the same flaws and dissension that all humans have (duh) so you can hardly fault Christianity for the behavior of people who profess to be Christians. The whole point of Christianity is that humans are generally ignorant hypocrites so why say Christianity is flawed when Christians act ignorant and hypocritical?

You have a great deal of prognostication in your post which, just like Jung's blather, is the wishful thinking of a mind so lost in itself that it thinks truth begins and ends with its comprehension. Other than a few fringe groups, who have been given an air of legitimacy by the internet's ability to spread 'fertilizer' on a mass scale, I see no general consensus or compelling evidence that the world is moving in the directions you propose. You've immersed yourself in the fantasy propaganda of fringe groups so much that you've lost site of reality. But just like with a Lemming, believing a lie does not make it true. It just justifies ignoring the truth until it's too late.

You should give up the irreality of the computer, go find a wife and spend your life building a good life for your family.  :saint:

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Holey Moley

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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #2 on: February 09, 2013, 11:30:43 PM »

Would you believe I was actually so bored I read through this while I drank my coffee?? You've got some wild stuff in there. Irreality has other names "fake, counterfeit, unreal, lie." Lemmings can believe the "irreality" that they are heading to a safe place when they jump off a cliff and swim out to sea, but that will not change the reality that their bloated carcasses will be fish food shortly.

Yeah subjectivity is irreality too. But that's on a whole other level.

Quote
The Sword of Moonlight, Guyra, Seath etc are silly half-baked clichés thrown together by some programmers who didn't really care. This fact is evidenced by the gaping plot holes and glaring inconsistencies throughout the KF trilogy. Any effort to make it meaningful, is just you projecting what you wish the world was onto a cheap set of meaningless drivel.

I'm not projecting, I am salvaging to see what more can be done with this. The beauty here is anyone can do anything. The only question is how do you make the most of things. There is a multiverse quality to From's games too. The later games don't even jibe with the trilogy if you try to marry them together. You can toss them out if you want but you can do it both ways and new ways too.

There is no single interpretation of a good story. That's why older games have a lot of appeal, holes and all, a lot more is left to the imagination. Not just graphically but often conceptually. I don't think its fair to draw conclusions about what the artists were doing. A lot of our most prized pop music doesn't present any kind of coherent message.

Quote
You've got some way off untruths... pardon me, irrealities about Christianity in there too. Christianity is not about Good vs Evil- that is ignorance spread by modern video game, atheist fantasy fiction and anime slop.

Yeah don't forget literature contemporary and prehistoric, Hollywood, you name it. There is no truth in here. It's a website about video games. And not Christian video games though if someone wants to do that with SOM more power to them.

Quote
It is about truth vs untruth. Why good is good is because it's TRUE. Evil is bad because its logic is based in untruths.

Yeah that is kind of the whole point of this thread aside from the idea of rebranding video games with the more holistic notion of irreality. And a lot of our fiction is modeled on Christianity which itself is modeled on other religions. People who consume a lot of media probably know more about Christianity than most people who go to church. If by know you mean mythology and not sexual intercourse (ie. know in the Biblical sense)

Quote
The Latin "light" root in Lucifer is to remind how alluring a false light (evil) can be. False light that draws people away from truth - just like your arguments' logic, bent and distorted half truths that slowly lead to believing a monstrously distorted lie.

There is a pre-Christian Roman god called Lucifer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus_%28morning_star%29) not that it matters. Light is associated with enlightenment and justice. Don't ask me why. But it's that cultural baggage that literature is made of.

Quote
Satan is not a Hebrew term, but a generic arab term for the "prosecutor" who accused defendants in a legal trial. All the rubbish and hype that has been piled on the term through the years is not part of the original message of Christ. You see, when you call yourself a "Christian" you don't get plugged into a communal brain that makes you like every other Christian. Christians have the same flaws and dissension that all humans have (duh) so you can hardly fault Christianity for the behavior of people who profess to be Christians. The whole point of Christianity is that humans are generally ignorant hypocrites so why say Christianity is flawed when Christians act ignorant and hypocritical?

There is nothing particularly Christian or anti-Christian in this thread except that popular culture is kind of suffused with this stuff for better or worse. It's our heritage. What can you do. These are archetypes that form a kind of hidden language that all of that fantasy fanfiction you denounce is written in.

Quote
You have a great deal of prognostication in your post which, just like Jung's blather, is the wishful thinking of a mind so lost in itself that it thinks truth begins and ends with its comprehension. Other than a few fringe groups, who have been given an air of legitimacy by the internet's ability to spread 'fertilizer' on a mass scale, I see no general consensus or compelling evidence that the world is moving in the directions you propose. You've immersed yourself in the fantasy propaganda of fringe groups so much that you've lost site of reality. But just like with a Lemming, believing a lie does not make it true. It just justifies ignoring the truth until it's too late.

Wolf. Try to separate fantasy and reality for only a second. The subject of this thread is "What is the nature of irreality?" ... it could just as well read "what is the nature of fantasy?". If you interact with supernatural Christian beings or whatever that's groovy, if you take it on an article of faith for god knows what reason, that's fine too. But at the end of the day for most people we don't live in a fantastical world. That's what we read books and play video games for. We do it because that's all there is to do.

Quote
You should give up the irreality of the computer, go find a wife and spend your life building a good life for your family.  :saint:

Now this is totally inappropriate behavior. In fact the entire post should probably be moved to the the holding area (http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/bbs2/index.php?board=3.0) as a prime example of how not to post. But as much as I would like to put that sub forum to use. I expected some backlash here from a Christian perspective (or whatever) so I will just leave it here if you don't mind.

Were these kinds of personal accusations leveled at any other user I would pull it immediately. Anyway let it be known there is no "religious" agenda to this website. Our fantasy is strictly fantasy. Hopefully no one will be killed over it or anything :coffee:


PS: Is it just me? Or do silly half-baked clichés not sound delicious? :evil:
« Last Edit: February 10, 2013, 12:29:07 AM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #3 on: February 12, 2013, 09:00:57 PM »

Just to be clear. This thread posits a few things. And it intentionally does it in a heady way just to demonstrate how much freedom there is for exploration in King's Field alone. The title (King's Field) itself is so beautifully open ended. To my mind it refers to the mental realm of the individual. It's a virtual field where you are the king. Even if you are just a lowly adventurer and some other NPC is the king, unbeknownst to him, you are the king.

By few I mean 3...

1) People will be playing more video games. People live to play games. People make babies so those babies can play games. Everyone else twiddles their life away on Face**** and gets laid. The games will get ever more convincing and compelling. It's hard to argue otherwise. Video games are better than war games. People like games and story telling media in general. They allow you to live out other lives, simpler lives, and most of all consequence free lives.

Video games will become ever more popular. And you will probably want to play them with handheld game controllers. So much for prognostication.

2) Truth vs Untruth makes for more interesting games than Good vs Evil. In King's Field we have the Truth Glass. Very few games actually make the player question the story that is presented to them. Much less make it a theme. And ultimately truths are relative and often incomplete and sometimes  even malleable. This also adds an element of mystery.

And if you think of a well structured game as a kind of therapy, you can ask yourself how does the game help the player better understand themselves. What if anything does the player learn from their ordeal? So in a way a player is in search of truth. Even truths that they can apply to real world experiences. Not unlike Never Ending Story or Stuart Saves His Family (sorry, that one was on television the other day)

Finally how can we help gamers be better critical thinkers. Go onto GameFaqs and you will discover that this is an epidemic.

3) There is a lot of fun to be had in "breaking the fourth wall" and there is a lot of potential for that with SOM. It's kind of the next level after first person.  It's not something you do to drive crazy people crazier. Though if religion is any indication there is no shortage of people who will believe anything. It's just another tool in a story teller's tool belt. A way to layer on meaning and subtext and really get inside the player's head. When we are entranced by the game we are willing to suspend belief. It's a kind of nirvana where the only thing that separates you from the game is your bladder or stomach growling reminding you that this is not a dream.


EDITED: Who wants to place bets on how long before Apple announces its new iReality service? :doh:
« Last Edit: February 12, 2013, 11:14:08 PM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #4 on: May 06, 2014, 07:09:22 AM »

I am rereading old topics tonight for ideas.

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 :evils:

These are things I've grappled with for a while. I think I have an answer now, and its a lot more pedestrian I think, but good. It comes out of an essay I wrote for a Patreon account/whatever for myself and this work, that is now linked to on the Support page of this website.

Basically my concept now, and I think this is final, for the "graphic novel" equivalent of video games is "action adventure". Not action-adventure game, just plain action adventure. Like video->action game->adventure.

I think this is a new medium that permanently take the game out of games. If a game has game-like elements then it's not a pure action-adventure (it's an action-adventure game)


This works because anything that embeds you in a story is an Adventure by definition. And because its real-time and fully 3D (these are the base requirements for this medium) it will always entail Action.

If you want to shorten it, it just becomes Adventure. We'll know what people mean because no one in their right mind goes on adventures anymore!


Also, as for my stance on how to enmesh Sword of Moonlight as deep into literature as possible. My feelings are that the base world of King's Field must be literary. So it must be generated from literature. I think there are two main strains of modern literature and modern culture that are undeniable, the obvious winners.

I think that's religion pretty much, but especially the Abrahamic kinds. Full disclosure, I'm not religious, but I know when to admit defeat. And I think vampires. There has to be vampires. In fact I saw Shadow of the Vampire for the first time last night, and I watched Nosferatu again afterwards on Netflix to see if it was really anything like SOTV, because that's not how I remembered it at all...

And of course, if you have vampires you necessarily have the religions, because their weaknesses are crosses and stuff, and there is just no other way to explain that kind of thing. But the reason I focus down on these is not because I am a huge fan, but because I think the King's Field universe must be virtual, so my concept of it is is nothing in it is real. It's like if you took a library and put in in a blender and fed that smoothie to a super computer and asked it to turn it into the coolest thing it can!

That's pretty much it for me. My working concept, and I think final concept, is the super computer crunches all of the literature and decides to create the King's Field verse, which is like our world, since our world/literature is the input, but it isn't. All of the dragons and really everything in the universe is really just the dragon in revelations who falls down to earth, and actually is the earth. And the dragon is kicked down by the other dragons in heaven, which is something you can never see since its outside the creation. The dragons are angels, and there is really no distinction, the words are interchangeable. Their true forms are dragons. If they appear as men/women I believe they should not have wings, they don't need them, and that looks silly.

The red dragon that is all of creation / Sylval is kicked out of heaven by archangel Michael whose weapons are the Moonlight and Dark Slayer. Both of those weapons are pulled into creation by the dragon. And when the universe ends, everything happens in reverse, the dragons all coalesce back into Sylval, and try again to enter heaven, only to be kicked out again, so that a feedback loop is formed and every repeat of the cycle feeds back into the next.

After so many cycles the super computer has pretty much lost track of that the Moonlight and Dark Slayer were originally the Holy Spear and Grail from legends of Christianity that it read about in a lot of the literature that it used to initialize the universe. And the "true cross" is when the Moonlight and Dark Slayer are combined...

And this explains why crosses freakout vampires. Because after the initial formation of the universe everything eventually settles down, but the vampires still remain from the old world (they have ground up shards of the Dark Slayer that runs through their bloodstream, and that's what makes them immortal/magical like the old world)

My other rationale is I want to create a universe that is as compatible as possible with Hideyuki Kikuchi's novels, since I think they are perfect fits for King's Field. They have Fire, Earth, Wind, and Water when it comes to magic like King's Field. And I think his stuff is about a century ahead of its time, and so perfectly fit for the 21st century. He's basically obsessed with vampires since he was a kid, but does write other things.


PS: Vampires are not supposed to have shadows! But since that's really hard to do on a movie set most vampires in film have shadows. But games / digital media shouldn't have that problem at all.

« Last Edit: May 06, 2014, 07:15:24 AM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #5 on: June 30, 2014, 03:32:01 PM »

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:

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.

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)
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #6 on: September 13, 2014, 08:35:54 AM »

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.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2014, 01:24:01 PM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #7 on: September 13, 2014, 09:56:48 AM »

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.
« Last Edit: September 13, 2014, 12:07:03 PM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #8 on: September 14, 2014, 02:57:47 AM »

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.
« Last Edit: September 14, 2014, 03:09:48 AM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #9 on: December 05, 2014, 07:06:25 AM »

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.
« Last Edit: January 01, 2017, 09:32:27 AM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #10 on: July 02, 2015, 05:02:06 PM »

I came across a more succinct expression of this dichotomy:

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth”.

This is from a long article on Kill Screen intoning the virtues of "low-poly" (http://killscreendaily.com/articles/poly-generational/)

The words are Pablo Picasso's:

From Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art by Alfred H. Barr Jr., published for The Museum of Modern Art by Arno Press, New York, 1980.

The following [excerpted] statement was made in Spanish to Marius de Zayas. Picasso approved de Zayas' manuscript before it was translated into English and published in The Arts (New York, May 1923) under the title "Picasso Speaks."

I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the pocketbook that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.

Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.

The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible, and therefore, the unpaintable.

They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.


The central tenet is is Seath is the lie, and Guyra is the truth (and King's Field is the artifice.)


PS: Kill Screen has slowly grown on me. It's probably the video game press website that most closely embodies what I'd like to see a video game press be like. For no real reason that I can tell the articles aren't always about video games, and I can't really see a relationship to video games within the articles that aren't, but they are often interesting anyway. Probably it's a mix of caprice and the mindset that video games should reflect "the culture" and feedback into it. Probably mostly caprice. I can't tell what its readership is like. All of the comments and social features seem to be broken. I doubt it's because of "adblocking" and I doubt it's because I'm not registered/logged in. There are just no comments or anything, but there are vestigial buttons to make comments. It's kind of weird. I think it's also a print magazine somehow.


EDITD: For the record I don't really agree with the sentiment of the article that seems to be that low-poly is a kind of art like Cubism that should be exaggerated and stark. That's fine, but I think games just tend to look better with fewer polygons, that there is no inherent value in mimicking our particular reality, and that in general it's more cost prohibitive to do that (eg. uses more electricity) and doesn't elucidate anything; indeed if anything to the contrary. I do agree with the article that it's just stupid to chase reality, especially at the expense of everything else, and it's just boring, boring as any old photograph.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2015, 05:19:09 PM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #11 on: February 02, 2016, 07:21:14 PM »

I am slowly becoming accustomed to pronouncing Guyra correctly, inside my head. It still sounds weird to me to say it, so I don't. But I will obviously once the regenesis of King's Field is underway.

I was watching a retrospective "documentary" about the musical act, Daft Punk, the other day. I don't know, I've always found their compositions overrated. I still think Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra, or even Pet Shop Boys or New Order have a much stronger house/electronic sound (which I am more inclined to listen to recreationally.) These bands are considered forerunners of electronic/synth pop.

But regardless, one of the members of Daft Punk is called Guy-Man. I am not sure where the name Guy comes from. It may be French or Portuguese or something else. But it is pronounced like Guyra. It may not be a coincidence that Jean uses the French spelling (pronounced like Jon) and Guyra is spelled this way (not like guy, but like gi.) Just an odd factoid I picked up on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy-Manuel_de_Homem-Christo
« Last Edit: February 02, 2016, 07:30:00 PM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #12 on: February 19, 2016, 10:10:49 AM »

I've been wanting to post something, anything of late.

In this (https://killscreen.com/articles/devil-daggers-is-one-hell-of-a-time/) article about what looks like a pretty spiffy game (I recommend checking it out on Youtube) there is a link to a website hosted by Google that is like the ravings of a madman. It seems like the writer chose to use this link very rashly. But for all my vague interest in demonology, owing to my Megami Tensei days, I wanted to find a better source to trace this name used by the creator of this game... a few searches didn't reveal much, but it introduced me to a figure named Rudolf Steiner I was not previously familiar with...

And that got me to this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy#Ethics) Wikipedia page for an "science-based" esoteric movement he was responsible for, prior to WWI.

I wanted to share a link to this game, but didn't have good reason to. But this gives me an excuse. This section on this page says:

The anthroposophical view is that good is found in the balance between two polar, generally evil influences on world and human evolution. Two spiritual adversaries endeavor to tempt and corrupt humanity: these are often described through their mythological embodiments, Lucifer and his counterpart Ahriman, which have both positive and negative aspects. Lucifer is the light spirit, which "plays on human pride and offers the delusion of divinity", but also motivates creativity and spirituality; Ahriman is the dark spirit, which tempts human beings to "...deny [their] link with divinity and to live entirely on the material plane", but also stimulates intellectualty and technology. Both figures exert a negative effect on humanity when their influence becomes misplaced or one-sided, yet their influences are necessary for human freedom to unfold.[1][4]

Each human being has the task to find a balance between these opposing influences, and each is helped in this task by the mediation of the Representative of Humanity, also known as the Christ being, a spiritual entity who stands between and harmonizes the two extremes.[4]

Now I don't know where this comes from. If it's accurate, and if so original or modern interpretation of the beliefs of the people gathered under the umbrella of this fantastical movement. But IT DOES roughly approximate the conceit I've entailed for Seath and Guyra...

It's clearly borrowing from Zoroastrianism, on of the oldest religions that looks like modern Western religion. I believe Hinduism style religion is older--said to be the oldest. It does what I am inclined to do, assume Lucifer is code for Ahura Mazda, or seems to. Even though I only recently looked into this view of Lucifer, and although it's very popular today, by hook or crook, it seems to be solely based on the Book of Enoch, some apocrypha, that likely inspired Milton to write Paradise Lost, which is where this domination by Lucifer in modern day fiction hails from, reinforced by modern tomes, like Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

I think it's synthesis of all of these fantasy characters from our tall tales past, that can be done rationally more or less, and it points to this kind of configuration, that you see repeated everywhere. Maybe that lends it weight--in some form of perverse speculative spiritualism--I don't know.


My only quibble is this group gets it wrong. In my book the role of "Lucifer" and Ahriman need be reversed. So in this quote the qualities attributed to Lucifer should be attributed to Ahriman (or more commonly known as Angra Mainyu) and vice versa. And then the Lucifer (Ahura Mazda) figure becomes Guyra, and the Ahriman (Angra Mainyu) becomes Seath. Lucifer is associated with light, and Ahriman darkness, but this is dealt with by sleight of hand... as Guyra is the light dragon, as black absorbs light, is photophilic, and vice versa for Seath.

The "Anthroposophy" people are unique in describing both urges as "evil" although the section go on to describe them as also vital, in equal parts. Usually Ahura Mazda is said to be pure goodness, but I don't think Guyra is best served by that role, as a character. And the quote says finding the balance is served by the model of "Christ". Which for better or worse I intend for the Moonlight and Dark Slayer to represent Christ. It's corny, but if there are going to be vampires, then there will be crosses, so that's that! What can I say, he's very popular. It wouldn't be a representation of humanity without it.

Only since the whole universe of King's Field is a fiction wrapped in a fiction, there is no actual Christ figure. It's there symbolically in the form of the twin swords. The swords belong to St. Michael in his many forms, who is a character who is only ever seen sidelong. There is a place like heaven where Michael is, or at least is partly, but it's unknowable, and to see Michael as he is there is impossible, but I think there can be a scene at the very end of it all, the depiction of the final moment where Michael is astride heaven and earth and so vaguely perceivable. And spoiler alert, he's really just Silval, or Silval is an alter-ego of Michael, and probably Michael is the ego of the supercomputer that's tasked with creating the dream-like VR world, so this computer is the dreamer so-to-speak, and also Michael, all self-contained, and we the player-characters are invaders inhabiting the figments of its dreaming imagination (are we one more level of fiction removed? Who can rightly say.)


PS: I want to add that Seath and Guyra are squarely both Earth Dragons in my working model. These are dragons that are instinctively cunning and deceitful. Their qualities are to mimic other kinds of dragons, and have no true qualities of their own otherwise. They are the model for the serpent. But this is merely their nature. It's not to say that they cannot have enduring qualities and good intentions. Indeed my private view is that Guyra is more or less the unsung hero of the KF universe, and that Seath is its arch villain. So I think the real challenge will be how to elevate Seath to a place of prominence. I want to associate Seath with the arts and nature, those are his/her/their main virtues. Inspiration. I also believe these twin dragons represent something more primal that is intangible that even they cannot place. For Seath this becomes Leon Shore, who is a character like Satan, a peer to Michael, and maybe in Guyra's case something like Lucifer. I don't know. He's certainly popular as well. The angel of our times that almost seems invented. I would rather not go there in the KF universe, but it would make for interesting Megami Tensei crossover! You can think of these figures like prime directives, aspects of the super-computer's programming.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2016, 10:56:06 AM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #13 on: February 21, 2016, 11:39:46 AM »

EDITED: Rereading this post now, I am reminded that upon further digging that day (it was an off-day for me, a half-day, make a pizza day) I unearthed some potentially interesting ideas:

For people who want to believe in magic (magick!) there's a character called the "Dweller on the Threshold" or something like this. I think I mainly know it from Twin Peaks (which is being continued this year on ShowTime! 25yrs later) which seems like pure fiction, as these things almost always do upon deeper inspection. I mean really, imagine living in a pre-Internet world and coming across all of these pseudo-fiction books on magic and things, almost assuredly all crap written by desperate scammers trying to put food in their mouths...

But anyway! It's still a pretty good concept. Good enough for David Lynch. In fairness a lot of Rudolf Steiner's group (which seems like it was chiefly the German branch of the Theosophy club of the time, only commandeered by Steiner. Another fun fact, Andrei Tarkovsky planned to make a film or something about Steiner before his untimely demise) recognized that fiction or myth was the proper venue for talk of magic and things unseen, although they also took seriously claims of clairvoyance, which is not a contemptible idea either; if only humans were not so weak and prone to inventing elaborate events for attention and succor...

Rudolf Steiner staged some plays, four in all I think, that were supposed to represent "mysteries", an ancient tradition of melding theater with activities of "mystery religions". In at least one this "Dweller on the Threshold" is used. I think generally to represent a Satan like figure, the arch nemesis of all of creation, although also a doppelganger, as if this is an aspect of each and every one of us. Wikipedia's article says that Steiner treats this as an amalgam of the twin urges from the main post, in "Anthroposophy" Lucifer and Ahriman. Still I think he jumps on the bandwagon of saying that this character is something to be reconciled with, and confronts the spiritual adept whenever they cross to-and-fro between the earthly and astral realms.

Now! I don't know if this flavor of King's Field needs an astral realm. I think the realm of dreams is sufficient for this purpose. Linking these two urges is simple for Guyra and Seath since, Valad is both of them. So it seems that if the "Dweller on the Threshold" business is to be appropriated, that this character must be Valad, as he lives on in the imaginary afterlife, the stuff of dreams. And to be clear, here I am talking about the after-universe, the "X" universe, which is probably described in this thread, but if not it is elsewhere.

I'd already decided to use Valad and this way, and to call him Abraxas in this modern form. Abraxas comes from Carl Jung, but also old magical talismans. So functional Valad become the initiator of magic awakening in the X universe. So when a person first gains some kind of magic, they will typically come face to face with a form of Valad in their dreams. Magic works solely via the Dark Slayer. So sorry, reading magic books alone won't get you anywhere in the X universe. You'll need a fragment of the Dark Slayer, or also called the Holy Grail. Magic talismans like Abraxas stones may have a small microscopic fragment of the dark crystal housed somewhere within them.

My intention is to weave a modern universe that feels like the real universe. So in this fiction there is a grain of truth to many of the ravings of histories men and women of magical tidings. So code words for Abraxas become the Dweller on the Threshold and so on. No one knows their true name, Valad, other than some of the old-timers held-over from the pre-universe world where Verdite and Elegria once existed.


Another interesting artifact of the history of professed magicians and sorcerers is Dee's "Enochian Language". (Not necessarily related to that "Book of Enoch" from earlier ago.) John Dee was a scientific/mystical adviser to Elizabeth I. Derek Jarman uses him in his Jubilee to transport Elizabeth to a post-punk wasteland of an imagined late-20th century, accompanied by Aerial from The Tempest.

I've never been crazy about this kind of magic. I mean esthetically. Even though it's considered one of the more impressive lineage's, and certainly the most elaborate one. It grew out of a traditional approach, the workings of the magic were supposedly given to Dee by angels, in a scene very reminiscent of how the Mormon religion was given to its founder. So it's very easy to have fun at its expense. But angels and demons handing over magical codes is nothing new. It's a tradition probably as old as angels and demons themselves.


Anyway ... the only real reason it's interesting, is because it's very well suited to King's Field's magic. Mainly because it's based precisely on the same five-elements, and organizes them in to tables, more or less how I plan to combine magics in the new King's Field games: where there is just a Fire magic, and using it does all of things to do with fire. Or if you want Ice, then use both Water and Wind, and now you have ice. In this model you can imagine mapping the four elements to the face buttons on the PlayStation controller, and pressing two buttons at the same time to perform ice spells (edited: or rather to construct an ice "Field" from within which to perform spells until the field's energy gives way)

In any case, it would take some work to make the Enochian magic seem cool, but I figure it's a strong candidate for representing a lot of magic systematically in the X universe, because it's very KF-like. Because the X universe is based on historical events, this is as simple as recognizing that fictional Dee really did fairly recently converse with angels, and his techniques more or less work, and then you can build on that to quickly establish something like KF magic in a modern setting that works like we expect violent video games to work where "magic" is involved. My guess is in this fantasy other-Earth almost all rumors of magic will be wide-open to plundering ... if only because it's so less interesting to say their purveyors were all cranks! I mean that's just not an approach that'd ever manage to be as broadly popular as "Star Wars" for example.

Somewhere on Wikipedia it's suggested that Dee's Enochian could be an amusing cover story for then military applications involving something like modern day cryptography--or just goofing about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian_magic
« Last Edit: February 21, 2016, 12:38:25 PM by Holy Diver »
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Holey Moley says,
« Reply #14 on: June 07, 2016, 09:43:42 PM »

Funny story. I was going to post this in Random News, but it's inadvertently about Seath.

I've noticed lots of wordplay in King's Field games through the years. It could just be my imagination. But anyway, yesterday my brother was asking me about the final water magic spell in King's Field 2. I didn't have a good answer for him. I told him maybe the magic isn't just water based...

But I realized today that because of how KF2 is setup, that all of the magic would be single-element based, and since "Seath" is learned from a water crystal, then it is presumably a pure water attack. (Incidentally I don't know if KF3 has mixed magic attacks or not. It has a somewhat different system.)

So I started thinking about what it could be, and loaded my KF2 game up to see how it was spelled and if it had a description. It is spelled just like Seath, but I'd already decided at that point that it's probably better translated as Seethe, and I just wanted to be certain.

We think of "seethe" in English in terms of seething-with-anger I think. But the literal definition is more like a surging/boiling water, so it's a perfect name for a damaging water attack to be fair...

And great wordplay if the writers intended for it to be a misdirect, since at this point Seath is associate primarily with the fountain maiden, who is associated with water, and worshiped by the old high-elves, who prized the fountain, so much so to worship its statue.

It isn't difficult to wonder if the entire plot involving Seath didn't develop organically out of the name of this spell. This could even be the genesis of Seath's character.

« Last Edit: June 11, 2016, 09:01:03 PM by Holy Diver »
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