Bard's Tale IV

One of my clearest memories of PC gaming comes from when I was in middle school. I was in the basement playing a PC game called The Bard's Tale. It was one of those games that really made you work. I had a ton of graph paper beside me, with each level of the dungeons carefully mapped out in pencil, with notes for everything I found. The Bard's Tale dungeons were especially devious, with teleporters and spinning squares that left you disoriented and uncertain where you were and what direction you were facing, and many of the pencil lines on the graph paper were erased and redrawn more than once as I struggled to reorient myself. But I did, and I was nearing the end of one of the final dungeons (I think it was Kylearan's Tower, so not the quite the last dungeon).  My mother had already called me up to dinner more than once, and I knew that she was getting impatient with my innaminutes.  Just a little farther, though.  And then, just as I was nearing the end of the dungeon, I ran right into a group of wandering monsters. Only these were new, not anything I'd ever faced before--I looked at the picture, which resembled nothing so much as slimy lizardmen on four legs in the CGA graphics (4 colors! 320x200 pixels!) of my 286 computer. Then I read the name.  Balrogs.  Balrogs?! I had read Tolkien, I knew what balrogs were--they're the things that dragged off your epic-level wizard and sent the rest of your party scrambling for the exit.  And that was just one of them--there were three here. This was going to be a deadly battle.  And then my mother called again, with the dreaded "If you don't get up here right this minute, young man, . . ." attached. There was no way I could finish such a tough fight and be at the dinner table soon enough to satisfy my mom.

So I left the game running--thank goodness for turn-based combat--and hurried up to dinner. I spent the entire dinner bouncing in my seat with delicious anticipation, eagerly telling my family all about the dread creatures I faced, and the very real danger that the party I'd raised from level 1--the dwarf paladin Astar, the half-elven bard Dinorin, the elven wizard Nilotin (nearly 30 years later and I still remember most of their names)--were about to face their doom.  That night, that anticipation, are among my greatest memories of PC gaming.  Of course, the fact that the balrogs happened to be real pushovers unworthy of the name was a bit of a letdown, but I was so close to defeating the evil wizard Mangar that I barely even cared.

I bring this up because The Bard's Tale is back.  Their Kickstarter campaign is already successful, and now they're aiming for the stretch goals. This is a true sequel, picking up 150 years have the last game, The Thief of Fate, and giving it all the beauty that modern gaming is capable of, as seen in this gorgeous video created using the game engine:

I'm hoping they meet some of their stretch goals--I'd especially like a 3rd person perspective on the party during combat, but the fundraising has slowed sufficiently that I doubt I'll see that.

Right now, the one thing I'm disappointed in is the backstory:

Ever since the Church of the Sword Father civilized the land of Caith and chased out the heathen a hundred years ago, the new Skara Brae, built on top of its ruined predecessor, has become a god-fearing town, where it is dangerous to admit to harboring such superstitious notions or knowing anything of the old ways. 

Which is unfortunate, because it's starting to look like the trolls and bloodfiends and hobgoblins from all those fairy stories have returned. Terrible things have been happening in Skara Brae - people slaughtered in their beds by unseen beasts, holy sites desecrated, folk disappearing between field and home, statues of the Mad God found in bloodstained back alleys, and the Song of the Maiden heard again for the first time in a generation. And worse, the people most equipped to deal with these old threats have been made outlaws.

Since the advent of the Fatherites, the practice of magic has been made a sin, and the old races of elf, dwarf, and trow have been banished, with all known ways to their realms smashed and sealed. And now, unable to stop the horrors that have been preying upon Skara Brae, the church has decided to put the blame for them on the Adventurer's Guild, shutting it down and calling its members cultists, witches, and pagans who must be burned at the stake for their unholy crimes.

This sounds like the standard fantasy trope of the evil monotheistic religion oppressing the good, more enlightened polytheists. It's a tired trope, particularly annoying to those of us belonging to one of those monotheistic religions. Aside from being based on more myth than history, the trope gives short shrift to both religions, mythologizing one while vilifying the other. Consider, for example, that witch-hunts predate Christianity. Persecutions of that sort seem to be a constant--if you believe in magic, then reacting violently against those whom you believe are practicing it against you is only natural. I'm hoping that the actual game will handle the religious conflict with a bit more nuance than this backstory implies.

To be honest, this is a small thing. It's one of those things you learn to expect if you play fantasy games or read fantasy books. Christians who want to enjoy fantasy just become inured to it. It was edgy in the seventies or eighties, but now it's so common that hardly anyone notices (though God help the developers if someone decides this is Islamophobic--which, given that I doubt they'll actually describe the Church of the Sword Father in terms of the Trinity or the Incarnation or any doctrine that is recognizably Christian, it may more closely resemble).

I'm still eager for the game and definitely want to play it, and I don't regret giving significantly more than the minimum for their Kickstarter. But I am just a little less eager now.

On Alienated Young Men

There's been a lot of talk recently about what motivated the Marathon bombers.  The assumption is that they were following the dictates of a radical form of Islam, but a lot of people think that it was their sense of alienation that drove them toward that belief system.   A lot of people are wondering what we can do to prevent young men, especially immigrants, from feeling like outsiders.

This is the wrong question.

There are always going to be alienated young men (and women).  Young people often feel like outsiders.  For many of us, it's simply a phase we go through.  I went through a couple of  years of feeling pretty isolated myself, where I lived alone and had a work-from-home job, and barely got out of the house.  I suspect that this was a more extreme form of alienation, a combination of my innate shyness and lack of impetus to get out, than most people ever experience.  It was a very lonely time for me, a time when I would sometimes feel like my life wasn't going anywhere.  And yet, it never occurred to me to lash out.

Some of this was just my nature.  Setbacks don't generally cause me to react with anger or depression.  Which is not to say that I was driven to overcome them.  My most common reaction to setbacks is to do my best to ignore them, using television, video games, and/or books.

But another large component is simply that it would be wrong.  My own belief system is quite emphatic that hurting people is wrong, so my mind is trained not to work that way.

And I wonder if this is part of the problem that we see in the case of not just the Marathon bombers, but others who commit horrific crimes--Sandy Hook, the Aurora movie theater shootings, and others.  The dominant philosophy today is one of postmodernism, that all beliefs are equally valid (or equally invalid).  However, a philosophy like that doesn't carry much weight when you need to decide what's right and what's wrong.  So people turn to other philosophies, ones that have clear lines and a strong code.  But since there's no guidance on how to choose a philosophy, nihilism is just as valid as theism or Platonism or Essentialism.

And when it comes to moral conduct, not all philosophies are created equal.  The problem is that our society wants to enforce moral conduct not with a solid grounding of any belief system, but an appeal to emotion and self-esteem.

This is not to say that there's only one belief system that a society can operate on.  Societies have successfully operated on many different belief systems.  But not all belief systems have successfully been a basis for a society.  And a society based explicitly on a refusal to acknowledge the truth of any belief system seems destined for difficulties.

The problem is that I'm not sure there's a good solution to this problem, not one that would be acceptable in a pluralistic society.

Doc Rampage on Kant

It's been a while since I linked to Doc Rampage, but he's had some interesting things to say recently.  I especially like his two posts on Immanuel Kant and irrationality.  Here's a tiny piece, from the first one:

Kant is not saying what the a simple reading of this sentence suggests: that he has to ignore the facts because they make it hard to believe in God. The reasoning that Kant is referring to is not reasoning that tries to show the non-existence of God --he is referring to reasoning that tries to show the existence of God.

In Kant's time, there was a common belief that reasoning could be used to prove all truths, including the existence of God. There were various "proofs" of the existence of God considered persuasive by influential thinkers. Although there were some who didn't buy any of the proofs that they had heard, it was widely believed that the question of God's existence could be settled, one way or another, by logical proof. Kant rejected this idea.

What Kant is saying in that quote is that since reason can never, even in principle, prove the existence of God we should give up the attempt and rely instead on "faith", by which he means another way of arriving at the knowledge of God.

More generally, Kant argued that we have different ways of arriving at different kinds of knowledge. There is no single faculty that is the ultimate source of all knowledge. This is in contrast to a very popular view in his day (associated with Descartes) that pure reason was the ultimate arbitrator of knowledge. In fact the title of the book that contains this out-of-context quote is "A Critique of Pure Reason"

 As they say, read the whole thing.

Update: Doc made an update to correct for a mistake for a misreading. I don't think it makes a huge difference to his interpretation, though.

Salem

As Kristin mentioned elsewhere, I recently attended a Writer's convention called Readercon. One of the panels I attended was about horror and New England. New England is a popular setting for horror stories, for a multitude of reasons. The reason I bring it up was that the topic of Salem was raised. Salem, Massachusetts has turned itself into something like a theme park of witches. One of the people on the panel, a Wiccan, in expressing how she felt about that, said that it was like how a Jew would feel about a theme park called Auschwitzland.

There are a couple of problems with this analogy. The first is that approximately 1 million Jews died at Auschwitz, while 0 Wiccans died at the Salem Witch Trials. All 24 people killed by the trials were Christians. And therein lies my biggest pet peeve. Witchcraft, as practiced in the Wicca religion, is a very different thing than what the Massachusetts colonialists considered witchcraft. Casting it as persecution of a religion that didn't exist then misses the point, and Wiccans have come pretty late to the game in order to claim that that they have sole authority to define what witchcraft means.

Witchcraft, by the definition used by the colonialists, involved making a deal with the Devil for power and using that power to torment and kill others. I believe that C.S. Lewis was the one who pointed out that if we truly believed that such a thing existed, we would agree that those who practiced it should be brought to justice, and thus our main disagreement with the people of Salem is simply that we no longer believe in witchcraft. Personally, I prefer a somewhat more balanced view, that is agnostic to the existence of witchcraft. I believe that the Salem Witch Trials were a grave miscarriage of justice and a failure of due process, convicting people on hearsay and superstition.

So what do I think of Salem? Well, comparing it to Auschwitz is silly. But so is its attempt to make witches into some kind of mascot. Because the mascot witch is yet another definition of witchcraft, very different from both the colonialist and Wiccan one, a caricature with none of the religious connotations of either. To pretend that it has anything to do with what happened in Salem over 300 years ago is an injustice.