qui tacet consentire videtur

Tell me, tell me, t-t-t-t-t-t-tell me/ 나를 사랑한다고 날 기다려왔다고

I got addicted to the Wonder Girls after hearing ‘tell me’ on Lobbyist. I wish I could afford the $150 tickets to see the Wonder Girls on Friday. I can’t remember the last time I paid so much for entertainment, but I think it would be worth the money to see all the people in the audience who memorized the dance steps. Admittedly I memorized them too (it works for the boy version), though I’m nowhere as good as these guys rofl or even these guys (or these guys that James told me about). I wish my army days had been like that.

Para Para disParity

After watching Pirates at yet another YR gathering, we passed by an arcade and so began the Para Para challenge between JK and myself, sponsored by WT. As first-time players we would challenge each other on the same song. Unfortunately I was completely defeated by his parapara skills, honed by years of salsa training. Way to represent Oxford, JK! It’s a lot harder than it looks, though Hinoi Asuka (ultimate cuteness) makes it look so easy.

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It has always struck me as somewhat incongruent that the RPG genre of games (from the original pen & paper to the computer and console species) is commonly defined by a ’statistical’ model. Characters i.e. the role that is played are defined by ‘attributes’ like ’strength’, ‘charisma’, ‘intelligence’ within a numerically defined space. In Dungeons & Dragons, that range is from 1-25(?). Everything that a character does is termed ‘experience’, which itself is defined in numerical terms - defeating monster A gives one B experience points. Upon accumulating C number of experience points, character attains level D. Everything in the genre seems to be quantifiable and definable in a precise, absolute sense. Even random outcomes and chance are determined by rolls of dice, where the odds and probabilities are easy for players to see with a calculator and some basic math. Dungeons & Dragons may be set in a fantasy setting of magic and wonder - but its mechanics are clearly otherwise.

In what sense can we call these role-playing games? Can the defining characteristic of an RPG be number-crunching instead of say, playing a role? Or are the boundaries set by absolute limits what give meaning to what is essentially a creative exercise?

I recently spent some time completing Final Fantasy X, a somewhat dated game I really wanted to finish at the time it was released but had exams and such to deal with. It belongs to a particular subgenre of RPGs that is about playing a strictly defined role through a linear, pre-defined narrative. One doesn’t actually have any meaningful agency within the game, with respect to the plot. Can we still call this a role-playing game? It seems to be that FFX (and the other Final Fantasy games) are best described as interactive movies with stylised tactical and resource management components. Yet the same can be said of most so-called ‘non-linear’ RPGs… Are the only true role-playing games pen & paper? Or MMOs like World of Warcraft and Everquest?

As ever-blunt Chris notes:

Personally, I think that the Dove campaign is both right and wrong. If they’re trying to suggest that one does not need to look perfect to be attractive, then they’re absolutely correct. But if they’re trying to suggest that the flaws actually increase one’s attractiveness, then I disagree.

Of course, women don’t need all 10 features in order to look attractive (remember, you only need 70 percent in order to get an A!). But that doesn’t mean that the way to look attractive is to explicitly reject these norms. Unfortunately, the Dove ads sometimes sounded like that.

Sure, the girl with single eyelids is quite pretty. But she’s pretty in spite of, not because of, the single eyelids. The best we can say is that having double eyelids is a less important determinant of beauty than say, having a small nose or high cheekbones. But no, single eyelids are not twice as nice.

First - some of the aims of the campaign are laudable, and I would agree with them on public-choice grounds. That said, Chris is correct in his analysis that the visual aspect of the advertising operates on the substitutability of beauty. We are inclined to accept the models as ‘beautiful’ despite their flaws because they make up for it with other components of beauty - in short, beauty is multicausal and modular. Perfectly acceptable. However, this is intended to reinforce the unrelated claim of Dove’s campaign for real beauty: that the flaws of the models are actually assets and constitute ‘true’ beauty.

This is more than mere egalitarian-fetishist celebration of mediocrity. They seek to invert (not merely subvert) the dominant aesthetic paradigm and institute a new concept of what is beautiful, what is feminine, what is desirable. The disparity between the intended message of the campaign and the advertising that it operates on strikes me as intellectually dishonest. This is unsurprising, the prime mover is commercial.

Perhaps the campaign for real beauty should focus more on substitutability and equivalence, the way Bridget Jones and Kim Sam-soon work: that unattractive women can be desirable for other reasons, which might be more important.

I find this highly amusing. It’s like Zork in a Shakespearean universe. Fortunately I’ve read enough of the bard to appreciate it.

Update: Having finished the game, I can safely say that having read most of the plays it pokes fun at has marginal impact on solving the game puzzles, but makes gameplay much more enjoyable.