Issue #311: "A certain number of us have thus been dumped into the same trash can"
If you know me, you know I am a compulsive user of page flags. These 3M Post-It page flags specifically:
They measure 44×6mm (that means 0.23622 inches wide) and are only sold in the Asia region. I usually buy them from Korea, but I purchased them when I was in Japan as well. I’ve been using them for the last six years with no sign of stopping. As a result, my books usually look like this:
As of a week or so ago, there’s a new Lacan seminar in English translation. Seminar XVI: From an Other to the other. It first appeared in print in French in 2006, but the actual seminar took place across 1968 and 1969. Though I’ve actually read parts of this seminar before in an unofficial translation, the new English edition is amazing. I thought it a little funny that I used a page flag on the first page. It didn’t take me long to plant my flag in a new text of Lacan’s.
There’s good reason to, of course. I am a judicious user of my imported page flags. He writes:
[W]e must define the status of the discourse known as “psychoanalytic discourse,” whose emergence in our era entails so many consequences.
A label has been placed on the way in which this discourse proceeds [le procés du discours]. “Structuralism,” it has been called — a term that did not require much ingenuity on the part of the publicist who suddenly coined it a few months ago, in order to emcompass a certain number of writers whose work had already long since sketched out several of the avenues of this discourse.
I just mentioned a publicist. You are all aware of the play on words I have allowed myself around poubellication [a combination of poubelle (garbage can or rubbish bin) and publication…]. A certain number of us have thus been dumped into the same trash can thanks to he whose job it was to do so. I could have found myself in worse company. Indeed, I can hardly be uncomfortable about those with whom I find myself lumped, they being people for whose work I have the highest regard.
In this era dominated by the genius of Samuel Beckett, we know quite a bit about garbage cans [see Endgame]. Having been a member of three psychoanalytic societies over the course of the past 30 years, in stints of 15, 10, and 5 years, I personally know a fair amount about what it means to cohabitate with trash.
Oh buddy.
This is just the first page of the text (page 3, specifically), and I’ve already riddled it with highlights. Needless to say, I’m enjoying the read.
I’ve had a couple songs on rotation lately that deserve a highlight on the front end:
Other than reading and writing, most of what I did last week was watch GDQ. Here’s a list of every run I remember watching and their VOD links:
Shoutout CarcinogenSDA who went to my high school
This was probably my favorite run of the event up to this point. I really enjoyed the demeanor and commentary from the runner, Kap.
Easily one of my favorite runs of the entire event and responsible for the ongoing “yee-haw” exclamations for the duration of the marathon.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Zangetsu has a cool character design huh? And Bobbeigh played this one using a Snack Box.
Another origin for a nearly-overused exclamation shouted by the crowd at every opportunity after: “hooray!”
I didn’t really understand the objective of this run, but it was entertaining enough.
Super Mario 64 “ Drum Percent”
A must watch: dude plays Super Mario 64 on a drum kit. Seriously.
More absolutely must see TV. TASBot, a GDQ stalwart, is a computer used to play back speedruns that involve the execution of tricks that are beyond the capabilities of human dexterity.
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Didn’t really care too much for this run, but they had two scientists who knew nothing about Armored Core explaining the real life correllaries to a bunch of the fantastical stuff happening in the game. I found that pretty funny.
This is another great one presented by a hilarious group.
Didn’t make it to the end of this one but what I saw was pretty cool.
They had to run this one twice thanks to a well placed “that’s never happened before.”
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Another one that I had to go to sleep before finishing, but I loved what I saw.
Why did I find this one so heartwarming?
A jawdropping showcase of Elden Ring glitches that are still in the game.
Took getting to the very end of the event to see a game I’d never heard of that I am 100% going to play this year.
Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster
Absolute barnburner of a finale full of thrilling twist and turns — no joke — in a sprint through one of the greatest games ever made. It might not end how you think.
Damn, I watched a lot of stuff. How did I have time to get anything done? Just the magic of my willpower, I guess. Consider this the Weekly Reading List for this edition.
Welcome to Palapagos
We have to discuss the legally distinct elephant-monster creature in the room: Palworld (2023). For those non-gamers out there, Palworld is a survival and monster collecting game published and developed by Pocket Pair, a Shinagawa, Tokyo based developer. It released on Friday, available on Xbox Series X/S (”free” through the GamePass subscription service) and Steam. MSRP for the game is $29.99. This is significant because of these headlines:
It’s true, it is really doing that well. Just on Steam, not inclusive of the legion of GamePass subscribers (Microsoft estimates 33.3 million), such as myself, who got to play the game with no up front cost. You can take a look at the Steam player charts yourself, which are impressive. This is what it looked like last time I checked:
And Palworld is no joke. I played it a ton over the weekend and really enjoyed myself. The game isn’t without its warts, though. In fact, those warts are extremely significant. The game, in many ways, is broken. Let’s take a look at some of the issues:
This is me abruptly dropped out of bounds (below the ground) when the ground decided to randomly despawn.
This is me abruptly dropped out of bounds when the ground decided to randomly despawn. I died because of it.
This is me riding on a flying Pal after being abruptly dropped out of bounds when the grounded decided to randomly despawn. You might be sensing a pattern here. Pals with flying abilities are the only way to avoid situations like this without dying 80~% of the time.
There are moments, I think, where my frustration with the game would have made me regret my $29.99 purchase if I had actually made it. But where I am sitting right now, the game feels worth it as far as the fun it provides.
Such a large, sudden player base will naturally occasion a lot of discussion. Especially in the case of Palworld, where it seems like every mechanic in the game is borrowed from another. The game takes liberally from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), Pokémon Legends: Arceus (2022), and ARK: Survival Evolved (2015). The amalgamation of features that makes Palworld is more than friendly homage or iterative influence. Its stamina and traversal systems are identical to Breath of the Wild (not for nothing, Genshin Impact borrowed the stamina and traversal systems from Breath of the Wild back in 2020). It has collectibles that appear on the map in the same way as Arceus and borrows its Pal riding UI and features from the game. I’ve never played ARK, but it seems like Palworld’s crafting and base building features are cribbed from it. More than anything, Palworld feels like a hodgepodge of mechanics and features that make it difficult to discern any underlying design principles. If nothing else, Palworld has targeted a bundle of highly profitable and frequently imitated mechanics (Genshin Impact’s revenue is in the neighborhood of $5 billion) to see what will stick.
But something certainly has stuck.
Edginess and Critique
Aside from the borrowing of mechanics, a point I’ll return to, Palworld has come under fire for its Happy Tree Friends (1999) irreverence. In a world of extremely cute, legally distinct Pokémon clones, the player can “butcher” Pals, deliberately overwork them to deteriorate their “sanity,” and make them wield modern assault rifles.
Palworld’s transgressiveness or cruelty doesn’t end there. Although the mechanic is hidden, the player can even capture humans using the mechanism for capturing the creatures. Humans, too, can be butchered in the same way and yield parts that one can sell for profit.
While the game makes these features available, they are not incentivized. I still haven’t built the meat cleaver item that would allow me to use the game’s “butcher” feature. I haven’t found any reason to slay my beloved bootleg Pocket Monsters. Whatever this suite of features might make you feel, the game has come under fire because of them:
I thought that the moral panic about video game content was long past. I especially didn’t expect such pearl clutching to come from a publication that specializes in video games, PC Gamer. It’s any critic’s prerogative to critique how they like. Lincoln Carpenter doesn’t just object to the game’s (in my view) understated edgy humor, but also gives the gameplay loop and combat poor marks.
Still, there seems to me to be something extreme about describing the game’s content as “animal cruelty,” akin to the kind of attacks PETA has aimed at Pokémon. Likewise, Carpenter’s evaluation of the function of some of the less pleasant content doesn’t match my experience. He writes, “[a]cross the board, Palworld [sic] is slanted towards getting me to abuse my Pals.” He goes on to support this claim by suggesting the pace of material production, a responsibility the Pals undertake at base, is too slow thus encouraging him to use the “Monitoring Stand.” He writes:
the Monitoring Stand [is] a building where I can increase my Pals' work rate from normal to "cruel," or even "brutal." Forcing them to work faster increases their sanity depletion until it's untenable, increasing their chance of injuries. They'll get depressed. They'll get ulcers. They'll get fractures. I could heal those injuries with medicine, but that would require me to divert Pal slots to medicine production—adding another pressure to work the remaining Pals harder.
I’ve been playing… and I mean playing. I never built a Monitoring Stand, have never felt the production of materials at camp to be slow, and my Pals don’t have ulcers, fractures, or depression. Though the window dressing may be a bit shocking, the underlying design is nearly as conventional as “Press A to Jump,” getting rewarded more quickly may incur drawbacks. Risk = reward. But I find the less risky path just fine. There are plenty of other avenues to speed up base production time: stronger Pals, buildings that make tasks easier, individual leveling, prayers to the Pal god (or something… it’s a resource exchange system). The game being “slanted towards getting me to abuse my Pals” is not, I think, an accurate description of the gameplay loop.
It’s slightly more interesting to me, in fact, that what is edgy and subversive about the game seems buried within obscure avenues of maximizing resources over time. Not to read too far between the lines, but my sense is the moral objection to Palworld’s content has less to do with the the idea of “animal cruelty” or “abusing my Pals,” but rather is a sublimation of more naive, but more argumentatively supportable, critiques of Palworld developer Pocketpair’s conduct and corporate strategy.
Early Access: Interminable
Prior to Palworld, Pocketpair released Craftopia (2020), another crafting game that borrows liberally from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game flew under the radar, but has been well received by players (it currently has 77.37% positive reviews on Steam) and is still in active development (its last update was January 22nd, 2024). The game launched in “Early Access,” a designation required for games on the Steam storefront that are only partially finished. A game released in “Early Access” presents sometimes severe caveats regarding available content. The story may end abruptly or gameplay mechanics may not work as intended.
An “Early Access” label implies that the game will eventually be finished, but like Kickstarter, there have also been high profile exceptions and failures. Austen Goslin discusses a range of examples for Polygon: DayZ released in early access in 2013 and didn’t have a 1.0 release until 2018. Kerbal Space Program went from an early access release in 2011 to a final release in 2015. Paragon released in early access in 2016 but was shut down in 2018, before a “final” release.
With two early access games in development, it stands to reason that the likelihood of Palworld and Craftopia both being finished is less than if Pocketpair was only supporting Palworld or Craftopia. Of course, this isn’t necessarily true. They might have enough staff to support both games and get them finished. Palworld’s success might provide more resources to finish Craftopia. Or, what I think is the most realistic scenario, Pocketpair will more or less abandon Craftopia and support Palworld with all their resources. Whether that means it ends up a “finished” game is an open question.
The possibility of either or both games in interminable early access has become a part of the criticism of Pocketpair’s business practices. The argument goes that requiring payment for a game in early access is unethical if there is no intention to finish the game. This ignores the reality of the transaction, and, indeed, any transaction: the only thing you can be certain to receive in exchange for your money is what you get up front. When it comes to luxury spending, value is both relative and personal. But even given Palworld’s glitchiness, I’ve found it to be worth the asking price.
A more severe allegation made against Pocketpair has been their “borrowing” of features constitutes immoral plagiarism or illegal intellectual property theft.
Intellectual Property is Born Free, but is Everywhere in Chains
Rendering judgment on Palworld’s indisputable use of features and ideas from other games might be best aided by a quotation from Walter Benjamin:
“The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence .... The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.” This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.
This lengthy segment from section “IX” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is the perfect encapsulation of Benjamin’s special confluence of naiveté and Luddism in the essay. Great thinker though he is, the significance of his concept of “aura” as it relates to art and authenticity has been widely repudiated. The very onset of the postmodern condition, which we still live in today, has obliterated the seriousness with which we take the notion of aura. The idea of an inherent, inextricable quality the provenance of every original work of art is sufficiently assimilated into culture. We seek out films on celluloid and paintings in museums, after all. But it is the notion that “aura” is depleted by reproduction that is most readily subject to critique. In addition, “aura” may not be the determining factor for why one seeks out works of art in their “original” state, with sufficient experiential differences between a print of a film and a digital copy or between an original painting and high resolution photograph.
My conclusion is it is Benjamin’s attitude toward film, typical of the Marxist critique of popular culture, as you can see above, that undoes his argument. In short, I would say that the power of film is hardly constrained by the medium of its production or projection. A film can transport its viewer on the largest or smallest screen, and the question of artistic quality or merit of films and plays is simply absurd.
In the case of Palworld, however, we are not talking about a post card of the Mona Lisa or a recording of a live music performance. From a cynical position, Palworld has stolen mechanics and visual designs from competing games in order to enrich itself and commensurately harm its competitors. But does this matter in the grand moral scheme?
The determination by others as to whether or not Palworld’s “plagiarism” has moral weight is fascinating to me for two reasons. The first is simple. Critics of Pocketpair collapse legality and morality, appealing to a correspondence that is not self-evidently true. Likewise, most critics of Pocketpair would be unlikely to use this method of resolving other moral questions. Take, for instance, piracy and fan art. Media piracy is obviously illegal, but there are arguments for its justification ranging from the unavailability of a given work to the idea that the pirate might be financially unable to otherwise purchase the work, thus mitigating or eliminating harm. Fan art that is sold for profit (such as via commission) is also illegal to produce and sell. Stopping commission artists, however, is unlikely to be the cause du jour for any online population.
What we’re left with is the fact that practices that defy the letter of copyright law are so common that the underlying substance of the action fails to galvanize or provoke. If Pocketpair committed intellectual property theft, however, both the legal and moral calculus about such an act would be vastly different than any one would apply to actions of a private citizen. Nonetheless, reasoning the morality of Pocketpair’s actions from first principles would run up against a general antipathy toward copyright enforcement — remember what I said about the postmodern condition?
People on Twitter are so smart, though, they sidestepped that whole problem:
The second point of fascination in the discussions about Palworld reveals a lot about the structure of modern ethical logic. The background here is that people have dismissed the alarm around Pocketpair’s “plagiarism” because Nintendo is the target. The long and short of the claim is because Nintendo is “a MASSIVE company,” theft from them is justifiable.
One corporation steals from another, who cares, right?
I’m certainly not scandalized by the possibility that Palworld is made up of lines and lines of stolen code taken from a safe inside a warp pipe that Takuro Mizobe, Pocketpair CEO, rappelled down to obtain. But that’s not because of our corporate players. A corporation seeking to enrich itself will act immorally. This is the logic of capitalism. There’s no question, every action that Pocketpair or Nintendo take is to divest consumers from the largest sum of money possible for the smallest amount of effort.
In the case of the person who might be upset by Pocketpair deceiving consumers, but okay with bad faith, illegal, or immoral actions toward “multibillion dollar compan[ies],” the very exercise of this thought experiment seems to me to suggest an attitude that posits any art one engages with should match one’s moral convictions without exception. The movies I watch, music I listen to, and video games I play must be created under morally upright conditions by morally upright people. Corporate espionage doesn’t diminish the shining gloss of rightness that so appeals.
What we are left with as a result are individuals with a complex and highly relativistic moral framework designed primarily to subject art to ethical scrutiny to ensure to complies with someone’s moral standards. Any system of ethics is destined to fall apart if the goal is to confirm a belief about oneself rather than provide a consistent view of what constitutes right and wrong.
It shouldn’t be surprising when the axion “a person can steal from Walmart” is broadened to “any person or entity can steal from big corporations” has deleterious social effects. The difference between an axiom for an individual action and a moral equation that covers a wide range of actions has a huge gulf between what function it will serve and what results it will have in a society that adopts that moral system. But, as I theorize, these ethical notions don’t intend to make a functioning society but rather justify what a person likes. The conclusions are forgone, the justification is retroactively generated, and the tail wags the dog.
What people forget is that a good moral system from the standpoint of society is one that requires the abdication of privilege for certain actions where the benefit of you taking the action is far outweighed by the harm of it being done to you.
More Than the Sum of Its Butchered Parts
As far as I am concerned, the claims by critics of Palworld are specious. However, it is the social context of internalizing the moral value of what one watches and plays and the inconsistent moral framework that is implicit in the arguments that weaken the broader assertions. In some sense, they are hard to deny. No, I don’t want to play a game that entails animal cruelty. Yes, I object to intellectual property theft by corporations no matter who it is from. I object to just about anything a corporation could possibly do other than give its money to its workers in excess of their wages. But Palworld isn’t a canary in a coal mine, it’s simply the latest in a long series of morally suspect clones that stimulate our lizard brains. Though it may be more brazen, its difference is one of degree rather than kind.
Above all, I’m intrigued by the very fact that I like this broken, derivative game. And I’m not alone. My initial hypothesis is only that the act of copying, in the context of video games, may even be better than innovation. A familiar re-presentation of the same mechanics and ideas might be more appealing than the first time, provided they have been sufficiently recontextualized. In this case, that recontextualization is combining some familiar mechanics with others. Something, something, formalism. What the hell, this is a topic for a whole other essay.
Weekly Reading List
Okay, you get a little more, but no explanation or context.
Until next time.