Book Review: We See a Different Frontier

We See a Different Frontier is an anthology of speculative fiction stories adhering to a theme of post-colonialism. It was edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, and was published in 2013 Futurefire.net Publishing.

This is an excellent anthology, one worth reading. Its stories explore the aftereffects of colonialism (in its broadest sense) from a variety of perspectives and concerns, and they generally do so quite effectively. Some of the stories here are very good, some are ok, a few didn’t resonate with me at all, but almost universally these stories take on some aspect of the theme from a unique perspective. The anthology sustains unity of theme throughout without being too uniform (or too heavy-handed, for the most part). (I should note the preface and afterword are also quite worth reading.) The end result is to create a whole that, to use a cliché, is more than the sum of its parts. Which is to say that this collections’s excellence rests not so much on the quality of the stories in it but rather on what the collection achieves in its totality.

Which is not to put down the stories themselves! “A Heap of Broken Images” by Sunny Moraine was especially worth reading; it is profound and thought-provoking. “Them Ships” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and “Remembering Turinam” by N.A. Ratnayake are also in the thought-provoking category. “A Bridge of Words” by Dinesh Rao is quite a good story, and one of the most traditionally science-fictional stories of the lot. “Dark Continents” by Lavie Tidhar is the least traditional of the stories, jumping between times and timelines, but it has in it some interesting what-ifs. I did not, as I said, like every story here, but some of that might be a matter of taste, and certainly I think the best stories more than make up for the weakest.

But whatever the artistic merits of this anthology, I think its social value is much greater. The effects of colonialism are not only worth discussing, they need to be discussed. That We See a Different Frontier explores this topic, and is so effective in doing so, is to be commended. I certainly found my thinking challenged and stretched by reading it, and sometimes, I was even uncomfortable. But I think that just demonstrates how effective this anthology truly is.

Table of Contents

(This review can also be found on Goodreads and LibraryThing.)

More on Virtual Tourism: “Haunted” by MMORPGs

A little bit more on virtual tourism, here, but this time, someone else’s words. I had wondered in my last entry how Star Wars Galaxies players had felt about that game being shut down. I said then that most of what I could find about it focused on the loss of social connection. Fortuitously, Scott Taylor, one of the bloggers for Black Gate has recently written a post on the topic.

First, his post reminds me that he has written an article on the game’s shutdown before, in 2012. He focused in large part on the amount of human effort, from both players and developers, that was put in to the game and now lost forever, but, critically, he also makes an interesting comparison with going back to the house where he grew up. Although he discusses the game’s world as art, there does seem to be an implicit sense of place he associates with the game. In fact he even says of the “world” he and other players created in Galaxies, “That world, that ‘home’ if you will, was as real as any you could imagine, and so it is for so many who play these games.”

He continues,

To the players, those that invest countless hours building a character their strange new world can be proud of, these games are something far more valuable than digital ones and zeros on a distant server in Arizona.

The act of creation, both by the artists who design the games and the players that utilize draft material to make the mundane magic, becomes a thing of beauty that has to be recognized for the untold investment it requires.

...

Still you have to wonder if, in some way, what I did in the game somehow relevant in real life? Does it truly matter in the long run? Who can ever truly say, but it is a fact that in December 2011 Star Wars Galaxies shut down for good, so anything I created there is no more. Whatever home I had is gone and there is no more visiting for me. In this case, I simply can’t go home again.

In his more recent post, he focuses more I think on the sense of loss of social connections and and the former communities of the game, but he also addresses the strictly aesthetic loss. His post does not regard the virtual reality of these places per se, though again it seems implicit in the way he speaks about them.

He concludes thusly:

In conclusion, and wrapping this back about to my original question of “what does this have to do with Art of the Genre”, well, it has to do with the perception of what art truly is, and at the very core it has always been perceived in the eye of the beholder. Video game art, even if found only on a hard drive, can also be as profound and moving as anything else in the fantasy and science fiction gaming and literature world, perhaps more so because it is art you can actually interact with. This interaction has always brought depth to me, and so I continue to think of it fondly and wish on occasion to see it one last time. Sadly, for games like Star Wars Galaxies, that art is forever gone [unless as Sarah Avery attests that future grad students will fire up old servers to study early 21st century behavior], but some images remain on wayward internet sites, like potshards of a lost civilization, and I think we should cherish them because they are as real and meaningful as anything else created by the will and imagination of the human condition.

Finally, in the comments one person mentions that an old MMORPG “haunts” them. Taylor responds, “... I like to know that there are others that feel the same and are ‘haunted’ by their experiences as I am, because indeed I do believe haunted is the perfect term for it.” Well put.

Haunted, unable to go home again, to a home that was “as real as any you could imagine” and that is “as real and meaningful as anything else created by the will and imagination of the human condition” — I think I am not the only one to experience memories of places I’ve never “been."

Virtual Tourism

I have a very good memory for places. I seem to remember the details of environments, buildings, and rooms long after I’ve been there, and usually long after whoever might have been there with me. It’s typical for me to remember a place even after I’ve forgotten the name of the location — which can be frustrating to me when I remember somewhere I’ve traveled that I found interesting but I don’t remember how to get back to it! — or even why that place was significant. I’ve found in recent years that this memory for places can sometimes spill over in to the “virtual” (if you will) realm.

One of the side-effects of living in the digital age is that the virtual can trigger in us responses that we would expect only from the material (or the “real”). This is not, of course, an effect confined to the digital age: people have been having visceral emotional reactions to fictional stories since the invention of the story. But the effect has been exacerbated and has been manifest in new ways by the rise of the digital. For me, one side effect is that there is a sort of interference with my memory of places from virtual places I have seen. (When I say “virtual” in this case, I am more concerned with environments I have seen and interacted with, not just imagined, which limits places mostly to ones from games and simulations.) People talk about being able to picture places they’ve read about as if they were actually there. I suppose I have experienced that to an extent, and perhaps my reaction to virtual places is similar. But it seems that my reaction to virtual places is stronger in me than my reaction to places I’ve seen in a film or read described in a novel.^[1] I don’t claim that virtual places are necessarily just as memorable to me as real places I’ve been — but some have been quite close for me, and are places that I remember in some cases years after I have seen them.

I think the first time I realized virtual locations could be almost as memorable as real ones was when I played Dark Forces in 1996. The level designers had a definite feel for the architectural and they had a certain flare for the expansive, but, most critically, they designed levels that seemed to exist as a place and not just a hint of a place to carry the action in a convincing way.^[2]

The first mission of the game, also used in the demo, was short and relatively simple, with a design that was concerned more with action than architecture. With the second mission things changed; it took place in a burned out rebel base now filled with stormtroopers, and was long on atmosphere. But the fourth mission (on a planet named “Fest”) was what really made me notice. It featured a small Imperial research facility located within mountainous terrain. The first part of the mission takes place outside in the mountains (which of course were merely appropriately shaped blocks of terrain with enough height to suggest mountains — “real” hills and mountains in games were still a couple years away). These “mountains” had plenty of verisimilitude with narrow and winding paths, deep chasms, and ledges; those mountain paths felt quite real. The next mission (to the “Gromas Mines”) was even more evocative. It looked like a mine — at least as I would expect one to appear in a science fiction movie — even if perhaps not all of it was layed out logically. The designers leveraged their game engine with this mission by including a reddish fog throughout the level.^[3] Both of these levels have stuck with me for many years. (Incidentally, I watched game play footage of Dark Forces in preparing this essay and saw that my memory of those levels was actually quite good.) I remember many places in games, but I remember them as settings for something that happened in the game, the way I might remember a scene in a movie; but these two levels have stuck with me in a different way, as somewhere that was a place, or at least, almost a place. You will have to take my word for the difference, but it is there for me.

Looking back, there might have been some precedent for this effect — believe it or not, I can picture some of the stretches of road in Test Drive II pretty clearly, for example — but Dark Forces stands out to me as something that made me notice this effect.

Among the places I can think of^[4], I must admit that I think the virtual places that most feel to me as if they are real are from World of Warcraft. I remember the first time I walked into Ironforge; I was somewhat in awe. Not only is it impressive for its design and its sense of scale, but Blizzard’s designers did an excellent job of making it feel like a city. The individual buildings are less distinct, but the city in the aggregate definitely seems almost real, which makes it haunt my memory, almost like some of the real cities to which I’ve been. Not everywhere in World of Warcraft seems so real, but there are plenty of places that do: Darnassus (despite its unnatural appearance), the tree Aldrassil in Shadowglen, most of Dun Morogh, much of Loch Modan, Thunder Bluff, Un’Goro Crater, Ashenvale, and the Redridge Mountains, among others.^[5] Whether an urban or natural location, each of those feels real enough to me that it’s somewhere I’d like to see and explore again. These places inspired me to explore the whole world of Azeroth. I was much more interested in exploring than I was leveling, and spent a large portion of my game time trying to safely traverse places designed for much higher level characters just because I was so eager to see the world. When I was leveling, I often was doing so just so I could get to the next place I wanted to go.

These locations in World or Warcraft raise an interesting issue, though. If I wanted to I could get Dark Forces running again and revisit the places I’ve been. But for places in World of Warcraft, I may not be able to go back. I’ve not played since the Cataclysm expansion, and I’ve been reading about the many places I remember in the game that were permanently altered — and altered to be what I can only guess would be barely recognizable to me now. I can never go back. But perhaps that makes these virtual places even more real: The Gromas mines look just like they did more than 15 years ago when I first visited them, but when I visited this summer the suburb I grew up in, many of the places I remember the most distinctly there have been gone for some time, torn down — and that after only 20 years. We can’t go home in the real world, and we can’t go home in the Warcraft world, but both worlds live vividly in our memories.

I wonder what WoW players will think when the servers are shut off for good and there’s no going back for anyone? Do they feel the same way I do about those places being almost real? Will they feel a great loss, as exiles?^[6]

I imagine that many people must be experiencing these kinds of memories of places they’ve never been, even if people don’t (yet, anyway) talk about it much. I can only think that as technology advances, and as the creativity it enables progresses, this might become something that more people notice. I wonder how this will affect our memories and our nostalgia.

Notes

[1] I suspect that interactivity is key to making a place seem real or almost real to me. In imagined locations from books or even movies (real or fictional) consistency is lacking; if you ask me to imagine some place that I’ve never been, I won’t ever picture it quite the same way twice. But if I’ve navigated somewhere for myself, it becomes burned in my memory.

One virtual place stands out to me as a bit of an outlier in this discussion. That place is Athkatla as depicted in Baldur’s Gate II, and it stands out for being a place that I did not experience in three dimensions (Baldur’s Gate II has an isometric third-person perspective). I would otherwise theorize that three dimensions are necessary for a place to seem almost real, but Athkatla makes me wonder. The city was drawn well though, and there was plenty to navigate. Most importantly, I could navigate it however I saw fit — so perhaps interactivity is important enough on its own.

[2] As I wrote in 1998:

Probably the most distinctive element of Dark Forces is its exceptionally good level design. Levels are interesting but consistently and believably designed. The interesting points in levels are spaced apart, level areas are large enough to be realistic, and almost all areas seem to serve some function. ... Level designers built interesting structures and locations into almost all levels.... The large open areas that appear frequently throughout Dark Forces are more realistic than the claustrophobic design seen in other games. Variety in altitude is also used well; in the fourth level it is used to create the impression of a mountainous area, for example. (Classic Games Emulation)

[3] See a screenshot of the mines from The Register’s write-up from 2012 and another screenshot from Wookiepedia’s article on the Gromas Mines.

[4] Some later virtual locations that stand out for me are some of the tracks in POD, Wipeout XL, and Wipeout 3 (and to a lesser extent Pod Racer), and Pacific City in Crackdown - especially some of the tallest skyscrapers.

[5] See Vistas of Azeroth for some illustrations. For Stormwind, see also Stormwind at Night and Stormwind Cathedral Evening. For Shadowglen, see Wow Insider’s screenshot of Aldrassil. For the Redridge Mountains, see Azeroth Remembered’s post about them. For that matter, Azeroth Remembered has a good overview of all these locations as they appeared when I played the game.

[6] I wondered if players of Star Wars: Galaxies, which was shut down for good, felt that, but most of what I could find seemed to focus on the game and social interaction, so this remains to me an open question.

Appendix

Memorable places that didn’t seem real but I can remember well for other reasons:

• Many levels in Doom. Some just because I was experiencing that kind of game so vividly for the first time (though I think I may have played Dark Forces as early as Doom.) Some because Imps jumped out of the dark and scared me — those I remember fairly well...
• The second level of Dark Forces. The Stormtroopers hiding in the burned out part of the city were startling, and the environment was disturbing. This place almost seemed real, but perhaps the action overwhelmed the place, for me.
• Places in Jedi Knight, especially large, open places and high places. The elevator in the demo level, for example, grabbed my attention. Somehow they didn’t have the same effect as the levels in Dark Forces. Perhaps there was too much drama in the place — like being on a mountain instead of being in a room. Bespin was memorable but felt too much like an arena to be real.
• Some parts of Half-Life — but in Half-Life, everything was a puzzle or a set-piece, and not a “place,” at least for me.
• Speaking, of Half-Life, some of the maps for Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic are ones which can be fun and nostalgic, and I can have strong feelings about how they affect gameplay, but no matter how good, they never felt quite real, I think.

Matthew Carter

The fonts Verdana and Georgia are ubiqitious and, designed as screen fonts, symbols of the digital age. For their October newsletter MyFonts has an interview with their designer Matthew Carter.