Cool. Maybe even better than the original!
GOP debate
I watched the GOP debate in South Carolina tonight. I did so not long after reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, an oldie but a goodie about bad history textbooks. It struck me, watching Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul duke it out, how pervasive the ideology of American exceptionalism has been lately in the campaign. Both parties tip into that dark well of power at will, of course, but it seemed particularly naked tonight. Gingrich is the most obvious source of it, but Romney, in his closing remarks, sounded like he was ready to lead an anti-socialist pogrom, and Santorum, the last speaker, seemed disappointed he couldn’t raise it with a book-burning.
The opener, the question about Newt’s ex-wife was pretty tasteless, but 1) it was essentially a softball for Newt in that it allowed him to win the audience immediately – if I were him I would have paid money to get that as the first question – and 2) it is the first time I’ve heard the term “open marriage” on network TV. It’s too bad Dan Savage doesn’t moderate for CNN…
What I found most compelling, though, is what wasn’t talked about. No class, no race, no gender, no religion, no foreign policy, even. Very little discussion of the root causes of any problem, as the answer is always ‘government,’ as if there were nothing wrong with American society besides that. In other words, the field has turned right pretty hard, when Romney, the supposed moderate, comes off as the pitchfork-bearer. I can’t say this strategy will prove useful in a general election for any of the participants.
GOP blues
The Romney train chugs on – next stop, South Carolina. A sizable chunk of the GOP doesn’t like this situation at all. If you add up all the poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire and any South Carolina poll, the problem asserts itself – despite his two wins, Romney still has more Republicans voting against him than for him. At some point, he has to break the 40% mark, because 40% of the GOP does not win a general election.
Fortunately for Romney, the main subparties that are holding out – evangelicals and Tea Partiers – can’t unite behind Gingrich or Santorum, much less Paul. The big winners if that narrative holds are Romney and Paul.
Paul didn’t withdraw until June in 2008 and I doubt he will do so any earlier this year. But maybe he won’t at all. His support has increased since 2008 – his polls trend only up, unlike each of the anti-Mitts (Cain, Perry, Gingrich) who spiked quickly and then fell just as fast – and he’s not running against McCain this time. He has a deadly weapon in his new arsenal of supporters – the threat of a third party run, which would almost certainly split the GOP/independent vote in the general election, much like Perot did in 1992 and again to a lesser extent in 1996. He has no reason to drop out and go third party right now, but circumstances are changing rapidly. If both Santorum and Gingrich drop out, I expect Paul’s numbers will only continue to rise.
There is always the possibility of a brokered convention, especially if Romney’s support remains flat. We haven’t had one in awhile. I wonder how many GOP rank and file hold out a secret hope that Romney could be un-anointed by convention ballot.
A interesting call
The Supremes recently made an interesting 9-0 decision. Church fires a “called” female teacher for filing an ADA suit instead of settling things within the church (presumably via the Pauline reasoning of 1 Cor 6). SCOTUS said this was ok because the 1st amendment keeps government from meddling with how churches choose their ‘ministers.’
Religious institutions that employ teachers typically have a parallel employment clause to the ‘at-will’ status of secular employers, which allows firing for pretty much any reason if the private or public life of the employee doesn’t meet the institution’s standards. Under this decision – which more or less maintains the status quo – federal employment laws like the ADA are pretty powerless to affect this situation, just as they tend to be useless for non-federal secular employees that have no choice but ‘at-will’ employment.
I’m a big fan of the 1st amendment and religious freedom. And I have to grudgingly admit that this decision was probably right on the law. But it does strike me as ironic. A secular employer would just state some other reason for firing her and dodge the ADA suit that way; a church, on the other hand, doesn’t need to dissemble. Furthermore, it’s another gentle reminder about the power imbalance between employers and employees – especially replaceable employees.
Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape
Another vacation book review.
There has to be a reasonable middle ground between the cultural relativism that Harris dislikes and the “New Atheist” hostility to religion that he champions. I can understand the attacks on the NAs because the lot of them, especially Dawkins, are often crass. Then again they’re sort of the professional poker players of the intelligentsia – a certain degree of crassness kind of automatically comes with the position.
Now I think criticism of religion is more than fair game. As Harris says in the book, he comes off arrogant only because he takes the claims of religion, particularly Christianity, seriously, and he does have a point that the usual faith/reason attempts at synergy end up being pretty ridiculous, as his lengthy example of Francis Collins shows.
I can’t buy his total dismissal of relativism and religion, though. Relativism has its flaws, but it at least pushes us toward a default position of tolerance rather than an automatic imperialistic judgment of superiority. And religion certainly has its flaws, but good can come of it – I’m not yet prepared to throw it out with the bathwater. It may be a ‘flawed science’, but that can easily be flipped around – Harris’ science is at times an unpersuasive religion, largely powerless against the straightforward power of family upbringing. A lot of die have to fall the right way for someone to drop their upbringing, family, and core beliefs for the cold – if best currently around – embrace of scientific humanism.
David Maurer’s The Big Con
Just read this book, which I picked up on a whim. Maurer was a sociolinguist who published this book in 1940 as a kind of summary of the language and habits of American con men. It is completely fascinating from the perspective of rhetorical theory. It’s a wonder I haven’t run around mention of it before. Take this passage, for example:
Big-time confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly. The insiderman is the star of the cast; while the minor participants are competent actors and can learn their lines perfectly, they must look to the insiderman for their cues; he must be not only a fine actor, but a playwright extempore as well. And he must be able to retain the confidence of an intelligent man even after that man has been swindled at his hands.
Also:
His (the mark’s) every probable reaction has been calculated in advance and the script prepared to meet these reactions. Furthermore, this drama is motivated by some fundamental weakness of the victim – liquor, money, women, or even some harmless personal crotchet. The victim is forced to go along with the play, speaking approximately the lines which are demanded of him; they spring unconsciously to his lips. He has no choice but to go along… He is living in a play-world which he cannot distinguish from the real world… He is living in a fantastic, grotesque world which resembles the real world so closely that he cannot distinguish the difference.
Sounds like Burkean dramatism to me, with a bit of Vatz thrown in! I am also particularly interested in the dual-actor nature of most of the cons described, involving both a roper (who “ropes” in promising marks) and the insiderman (who runs the con). In all arrangements, big and small, there is the moment of the “switch” where the allegiance of the mark is handed off to the insiderman and the roper becomes the bad guy, a tricky ethos-based maneuver that I’ve not seen described previously in rhetorical theory. The switch serves to confuse the mark enough that they are swept along into the “play” that is being run without knowing of the transition to the fake-world.
Rejection, holidays
I got a split decision on a manuscript just before the holidays that has gotten me thinking about the nature of academic rejection. My hit rate is pretty high, so any individual setback is not serious, but I am reminded yet again of Mike’s Rule of Manuscript Submission: for anything you write, someone somewhere will love it, and someone somewhere will hate it. In that sense the publishing process can seem unbelievably random at times, but I can’t think of an improvement to the process at the moment.
The holidays have kept my spirits up for the most part, though I’ll admit to being moody and pensive at times. We’ve been playing a lot of board games here in addition to the usual Shanghai rummy – I brought Power Grid and Elder Sign with me, and there is always Ticket to Ride which has been the subject of dueling iPhones. We even played Monopoly the other night, and I lost horribly.
Pre-Turkey
I’m sitting in my office, staring at my unfinished article on Origen and Augustine. It’s made great strides, many in the last hour, but there’s still a lot to do and that can be simultaneously inspiring and depressing. So much of my writing takes place in very short intense bursts after long periods of thought – I just finished one of those, and now I feel slightly cheered, but also mentally drained. I have enough in me to reread an old dissertation for ideas, then I think it’s time for the break.
Sword of the Samurai and its manual: some observations
Today I was reminded – I forget exactly how – that I’ve always wanted to write something about the manual for Sword of the Samurai, an old classic Microprose title that came out in 1989. It is the only PC game that I still own a box for – not the original, which is long lost, but a replacement that I bought for five dollars about fifteen years ago because I wanted a copy of the manual. I have a bootleg copy of the game that runs on DOSbox, which is fortunately as my boxed copy is on two 3 1/2 disks, and I haven’t built a computer with a 3 1/2 drive in years.
Anyway, the manual. Why did I want a copy of the manual? Well, I remember thinking, well before I became the nascent textual critic I am now, that there was something special about it, and that I should have a copy, just in case I wanted to do something with it. What that ’something’ was, I had no idea – and I still don’t, not completely, though my critical training allows me to articulate that something a little better. But I try to keep things around that spark my interest, and so here are some thoughts.
Manuals for PC games used to be bigger. The industry standard these days is to have the game teach the player how to play it. Arkham City is a great example. There’s no need to read any manual. Even the button assignments are stored on the disc and accessible at anytime. Why wasn’t it that way back in the day? Three reasons, I think. First, hellish size restrictions on game files (the halcyon days of technical feats such as packing Starflight onto a single floppy are long past in this lazy era of gigabytes) prevented in-game demos, so player instruction was consistently pushed to paper, where space was basically unlimited. Second, game design hadn’t moved into the era of simultaneous console development; Microprose, as far as I know, never went into consoles. Their games were by and large complex affairs, with many vehicle simulations that assigned specific functions to nearly every key on the keyboard. It was socially and economically feasible to ship a game with a keyboard overlay; it was mightily appreciated, even. There’s a third reason, also. The /idea/ of a game was different. PC games were not just games, but /software/. And software, no matter how apparently simple it may seem, required a manual.
So the SOTS manual exists in these conditions. But it is different. Most obviously, it doesn’t explain just how to play the game. It is also a primer on 16th century Japanese culture, politics, and warfare. It’s not exactly “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” (which is itself a famously book-researched oversimplification), mind you, but the analogy is surprisingly apt as there is an attempt at cultural translation going on, at the hands of developers who have watched a lot of Kurosawa movies (they list seven in particular as inspiring) that themselves are postwar explorations of Japanese-ness. This is a very interesting position for a game manual to be in.
As such, interposed between explicit instructions on how the game works are sections that have almost nothing to do with the game – there is a 12-page overview of the Warring States Period, for example, that feels neither useless nor out of place. Likewise, those same explicit instructions are pretty explicit, even moralistic. For example: “If your villainous goal in a rival’s house is the treacherous murder of an envoy, find the room where he sleeps, draw your sword, and kill him with one blow (he is but a pawn – there’s no point in making him suffer.)”
I love this example as it blurs the very notion of instructions and cuts to the core of the game. First off, there is no way in the game to NOT kill the envoy with one blow; that’s how the melee phase of the game works. I suppose you could deliberately miss and scare the poor sod to death, but the envoy is merely an unmoving, sleeping sprite on the screen that never moves save to be replaced by a bloody corpse. What the instruction is trying to do, and succeeds in doing to the large part, is enlivening the story. It /is/ villainous and treacherous to kill an envoy in my rival’s house. He’ll lose honor for failing to defend his guest, and I’ll walk away scot free after the cold-blooded murder of an innocent man. That sounds far more dramatic and exciting than the reality of the single keystroke.
In other words, the manual is not showing me how to /play/ the game as much as how to /interpret/ the game. The manual acts as a kind of travel guide to a distant land where customs differ from mine. For another example, the manual explains how marriage in the game works and the many advantages of having a bride, including having someone to run your household and the general honorable state of affairs. Realistically, though, getting married in the game only does two things: it gives a one-time shift to honor, and it allows you to eventually have a male heir (and thus continue the game if you are killed or grow too old and feeble). The player is given enough information to play in a culturally savvy way but not necessarily a practical way – there are serious in-game advantages to marrying when older, and avoiding having to raid a castle for the most desirable brides, but the manual shys away from getting bogged down in all that. Its main mission is always giving cultural context for possible actions.
I am tempted to say the manual is merely the reflection of a great game. And the game is unique, certainly, using many of the same branching story-telling innovations present in Pirates!, the other Microprose game that resembles it the most closely in manner and in its immersion in a cultural space (the Spanish Caribbean). But there is an X-factor present here. I can remember the first time I read the manual and realized that it almost stood by itself as a statement of some sort. The “Designer’s Notes” epilogue by Lawrence Schick is the case in point.
Schick states that a major design consideration was to “make the abstract concepts of honor and responsibility important to the player” – as such, these concepts were deeply embedded in the game. Honor, for example, was made into a quantifiable resource tagged to apparently qualitative adjectives – you could have “great,” “commendable,” “average,” “barely adequate,” “little,” or “no” honor, if I recall correctly. Some actions lowered honor; others raised it. You couldn’t ignore honorable behavior because you needed honor to proceed in the game. Losing too much honor was a lot like dying, although I recall quite a few desperate samurai retainers in the game trying to out-villain each other in a race to the honor gutter (after the third time they’d get caught trying to assassinate or steal, they just came off as creepy losers) and still hanging on without committing seppuku.
In other words, the game’s structure is a bit of a mindfuck. In order to succeed at the game, you have to act like a samurai, or at least the game’s truncated idea of a samurai. This is much like King of Dragon Pass, where the game expects you to respect and follow the often barbaric customs of the game’s artificial culture – laugh them off at your own peril, quite literally. The result is a shift in awareness on the part of the player. They are not just playing a game so much as being forced to change the way they think and react.
Sounds kind of like learning, no? Maybe that’s why I kept this box around for so long. There are other reasons, of course. The manual is very attractively designed – it fits the box like a glove, has good use of white space, and is an entertaining read by itself without the game. It represents something of a lost art.