Verbal Spewage

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 4

Quantifiably Enigmatic Operations

Math’s precision is so exacting that it does not leave any room to explain what it is telling you. The measurements that come out of an equation are abstract to such a high degree that without any objects attached to the value, there is no telling what has been said. For some, this makes math a chore best avoided. There is no denying that the operations are meaningless without objects present, but there is something at the basic level that bears examination in order to best view how the abstraction makes math unable to engage language in a meaningful dialogue.

Unlike language, math has several properties that make it universal and fungible. This does not mean the values or quantities can be moved around with willful disregard. Rater, it means that eight apples and eight oranges are quantifiably equal even if the two fruits are not. Even if one uses different symbols to represent numbers (e.g. Roman and Arabic numerals), their value remains unaffected. Thus, the measures of each value remain consistent and immutable even while their representation or objects vary. The power of math is tied to its ability to transmit information past linguistic or symbolic barriers. This is evinced in mathematical patterns.

Certain sequences are found everywhere in nature. The Golden Ratio is one such sequence. It appears in nautiloid structures like snail and sea shells. It also appears in weather patterns and ocean waves. Even plants make use of this pattern. Sunflowers are an example of this along with the placement of leaves along the stalks of plants as well as the placement of limbs on trees. And these are just examples from the natural world we can observe. Physics does the same in such notations as the gravitation constant of 9.8m/s² for falling objects on Earth.

Math follows syntactical rules like language, but the rules are driven towards outcome. Language works towards an outcome as well, but it is not driven; it meanders compared to math. With math it is all about operations more so than it is nuance. To be sure, the complex higher orders of math are nuanced, but not to the degree of language. That is because even then the subtleties are in the employment of the operating symbols. Math lacks the ability to create metaphors; which, having a part of catachresis to some extent, defy nature. We can equate a trait of an animal to a human and have the point be understood with no issues for the validity of the quality. If you tried to make 2 + 2 = 5 in math without invoking complex rules or synergy, you will be challenged and found at fault for violating the laws of nature.

The basic structural grammar of math uses the acronym of PEMDAS to describe the order of importance for the main operations in any equation. Languages also have a strict word order for understanding to be achieved. In English, the basic structure is SVX (subject, verb, and everything else). For math, the operations are parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. Notice that there are no rules governing where the information subjected to the operands go, save that they must balance out when an equal sign appears. This lack of “word order” is what makes math operationally-driven.

Consider the following statements: 16 ÷ 2, 2 x 4, 2³, and 12 – 4. All of them have the same resolution. They are all expressions of the value of 8. None of these expressions are conceptual. Given enough objects to see this, you can physically see the answer. In fact, with most mathematical equations, you can directly observe the results. Some might require very specific knowledge sets, but observers with said knowledge can see the math in action. Language does not work this way. As described in the previous section, words generally have multiple meanings, leaving the sentence open to interpretation based on the concepts bound in the word and the mental image needed to construct the sentence’s intended meaning.

But, one might point out, I have left out mathematical formulae and variables. They are not basic math, for one. The use of variables as stand-ins for math problems represents the values that will eventually go into an equation, but they are not concepts in math. Variables and equations are concepts of language of how the world works based on experience and then rendered as equations. The equation F = ma does not measure force; it tells the observer how to measure force. Force equals mass times acceleration. What about the formula d = rt? This tells us how to measure distance by multiplying the rate of speed by the time of movement. Let us replace the variables with numbers: 8 = 4 x 2. Without the equation, is that a measure of distance or force? Both formulae use the same mathematical operations. The famous E = mc² equation is not much different once you reduce c² to the speed of light squared. This means once you plug in the number for mass, you can carry out the multiplication just like with F = ma and d = rt. The concept is not in the operation, it is in what values you select for and the measurement you are making.

The last point bears focus as it is operational in nature. The act of data selection to parse through an equation’s operands is not a concept, it is information objectively observed. We assign meaning to measurements so that they have conceptual weight. To prove this point, let us refer back to the numeric symbol of 8. Outside of the expressions used thus far, what does it mean? What does it quantify on its own? Outside the concepts informing the equations, the result of 8 has no attachments. For our purposes of understanding the syntax and outcomes of math, the symbol of 8 represents a quantified unknown. I can express the symbol as the word “eight” and still be no closer to the truth of what is being signified. The meaning is missing. In fact, it cannot be found in the word’s definition.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “eight” is an adjective, and thus, by grammatical rules of the language, requires something substantive (a noun) to follow its use. The OED also defines the word as a substantive and goes on to define it as “the abstract number eight.” Other definitions are listed for the adjectival form of the word, but the root of many of the problems in gaming can be seen in the definition of the number as an abstract. Language does not do abstracts well. Why? Because we rely on our eyes to gather the greatest amount of information. Abstract ideas lack physicality and sensory details we can readily experience or imagine experiencing. Math cannot tell us what is happening, only the mechanics underlying why it is. Thus, math can give an exacting answer, but it cannot contextualize it.

And here we find what language does well: contextualizing raw data we observe and experience. Here is an example: five apples plus three oranges equals eight fruit. I mixed objects, but I still have a mathematical function that occurs despite categorical changes (actual objects in apples and oranges to abstract concepts: fruit). But wait, you say, you just said language does not do abstracts well. Yes, which is true, but what is a fruit? Tomatoes and avocados are fruit, but most people do not consider anything not sweet a fruit even if that is its scientific category. But while I am arguing with myself rhetorically, 5 + 3 still equals 8 and the math did not care one whit that words got appended to the equation. That is because the values parsed are universal; the rest was a linguistic argument.

What about the symbols used in higher levels of math? They appear conceptual at first glance, but they are not. A capital sigma (Σ) is used for summations. Now that symbol may have annotations subscripted, superscripted, and to either side, but the sigma is shorthand for the procedures behind the summation function. The same applies to the lower case sigma (σ) used to denote the math that governs the standard deviation function of a bell curve distribution. What we have to do is unpack the math behind the symbols to understand what they mean. I might have to think of the concept that describes the math, but it does not impact the shortcut the symbol represents, only your understanding of how it works. The concept is within your linguistic capabilities of describing what the math is used for and why you are doing it.

Even those who feel more comfortable doing math than describing the world through words hang their calculations on observable concepts. We cannot see gravity, for instance, but we can measure its effects. So, when a physicist uses 9.8m/s², he knows it is a constant referring to the rate of speed of falling objects on Earth. If a chemist needs to measure molecular mass for a mixture, she knows that 1 mol of water has 18.02 grams of weight. A mol, like a meter or a second, is a concept that has had a specific meaning attached to it so the math can be understood as something concrete. Remove the units of measure and it looks like the chemist is saying 1 = 18.02.

Units of measure are one of the linguistic concepts that underpin the way we interact with math to make use of it. It is through our assigned units that the numbers acquire meaning. Otherwise, complex math has no meaning beyond numbers that cannot tell us much. It makes the difference between 2″ x 4″ x 8′ and 2″ x 4″ x 8′ as the marks tell a carpenter one thing and others that these marks are exponents. That is how math is so exacting as to be vague. Just like language, it is the context of the observer’s frame of reference that defines the content.

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 3

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 5

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 3

Speaking About Tongues

The issue of how language works was alluded to in the last section and in previous blog entries, such as Precision Games. If you are a grammarphobe, this section might bore you or drive you crazy, but I assure you that it has a significant bearing on this discussion and the definition of the catachrestic dichotomy. Such as where games, like programming and other forms of information theory, use a controlled vocabulary, study languages though I am nowhere near as well versed in this region as Saussure was, I know enough about linguistics to make some general observations and point this out as an apology in advance for any linguistics majors reading this. The difference here is that game rules are not descriptive about the role of their mechanics, only in how they are applied; thus, a pawn in one game is a token in another without describing the fact that these are the same device to show players positionality in the conceptual framework of the play space.

While we can apply general rules to describe classes of functions, each game must be studied on its own as one would any language. Grammar is the linguistic equivalent of the rules of the game. Tokens and pawns, being objects which have actions applied to them are the nouns/pronouns of games. The ways in which they are affected make up the verbs. Modifiers can thus be viewed as adjectives and adverbs based on how the modifiers are applied (e.g. +2 to hit, a king in checkers). The analogy begins to break down when it comes to individual words. Words do not necessarily belong to subclasses based on related definitions the way rules can often be categorized.

Here is where languages get weird. They are not quite semiotic despite being an arbitrary assignment of sounds and letters to represent the object, concept, or quality being represented and bound to each word. Yet, the words remain just fuzzy enough that by themselves they retain multiple meanings that represent shadings within the symbolized value. The word “play” for example can be a noun, verb, quality, or concept. By itself it becomes a symbol as it stands for itself and the multiplicity beyond its form. It is only when placed in a sentence that it loses its ambiguity (perhaps even its liminality).

Language works to form a picture that is a cohesive whole. The gaps left in the details allow enough room for interpretation by the message’s receiver. Whether an outgrowth of evolution or conscious effort, language has been shaped to allow the core message to be transmitted without the need for exacting details, ensuring the concept is transferred. The rest of the details are left to the receiver to fill in. For example let us use the sentence “the boy hit the ball.” How much information did I give you? Very little. How much information is concrete? Again, very little. The only real information given is the gender of the child, what he does, and the object he interacted with. Other than the gender, even the other details are not very concrete as no information for how (or with what) the ball was hit or the type of ball described. However chances are very good you supplied all of the details to make the concept into a complete picture, down to the clothing and age of the child. You also supplied the ball and the manner in which it was struck. This is how words are fuzzy but come together to form a concise picture.

By relying on the receiver, a message works with the loose collection of data to create what Saussure refers to as the signifier and signified. These two items together create a sign, but keep in mind that the information is going from the signifier to the signified. Thus, without an actual object present, no one can say they are observing the same object. This is why words from multiple languages for the same object do not look nor sound alike. Hence words are arbitrarily assigned to objects and concepts, just like the components in games. This is in part where the fuzziness of the words comes into play. The aforementioned sentence of the boy hitting a ball is a prime example. The sign I envisioned is not necessarily the same as yours. Chances are that you uses a child you know to concretize the image, just like I did.

Games do the same thing. The difference is that the sign generated is unique to the play session. You may recall the meanings generated from each play experience, but that by no way means the signs of different instances will be the same. However, they are related by the context of the rules. The signs of the events are akin to definitions. Sessions of Risk have similar outcomes. The same is true of Settlers of Catan, Power Grid, and so forth. Such “texts” grow out of the experience; this is similar to what leads to new definitions that are appended to existing words. With games, however, there is a liminality to the sign that cannot be fully rendered in words or symbols to express it to anyone who was not present.

So, this is how language grows and functions. We start with the strings of arbitrary sounds and imbue within them meaning. As our range of experience increases, we come across new items and situations that fall outside our descriptive powers. How then do we encode these new experiences and concepts into language? For one, we have to incorporate the change to nature as we understood it in our psyche. Once we have accepted the existence of the change we need to find a way to speak about it in a manner that will be acceptable to all parties involved. The process involves abusing language by making it bridge a gap in our knowledge we now know exists. This can be messy, political, and confusing.

Forcing language to accommodate anything disrupts the social balance. This is in part due to the inherent power ascribed to defining concepts. We can see this in such phrases such as “estate tax” being referred to as a “death tax”, “illegal immigrants” as “undocumented immigrants,” and the terms used to describe various ethnicities that have replaced the unquestioned racially-charged monikers of the past. There are clear feelings closely bound with these words and that colors the perceptions of the speakers and the audience. That is how potent language can be. When we force this shift in view that comes with new words and definitions, we engage in catachresis. This is the act of “abuse” that seems to pervert nature and language. The power to view the world as however we choose can shake society to its core. Though it is we who undergo the paradigm shift, we experience it as an abuse of the status quo.

Without catachresis, however, we have no way to express new ideas in a relatively compressed manner. Words are already filled with compressed content. This is why we have multiple definitions assigned to words. What are being transmitted are the concepts embedded in the words used. For this reason, language has to grow in order to allow us to save time while transmitting meaningful messages as efficiently as possible. This allows us to cut down on tedium and the drudgery our brains do not want to deal with when executing routine tasks. Seriously, try concentrating on the individual steps needed for tasks we do every day and see how quickly it frustrates you. It also explains why language acquisition is harder for adults and children. Our brains do not want to learn new ways to express concepts we have already mastered.

The inherent problem in all of this is that it leaves plenty of room for misunderstanding and misinterpretation to occur. Catachresis and the eventual arrival at consensus for incorporating these concepts into the lexicon is how we try to resolve these issues collectively. This leads us to a point where we are always striving to close the gaps between what we observe and experience and how we share that information through mutually accessible signs. All the while, the terms used to convey the same information work like game tokens and relate the social positionality of the speaker, which further aids in miscommunication and misunderstanding. These types of shifts lead to the development of dialects and language splits. For games, this is not all that far removed from the concepts of house rules and new games designed in response to a community’s needs or isolation.

The fuzziness that leads to a concrete whole is a precarious communication method. It is also very versatile. The divergent methods that allow us to reach the same sign speak to the resilience of language and its rules along with why it, and not math, has become the preferred communication tool. Thus, going from an abstract, emotion- and experiential-laden collection of words to a single idea with little to almost no mistaken identity is what gives language its power. To further the utility of language, it can grow and morph by the actions of the speakers to co-opt areas of nature never before encountered. Compare this to the structure of math in the following section.

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 2

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 4

Work Stoppage

I know it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted anything. The reason this has been the case is that my day job has put quite a dampener on my time. Working in a library isn’t about reading books all day. I only wish that were the case. This time of the year is one of our busiest periods for libraries since we’re essentially tasked with the job of preventing the summer slide as much as possible for our school-aged patrons.

Having to do double and sometimes triple duty these last few weeks to make sure everything’s in order means I’ve had to either spend time working on writing, cartography, or this blog. Given the choice between the three, I went with the two that helped move projects forward. My burden should be lightening in a bit, so that means I’ll be able to pick up the pace on several fronts.

Mapping Update

I’ve been working on the map and have overcome some of the problems I was having with a few elements. Currently, the map is nearly done topographically. I have to finish a few elements and then add all the buildings.

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 2

The Art of Ideation

What is our most powerful sense as a species? Note that the question is not which sense we rely on the most. They are not all equal, which should not come as a surprise. What might be is that the answer is touch. Our skin as largest organ aside, no other sense can kill you if it is denied. Touch is our strongest sense because it binds us to a community, brings us pleasure, pain, comfort, and healing. Denying the sensation of touch can kill infants, it can also be lethal for adults who are suffering from illness. Being denied the sensation of touch means our bodies do not produce some of the healing agents our bodies produce, like oxytocin. The lack of physical contact can trigger psychological ailments as well. Yet with all that power and brain matter devoted to the sense of touch and the skin, it is not a sense we depend upon to make sense of the world at large beyond tactile sensations and ambient temperature. Even smell, which triggers potent memories, feelings, and alerts us to potentially harmful food sources, gives way to the primacy of sight.

There are some highly complex aspects to how our senses operate, but for purposes of this topic, only one type of stimulus matters: oscillations. They come in numerous types, but the two that affect perception are pressure and electromagnetic. Depending on the sense, the wavelength and the medium of transmission, the senses of sight, touch, and hearing are alerted to a stimulus within range of our sense organs. Our eyes perceive electromagnetic, our ears pressure, and our skin both (heat is a form of electromagnetic radiation). To be clear, none of these elements are the same or should be seen as such as the oscillations in a floor do not equate with those from sound. Both are forms of pressure, but one does not normally hear the gentle sway of a building or feel the pressure of the upper registers of sound (though you might be able to observe an object vibrate in resonance of a sound). The same can be said of visible light and heat. Without venturing into territory often reserved for metaphysical studies, the sensations are measured using the same measurement: the number of vibrations per second, known as hertz (Hz). Something that vibrates twice every second is annotated as 2 Hz, for example.

Here is where I completely collapse unrelated systems into their mathematical equivalents with full knowledge that none of these should be construed as forming the same continuum (sound and light are not part of the same spectrum). Each octave has double the oscillations as the one below it. That range denotes all of the sounds (e.g. notes) in the octave. It also helps to explain why the pitch of a note is recognizable despite being from a higher/lower register. The sounds have wave peaks that sync up with a 2:1 ratio per octave shift. From that, we recognize the notes as the same, just different pitch. You might not be aware on a conscious level that your brain is doing this, but you do recognize the harmony of sounds.

Four paragraphs in and I am afraid I may have lost part of my audience or that it may seem that I have gone far afield of my original point of catachrestic dichotomy. This is because the issue of conflated oscillations for three of our senses might not seem related (similar to how this paragraph has been calling attention to itself as an apology). If all frequencies of vibration occupied the same scale, we would have less need to talk about this issue and the artifice of communication from one medium to another. According to Kimberly Myles and Mary S. Binseel, amongst other researchers, the range of our greatest sensitivity to vibrations by touch is .4 Hz and may very well exceed 100 kHz. Our range of sensitivity to sound is 20-20,000 Hz. For light it is 430,000-750,000 GHz, or 430-750 trillion oscillations per second. Translated into “octaves,” touch astoundingly yields an approximate seventeen, hearing has ten (though as we age, most adults can only hear eight), and visible sight is limited to one. The sense we rely upon the most has the smallest range on this conflated scale of octaves.

Stereoscopic vision aside, it seems a weakness that we should, as a predatory species, put so much stock in the most restrictive of our three external world processing senses. Then again, the ramifications for the importance could not be made more manifest. Perhaps it is a consequence of modernity that auditory sensitivity is not given so much weight in our dependence on stimulus receptors. The narrowness of sight does help to explain some of our problems in translating from one medium to another. Namely, how do we pass on knowledge from one person to another?

Try this thought experiment if you do not have the means to do it actively: teach someone a skill without using words. You may use sounds, but no actual language. Odds are quite high that you would demonstrate the skill and use a series of gestures inviting your student to attempt the skill. This would be reinforced with touch and visuals cues (possibly facial expressions) with verbal sounds that convey emotional tones, but no language to transfer the concept to the person being thus instructed. Imagine the tools being created mean life or death. This is likely how our hominid ancestors first began to share knowledge. Primates have exhibited the same behavior when using tools to acquire food, such as chimps using twigs to root out termites. We take in a lot of information without resorting to language.

Neither you nor I need to speak the same language to share knowledge with one another. I could teach you how to do a simple sewing job to return clothing back to operational use. It will not look pretty, but it will get more utility out of the item mended. If you watch how I thread a needle and make my stitches, you will eventually learn how to do it yourself without ever having practiced the skill yourself. That is how I learned to sew. There was plenty of trial-and-error as I learned to make my stitches smaller, and thus increasing the strength of the mend, but no one conveyed the skill to me through language. I internalized the process and improved over time through my observations of others. Should you know how to affix a stone point to a stick so that it creates a serviceable spear that will last longer than a thrust or two and I can watch you make it, I will learn to make a crude version of your copy. There is nothing special in this. Children learn by observing a lot of activities performed by parents. The mimicry is enough to begin the learning process.

Throughout my schooling, I was told that ninety percent of all communication is nonverbal. So, to speed up the learning process, we learn to read the body language and tone of our mentors’ voices while they instruct us. By seeking information through the expressions of a teacher, we learn how much approval, and thus success in replicating the skill, we have in progressing towards mastery of the construction of whatever we are being taught through such means. After all, there is not much in the way of theoretical constructs that can be communicated through nonlinguistic means or is required for basic survival skills. Not even the power of touch allows the transfer of information. We use it to secure the attention of the student or teacher.

Think about the ramifications of this: the sense with the greatest octave range is reserved for the task at hand and for getting our attention while the ten octaves of sound seek out notes of approval or disapproval, and the one with less than a single octave receives the lion’s share in learning what has been communicated. Yet, our eyes do not transfer information from one mind to another in a direct manner the way touch and sound do. Other than some emotional content, eyes cannot share knowledge. What is a predator with a good idea supposed to do when a new idea occurs to him and he wants to share it to increase the group’s survival chances? Then again, how do predators form lasting social bonds to diffuse tension and prevent misunderstandings? Art.

Wait, why art? Aesthetics are pleasing and comforting. A well crafted tool, a pattern worked into fabric, a dyed piece of cloth, worked stones, a joke that makes fun of you instead of others, exaggerated gestures, and a good story are all examples of art. Art also allows for the transcendence and the translation of information from one medium to another. The trouble with most art is that it is semiotic. This makes the meaning of the art transitory, leading to interpretations that are subjective and highly mutable. What, then, is more concrete and yet retains the plasticity necessary to translate information from one medium to another? Language.

Language is symbolic enough to allow words to embody ideas without being inflexible in their meaning. After all the word “tree” does not look like what it symbolizes any more than “arbor,” “Baum,” and “derevo” or “drevo” do in Latin, German, and Russian, respectively. None of these words resembles a tree or each other, yet they all carry the same basic information. In The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker invokes Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man by saying “Darwin concluded that language ability is ‘an instinctive tendency to acquire an art’ a design that is not peculiar to humans but seen in other species such as song-learning birds.” This harkens back to previous examples of the conveyance of information through tonality as that is what music is: harmonious tones that produce a pleasing aesthetic. We do not need words to show people we care about them or wish them ill. Gifts, labor on the behalf of others, and a hug communicate the former as much as a glare or a punch to the face expresses the latter. What possible art does a verbal exchange facilitate beyond emotional states? Eleven paragraphs into this section have shown just that.

Language is an art that translates concepts, actions, and objects from one medium to another for the express purpose of transferring information from one person to another. How do we accomplish this goal? Predominantly through sensory descriptions. Chief amongst these are, to no surprise, visual details. Given our propensity to rely on vision, it should not be much of a shock that this is the case. Consider some of our expressions: “hand of god,” “fickle finger of fate,” “scales of justice,” “long arm of the law,” and “quantum foam.” I would like to see these concepts as objects if anyone knows where they can be found outside of linguistic constructs and artworks.

Each word has a specific idea (a semi-concrete definition), but the words are combined here to create an idea that builds an image of ideas that have no concrete form. There are no literal scales of justice or an arm of unusual length for the legal system. Rather, they describe visually the extent to which the legal system can reach to enforce laws and the inherent belief in a fairness in the system. No instruments exist to prove that there is a foamy structure to a zero-point energy field, but the math suggests the shape and consistency of something akin to sea foam. This emphasis on the visual colors our perspective but by no means is the whole of sensory input used to transfer ideas from one brain to another. Sounds, touch, smell, and taste also find representation in language. Sounds often describe tonality, emphasis, noise, confusion, and volume of quality. Touch sees use in myriad ways as is fitting of a sense that has multiple sources from which to draw (texture, temperature, solidity, pain, pleasure, etc.). Smell and taste are used the least because of their subjectivity (especially amongst novice writers). They are highly subjective and are employed to trigger memory responses or feelings of revulsion or enjoyment. Scents do not nail themselves to your nose or otherwise block the nasal passages, but we describe them as being cloying (“cloy” means to nail, spike, clog, or claw something) when they are inescapable.

Notice how we use sensory descriptions to express an idea that we wish to share but have no physical object to present. However, how does language do this? By assigning fixed meanings to the words so that when an idea is given form, it does so by those meanings contribution to the overall concept. Hence, we understand that the “hand of god” is a description of divine influence or touch on a situation; or for the nonbeliever, an act of nature beyond mortal ken to understand in its full context. But, there is play in the definitions so that words have multiple yet subtle shifts in meaning. Thus, I can like someone or relate the similarity of two items which share a similar quality because the word “like” expresses some sort of affinity between two or more objects. On their own, the words retain their ambiguity for which specific meaning should be applied. That gives way to specificity when the context becomes clear.

Why so much emphasis on sight and mental pictures? This goes back to the primacy of vision in predatory species. This also explains why ninety percent of communication is nonverbal as how a message is delivered is as important as or more so than the message itself. You are more likely to retain knowledge with a mental picture than without it. What evidence is there for this? Plenty as studies have shown that we remember about ten percent of what we hear and double that for what we read on average. With the exception of music and language, art is overwhelmingly rooted in visual sensory experiences. Hence the abundance of imagery in the translations across media that language employs.

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 1

Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 3

Entering the Innermost Cave with an Open Eye

Cameras and the surveillance state are everywhere in the cyberpunk world in part because they reflect the damaging nature of surveillance on the human psyche and are endemic to creating a dystopic world. The audience gets to ride along with the characters as the mystery they’re plunged into in a realm with so little maneuvering space unfolds, but the deeper the characters push, the less illumination there is in a world that’s nearly always cloaked in eternal night. Paradoxically, the eye is always open and observes the progress. Then again, that darkness is directed as much inwards as it is a reflection of the setting. That is the point of cyberpunk as the existential crises asks us, the audience, to answer what it mean to be human and to really look inside for that answer just like the characters in the story.

The glaring element of the cyberpunk genre is the landscape. It’s essentially barren. The ground yields nothing. Concrete, glass, and steel make up the majority of the surroundings with a healthy dose of plastic thrown into the mix. Nothing grows organically in the cyberpunk urban landscape. Everything is contained and controlled to such an extent that the artifice of the world is laid bare for all to see. This is a world that is flooded with data culled and collated to get the best aggregate advanced math can divine.

Despite this seeming infertility, there is a lot of life—or the semblance thereof—teeming in this environment. The darkness doesn’t prevent the thriving populace from flourishing in a sea of neon. Rather, it all serves as a counterpart to the organic, pastoral world. In this context, the cyberpunk landscape is treated as being empty and wasted with its complete disconnect from the organic world of nature. This is an accurate literary description but only inasmuch as the pastoral world is purely physical with its emphasis on sensations and simple pleasures. Cyberpunk is a completely internalized world, wholly fitting for existential, transhuman genre that, on its surface, may not appear as such with its noir trappings.

Fortunately, there are clues that provide a roadmap to show how to interpret the signs and symbols of the genre that make it clear what the genre is communicating. The first is the tenebrous environment. The world is filled with darkness from the shadowed recesses of doorways, the ebon sky of night, the wide-brimmed hats and/or obfuscating eyewear, and the shades of grey fading to black clothing ubiquitous to the genre all point towards a cave-like structure encompassing the world. The conditions the characters find themselves in are also oppressive with shady undertones—and sometimes overtones—adding to the weight pushing down upon the world and making it feel smaller despite the vastness of the landscape. The main source of light is artificial and mainly neon (with the occasional spotlight thrown in).

The darkness matters here because, in reference to the poem, the night has one thousand eyes. In this case it is the cyclopean eyes of the ever watchful cameras that surveil the world. But the cave, like night, is supposed to shield the true nature of deeds and objects from scrutiny. It’s the same conditions found in film noir where the shadows of night cloak the deeds and motives of all the principle characters. The bright lights and the shiny chrome are here to deflect attention in much the same way a beautiful woman serves as a magician’s assistant: pleasing to the eye and subconsciously stealing the focus away from the magician’s movements. But this is a subterfuge as well; a set-up that performs a portion of the duties while the crowd focuses on where they think the real trick is unfolding.

The light and the chrome draw the eye as much as the shadows, but we are trained through various artifices of storytelling to ignore the shaded areas where the eye cannot penetrate. The focus is to be given to the areas alight where the action is performed for the spectators. But the elements of noir throw this into question. The hidden agendas of the various participants become too perfect to not be suspicious. Why is that light illuminating this object and not that one? Why are there shadows here where someone is most certainly lurking? Why are things held outside of the visual range or excluded from the frame? Remember, the camera showing the audience the world is also showing the cameras qua plot devices filling the world for the hidden audiences the principle audience may never see.

But why is the cyberpunk world like this despite all its shiny surfaces and it’s lighting to keep audiences from descending into utter darkness? For one, the setting is telling the audience that this is hell. The world has fallen under the spell of darkness and the heroes begin their journeys moving to ever deeper recesses from whence no one could dream the world could rise from such a descent. From the very beginning, then, the audience is forced to question everything, to include one’s own indulgence in such fiction. The hell here is a very specific one: the innermost reaches of the person’s soul. This is Nietzsche’s abyss, a monstrous desire for power and control where no stray bit of information goes unaccounted.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work this way and it cannot be measured to such precision. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle forces its way to the fore and the quantum kick pushes the desired objects well out of focus or completely arrests its development in the instant in which the single photograph can be captured. As such, the world teems with life paradoxically while simultaneous being static, which is befitting of a world full of dialectics refusing or unable to reach synthesis. Then again, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance at work in cyberpunk. Much of these two elements drive the action of the stories as one side or another works to achieve something more than a fleeting victory that shifts the paradigm for one or more participants.

The reason it is difficult for anyone to achieve lasting goals for long is the mercurial nature of the genre. Nothing in the innermost cave has substance beyond what the observer assigns to it. This is a realm of shadows and smoke a la the cantina scenes and latter half of Casablanca. They linger and hang over everything in the world. In a storytelling sense, this imagery is symbolic of the interior as that aspect of characters is often left unstated or revealed through references of other works dealing with shady inner lives. That murk is like the future: impenetrable, unknowable, always in flux, and no matter how much light shines on that path, once the moment of clarity passes, the darkness returns unchanged.

The genre covers everything in a silver lining that gives the eye a pleasing aesthetic to behold, but once you look beyond the surface, everything is hollow and empty, just like the shadows. There is no meaning behind the façade. Whatever is presented is a symbol and requires the viewer to interpret the meaning and give it purpose. Neither anima nor animus has power without the agency of the audience and/or the characters. This shouldn’t be surprising as the line between sentience and program has been blurred. The everyday individual lives hand-to-mouth or in a pre-defined routine that is no different from a set of instructions fed to the machine. The artificial intelligence is an emergence from the pattern realizing that information generated from any and all sources is the new sustenance, the same as the old sustenance for a species that has been more infovore than omnivore for most of its existence.

Cyberpunk essentially expresses the core of what humanity has always known: information is the world’s chief and oldest commodity. But information has to be acted upon and read correctly. Some is foundational, but much is fleeting and contains a margin of error no matter how well established it is. All one needs to do is turn his head and see that the shadows are cast from a light hidden behind the audience. But the source is ultimately unknowable. Those platonic forms are artificial divisions designed to collate data into manageable chunks the human brain can process and use. And that light, it’s the projector lighting up the wall of the innermost cave to distract from the central figure struggling to find its place and assign meaning to the world: the mind’s eye.

In the cyberpunk world, even the machines interpret data streams. They may have a greater computing power than the flesh-and-blood co-inhabitants, but they, too must make sense of the information fed through their various input mechanisms. However, they are limited to their algorithmic functions. There is no real thought here, though the intelligence is artificial and capable of rational decisions, it is ultimately enslaved by the cold rationale of logic. Or is there?

On the surface, the complex math that makes artificial intelligence simulate actual thought is complex, but limited by the capability of the processors and the programmers who write the code. However, with complex enough formulae interacting with one another, the effect approaches human consciousness enough that at some point, the line is blurred or crossed and the same deductive reasoning used passes the Turing test. Humanity in the cyberpunk world is no longer alone, but when the machine has also developed its own innermost cave the old forms lose cohesiveness. Only the individual on its lonely journey can answer what it means to be human in a world of darkness within and without. Thus, the existentialism of the genre is part and parcel of the crises of agency.

Been busy and then some.

Yeah, I’m more than overdue for an update, so here goes: I had and still have a lot of stuff to do outside of writing that has put a huge crimp in my semi-normal work schedule. There’s a couple of things coming in a day or two.

To Surveil in the Cyclopean World

One of the interesting features of cyberpunk literature, film, and television, is the all-intrusive voyeuristic nature of it all. As one of the features of this genre is to borrow from the dystopic hells of Bradbury, Huxley, and Orwell, there’s always an apparatus available for viewing the world at any scale. The audience doesn’t need to be reminded that someone always watches the events unfold, but the genre lends itself particularly well to the notion that you, as audience, are the passive observer always present even when the story has a shadowy element that is monitoring the world depicted. The camera and the entire apparatus it represents is inescapable. It also stymies the purging of pathos because the presence of this lens becomes both the window in and barrier to the world under surveillance. It’s also the only way that the computer can relate and respond to the physical world that is also shared with the audience and the story’s characters.

Why a camera lens? Of all the senses it is at once the most visceral and detached. Hearing delivers an astonishing array of information, but the interpretations are subjective and often the greatest concentration of information is arbitrarily shaped. Smell triggers memories and emotions. Touch is an internal and often deeply personal sense, just like taste, which requires you to take into a sensitive area of your body the substance to be sensed. The camera’s lens is objective and it can’t hide what passes through its field of view. The camera has to be manipulated to avoid objects one does not want to see, but catching a glimpse means that the viewer knows the shunned objects are just out of frame.

Writers and directors know how to do this expertly. It is a technique used to shape the information and keep the audience focused only on the scenery that creates the desired narrative. Thus, there is a tendency to metafiction references sprinkled throughout cyberpunk stories. These aren’t just held to the homages to the source materials, they’re also self-referential and the ironic desire to escape the unsleeping eye. The main difference between the two methods is the details used to convey the world, and not just in terms of medium. The writer uses metaphor, yes, but this is a way to take the overwhelming ineffable and distill it into an experience a reader can have. The director just throws the imagery at the viewer full force and with the sense of overwhelming magnitude because the image conveys the whole of the experience.

There is little difference between the monstrous proportions of the Los Angeles landscape in Blade Runner and the opening line of Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.” Both are devoid of life and full of vibrancy at once. They are the undulating tabulae rasae upon which the future will be wrought. The camera eye has turned its focus on the liminal threshold, the very interface through which audience and the unknown entities receiving the visual feeds from the unblinking eyes observe the world. There is more intimacy on the audience’s part as they have a protagonist or point-of-view character to help ground them in the world, but it’s limited and often kept at a distance.

Cyberpunk is an existential medium. The art form circles the question of what it means to be human but it can’t get close to an answer because to use more than the eye is tricky. For one, no one has lived in these environments and there’s no comparison to draw upon, so it can only be dreamt of. The world is a transhuman one. Flesh is no longer the privilege that separates the apex predator from the terrain. It is logic, often cold and unfeeling, bound up in the complex programs that simulate consciousness. Most such personifications lack the human form and the sensory/emotional pleasures that temper the rational animal aspect of our species. Their perceptions are mathematical expressions.

The camera lens is different. It is designed to explicitly mimic the human eye and capture the light streaming into it so the moment can be saved and reproduced and shared with others. It’s disembodied and detached from time the way memories are. However, memories fade and become distorted with time. Preserved properly, the recordings of a camera are virtually eternal and resist degradation caused by age. This makes the presence of the camera pervasive and invasive to a degree that’s inhuman. It verges on the supernatural.

What makes the surveillance state so prominent in cyberpunk fiction is our own forms of entertainment and our predatory nature. Humans are intensely curious about the lives of others; it’s why most stories focus on individuals rather than on groups or nations and their collective narrative through an arc. It’s one of the primary factors for the rise of reality television’s mass appeal. But there’s a darker edge to this need to observe from on high or at a safe distance: that’s the predator’s instinct.

This is power in its purest form, not because it gives any true authority or the ability to inflict harm at a distance, but rather because it is ubiquitous and the watcher is invisible. The predator’s perch is almost always above the prey for its superior vantage point. Not knowing who’s behind the camera gives a godlike quality to the observer. The proliferation of cameras creates the aura of omnipresence and, to some degree, omniscience. Thus, the sense of an inescapable presence always looms large in the minds of the audience and the inhabitants of the cyclopean world.

The camera eye also does something that none of the other senses can that is critical to the cinema and literary arts: it can magnify. Other senses can be amplified, but they can’t zoom in or out. This makes them less sensitive as a result. Scrutiny isn’t possible with the other senses. But the eye is focused on picture or text and can expand or tighten the frame as needed. All of this is relatable with what computers can do with a camera lens, and it’s terrifying.

The cyberpunk world has been turned into an amalgam of Plato’s and Polyphemus’ caves. There are flickering shadows and nightmares observing and devouring the inhabitants as they are wont. With the godlike twist on surveillance, however, the setting takes on elements of Piers Plowman, Everyman, and Pilgrim’s Progress. Much of the genre is allegorical, but it does what all good allegory does: use the imagery of the world to construct the allegory. Cyberpunk just does this in a hyperreallistic way. Sometimes there is bias here, just like the exclusion of all things outside the frame, but it’s the flood of pure information of hyperrealism that bleeds through.

It makes this godlike entity of “them” on the other side of the lens feel like the Christian allegorical works where God is watching and weighing. So is the audience. The viewer is judge and jury, forming an opinion based on the unfolding information. The signal-to-noise ratio is an ever-present concept that has to be filtered out as the world becomes inundated with an unceasing flow of telemetry and new data. But, is the audience as voyeur part of the apparatus or just another disembodied figure scrutinizing the world to find any cracks that must be shored up and keep the artifice intact? To do otherwise would shatter the suspension of disbelief, wouldn’t it?

This is what a computer would do. Its design is to weigh and measure, focus and zoom as it is programmed to do. It can only respond to its programming and the stimulus that coding tells it to react to. The audience is in the same position. If the story is unfolding on a screen, then the audience is in its own cave watching the projection, consuming the commodity. Should it be in the form of a book, the eye is constantly scanning the text, line by line. The text commands the imagery to form in the brain where the actions of the world play out. In both instances, the brain weighs and measures. And, with the camera’s power to drag out time the way a memory can be examined, what difference is there between the apparatus that captures and replays the event and the observer? The realization: the audience is the surveillance state.

As inheritors to Polyphemus’ estate, how can the protagonist represent Everyman and be the true emotional doorway through which the audience enters the world? It’s a dialectic that cannot resolve itself cleanly in favor of the viewer. The synthesis requires that it become an amalgam that allows glimmers of Everyman to surface so the audience can insert itself into the story, but that’s as far as Everyman can carry them. Everyman is being devoured in every frame. If he dresses like those around him, he disappears and so does the story. He has to stand apart. He’s commanded to by his own pilgrimage, caught between the donjon and the tower there is no way to stop until the answers that plunged him into this world have been discovered. Hence, the dreamer must keep dreaming.

Society doesn’t hold the key to his dilemma, however. It is allegory and thus empty past its surface. The power that holds it together is fragile and fleeting. It can only be held in place with a response of overwhelming force and terror. What does Everyman do, the only thing he can: he must blind the surveillance state to his true goals and become the one thing they don’t expect. Rather than becoming one with the social order or remain as the average Joe, he becomes Noman. And thus, the social order and the surveillance state stays intact, but the audience is bereft of its vehicle to help it shed the pathos built up as a result of the world it’s helped create. Because no man has been judged, no man has gone unnoticed. It’s the machinery that has been on trial.

Caught in a World Full of Monsters

There are a lot of issues surrounding Blade Runner that keep me coming back to it in regards to explaining some of the elements of the cyberpunk genre. One of the reasons for this is its rich imagery and how much the film calls attention to its source material. There’s one element that my screenwriting professor points to that I want to address here: the seemingly problematic point-of-view character. The film is populated with characters that are builders and the built. Some of them are in positions of surveillance, making them spectators along with the audience watching the drama unfold—except one character. Deckard doesn’t know who he is. The audience doesn’t know who he is and this is what makes him the perfect character to introduce us into this horrid landscape.

So, why is it the case that Deckard is our POV into this world? It comes from the tradition of noir fiction. During the interbellum period of the world wars, predominantly the Great Depression, people lived hand-to-mouth and this is pretty much embedded in the private investigator characters like Sam Spade. They are perpetually living on the edge, forced to take the next case that comes along so they can keep the lights on and afford a cheap meal. The oppressive heat that seems endemic to these stories lets us know as an audience just how hellish or close to hell these characters are.

The private investigator doesn’t have the ability to refuse the way a cop does. Sometimes the character is an ex-cop who still has connections on the police force. Of course, this just reinforces the concept that the character is caught between worlds. In this case it’s the duly deputized agents of the law (representing the light) and the shady characters the investigator is often paid to follow and discover what they’re up to. This is surveillance by the half-blind without the right gear or all the facts in a murky realm of twilight.

And this is where Deckard comes in. When we are first introduced to him he’s unconcerned with the world around him. He understands it, is a part of it, but wants to be distanced from it. How does the audience know this? He pretends to not understand the pidgin spoken by Gaff, played by Edward James Olmos. In the theatrical release, the audience is told this through the use of a voice over that doesn’t bother to hide that this film takes a lot of cues from film noir. Deckard is our Sam Spade, but his inability to refuse isn’t financially driven. No, this investigator is at the mercy of the law embodied by M. Emmet Walsh’s character, Bryant.

The audience is given very little information about Deckard beyond his desire to not blend into either world. We are told from the very beginning that his position is in question. Furthermore, some line spoken by Gaff recall actions taken or line spoken by Deckard that the audience cannot be sure if Deckard is a replicant or a human. All the audience can know for sure in the context of the film is what Deckard needs to do to escape the hold the law has over him given his skill set.

But, that isn’t the shadowy underworld that Deckard is plunged into. No, because in cyberpunk, the noir isn’t of the streets, but the mind and what it means to be human. This is why the question of the replicants and their place in the social order needs to but can’t be answered without violence. Where does the line between human and machine exist and can anyone be sure that it can’t be crossed? The Voight-Kampff test is supposed to tell Deckard, and the viewer, that at first blush, you can tell the difference. Here is where the femme fatale enters the story in the form of Rachel. The femme fatale character is a succubus figure that, with her beauty and sexual energy, draws the protagonist into the underworld.

The question here is who or what is Deckard. The audience is never told, but as he hunts down the replicants, there’s a subtle descent into the character’s subconscious through his interactions with each target. But, here’s where Deckard’s knowledge diverges from the audience’s and the story shows this world to be filled with Frankensteins and their monsters. The first one is the landscape itself. The monstrosity of the city sprawl and the darkness in which it’s veiled reveals the urban world as one of leviathan proportions. Anyone in the city is in the belly of the beast, which is what is shown with all the teeming press of people surrounded by buildings, some of which overhang the street.

The second realization is that the replicants may in fact be human despite their artifice. This is a nightmarish Pygmalion in the vein of Frankenstein. As a result, we have a world that is completely sterile with the only life therein is either filled with production values or an artifice playing at being alive. Regardless of the case may be the result is the same: extreme alienation and the illusion of freedom. The visuals of the world reflect this. It’s why the city is seen at a distance. The scale of the snake is examined in the extreme to reveal the manufacturer’s serial number in much the same way Deckard cannot look at a the whole of a photo, he has to zoom in and twist and turn around angles to decipher the information it contains in his pursuit of the inhuman while engaging in a decidedly inhuman act.

There is not satori here. Nothing in Blade Runner is appreciated for what it is, only for how it is put together. That is until Deckard is confronted with Rachel and the audience later with the unicorn dream and the subsequent reference with Gaff’s origami unicorn. And the origami (both the match man and the foil wrapper unicorn) here matters because it’s the only sign of life in this bleak environment and emblematic of the missing elements of the environment: vitality and light.

Is Deckard a replicant or is he human? The audience is never clued in and nobody says anything concrete. Yet, hints are given that he may very well be a duplicate of someone else. The theatrical release provided some important references here that give us another monster to confront in the struggle for identity and individualism. Deckard’s outfit is different than everyone else’s, but he is cast from the prototypical gumshoe mold complete with trench coat while Gaff wears the hat. Gaff and Bryant appear to surveil Deckard and when he finally makes a break for it with Rachel, the unicorn is the reference to let the audience know Gaff was there and knows his plans. It is as clear a message as any that in this murky world, someone has perfect measure of this man who doesn’t know himself and the audience cannot truly know.

This is a hideous position to be in and explains why the underworld in Blade Runner isn’t the club or Zhora’s erotic dance with the snake, but rather the internal turmoil Deckard is plunged into after meeting a woman who gives every indication of being human but has to be cross examined ten times as long (and thus psychologically dissected) to detect the artifice behind her construction. Deckard’s attraction to her isn’t Pygmalion’s, it’s the Nathanael’s from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” Rachel is therefore a newer model Olimpia and the obsession with eyes begins to make sense in this world of monsters.

Why the eyes, because absolutely nothing can be taken at face value even though nothing has depth. Everything presented is an interface devoid of content except for the replicants. They cry, they fume, they even commit murder as a crime of passion when Roy gouges out his maker’s eyes before crushing his skull. Zhora is a combat model who plays the seductress. Pris, the pleasure model acts like a child and in her death throes is depicted as having a tantrum as she thrashes her way into oblivion.

The violence here is justified as the only humans in the story are passive observers who show more interest in how their creations act and have turned out rather than treating them as people with equal dignity. Tyrell is interested in Roy’s mind and his growth in his short life. J.F. Sebastian is a toy maker whose work helped engineer the construction of the replicants’ bodies. Hannibal Chew only makes eyes, the windows to the soul, but no actual soul. No humans breathe life into this story, they only judge and marvel at their own work. They’ve played god and worship their own idols. This is a grotesque and inhuman response that’s all too human when we marvel at our own deeds and what we’ve wrought.

Deckard doesn’t answer the question of his position, but his escape from the city with Rachel speaks volumes. It’s the only time the sun shines in the film. The wilderness of the trees lacks any connection to the human world of machines and labor-saving devices. It is the equivalent to the monster’s flight into the barren Arctic waste in Frankenstein. Deckard is a monster like the rest of them, albeit one with a conscience. Blade Runner reveals the cybernetic world as one of irrational order. As such, Deckard is the correct POV character for the one thing he does: avoids giving into the madness of the darkness enveloping him, a remarkable feat compared to the artificial intelligences that come before him in the literary roots of cyberpunk fiction.

The flu wiped me out.

Well, I lost about a week of productivity due to whatever crud is going around. It was pretty bad and on Saturday when the fever kicked in I ended up having some pretty lucid fever dreams. You know, the kind where you can’t really tell if your actually dreaming or sleeping. It’s pretty weird and one of the reasons I’m glad I don’t get sick all that often.

My lungs are still congested, so I’m not sure how much voice dictation I can do, which is where I can really up my daily word count. That said, I have several essays to crank out and a bunch of other things coming your way that have already been written and just need editing and the like.