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Posted on 2017/10/10 by
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Mountbatten probe

YouTube video for context

The first artefact from the Mordecai Richler collection that I choose to look at is the biography of Earl Louis Mountbatten of Burma. It is a weighty tome, 756 pages, about one and a half kilos, hard cover with book jacket, described by the author as ‘massive. The size is a conventional 6.5 x 9.5”, 2 inches thick, published in 1985:

first photo

Richler’s first edition describes it as A Biography, whereas the UK origin second reprint emphasises that this is the official biography. In the Richler collection copy, a north American edition, Mountbatten is pictured as a Commander in the Royal Navy in 1932, a much more dashing version than the second printing of the much older Mountbatten with his admiral’s epaulettes and more serious expression, perhaps reflecting the excitement of the new world and the nostalgia of the old, and their different markets.

There is no annotation in this book and it shows little sign of use. Richler may never have opened it. The cataloguers put it in ‘World History,’ and that is a good decision. Mountbatten’s story is much more than World War II.

As Gerard Genette suggest in Paratexts, the title and subject for the book carry the authority of someone who is a household name in England for his mostly distinguished naval career; that it was written by the Eton and Oxford educated author of Addington and King William IV, Philip Ziegler, ensured a wide readership. It would not have sold so well as ‘First Sea Lord’ (Genette 2, 7-8).

Professor Wershler, in conversation, suggested that the position of the book on the shelf, and enquiry into adjacent volumes might be revealing. Here is Mountbatten’s shelf:

Second photo

The librarian positioned Mountbatten at the opposite end of the shelf from the 1997 biography of his wife, Edwina Mountbatten. He was married to his work, and she was a magnificent partner in this endeavour, but as Ziegler says, overbearing in the marriage; in short, Mountbatten was a lonely man (Ziegler 483, 693). As both Ziegler and the author of Edwina Mountbatten, A Life of her Own, Janet Morgan, agree, the real love of her life was Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘If there was any physical element it can only have been of minor importance to either party,’ Ziegler says, somewhat stuffily (473). Morgan says nothing like that happened, indeed, at that time and place it would have been unthought of. Lady Mountbatten and Nehru did correspond daily, and the letters were ‘rhapsodic but chaste,’ but they denied themselves physical passion (Morgan 440).

Mountbatten is also lonely on the shelf, separated from Edwina by other failed partnerships: Katherine of France is left with a babe in arms when Henry V dies of dysentery fighting in France, Henry VIII murders the subject of his adjacent book, his Queen Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I’s decision to avoid a partnership led to the public execution of her nephew’s son, and the volume of Wallis and Edward reflect the values of which Louis disapproved (Ziegler 96). Edwina had left-wing tendencies, so she would not have minded her biography next to that of Aneurin Bevan, the welsh coal-miner’s son (502). On the surface the Lord Louis and Edwina cooperated well, but as Morgan says, ‘Dickie’s chief failing was that he was not Nehru’ (Morgan 436).

From today’s excerpt from The System of Objects, how does Mountbatten satisfy Baudrillard’s proforma for collecting? It does add authenticity to Richler’s knowledge of twentieth century history, it could be one of a series if linked with the biography of Mountbatten’s wife, and may have a connection to nostalgia; Richler did write an anthology of writings about World War II (Baudrillard 75, 88, 95).  It does not seem to be a passionate acquisition, it is not annotated, and it has no discernible intimacy (87-8).  We also have to ask if Richler was impoverished or inhuman because he collected books? (106). I don’t think so.

Elsewhere in Baudrillard, we could also ask if we think the Richler Collection has a style, how far do we think the collection was manipulated by the collector, did it give him gratification and does it constitute a Richler brand? (147, 153, 177, 191).

How far is Baudrillard relevant to Richler as collector? The Richler collection is principally books, and Mordecai Richler was an avid reader, as Charles Foran’s biography of him demonstrates (Foran 85-6, 201, 568). According to Foran, Richler was more a collector of stories for his writing than a collector of objects.

Works Cited and Consulted

‘Mountbatten: Death of a Royal’ A Documentary. YouTube, uploaded by AngelDocs, 8 February, 2013,  www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0H2SCdnKtE&t=10s.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 1996. Print.

Foran, Charles. Mordecai : The Life & Times. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2010. Print.

Genette, Gérard. Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation.  New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Morgan, Janet. Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. Print.

Richler, Mordecai. Writers on World War II: An Anthology. Toronto: Viking, 1991. Print.

Ziegler, Philip. Mountbatten: A Biography. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985. Print.

Raymond B

 

Posted on 2017/10/10 by
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After Looking at Mordecai Richler’s Library

What was lost when Mordecai Richler’s library moved from Lake Magog to LB 655 and 677 in the English Department at Concordia University? This essay contends that the “Richler Library” should not be seen as a collection that was simply looking for a warm and happy home and found it. Any writer’s library is not, as Richard Oram presents in his Handbook on the topic, “a set of books or other printed works owned by the author at a particular time” (1-2). A library is not “all the books and stuff” but a far-reaching assemblage and socially realized space that cannot be packed up, moved, cleaned up, and reordered without undergoing a sea change.

Richler’s library at Lake Magog

It is an open question if the assemblage and the space it produces can survive this change, no matter curatorial resuscitation efforts. It is another question if the intensely personal assemblage of a writer’s library can survive the death of its author, himself or herself not just its creator and caretaker, but one of its critical components.

The new order of Mordecai Richler’s private library is arbitrary. Its meticulous touch only emphasizes this. The collection’s objects have been classified, duly separated, and stored apart in two rooms and a hallway. Miscellany have been locked away in white cupboards. A salient system of organization is at work, which could have been another system. For the books, it is the system of classification of the Library of Congress. One slip of paper or more sticks out of each book, announcing that it is documented: it has its papers and can pass into this new world and exist on the new terms of production. Without its papers, it would be lost here. It would be an illegal in perceived need of legalization, or else. These slips visually chop up the collection—they catch the eye and create a visual stutter—a constant reminder that the laws of this library are one of its most active dimensions, and they are not the old laws.

Locked cupboards holding some of Richler’s stuff, in the hallway outside the Richler Rooms

A library’s organization is part of its constitution. This aspect of the old assemblage is lost. This is no minor loss, though it is convenient to ignore it. In Collecting, Curating, and Researching Writers’ Libraries: A Handbook, Richard Oram glosses over the question of how writers’ libraries are organized, saying, “I have never known a scholar to be very interested in it” (23). This is a big problem—a dead spot—in the study of these libraries. If the organization cannot be preserved, its absence should be well-noted and weighed in. It should haunt us. If the organization is somehow preserved, its impenetrability is another question.

What else is lost? If this were a garden, imagine all the plants are plucked up and put in the back of a truck. A new gardener comes, moves the plants and some of the rocks to another yard, then replants, prunes and spruces things up. Only desirable weeds make the cut. Is it the same garden? Not only has its original ordering logic, which includes its original chaos, been bowled over, but so has the composition of the garden. The composition of the library is lost, too. Its image is gone. In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin emphasizes the importance of a library’s composition, describing “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate” (60). It is not romantic to believe the composition—“the scene,” “the stage”—matters. It is romantic to believe that it does not and that somehow the library survives its loss.

The assemblage is limping before we examine its greatest loss: the gardener-writer himself. As Benjamin describes, the author is not just the owner but a part of the library. Not only does the author shape his collection, but his memories are housed there; the library presents these memories in turn, in repetition with revision, shaping the author.

Benjamin goes so far as to equate himself with his collection. He does so grammatically with an elegant comma. He writes, “the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with him, with his own collection” (61). “Him” = “his own collection.” At the conclusion of “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin plays out a dramatic trick—he pulls a trapdoor—emphasizing this symbiosis. In the final line, he abruptly exits, subsumed in the library he has just finished unpacking: “now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting” (67).

For Benjamin, the writer’s library is irrevocably personal. “For what else is this collection,” he writes, as he sorts through his books, “but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals” (60). Part of the library as assemblage is a highly individual “disorder to which habit has accommodated,” likely impossible for anyone else to follow and accommodate. This part of the library is within the author, and is so integral a part of him that Benjamin leaps to suggest that the loss of his books would be life-altering. Their loss could render one an invalid. And vice versa: the loss of the author in this situation would alter the library, which would never do the same kind of work and be the same space again.

There is a surprising and tender moment in Hannah Arendt’s “Introduction” to Benjamin’s Illuminations, in which she suggests that Benjamin, in fact, could not live without his library. Before describing the terrifying circumstances of his suicide on September 26, 1940, on the Franco-Spanish border—how the Spanish had closed the border that same day, blocking his already arduous route of escape—Arendt offers another reason for his death:

There were various reasons for this. The Gestapo had confiscated his Paris apartment, which contained his library (he had been able to get “the more important half” out of Germany) and many of his manuscripts, and he had reason to be concerned also about the others which, through the good offices of George Bataille, had been placed in the Bibliotèque Nationale prior to his flight from Paris to Lourdes, in unoccupied France. How was he to live without a library, how could he earn a living without the extensive collection of quotations and excerpts among his manuscripts?” (17-18)

“How was he to live without a library?” It is a question to honor, and one that circles back to ask: What is a writer’s library?

In The System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard provides another explanation for understanding the writer’s library as lifeblood.

What man gets from objects is not a guarantee of life after death but the possibility, from the present moment onwards, of continually experiencing the unfolding of his existence in a controlled, cyclical mode, symbolically transcending a real existence the irreversibility of whose progression he is powerless to affect…

Objects allow us to apply the work of mourning to ourselves right now, in everyday life, and this in turn allows us to live—to live regressively, no doubt, but at least to live. A person who collects is dead, but he literally survives himself through his collection, which (even while he lives) duplicates him infinitely, beyond death, by integrating death itself into the series, into the cycle. (104)

This theory is in harmony with Benjamin’s description of unpacking his library. Each book “duplicates him infinitely, beyond death,” in series. It is a cycle that stops with either the loss of the library or the loss of the author.

Benjamin’s ancestor here is Michel de Montaigne, who like Benjamin was at one with his library—his arrière boutique, to which he withdrew from court life to live among his books. De Montaigne saw his work as philosophy, defined in the title of one of his essays: “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die.” De Montaigne is like a DJ, sorting through his books and pulling samples to incorporate in his writing. His writing, his life, is a dance with his books. He keeps Baudrillard’s regressive but sustaining cycle going: “integrating death itself into the series.” In someone else’s hands, the cycle would not be the same; and without the cycle, the writer who now depends on it for his existence would be at a loss. Using Baudrillard’s terms, through their libraries Michel De Montaigne and Walter Benjamin “recite themselves, as it were, outside time” (103). They both claim to be writing about themselves (De Montaigne always, and Benjamin at the opening of “Unpacking My Library” is “speaking only about himself”). In talking about their libraries, they are talking about themselves: it’s equivalent. There is no de Montaigne apart from his library. For Benjamin, it’s the same.

In Oram’s Handbook to collecting writers’ libraries, he expresses surprise that the five writers interviewed for the book do not imagine their libraries surviving them. “More unexpectedly, most of the writers see their libraries as ephemeral and are reconciled to their eventual dispersal” (85). It seems like Oram is not listening to these writers, even though he pulled them into the conversation. If their libraries are “essentially ephemeral,” then they are “in essence” not something that can be preserved, like the writers themselves. What remains after a writer’s death is not his or her library, but a collection of archival materials.

To ground this argument, I am using Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as socially produced. This way, we can see moving a writer’s library from his house to an institution as moving it from the terms of production of the house to the terms of production of the institution. Each space is different: “Each is produced—and serves a purpose” (403). The writer’s library is a produced space that is beyond replication.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 2005; 1996.

Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 2007; 1969.

De Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Works :Essays, Travel Journal, Letters. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2003.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991.

Oram, Richard W., and Joseph Nicholson, eds. Collecting, Curating, and Researching Writers’ Libraries: A Handbook. Landham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 

Posted on 2017/10/10 by
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Collect Them All (Again): Ownership, Obsession, and Monetization in Mobile Gacha Games

Last February, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems released the first title in the twenty-seven-year-old Fire Emblem franchise specifically designed for mobile gameplay, and the only installment to operate on a platform other than a Nintendo console—emulation notwithstanding. As a strategy role playing game imbued with gambling elements, Fire Emblem Heroes conforms to an increasingly prevalent free-to-play (F2P) model known as the gacha game. While all but the newest players can complete the entirely of the game’s content with various degrees of ease without in-app purchases, Heroes nevertheless earned $114.9 million in revenue within its first six months, surpassing Super Mario Run—which retails for a flat $10—despite significantly fewer downloads. With the intention of interrogating how an ostensibly free game can exceed the earnings of a top-tier Nintendo IP, this probe explores how collecting operates as an incentivizing factor in gacha games that trade on pre-established intellectual property. Borrowing Nick Montford’s model for the analysis of video games as an organizing framework, this probe surveys issues of ownership, ephemerality, fan interest, and ethics to undertake a consideration of the monetization of digital collections.

Platform: On the Affordances of Mobile Technology

In 2011, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata declared that:

“[mobile gaming] is absolutely not under consideration. If we did this, Nintendo would cease to be Nintendo. It’s probably the correct decision in the sense that the moment we started to release games on smartphones, we’d make profits. However, I believe my responsibility is not to short-term profits, but to Nintendo’s mid- and long-term competitive strength” (Andriansang qtd. in Gilbert).

As it happens, the profits Iwata describes won out over Nintendo’s brand, which was subsequently reframed to include casual mobile games and gamers. Whereas consoles retail for hundreds of dollars, most people already own a mobile phone, and the abridged adaptations of main-series content of the kind we see in Heroes affords the ability to splinter content into digestible fragments playable on-the-go. Smartphone features like the push notification are strategically mobilized to incite players to check back frequently: “Fire Emblem Heroes: Your first summon is free!” is visible the instant a player turns on their phone the day new content is released. Moreover, unlike home console games, the collection of heroes in the mobile game are available wherever you are, whenever you want to peruse it.

Or is it?

Game Code: On Ownership and Ephemerality

The migration to mobile gaming brings with it new discursive frameworks of control. Digital piracy and the rampant trend of emulating video games have prompted Nintendo and Intelligent Systems to consider a model of game production wherein content is server-side, providing the developers with greater opportunities to regulate access. Players therefore have limited access over what is marketed as “their” collection. Within Heroes’ initial three months on the Google Play and Apple App stores, developers efficiently and effectively banned accounts with hacked or suspicious content, and foreclosed the possibility of emulation.

The result of Nintendo and Intelligent Systems’ control over the game code is the ephemerality of the digital collection. Whereas Amiibo or posable Figma figurines of characters exist as possessed by the owner until the plastic degrades or the owner resells or disposes of it, the digital collection of heroes exists insofar as Nintendo and Intelligent systems maintain the game and its servers. Since most gacha mobile games in North America were released between 2013 and the present, we currently have little ability to predict their lifespan, but the survival on the Japanese market has historically been a mere four to five years. [1]

Game Form: On the Capital of the Collect-Them-All Catchphrase

The term gacha, short for gachagacha, or gachapon, originated in Japan as an onomatopoeia for the practice of using toy capsule machines (Shibuya et al. 99-100). While Western freemium mobile games like Candy Crush, Farmville, and Clash of Clans encourage spending in order to progress through the game more quickly, gacha games are those in which one plays against their own impulses: the urge to exchange real-world currency to roll the dice for a randomly generated reward based off predetermined loot rarities, or the capacity to tolerate an imperfect collection.

The Wall of Gachapon at Akihabara. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The immediate success enjoyed by many of these games is predicated on their engagement with intellectual property that possesses a pre-existing and loyal fanbase: Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, and Star Trek Timelines are but some of the more well known and profitable games of its kind. In “The Non-Functional System, Or Subjective Discourse,” Jean Baudrillard notes the “the collector’s sublimity, then, derives not from the nature of the objects he collects […] but from his fanaticism” (3), and it is precisely this fan—with all that being a fan entails—who is the targeted consumer of these games. Still, the situation begs the question: if a player can make a one-time payment of $50 to purchase the latest Fire Emblem title for 3DS, gaining possession of not only the game card but all the playable heroes contained within, for what reason would they spend money on Heroes for a random chance at collecting the character?

In “Marvel and the Form of Motion Comics,” Darren Wershler and Kalervo A. Sinervo apply Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction to Marvel motion comics, arguing that “in the very process of creating a new version of itself, its economic structure never ceases to destroy itself from within” (188). Heroes likewise trades on the cultural capital of its intellectual property to incite players to collect beloved characters yet again. Heroes acknowledges the existence of previous Fire Emblem titles insofar as they host recognizable characters—and can be another source of revenue in a bi-directional relationship to Heroes—but subsequently destroys the content by re-releasing characters with new artwork—often vastly improved from the low-resolution models of the Famicom and NES era—on a different platform.

Again, Baudrillard unwittingly offers insight on the monetization of collector psychology in gacha video games:

The object attains exceptional value only by virtue of its absence. This is not simply a matter of covetuousness. One cannot but wonder whether collections are in fact meant to be completed (6).

With the rate at which content is released in Heroes, it is clear that the collection is most certainly not meant to be completed, especially not for the free gamer or casual spender. Yet the desire to complete this collection, in line with the examples Baudrillard himself gives, incites the player to place exceptional and exponential value onto a collection of pixels on a mobile screen. As a F2P game a player does not even realistically own, these characters are quite literally worthless, but to a collector of these avatars, a given unit can easily end up costing upwards of $1,000 due to the game’s gambling mechanic and the interface that sustains it.

Interface: On Lack and the Intangible Collection

Although much can be said about the interface of a gacha game like Heroes, I wish to foreground the Catalog of Heroes. True to its name, the Catalog features icons of all the heroes a player has collected, interspersed with the shadows of the characters they have not. The catalog plays a specific incentivizing role in urging players to spend money to fill in the gaps.

[J]ust one object no longer suffices: the fulfillment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects. This is why owning absolutely any object is always so satisfying and so disappointing at the same time (Baudrillard 1).

The satisfaction a player feels when summoning a new hero—replete with exclamation mark—is offset by a glance at the empty boxes in the catalog. So why aim for the complete collection? One reason is nostalgia Walter Benjamin expounds on ownership as being “the most intimate relationship that once can have to objects” (67), noting that the possession of books and his tangible engagement with them evokes memories of the cities in which they were found or read or stored. In many ways, then, the collection is a narrativization of personal history, using objects as shorthand for life experience in which nostalgic meaning is inscribed. Players who have spent nearly thirty years invested in the Fire Emblem series will have cultivated relationships to the cast of over 800 characters (only 176 are presently included in Heroes), and these characters may serve as reminders of who the player was at the time of a given game’s initial release. It could therefore be no surprise that a collector wishes to complete the catalogue of characters imbued with personal meaning.[2]

To the left, a screencap of the Catalog of Heroes. To the right, a screenshot of the primary interface players engage with.

Reception: On Ethics and Envy

While the length of this probe precludes me from fully exploring the phenomenon of collection in mobile games, there are two aspects related to reception that I wish to address, however incompletely. The first is the dubious ethics of producing a gacha game based on intellectual property historically marketed to young people. Much has been argued about the predatory practices of gacha games in general, but Fire Emblem Heroes in particular inculcates children into a highly addictive model for collecting their favorite characters.[3] The collection mechanic discussed above is strategically deployed to encourage users to make continued, large purchases with the release of new content even though the game can be enjoyed for free, and the sunk-cost fallacy is rhetorically deployed to maximize player retention and spending. The increasing ubiquity of the gacha game model necessitates critical consideration of how to protect at-risk individuals who, for love of a given IP, involve themselves in a predatory game, as well as what safeguards parents can put into place in order to protect their children. Who is responsible for educating players about the dangers of gambling? How do we reconcile “the problem of time [as] a fundamental aspect of collecting” (Baudrillard 9) with the ephemerality of the gacha game?

The final point I wish to make is with respect to the problematic ramifications of vilifying the gacha model, which include the dehumanization of people who actively and consentingly participate in it. A 2017 study of spending in F2P mobile games reports that 48% of F2P revenue is generated by a mere 0.19% of the playerbase (Allison 454). Both the industry and community boards such as Reddit and Gamepress refer to this fraction of players as whales. Just as Baudrillard notes that “collectors […] have something impoverished and inhuman about them” (17), players who invest in gacha mobile games are derided and dehumanized by players who have spent little to no money on the content, as can be seen through examples such as this meme by Reddit user MayorOfParadise or this graphic by MooseChangerPat, which declares that individuals who have spent between $1440-$2880 on the game “need to get a life.” Baudrillard notes:

at the terminal point of its regressive movement, the passion for objects ends up as pure jealousy. The joy of possession in its most profound form now derives from the value that objects can have for others and from the fact of depriving them thereof (11).

The vitriol with which high-spending players are received in gaming communities is therefore particularly fascinating in light of the fact that, unlike the collections Baudrillard and Benjamin describe, which foreground the uniqueness of each tangible object, the characters in Fire Emblem Heroes exist in near-infinite replication. The question thus becomes: how do we reframe and re-contextualize this argument when talking about digitally licensed content rather than a unique and priceless artefact, or is doing so impossible? How do we even qualify possession of something we cannot touch?

Recent announcements by Nintendo suggest that Fire Emblem Heroes is merely the beginning of the company’s foray into F2P mobile gaming and the profit margins they facilitate. As gacha games continue to be developed, harnessing the selling power of established intellectual property, these questions and those above merit further consideration in order to anticipate and understand the changing future of the industry.

Works Cited

Allison, Erik. “The High Cost of Free-to-Play Games: Consumer Protection in the New Digital Playground.”

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Non-Functional System, Or Subjective Discourse.” The System of Objects, translated by James Benedict. Verso, 1992, pp. 71-105.

Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books, 1968, pp.59-67.

Brian. “Fire Emblem Heroes Has Generated Over $100 Million so Far.” Nintendo Everything, 20 July 2017.

Fire Emblem Heroes. Intelligent Systems and Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development. 2017.

Gainsbury, Sally M., Nerilee Hing, Paul H. Delfabbro, and Daniel L. King. “A Taxonomy of Gambling and Casino Games via Social Media and Online Technologies.” International Gambling Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2014, pp. 196-213, DOI: 10.1080/14459795.2014.890634. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.

Gilbert, Ben. “The History Behind Nintendo’s Flip-Flop on Mobile Gaming.” Endgadget, 17 Mar. 2015. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

MayorOfParadise. “Whale BTW.” Reddit, 23 July 2017. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Montford, Nick. “Combat in Context.” Game Studies, vol. 6, no.1, 2006. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.

MooseChangerPat. “What Kind of Whale Are You?” Reddit, 20 June 2017. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Shibuya, Akiko, Mizuha Teramoto, and Akiyo Shoun. “In-Game Purchases and Event Features of Mobile Social Games in Japan.” Transnational Contexts of Development History, Sociality, and Society of Play, edited by S. A. Lee and A. Pulos. Springer International Publishing, 2017, pp. 95-122.

Skrebels, Joe. “Nintendo Aims to Make 2-3 Movie Games a Year from Now On.” ING, 7 Feb. 2017. Accessed 9 Oct. 2017.

Wei Shi, Savannah, Mu Xia, and Yun Huang. “From Minnows to Whales: An Empirical Study of Purchase Behavior in Freemium Social Games.” International Journal of Electronic Commerce, vol. 20, no. 2, 2016, pp. 177-207. DOI: 10.1080/10864415.2016.1087820. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.

Wershler, Darren and Kalervo A. Sinervo. “Marvel and the Form of Motion Comics.” Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and A Comics Universe, edited by Matt Yockey. University of Texas Press, 2017, pp. 187-206.

[1] In fairness, video games have gradually shifted from ownable, re-sellable media to microtransaction-based networked content over the last decade, ever since consoles gained the ability to connect to various developer stores via the internet. The increased prevalence of downloadable content (DLC) means that we have already had time to come to terms with the fact that our products now also rely on maintained services without which they offer merely incomplete collections. An example in keeping with the theme, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, released in 2008, had an online shop through which, under certain conditions, players could purchase items unattainable through standard gameplay. When Nintendo terminated Wi-Fi services for the DS and the Wii in 2014, they consequently terminated the ability for players to access certain collectible classes and items. Players who wished to play the game after 2014 were thus required to come to terms with the impossibility of ever amassing a complete collection of items.

[2] One positive note about the interface of digital as opposed to physical collecting is arguably the more ecological approach to collecting. Physical media has clear financial and ecological costs: materials need to be purchased, extracted, and refined. The completed objects are transported to warehouses that move the stock to smaller storage facilities, that in turn distribute the merchandise to shops that pay rent and employ staff. With digital content, the labour of coding, illustrating, writing, and developing the game still exists, but the material costs are greatly reduced to that of electricity and bandwidth—presuming no one buys a smartphone solely to play Fire Emblem Heroes. Collections of character figures often results in a box of plastic collecting dust, and old consoles make their way to garage sales and sidewalks, so perhaps the redeeming factor of gacha collections is the reduced impact of the ephemeral collection.

[3] For empirical studies and analyses of the dangers of including gambling elements in mobile games, see Allison, Gainsbury et al., Shibuya et al., and Wei Shi et al.

Posted on 2016/11/15 by
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The Last Time You Probed Me: Nicolas Bourriaud’s Exform and Jen Bervin’s Nets

I write this introduction post-facto, in order to denounce myself. I am guilty, though I know not for what. On the one hand I’m trying very hard to be critical; on the other hand, I must be critical of criticism; and by accusing criticism of being uncritical, I accuse myself.

This “probe” – in the most painful sense of the word – somehow weaves in words like “Jen Bervin’s Nets”, and “Nicolas Bourriaud’s The Exform“, but if the reader expects a straightforward definition of these terms, I will ask him to spare me that additional moral pain

First Circle of Hell

It is horrifying to me how much of close-reading criticism has as its task to present interpretations which, if the reader let his mind wander eventually, he would hit upon; criticism here functions as a physic in the worst sense. To name something as an exform, then, in opening up new meanings also operates the gesture which closes them off; it does the psychic work for the mind, leaving the mind more under the grasp of censorship.

I suppose what I might do is to offer my illegitimate masquerade of a materialist glossing over of Jen Bervin’s Nets. In the nets, the more one tries to read, the more one is confronted with the need to signify, the need to have context for meaning. What the Nets do is deconstruct and present the function of each contextual element of meaning. Is the author Jen Bervin, Shakespeare, myself, society? Are these words selected – how much of this selection is done by whom? To what am I supposed to tie these words? To themselves? To the words in the sonnets? To none? What is the nature of these ties? If no ties, why is the word doing things to me? Where have rhyme and metre gone? Do I miss them? In other words, the Nets force us to assemble an interpretive method from scratch.

Have I changed the Nets?

They cannot be changed because they are an object. Yes, I have changed them because they exist as phenomena. They cannot be changed because they are change itself. That is not the right question, because you are assuming that there is something to change. You are assuming that the Nets are a thing. The Nets are a thing, and exist as I define them. There is a truth to the Nets that can be discovered by consensus. We will discover what the Nets have always already been.

To say that the Nets force wide the void of meaning creates. A new meaning erupts. If it is taken, the beholder donates his authorship; or, it has already been robbed. The creation of such criticism works against the exform. To describe the exform is to avoid it.

The words in Nets do not mean anything on their own. The act of interpreting Nets brings to the fore the nature of tradition as tradition, of signifier as signifier, and their incompatibility; it opens up the very space of context, of interpretation. To characterize such an object as an exform is of course besides the point, there being no point at all; if we think without a centre, we do indeed describe the exform.

My Laptop

Will a materialist critique show everything? How does it interact with its own history? Can it be edited? Can words be erased? The trace of the erased word is invisible to the human audience, only the computer knows it. The laptop as object is completely aware of the essay, the laptop has a materialist understanding. Or does he? The laptop is unaware of anything outside the pressure on its keys; as far as it knows, it is struggling very hard to write an essay. Or perhaps it is composing one with ease.

From my perspective, the erasure is pure loss. The trace buries itself in me somehow and I must make its death meaningful as I forget it through new writing. Does the beholder experience the erasure as it is lived?

The erased is the space of the excluded. Erasure is the idealist gesture par excellence, yet only so if the erasure remains. That is, the veil must always hide the truth, which may only be viewed in glimpses. The veil draws attention to itself; thus what it veils is less what is behind it, than the fact that it is drawing attention away from what isn’t veiled. It is easy to read the Nets idealistically, whereby the gesture of erasure leaves intact the essence of the sonnet; this essence existing only by this gesture, by the gesture of interpretation; within that erasure itself would be located the truth. We might then say that there is nothing behind the veil but a void; we might then say that the erasure itself is truth.

To attempt a critique of Jen Bervin’s Nets is to work against them, to ignore them; to critique them is not to read them. I’ve highlighted some standard aspects of critical discourse which could be used in critiquing them, all calling attention to themselves, not the nets. “Beyond all date /////// bold” evokes a beach in me; there is no way I could justify that in standard criticism, in a standard close-reading; as I’ve mentioned, the nets are “open, porous, possible”, their author-function non-fixed, non-centred, radicant-like, perhaps; if anything is an exform, they should be. Yet this criticism has little to do with Nets.

 

Works Cited:

Bervin, Jen. Nets. 2004. Sixth printing, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Exform. Translated by Erik Butler. Verso, 2016.

Posted on 2016/11/15 by
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The Controller is Mightier than the Pen: How Video Games Blur the Lines of Authorship

There’s an argument to be made that the video game, as a medium, is inherently post-modern. If that, as a statement, is too general or perhaps diminutive, then it’s perhaps safer to say that the medium reflects certain key characteristics of post-modernism as it appears in art: there’s a tendency towards self-reflexivity, an arguably necessary awareness of its audience, an obvious emphasis on interactivity and art that is “used”, and a blurring of boundaries between the author and the reader, or the producer and the consumer.

probe3-wowyoulosexIn that sense, there’s almost no doubt that games are post-modern by nature: they do not exist as a passive means of entertainment, but require player interaction. Even the earliest of games had the “post-modern” tendency of, as it’s colloquially known, breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging the audience: consider non-diegetic text appearing over the screen that informs the player, ‘You lose!’, or a game over screen that asks, ‘Try again?’ – the audience is being directly addressed in these instances but rarely as a stylistic choice, simply because it’s the most efficient way of instructing the audience on what’s to come next. Games are “usable art” in the sense that the literature of a game – its stories, both embedded and emergent – cease to exist until someone interacts with the dormant coding and mechanics of the game. In his book “Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World”, Nicolas Bourriaud points to “an emerging culture of use, in which meaning is born of collaboration and negotiation between the artist and the one who comes to view the work.” (Bourriaud)

On that note, games afford audiences a certain authorship in the form of emergent narratives – narratives that come from gameplay choices and player action, as opposed to the embedded plot that might supply the game’s premise. This variability in narrative form is called out by Dr. Alistair Brown in his essay “Are Video Game Narratives Postmodern?”:

“A game like Mass Effect, with 250,000 words of dialogue, might well be studied narratologically, but if so it offers a very different type of “narrative” to that of Minecraft in which the only story is that which the player writes for themselves through their own methods of creation.” (Brown)

Brown speaks to the allegedly post-modern nature of games by asserting that “As long as it [is] talked in Barthesian terms about the death of the author and licensed the reader to act as co-producer of the text, literary theory could situate games within a model that stressed narrative variability”, but goes on to argue that to simply graft the literary characteristics of post-modernism onto games is ultimately unhelpful, as games operate differently from the way the novel, the film, or the poem operates. If all games are post-modern, then are any games really post-modern? What would a post-modern game be?

Brown quotes philosopher Alan Kirby who coins the term ‘pseudo-modernism’, which does in fact take into account the computer game. Kirby says:

“Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.” (Kirby, emphasis mine)

To effectively illustrate post- or pseudo-modernism in games, I look to a popular example: The Sims (Maxis Entertainment, Series, 2000-2016).

The Sims, as its catchy name would imply, is a game series built around the idea of simulation. The player is given an unparalleled amount of control over and asked to, essentially, create and maintain the lives of individual characters known as ‘sims’. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, designing the Sims’ physical appearances, crafting their personalities, aspirations, and character traits, building their homes, creating or managing their family and other inter-personal relations, climbing a career ladder, and more. To ask what is the exact goal or objective of The Sims is a foolhardy task, as the game is infinitely flexible to the playstyles of different players. Fulfilling a Sim’s ambitions and achieving monetary wealth and professional success is just as ‘valid’ a way to play as creating sims simply to drown them in a pool, or to not create sims at all and use the game simply as an interior decorating simulator. None of these playstyles result in a screen proclaiming that you have ‘won’ or ‘lost’, nor is there any ending set in stone within the game’s data. As such, The Sims finds its roots not in objective-based or competition-based games, but in toys like the dollhouse, that provide the player with a basic framework but invite them, ultimately, to create the cultural content of the ‘game’.

I choose to focus on a game that is so endlessly malleable because it exemplifies better than most Bourriaud’s concept of usable art. It would be much harder to map the narrative of The Sims onto another medium – for example, a film adaptation – as it would be for a more traditionally literary game like the Final Fantasy or Mass Effect series, both of which make use of far more traditional narrative devices. The Sims relies almost entirely on the player for any kind of story to emerge, and it’s this extreme level of authorship that speaks loudest to the post-modern notion of collaborative storytelling.

probe3-simsbuild

Bourriaud’s concept of postproduction is coded into the very way in which The Sims is played. As he claims, “The artistic question is no longer: “what can we make that is new?” but “how can we make do with what we have?” In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?” (Bourriaud). In The Sims, traditional gameplay occurs in two different ‘modes’ – ‘Live Mode’, in which Sims are controllable and go about their daily lives, ‘Buy/Build Mode’, in which the Sims are frozen in place and the player is free to manipulate the world around them, usually by buying and placing furniture, constructing walls and floors, and further customizing their homes. Players select ready-made objects, wallpapers, floor designs, and more from in-game catalogs and are then free to place them however they like. Aside from pre-made houses, the game offers no guidance on where to place furniture, leaving it up to the player and their assumed ability to recognize a 3D model of a toilet as a signifier for a real toilet and its functions, and thus choose to place it in the appropriate room of a home. As such, there’s nothing stopping a player from creating a room in which there is a toilet, a pool table, and a barbecue all together (The Sims’ allowance for absurdity is, of course, also recognizably post-modern). This is all to say that, while The Sims offers a staggering amount of creativity in its gameplay, the player is rarely creating raw material, but rather recontextualizing ready-made objects and symbols in order to create further meaning: there is nothing to distinguish a bathroom from a bedroom aside from the ways in which the player chooses to design them, often drawing on their familiarity with their real-life counterparts to create combinations of objects, wallpapers, floors, etc. to create spaces that are meaningful to the player (that is to say, legible as familiar to their real-life counterparts) as well as digitally meaningful to their Sims’ coding (for example, not creating a room in which sims play pool and use the toilet at the same time, as this would simply create friction that would cause the sims to act inefficiently). As Bourriaud puts it, unintentionally summarizing the gameplay ethos of The Sims: “It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects.” (Bourriaud)

Bourriaud says, “To learn how to use forms … is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them” (Bourriaud). As I’ve illustrated, the way The Sims is played is entirely about making it one’s own and tailoring gameplay to suit the individual player, but the way The Sims is used extends beyond its use as a game. The Sims can be used as, itself, a tool with which to create more art: there’s the obvious example of the game being used as a tool to create architectural art, interior designs, or character designs. Beyond even that, however, The Sims has been used to create comics, web series, music videos and other narrative forms.

probe3-simssuperman

 

These artists use the game’s assets and mechanics, in conjunction with photo or video editing software to generate more art. With the game’s ability to create unique-looking characters, the ease with which it allows the building of locations and backdrops, and its in-game camera feature capable of taking both still images and recording videos, there is no doubting the creative potential of The Sims as a generative tool. A game about recontextualizing symbolic objects to create meaningful spaces simultaneously offers symbols and materials ripe for the picking in order to create further meaningful art, a concept that strikes this academic as remarkably post-/pseudo-modern.

Posted on 2016/11/15 by
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Kowloon Chic: The Atemporality of Ghost in the Shell

With a live-action adaptation of the Ghost in the Shell franchise looming, I thought I’d take a crack at applying Bruce Sterling’s thoughts on the concept of ‘atemporality’ (as the concept applies to creative artists), to the films Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004).

In the first of these two films, viewers encounter a sci-fi vision of the future located somewhere between dystopia and utopia. The movie draws heavily from earlier films like Blade Runner; both films merged noir with cyberpunk aesthetics and dealt with the use of cyborgs (or androids in Blade Runner’s case) as tools of law enforcement.

In Ghost in the Shell, as in Blade Runner, existential questions about the nature of thought, consciousness, and ‘humanity’ for the cyborg permeate the narrative. But unlike Blade Runner, characters in Ghost in the Shell (particularly The Major Kusanagi), are not androids, but former humans that are now heavily posthuman.

Major Kusanagi’s brain is the only part of her physical body that still retains organic tissue, and even large parts of that organ are artificial. This leads the Major to wonder if she was ever human at all, since her memories could have been implanted, edited, or erased and, as she points out to her partner Batou at one point, she has no evidence that her brain is anything but completely artificial either. So what does this have to do with atemporality, and how does Ghost in the Shell stand up to Sterling’s criticisms of similar creative efforts?

Sterling criticizes efforts like Ghost in the Shell, characterizing them as “Frankenstein mashups” that “lead to the kind of leveling blandness of ‘world music’” (Sterling). However, Ghost in the Shell manages to “refuse the awe of the future [and] refuse reverence to the past” (Sterling), as Sterling urges his audience to do.

The universe of Ghost in the Shell acknowledges and explores both what Sterling calls the ‘Gothic High-Tech’ and what he terms ‘Favela Chic’ (i.e.: failed modes of historicizing culture and failed systems of knowledge management; and the underground, pseodu-punk, pseudo-legal network culture that’s emerging, or has emerged in the case of Ghost in the Shell, as the dominant order of society). The franchise transcends even vaguely-postmodern hybrid labels like ‘cyberpunk noir’ by attempting to represent responses to the projected dominance of network culture in markedly ahistorical ways.

The Major and one of her subordinates have an interesting conversation near the beginning of the film. The subordinate, Togusa, chose not to augment his body beyond the necessary brain implants required to maintain covert communication with his team. He even goes so far as to continue to use a barely-regulation old-school revolver as his weapon of choice. While Batou criticizes Togusa for this, Kusanagi reminds viewers that: “if we all reacted the same way we’d be predictable, and there’s always more than one way to view a situation…overspecialize and you breed in weakness. It’s slow death.” (Sterling)

Like Sterling’s hypothetical person who dresses like an Astronaut to perform their daily routine, Togusa embraces the outmodedness of his aesthetic and personal preferences, and this is seen as an advantage by Kusanagi. It’s a form of ‘temporal diversity’ that elevates the film (and its sequel) above the level of your everyday postmodern pastiche.

In Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the same team of detectives (minus Major Kusanagi, who has ‘ascended’ by merging with an AI at the cost of losing her individuality, becoming both a part of the network and a network in-and-of herself), investigate a rash of killings perpetrated by sex dolls.

As the plot progresses, both the advances and advantages of the future and the abuses and drawbacks of progress are showcased. Without giving too much away, the mass-copying of human consciousness and a massive submarine parked in international waters are involved. More existentialist banter ensues, this time with a few somewhat ham-fisted shout-outs to 18th century enlightenment thinkers like Descartes.

Speaking of AI, (on a side note) a recent article in New Scientist has presented some disturbing evidence of neural networks demonstrating a nascent ability to encrypt their own data. The Anthropocene was fun while it lasted. Prepare to ascend.

Back to Ghost in the Shell: to sum up and to laud the IP a bit, both films’ visuals are exquisite and both are worth watching (I actually like the sequel a bit better than the first movie, which I expect is blasphemous to admit to hard-core fans of the franchise). The Ghost in the Shell animated series is also worth checking out. At its best, the franchise echoes Sterling’s call for us to become “‘multi-temporal’, rather than multi-cultural” (Sterling) in order to more effectively interrogate how we form the parameters of what we consider ‘problems’ before trying to solve them. In working out the mysteries they encounter, the Major’s team performs this kind of interrogation of the structures that form the networks that entangle them.

Works Cited

Sterling, Bruce. “Atemporality for the Creative Artist.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 14 Nov. 2016.

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Posted on 2016/11/08 by
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You’ve Been Steampunk’d: Postmodernism Re-Imagined

Steampunk, a relatively recent genre, is most recognizably understood as a hybrid genre that includes contemporary technology, powered by steam, usually set in either the Victorian era or the Wild West. In his speech “Atemporality for the Creative Artist” Bruce Sterling describes steampunk as a “lost future” which is created by a process of “finding earlier methods of production, pretending that they’d never become defunct, and then adding on to those” (Sterling). The style spans across several genres, such as music, film, literature, jewelry, and, for some, has even become a way of life. It is a style that – as with most things – takes its inspiration from something pre-existing in order to create something new.

screen-shot-2016-11-08-at-10-56-32-pm

Yet with steampunk the question becomes: do these artists really create something fundamentally new or simply a variation out of that which already was? Though specifically targeting DJs and computer programmers, in the introduction to his book Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World Nicolas Bourriaud describes a set of notions that provide insight into one potential answer to this question:

“More and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products […] These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape” (1).

Steampunk is a genre that looks both at contemporary technology – in a way that people in the 1800s might have envisioned – it as well as 19th century technology imbued with modern technological capabilities. In both regards, the style is not a creation of an entirely new object, but rather the reinvention and reimagining of already existing objects. As described by Bourriaud, they do not manipulate raw material to form something entirely original, but instead take objects already in circulation and alter or tweak them until they become different objects. By this reasoning, one could argue that steampunk is not “new,” but rather simply a repurposing of old styles.

Image taken from etsy.com

 

However, the distinction here is more complex. Steampunk’s particular type of artistic re-working also spills over into other domains, as different clothing and jewelry styles are merged to form a type of fashion so unique it can no longer simply be termed ‘Victorian’. Yet this renaming adds extra depth to our original question: though this fashion is a combination of various Victorian styles, does the necessity of a new name not then make it something entirely novel? Bourriaud describes the term ‘original’ as “being at the origin of”; is the final result of the re-workings of Victorian era material and styles not the origin of the new genre of steampunk? Granted, raw material is not what gets used, but nevertheless something so different is created that it necessitates a new name, and thus it can be argued that steampunk artists do in fact create something unprecedented.

The genre also embodies the utilitarian aspect of Victorian culture. Artist John Lopez is a bronze sculptor who stumbled upon the idea of using scrap metal as a medium for designing new sculptures. His art embodies the Wild West factor of the steampunk genre. In keeping with steampunk tradition, he “pays respect to the past while also playing with the idea of renewing and reconfiguring familiar imagery into something completely different” (Manning). Lopez’s use of what is essentially trash to create beautiful works of art is a perfect example of Sterling’s notion of the blurred line between “originality” and “creation”. The South Dakotan sculptor is in fact creating something out of nothing, if we are to understand ‘nothing’ as material which has no further intended use. In addition, the steampunk symbol of a pair of goggles also illustrates utilitarianism. Part of the choice to use goggles “may be the result of their portability” as they are easier to carry around than an actual steam-powered piece of technology, but they also “straddle the divide between past and present. They’re comfortingly old-fashioned, but useful for modern steamy activities such as welding the gadgets steampunks love to carry around” (Sullivan). Essentially, steampunks have chosen a symbol that is not only depictive of their mindset as well as useful to have when creating the very objects that make up the genre, but that also re-imagines a way of thinking that evolved long ago with modern-day utilitarian concepts.

Steampunk also allows for political and cultural statements to be made concerning many controversial Victorian-era issues. For example, when interviewed for an article in The Guardian, steampunk music artist Robert Brown declares “The injustice and poverty in the Victorian era were horrific. That’s the great thing about this – Victorian women were repressed, but steampunk women are the opposite of that” (Sullivan). Centuries later, steampunk allows for a way of “reimagining an imperfect past” (Sullivan). Therefore, not only is the genre taking material forms from the era and reworking them, they are also taking intangible Victorian concepts and doing the same. Yet steampunk also protests contemporary issues as well, such as the loss of individuality in a world that is growing increasingly similar and technologically-based. This is where the ‘punk’ aspect of steampunk comes from, as those who adhere to the style defy convention and declare their individuality. However, it is important to keep in mind that steampunks draw their inspiration from the past while using material from today in order to fashion the objects of their rebellion. Are they then creating a new form of rebellion or simply re-imagining rebellion in a different way? Nevertheless, the style is a combination of cultural and political protests from both the 1800s as well as today, which essentially forms a kind of steampunk politics.

The steampunk genre is yet another instance where new material is created by drawing inspiration from old. Yet, steampunk is unique as well in that obtaining inspiration from the past is necessary in order for an object to qualify as steampunk. Ultimately, it is a new form of art that Sterling describes in his speech as “pre-distressed antique futurity”, wherein he urges those of us who want to create to “Refuse the awe of the future. Refuse reverence of the past” stating that if they are “really the same thing, [we] need to approach them from the same perspective” (Sterling). Steampunk does just this – it looks at the past through the lens of the future, imagining what the technology of today would look like in the days of the past. It combines the awe of the future and the reverence of the past to create objects that erase the generational divide – something that is rather original indeed.

 

Works Cited

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World”. Has & Sternberg, 2005. PDF.

Manning, Jake. “Artist transforms old farm equipment into incredible animal sculptures like none you’ve seen”. Shareably.net. http://shareably.net/john-lopez-scrap-metal-sculptures/ . Accessed 6 November 2016

Sterling, Bruce. “Atemporality for the Creative Artist” Wired.com Conde Nast Digital, 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 6 Nov. 2016

Sullivan, Caroline. “Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1899”. (October 17, 2008) London: Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/oct/17/popandrock2 Accessed 6 November 2016.

Posted on 2016/11/08 by
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Game of Clones: Copying, Authorship, and Ownership of the World’s Most Pirated TV Show

Game of Thrones is the most pirated television show in the world, with up to 1.5 million copies being downloaded on a single day. Additionally, the book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, has sold more than 58 million copies, and Archive of Our Own returns more than 150 000 unique fanfics of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire. It might just be one of the most reproduced narratives of our times. What does this massive amount of copying do to the ideas of authorship, ownership, and appropriation?

It is hard to look at Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire as a single story, so it is also a little difficult to determine authorship. Does it belong to author George R.R. Martin, who created the world of Westeros and The Seven Kingdoms? Or does the narrative belong to the HBO adaptation’s show-runners Dan Weiss and David Benioff, who have taken the narrative beyond the books, and will most likely write the ending to the story? Or does it belong to the legions of fanfic and fan-theory writers, who have been filling in missing details and theorising about untold plot points while (not-so-patiently) waiting for the “official” series to continue?  All of these participants have “authored” elements of the Seven Kingdoms in some way, and claimed different versions of the story. This lines up with Marcus Boon’s definition of “appropriation”: the act of claiming the right to use, make or own something that someone else claims in the same way.” (Boon 205) Martin, Weiss, Benioff, and all the story’s fans claim parts of the story. But does claiming mean ownership? Do the fans own this story?

The “obvious” answer would be “no”: the story belongs to George R.R. Martin, its original creator. He claims ownership through authoring the narrative – it’s his name on the cover of the books, after all. But not everyone sees it this simply, and many people feel that they have a stake in A Song of Ice and Fire. For example, Martin regularly interacts with and responds to his fans and critics as if he has a responsibility to them, and they often interact with him in a way that suggests they feel that they own the story. Martin’s fans definitely have “the expectation …that they’ll be able to interact with the fictional worlds they adore, and even sway the activities of their creators” (Wershler et al 17).  The fans may not be claiming authorship of Martin’s work, but with this sort of attitude and interaction, they are claiming a sort of ownership over the narrative.

Martin does not always respond favourably to this attitude, but he is often very supportive of and very interested in how invested his fans seem to be in the world he created. This situation reminds me of Benjamin’s description of a movie actor, who “knows that in the end he is confronting the masses. It is they who will control him (Benjamin 33). Martin’s critics and fans are not powerfully “invisible” like Benjamin’s masses: he greets them at conventions, responds to them on forums, and reads fan theories. However, they are influencing Martin’s work. Many fans feel like they are not waiting for Martin’s next instalment, but their next instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin occasionally caters to this feeling, with apologies about delays in writing, and defences for certain story-line choices. Despite these clear nods to fan influence, and many claims from fans over a certain “ownership” of the story, Martin insists that he is writing the books for himself, to his own standards and at his own pace. When fans clamor for “their” next book, he responds that he will not finish his story until he is done with it.

So, whose story are David Benihoff and Dan Weiss finishing? The two show runners (who are also big fans who “nerd out” about Martin’s story-lines) adapted the first five books of Martin’s series for the first five seasons of the HBO series Game of Thrones. But by the sixth season, they had run out of source material to adapt. Instead of putting the series on hold while waiting for new material from Martin, Benioff and Weiss took over as authors, and wrote their own new material. They had shifted from adapting source material, to possibly becoming source material.

This shift elevated Weiss and Benioff’s status as authors, which in turn strengthened their claims to authorship/ownership of Games of Thrones, and increased the perceived value of their adaptation. As Marcus Boon points out, “the copy is never allowed the myth of essence that is accorded to other things, and that is used to establish their value” (Boon 233). Perhaps it could have been said that it would be impossible to judge the value of Game of Thrones, because it was always a mere copy of A Song of Ice and Fire. Until it wasn’t. Now that it’s no longer “adapting” from Martin’s written work, is Game of Thrones still an adaptation? Or is it an original in its own right? Has the adaptation appropriated the “essence” and value of the original?

Boon would argue that a copy can only establish value “through deception and dissimulation”, which perhaps could be stretched to included Weiss and Benioff’s deviation from the source material (233). Both Weiss/Benihoff and Martin stress that the two stories will now be different, so that the unwritten original won’t be “spoiled” by the TV adaptation. Martin stresses that “some of the spoilers [fans] may encounter in season six may not be spoilers at all … because the show and the books have diverged, and will continue to do so” (Sims Divide).

I think it’s not really easy to say that Martin’s books still hold the title of “original” and Benioff and Weiss are still producing an adaptation. The roles of copier and copied have been switched, which seems to suggest that Benihoff and Weiss are producing the original now, and Martin is producing the copy.

On top of Benihoff and Weiss and Martin copying from each other, there are also fans copying the books and shows. Game of Thrones in particular is notorious for how much it is copied. However, everyone involved in making the show seems to appreciate that “reproduction do[es] not diminish and destroy the original but – quite the contrary- set[s] off and highlight[s] its value” (Assmann 147). Martin, Benioff, Weiss, and even Time-Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes have all spoken favourably about how frequently the show is pirated, as if it is a compliment. Bewkes is quoted as saying “Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world. Well, you know, that’s better than an Emmy” (Tassi Game). Upon hearing that Australia illegally downloads the most episodes per capita, Weiss exclaimed, “Yes! I’ll take it!” (Windolf Connections).

Why are Martin, Benioff, Weiss, and Bewkes, not only unworried that people are stealing their work, but actually pleased? They probably realise that “such free “advertising” or publicity may enhance the artist’s reputation and increase the value of his works.”(Landes 4) The insanely high demand for the TV show creates more demand for both the TV show and the books. As more people watch and talk about the show, more people want to watch it. Martin’s book sales increased by a healthy margin after the show premiered, and HBO gets more and more subscribers each year, despite (or because of) the millions of pirates “stealing” their work. They may in fact be “allowing unauthorized copies to circulate as a deliberate distribution strategy” (Wershler et al 17). HBO does send letters informing people that what they are doing is illegal, but there doesn’t seem to be a real effort to enforce their ownership.

The creators and network may also not subscribe to the idea that the pirates are “stealing” their work at all, or that the copying of their work actually damages it. Marcus Boon suggests that (in a Heideggarian point of view) appropriation of a work grants some legitimacy to its “essence”. He writes that “for Heidegger, the process by which thing come to appear to have essences relies on an appropriation … thus, it is appropriation, rather than essence, that is determinative of these things” ( Boon 218). The fact that so many people take and claim this narrative actually gives a legitimacy to the “essence” (or aura) of the story, demonstrating that it has such a universal appeal. If taking, claiming, and appropriating the story gives it its essence, are these “pirates” and consumers fulfilling a type of author function? What is their role in the creation and legitimization of the Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire phenomenon?

George R.R. Martin’s creation has left his control and been adapted both officially and unofficially. Millions of consumers have taken and made copies of the narrative, both officially and unofficially. Thousands more fans have taken the narrative and authored their own versions, mostly unofficially (but with the exception of Weiss and Benioff’s officially sanctioned version). There are a lot of feelings involved when talking about who owns this narrative, and even more questions. Is the narrative larger than the original author? If the “original” begins copying its own adaptation, is it still “the original”? If the authors allow consumers to influence them, and to take and copy their work, are they still really the authors? When fans feel a sense of ownership and entitlement over a work, and the owners respond to this entitlement, are they legitimising this claim of ownership?

 

 

 Works Cited:
Assmann, Aleida, and Jan Assmann. “Air From Other Planets Blowing: the Logic of Authenticity and the Prophet of the Aura.” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 147-57.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Second version. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others. Cambridge/London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2008. 19-55.

Boon, Marcus. “Appropriation.” In Praise of Copying. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 204-37.

Landes, William M. “Copyright, Borrowed Images and Appropriation Art: An Economic Approach.” _U Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper_ 113 (2000). 

Sims, David, “ The Growing Divide between Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin.” The Atlantic. 12 May 2016. Online. 4 November 2016. 

Tassi, Paul. “Game of Thrones sets piracy world record – but does HBO care?” Forbes.com.  15 April 2014. Online. 3 November 2016.

Wershler, Darren, Kalervo Sinervo, Shannon Tien. ”A Network Archaeology of Unauthorized Comic Book Scans.” Amodern 2 (2013). Online. 1 November 2016.

Windolf, Jim. “The Surprising Connections between Game of Thrones and Monty Python”. Vanity Fair. 24 March 2014. Online. 6 November 2016. 

Posted on 2016/11/08 by
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Copy & Paste & Play: Amateur Games as Appropriation Art

Independent game-making has, despite its relatively short history, seen a significant evolution. “Indie” games, as they are known, are now associated with such popular titles as Minecraft (2011), The Stanley Parable (2013), and Don’t Starve (2013) – games that have unquestionably penetrated mainstream consciousness. There is a certain sophistication associated with the Indie genre nowadays, with more and more titles whose end results are often capable of rivaling the sheen of commercial games. Crowdfunding facilitators such as Kickstarter or GoFundMe allow for the possibility of significant financial backing from the general public, changing the economic landscape in which independent games are made, and consequently shifting the characteristics that make up an indie game.

Prior to the popularization of crowdfunding or online distribution platforms like Steam, indie games took on a different form: they existed as games made in Flash, or as text adventures played in an internet browser, or as games cobbled together on  free (or pirated) rudimentary game-making software, such as GameMaker or RPGMaker. These games were often the passion projects of one-man teams, with the prospect of putting them on the market mostly nonexistent. As such, the economic realities in which these games were made differ vastly from the games dominating the indie scene today. These kinds of games – specifically those made with RPGMaker – are the form I intend to explore in this probe, and to use as an argument for their status as appropriation art.

William Landes, in his essay “Copyright, Borrowed Images and Appropriation Art: An Economic Approach” describes ‘appropriation art’ as such:” Appropriation art borrows images from popular culture, advertising, the mass media, other artists and elsewhere, and incorporates them into new works of art. Often, the artist’s technical skills are less important than his conceptual ability to place images in different settings and, thereby, change their meaning. Appropriation art has been commonly described “as getting the hand out of art and putting the brain in.” ” (Landes 2)

While Landes’ discourse does not touch on games as an art form, his definition fits the subset of indie games described above to a tee.

probe2-rpgmaker

RPG Maker 2003 at work. The tileset is displayed in a pallet on the left, and the user can select each tile to ‘paint’ the map on the right.

RPGMaker is a series of software created by the groups ASCII and Enterbrain that allows for the relatively easy development of role-playing video games. While the latest iterations of RPGMaker (XP, VX, MV, etc.) are available through distribution services like Steam, earlier versions (RPGMaker 2000, 2003, etc.) were harder to come by legally and were often pirated. The software’s interface is purposefully intuitive, allowing a player to easily craft maps from tilesets, program events through the selection of options from a menu (‘Show Message’, ‘Change Character HP’, ‘Play Sound Effect’, ‘Open Main Menu’, etc), and edit playable characters, enemies, and other resources through an organized database. The software requires little knowledge of coding, though later entries in the series would allow for advanced programming via an internal scripting language, the use of which was entirely optional.

 

The ease of use afforded by the software and the relatively easy accessibility of it (assuming one was comfortable with piracy), meant that there was soon a quiet explosion of RPG Maker games on the internet, populating a preliminary wave of what would be considered the “indie” genre. The RPG Maker games that were released as part of this wave, which I’m going to capriciously place as occurring in the early 2000s, were of a particular nature that was almost inherently appropriative, and were backed by an infrastructure that both enabled and encouraged this appropriation to take place.

In short, the RPG Maker games I’m referring to made egregious use of the resources of other commercial, industry-made games. The reasons for this stem from the claims I’ve made above: creating a game with all-original resources – and by resources I mean graphics, pixel art, tilesets, sprites, animations, sound effects, background music, window skins, fonts, etc. – is simply too tall a task for the one-person hobbyist teams who were creating these games. Games often require whole teams of people to tackle even one of the resources I listed above, in addition to additional software and a whole lot more time. As Landes says:

“These works all have in common what economists call a “public goods aspect” to them. Creating these works involve a good deal of time, money and effort (sometimes called the “cost of expression”). Once created, however, the cost of reproducing the work is so low that additional users can be added at a negligible or even zero cost.” (Landes 4)

As such, it became common practice for members of online game-making communities to ‘rip’ assets (sprites, tilesets, etc.) from pre-existing games, rearrange them in such a way that they are legible to the RPG Maker software, and distribute them online, free of charge, often simply asking for credit. Game makers would then import these resources and use them to craft their own games, resulting in games that were unique chimaeras of familiar imagery taken from other video games. Landes asks us to consider the following case, which I include here as an apt analogy for what was taking place when these kinds of games were created: “Consider first the case of an artist who incorporates a copyrighted photograph from, say, a popular magazine into a unique collage. The artist removes the actual image from the magazine, affixes it to a board and adds other objects, colors and original images. No copy of the photograph is made and the photograph itself may constitute only a small part of the collage” (Landes 12-13).

This shot alone includes resources from Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Final Fantasy Adventure, and Final Fantasy Legend

This shot alone includes resources from Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Final Fantasy Adventure, and Final Fantasy Legend

These games were often distributed within insular RPG Maker online communities, never for the purpose of turning a profit and never quite breaching the mainstream, and therefore never quite coming under the scrutiny of the developers whose intellectual property was being blatantly appropriated. One must take into consideration the cross-cultural nature of these games as well: as in the example above, the graphics put to use in Eden Legacy: A Knight of Eden were all ripped from Japanese games, then applied to an English-language, western-produced amateur RPG downloaded by an approximately 1,000 people (as per its download stats on RPGMaker.net); as such, the chances of companies like Square-Enix or Game Freak taking notice – much less taking legal action – were relatively slim.

As Landes puts it, this process inevitably became one of “conceptual ability to place images in different settings and, thereby, change their meaning” (2). The lifting of familiar symbols such as the sprite of the protagonist from the early Pokémon games and using it for the protagonist of a game set in a world of medieval fantasy reconfigures the meaning of the sprite. As a player of RPG Maker games, you are exposed to a unique language communicable only to those with a particular vocabulary – in this case, the reconfiguration of the Pokémon sprite only truly occurs if you have played and are familiar with the Pokémon game from which it originates.  As in the above example, games rarely simply aped a single game’s assets (though those do exist, particularly when the intent is to create a fangame), but instead combined the resources of several to create a unique, if jarringly familiar, pastiche.

Marcus Boon, in his book “In Praise of Copying”, writes of the putting together of a mixtape or iTunes playlist in a way that I think reflects the philosophy of these RPG Maker amalgamations: he notes that the process of making a mixtape is “intimate” and “emotionally charged”, and that “the mixtape maker has available in accessing the variety that is essential to copia, and straight out of a classical rhetoric manual: inventio (the selection of tunes to be played), dispositio (the ordering or sequencing of them), and elocutio (the cuts and edits made, but also the loving care put into the handwritten cover, the decoration of the cassette), all deployed in order to charm the recipient of the tape” (Boon 55). Just like the mixtape-maker, the RPG Maker game designer carefully selects the assets they’re going to copy, rearranges and reorders them in new configurations, and also omits, edits, and personalizes these resources to make a product that is uniquely theirs.

Rips of characters from Final Fantasy IV provided by a user of the Charas Project database

Rips of characters from Final Fantasy IV provided by a user of the Charas Project database

These chimerae were not isolated instances either, as they were supported by an insular infrastructure that facilitated the practice of appropriation. Databases like Charas Project came into existence to archive and distribute user-created ‘rips’of resources, specifically formatted for use in RPG Maker. More broadly, sites like The Spriters Resource compile ripped graphics of games from a multitude of systems for personal use. As Boon puts it, “What appears to be on offer on the Internet, what fuels its imaginal space, is the utopia of an infinite amount of stuff, material or not, all to be had for the sharing, downloading, and enjoying. For free” (Boon 42) – he clarifies subsequently that naturally what appears to be ‘free’ is only being perceived as such, for ‘free’ implies a degree of consent on the part of the original artist, the likes of which are not found on these online databases full of ripped video game assets

probe2-blackmoonvsff4
RPG Maker game Final Fantasy Black Moon Prophecy, a fangame of the Final Fantasy series, makes use of assets from Final Fantasy IV, released 25 years ago as of the writing of this probe. The fangame uses a tileset from the game’s town maps, safe zones for the player to recover their strength and restock on items. Black Moon Prophecy, however, edits the tileset and then uses it to map one of the game’s dungeons, Niflheim (Left), a decaying town in which monsters abound. This is another instance of familiar iconography being reconfigured and given new meaning – note the re-use of graphics between Niflheim (Left) and Final Fantasy IV’s town of Baron (Right)

To further illustrate the case for amateur games as appropriation art, I look to a popular fangame currently in circulation: Pokémon Reborn. The game, created in RPG Maker XP by a team of amateur developers, describes itself as such:

“Pokemon Reborn is a Gen 3-styled downloadable game featuring all content through Gen 6. Experience a never-before-seen layer of strategy with the all-original Field Effects, using the terrain to outplay and overwhelm your opponent! Collect, train and battle with all 721 Pokemon available in-game and take on Gym Leaders of all 18 types as you fight to restore Reborn to prosperity!”

Its setting is described as a city wherein “black smog and acidic water garnish the crumbling structures” and “city streets fest like alleys with disaster and crime”. Among its list of features are “Increased Shiny chance”, “Visible IVs/EVs”, and “18 Type Gyms”. While the significance of those features or the grim backdrop painted in that description may be lost on those who have little familiarity with the Pokémon video games, the promise being made is that Reborn offers an experience that’s familiar enough to appeal to fans of Pokémon, but different enough that it acts as a salve to those who believe the official Pokémon games to be lacking.

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Fans of the series have often wanted exactly what Reborn is providing: a Pokémon game that reflects the more mature demographic of its player-base, the ones who might not be so enthused by the colourful, saccharine settings in which the games usually take place. The fangame makes copious use of the official games’ properties – from sound effects to tilesets to the Pokémon themselves – and does a shockingly thorough job of mimicking the games’ mechanics, menus, and gameplay elements, but through graphical edits, brand new level designs, and a unique and original story, reimagines the Pokémon narrative in a way that may appeal to different parts of the Pokémon-playing demographic, all while allowing for an experience that’s sufficiently familiar. Similarly, the game features enhanced difficulty as a response to accusations that the original games are too easy and child-like; the game also offers features such as the ability to play as a character of a non-specific, non-binary gender identity, a feature that few commercial games offer. In this context, we can see appropriation art performing an important and unique function: fulfilling the particular demands made of the original art, to which the original artist(s) have not responded.

 

Notes:

[1] Also up for a similar kind of examination are webcomics, particularly the ‘sprite comics’ that were popular in the early 2000s: Bob and George, 8-Bit Theater, Zelda Comic, etc. These internet-born comics also made use of video game resources, notably the character ‘sprites’ from which they get the title of their genre, and not only reconfigured their symbolic meaning but transported them to an entirely new medium, that of the comic. 8-Bit Theater, for example, reimagined the entire narrative of Final Fantasy, giving voice to previously mute characters and offering a wholly new and innovative interpretation of a familiar world using familiar iconography. Zelda Comic, on the other hand, made use of resources from multiple games, including the titular Legend of Zelda as well as Kid Icarus and Bubble Bobble, creating a unique pastiche wherein several cultural icons could interact with one another.

[2] It’s worth noting that these indie games are not only economic to make, but also to play. As these games cannot legally be distributed with a pricetag, and yet offer content hefty enough to rival commercial games (Reborn boasts over 48 hours of gameplay, and has yet to be completed), gamers can enjoy these games without shelling out the money that is required to purchase the game as well as the console on which the game plays. This is especially true of Pokémon games: the official games allow for only one save file per cartridge, hampering replayability as, assuming the player does not want to lose their data, they are required to buy an additional cartridge to replay the game. Reborn circumvents that, as save files can be exported and imported, and its very existence as a free-to-play game makes it a suitable remedy for the Pokémon fan who’s itching to play again but is unable or unwilling to pay for another cartridge.

Posted on 2016/11/06 by
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Avatar: The Last Airbender: Bending Boundaries between Appreciation, Appropriation, and Adaptation

Between 2005 and 2008, American-based television network Nickelodeon aired what would become one of the most lauded and commercially successful children’s shows of its time, Avatar: The Last Airbender. At its best, Avatar presents stirring storylines that grapple with the complexities of human relationships in meaningful ways, offering the audience narratives that confront racism (“Book 1-3”), misogyny (“The Warriors of Kyoshi,” “The Waterbending Master,” “The Painted Lady”), classism (“The Swamp”),  and ableism (“The Blind Bandit”), while foregrounding redemption (“The Western Air Temple”), forgiveness (“The Southern Raiders”), and the importance of social support systems (“Sozin’s Comet: Part1-4”).  Grounding its moral message primarily in the tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism, Avatar encourages children to become peaceful adults who work together to avoid perpetuating erasure or violence against other cultures.

Yet the American television show’s homage to and reliance on eastern and indigenous culture—in everything from its visual aesthetics to the cultural makeup of its invented nations—threatens to push the series into the realm of cultural appropriation. The fraught relationship between North American and Asian culture embedded in the makeup of the show is further complicated when considering the ramifications of M. Night Shyamalan’s film adaptation, The Last Airbender, in which the three protagonists are effectively whitewashed. This probe considers a number of nuances between cultural appropriation and appreciation in an attempt to underscore the fluidity between these categories and interrogate whether culture can be owned—and, if so, by whom.

Book 1: Appropriation

Avatar: The Last Airbender is set in a fictional Asian-inspired world divided into four nations based on the elements of the dominant natural-philosophical theory in Chinese Buddhist literature: the Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Air Nomads. Populating this world are people who can manipulate the elements of the nation they are born into through a process called “bending,” which is visually stylized after the martial arts T’ai Chi, Hung Gar, Northern Shaolin, and Ba Gua in each respective nation. The story follows a twelve year old boy named Aang—the last surviving airbender after the Fire Nation committed mass genocide against the Air Nomads—who also happens to be the Avatar, a being of heightened spiritual ability whose role is to master all four elements and bring balance to the world. Accompanying him on his adventure are siblings Katara and Sokka, whose dress, hunting practices, and villages in the South Pole borrow heavily from Polynesian and Native American cultures.

 

Avatar’s visual style is heavily indebted to Japanese anime and the work of artists and studios such as Miyazaki, Gainax, and Shinichiro Watanabe, setting it apart from other cartoons airing on Nickelodeon. The show’s broader eastern aesthetic is equally deliberate. In an interview on Nickelodeon, creators Michael Danter DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko describe the process of creating Avatar as the following:

[W]e wanted to create a mythology that was based on Eastern culture, rather than Western culture. […] we were inspired by Asian mythology, as well as Kung Fu, Yoga, and Eastern Philosophy. […]  We read a lot about Buddhism, Daoism, and Chinese history. We also have several consultants who work for the show—a cultural consultant that reviews all the scripts; a Kung Fu consultant who helps choreograph all the bending moves so that they are accurate to the style on which they are based; and a Chinese calligrapher who does all the signs and posters in the show.

DiMartino and Konietzko vacillate between appreciation and appropriation of Asian culture and, at times, even seem suspicious of their own positionality relative to their creation. On the one hand, they engage with the people whose cultures they borrow from in order to build trust and ensure their work is as authentic as possible. As Marcus Boon argues in In Praise of Copying, “copying […] is connected to love” (234), and the creators of Avatar claim they are “just trying to pay homage.” On the other hand, DiMartino and Konietzko do more than pay homage when they appropriate spiritually significant terms: “We chose the word ‘Avatar’ because it is an ancient Hindu word meaning ‘a temporary manifestation of a continuing entity.’” Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Shinto spiritual influences converge and become the religious doctrine of the Avatar world, ignoring the fact that these religions have historically served as a source of social and political divisions between groups.

In “From Appropriation to Subversion,” Peter Kulchyski argues that “[a]ppropriation involves the practice on the part of dominant social groups of deploying cultural texts produced by dominated social groups for their own (elite) interests” (614). Following that definition, Avatar can be considered appropriation par excellence, a franchise that engages both in cultural voyeurism and cultural appropriation in order to create a show that appeals to the exoticization and fetishization of dominated social groups.

“Since ‘culture’ can be characterized as one of the most useful intellectual tools of the twentieth century—slowly coming to replace the nineteenth century concept of ‘race’ as a way of differentiating peoples—it has come to be taken for granted and, to an extraordinary extent, vacated of focus or precision.” (Kulchyski 605)

It is this lack of focus that facilitates appropriation in the name of homage; two American creators cherry pick from various Asian and Indigenous cultures to create a melting pot that blends aspects of real-world nations and erects distinct—if not wholly artificial—boundaries within the cartoon environment. As a result, Avatar presents an ancient world comprised of elements an American is likely to associate with Asia or Indigenous groups—martial arts, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, food preparation and consumption practices, Chinese calligraphy, etc.—decontextualized from any explicit, specific history or culture. Avatar’s world, no matter how well researched, becomes flattened into a generic representation of Asian-ness, and it is this very flattening that eludes appropriation. With the boundaries so blurred, what can we even argue has been appropriated from individual cultures?

Book 2: Adaptation

When Paramount announced a live action film trilogy adaptation of the much beloved series, fans’ excitement was short lived after it became clear that the movie would whitewash the series. The Last Airbender’s four starring roles were initially all to go to white actors, but, when pop singer Jesse McCartney backed out of the role of villain Zuko due to scheduling conflicts and was replaced by Dev Patel, a whole new issue of representation came to light. In casting a South Asian actor as the villain, The Last Airbender problematically connects darker skin to the corruption of the Fire Nation. Although Avatar is by no means a perfect representation of Asian cultures, The Last Airbender strips the series of its detailed research and replaces complex race relations between the four nations with a world in which the villains are marginalized bodies in opposition to homogenous white heroes.

In an interview with TIME Magazine, Shyamalan takes full ownership of the whitewashing of The Last Airbender, saying, “I could have cast anybody I wanted to. You’re talking to one of the only Asian filmmakers in the world who has complete control.” Shyamalan’s case is that, given his status as Indian-American, casting exclusively white actors to play the heroes of his film cannot possibly be racist because he himself is of South-Asian descent. This defence raises important questions of appropriation: namely, can one appropriate when one comes from an often-appropriated community themselves?

Evolving out of a letter writing campaign on LiveJournal called “Aang Ain’t White,” which protested the movie’s casting decisions came Racebending.com.  Informed by the theories articulated in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, racebending also makes a clever pun on the abilities of inhabitants of the Avatar world to bend the elements. Whereas Butler’s theory of gender bending refers to the celebratory practice of performing gender against biological sex and cultural expectations, racebending replaces marginalized bodies with white bodies, restricting rather than broadening possibilities.  As well, “‘racebending’ can be seen as more than simply changing the race of a character: it is changing the race of characters of color to white for reasons of marketability” (Lopez, qtd. in Gilliland 2.4). Not merely a symptom of neglect or cultural naivety, racebending is a deliberate, strategic erasure of people of color in order to increase capital.

Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko in the animated series, their actors, and their voice actors. Only Zuko, the villain, is consistently represented as a person of color.

 

But how can one claim the erasure of identity when, to a great extent, the characters in The Last Airbender have always been white? While they are visually depicted as Inuit and East-Asian and drawn in an anime style, Aang, Katara, and Sokka were created by two white men and voiced by white people. Indeed the villain-turned-antihero Zuko is the only one of the four to have been voiced by an Asian-American in the original series.  The fact that boycotters of The Last Airbender were a) by and large not Asian or of Asian descent and b) seldom considered the fact that the majority of the original voice actors were also Caucasian suggests that perhaps fans are more attached to the idea of Indigenous- and Asian-ness the American creators present in Avatar than with the individual cultures themselves. After all, the show attempts to provide a model for doing Eastern cultural appropriation right. Fan outcry that The Last Airbender is “ruining” Avatar directs the gaze instead towards the endemic problem in Hollywood where Asian actors, writers, and directors are replaced with white actors, writers, and directors who presume to tell their stories. In my previous probe on appropriation of Coast-Salish cultural objects, I briefly addressed the ways in which dominant culture insists on enforcing their own understanding of what aspects of a given marginalized culture is authentic. In this case, Avatar and the resulting resistance to the casting of The Last Airbender use authenticity as a way to legitimize the cultural appropriation inherent in the original television series.

Book 3: Appreciation

Avatar and The Last Airbender do not exist solely on a screen, but are part of a larger system of cultural production. As Frederic Jameson notes, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (qtd in Kulchyski 610). Between Avatar and its spiritual successor, The Legend of Korra, the franchise has built an immense commodity culture, consisting of comic books, video games, Lego, jewelry, clothing, and cosplay, raising questions about appropriation grounded in fans’ reactionary behaviors. For instance, is wearing orange robes appropriative if it is accompanied by blue arrow tattoos as a direct homage to an American cartoon at a comic book convention? Is it appropriative to write fanfic grounded in Asian history and mythology in order to engage in world-building in the Avatar universe?

To conclude this probe, I want to address Marcus Boon’s comment that, although today’s prevalent appropriation does not obey the laws of cultural exchange, “this doesn’t mean it’s used solely by the privileged or powerful on the marginalized and powerless, since it’s also employed by the marginalized and powerless” (231). Two weeks ago, Nigerian illustrator and comic book artist Marcus Williams released images from his Avatar fan-fiction, Avatar: The Legend of Abioye. Set one hundred years after Korra, the adaptation reimagines the characters as Nigerian, and encourages us to think about the effects of yet another type of racebending: is it appropriative for one dominated culture to depict themselves in the space of another? Or is Williams reclaiming Avatar for the marginalized after Hollywood’s instatement of white hegemony? By setting his story a century later, Williams refrains from appropriating and erasing the characters who are clearly stylized as Asian and Indigenous and tactfully allows his new Yoruba benders Iya, Ikenna, and Ballogun to (co)exist in the Avatar universe. As fanfiction, Avatar: The Legend of Abioye arguably presents a true attempt at appreciation without appropriation.

Works Cited

Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Written by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, directed by Lauren MacMullan, Nickelodeon Animation, 2005-2008.

Boon, Marcus. “Copying as Appropriation.” In Praise of Copying. Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 204-37.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

“Everything you ever wanted to know about Avatar: The Last Airbender answered by the creators, Mike & Bryan!” Nicksplat.com  Nickelodeon, 12 Oct. 2005.http://web.archive.org/web/20071217111256/http:/www.nicksplat.com/Whatsup/200510/12000135.html. Accessed 4 Nov 2016.

Gilliland, Elizabeth. “Racebending Fandoms and Digital Futurism.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol 22, 2016, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/702/651. Accessed 4 Nov 2016.

Konietzko, Bryan, & Michael Danter DiMartino. Avatar, the Last Airbender: The art of the animated series. Dark Horse Comics, 2010.

Kulchyski, Peter. “From Appropriation to Subversion: Aboriginal Cultural Production in the Age of Postmodernism.” American Indian Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 4, 1997, pp. 605-620. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185715. Accessed 10 Oct 2016.

The Last Airbender. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, performances by Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, and Dev Patel, Nickelodeon Movies and Paramount Pictures, 2010.

Shyamalan, M. Night. “10 Questions for M. Night Shayamalan.” TIME Magazine, 12 July 2010. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2001008,00.html. Accessed 4 Nov 2016.

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