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woffordswords · 3 years ago

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NieR Replicant (Part 2: Themes of Violence and Sacrifice)

In part 1, I examined the doubled narrative form of NieR and suggested that it makes sense to consider the significance of this form as a negotiation of a contemporary desire for stories that exist between myth (timeless, cyclical, and essential) and history (chronological, linear, and causal). In part 2, I wish to deal more directly with some of the themes that began to emerge in my overview of the game’s story in part 1. In my opinion, NieR is notable in the context of contemporary AAA games (big budget games published by one of the industries major publishers) because of it’s concern with the meanings of human behavior. In particular, NieR explores forms of behavior that are commonplace in gaming, but are not often interrogated or placed at the center of gaming narratives. Chief among it’s concerns are the boundaries between the self and other, notably in terms of questions of the distinction between selfish and selfless behaviors. Furthermore, violence and violent impulses are held up and acknowledged as a central aspect of the human character, something that is complex and meaningful and deserving of more careful consideration than what it usually receives in video games, especially given its predominance as a mode of interaction across a wide range of genres.

Starting with the latter, violence in video games is typically treated in one of two ways. Typically it is adopted and embraced as the primary mode of interaction in many games due to it’s exhilarating and demanding forms. In these games, little attention is typically given to the reasons behind engaging in violent behavior or the consequences of such actions. External discourses often celebrate these games as an appropriate release for violent and aggressive impulses that allow the related urges to be sublimated in daily life. Alternatively, critics argue that frequent exposure to violence in these games, especially among children, can lead to an increase in the prevalence of aggressive impulses and a narrowing comprehension of the range of possibilities through which people can interact with others and resolve our conflicts with them.

Violence in video games is typically not scrutinized by the games themselves. It is a means to an end, a way to achieving an engaging interactive experience that emphasizes skill, strategy, and dexterity. However, the alternative trend has been to engage with the critique of violence in video games outlined above in order to tell stories about characters whose violent impulses detract from their ability to function as empathetic, rational, well rounded human beings as well as to present the possibility of desirable alternatives. Two good examples of this sort of game that are roughly contemporary with NieR are the critical darlings Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale.

NieR takes a slightly different tact. Although it too features characters who succumb to violent impulses and are limited and even potentially damaged by the effect of engaging in such behavior, rather than condemn the behavior and the characters who perform it or suggest and provide the opportunity for alternatives, NieR considers violence as a necessary and even essential aspect of a cyclical pattern of behavior that in some ways defines for the game what it means to be human. In other words, the game neither celebrates nor criticizes violence, but instead provides a compelling framework for understanding it that allows us to consider the significance of violence in human nature and contemporary history, as well as in our own behaviors as players of violent video games.

The role that violence plays in NieR is initially one connected to a collectivities prospects for survival. The first creature that the player kills in the game are sheep who wander the plains just north of the protagonist’s village. Killing for food quickly becomes killing for protection as the player is informed of an attack by Shades on a group of human workers attempting to rebuild a bridge that connects several human settlements to the player’s village. From there, killing gradually shifts from something protective and retaliatory to something proactive, capable of fostering greater powers for the protagonist. Once the player has teamed up with Grimoire Weiss and the idea that Shades contain within them “sealed verses”, capable of augmenting the players magical powers and brining an end to the disease that plagues his people, the Shades shift in significance from a menace to resource that must be culled in order to be harvested. The old excuse about needing to protect and/or avenge people still presents itself at different moments of the game, but the player hardly needs a reason to kill. Their violence becomes indiscriminately targeted towards an entire population of creatures, even those that seem to serve no immediate threat and whose elimination fosters the completion of no immediate goal. This process of gradual abstraction where killing becomes detached from more immediate causes and broadly justified by a totalizing mission is a pattern that can be found throughout history, but can immediately and obviously connected with the war on terrorism that Western countries have been waging for the last quarter century.

Along with this evolving rationale for enacting it, violence in NieR also can be connected with a general ignorance and obliviousness to the world one lives in. Throughout the game, strange and unique situations that range from the seemingly evolving intelligence of the shades to the existence of strange and difficult to explain locales and phenomena are hand-waved away by the protagonist in favor of maintaining focus on the more immediately demanding and gratifying violent spectacles in which they are engaged. Even towards the game’s conclusion when information about the circumstances of their world and the consequences of their actions are being directly and forcefully explained to them, the protagonists ignore and block out this information by focusing on the violent acts at hand. There is here a debate about means and ends that can be had such that it could be argued that a focus on the violent means by the characters really reflects their total commitment to their end goals. which are noble. However, it is equally arguable, and in my opinion more convincing given the ways the protagonist’s commitment to their violent actions are demonstrated to be beyond reflection such that even if new information arose that challenged their thinking in terms of how best to reach their goals, they would continue to pursue their violent course because it is the means and not the ends to which they are more committed.

This idea of violence as something so directly engaging that in precludes the accumulation and processing of new knowledge is an interesting one and something that relates back to part one’s discussion of the relationship between myth and history. Violence in NieR seems to have the effect of perpetuating the mythical cycle of extinction and rebirth precisely because it precludes the protagonists becoming aware of the historical context in which they are acting. The protagonist refuses to grasp their role in wiping out a previous form of humanity and it is because they never gain this knowledge about the historical significance of their actions that they are able to carry them out. Violence is, as has often been stated in other contexts, something of a cyclical phenomenon, with patterns of action and retribution that continue in perpetuity across history. However, instead of suggesting that violent atrocities have stood in the way of history, or set society back, it might be more effective to say that violent actions keep people involved at a mythical level of understanding and involvement with the world around them and prevent them from entering into a historical one. Emerging from this, the question that NieR seems to beg is whether or not this mythical level of acting is immoral or not.

The events of NieR are certainly tragic. They concern the extinction of a form of humanity, carried out but another form of humanity that lacks the knowledge of the full significance of their actions. However, the game also seems to suggest that there is little room for alternatives as it relates to this matter. There is no possibility for coexistence between Gestalts and Replicants. Either the Gestalts themselves share this violent predisposition and pose an immediate and unavoidable threat to the Replicants, or else they are as committed to their own survival the the replicants are and rely parasitically on the Replicants to achieve it. This is, of course, most pronounced in the case of the Shadow Lord, who, like the protagonist, will do whatever it takes to save his sister, even if it means committing atrocities against another intelligent form of humanity. Since the parasitism of the Gestalts ultimately leads to madness and the destruction of the intelligence of both Gestalt and Replicant, the elimination of the Gestalt threat is a necessity for intelligent life’s continued survival. While one can empathize with the Gestalt, there is no denying within the system that the game has established, they are, so to speak, on the wrong side of history, which is to say that their existence must come to end for humanity itself to continue. However, their fundamental sameness to the Replicants in terms of their right to be considered human is undeniable. It is this sameness, this inability to distinguish between the moral and human rights of either side that causes a major problem for humanity’s continued existence.

This is where the mythically oriented violent disposition of the protagonist becomes important. The violent outlook is capable of creating dichotomies where none exist, of disrupting markers of commonality and sewing division and discord. While these aspects of violence are rarely celebrated (or worth celebrating) they are capable of allowing life to orient itself by the cyclical form as opposed to the stable form of history. They preclude the definition of the human based on intelligence and consciousness and and preclude rational and emotional connections with others which might break the cycle and establish the alternative trajectories of history. The cycle is a sort of trap or prison, but it is also something that inevitably continues and this may hit closer to the essence of what life actually is than the many ways that historical consciousness allows us to envision life as something that evolves and makes progress, or, alternatively, collapses and comes to an end.

It is in this sense that the game does not render a traditional moral judgment on the actions of its protagonists, what it offers, or at least tries to offer, is an alternative orientation (that of cycle and myth) to view these actions from so as to make sense of them. Moral judgment does not exist in the same way within myth since the cycle is fixed and eternal and thus morality has no weight as a means to determine the direction in which human life should proceed or the means by which it may be judged. However, as stated in part one, the game does not wholly commit itself to myth, nor is the mythical outlook able to supersede the historical. Even if the protagonists fail to grasp the historical weight of their actions, the player has the opportunity to come much closer to doing so. They are torn between two poles, the desire to play the game and the desire to make sense of the story and these poles are roughly aligned with the mythical and the historical respectively.

Playing the game, participating in the thrill of combat, becomes something that supersedes the story world in many games, including NieR. Because combat in games is essentially mechanical, which is to say that it is defined and governed by the rules of an abstract system, it is endlessly repeatable and detachable from its context. It is always possible for the player to detach themselves from the world in which the action takes place and to focus on the combat. NieR itself explores and encourages this relation by encouraging multiple playthroughs in which the details of the story, since they have already become familiar, recede into the background, while the more abstract stimulation of the mechanically challenging combat becomes the focus. However, what is intriguing here is the way that NieR, in a seemingly contradictory manner, ties this mythical and cyclical engagement to gameplay systems into a continued desire for historical understanding. Many games now offer what is commonly known as New Game +, which is basically a mode in which the player can replay the game that they have already completed with the narrative remaining entirely unchaged but allowing them to keep their character/abilities/items/etc. and be faced with more difficult gameplay challenges. New Game + modes obviously place almost exclusive focus on the player’s desire to continue to “play the game”, pushing the story to the background as something that has already been completed and fully experience. However, NieR promises the player small and subtle, yet revealing and significant differences to the narrative upon subsequent playthroughs. As such, in the instances where systems would appear to be the major driver of the experience, NieR doubles down on the desire for story in order to challenge the straightforwardness of this progression towards gameplay focused abstraction.

NieR continues to hold out the prospect of more of the narrative to the players, even after the characters involved and their fates have largely been settled. It conveys the protagonists own imprisonment in the mythical cycle but also delivers to the player the promise of narrative progression. What seems to be the case is that ultimately the pull that NieR makes on the player is undecidable. Instead of narrative receding in the face gameplay as the primary motivating desire upon subsequent playthroughs, it becomes difficult to say at which level the player’s desire is more firmly rooted. NieR offers the possibilty to see its events cyclically by replaying it at the same time that it promises the ability to break that cycle by revealing new aspects of the story. Ultimately, NieR doesn’t restrict its player to either commitment, it asks them to move between the two, to experience the game and its events in both ways, not to judge which is the more proper way to view the game, but rather to suggest that the game is a novel form that allows for the experience and awareness of both.

This seems to me to be one of NieR’s major contentions about video games: that they offer something like an evolution in terms of the way we understand the world as well as tell and experience stories because they lend themselves to this simultaneous mythical and historical engagement with the world in a way that other forms do not. They allow these two forms of desire to coexist without extinguishing one or the other. The player, in the end, does not fully have the means to render a historical-moral judgment on the protagonist because despite their efforts they do not have the full picture. The mythical cycle of the game is incomplete and yet compelling in its form so as to justify itself and its continued existence (similar to the way human life is able to justify its continued existence despite the moral obstacles placed in its way by the narrative predicament NieR poses). However, neither does the protagonist have the ability to fully embrace the myth. There is too much historical and moral weight to knowledge they have accumulated while playing the game to feel that the protagonist and their role in the cycle of extinction and survival can be identified with and accepted. The player finds themselves feeling both inside and outside of this cycle, both related to and estranged from the characters they control. This is a unique position in relation to a story such as this and one that is not entirely satisfying. It presents the player with gaps and contradictions in their own experience as well as in the desires upon which said experience is structured.

If the mythical cycle is a prison that allows life to continue but locks it into an inevitably limited, cyclical awareness of its relation to the world and the historical offers lines of flight that may lead towards shared progress, but are just as likely to lead towards total ruin, NieR puts forward the need for an alternative. This alternative is the perspective of the player, at once within the world and out of it, at once able to know and judge as well as too limited in scope to make such knowledge and judgments definitive. In short, this is a means of experiencing and understanding the world that puts a premium on more immediate involvement in an experience as opposed to more detached contemplation of it, but also wants to include means of contextualizing that experience that are emotionally challenging and thought provoking without being overly moralizing or didactic. As such, what this alternative perspective seems opposed to is the rigidity of uncompromising moral and historical lenses while simultaneously rejecting the atomization and detachment of the cyclical over-investment in direct action (figured predominantly through the figure of violence). It imagines the game as a system for negotiating these two poles and thus for knowing the world differently.

NieR might, in this sense, be seen as functioning dialectically, producing a new means for understanding the world out of a clash between opposed alternatives. In my view, it provides an elegant view of stakes against with humanity threatens to exhaust itself. It offers something fluid yet thought provoking and it leaves us with a sense of these characters and their world that demands more of us in terms of our ability to make sense of it. If neither the mythical outlook nor the historical one can give us a satisfying account of the meaning of NieR, we are spurred to look instead at how we experience the push and pull between these two perspectives in our own experience. This reflexive knowledge that games can create through juxtaposing their systems and narratives with the player’s desires and experiences is, in my view, crucial to getting people to reflect on meaning differently. Whether or not it represents that transcendence necessary for life to mean something more than an a cycle or a linear progression remains unanswered. However, the way it involves the individual and their own negotiation of experience and what can be known about it is important to me, because it involves a fundamentally questioning of how we make sense of things. I hope that it engages people in a way that can’t be resolved by resource to rote ideologies or abstracted patterns of involvement, but instead makes these two domains relative to each other, leaving the player with need to sort through their own sense of how to make these domains most compellingly work together. For myself, as it relates to NieR, this means acknowledging something in my own desire for knowledge of causality that keeps me involved in the mythical cycles of violence that the game depicts. There is something in my experience therefore that cannot be reduced to either one or the other.

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We can establish a contrast between the way violent impulses and violent behavior function for the protagonists of NieR and the way they function for players of the game. Of course, there are many who do play games with the mentality displayed by the protagonists. They play games for the action, they skip cutscenes, they tune out dialogue, they are bored by anything resembling downtime. For people with this approach, NieR is a game whose story recedes into the background. Important dialogue is often conveyed during fights and thus is easy to ignore. Important portions of the dialogue can even be missed entirely if the player completes segments of fights too quickly, something that in my experience occurred fairly often unless I actively held back. In the second playthrough there are totally new segments of dialogue spoken by the boss-shades that the player fights, but they are not spoken in english (or whatever language the player is playing the game in) and must be read via subtitles, something that is difficult and requires conscious effort during a frenetic fight scene. For the player who is keen to focus on the action NieR makes it easy, but for the player who has an interest in the story, these devices create the kind of dissonance that symbolize the conflict between these two desires through setting the players experience of both at odds with each other.

As such, for the player with some sort of desire to understand the narrative, violent action in NieR becomes something like an impediment to receiving the story. An intense focus on the gameplay, something most action games demand, is actively at odds with the player’s experience of the story. Even player’s like myself who do care about the story and desire to understand it may find themselves slipping habitually into preoccupation with the action and only once it is too late realized that they have missed something that they wanted to see or hear regarding the story. This is highly characteristic of a common vein of difference in video games between the habitual nature of gameplay, particularly fast-pace visceral action oriented gameplay, and the unexpected interruptions of story that seek to command the player’s attention with their difference from the usual experience of the game. It also symbolically stands in for the way certain actions, notably those violent in nature, can stand in the way of our ability to understand the wider context of our actions, as I have already discussed above.

However, in NieR, as in most action games with prominent narrative components, violence is not only an distraction from the story, it is also the only means to access it. In a meaningful contradiction, the player forced to perform the violent actions of the gameplay in order to reveal further aspects of the story. Violence is thus depicted as not only as consuming and narrowing the player’s focus, but also as opening up and revealing more and more about the world. Players do not just commit violent acts in games because they enjoy them, although they may, violence is a means to progression in the overall narrative structure of many games, including NieR. It takes the characters to new places, it introduces them to new people and creatures, and it leads to many other moments of revelation, even as it also actively threatens to obscure and destroy what it potentially reveals. The player is perhaps more aware of this double-edged nature of violence than the game’s protagonists are, especially if they have a desire to understand the world of the game, which the characters who live in that world do not. This struggle between knowing what violent actions are capable of revealing and also understanding how they threaten to destroy or deform those revelations is a major characteristic of the experience of playing NieR. It is an uneasy knowledge that the player may sometimes actively suppress in order to feed their desire for kinetic stimulation while at other times it will erupt and confront them with the limitations of their means of interacting with this world.

Ultimately, if one way to read the gaps and ellipses in NieR’s narrative is to see it as a negotiation between different knowledge systems and are conflicting desires to understand the world, another way to read them is as a critique of our limited means of access to understanding that our means of interacting with that world provide. If we had some other means of interacting with this world we might be able to come to a more satisfying means of understanding it. However, for whatever reason, whether it is because of the limitations of our protagonists or because of the limitations of the commercial video game marketplace that allows this game to exist in the first place, we are left with a story filled with gaps and ellipses because the violent action takes precedence and determines the form of the former. This is a more critical and moralizing interpretation of the role of video game violence, but it is certainly a valid one.

Another similar and yet different interpretation of these same points would claim violence as necessary and integral, not just to this game and these characters worldviews, but to human life in general. It would claim violence as something properly human, something essential to our will to survive and protect our sense of self. As such, the game would be less about the limitations of the protagonist’s or the gamer’s perspective on the game world, and more about the limitations of humanity’s perspective on the world in general. Returning to the points above we could see these limitation as an impediment to a more complete form of historical knowledge that we desire, or we might also see them as the reason we become locked into a cyclical form of knowledge that is always relative to our position in a repeated cycle. Or, as I have more affirmatively suggested above, we may take these limitations as affordances and see them as the tools that we are capable of working with, and from them attempt to devise more satisfying and productive means of understanding the world that do not depend on an outright rejection of the violent means by which we as human beings often propel ourselves forward.

In either case, this is a much more complex and ambivalent take on violence than what we are often granted by other video games, one that forces us to reckon with the integral place of violence in our lives and its role in enacting our desires, even as we recognize how it warps and limits us and the world around us.

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The other aspect of NieR worth examining is the question of selfishness and sacrifice. Many video games over the years have purported to have moral choice systems. These often boil down to a rudimentary binary where the player is either able to act selfishly or selflessly and see some sort of impact based on their choices in the events of the story and in changes to the world around them. This trend reached its zenith with the 360/PS3 console generation and was typified by the likes of Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Infamous. Although many classic CRPG’s such as the Fallout series featured a wider range of more nuanced moral choices, the distillation of this concept in these more commercially prominent series has served in large part to define how we think about moral choice, for better or for worse, in contemporary video games. Since many of these games (as well as a plurality of games in general) grant players great and substantial powers in the context of their worlds, games are often dealing with fundamental questions about heroism and its possibility. They often treat on the old theme from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”, and spur the players to think more about the impact that their desire can have on the world around them.

NieR is an interesting game because it bucks many of the presiding trends in video games related to exploring what effects a powerful, potentially heroic character can have on their world. Generally, It doesn’t give the player choices about their actions. The positive or negative effects that the protagonist’s actions have on those around them, such as the decimation of the Aerie or the eventual destruction of Project Gestalt itself are ultimately outside of the players control, part of an escalating cycle of power-accumulation and violence spurred on by the looming threat of extinction for Gestalts and Replicants alike. The player is swept up in a current of events occurring in the world of NieR, acting before they fully understand the implications of their situation, forced to serve as the catalyst in terrible cycle of death and rebirth, an integral part of an enormous machine whose function is beyond their control. In this way, the protagonist’s involvement in the story of NieR is something like an allegory for the nature of the player’s involvement across the medium of video games. Although player’s of video games often do have a great degree of control as it relates to their interaction with gameplay systems, the same cannot be said about the stories and worlds within which such systems are contextualized. Typically moral choice systems in games work to combat or obscure the sense in which the player’s role in determining the story of a video game is pre-determined and their agency circumscribed. NieR takes the opposite track, reveling in making the player aware of the way that the fate of the world of NieR is almost entirely outside their control, regardless of their intentions for it.

While the mandatory missions at the center of NieR’s story always play out the same way, where the player is given more agency to shape the events of the game’s story is in relation to the game’s side quests. Unlike the main objectives that must be fulfilled for the story to progress, side quests in NieR are entirely optional. (The only exception is that if the player wishes to reach endings D and E there are certain side quests that they must complete in order to collect all the in-game weapons. Endings D and E represent the biggest part of the game’s story where the player does have some degree of agency. I will discuss them in more detail later in this piece.) The greatest sense in which the player has agency has to do with whether or not they are interested in taking part in these side quests to begin with. Since they all tend to revolve around the player taking on errands and requests from people who would be at greater risk from the dangers of the outside world than the protagonist would be, these side quests are an important area where the themes of selflessness/selfishness and heroism are explored.

In RPGs, side quests will range in terms of their significance to the larger themes and stories of the games. Often they can be acknowledged as forms of mindless busywork, intended to allow the player a structured means to gain power and resources, or else a way to pad out the game’s content and serve as an interlude between the more eventful mandatory missions. Other games use side-quests to tell relatively robust stand alone stories that contribute to the player’s overall sense of the world and develop the game’s various themes. NieR falls somewhere between these two poles. In NieR, side quests vary in terms of their subject matter, but are generally relatively mundane in terms of the tasks involved. They often revolve around revisiting previously explored areas to kill a dangerous shade or to track down some missing or needed item for a given NPC. However, they are typically much more interesting in terms of how they contribute to the player’s sense of the game’s world and its central themes. While the tasks themselves are typically quotidian, their meaning often deepens and evolves upon reflection. All contain at least a few extended conversations with the quest giver and usually also include some dialogue between the protagonist and Grimoire Weiss. It is in these instances of dialogue in which the characters are able to reflect on and consider the significance of their actions before and after the fact that surprising and unforeseen aspects of them typically become apparent.

There is something like a general pattern that the side quests in NieR follow that I would summarize as the following: The protagonist receives a fairly innocuous request, Grimoire Weiss comments on the protagonists tendency to involve themselves in the problems of others, despite them having their own more pressing concerns, the task is completed, but something begins to feel off about the whole thing, and, finally, the player returns to the quest giver where they are forced to confront the reality that some other purpose was being served by the protagonist’s actions then the one they thought they would be fulfilling. The general tone of these quests can range from the silly to the serious. In one, for instance, the player helps a family to track down their missing son, only in the end for it to be revealed that said family was a family of criminals and that the son who you tracked down and forced to return home was attempting to flee a life of crime. This ends up feeling strange and slightly comical, a sort of “whoops, perhaps we should have been more careful about what we were getting ourselves involved in,” moment. In another, things become much more serious, when upon delivering letters to an old woman who lives in a lighthouse at edge of the village of Seafront it is revealed that the letters that arrive from the woman’s lover living overseas are an elaborate multi-generational ruse devised by the villagers to protect the woman from learning that her lover is dead and to ensure that she continues to wait in Seafront and continue to operate the lighthouse to the benefit of the entire community. At the conclusion of the quest, the player is given the opportunity to tell the old woman the truth about these letters and the fate of her lover or to continue to perpetuate the lie.

Apart from the choice about whether or not to engage with these side quests in the first place, these sorts of unexpectedly harrowing decisions about whether or not to tell someone the truth about the sinister, deceptive, and/or tragic circumstances of their life are the other major form of agency that the player has in the side quests that they do not have in the main quest. Their decisions ultimately do not substantially change the events of the game or the world around them. Sometimes they lead to the player receiving one reward or another, but more often than not, their only impact is in terms of how the NPCs involved understand the significance of their lives, as well as how the player views the protagonists responsibility to these characters. The player may choose to lie and keep the truth of a situation from an unwitting NPC or they may choose to tell them the truth. However, even in the latter context, the NPCs always reach an acceptance of this revelation that allows them to keep living their lives be at peace with the tragic or unexpected circumstances that have affected them. While the player may have feeling that they express through their choices in these moments about whether these NPCs are better off knowing the truth or remaining blissfully ignorant, ultimately their choices do nothing to alter the fates of the characters involved, nor their own. Telling the NPCs the truth doesn’t do anything to make the player more able to face the truth of their own situation. Neither does choosing to keep the truth from them cause the player to look away from the reality of the circumstances they are in.

Ultimately, the characters in NieR are compelled to live their lives, to fulfill their roles in their societies, whether or not they are given the opportunity by the player to come to terms with the truth. The player may agonize, feeling the weight of the choices that are put in front of them and their responsibility to these NPCs, but ultimately the player and their choices don’t have the ability to change the lives of these characters, for better or for worse. The player may have the desire to act selflessly, to behave heroically, or else they may make choices out of self-interest that best serve themselves. However, despite having the power to be in this position where the player has the ability to imagine themselves as a hero, in truth, if heroism and selflessness are about having the power to make sacrifices that improve the lives of others, then the player is ultimately unable to live up this standard. In this sense, we can see NieR as being about how a powerful and potentially heroic figure remains relatively powerless in the face of larger and more mysterious forces that they fail understand, let alone control, or, alternatively, only understand too late when the opportunity to make a decision that might positively or negatively affect the lives of those around them has already passed.

This “too little” or “too late” sense of heroism is ever-present in NieR and goes a long way towards contributing to the general aesthetic of the game. It is a markedly different experience of having power and aspiring towards heroism than the ones that are typically offered by other video games. It conveys a sense in which having power is not the same as having agency, but instead contributes to a more acute sense of ones limitations. NieR is a game about being trapped in a cycle, about the inevitability of tragic events, and about a desperate desire to resist those things that must remain largely thwarted. What it means to try to act heroically in this context serves as a powerful and enlightening corrective to the sense of heroism put forward by other games and media.

We can explore this sense of heroism in more detail at this point by refocusing on the main narrative of NieR. As previously mentioned, the player has little to no agency as it relates to shaping the events of the larger story. However, the game’s plot deals directly with themes of heroism and sacrifice, as well as their limitations. At the center of the narrative is the protagonist and a few different sets of relationships. Chief among these are the relationship between the protagonist and his sister Yonnah, the relationship between the protagonist and his companions, Kainé and Emil, and finally the protagonist and his relationship with his allies and enemies, notably the games many quest givers.

The protagonists relationship with Yonnah in particular poses interesting questions about heroism, particularly as it relates to the distinction between selfishness and selflessness. A recurrent motif throughout the game, especially the game’s first half, is the idea that acting to protect/cure/save Yonnah means becoming more distant from her. The sense that Yonnah is trapped and imprisoned, even in the game’s first half when she is in the protagonist’s village, not yet captured by the Shadow Lord, is the most prominent aspect of her character in the game. She is imprisoned by her failing body as much as she is by external forces. In the beginning of the game, we see the protagonist taking on minor tasks in service of the villagers, culling sheep, fighting shades, but these do not take the protagonist very far away from Yonnah. However, after Yonnah’s “escape attempt” where she searches in vain for a lunar tear before being captured, the player teams up with Grimoire Weiss, gaining substantially more power and beginning to take on greater responsibility. The quest for greater power that will ostensibly save Yonnah also takes him further and further away from her. This is primarily conveyed through the game’s loading screens which depict excerpts from Yonnah’s diary. These generally convey the sense that Yonnah is lonely, that she misses her brother, and that she wishes she could be more involved with the exciting life that he is living and meet the new companions that he has teamed up with.

The player may begin to feel. as I did, what Yonnah really needs is her brother’s companionship and that his tireless efforts to save her, which extend towards his becoming something like the hero of the land, may ultimately be more about his needs than about hers. It is not at all clear the plan to collect the sealed verses will work. The game is careful to indicate that the ancient song that gives rise to this plan is itself imprecise and not necessarily reliable. Still, the protagonist leaps to the conclusion that murdering shades in service of accumulating power is the right thing to do, precisely, I feel, because he cannot stand the feeling of being trapped and powerless, the same feeling that Yonnah inevitably has to live with. The protagonist has the power to resist this feeling, but in so doing he separates himself from his sister.

At the game’s conclusion, the protagonist successfully slays the Shadow Lord and brings Yonnah back home. The initial A end provides a sense of peace as well as a return to innocence, with the two symbolically reverting to their childhood forms. While this may seem to suggest that, in the end, the protagonist’s actions were justified and that now, with the dark threat eliminated, the two will live happily ever after, this ending is tinged with bitterness. This is because of the fate of the protagonists companions, who are either dead or left behind at the game’s conclusion as well as because of the the fate of the world, which the protagonist willfully ignores in his relentless desire to save his sister. We are left with a sense that by growing more powerful and expanding his horizons outwards, the protagonist had assumed responsibilities to people other than just his sister. In this light, the idyllic return home to a time of innocence reads like another selfish attempt to escape the burdens of caring for the sick and damaged, rather than a culminating reward for the protagonist’s selfless heroism. Saving his sister was ultimately possible because of the many sacrifices the protagonist made with an aim towards selfless devotion, but it is difficult if not impossible to separate these actions from their selfish aspects.

The relationship between the protagonist and his sister Yonnah in which the protagonist neglects her in order to try to save her and distance himself from her and the sense of imprisonment that she represents can be considered as the paradigmatic instance of a dynamic in which selfless and selfish actions are hopelessly intertwined, we can see this dynamic repeated in the relationship between the protagonist and his world. A consequence of the protagonists newfound powers are his ability to travel across his homeland and come to a greater understanding of the problems of others and their relations to his own. Part of the heroes journey is a gradual realization that the world is bigger than oneself and a subsequent willingness to accept responsibility for the problems of others. The protagonists journey in this regard is one of stunted growth. His continued focus on his sister’s problems ultimately lead him towards narrow solutions to the problems of others that benefit him and his smaller worldview. He never truly reaches an awareness of the most important problems of his world, not because he is unable to comprehend them, but because he is unwilling to.

Despite an abundance of evidence that the shades that he fights are intelligent and close to human, the protagonist never considers altering course away from his genocidal campaign of violence. He does not search for more nuanced solutions to the problems that other communities have with shades. As the game progresses, the player is able to see more and more clearly that the shades he’s fighting are not villainous, but rather misunderstood, but the protagonist never comes close to making these same revelations. In the most extreme case, that of the Aerie, the protagonist, although not entirely of his own volition, resorts to annihilating that village in order to defeat a powerful shade. This unconcern with the fate of other living beings speaks to the protagonist singlemindedness as it relates to the growth of his power, a single-mindedness that leads to his greater failures to comprehend his responsibility to the world around him.

This reaches a culmination in the game’s conclusion when the protagonist refuses to understand the information about Project Gestalt that Devola and Popola supply him with. It is not that he accepts what they tell him, that he is essentially committing genocide against the previous iteration of the human race, and decides that there is no turning back at this point. Instead, he simply stubbornly refuses to listen to and consider the meaning of any of it. In the end, it is Yonnah, and more specifically the Gestalt version of Yonnah, that grasps the full truth of the situation that their world has found itself in. It is in her sacrifice of her own life that we see what it means to come to terms with a responsibility to the world around her and to humanity in general. It is only in the depths of her confinement, rather than in the liberatory potential of the power possessed by both the protagonist and the Shadow Lord, that she finds the capacity to acknowledge the reality of the world around her and to truly make a heroic sacrifice.

At the game’s initial conclusion in ending A, despite its idyllic semblance, the ending is tragic because the protagonist’s failure is so pronounced. He has failed to understand anything, and this failure is perhaps most prominently symbolized in the moment where he holds out his hand to the Gestalt Yonnah who procedes to walk right by him. It is in this light that we can see that something in his potential journey towards heroism has failed. However, it is not only in this light. The protagonist can also be seen to fail in his journey in terms of his ability to help and understand his companions. Kainé and Emil are both characters who have their own tremendously impactful struggles and the protagonist’s ultimate ignorance towards them is another black mark that signals his failure to arrive at consciousness of his own situation.

(Mention the episode where Devola and Popola ban Kainé and Emil)

In a sense, NieR is about how a powerful and potentially heroic figure remains relatively powerless in the face of larger and more mysterious forces that they cannot understand, let alone control.

NieR is also a meditation on the difficulty of separating selfless and selfish actions and the ways that intending to change things for others inevitably ends up being about changing one’s own awareness and understanding of themselves. As previously stated, rather than changing the lives of the other characters or the world around them, the players attempts to be a hero only really have an effect on themselves. They aren't able to change the course of the world for worse or for better, but they are able to shape how the player knows and feels about the world. This leads to a different sense of what heroism means in the context of humanity and suggests that the selfish and selfless dichotomies that underly so many of our stories about power and how it ought or ought not to be used are reductive and fail to account for the ways that having power is itself a perspective on the world.

The premise that one can be good or bad, selfless or selfish, with the use of power, suggests that they can have a worldview that they bring with them into their acquisition of power that remains intact. It suggests that what will change when a person becomes powerful is everything around that person, rather than that person themselves. But this focus on selfishness and selflessness obscures the degree to which power is essentially a change in ones own worldview and that how one uses their power is ultimately something that has consequences for the self, not something that changes the world. Power is thus far less liberating than it is often imagined to be and primarily serves as challenge to the individuals sense of themselves, often in a way that brings them closer to their limitation as an ordinary human being, rather than something that allows them to transcend them.

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phoenixrisesoncemore · 5 years ago

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It’s true, I personally think the universe is really amazing yet also really stupid, but maybe it’s because I think of it as another rough in-process draft of an indefinite number, to use your metaphor. But anyway if going by the premise + logic of what you say at the end of your post, how would one theoretically know that this universe isn’t the result of someone else remaking a former, even shittier/less amazing universe into something less shitty/even more amazing.

Hi, Anon. Sorry this took me a bit. I think that’s a great question (like, I can’t quite express how great because it gets too close to some other writing I am doing for me to talk about it too much right now, but it’s a *really* great question)!

[Note this is in response to this post.]

In the real world, I’m not sure there’s anyway we *could* know if we are living in one of a series of universes and most especially whether the cause of the “Genesis” of any of said universes was the result of the action of a conscious being working to “improve” on its predecessor, but it’s fascinating to consider! It’s really a *series* of great questions:

Are we in one of a linear series of universes?

Can we know if and how the previous universe in the series differed from ours?

Can we know if our current universe was engineered by a consciousness in the previous universe in response to fundamental conditions in the previous universe?

Is the current universe in some way ethically superior to the previous one and how would we measure that?

According to Cosmology

If we take out the metaphysical/theological/moral aspect as well as the “intention of a conscious instigator” aspect (that is, stick to question 1) it’s basically cosmology’s “Big Bounce” hypothesis (Einstein’s cyclic model, for example) where the universe doesn’t begin or end, but simply collapses and then re-expands in a cycle forever—Crunch, Bang, Crunch, Bang, etc. Something I’ve wondered for a while: if this is true, could there be any evidence available to us that past cycles existed and, if so, what they were like? I don’t know what such evidence would be (not that I’m, like, an expert :D), but that’s just a small part of the question you’re asking.

I don’t remember if the underlying “laws” of the universe were conceived as capable of changing between cycles in this conception—is gravity still the same, is there still electromagnetism, is there still entropy?(1) If we want to do more than limit this question to the material/mechanical “is it possible?” by looking at the moral implications(2) then we’d need for some of the underlying laws to be able to change.

There is an alternative to the Big Bounce: each universe (a) may create new universes (b, c, d, ...) through some action(s) either within the universe (a) or outside of all universes. White holes are an example of the former: new, separate universes beginning from singularities inside white holes in our universe. Brane Theory postulates that this happens when meta structures outside the universe called “branes” bump into each other; this would be an example of the latter. And I’ve seen versions of hypotheses for both that suggest the fundamental laws of nature need not be the same among the universe (a) and the universes (b, c, d, ... ). But as far as I know (and that’s not necessarily saying a lot :) ), no one has found a way to make these hypotheses falsifiable.

Still none of that addresses the conscious intent question, to say nothing of the last question; the last is, of course, quite subjective.

According to Religion

I’m not very familiar with religious/philosophical(3) conceptions of Creation as cyclical, though I know they exist in Buddhist and Hindu models as well as in the ancient Mayan religion. I’m afraid I don’t know which, if any, view this process as one with a goal or direction. Is growth and improvement of the universe and its mechanisms from cycle to cycle important in the same way as it can be said to be important for living creatures within it in these models? Furthermore, do any suggest that any such improvement is, was, should be, or will be the result of conscious, intentional actions? Can anyone help me out on this one?

It’s a fascinating prospect though. I’d even say it’s a hopeful prospect (and maybe, just maybe, not entirely out of line within the context of Tolkien—see below)!

[Forgive me if I get a bit over-explicatory and didactic here—it helps me to write all this out, even if it might be common knowledge to readers, particularly in the Silm fandom.]

For the purpose of my previous post, I’m speaking (somewhat obtusely) about Tolkien’s cosmological/metaphysical belief system which, at least by the time of the writing of the contents of the published Silmarillion, is somewhat in line with his underlying Catholic faith. The issue at hand, of course—and the issue that Tolkien was trying to “solve” (or at least consider)—was The Problem of Evil.

How does someone working from a Christian perspective square the fact that the world is filled with horrific pain and suffering with belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God? David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion expressed the problem thusly: "Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"(4)

One such answer to this question includes an appeal to Free Will—after all, if people are to be allowed Free Will, then they must be allowed to use that will to commit evil, even if an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God would prefer they did not, since that is the definition of Free Will. And this may be convincing for some—or even for me on good days so far as it goes—but it does not address the fact that the natural world, up to and including processes that are several steps removed from consciousness/will (or even life!), generates the conditions for suffering. Free Will may explain why God tolerates things as unconscionable as genocide, but it does not explain why most of Nature consists of suffering as an integral part of its mechanism: we can see the fear in the prey animal’s eyes when it hears the twig snap, but the predator has to eat, too. Suffering is required for the system to run. The story of The Fall as told in Genesis may explain why such suffering happens to human beings, but it does not explain why it happens to everything else, why The Whole Damn Thing Is Fallen.

Enter Melkor stage left.

Tolkien’s Felix Culpa

There’s a quote in one of Tolkien’s letters where he addresses The Problem of Evil almost directly. Tolkien is writing to his son, Christopher, during his RAF training during WWII. Christopher was the child closest in mind to Tolkien, himself, and I am sure his proximity to danger at this time was especially hard for Tolkien on a number of levels. In Letter #66 Tolkien writes the following:

“I think also that you are suffering from suppressed ‘writing’. That may be my fault. You have had rather too much of me and my peculiar mode of thought and reaction. And as we are so akin it has proved rather powerful. Possibly inhibited you. I think if you could begin to write, and find your own mode, or even (for a start) imitate mine, you would find it a great relief. I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes(5).” —Letter #66, to Christopher Tolkien, 6 May, 1944

The cosmology and theodicy of Tolkien’s Secondary World (Middle-earth, Arda, Ea) is laid out in the first chapter of The Silmarillion (Ainulindale, aka “The Music of the Ainur”) and represents an attempt to “make sense” of a world that could generate the kind of evil he had experienced in his life. If I may postulate: the death, during his childhood, of first his father and then mother; what he perceived as his mother’s martyrdom for her Catholic faith; and the endless mechanized, brutal, and senseless horror of WWI.

The answer to this for Tolkien was Melkor/Morgoth, his own resident Satan. But unlike Christianity’s Satan, Morgoth/Melkor had both sub-creative capabilities(6) and was responsible for some aspect of the “Design” of the universe through his Marring of the Music.

In my post the “drafts” are the Two Themes that were sung before the Third Theme (most importantly The First Theme—the Perfect World). The Third Theme is the Theme that finalized the means by which Melkor’s Marring would be integrated into Eru’s greater purpose in such a way as to generate Good that is far greater than what could exist in The Perfect World. It is the Theme that describes our Fallen World.

As The Fall of Man is envisioned as a “Happy Fault” (Felix Culpa), a sinful act that nevertheless allowed the far better redemption of Man through Christ to happen, so too is Melkor’s Marring of the Music envisioned as the means by which greater things than could have been otherwise will arise in the world.

The Problem of Evil as it extends to suffering “baked in” to the system is thus “solved” by placing a conscious agent, allowed Free Will, between God and material reality, with sufficient privileges to affect the design of the universe (Laws of Nature) and sufficient power to enact those designs, however evil, in matter, itself. While that latter part is not unique to Tolkien (hello demonology), the former is not something I have really encountered in quite that form anywhere else.

Now, getting back to your question and tying it to Tolkien :).

At first glance it might appear that any kind of cyclic model of the universe, with the actions of finite, fallen, non-divine beings working to “improve” on the designs of their divine predecessors, would be antithetical to Tolkien’s increasingly Catholic metaphysic. And yet...

Pair up some statements he made regarding both the Primary and Secondary Worlds with the events of the short story Leaf by Niggle and things look rather different. Tolkien said in a few places that he hoped that the ultimate fate of humans, as fundamentally sub-creative beings, would be to have God grant reality to their ideas, in the same way Eru grants material being (reality) to the vision created by the Music of the Ainur. This is essentially what Niggle receives when he reaches the upper layers of “purgatory”: his Tree made REAL (“Ea! Let these things Be!”). Not only that, his experience of it and its reality is intimately tied to his neighbor, Parish, the man who in life was always getting in the way of Niggle finishing his Tree painting. And this is a supremely important point for Tolkien and its the point that Melkor rebels against: sharing in the work of creation. Melkor cannot abide it, to the point that he would rather make all of creation not exist if it can’t consist only of his own mind.

Indeed, even in the context of his Secondary World there are hints that after the end of the Universe, Men will Sing a new Music, supplying their own ideas for the Design of new Eas. What would these human ideas be, and might they include universes even better than Ea, Men having lived in it and having not originated outside it and having been granted a capacity for working outside The Music unlike any other beings in Ea?

Well...one does wonder....

Notes

I seem to remember that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of the reasons this hypothesis fell out of favor back in the late 20th century

And unless I can lay my ethical issues with Nature purely at the feet of the happenstance of evolution on our particular planet (maybe on other planets life evolves in such a way that suffering does not exist but all the good stuff does?).

There’s also Nietzsche’s question of Eternal Return (among other philosophical equivalents). However, I don’t think that required distinct universes, but rather merely infinite time in which matter might, by sheer probability, return to a copy of its previous arrangement.

I posted a quote from Candide not long ago. In Candide, Voltaire was directly mocking Gottfried Leibniz’s take on this issue—that our reality must represent The Best of all Possible Worlds because it is the reality that God chose to create. OK, sure, Gottfried.

“History of the Gnomes” refers to the tales of the Noldor (then called “Gnomes”) and the Silmarils that make up the bulk of The Silmarillion.

It wouldn’t, I think, be out of the question to view much of Tolkien’s divine cosmology as rather Gnostic in flavor: a supreme One delegates creative powers to subordinate divinities who enter into the world, much as some Gnostic thought perceived the demiurgic Yahweh as doing, against the will of the higher God. The (very important) differences being that the Ainur’s powers (at least by the time of the writing of the contents of the published Silmarillion) were only *sub-creative* (they could not create matter or material existence ex nihilo), that material existence is conceived of as fundamentally good (divine sparks/souls are not “trapped” in matter), and that the demiurgic entities are not themselves responsible for creating humans (who are positioned as their peers).

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tonystarktogo · 6 years ago

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Since we are doing this. Let's go all in. An au where the avengers are each a stone. Tony: Reality Natasha: Soul Steve: Time Bruce: Power Bucky: Mind or Death (death stone is native to battlerealm it's Canon and thanks used it to collect the others unaposed) Sam: Mind or Death Thor: Space What say you? Should the stones be switched around for others you think might match better with?

I absolutely love your designations and the concept of the Death stone but just take a moment to consider:

(This got very, very long. If you prefer, you can read it on AO3.)

The Infinity Stones are not simply stones. They are energy. They are intent. They are will. They are origin. They are beyond our understanding and beyond our perception. They can take many shapes and forms, but before everything else they are a concept. An idea.

And yet despite all that, they can be found.

They were made to be found.

Time

Thor is at his heart a simple man.

Not in the sense that he is stupid – Thor has never found the same passion for history and books and knowledge that burns so brightly in Loki, may never possess the same razor-sharp wit that his brother wields with the same deadliness as his daggers, but Thor is smart and intuitive and far more calculating than anyone, safe his mother and Loki and perhaps his father give him credit for – but in the sense that he is generally happy to live his life one day at a time.

Perhaps he has to thank Asgardian’s long lifespan for this. For the calm with which he regards the history he has no desire to discover, for he has lived it himself thousands of years ago, and once was more than enough. For the lack of hurry when facing an uncertain future, knowing you will in all likelihood be around long enough to see it come to pass.

[goes on after the cut]

Knowing, even after thousands of years, the universe can still surprise you – and that it is those surprises that make life bearable. Make life interesting.

Even after having spent much time on Midgard in recent years, there are still many things about mortals that Thor doesn’t understand. Their obsession with time travel – with traveling into the past, jumping head-first into the future – is one of them.

Jane had tried to explain it to him. The fascination of exploring lost civilizations, of getting a chance to undo your own mistakes and make better choices, the concept of knowing what is to come and how it may affect the present… Thor had liked listening to her, to the genuine enthusiasm and boundless curiosity, see her eyes sparkle with fascination. But he hadn’t really understood.

From what Thor has seen, it doesn’t matter if you have two hours or fifteen thousand years of time at your hands – at the end of the day, time is intangible and unstoppable and even with an endless supply, you’ll always feel it racing through your fingers, running out too quickly to accomplish all your goals.

That – the endless, boring court meetings, the uneventful evenings filled with laughter and mead and jokes that never change, the sudden, startling realization that after having traveled the universe for centuries you are suddenly running out of time – that is life.

Time is linear and cyclic, is constant and ever-changing, is always and never enough and Thor has little interest in hypothetical scenarios, in jumping back and forth between is and was and will be. He has no need for any more than the time he’s been given.

And if he dreams of better times – his mother’s warm embrace, the safest place in the entire universe, his brother’s jokes, back when they were still amusing instead of hurtful – long passed or never been sometimes, with the clarity of a freshly-born memory, that is just what dreams offer us. A dual edge of peace and misses opportunities.

There are no theories and time twists and paradoxes because Thor has no need for them. At his heart, he’s a simple man with simple wishes. Some of which he works for, some of which are already beyond his reach.

And time – like life, like Thor – goes on.

Space

Long before Bruce grows up, he learns to be small. To make himself fit into places people don’t give a second glance, squeeze into tiny spaces that shouldn’t fit until he makes it work.

He puts things into his pockets and finds them days later. Small, odd things, like missing keys and chewing gum and coins. They’re never full, his pockets, but Bruce doesn’t think pockets are supposed to be full. And anyways, he has bigger things to worry about.

Like that time he opened his closet and found endless legions of monsters with scary, glowing eyes staring back at him. Like that time he pulled a window open and could feel the air getting sucked out of the room, a black nothingness before him that sucked everything in. Like that time Bruce stumbled through the door, aching and desperately, and he doesn’t know how he made it to the hospital. Somehow he was just there.

Things don’t necessarily change, but Bruce grows up.

He stops believing in monsters in his closet and under his bed. Stops believing he can reach the milky way through his window. Stops squeezing himself into too small places that people keep telling him he doesn’t fit in.

(Sometimes Bruce carries books in his backpack that he’s been searching for months. He’s a forgetful person, apparently.)

In retrospect, things were always gonna go wrong in that damn lab.

But even with all his degrees and theoretical knowledge, Bruce couldn’t have foreseen the Hulk. And even after living with him for years, he is no closer to understanding it. The phenomenon. The way the Hulk works. The rules, all the god damn rules of physics he breaks every god damn time.

As Bruce shifts back and forth with the Hulk, sometimes on purpose, often accidentally, perhaps one of the strangest sensations will always be the way he grows. The way he twists his mass, changes his body and twists the space around him to make it work.

(There’s a crazed, genocidal demigod somewhere in Bruce’s future that looks at him in horrified terror – and for a brief moment, Bruce wonders what this monster sees when it looks at him to fear him so.

And it is many years after that, when Bruce doesn’t just change but consumes the space around him, leaves nothing behind, that he asks himself for the first time whether Loki feared him enough.)

Mind

Steve sees the world with a certain clarity, long before the serum fixes his color-blindness and gets his body up to speed with what his head has already figured out a long time ago. He looks over the busy streets of New York and thinks pattern, follows grumbled debates in smokey diners with terrible coffee and learns politics, watches two old men play chess on a corner twice a week and understands strategy.

The thing is, Steve knows he’s smart. And nobody’s ever called him stupid – but that doesn’t matter when he doesn’t have the physical strength to back his ideas up.

When war comes, deciding to sign up is the easiest thing Steve has ever done. Getting in, well. That’s what brings him to a government-sanctioned human experiment – and Steve is smart enough to know that ‘government-sanctioned’ isn’t much of an assurance in dark times like these.

(Doctor Erskine takes a shine to him. Steve isn’t sure why, if it’s the potential the man sees in him, for what his serum might be able to do or something else. But they end up chatting a few times during the days before the experiment starts and surprisingly Steve finds he has quite a few things to say about the composition of the serum.

And if Doctor Erskine makes a few last-minute changes that never make it into his notes – what with him getting killed in the direct aftermath of the successful implementation – well.

Nobody thinks to ask Steve whether he understands the chemical details. And after witnessing firsthand how far HYDRA’s arm reaches, Steve wouldn’t have told them anyways.)

War is uglier and crueler than anything Steve had imagined. But there is light to be found – in the people around him, the men following him, the friends he makes among those just as terrified and determined as he is.

“You bring out the best in me,” Peggy tells him once, as they outline their new plan of attack, a challenging smirk on her red-painted lips that dares him to do even better.

A few weeks later, Howard refers to Steve as his muse and inspiration – a comment that the Howling Commandos tease him endlessly for.

It’s Bucky – of course it’s Bucky – who finds him after dinner that day, crushing a rare cigarette between his fingers as he stares blindly ahead. “You do, you know?” he says, and nothing else.

Doesn’t mention the shots he’s taken in the last fight – the ones Steve could’ve sworn were impossible, except that impossible is a word that’s lost much of its initial meaning these days.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Steve asks. Try as he might, he can’t make his voice as light as he wants to.

If he’d turn his head, he knows he’d see the same question on Bucky’s face, the same doubt. What do we really know about this serum? What do we really know about what it does? Isn’t it just too good to be true?

But Steve doesn’t turn. Because they’re in the middle of a war they can’t lose and need all the help they can get. They’ll deal with everything else later.

(Bucky falls and Steve follows and later turns out to be much, much later than either of them could have hoped to imagine.)

Power

Natasha never shares more than the barebones of the skeleton that is her time in the hands of the Red Room with anyone. Entire years are summed up in simple words and descriptions that will never accurately express the horror underneath. Small girls with unsmiling faces and sharp elbows, tied to their beds with handcuffs and fear, turned into cold, merciless killers.

Black Widows, Natasha says, calm, clinical, detached.

That is all SHIELD needs to know about a program too easily replicated.

Natasha never talks about the moves they taught her, again and again, an endless routine until she can do them in her sleep. Never talks about how she was always the last one to fall asleep. How she moved faster and faster until she noticed the other girls couldn’t keep up. How sometimes, in the rare, quiet moments she has, Natasha closes her eyes and swear she can hear electricity humming in her veins.

But the Red Room has taught her all about hidden trump cards (all about the limits of humanity and how far some are willing to push beyond them) and Natasha has no wish to test SHIELD’s respect for ethnic guidelines.

She waits for that one mission where she’ll be too fast, too strong, will mess up. Because Black Widows are made of marble, but they aren’t perfect – false confidence gets you killed faster than any other mistake.

It doesn’t come.

(It takes Natasha years to realize that her first slip has nothing to do with her ability to drop-kick the Hulk into a crate.)

The truth is, Natasha doesn’t mess up. She’s a child raised as a killer, a girl trained for murder and hunting. At SHIELD, she’s almost at home. Not quite comfortable, but as close as she ever gets. Functional. And that’s the operative word isn’t it?

(The first thing Phil Coulson notices about Natasha Romanoff is her calm aura. There is nothing manic or desperate about her, not even when they have her surrounded, sniper rifles aimed at her forehead, the ultimate nowhere left to go painted on the wall for all to see.

The second thing is the lack of nightmares. The third is her odd, emotional connection with Clint Barton.

Coulson knows more about the Black Widow program than most people. But what truly disturbs him is not Natasha’s eerily efficient kills, it’s the way she’s handled her unconventional upbringing. It’s the lack of trauma and psychological problems. It’s her settled state of mind, her steadiness. There’s a layer of steel underneath her bright red hair and calculating eyes that even a lifetime with the Red Room hasn’t touched. An unbreakable core that doesn’t yield, not to anything.

Handle with caution, Coulson notes in his first assessment. Do not push.

Natasha comes close only two times in her life. The first time is after Budapest, after Clint lost most of his hearing and is looking at her for anything, anything at all to believe in, and Natasha can’t carry that responsibility, doesn’t want anyone to ever look at her like that again and she almost–

The second time, the Winter Soldier re-enters her life like a forgotten childhood horror remembering its form. Her eyes fly over paper after paper, observe data, anything and everything she can get her hands on before she dumps it all – almost all – on the Internet.

(She never tells anyone about the words they yelled at her until she was deaf to their original meaning. Never tells anyone about the endless repetitions, the carefully calculated conditioning. About watching it sink like poison into the minds of those around her. About getting better and better at pretending, so they would finally leave her alone.

Natasha never tells anyone but when she’s twenty-six and an old handler uses those words on her, she guts him without pause and never looks back.)

Soul

Clint doesn’t put a name on it for the longest time. It’s just instincts, really, honed by years of pulling one after the other over unsuspecting people as a carnie, followed by a surprisingly successful, if not particularly long-lived career as a mercenary. He says ‘no’ to more jobs than he takes. Sometimes because the pay isn’t right or the risk isn’t worth it. But mostly because Clint can read people.

To this day, it’s still the best way of putting it that he can think of.

There’s just something there, in the back of his mind that tells Clint when a customer is about to double-cross him. Like an itch in his mind that he can’t quite scratch.

He looks at people sometimes, on the streets, just passing by, and he picks out the ones he wouldn’t mind hitting with an arrow or two.

It’s that same itch that makes Clint listen Phil Coulson when the man first approaches him. And he doesn’t need to read the contracts or listen to the empty promises SHIELD makes him. All Clint needs is to take a long, hard look at Director Fury before he makes it choice.

(All Clint needs is to take one long, hard look at any target SHIELD points him at before he makes his choice. Clint’s tendency to disobey orders is only overshadowed by his success rate.

It’s what helps him convince Coulson to give Natasha a shot. It’s what helps him knowing she wants that shot.)

Clint reads people. Better than Natasha, maybe. Not that there’s any way to reliably measure such a skill. But it’s just damn good instincts. That’s all there is to it.

(Only years later, after his future, his family has crumbled to dust, after a fight that’s cost him everything, does Clint put his gift to use. He looks and looks and looks, closer than he’s ever dared to before.

And it’s there, surrounded by dead bodies and blood and rain, the hysterical laughter of a dying man ringing in his ears, that Clint smiles the only smile his lips still remember.

It’s easy to become judge, jury and executioner when you see everyone for who they really are. When they can’t hide their sins, can’t evade your gaze, their deepest secrets bared for you to see.)

Reality

Tony talks a lot about his plans for a first robot. It’s the topic of his master thesis, so it’s not like he has much of a choice and his supervisor is awesome. But all too soon everyone and their grandma’s cat seem to have an opinion on the feasibility of his project. Tony’s getting tired of having people tell him what he can and can’t do.

He doesn’t need daily reminders of the limits of their current technology. He doesn’t need the mocking quips and eye-rolls of people who don’t have the guts to say ‘just another Stark with his head in the clouds’ to his face.

DUM-E turns out not even half of what Tony hoped he would be – but still more than anyone else expected.

(He’s Tony’s pride and joy, but that’s another topic altogether.)

Tony doesn’t say a word about JARVIS. Not until it’s over and done with. At first because it’s just a spur-of-the-moment idea. Then because he and Obadiah have different ideas about Stark Industries, and are arguing enough as it is.

There’s no one around to tell Tony that AIs aren’t actually possible outside of science fiction. No one around to tell him that a computer program can’t replicate emotions, can’t actually understand sarcasm.

JARVIS surpasses any program the world has seen – not that the world knows as much. Tony is careful to keep his true capacities on the down low.

There’s no need to share this feat with the world. Tony knows what he’s created, and that’s more than enough.

(Tony builds himself an arc reactor in a cave, dried blood and sand on his lips. It’s months later, when he finally runs the numbers. Figures out that the materials he’s used shouldn’t have worked, shouldn’t have been stable, should have overloaded the human organism instead of integrating seamlessly.

He stops the calculations then. Clearly, there’s some variable he’s missing because the math is wrong.

And so what if he has the self-built equivalent of a star in his chest? So what if mankind isn’t supposed to build stars just because they need one?)

“Make a wish, Mister Stark!” Peter Parker will insist years later with a brilliant smile as he pushes a self-made, oddly shaped cake in front of Tony.

And.

Tony looks up. Meets the eyes of these familiar strangers, his team, his family, the people he’s been drawn to from the moment they met. The first people he’d instantly clicked with, like something finally slid into place and settled down, and all the ones they’d collected since then. Since they first started out as a rag-tag group of six desperately cobbling a last-minute plan together to save the world.

Closes his eyes. Blows out the candles.

Makes a wish.

Thoughts @thoughtfulbreadpolice?

#ReRe answers #ReRe writes #well that escalated quickly #thoughtfulbreadpolice #Tony Stark #Natasha Romanoff #Thor #Bruce Banner #Clint Barton #Steve Rogers #Avengers as Infinity Stones #Avengers as a Team #character study #some feels #some angst #AU

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mishifoltyn · 5 years ago

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I wrote a text about Circular Dimensions, an exhibition of sculptural ceramics and paintings and drawings by Ontario-based artists Heidi McKenzie and Maya Foltyn. The goal was to bridge these two independent practices through echoing experiences and moments in the artists’ lives. Here is the text in full. Circular Dimensions – Heidi McKenzie & Maya Foltyn February 7 – March 1, 2020 Opening reception: February 7th from 7:30 – 9:30pmMeet the artists: February 23 at 2:00pm Circular Dimensions merges two distinct and individual practices, taking inspiration from personal experiences and collective histories from all over the world. Artists Heidi McKenzie and Maya Foltyn bridge and cross disciplines, roles, trajectories, and aesthetic languages in this ceramics and painting exhibition founded on circular movement. Join the artists at the vernissage on Friday, February 7th from 7:30 – 9:30pm at Carnegie Gallery (10 King Street West, Dundas, Ontario) and meet the artists at a special conversational event on February 23rd at 2:00pm. A look into, around, and within Circular Dimensions, a ceramic and painting exhibition by Heidi McKenzie & Maya Foltyn Text by Agnieszka Foltyn “Everything is a balance between control and gesture,” Maya starts. This simple statement echoes a conscious act of negotiation of change or perhaps tensions in flux within our rhythms, our perceptions, and our responses to the world. It is a negotiation of the stimuli of phenomena that makes up our understanding of the world around us: its politics, its people, where we are, who we are, but importantly, how we are together. The practices of Heidi McKenzie and Maya Foltyn touch and separate, intersect and cross over, flow in parallel, and divide in separate directions. These are not linear trajectories but rather circular or cyclical meanderings, stimulated and affected by the machinations of society throughout time. They are dreams, thoughts, extensions of a willingness to understand or to come into contact with the unknown. They are meditative, rhythmic techniques tailored to the individual lives of the artists. They express a subtle hope. “Everything is in flux. That we see something as static is a form of abstraction,” Foltyn states. And in this exhibition, abstraction is key. Perhaps what draws us to this concept is a negation of the direct messaging of a qualified truth. In this present of fake everything, scripted bias, and media monopolies, what abstraction does is make space. It makes room for the viewer to determine their own position – through their movement within the gallery space, peering from one work to the other, from one artist to the other and back again. The viewer has the freedom to exercise their agency, their will to decide or not to decide, to determine or to not, to look, to question, to relate, to feel wonder. Making room for agency is a powerful political act. It creates space for a diversity of voices to be heard. The artists make space through the use of a minimal visual language, the round shape, the circular trajectory becoming a symbol of a journey – their own intersecting with many others. Heidi McKenzie’s ceramic sculptures flow, grow, shape, twist, and turn as “soul sketches”, moments of her personal journey capturing a specific moment of her own development but at the same time resonating within the entire sum of her experiences. It is a moment, but one that points to the future. McKenzie’s practice brings her all over the world, connecting to people, places, skills, and techniques. Her background traces its roots across continents and her inspirations delve even further. “As an artist, it’s important to speak in your own voice – play in your own sandbox,” she begins. “Speaking in my own voice speaks to a lot of people.” The global movements of humanity over time have shaped our cultures and our viewpoints. Values and meanings have risen and changed. These intersections, moments of meeting, create a certain effect that resonates in other people’s lives. Paisley is a recurring motif in McKenzie’s work. “It represents both sides of my cultural heritage,” she states, referencing her Indo-Caribbean, Anglo/Irish roots. She draws a simple outline of its journey, originating as an almond shape in South Asia before making its way into the Scottish textile industry. While at a residency in Australia, she found herself exploring a particular shape. “That form came out of me in Australia,” she states, her arms outstretched. “There is a humanity that is connected to this shape.” The word excavate appears several times. To excavate: to dig something out, to expose something that is made meaningful in a new time. These works trace stories, identities through time and place, affected by meetings with other people, their cultures, and their traditions. These narratives are assertions of identity. But they stay away from appropriation, rather they comment on how interconnections with the unknown or the Other impact the ways we live now – and also how we move into the future. Aesthetics are visual languages laden with symbols and meanings from the past and the present. They advance certain ideas, certain markings through moments in time and history. These languages have been used, appropriated, and redefined. “And why shouldn’t I?” McKenzie counters, when asked about this choice of visual language. Specifically the languages of minimalism and modernism have historically championed the division of the sexes and a Eurocentric viewpoint, erasing particularly women and people of colour from the annals of art history. But these movements originated in functionality, forms of categorization, and a use-function with the person in mind. “The fact that I am a woman of colour, it never made me repulsed by this aesthetic.” She continues, “What am I going to do that makes it different? And how am I going to invite a broader more pluralist audience to engage with these genres?” A position is easy to betray or contradict. But a presence brings something completely different to the table – a seat. If we see the table as a place in which dialogue, community or exchange can happen, then taking a seat at this table is the most important act of all. It is a willingness to meet with the Other, a gift in a way, where the artist takes the first steps in reaching out, saying something of themselves with the hope of a response, a beginning. We assert our positions in this world through presence by bearing witness. In an age of increasing turbulence and concerns about our collective future, being visible is important. Being visible together is an act of solidarity. “It’s important to have ideas and to make artwork,” Foltyn states. Art is a dynamic bodily happening. It is an expression of a specific spatio-temporal context. The phenomena of the surrounding environment, the thoughts and dreams and lived or imagined experiences are understood and come out through the actions of the body. Foltyn describes her work as a combination of interior and exterior landscapes, stemming from the junction of the mind and the body. It is a blend of memories and experiences, reacting into the moment through bursts of gestural movement and controlled, skilled technique. “I was never good at or drawn to react to the world realistically,” Foltyn states. She describes the teaching approach of professors in Poland in the 1980’s, which focused on the development of a specific individual style and on the mastery of technical skill within it. But for Foltyn this instruction was limiting. Education is for experimentation, with a freedom to try, to innovate, and to make mistakes. “Sometimes a mistake brings forth a new experiment.” She continues, “Art speaks to your perspective and point of view. It is what draws people in and what pushes them away. Those who are left are to be nurtured and grown from.” Working across multiple pieces and compositions at once is an approach Foltyn uses to moderate between these two elements. “What is most important are the ideas that rise to the surface, that come out.,” she states. They come after a night’s rest, in the shower the next morning. Intensity and repose is also a rhythm. We often find that ideas come at moments of rest, during which the mind is free to dream. “It is the collection of different elements coming together,” she continues. “You pull them out, they come in. Sometimes it’s so intense you cannot sleep.” Abstractions don’t come from nowhere. She describes an intensification of many stimuli, phenomena, and emotions that are processed during moments of rest. “It’s not that it all comes from an experimentation of different gestural forms,” she says. But this is way of learning, too. The movement of the body taking internalized forms of being and translating it into visual forms of articulation. They say something. These are wishes, not only coming to the artist from the outside but also hopes for something else. This embodied method of working provokes ideas, thoughts, drawn from the subconscious more than from reality but having lived it all. Musing is an important process of understanding. The artworks seem to be landing points for both artists – acts of making that serve as temporal reference points in the development of ideas, echoing rhythms of control and gesture. Alternate and embodied forms of articulation engage different types of knowledge. This process underlines the importance of making as a method of learning, sorting through information in an embodied way – taking part in the world, physically, emotionally, and mentally. We are corporeal beings. Through the act of making we come to a fuller understanding of being in the world. We also cement our presence – within the cannons of history, in art, in daily life, situating ourselves within histories in which many narratives have been omitted or made invisible. The works in this exhibition convey very clearly the artists behind them, in a firm but accessible way. This exhibition is full of contrasts, brimming with nuance, time, and change. The viewer has room to feel it out on their own but always in relation to something there – the wondering of time immemorial, the cultures and roles of the people throughout history, the space we inhabit, and how we navigate our societies, perhaps our society as a whole.

#contemporary art #art criticism #ontario #carnegie gallery

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wumblr · 6 years ago

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I spent hours working on this. I'm looking at it as more of a journal entry describing where I'm at with these concepts. It could be riddled with misconceptions, I guess. I would caution you against assuming it's profound, and encourage you to figure it out for yourself.

There is an urge among a certain subset of physicists to derive a fundamental theory from dimensionless constants. This means you would theoretically be able to calculate any salient value by deriving it from other fundamental constants, without requiring any frame of reference, or standard ruler... An even more specific subset of physicists believe that these fundamental dimensionless constants should be "natural" and not "fine tuned," meaning when you derive them from each other, you could multiply or divide something by quantities like 2 or 5 or 10 without too much trouble, but as soon as you find yourself working with values such as 1/137th, you lose "naturalness." Unfortunately, experimental observations of electromagnetic interactions are the origin of the value 1/137.

This does not necessarily mean dimensionless constants are a fool's journey, but I think naturalness might be. I don't see a reasonable expectation at its base -- why should absolutely nothing be fine tuned in a 14 billion year old cosmos? Do you think the laws of physics are timeless and unchanging, or did they evolve over the history of the universe out of the available materials? I could believe that timeless laws require naturalness, but I can't believe in unchanging laws. Experiment shows fine tuning -- perhaps there is a deeper mechanism at play that will explain this in naturalistic terms, but until that mechanism is found, we have to accept the results of experiment at face values.

For contrast, I do see a reasonable expectation for dimensionless constants. It should be possible to define the universe using only pieces of it, without invoking anything exterior to it, including clocks and rulers, i.e. absolute measurements. (This is a multiverse-agnostic stance -- it doesn't matter whether anything outside our universe exists, assuming "outside our universe" means it cannot bear any causal relation to us. If there is a multiverse where gravity pervades the bulk, and exerts influence on our universe due to mass not located in our universe, that would be a different story, because there would be a theoretically detectable causal relation.)

This pursuit is relationalist, and background-independent -- all things ought to be able to be defined in relation to each other and nothing else, without having to invoke a background of aether, or absolute space, or a timeless block universe, or a notion of time that keeps ticking when nothing is happening. Somewhere near the logical conclusions of relationalism, there is a white rabbit. Let's find him.

The thing about dimensionless constants is that you can't have them without scale invariance. If everything is interior to the theory, and you invoke no external absolute ruler unaffected by the circumstances of the experiment -- which seems to me a sensible approach until we can physically experimentally place a ruler outside the universe -- then the fundamental constants are invariant under conformal scale transformations. Things could change size, as a whole or in relation to distant objects, without changing the relationship between them. Drink me.

We can't know whether we're, at present, as the planet travels through space, traversing a rabbithole that will leave us, in comparison to ourselves in the past, a vastly different size. If there was a direction of travel which would change your size as you travel along it, then we would need to come up with a clever way to detect it. If every direction of space is identically warped in this manner, we may not be able to detect it.

Of course, the universe doesn't have to be scale invariant just because the theory allows it, and if I were to pursue this idea on that basis alone, I would be vulnerable to the same error in thinking as outlined for naturalism above. (The universe does not need to be natural just because you can imagine a naturalistic set of constants. The universe does not need to be scale invariant simply because you can imagine how cool it would be.)

True, we seem to have no anomalous experimental results to indicate that scale is varying... Unless we've already seen this indication and interpreted it as something else.

The generally accepted interpretation of general relativity is that, across distances, you must discard the possibility that events can be simultaneous, and objects (and distances) must remain consistent in size. If you discard the possibility that size is immutable, you can reintroduce simultaneity. The theories are dual, meaning they match experiment equally well. We can have a linear conception of time with a notion of simultaneity, or we can have a linear conception of space with a notion of consistent scale. They are interchangeable, but mutually exclusive. Relativity was a choice to preserve the consistency of objects, and so we lost the consistency of time. But time or size could be relative. The two theories imply indistinguishable results.

The generally accepted interpretation of the redshift of distant galaxies is that the universe is expanding, and they are accelerating away from us. But consider the possibility that distant galaxies are increasing in mass -- would this theory produce a similar observable to the expanding interpretation?

Perhaps, and perhaps not. Shouldn't changes in mass under true scale invariance be impossible to detect, if they're changing in a relationally consistent way? Expansion is not a scale transformation -- the distance between objects is expanding, but the objects themselves are not. The relationships among the objects, and the distance between them, are changing. This is not the same as the fundamental values changing in concert. Any true scale transformation preserves the relation.

This would, I suppose, require a caveat that scale invariance applies at fundamental scales, but at scales such as galaxies, invariant processes might provide emergent, scale-variant properties. Particles that gain mass in concert cannot be detected in relation to each other, but collections of particles as large as stars or galaxies might experience additional effects from this increase in mass. Chemical reactions within stellar furnaces may subtly deviate from the predictions governed by the standard model because of this. Perhaps Rubin's observations of anomalous galactic rotation, which led to the theorization of dark matter, are in fact ordinary matter performing ordinary processes in a way that is categorically different from our standard model.

Since I am a pragmatist and a believer in Bohmian mechanics, this caveat works for me. In the historical development of pilot wave theory, de Broglie started from the assumption that wave/particle duality is a little bit of both. I see a similarity in the duality which scale-invariance/relativity can exhibit, so I suspect it's likelier to be a little bit of both scale invariance and relative interactions, depending on which effective theory is relevant to matters at hand.

The generally accepted interpretation of the very early universe is that there was a brief period of uncharacteristically fast expansion we call inflation. This could also be re-envisioned in scale-invariant terms. This is the most dubious assertion I have today, but perhaps the Higgs mechanism was not part of the early universe, and when circumstances arose allowing it to suddenly come into being, all mass in the universe simultaneously changed -- seeming, from our distant perspective, to be indistinguishable from exponentially quick inflation. (The change from "all particles having no mass" to "particles having various masses" is not scale invariant, because the relationships between particle masses change. The change is noticeable because everything didn't change exactly the same amount in relation to each other. Particle mass progressed from "all the same" to "diverse," which is not an invariant transformation.)

People that have written about this include Juan Maldacena, Roger Penrose, Lisa Randall, and Lee Smolin. Each of them took a different direction.

Maldacena developed Anti de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory Correspondence in the 1990s, proving that boundaries of higher dimensional shapes can be theoretically dual to the shapes themselves (AdS/CFT is where "the universe is a projection" comes from, although it's a misconception, because we are not in an Anti de Sitter space). Some of Maldacena's students developed Shape Dynamics in response, where size doesn't matter at all, and difference of shape is the only defining feature for objects (particles don't interact directly with galaxies because they are different shapes, not because one is vastly bigger than the other).

Penrose developed Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, where at the end of time, the universe is indistinguishable from the beginning and thus it "rescales" and restarts the big bang cycle.

Randall noticed a variability inherent to Einstein's equations while looking for testable predictions for the LHC, and developed Warped Geometry in response, positing compactified extra dimensions that only fundamental particles can access.

Smolin is the only one who tries to use the idea to develop a central theory and philosophy of physics, but in order to resolve nonlocality he presumes 1) space is quantizable, 2) networked in a spin-foam, and 3) nonlocal interactions are nonadjacent networking of the quanta of space. I don't like assuming that motion is non-continuous, although that's little more than a hunch, and there are a few other reasons Smolin's work leaves me doubtful, but I might have to finish the book before I can put my finger on them.

Out of these four, I tend to trust Maldacena's conclusions most of all, because he doesn't seem to take them as anything other than mathematical constructs. The other three try to explain the universe.

If I'm going to dip my toe into the philosophy of science, it will be to say this and nothing else: Science does not need to explain the universe, it should merely predict the results of experiments. If we find an explanation for the universe along the way, that's great, and not even entirely implausible -- but this explanation must grant us deeper predictive power, or else it isn't physical science.

In the 2015 physics conferences at LMU in Munich, discussions abounded on how to proceed with regards to naturalness. David Gross put forth an operational definition of scienctific progress in the absence of empirical verification: "Will I continue to work on this?" I think this is a fantastic distinction with great clarifying power, and it's helpful to develop a rubric to admit when you're following unempirical ideas. My concern about this distinction is that it's not distinct enough -- a mathematician might take this idea to vastly different conclusions than a physicist might. Mathematics contain (and should contain) a freedom that physics don't (or at least, shouldn't): the freedom to work without tying that work to reality. Internally consistent mathematics bearing no relation to reality possess a utility not present in internally consistent but unreal physics. Thus the same operational litmus test produces different results in each field.

If time and distance under lightspeed are interchangeable (because distance is defined by the time it takes light to cross it), why assume time is the relative quantity? Does relativity of scale resolve issues that are intractable for relativity of time, or does it create new intractable issues unique to itself? Are the two distinguishable at all, or do they produce exactly the same intractable problems?

In order to unify spacetime, either space or time must become relative, and I'm thinking we might have gone in the wrong direction here. In order to determine this, we might need to go as far in developing relativity of scale as we have for relativity of time. If they produce the same paradoxes, they are dual and indistinguishable. If one produces more, it is wrong.

#sorry mobile users

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holy-mountaineering · 6 years ago

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Interesting. I can't speak to the writings pertaining to the Myth of Eternal Return in general as I haven't read much else regarding the subject. The original title of the essay is Cosmos and History, which is much more accurate as The Myth of Eternal Return often means something else entirely. The essay is ultimately an exploration of the notion of cyclical time vs. linear time and how they affected the lives of archaic peoples. the depth of scholarly rigor is what really makes it shine.

Yeah, I mean, I like it and my confirmation bias just goes nuts reading about shit like this. I just don’t know about (white) folks’ ideas that all cultures are “the same” and that there are principles. These ideas are being first extracted from European culture, usually, then placed on top of other cultures to show that everything is the same and trying to convey the same message. I understand the want to do that, I just find it a bit dangerous to attempt to synthesize all cultures into a homogeneous mess with so much grey area it’s a blob. Again, I really want this stuff to be capital T true, but it seems dangerous and a big ham handed.

That isn’t to say it’s bad, I just think those are things to be aware of when reading stuff like that. Same goes with the “collective unconscious” and Jung. And y’all know how much I love that!

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warmdevs · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://warmdevs.com/design-thinking-101-2.html

History of Design Thinking

It is a common misconception that design thinking is new. Design has been practiced for ages: monuments, bridges, automobiles, subway systems are all end-products of design processes. Throughout history, good designers have applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful and effective solutions.

In the early 1900’s husband and wife designers Charles and Ray Eames practiced “learning by doing,” exploring a range of needs and constraints before designing their Eames chairs, which continue to be in production even now, seventy years later. 1960’s dressmaker Jean Muir was well known for her “common sense” approach to clothing design, placing as much emphasis on how her clothes felt to wear as they looked to others. These designers were innovators of their time. Their approaches can be viewed as early examples of design thinking — as they each developed a deep understanding of their users’ lives and unmet needs. Milton Glaser, the designer behind the famous I ♥ NY logo, describes this notion well: “We’re always looking, but we never really see…it’s the act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it.”

Despite these (and other) early examples of human-centric products, design has historically been an afterthought in the business world, applied only to touch up a product’s aesthetics. This topical design application has resulted in corporations creating solutions which fail to meet their customers’ real needs. Consequently, some of these companies moved their designers from the end of the product-development process, where their contribution is limited, to the beginning. Their human-centric design approach proved to be a differentiator: those companies that used it have reaped the financial benefits of creating products shaped by human needs.

In order for this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized. Cue design thinking, a formalized framework of applying the creative design process to traditional business problems.

Design thinking was coined in the 1990’s by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO, with Roger Martin, and encapsulated methods and ideas that have been brewing for years into a single unified concept.

What — Definition of Design Thinking

Design thinking is an ideology supported by an accompanying process. A complete definition requires an understanding of both.

Defintion: The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process and comprises 6 distinct phases, as defined and illustrated below.

How — The Process

The design-thinking framework follows an overall flow of 1) understand, 2) explore, and 3) materialize. Within these larger buckets fall the 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.

Empathize: Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel.

Imagine your goal is to improve an onboarding experience for new users. In this phase, you talk to a range of actual users. Directly observe what they do, how they think, and what they want, asking yourself things like ‘what motivates or discourages users?’ or ‘where do they experience frustration?’ The goal is to gather enough observations that you can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives.

Define: Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. In pinpointing your users’ needs, begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.

Consider the onboarding example again. In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users’ current experiences. Is there a common pain point across many different users? Identify unmet user needs.

Ideate: Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the define phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too farfetched and quantity supersedes quality.

At this phase, bring your team members together and sketch out many different ideas. Then, have them share ideas with one another, mixing and remixing, building on others’ ideas.

Prototype: Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes.

Make your ideas tactile. If it is a new landing page, draw out a wireframe and get feedback internally. Change it based on feedback, then prototype it again in quick and dirty code. Then, share it with another group of people.

Test: Return to your users for feedback. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’ needs?’ and ‘Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?’

Put your prototype in front of real customers and verify that it achieves your goals. Has the users’ perspective during onboarding improved? Does the new landing page increase time or money spent on your site? As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way.

Implement: Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users.

This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. It’s not magic. Milton Glaser’s words resonate: “There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”

As impactful as design thinking can be for an organization, it only leads to true innovation if the vision is executed. The success of design thinking lies in its ability to transform an aspect of the end user’s life. This sixth step — implement — is crucial.

Why — The Advantage

Why should we introduce a new way to think about product development? There are numerous reasons to engage in design thinking, enough to merit a standalone article, but in summary, design thinking achieves all these advantages at the same time:

It is a user-centered process that starts with user data, creates design artifacts that address real and not imaginary user needs, and then tests those artifacts with real users.

It leverages collective expertise and establishes a shared language and buy-in amongst your team.

It encourages innovation by exploring multiple avenues for the same problem.

Jakob Nielsen says “a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail.» Design thinking unfetters creative energies and focuses them on the right problem.

Flexibility — Adapt to Fit Your Needs

The above process will feel abstruse at first. Don’t think of it as if it were a prescribed step-by-step recipe for success. Instead, use it as scaffolding to support you when and where you need it. Be a master chef, not a line cook: take the recipe as a framework, then tweak as needed.

Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. This is because it is not until wireframes are prototyped and your ideas come to life that you are able to get a true representation of your design. For the first time, you can accurately assess if your solution really works. At this point, looping back to your user research is immensely helpful. What else do you need to know about the user in order to make decisions or to prioritize development order? What new use cases have arisen from the prototype that you didn’t previously research?

You can also repeat phases. It’s often necessary to do an exercise within a phase multiple times in order to arrive at the outcome needed to move forward. For example, in the define phase, different team members will have different backgrounds and expertise, and thus different approaches to problem identification. It’s common to spend an extended amount of time in the define phase, aligning a team to the same focus. Repetition is necessary if there are obstacles in establishing buy-in. The outcome of each phase should be sound enough to serve as a guiding principle throughout the rest of the process and to ensure that you never stray too far from your focus.

Scalability — Think Bigger

The packaged and accessible nature of design thinking makes it scalable. Organizations previously unable to shift their way of thinking now have a guide that can be comprehended regardless of expertise, mitigating the range of design talent while increasing the probability of success. This doesn’t just apply to traditional “designery” topics such as product design, but to a variety of societal, environmental, and economical issues. Design thinking is simple enough to be practiced at a range of scopes; even tough, undefined problems that might otherwise be overwhelming. While it can be applied over time to improve small functions like search, it can also be applied to design disruptive and transformative solutions, such as restructuring the career ladder for teachers in order to retain more talent.

Conclusion

We live in an era of experiences, be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. With each evolution comes a new set of unmet needs. While design thinking is simply an approach to problem solving, it increases the probability of success and breakthrough innovation.

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