Post-Apocalyptia: Fragile, Metro, and Fallout, Part 4 - A Sense of Place

Post-Apocalyptia: Fragile, Metro, and Fallout, Part 4 - A Sense of Place

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

In the final part of this long-ass series, we're going to tackle the main point I was going to structure it around, back when I was envisioning a single post of maybe a thousand words. As I played through these games and read through the Metro books, it occurred to me that, sometimes without even meaning to, each one in some way embodied its country of origin. Yeah, every work of art is the result of a certain person living in a particular place at a particular time, and could have turned out radically different with but a nudge. But I still contend that Fallout is uniquely American, Metro is uniquely Russian, and Fragile is uniquely Japanese. I will now explain!

A sense of place

The town of Goodneighbour from F4

One of the coolest thing about Fallout is that everything in its world is based on the state of the world in the 1950's. Communism is still regarded as the greatest threat to world peace, although it's now China rather than the Soviet Union, or was right up until it and the United States wiped each other out. The science, too, seems to be based on what was generally understood back then, so wasteland denizens find radiation poisoning fairly inconsequential; it's true that they have spent generations building up resistance, and it's natural for any wasteland doctor to be well-trained in the matter of curing radiation poisoning, but on top of that, radiation was once thought to be far less dangerous than we now know it is, allowing your character to shrug off a dose of rads that would be fatal in our universe. Regarding the retro-futuristic laser guns, the physical appearance of alien grays, the focus on nuclear power to the detriment of computer development, and other relics, we can see that Fallout basically looks like how people of the 1950s imagined the future.

And it follows culturally, as well. Like any truly great work, Fallout draws inspiration from all manner of sources, but the little details of people's everyday lives, particularly as they were before the Great War, is clearly based on classic Americana: the attitude that America is Best and would only keep getting better, that the worst was over and it was only a matter of time before technology solved all of humanity's problems. I think that's probably an exaggeration of the American mentality of the time, but just comparing their media with our modern media it's pretty clear that we're a lot more jaded now. Well, considering how that worked out in the world of Fallout, you might be able to draw some interesting parallels with our own disillusionment...but anyway, the point is, the series could not have been made anywhere else but America, or more accurately, it would look very different if it had been. That is, it wouldn't be Fallout.

Fallout is as American as cultural imperialism or gross ignorance. F3 takes place in Washington, DC, for Christ's sake. It's not just window dressing, either. The theme of what is America and how do we find it runs thick throughout the main storyline. The Enclave, the remnants of the American government, still claims to hold jurisdiction over the original borders of the United States, but in reality, they're fooling themselves, as their authority has long since been supplanted by new governments such as the New California Republic, the state of independent Las Vegas, and small groups of humans long cut off from civilization who have reverted to tribalism. Hell, even the military swore off its corrupt parent and reformulated itself into a neo-knightly order, the Brotherhood of Steel. But while the United States may be gone, America and the values it believed it stood for may still be hiding somewhere out there in the wastes. Ulysses, a tribal whose people were forcefully absorbed into the expansionist Caesar's Legion, stumbled upon an old US flag and decided to dedicate his life to resurrecting the country, and while I think it's a fool's errand, I can't help but admire his principles.

And while Ulysses's story is the only one that's fleshed out properly, others aspire to rebuild the United States as well. The Enclave's Colonel Autumn wishes to restore it because he believes in the righteousness of the cause, and is willing to go to despicable lengths to achieve this goal. Part of this entails wiping out all mutated beings in the Capital Wasteland and presumably the rest of America after that, but everybody has been affected by radiation at this point, so his plan seeks only to garner his organization a greater share of nothing. Van Buren and Fallout Tactics both introduce us to AI protocols designed to take effect should the worst happen, but both go terribly wrong.

Metro, too, derives a sense of place from its set pieces. It does a good job of painting the city overhead as a sort of Necropolis, frequented only by well-equipped adventurers and the sometimes literal ghosts of its former inhabitants. And, at least in Metro 2033, it's encased in ice and snow, which, you know, tracks with my understanding of Russia.

I somehow feel like there's something uniquely Russian, and Moscovite, about Metro's metro. The defining feature is that the Moscow Metro was explicitly designed during Soviet times to double as a massive nuclear shelter. It is so much deeper underground than similar systems for this exact reason. It also has its share of legends owing to this, most notably D6, an even deeper, most likely fictional secret line that supposedly connects important points of interest such as the Kremlin and the national theatre, should high-ranking political executives ever need to be evacuated while at a function. And I only say “most likely” fictional because it's totally absurd, but a) it would make perfect sense, and b) if anybody could keep a construction project of that magnitude a secret, it's the Soviet government. By the way, Metro 2035 was first published in Metro, a free magazine distributed only in the Moscow Metro. I was just thought that was amusing, and kind of brilliant marketing.

The character of each station is evoked beautifully, whether it's a local station with a handful of tents scattered across the platform or a relative metropolis built throughout the shell of a former transport hub. From what I can tell, each station was realised by a different architect rather than a team of city planners, giving each one a distinct flavour (here's a sample). The creator might have slapped some ornate columns or controversial murals up in there. Even those that were the result of a Soviet-era relentless pursuit of function over form end up being unusual simply by comparison to their neighbours. The result is a series of stations that stand as works of art – or maybe the entire Metro is one big work of art. (Oddly enough, thanks to constantly referring to the maps while reading the books, I now feel like I know Moscow's public transit system better than some places I've actually lived in.)

Polis

Much of this beauty has been lost by 2033, but history is a continuum, and new traits have popped up to replace the old ones. Some stations have had their art preserved, to the ambivalence or even derision of those who pass through them, where others have come to stand for something else entirely, like the city of Polis, a conglomeration of four different stations now dedicated to the preservation of knowledge and nobility. And, generally, the reason for the evolution of a particular spot is clearly explained, and somehow rooted in its past.

There is also the fact that Ghlukovsky wrote Metro 2033 as a veiled evaluation of Russian society. Knowing this, the portrayals of, say, the Hanseatic money-grubbers, Communists driven mad by ideology, and exaggeratedly naiive and illogical Christians, suddenly seem a little less gratuitous. And the Nazis aren't really Nazis, but anti-immigration conservatives and racists. Maybe some characters and their motivations could do with a little more nuance, but at least it makes sense as an allegory. Dissecting all of modern Russian culture would be a mammoth task, but the author brings it down to a manageable scale. The Metro is a microcosm of Russia itself.

F3's Meresti Station, where, if I recall correctly, your
character murders a troublesome journalist by
pushing her into the path of an oncoming train.

Of course, other cities certainly have their own metros, so could you do a Metro-alike in another city? Sure! In fact, the wider Metro universe includes books set in locations like St Petersburg, elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and even as far afield as London, which is, after all, known for “the Tube.” Paris and New York come to mind as well. For that matter, both Fragile and Fallout 3 spend significant spaces of time in their cities' subway systems! (Shinjuku Eki is a major location in Fragile, and in F3 much of DC's streets are impassable due to rubble, making many downtown areas accessible only through the subway tunnels.) Vancouver might not work, since a SkyTrain station is a little less insulated, but you get the picture.

Speaking of Fragile's subway, the first real level takes place within Shinjuku Eki, famously the largest and busiest in all of Japan. Except, of course, that it's now deserted, save for a smattering of wild dogs and other monsters. Not saying that train travel is unique to life in Japan, but it's definitely an inextricable part of it, and one of the things I noticed most when I did my high school exchange.

After exploring a platform and concourse, the stage moves farther underground, to the 地下商店街 chikashoutengai, literally “underground shopping district.” I have no idea if they have these in countries other than Japan (surely China and Korea at the very least?), but I love these places. Narrow, crowded, and confusing, in another post I said that navigating them is like trying to play Pac-Man in first-person. The steet-like halls are lined with restaurants, clothing stores, all kinds of stuff really. The shops are densely packed and it's impossible to find what you're looking for. You might think that they cater to people in transit, but that's not true at all. Actually, it's just that their accessibility makes them terribly convenient. It's not uncommon for someone to head for a major station just to shop, then head on home. I've always loved train stations because they are the intersection of so many lives, shared alone; chikashoutengai are all of that PLUS the socializing of a mall. The energy is infectious, and I always end up leaving with that feeling you get when haven't accomplished anything of any great consequence, but you have experienced a slice of life.

But even if these aren't found elsewhere in the world, they are all over Japan. So, sure, Shinjuku Eki puts in an appearance, but it could be replaced with any other major station in Japan with little impact; for the most part, the city of Toukyou does not assert herself. The exception here is Toukyou Tower, an omnipresent neon presence off in the distance, not to mention your ultimate goal and the site of the final battle. It demands your attention when you first leave the observatory, it frames the background when Ren first appears, and whenever you venture indoors, almost forgetting about it, it's the first thing you notice when you reemerge, slowly but surely drawing closer.

Does it say anything that Fragile includes an amusement park level? Probably nothing significant about Japanese society, but the fact that the developers picked this as a stock setting (alongside the more universal train stations and hotels) might. I could be wrong, but I feel like not a lot of Westerners would.

For what it's worth, the choice of art style is undeniably Japanese. I mean come on now, it's freaking anime. If you were deliberately trying to make something Japanese and you picked an anime art style, people would tell you it was too on the nose. Flat cells, detailed textures, bright colours, exaggerated features – yup, that's Japanese animation.

And then there's the themes. Whether or not I'm right about the global warming angle, we have the scenes of nature to go off of. There's the northern lights scene we talked about earlier, visible through a smogless sky, and of course the hotel, slowly being reclaimed by the forest. The moon, as beautiful as it is cold and implacable. No less a person than Miyazaki Hayao has based many of his works on environmental themes, and he's regarded as one of the finest creators in Japan. Plus, what's the overriding emotion throughout the game? Loneliness. Various characters complain of the pain. Humanity is nearly destroyed in trying to eliminate it forever. Seto loses one person after another until he finally finds one who sticks around. Even the player may share in his distress, wandering a hostile environment without company. To paraphrase Hitching Rides With Buddha: “In the West, people fear irrelevance; in Japan, people fear loneliness.”

As with Fallout and America, I have to conclude that Fragile could not be made anywhere other than Japan – or that if it had been, it wouldn't be Fragile as we know it.

(Additionally, I resisted watching the Mad Max movies until after I'd completed this post, because I didn't want to be influenced except by the works I was actually writing about. There were a few reasons for this, number one being that the Mad Max game hadn't come out yet, and I thought I'd keep things consistent by following the gaming thread. Three is also a nice number. But more significantly, while I'm far from an expert on Russian or American culture, I know next to nothing about Australian culture. I've since watched the films and can safely say that – unsurprisingly, since it invented half the tropes that Fallout, Metro, and Fragile are drawing on – Mad Max would have been a good fit for this series, so expect an update eventually.)

Conclusion

By now it's probably pretty clear why I play these games and read this books (and watch these movies, and...), and why I wrote this post: I love thinking about this stuff. That, to me, is the real heart of philosophy: Taking extraordinary situations or seemingly impractical thought experiments, and finding a way to relate it to your real life. By asking us to confront questions about technology, the place of humanity, and what you the reader would be capable of in exceptional circumstances, Post-Apocalyptic fiction not only succeeds in provoking contemplation but delivers it in an entertaining package to boot.

Post-Apocalyptia: Fragile, Metro, and Fallout, Part 2 - Themes

Post-Apocalyptia: Fragile, Metro, and Fallout, Part 2

Themes

Part 1

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Post-Apocalyptia is an interesting setting for a variety of reasons. Wish fulfillment is definitely part of it. We may not really want to live off maggots and live in constant fear of violent death, but from time to time we all wish we could leave our obligations behind in exchange for something more adventurous. It's the same appeal we see in the Wild West or outlaw biker gangs. But it's also a great place to tell a story, because it pushes our characters so hard and asks so many interesting questions in the process. Does morality change in this situation? What level of depravity is acceptable in exchange for survival? To what extent are we culpable for the sins of others? And should we be trying to restore what we've lost, or build something new? These questions and others pervade a post-Apocalyptic setting, intentionally or not.

Decay/Atmosphere

I remember doing the Fallout: New Vegas quest “That Lucky Old Sun,” named after a song from the 50's. The quest has nothing really to do with the sun – it concerns the activation of an orbital laser cannon – but the name made me stop and actually look up at the sun, shining down on my character (a hot young Chinese girl). And I remember thinking, how incredible is it that even when the world has been all but destroyed and virtually nothing looks as it once did, the sun beating down on this Mojave desert is the same one that shone on the face of human civilization 200 years ago. The sun observed humanity's self-destruction from afar - safely, and indifferently.

In Metro, much discussion is given to the ultimate fate of humanity, whether the last scraps of it subsist in the Moscow Metro or if other pockets remain elsewhere, whether we will ever be able to reclaim the surface, or if we will be forced to live down there forever, or yet again if we will simply die out within a couple of generations, once there's nothing left to scavenge and our subterranean farms go fallow. Meanwhile, for all its politics and gunfights, the underlying story of Metro is that of the dark ones, an offshoot of human beings seemingly made for our war-scorched earth. They are telepathic, unaffected by radiation or extreme temperatures, and difficult to kill. We're out, they're in. They want to help, if only we'd let them, but even if we die out completely, the earth abideth forever, and our passing from it will be only one chapter in its long, long chronicle.

Marcus, an intelligent Super Mutant

Funny enough, Fallout actually makes kind of the same point, twice over. In this case, however, it's only fringe groups who believe that the newtypes have inherited the wasteland. Ghouls are humans who have received large amounts of radiation and become zombie-like due to their symptoms. In Van Buren, there was going to be a character named Dr Willem Clark, a ghoul who claimed that, as radiation was the source of ghoulification, ghouls were the natural successors to their frail human ancestors. One day, he claimed, he and his people would strike out from their isolated fortress, the Reservation, and claim the Southwest (if not all of America) for themselves, and as ghouls can potentially live for hundreds of years, they were willing to endure slow progress. Similarly, the ultimate plot of Fallout 1 centres on the Master and his army of Super Mutants, humans who have been mutated by the Forced Evolutionary Virus. Like ghouls, they are immune to radiation (though unlike ghouls, they are not healed by it), and they are furthermore huge, fast, and incredibly strong, capable of wielding weapons such as miniguns and Super Sledges with ease. Indeed, they are already the masters of much of the American wasteland, such as the ruins of Washington DC, where they are more or less the dominant force. On the other hand, many Super Mutants have had their intellects dulled to animalistic levels, and the store-brand humans' main advantage over them is superior training and small unit tactics.

Source

Fragile seems to be driving towards exactly the same point as Metro: We should absolutely struggle to survive, but it also wouldn't hurt to occasionally remember that we may not be as important as we think. I never felt this more strongly than when Seto saw the northern lights in Fragile. Of course, they're beautiful, a wonder of nature; but even if civilization was destroyed, wouldn't they still be beautiful, regardless of whether there was anyone there to observe that beauty? On the other hand, if there's no one there to observe something's beauty, what's the point? There's a similar scene at the end of the dam level, where the camera pulls back to reveal the nature that has grown up around the abandoned dam, which, by the way, put a stopper in a natural wonder in the first place. The dam is still fully functional, too, constantly generating power for a population that is no longer there to use it. Like if you made dinner for five, but no one was hungry. And let us not forget the moon, which, like that lucky old sun, looks on from above. This theme of nature reclamation, of course, pervades nearly every second of Fragile.

Besides that, we have the “everyday life” angle. I appreciate that in the Metro 2033 novel, the national pastime seems to be sitting around sharing stories – news from other parts of the metro, rumours embellished by each successive purveyor, or just a personal anecdote from five years back when you were living an another station and apprenticing with an ironworker. It works really well, because with little else in the way of entertainment, and most information being exchanged by word of mouth, that's how people really would spend a sizeable chunk of their time.

In your travels through the world of Fallout, you will frequently meet with communities struggling for survival, and can offer your assistance if you wish. For instance, a typical quest line might involve the breakdown of a town's water purifier, and possible solutions might be to either help fix it, or negotiate a trade relationship with a neighbour. But for the most part, you yourself do not have to contend with any such issues – you are capable of days if not months without sleep, don't have to worry about biological trivialities like food, and can repair massive internal hemorrhaging with a 200-year-old first aid kit you found in a burnt-out house. Although Metro does an excellent job of making you really feel the constant danger of sudden, violent death, if you look at similar real-world situations like impoverished nations or the Old West, a slow descent into disease and malnourishment is far more likely than a quick and dramatic end. But in Fallout, anything that doesn't kill you outright is of little concern.

Of course, we accept these quirks in the name of fun. New Vegas, however, introduced “Hardcore Mode,” in which you really do have to pay attention to your bodily needs. The healing system is more complex, and some injuries can be tended only by a trained doctor. You have a hunger and thirst metre, creating the interesting dynamic where you may be forced to drink irradiated toilet water and risk radiation poisoning later in order to stave off immediate death by dehydration. In the normal game ammunition is weightless, allowing you to carry hundreds of rounds for weapons you don't even have, but Hardcore Mode forces you to pack more carefully, selecting only the equipment you will need for the mission at hand. Suddenly all of your decisions take on greater weight. Certainly you can't fault anybody who just wants the freedom to explore a compelling and detailed world without worrying about finicky irritants, but the light sim aspects of Hardcore Mode really clinch the post-Apocalyptic atmosphere for a lot of players.

The other two utilise their atmosphere to great effect, but Fragile lives and dies on it. That is, if you stripped away the details, Fallout would still be a top-knotch open-ended RPG, and Metro would be an ok FPS (and the Metro novels would still be good Hero's Journeys). On the other hand, Fragile, taken at its fundamentals, really isn't much of a game. Without the ancillary trappings, you're just running around aimlessly and occasionally hitting things with sticks. The art direction and slowly building pathos take that and make it compelling.

Of course the biggest difference between Fragile and the other two is that in Fragile, nothing was destroyed – it simply began to erode in the sudden absence of humanity. Moscow's Ostankino Tower had its top blown off, but Toukyou Tower stands intact. Fragile's degradation process was much slower, and, really, almost even sadder than sudden violent erasure. For inspiration, the developers looked to photographs of 廃墟 haikyo, meaning “ruins,” but used here to refer to abandoned train stations and amusement parks that Japanese urban explorers sometimes seek out and document. Give it a Google and you'll turn up stuff like this:

Unsettling, eh? The weird part is, you actually kind of get used to it. The sight of the ruined world is arresting at first, but while you never stop noticing it, you do start accepting that this is just the way things are now.

I think it also says something that in Fragile, of the two electronic friends Seto meets – PF and Kurou – both perish by the end of the game, whereas the flesh-and-blood characters not only fight to survive, but even live on as ghosts, long after their bodies have died.

Nostalgia/The Old World

From time to time when stopping at a campfire to rest and record his progress, Seto will find some small object from when the world was whole. This is accompanied by a few lines of monologue from the person who used it, and while the process is a little forced, they do make some poignant observations, such as the cup that once held hot tea on a cold winter's day, and cold, refreshing tea on a hot summer's day. You know – the little things that we never think about, that we take for granted because we don't live in a post-nuclear apocalypse. Yet.

Likewise, Artyom remarks on what a pity it is that humanity managed to accidentally destroy almost everything it had worked for up to that point. Having been born less than a year before the bombs dropped, he remembers nothing of the old world and can evaluate it as an observer. Anytime he encounters a relic of what now seems to be the Golden Age of civilization, he mourns its passing. Encountering the burned-out hulls of train cars, he almost finds it hard to believe that these machines could carry a person across Moscow in a matter of hours, when his own journey takes weeks or months. When he looks across the shattered landscape at what remains of Ostankino Tower, his thrill of awe is immediately followed by a pang of remorse that nothing of this scale will ever be built, ever again.

Ulysses

Most of the inhabitants of Fallout, however, are remarkably well-adjusted to their condition, being far enough removed from the Great War and what was lost in its wake that they feel no particular attachment to it. Indeed, everything that came before it is regarded as merely another stage of history (or what's survived of it; Abraham Washington will inform you that the Declaration of Independence was signed by the Second Judgmental Congress and taken to Britain by plane). Some, however, have managed to develop a yearning for the good old days that borders on obsession. These aren't generally ghouls, either, who would at least have a reason to miss the world they once inhabited, but rather people who have never even seen it with their own eyes. The condition has come to be called “Old World Blues,” and there's a whole New Vegas DLC on that theme that goes by that very name. In most cases, the afflicted fail to even understand what they're trying to restore, and end up getting bogged down in unimportant details like the kind of technology that was being used at the time. One character, however, who gives himself the name Ulysses – after Ulysses S. Grant, not the James Joyce novel – discovers a United States flag, latches on to it, and never lets go. This is not because he is unduly fascinated with the object, however, but because he understands all too well the power of symbols, and he believes in what the United States was supposed to stand for. To him, even the Enclave (which up until its destruction claimed to be the legitimate American government in recluse) is a betrayal of the American spirit, as it has perverted the ideals on which it thrived and twisted them towards petty personal concerns. His goal, though pointless and impossible, is noble.

Society and commerce

In Metro, the people everyone looked to for guidance were not the political elite or even military commanders but the station employees. Train operators are especially sought after, because they know the territory and, in the words of the novel, do not panic the moment they have to disembark and enter a dark tunnel.

Both Metro and Fallout have a surprisingly good grasp of economics, as well. Personally I think it's totally possible for the local currency to remain in use, but it makes just as much sense for it to fall without the presence of government to guarantee its value. In the case of Fallout, people start using the metal caps off Nuka-Cola bottles, which seems kind of silly and indulgent but actually makes perfect sense: The technology to manufacture them has been basically lost, which not only makes them difficult to counterfeit, but insulates them against inflation as well. The denizens of the Moscow metro end up using old AK-47 bullet casings for exactly the same reason.

Unexpectedly, both settings even demonstrate a basic understanding of the principle that capitalism inevitably leads to inequality. Fallout 3 has the inexplicable Tenpenny Tower, a low-rise apartment building somehow spared bombardment and currently inhabited only by affluent, non-mutated humans. Well, the nearby population of non-feral ghouls wants in, but the titular Tenpenny doesn't trust those sometimes literally two-faced no-goodniks. There's not only an obvious racism allegory, but a classist one as well. So you have the option to side with Tenpenny and tell the ghouls to piss off, in which case, congratulations on being an asshole. Alternately, you can convince him to give them a chance. The ghouls will move in, and, despite a few rough jolts, the new and old residents will overcome their differences and start to build a future together. For a couple of weeks anyway, at which point the ghouls will prove all of Tenpenny's fears well-founded and murder everybody in the Tower on some flimsy pretext. Tenpenny was a bad man, but not all of his tenants were. So, congratluations on being an asshole.

Just gonna leave this here

Metro is quieter on this point, but it's significant that the most powerful faction in the Moscow Metro got that way by commandeering the Ring Line, which allowed them to impose tariffs and thus become a huge economic power, relatively speaking. This in turn allowed them to bolster their military, and after a stalemate war with the Red Line, they sat as the virtually unchallenged masters of the Metro. Life in the Hansa (named after some European history thingy that I'm not really familiar with) is on a totally different level from other parts of the Metro; the lights are brighter, the food is better, and everyone is happier. Yeah, they're still basically destitute by our standards, but its citizens enjoy luxuries unavailable to almost anyone else, such as reliable electricity and hot water. No other force in the Metro is as effective. Christianity is reduced to a tiny fringe religion, Communism (the Red Line) focusses on ideologically significant but impractical physical holdings, and nationalism (the Fourth Reich) gains only a tiny, insular territory of a mere three stations that is very dangerous to trespass but poses no credible threat even to its neighbours, rather like the modern DPRK. The guys who decided early on that money was the number one priority, though? Oh, boy!

In Fragile, of course, it's a moot point, because there is no society, on account of there being no people. Seto can buy stuff from a travelling merchant, but that's more of a gameplay mechanic than anything worth reading into. It is notable, however, that all the humans who meet each other both instinctively seek each other out, and are instinctively distrustful of each other. Wouldn't you? And in a way, this actually underscores the main theme of the game: Loneliness, and the “fragility” of human relationships. After all, it is human beings' limited, imperfect means of communication that led the central antagonist to search for a means to human instrumentality, and, in fact, you find out at the end that he personally felt alienated from society, which viewed his eccentricity as worthy of derision and ostracism. He sought not only to alleviate his own pain, but that of anyone who has ever experienced the torture of being misunderstood, who wants to fit in, but can't, whatever they may say about not needing anybody. (I could make a point here about how this message, borne on a very Japanese, otakuish game, might speak to Fragile's target audience, but that might be a little too close for comfort.)

Funny enough, the fact that people always come up with some form of currency backs up claims by John Locke. Or they would, if they were real. You knew what I meant. So Locke, he says, suppose we only ever relied on the barter system. A quart of milk to fix a flat tire or whatever. Well, some people would still end up having more than they need. They would start to value things with no practical purpose – majestic Hercules beetles, let's say. They'd start trading legitimately valuable items like wool for Hercules beetles just because the little guys are the only ones who understand them. But nobody else has any use for them, right? Wrong. If the rich guy has more than he needs of everything, and he'll accept Hercules beetles as payment, then there's little reason for me not to accept Hercules beetles as payment as well, because I can turn around and sell them to the rich guy. Suddenly, we're all using Hercules beetles as a unit of exchange amongst ourselves, knowing their value is backed by the rich guy who wants them so bad, and we come to see that we haven't created something like money – we have actually created money. So, Locke says, money is inevitable.

Now you may notice that the way I describe things, the emergence of money is dependent on at least one person being significantly better off than your average Joe (or Ivan, or Tarou). Well, Locke says that this is inevitable too, and so does Marx. Except that Locke says this is because some people are naturally harder workers than others, and will sooner or later reach a position where they can start paying people to work for them, while still skimming off a profit for themselves, at which point they're commanding a labour force so large that they are now managers. Whereas Marx says that it is inevitable for complicated economic reasons that boil down to employees adding value to the object they work, and the employer keeping that value for themselves, without actually working for it. Marx was a horrible idiot of a philosopher but a brilliant economist and I'd love to delve into this further but you know what, “Marxist economics in post-Apocalyptic settings” could be a whole book. Suffice to say that economic powerhouses like Tenpenny or the Hanse are not at all far-fetched.

I hope you enjoyed Part 2 of this series. It was a little heavy, but it's pretty interesting stuff. Next time, we'll clean up a few mental bits and pieces that fell out while I was writing the rest of this series.

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Post-Apocalyptia: Fragile, Metro, and Fallout, Part 1 - Introduction

Post-Apocalyptia: Fragile, Metro, and Fallout, Part 1

Introduction

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

What would you do if the world ended tomorrow?

What can you make? What skills do you have? Can you sew? Are you trained in first aid? Good at hunting? Can you fill out document requisitions in tripli – oh, wait, no.

To whom would you offer those skills? Your friends and family? A hardened corps of survivalists? Go it alone? Settle down in a frontier boomtown where you can trade meat for a new shirt or sex for some potatoes?

Would you lie to survive? Steal? Kill? Betray a friend or benefactor? Are some things more important than survival? Would you rather debase yourself and survive like a rat, or die with a shred of dignity? Would your moral code change to reflect your new circumstances, or is morality immutable? What should you try to accomplish? And what should humanity?

I love post-Apocalyptic fiction. Like cyberpunk, it combines high-pitched action with compelling philosophy. For whatever reason, three that stand out to me are the Fallout series, the Metro series, and the game Fragile (known as Fragile Dreams in the English translation). I was reading, playing and thinking about all of them around roughly the same time, and suddenly it all came together. Maybe it's a little strange that of all the post-Apocalyptic fiction in the entire world, I should draw a connection between these three in particular, but it somehow makes sense in my mind. The clincher is that each has a different country of origin, and appears to be among the best that country has to offer, so we can imagine that they represent each country's perspective on the genre. And since one of those countries is Japan, it luckily fits with my Japan-themed blog.

This series will explore some of the issues these works raise, comparing and contrasting their responses. If the fact that we're 308 words in and still doing the introduction hasn't given it away, I'll warn you now that this is going to be a dense, lengthy treatise. I'm still going to try to make it fun though, so if I haven't lost you yet, I think it's going to be a great ride.

Spoilers are unavoidable, but I will do my best to avoid major ones.

I hope this topic is as exciting for you as it is for me! Let's get started. In this first post, we will introduce the three franchises we'll be discussing.

Plot and Backstory

A Veteran Ranger of the New California Republic

Fallout takes place in the future, but not our future; history diverged directly after World War II. Instead of computers, science turned most of its attention towards the nuclear. Though weaponry was the obvious point, nuclear power made rapid strides, soon bound in reactors small enough to power a car, a suit of power armour, or even a rifle. This was all very nice until 2077, when, for reasons lost to history, the United States and China unloaded their missiles on each other. In a matter of hours, the two greatest civilizations on earth were destroyed, and possibly so too was the rest of the world; there's no way to know. The immediate damage was catastrophic and the long-term effects just as deadly, but pockets of humanity persisted through quick thinking or flukes of geography. Others took shelter in massive Vaults, supposedly designed to house a thousand residents until it was safe to emerge (though their true purpose was very different). Some Vaults re-opened just a few years later, others remained locked for a century or more, at which point Vault dwellers emerged into an unrecognizable world. The technology is a combination of Used Future and whatever can be cobbled together from any random materials at hand. In the new order, it's hard to say which is more dangerous: The environment, the mutated wildlife...or the survivors.

A heavy assault squad from the Fourth Reich braces
 for an attack by the communist Red Line faction

The world of Metro suffered a similar nuclear event in 2013, only this time people took shelter in the Moscow Metro, either fleeing there when they heard the sirens or having the good fortune to be commuting when it happened. The world above is now uninhabitable, the pollution making it impossible to traverse without a gas mask, and the monsters making it inadvisable to do so without heavy weaponry. By 2033, outside threats are legion, resources are drying up, and yet all we want to do is fight and kill each other. On top of this, inexplicable supernatural forces run through the length and breadth of the Metro, and we are fast approaching a pivotal point in history that may decide whether the human race continues to scrabble onward or is extinguished once and for all.

The mysterious girl gazes at the moon

Fragile's apocalypse is a little more fantastical. Intriguingly, it came about from efforts to end war and misunderstanding. Using an invention called the Glass Cage, a mad scientist planned to form a psychic link between all human beings – similar to the “human instrumentality” concept in Evangelion. In this case, a single young girl, imprisoned in the Glass Cage, was to act as the conduit for all human thought and emotion, disseminated instantly across the world. Language, the scientist claimed, is insufficient for true understanding (an interesting point, and one that I also touched on in the Evangelion post), so this was the only true solution. But the results didn't mete out the theory, as instead of ushering in a golden age, the activation of the Glass Cage instantly killed nearly every human on earth. The plot concerns a handful of survivors and their need for human contact.

In exactly 10 words

Fallout: Wander the wastes and kill everyone – or don't.

Metro: Life underground, the cost of hubris, and agony of survival.

Fragile: The haunting beauty of what's left behind. Also, hitting things.

The coolest part

Fragile – The art direction. The small number of other characters to interact with forces the game to show, not tell.

Fallout – Besides the oddly appropriate mix of camp and dead seriousness, the ability to take sides. Nearly every major mission allows you to do the total opposite of what you're asked to do; if contracted to kill someone in a typical mission, you could instead warn them off, extract a bribe in exchange for letting them go, or even join forces against their enemy.

Metro – Daily life in the Metro. Fallout lets you visit shantytowns and whatnot, but Metro does a far better job of depicting the desperation, boredom, and sheer ingenuity that would really be in the offing in a situation like this.

A brief release history

This section is going to feel a little like filler, but I think it's important to do a quick rundown of the franchises we'll be dealing with, just to make sure we all know what the hell we're talking about.

Fallout 2 cover art

Fallout is a series of mainly PC games going back to 1997, when the first installment came out. Next year, Interplay published the sequel, Fallout 2. Fallout 3, however, did not come out until 2008, after Bethesda purchased the rights. Bethesda subsidiary Obsidian developed a sequel, Fallout: New Vegas, released in 2010, and Fallout 4 was released in 2015. These five games comprise the U-canon of the Fallout franchise, but there are two others considered to be “broad strokes canon.” The first is the original version of Fallout 3 developed around 2000 by Black Isle Studios, known coloquially by its working title, Van Buren; if you hear people talking about the “real” Fallout 3, this is what they mean. There is also a game called Fallout Tactics that lies in this same category, as well as a couple of other titles that are non-canon and which we won't be taking into consideration. Many of the games take place decades apart, with a 116-year difference between Fallout 1 and Fallout: New Vegas, so the world's history has developed along with the franchise's.

Metro: Last Light cover art

Russian author Dmitri Glukhovsky first published the novel Metro 2033 in 2005. In 2009, he released a sequel, Metro 2034, which takes place in the same universe but features mostly different characters. Metro 2033 was adapted into a video game a year later, published by THQ and developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games; a direct sequel to that game, Metro: Last Light, was released in 2013. Glukhovsky wrote the story for Last Light, and in the process found he had more ideas than could be contained in a game, so he took the plot, added to it, and wrote Metro 2035 for 2015. So, yes, 2035 is a direct sequel to 2033, but it's also a book based on a game that was a sequel to a game based on a book. Brilliantly, it was also first serialized in a newspaper that is only sold within the Moscow Metro.

Fragile cover art

Fragile is a video game developed by tri-Crescendo and published by Bandai Namco, released in 2009 for the Wii. So that one's easy.

(This information accurate to 2015. More stuff may have been released depending when you're reading this. I'm sure not updating the post every single time something new comes out.)

Gameplay

Fragile is arguably the simplest game we're looking at here, but only because the focus is on exploration above all else. Actually, the main mechanic is just stalking around the ruins of train stations and hotels, waving your flashlight at things (in a nice touch, the Wii remote is your flashlight, so you just point where you want to look, allowing you to survey your surroundings on the fly). There is some amount of combat, rather more than I would have liked, actually, but it's pretty crude. Your character carries a weapon in his left hand at all times, and it can be either a melee or distance weapon, and is basically anything he can find on the ground, like a stick, or a slingshot, or a bug-catching net. They have various properties, such as power and durability, and you can perform a Spin Attack-like charged strike, but it boils down to running up to something and whacking it. It's hardly a deep combat system, but perhaps that was intentional, as it's also rather easy, allowing the player to focus on the visual experience.

Fallout is notable for its extreme open-endedness in regards to problem-solving. If called upon to get past a guard in order to enter a building, you could simply murder him, but you could also bribe him, intimidate him, trick him into thinking you're his boss's boss, pickpocket his key, or find an alternate entrance, to name one example. The RPG elements aren't terribly robust, but they're strong enough to add some interest, as you gain new skills, equipment, and selectable “Perks” (for example, one Perk improves your shooting and another makes you more popular with the opposite sex...or, if you prefer, the same sex, or both!)

Metro is a first-person shooter. There is a heavy emphasis on stealth; although you can attempt to outgun your enemies, you are liable to become overwhelmed, and sneaking through an area without leaving any sign that you were ever there is far more satisfying. From time to time you'll holster your weapon to scurry around a town, interacting with the townsfolk and buying supplies for the next leg of your journey.

Characters

Seto and his companion Sai

Fragile casts you in the role of a 15-year-old boy named Seto. He was born into the post-Apocalypse and has lived his entire life with his grandfather in a stellar observatory, but when his grandfather passes away he is forced out into the world. Though understandably rather naiive, he is also both friendly and brave.

Artyom

Metro puts you in the shoes of Artyom, who lives in a small backwater station of zero interest to outsiders. Although Artyom's character arc is fairly simple, it is kind of fun to observe through the course of the two games. About 21 in 2033, he is sheltered and inexperienced, and can see no resolution with the dark ones except violence. In the sequel, however, he has become a skilled soldier for a major faction, and ends up on something of a quest to rectify his mistakes of the previous story.

Fallout 4's character creation

Fallout is, um...it's a little more complicated, because there are so many installments. Plus, your thinking and behaviour are thoroughly up to you, so it's hard to say what is or isn't true about the Fallout protagonists. However, each one has a definite overarching goal. It'll quickly recede into the background in the face of the reams of other plotlines and assorted distractions, but you never quite forget it's there.

That about wraps it up for the introduction. Next time we'll actually dig into the meat of the subject, as we discuss some of the major themes of these works.

Keep Reading

Introduction to Japanese Philosophy, Part 2: People and Concepts

In the last post, I outlined the historical and cultural/religious factors that influence the Japanese understanding of Philosophy. And it took way longer than I thought it would, so I ended up having to break it up into another post. Which is fine. Thinking up stuff to write about is hard sometimes. Messes up my posting schedule.

As I noted before, most of the big names in Japanese philosophy are Buddhist thinkers. Here's a few of them and a couple of abiding concepts.

The 17-Article Constitution

Shoutoku Daishi

Way, way back in the day, Japan was ruled by the young 聖徳大師 Shoutoku Daishi or, as he is called in English, Prince Shotoku. He was responsible for the drafting and promulgation of Japan's first constitution, except the thing is, it is entirely unlike what you or I would envision. Rather than a system of rights and regulations, Shoutoku Daishi's constitution had more to do with what was considered acceptable and virtuous behaviour. To some extent it was a little biased towards court officials, who were expected to lead by example; this kind of follows the ancient Chinese thinking that if the Emperor is good, his underlings will emulate him and be good, and so on, so that ultimately all of society is good. Trickle-down morality, basically.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Harmony is to be valued
• Sincerely revere the Buddha, his teaching, and the ordained community
• Turn away from that which is private, and turn toward that which is public
• Important decisions should not be made by one person alone.

So there's Buddhism, right there, written into the ancient Japanese constitution. You are literally required by law to be a good Buddhist. The first and third, meanwhile, would not seem out of place in modern Japan! Let's not exaggerate, but it's not unfair to say that Japanese people strive for harmony and facilitation in their everyday lives. And finally, that last one – one person should not have absolute power? That's an interesting thing for an autocratic dictator to write into official policy.

Interestingly, since it was never actually struck down by any act of parliament, some Japanese legal scholars theorize that the 17-Article Constitution is technically still part of Japanese law.

Kuukai

Kuukai

Also known posthumously as 弘法大師 Koubou-daishi, 空海 Kuukai was an explorer of tantric Buddhism and of the most prominent religious figures in Japan. A poet of some note, he is credited, perhaps apocryphally, with writing the いろは歌 Irohauta, which uses every character of the ancient Japanese syllabary exactly once. It's one of the most famous works in all of Japanese literature and is sometimes thought to embody the very spirit of Japan itself (that's “spirit” as in a shared sense of values, purpose, and culture, not like a religious spirit). Also, if I recall correctly (and I may not), Kuukai was the first Buddhist of influence to assert that women could reach Heaven without needing to first be reborn as men and then taking another crack at it. Also, his name is a combination of the character for “air” and the one for “sea,” so that's pretty cool.

Nenbutsu

Yoshimitsu from Soul Calibre

In brief, 念仏 nenbutsu is the Japanese word for invoking the name of Buddha. If you have a passing familiarity with Japanese popular culture, you'll have heard the most basic version before – namu amida butsu. For example, Yoshimitsu from Soul Calibre sometimes recites it after battle. The idea is that invoking Buddha himself brings you closer to the enlightenment he was able to achieve. The nenbutsu is often done in repetitions of 108, which is the number of worldly temptations that humans must attempt to avoid (or seek out, depending on your point of view). To help with counting, Buddhists will sometimes use a string of prayer beads, which, again, you've no doubt seen people holding – hell, some of the pictures on this very page have them plainly visible. But while the basics of nenbutsu are more or less agreed upon, there is still some contention, such as that between...

Hounen and Shinran

Hounen

放念 Hounen and 親鸞 Shinrann are kind of the Obi-Wan and Anakin of Japanese philosophy. The latter studied dutifully under the tutelage of the former, soaked up every bit of knowledge he could, and then said “thanks for that, Imma go do the exact opposite nao,” and then founded an evil empire. Or in the case of Shinran, a competing sect of Buddhism, which I guess isn't quite as bad.

The two had many minor points of contention, but one of the most important was their differing beliefs regarding salvation. Hounen thought that through dutiful nenbutsu recitation, you could effectively reach out to Buddha and rise up to Heaven of your own accord when you died. Shinran was a little less optimistic. He thought that since humans are so utterly mired in sin and confusion, there was no way they were getting anywhere without Buddha's direct intervention. Concordantly, where Hounen advocated busting out the nenbutsu at the slightest provocation, the better to achieve a more thorough enlightenment, Shinran held that it was more for giving thanks to Buddha rather than asking him for more stuff, sort of like saying grace in Christianity, I suppose.

On the whole, I've always felt that Hounen doesn't get nearly the respect he deserves. Shinran is by far the more famous, but Hounen is pretty interesting too, and his temple is pretty rad. Plus, compared to his pupil, he was a rugged individualist who believed in relying on your own power, so where are your stereotypes now, hypothetical Japan-hater who I invented just now?

Dougen

Dougen

I haven't studied 道元 Dougen as much, so I'm less familiar with him (because that's how studying works). Mainly I'm aware that he was pretty up on 座禅 zazen, which is – know what, just go ahead and imagine a Buddhist deep in prayer. There, you almost certainly envisioned him doing zazen, the sitting meditation with legs crossed. For extra potency, you can have his thumbs and forefingers around his abdominal chakra. My History of Japanese Thought teacher demonstrated on himself. “I know it feels stupid,” he said, “but don't be embarrassed, and give it a try.” No one did.

Kyouto School

Full disclosure: I did not talk about the Kyouto School in my original presentation and took most of the information in this next section from Wikipedia, although I had heard of it before, it just completely slipped my mind until I rediscovered it recently while researching something unrelated to this project.

I thought it was interesting for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it originated in the 20^th Century, balancing out the ancient slant present in the rest of the post. I'm not a huge fan of 20^th Century philosophy – it has, what? John Rawls? Ayn Rand? Vandanna Shiva, if you can call that philosophy? A couple of French guys, Camus I guess, and (that guy Bruce translated). And a handful of Germans, of course, but Germans are just extremely dominant in philosophy in general, owing, perhaps, to their having the best educational system in the world in the 19^th Century.

Fittingly, the Kyouto School is heavily influenced by the German tradition, particularly their own German contemporaries. This is pretty natural, though – once you hit the 19^th Century or so, the Germans become pretty heavy hitters in philosophy. In fact, my teacher actually went to Germany to study philosophy – in German. (And some of my friends told me not to worry because I could speak German if I wanted to, even though I don't speak German, but do speak Japanese, and they all should have known that, particularly as they were explaining all of this in Japanese and we'd never spoken anything else to each other before then either, but that's another story.)

The other reason I thought them particularly relevant is that the Wikipedia article contained a couple of quotations specifically on the relationship between Japanese philosophy and religion, which, as I've intimated elsewhere, is something I've grappled with myself in trying to understand the topic. I'd feel a little chintzy directly quoting something I'd heard about before but never properly researched, so I'll just recommend you follow the link if you're interested, which, if you've read this far, you probably are. Pay special attention to Nishida, who founded the tradition, and explored the concepts of 無 mu, “nothingness,” and 場所論 bashoronn, “the logic of place.”

The Ten Bulls

Finally, we've come to the main thing I wanted to talk about, and the focus of my presentation at the conference: The Ten Bulls! I'm actually not sure I like the translation, because there's ten images, but only one bull, and he doesn't even appear in all ten panels. The Japanese is 十牛図 juugyuuzu, more like “ten bull pictures,” but anyway, it's an allegory of the search for knowledge, the truth, inner peace and understanding, something along those lines. It actually originates from the Chinese equivalent of Zen Buddhism, but is studied enough in Japan that I'm willing to consider it Japanese philosophy as well. So we're going to go through, step by step, and see what we can figure out.

#1, the boy – or man or whatever he is – is alone in the forest, searching. But he has no idea where to go, or what to do, so he wanders aimlessly, lost.

#2, he comes upon some footprints – a path to follow. He hasn't found what he's looking for just yet, but now he's moving in the right direction. This could be in the influence of Buddha, or a Bodhisattva, trying to help us out. It actually reminds me of that little place near the front of Kiyomizudera, where you descend into a pitch-black basement, and have to follow a railing so you don't crash into anything, and the railing is supposed to represent Buddha's guidance.

#3, he spies the bull's back legs and hindquarters. The bull seems to represent “wisdom,” or whatever you want to call it. But he hasn't caught sight of the important part of it yet – just the tip of it, the ancillary, irrelevant parts.

#4, he manages to actually catch the bull. But it doesn't immediately relax under his grip, it struggles for control. This is significant – at times, the things we most want seem to actively reject us.

#5, the boy has gotten to a point where he can take the bull around on a lead. He no longer needs to exert quite so much discipline to get it to do what he wants.

#6, now he's attained REAL mastery! He's riding on the bull's back, he's playing the flute while he does it, he barely even needs to pay attention to what he's doing. He rides it all the way home.

#7, sitting at home now, alone. The boy seems to have aged, matured. More importantly, the bull is gone – the target was an illusion. He doesn't need it anymore.

#8, this one sometimes moves around, but I'm going by the most common order. My philosophy teacher, in Kyouto, said that this was the most most important image of all. When he explained it to the class he said, “As you can see, this one is blank. Why do you suppose that is? There must be some meaning hidden in that. …Think about it, it's going to be on the final exam,” and then he moved on, without any further explanation whatsoever.

As far as I can tell – through reading various secondary sources – this panel is meant to imply a sort of transcendence. The boy has moved beyond the trivialities with which he was so concerned until now. Another interpretation is peace and tranquility, as the mind has been allowed to fade to white. Personally, I am reminded of Wittgenstein (fucking Wittgenstein), who believed that words, by themselves, were insufficient for understanding ideas. They could cajole you into understanding, drive you down the right avenues of thought, but they could not, by themselves, transmit knowledge. So you could use them as a sort of crutch, a ladder, but one which, as he said, you would then have to “throw away after you have climbed up,” because they're just tools, not the object of the exercise themselves.

#9, both boy and bull are still gone, nothing but the sound of cicadas chirping. Again, tranquility perhaps? Or signaling that he is now attending to more important matters?

#10, the boy has become a sage or Bodhisattva, and is now using what he has learned in his experiences to educate others.

Obviously, the intent behind this series is very Buddhist. That would make it of very limited interest, but it doesn't have to be that way – actually, you can take this and apply it to almost anything you want to learn! Hell, I could use my own experience learning Japanese as an example.

1. I knew that I wanted to “learn Japanese,” but I certainly had no idea where to start, or how to go about it.
2. Fortunately, I had many excellent teachers to show me the way. They provided learning outcomes as well as relevant materials, helped me with difficult concepts, etc.
3. Naturally, I started simple. Everything written out in roumaji and exceedingly simple. I was not, at this point, actually communicating in Japanese in any meaningful way, but it was a start.
4. Try as I might, I couldn't actually get to a point where I could use Japanese fluidly or for any length of time. Frustrated, I actually considered giving up a couple of times.
5. Once I'd mastered the basics, I started to show measurable improvement. Further progress became a little easier. Eventually, I even started having bursts where I could use Japanese without first translating in my head (without even noticing when it happened until later).
6. Finally I actually came to be able to use it with some degree of fluency, to make it do the tricks I demanded of it. (In the analogy I would now be “done learning,” though in reality of course you are never done learning a language.)
7. The goal was never to make it all the way through the textbook, or to get a certain score on a test; the goal was to learn Japanese. I don't need those things so much anymore, so I abandon them. (Though if I ever find another textbook that works for my current level, I'm obviously not going to pass it up.)
8. While I still actively strive to improve my Japanese, I've gotten to the point now where I can just use it.
9. Cicadas. I admit I don't really get how this one works.
10. Nowadays, I am capable not only of teaching Japanese to others if I wanted to, but of helping them through the same steps and struggles that I have already overcome.

See that? Ok, it's certainly not perfect, but for the most part it works. Philosophy isn't just this academic, impractical discipline; if it were I'd never have become wrapped up in it. It honestly doesn't provide any answers, either, because for every assertion there's a million objections, and nine different philosophers will give you nine contradictory proposals. But the fun parts of philosophy are finding applications for it in your everyday life. Apply the categorical imperative to your coworker's bad behaviour. Do a Marxist analysis of the other tabs you have open right now. See if you can prove your own existence. That sort of stuff.

As long as Japanese philosophy gives me things to think about, I'll keep it in my mental notebook.