Consequences

So One Manga is down. The online reader has been disabled. The site’s still there, still has plenty of features, but no one’s going to be reading any manga there for the foreseeable future. Of course, this happened over a week ago, but I didn’t have Internet access for most of the last week, so it was kinda hard to comment.

Honestly, I don’t expect my life to change much. I mean, I didn’t use One Manga. And it’s not like every manga reading site is down; Manga Fox is still functioning, last I checked. But the only thing I read there is Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, and I’ll be in Japan soon enough buying the actual manga myself. So yeah.

I’ll be honest: it’s hard for me to muster up any regret over this one. Or should I say, it’s a little bit difficult to repress my sense of “had it coming”. Let’s be honest with ourselves: what One Manga was doing was, in all probability, illegal. And the only thing stopping me from saying that’s beyond any doubt is because I am not familiar with the relevant laws in the necessary detail. But I would be very surprised if it was permissible, under either Japanese or American copyright laws, to read things like Naruto and One Piece without legally paying for them.

Really, though, the legalities don’t matter as much as you’d think. Certainly, they didn’t stop uncountable masses of manga fans from using sites like One Manga. And I am perfectly fine with that. I’ve read manga online myself; I did so just before writing this. (Caught up on the aforementioned Nanoha manga.) I do not care what decisions people make in situations where those decisions do not affect me.

What I do have a problem with are people that, willfully or not, delude themselves as to the nature of those decisions. Most people don’t think about it, I’d bet. Certainly I don’t spend every minute of reading Nanoha thinking “wow, this is illegal and I shouldn’t be doing it.” But neither do I tell myself “it would be an injustice if I couldn’t do this.” I have made my decision, and I will not lie to myself about the nature of that decision.

And I think it’s almost more important to recognize that every decision carries its consequences. Even the decisions that can be recognized as “justified”, whatever that means. And sometimes those consequences deserve to be questioned or challenged. But they can never be avoided or tossed aside.

To use a somewhat extreme example, if someone chooses to kill another over a minor disagreement, in some places they can be killed by the government in return. Some people question whether the death penalty is in fact justified or not... but for the moment, it continues to exist. And anyone who chooses to commit the crime of murder, in a place where the death penalty exists, should be prepared for the relevant consequences, including the death penalty.

Of course, I seriously doubt that most criminals actually have considered that factor beforehand. But the point remains. I do not care what decisions people make... but I can have little respect for people that make those decisions without being willing to accept the attendant consequences of their actions.

The people that set up and run One Manga made a conscious choice to do so. They made that choice with full knowledge, or at least full access to knowledge, of the relevant laws and controls governing the use of material like the manga that they posted to the Internet. And now, the consequences of that choice have taken effect. Frankly, if I were one of them, I’d be glad that they were no more severe than “cease and desist.”

Order, Control, and Gaming

Control. There are those people that like to have it, over themselves and the environment around them. There are others who could care less. This is one of the ways to look at the old Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 alignments of Lawful and Chaotic. One values order and control, the other sees them as unnecessary or even a hindrance.

And, in the story of .hack//Legend of the Twilight, it’s pretty obvious where the system administrators of the biggest MMO ever created fall. To quote, “What cannot be controlled must be deleted.” To be fair, it’s on some level an opinion shared by every single game designer and developer ever to make or run a game. Even the most basic games in real life have rules. Have a winner and a loser, and a set of regulations governing what can and cannot be done in the game.

Order and control are thus very important to games of any kind. It is the knowledge that the rules will be enforced that prevents a game from disintegrating. Who would play World of Warcraft if a high-level monster could just teleport into the low-level zones and wreak havoc, killing off all the low-level players that can’t fight back? It is the order present in the game world that allows it to function. That reassures players that low-level monsters are here, and higher-level ones won’t be found there.

And when that order, when that control, breaks down, it must be dealt with. If a player starts cheating to gain an advantage, they need to be removed; if a bug comes into the system, it needs to be fixed. This is a philosophy shared by both the administrators of “The World” in .hack// and the admins of World of Warcraft or any other MMO.

So then, it is clear that a Lawful alignment preserves the game and allows it to function freely and evenly for all players. But then, aren’t there some things that can’t or even shouldn’t be controlled? Surely it’s ridiculous to assume that everything can be brought under strict order, and even more so to think that that’s a good thing. Such is the Chaotic argument.

In today’s games, the systems and worlds are tightly controlled. There’s really not much chance of anything too odd happening. But in .hack//Legend of the Twilight, “The World” is a massive MMO, with far too many details to easily monitor… far too many details to keep control of. And maybe in a world like that one, it’s better to leave some things be.

An element that cannot be controlled is not automatically evil or unbalancing. It can be, but the default position need not be the above quote. Maybe it’s better to let the world change. If something isn’t harmful or dangerous, then why does a lack of control need to mean destruction?

It’s not just the massive world of .hack// that can’t be entirely controlled. In fact, there are elements of chaos in any game, even in our own tightly regulated games. There will be a lack of balance in any system we create. We aren’t good enough to create a perfectly balanced, perfectly fair game world; what’s more, we never will be. So we might as well recognize that some things need not be controlled.

The dichotomy, the divisions between Lawful and Chaotic opinions, can be seen in modern games. In the MMO EVE Online, there are rules to protect the newer players. Certain systems are under the protection of the law, and any act of aggression in those systems will merit a response from the police forces of the world. What’s more, surviving their attack is considered an exploit by the game’s designers. Again, we see that tight control over what can and cannot be done.

But. Unlike in some games, there are no restrictions on who can be attacked; many games with a Player vs. Player element give new players immunity to this warfare as protection. Nothing of the sort exists in EVE, only the police forces that, like in the real world, can’t respond immediately to a threat. And so, chaos works its way back in. EVE players can always be attacked, anywhere and at any time. There will be consequences for the attacker, but that may not save the victim any grief.

And in the systems where the law has no authority? That’s where the players come in. There are several major player-created alliances in EVE, and they’ve managed to fill in the hole that the designers left behind. The systems that the designers left chaotic and uncontrolled? The players have sovereignty over them now, and they can do whatever they like there.

The designers of EVE could have created a police state. They could have created a sprawling empire of powerful police forces that control every known system, lockouts on targeting systems that prevent the targeting of newer or weaker players, and a regimented system of growth and development that would have guided a player up the ranks. They could have controlled everything in sight, and removed any trace of chaos from the game.

But they would have destroyed the fun of the game in the process. By backing off, by creating a system that combines law and chaos, they created an incredibly compelling system. They control what needs to be controlled, to allow players some sense of security, and they leave the rest chaotic.

There’s a message in there somewhere. Control and order are important, to be sure. Without them, no one could live without being hindered by the random whims of others. And order is far more often than not designed for a good purpose. But also, not everything can be controlled. And sometimes, one needs to just let things run unchecked. At times, life needs to be kept on track through order and control. And at other times, life needs to be allowed to run free in a celebration of chaos.

Who Wants to Be a Hero?

Spoilers from Mega Man Star Force 2, In the Starlight and Live Free or Die Hard.

Don’t we all. I can barely begin to count the times when my imagination has put me in the forefront of whatever story I read last. Or when I’ve just made up new stories with myself as the protagonist. If my imagination was reality, I would have found myself in every fantasy world I’ve ever known at least once.

Certainly, in video games, anime, comics, and movies, it’s common enough for apparently random people to end up being the hero that saves the world. In Mega Man Star Force, Geo Stelar meets an alien being and becomes the newest incarnation of Mega Man as a result. Of course, only the demands of the plot direct when and where that alien arrived, making the choice in the game world itself somewhat random. Magic Knight Rayearth is another good example, where the three people that were summoned from Tokyo could just as easily have been anyone else as far as the summoning spell cared.

The storyline of In the Starlight is another example. Eventually, the links that the protagonist has to the rest of the story are shown to be far more complicated, but before that point, said protagonist actually muses on many of the same things that I’m going to, about having a normal life as opposed to having strange things happening to her. Finally, in the fourth Die Hard movie, the computer hacker (who I will always remember as the guy from the Mac commercials) wonders how and why McClane does what he does.

Who doesn’t wonder what they would do if they were the ones forced into an unknown situation, and who doesn’t think that they’d do better than the protagonists of those events? And yet, I find myself wondering these days if that would really be as fun as I used to think it would be. Who can really tell how much fun that would be? I’ve never actually been in any kind of situation that resembles one from a game, never had to prove whether I could stay calm or react quickly to an immediate problem.

Geo, in Mega Man Star Force 2, gains a lot more publicity and recognition. Although, most of that is recognition for Mega Man, not Geo, he still doesn’t like it. That was a little hard to understand at first. I know that when I do something right or reach some kind of goal, I’d rather have people know about it. I was irritated when I learned that the principal would announce the valedictorian and salutatorian of my high school class at graduation practice because I knew that I was the salutatorian, and no one outside school staff and students would be at that practice.

For Geo, though, it wasn’t a matter of people recognizing his actions. He didn’t like being called a hero because of the expectations that came with that title. The few people that knew who Mega Man really was kept turning to him when a crisis broke out, and he was afraid that he would fail to live up to their expectations. I can fully understand that; after all, everyone saw me as a genius during high school. Which can be a good thing, but gets very annoying when I hear for the third time, “You got a C? You???” Yes. I’m a human being, is this some huge surprise?

Being a hero is a lot harder than it may seem. For a very long time, I fantasized about how I would react if I found myself in any number of the fantasy worlds I’ve seen, as I already mentioned. And in all of those imagined events, I adapted to the new circumstances rapidly and acted with all the intelligence and efficiency I could muster. You would think, though, that the heroines of Magic Knight Rayearth would be able to do the same. Fuu had played video games before, after all. Yet they had no small amount of difficulty adapting to their new circumstances.

The difference, I think, lies in the setting. All of my fantasies have been with worlds I’m well familiar with. From the time I imagined myself also getting thrown into Cephiro and meeting the aforementioned magic knights, to all of the times that I’ve intervened at a key part of some other story, I’ve already been well familiar with the world and the rules. For Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, they found themselves in an unfamiliar setting, and a situation that they knew nothing about. Who can say if they’d be able to retain their poise when faced with a completely unknown situation?

I worry that there are people in this world who are absolutely certain that they would make a good hero. I have no doubt that there are people that yet dream of them protecting others from some danger, or intervening to save the world. But those kinds of dreams aren’t how one becomes a hero. I can tell myself that I would intervene if someone’s life was threatened, even at the risk of my own, but I can never be certain unless I am actually tested in that regard. And because of that, I hope that I never will be certain.

Heroes aren’t created by people going out and looking for trouble. Geo Stelar, despite the power that he had access to, didn’t wake up every morning wondering what problems he’d have to solve that day. He was reluctant to act even when a problem threatened him personally. Yet he always did something. McClane in the fourth Die Hard movie didn’t really want to be a hero. As he put it, “Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so [I'm] doing it. That's what makes you that guy.”

Running around bragging about what you would do if someone broke into your house doesn’t make you a hero, and it wouldn’t even if you did manage to repel an intruder. Humility is a trait that goes unrecognized far too often, and without it, it’s hard to gain respect as a hero. Hoping to prove yourself as heroic means that you probably don’t have the right mindset to be a hero; as I see it, some of the greatest heroes are the ones that hope they never have to act, but do so anyway when they must.

The Growth of High Technology:Part I: The Promise of Utopia?

I felt the need to split this into two parts as it continued to grow steadily. Not that I have a problem with too much to write, but I just can’t drown everyone in text. And I apologize for the delay in updating; AP tests coinciding with final exams and a major chorus concert made the last week sheer hell. On a happier note, it was literally the last week; of high school if nothing else.

I suspect that the spoiler warning will become standard issue. For this one, I’ll be referring to the video game BioShock and a manga called Aqua.

Hopefully, we’re all familiar with the growing development of technology. It’s visible everywhere: computers get faster almost every week, cars powered by electricity or solar power are announced, and many other examples. And almost without exception, we herald these changes and improvements as better. We’ve grown to the point where we consider new technology to be a good thing.

But is it a good thing in and of itself? Is improvement simply to make a more powerful computer a good thing? And the million-dollar question: do we apply the idea that everything is a system to improve upon to our own bodies?

For me, the answer is a resounding no to all. And I can gladly call upon many, many examples from the fantasy worlds that I enjoy to defend that point.

The most obvious example from the games that I know comes from BioShock. As a quick caveat, I have not actually played the game; my knowledge of the game comes secondhand from sources such as the Plot Summary article on GameFAQs. (For those interested in seeing that themselves, go to GameFAQs through the link I have, search for BioShock, and click on FAQs.) And even then, it’s not really the game play or what the protagonist does that really concerns this topic. It’s the back story, the events that set the stage for the game, that provide a chilling example of the faults of high technology.

Admittedly, that quick comment doesn’t do the many factors in the fall of Rapture any justice. For those unfamiliar with the story, a man named Andrew Ryan built an underwater city called Rapture to break from the ideals of the world. He wanted a purely capitalist society where no one would be obligated to share what they had, as people in the U.S. and the Soviet Union had to. The city quickly became a haven for what Ryan felt were the best examples of mankind, and indeed, their technology progressed much faster than the rest of the world’s.

That didn’t exactly save them, however. When a new substance was commercialized by a man named Frank Fontaine, Rapture slowly descended into war. This substance, called Adam, had the power to change the human body in unimaginable ways. And yet, as this new technology granted Fontaine ever more power and influence, it also led to Ryan’s strong desire to eliminate him. The resulting civil war destroyed the city as the utopia that Ryan intended it to be.

The point behind all the back story is that the technology of Rapture didn’t help improve the lives of its citizens. While it certainly wasn’t the only factor involved, it also was a contributor. I see the story of Rapture as a warning: the warning that an ever-increasing march toward “better” technology isn’t certainly going to improve the lives of people.

As with anything, the real determinant of what our lives are like won’t be directly connected to how advanced our technology is. As human beings throughout history have found, the enjoyment that one gets out of life is connected to what you do with that life.

Simply making our lives more convenient isn’t going to ensure that we’re happier. As Akari Mizunashi put it in the first volume of Aqua, “All the cities are progressing with beautification and simplification. It’s very neat and tidy. And shopping, and work—unlike here, you can do everything from home. It’s very convenient. But… I feel like something is missing in those neat, tidy, convenient cities.” That, I think, exemplifies this reason against a continued improvement of technology. Some things can’t be quantified in science, and those are exactly the things that would be missing.

How do you measure the joy that one gets from a job well done? The pride when one is praised by a parent? Or the determination to complete a task? These are all things that the future would ask us to sacrifice, if the future holds a continued race to higher and higher levels of power.

Akari left those neat, tidy, convenient cities to come to a different world. She came to do a job that in the advanced world would be a computer’s job, as a gondolier and tour guide in a city much like Venice. Yet that is what she wanted to do, and what her attention was devoted towards from the day she left that advanced world. She sought that determination, that pride and joy in her life. In a world of the highest possible technology, she wouldn’t find those things, and neither would anyone else.

Simply upgrading ourselves so that we can run faster, breathe underwater, or even fire lightning bolts from our hands isn’t a ticket to bliss. I am a runner; I enjoy track and cross-country. But I can’t say that I’d be considerably happier if I could improve my time with genetic modification or nanotechnology. Either would improve my fairly mediocre 11:04 two-mile race, yes. But I take pride in what I do. I work to improve my capability as a runner, and I find joy in doing so.

That last race, when I set that 11:04, was one of the best races I’ve ever been in. I was constantly changing positions with two other runners, with first place in that heat as the prize. It was a matter of sheer determination at the end there. I fell behind the leader by four seconds at the end, and only barely held second place against the other runner. That race required all of my skill and determination, for sure.

And had I been “improved” to be able to run 10:34 rather than 11:04, then one of two things would have happened. Either I would have won because the others were not enhanced, or they also would have been enhanced and nothing would have changed. What would my victory have proven, then? That I had a better geneticist than the other two? Certainly, not that I was a better athlete or runner than they were. When I win, or when I set a personal best time, I take the joy from the fact that my work paid off, not from the victory or the personal record itself.

So, what does this say about the growth of high technology? That it is nowhere near an assured utopia for all. Rapture tried to create that; they failed spectacularly in a manner that assured death for all involved. Akari found herself in the growth of such a “utopia,” and found it to be unsatisfying. Why then must we continue to strive for such a false hope, when we already have the tools to create happy, satisfied lives?

Of course, I have no doubt that some question our ability to create happy lives. That, however, is a subject I’ll address with my next major post.