On Wistfulness: Final Fantasy VI for iOS

Final Fantasy VI has just arrived on the iOS App Store, and I'm thrilled. There's been a lot of hubbub over the graphical changes, and, playing it on my 5th generation iPod touch, I can see a few problems already–namely that the sprite colors have too much low-contrast pastel, the “high-res” graphics are still pixelly on retina screens that were introduced four and a half years ago with the barely-supported iPhone 4, and, most egregious, the graphics seem noticeably stretched on my wider 4-inch screen from what I've seen in screenshots (especially when the background graphics don't seem stretched at all). The last problem will probably be fixed in a coming release, my other two observations just the price of expediency and taste.

There's been a lot of complaining that the graphics are upscaled at all, but really, that doesn't bother me. I'd have loved to see retina-level graphics based on the original character art, but I know that the sprites I'm used to were only based on the original art, not downscaled from them. That's not how pixel art works. I've been playing a lot of Cave Story+ lately, and I feel a similar vibe: the new graphics are higher-resolution from the original, but still pixelly enough to try to satisfy “old school” purists. Of course, those people can never be satisfied, but I'm not complaining. The original release had bugs and the PS and GBA rereleases had bugs, and our notion of perfect art is clouded with nostalgia, that most dangerous of drugs.

But they didn't mess with the music. They didn't mess with the music. Back in 1997 or 1998 I imported the soundtrack from Japan. I love it. It remains one of the best pieces of game music to this day because it is both beautiful and appropriate to the world. Most video-game music is one or the other. I love Keiichi Suzuki)'s Earthbound soundtrack too, but I don't know if I'd use the word “beautiful” to describe it. Yoshitaka Amano's art is the star of the show, but Nobuo Uematsu's score is its soul.

At the heart of Final Fantasy VI is the opera scene. It's poignant, but it's really great because the entire game is an opera. There is a large cast of characters, each with their own motivation. Strong characters with strong personalities and strong motivations go throughout. Much has been written that Kefka, the main villain, acts more like a protagonist than many of the playable characters. Even characters without personalities have backgrounds (Gogo), and characters without backgrounds have personalities (Mog). The stories are epic, not in that bland, overdone “we have to save the world” variety, but “we have to save each other.” The story is epic not in the way that Final Fantasy, say, is epic, but in the way that the Ring Cycle is epic, the way that the Iliad and Odyssey and Aeneid are epic. Even the townspeople, easy to underrepresent as cardboard cutouts, change from moment to moment as the world changes politically, ecologically, and geographically around them. The music is operatic from the notes of the chorale prelude and opening background scene. Then a windy silence, as we overlook a hill, then the opening credits, with a fuller overture of the main theme, Terra's personal theme, and the overworld theme. You can't skip past this section or speed through it, ostensibly so you can appreciate the nice people who made the game, but also so you must soak up every bit of the score as the three soldiers trek slowly through the blizzard. The blizzard is the game.

The main emotion of Final Fantasy VI is wistfulness, as seen in its perfect score, but also in its story. The world is destroyed. Evil is defeated, but lives are still changed, in many cases ruined. People gain redemption and struggle for hope, but it is a ruined world they struggle in, and the memory of a world forever lost is what gives them hope for the future. The world is never remade, just improved. The cataclysm is never undone, merely mitigated. When characters die, we feel for them, but others fight on, make lives for themselves, and care for the next generations.

I can tell why so many people complain about the sprites. The game is amazing, and playing through it the first time changed how its players saw the genre and the medium. The wistfulness that the game employs is close to nostalgia, but what we once felt is gone. Those of us that played it as teenagers or young adults back on the SNES were changed by it. Those that first played on the PlayStation or GameBoy Advance or in emulation feel a pull back to that earlier time, but those of us who played it back in the mid 90s feel something greater–its original North American release was 20 years ago this year, and we are all different people now, with jobs and spouses and kids. We might not be as idealistic as we were in our teens, and the world has changed around us. Yet, transported back to that time, we shouldn't long for those romantic days gone by, but embrace the new world we live in. The World of Balance is a memory, but not all hope is lost.

My Week with Green Dot

This week I was in in Martin doing Green Dot training. Honestly, I wasn't really looking forward to it. I'm away from my wife and kids and it's a week out of my summer. I know that Green Dot's mission to prevent personal violence is a good one, but what could I really do?

It's crazy how I played directly into their hands.

Before coming, it seemed like a program. I don't really like programs. Programs are zombies: thoughtless, moving only under momentum, slowly, and certainly dangerous in their unfeeling mass. Unfortunately, people act in groups, and if we can emphasize the personal relationships we all have, we can help.

Green Dot focuses on proactive things, not reactive--healing the wounded is good, but preventing wounds is better. Along those lines, Green Dot hinges on two things. First, it doesn't ask us to identify as a potential victim in need of defense or a potential aggressor in need of restraint, but a bystander who needs to act. It's easier to identify as a bystander than either of the other groups, so it's easier to prepare to act before an emergent situation. Next, Green Dot emphasized the dilemma of a bystander's action/inaction, excluding any middle neutral path. We don't all do the best, but, as Yoda says, we do or do not, although in this case trying is rounded up, not down.

It's a program, yeah. It has a brand--it even has a logo, the eponymous Green Dot. But it focuses on on action more than "activism"; us ourselves rather than "community." I was afraid of a program that focused on keeping women from getting hurt and keeping men from doing horrible things. I discovered a conversation about how bad things happen to all sorts of people, but primarily how all sorts of people can help each other stay safe--most directly, it's about how we protect other people.
We good people outnumber the bad people, and the only way to stop bad actions is to replace them with good actions--interpersonal violence hurts too many people, so we the majority needs to act in each other's lives, to help each other out, even to look out for chances to help.

The Gods of Our Amorites

Some hold that the Reformation held within it the germ of modern atheism, as the emphasis on personal choice for God also must allow for the personal choice against God. On a long view, however, that must have been the point from the beginning. God desires that nobody would fall, but desire implies a lack of domination, an acceptance of the possibility or even probability of rejection. In all, we know that the straight path is narrow and the wayward path is wide.

This is what Joshua told the people of Israel. We concentrate on the "choose this day who you will serve," but there's more there. Joshua emphasized choice in serving God, but in particular he was speaking to those who did not want to serve God, those who in his words found serving God "evil" in [their] eyes." Joshua emphasized his own choice of God, but confronted the rebellious, disgruntled Israelites with a dilemma: either serve their fathers' God, or serve the Amorites' God. There are only two paths, after all, and either we must choose to submit to the God who loves us, or submit to the gods of those who hate us and want us dead.

For our Amorites, whether philosophically atheist or simply uncaring, want not to glorify us but to glorify themselves. They don't want to save us eternally, but to prolong the suffering of this world under the guise of "preserving life." Our Amorites praise the man as opposed to the God who has brought us this far. Our Amorites praise the seemingly immortal god Mammon, who shall be destroyed with his gold in the fires that end the world, as our God and his faithful look on, sad for the great loss but safe eternally. Our Amorites worship science but not the Creator of nature, asking questions of the universe that provoke more questions, not seeking solace in the God who satisfies fully in the waters that satiate all thirst.

Our God made this world for us, and brought us into it, but we are here because of him and the service he asks of us. While in this world, it tries to distract, distort, taint, and corrupt, and destroy us. The gods of the Amorites demand death and blood unending, while our God desires clean hearts and loving service. The King of all that is came to us as a pauper, serving us to his own death, and begs us to let him in to our hearts, knowing that he has made the rock he cannot lift: he has given us the keys to our own hearts.

A beast, a monster, a demon might compel us to be his slaves. Our God asks us quietly, in hopeful patience, and the only time limit is our own.

Busyness as Usual

At the beginning of the semester I have everything to do. And right now, a week in, is when it hits me: until December, I won't not be busy. Every second of every day, I've got something to do—something I could be doing. As I write this, I could be grading essays or working on my conference paper or finishing my gradebook or preparing for next week's classes or smoothing out Blackboard.

I'm wasting my time writing all this.

But no, I'm not. It's not because it's almost 2 am and past time when I can competently grade. It's not because this is a form of mental work and mental work is good. It's not so I can build up a body of blog posts or even for me to look back on when I'm feeling the squeeze at the first of next semester or next year.

I'm doing this because I want to, because I find it rewarding. Writing down my thoughts makes me feel good, right now, and feeling good, though it is a tautology, *makes me feel good*.

I'm not getting behind every second I sleep instead of grade. I'm not getting behind every time I watch an episode of Doctor Who instead of grade. I'll get my work done, but what makes me good at my job—if I am—is that I am human, and being human means caring about stuff, doing things because they make me feel good.

It also means not watching *another* episode of Doctor Who, or fussing with my gradebook instead of grading essays, let alone checking Twitter again. Tomorrow, I need to grade a bunch of essays. And really, I'll enjoy it, and feel better with it done than I did before. And then I'll work some more.

But right now, I wanted this time to write.

The Minority

We know, because Jesus says so, that the only path to Heaven is a narrow one. This can only mean that the minority of humans will be in Heaven, and that the minority of humans at any given time will be faithful—do we expect that this minority is 49%, or much, much less?

In our society, in our world, majority rules. The government is run on elections more than inheritance or appointment, and the popular mob dominates culture, and so we faithful must always expect that the government will be outside us. Some governments value protecting minorities, but that's never something we or any other minority can depend on or put our trust in. We are aliens in a foreign land, our king ever-present but seemingly distant.

We are the minority in a sinful world; by very nature of a narrow path this is so. Luke 6 holds us to bless those who hold themselves as our enemies, not to gain power over them, to force them to obey in body but not in spirit, but rather to allow them to boss us around and dominate us, and to serve them lovingly. Our subservience is our mission technique; our oppressors are our mission field.

If we seek to be the majority instead of seeking to minoritize its members, we seek the trappings of this world and their impermanence. If we seek thrones rather than to serve at God's throne, we seek revolution and strife, not the peace of service—service as loved sons and daughters. We are salt and light, and salt and light are very small things, things that project their flavor, their radiance, far outward. That is our mission, our goal, our path in this lost world.

Adventures and Quests

One of the things that regularly irks me is the use of the word “adventure” in general culture, and roleplaying culture in particular. Yes, as a descriptivist, I admit that definitions change and that they’re ad hoc at best: if people at large use a word to mean X when I alone think it means Y, I’m wrong and they’re right, because words are not eternal, but only for shared meaning. Still. The original idea for adventure was caught up in the idea of randomness: it’s from the French  aventure, or “at random” or “by chance.” A knight on the Platonic ideal of an adventure mounts his horse and goads him on without touching the reins. Whatever happens, happens, and he surrenders control over the situation. When a person sets off on an adventure, he’s saying from the outset, “I have no idea what’s going to happen. In fact, I’m planning to make sure.”

By stark contrast, questing has a purpose. The most famous quest literature affords us, the quest for the Grail, has a set beginning, middle, and end. While an adventure is a serial story, a quest has the beginnings of something greater: a plot.

Both have their advantages, but again, I want to turn my attention to words and definitions, because I believe that this differentiation between adventure and quest—the de-synonymization—doesn’t limit us, but instead opens up our expression. Did you have a plan that turned out differently? That quest became an adventure. Did you just do whatever came into your head, only later realizing that it all linked together and set up a conclusion, not just an end? That adventure turned into a quest.

Through this terminology, we can even describe many smaller quests as part of a larger adventure through life, or many episodic adventures as part of a greater destined quest. When a person organizes a game (such as my friend Ian has been theorizing about), differentiating between the two is helpful. After all, if you want to set off into the unknown, or if you want to pursue a set goal, isn't it nice that we have specific words to mean each concept?

On Stealing Ideas

I like art and literature, and therefore I also like remixes and adaptation. I've been hearing a lot of Picasso's T.S. Eliot's "good artists borrow, great artists steal" maxim. Also, I've been teaching Milton, who in Paradise Lost not only adapted Genesis but also blatantly stole from Ariosto.

The problem with that quote is that "borrow" seems good, and "steal" seems bad. The quote makes it sound as if the True Geniuses of Mankind are all jerks, and that only by being jerks can they exert their Geniusness.

That's missing the point entirely. Stealing ideas is better than borrowing ideas. If I borrow a book, I have to give it back. If I steal a book, it's mine. However, like Cory Doctorow on "buying" licenses to DRM'd digital works vs stealing those digital works—the one you steal will never get arbitrarily deleted if the DRM company goes bankrupt—borrowing and stealing ideas is different. Contrary to public opinion, there is no shortage on ideas. There is no idea deficit. Ideas come out of the ether, they sublime from books and movies and human interactions. They just pop in your head and you can't control them. That's ideas for you. If I use your idea, you aren't suddenly without it any more. No, now we both have it. Ideas are not zero-sum.

So how do "borrow" and "steal" even apply? OK, here we go. If I "borrow" an idea, just like when I borrow a book, I know in every waking moment that it's not mine. It's not a part of me, and I'll be very careful around it because I see it chained to someone else. Whenever I talk about that idea, I'll reference someone else not simply to preserve attribution and good faith and all that, but because I'm uneasy around that idea. It's not mine, in the same way that to me a given funny story will never be mine, but always my father's. If I tell my daughter, though, she'll assume it's mine unless I tell her where it came from. I do that now, with my students. I tell them where I get a lot of stuff, because I'm uncomfortable claiming any (fleeting, transitory, meaningless) honor of "I came up with that."

When I get beyond that, if I get beyond that—when I realize that ideas and apothegms and proverbs and metaphors are just floating around, I can get it and use it. That's not your book, that's my book—I borrowed it years ago, but I've possessed it ten times as long as you did, and it has my notes in it and it's been a major part of my life, not yours. Those creases in the spine are mine, not yours. If you want it back, my duty is not to return it but to buy you another copy.

This works not only horizontally across friendship, but vertically, across generations. I have some books that are mine that used to be my dad's. They're mine in a way they never were his. He gave me ideas that live in my head, ideas that he tossed off one day that will stick with me forever. In a sense, I've stolen myself from him. I was his son, and now I'm my own man. In a non-zero-sum world, relationships don't change, information doesn't abandon its source—it just finds a new place. If I steal it, I make that place a home.