Thoughts on Postmodernism

Lately, I've been noticing all the subtle ways Paper-Soul Theater takes after Alice in Wonderland, a surreal-humor book about a young Victorian girl who runs off to a place of confusion and dystopia and discovers that grass in such a place is not greener.

The book as a whole plays out neither as a counterargument to Postmodernism nor as a celebration, but it maintains some very important lessons for a modern reader. First of all, Alice, like both Generation X and the Baby Boomers, has no direction and saw it fit to let her intuition guide her. The Cheshire Cat, by contrast, is a master at predicting the future to the full extent any person could reasonably be, and it is enabled by its precaution of the future to find a path for itself that it likes. The grinning cat perhaps grins because it has the world figured out, which allows it to trick everyone that passes it by, even the king. Yes, it tricks most people because they are Modernists, but that doesn't mean the cat itself is a Postmodernist, because that would imply it's an equal with the mad hatter, whom it is wiser than. The mad hatter is a postmodernist who things making shit up and living life in anarchy will satisfy all his needs, when in reality he is blissfully unaware of the way this repels others from being his acquaintance and has trapped him.

Ever since the Beatniks, many people have fallen into the trap of trying to live like mad hatters: on their own terms with little regard for reason, established morals, or progress made in the past. I am hopeful that people of the Digital Age take after the Cheshire Cat, who has access to more options than ever before yet found the strength to pick a path rather than drift on the wind.

The problem is, Postmodernism as a mainstream norm refuses to go away and allow for the response to Postmodernism to take its place. Both my generation and Gen Z are in danger of falling into the same trap of choosing doublespeak over established order, of choosing no direction over any sort of plan, of having no backbone to reject what they think is wrong at the cost of stepping on someone's way of life. What I find maddening is that Postmodernism has become conservative, and a sort of Neo-Modernism (Digitalism as I call it) has become progressive.

With Paper-Soul Theater, I aim to demonstrate how Postmodern thinking can destroy a person's life and limit them much like modernism once did in a completely different way. The Cheshire Cat is content because he found direction in life in such a way that is neither rigid nor uncareful but instead nuanced.

Paper-Soul Theater is on hiatus: What you need to know

Paper-Soul Theater, a game in development directly-inspired by early-2000s Paper Mario.

For those who don't know, Paper-Soul Theater is a not-so-subtle continuation of the art style and revolutionary game mechanics of the first two Paper Mario games. It's an original property with a different direction: Paper-Soul Theater is not just a turn-based rpg but also a horror game to its core. Furthermore, PST layers on ideas from tactical rpgs such as Fire Emblem, and Final Fantasy Tactics, as well as experimental idea from story-focused indie rpgs like Lisa: The Painful and Undertale. That may sound like a radical departure from the Paper Mario formula, but most of the differences are things added on top of Paper Mario, or are there to directly subvert it.

It is no exaggeration that Paper-Soul Theater is a highly-anticipated upcoming game. Some argue that it's detachment from Paper Mario allows for it to coexist--perhaps even pick up where Nintendo left off a decade ago, which according to them, makes it more "Paper Mario" than Nintendo's latest offerings! Plenty of Paper Mario fans have emailed us to say how excited they are for this game, and some have gone as far as to ask to volenteer, as they see it as a Paper Mario community project, which is how we'd describe it too; most people who've worked on Paper-Soul Theater thus far have been fans.

Past, Present, and Future
"You said 'two years,' what has the team been up to all this time?" Learning through failure. I gained painful lessons about what not to do almost daily, and twice I've watched a prototype rise and crash to the ground. I watched team members join and leave with the seasons. It was development hell; we worked day and night to run in circles! In December, my business partner and I decided what we needed was to take a break by making a smaller game, Phantomatics.

Our smaller game, in which the player controls a spooky ghost in one hand, and a clunky robot in the other.

I wouldn't blame you for thinking that means Paper-Soul Theater is going to be forgotten about; developers often leave exciting projects unfinished to pursue fun new ideas. Allow me to explain why that isn't the case:

• The period of my life when I abandoned old projects to chase the newest, shiniest idea, is long gone. For about three years, I started/ abandoned five games with so much potential, all because I didn't have the strength to sit down and vow to finish anything. Paper-Soul Theater means the world to me, and I'm never looking back.
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• Phantomatics is being made to give us the experience of completing and releasing a game. We've never sold a videogame before, or done this professionally, so when PST is up to bat, I don't want it to suffer because we were amateurs. I know in my heart this game deserves better.
• Think of Phantomatics as a convoluted fundraiser so that we can make the Paper-Soul Theater Kickstarter and prototype. I don't like to beg for money if I don't have to. I'd rather make a small product that people want to buy on the merits of the product itself, so that we can properly earn the money.
• Eventually when Paper-Soul Theater is on Kickstarter or some other crowdfunding site, I want people to be able to look back at our past work and see that we are creative, capable of making a game, and hold ourselves to a high standard. Otherwise, they only have our word that we know what we're doing.

So if you're someone who considers the prospect of a Paper Mario spiritual successor to be exciting, here's what you can do in the meantime:

• Write "Paper-Soul Theater" on a sticky note and draw a doodle of a round plumber beneath it to give the words some context. Then, put that sticky note somewhere you don't look often.
• Sign up for the e-mailing list! When we resume development, you will be the first to know! Please send a tiny email to otyugragames@gmail.com; it's the best way to be a part of our community and to stay up-to-date without the fluff of social media.
• Read about the game on our website (otyugra.weebly.com/), then have the courage to show your excitement online, even if most people haven't heard of PST. Where's the fun in being a fan if you don't get to express your feelings?
• Tell your close friends about it, if they like videogames in general.
• Purchase Phantomatics when you get the chance. You'll get a neat little game and get to support us directly!

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Pixar's Coco: Modern Racism and Sterile Character Writing

Before I start, yes, this is a videogame blog; bare with me, I'll relate it to videogames soon enough. Before you ask, yes, I am well aware of the high critical score of Coco, the high approval from casual moviegoers, and the high approval from the majority of Central Americans.

In high school, I remember seeing a black motivational poster in some other teacher's classroom about the importance of not backing down when you feel you are alone in thinking something. I think it depicted a yellow, exotic, oceanic fish, but the point is, I'm perpetually shocked by how relevant that poster has been through the years. I never would have guessed I would go on to harbor so many deeply-unpopular opinions, that have frankly made me ashamed of myself. As an example, I found Thor Ragnorak to be so bad that, when I left the theater, the only thing on my mind was how ashamed I was to be a writer if being a writer means I'm a part of the same occupation that produced something that colossally embarrassing. Fortunately, mankind has always had the power of logic and reason, so those with unpopular opinions were able to avoid death by angry mobs. Thank God.

I think Ragnorak and Coco make for an interesting comparison because they are on the opposite ends of storytelling. Ragnorak is about putting consistent characters first and stringing together a random series of events to call a plot for those characters to react to. Coco is storytelling that has everything bend to the iron will of the plot structure, even if that means having 90% of your characters exist solely to be puppets for the plot. Most stories, even most stories in videogames, have both interesting characters, and a well-functioning plot structure. While most games sit in the middle of those two movies, Paper-Soul Theater, for better or worse, is going to be much closer to Ragnorak in terms of structure, and that's what's so terrifying to me. Well, that's not a fair comparison, because our game is character driven much the same way 1984 is, rather than the kind of aimless plot that a comedy sitcom might have. All the same, I am diametrically opposed to Coco's idea of "characters."

Coco does a lot of things right, regarding culture, summarizing ethnic groups, and accurately portraying a spiritual celebration, from what I hear from American Hispanics all across the internet. You don't need me to tell you that it does more right than wrong and that it is a worthwhile experience. It even deserves all the awards it won. It's a pleasant-long-cry from the old-school racist days of 1940s Walt Disney shorts. ...but that's just it, old-school racism, the kind when a race was exploited for money (exoticism, made exclusively for the dominate race), when negative and neutral stereotypes were the only kind, etc.

Modern racism started with pieces of media like Disney's Pocahontas. Pocahontas is a movie made with nothing but endearing respect for native people because of Walt's desire to make something progressive a la To Kill a Mocking Bird. Linsey, a movie critic, and an ex-friend of YouTube's Doug Walker, made a great video lambasting Pocahontas for its bad portrayal of native people, despite having good intentions, softening people's hearts for other races, and universal appeal. The truth is often tough to swallow, and one such truth is that racism is not something that can be whisked away using a magic wand and good intentions. No, racism is something you have to work your ass off to avoid, and to anyone who fights it fiercely, you are a hero who bears a heavy weight on your shoulders. Pocahontas may be an interesting character who stands out among other people of her race within her own movie, but she still exhibits traits that reinforce deeply unrealistic characteristics that skew our understanding of what native people are like. They're just fucking people, Goddamnit; they are nothing more--nothing less--but the movie treats them as if they're magic forest elves worth marveling at for their divisively-distinct foreign majesty.

If Pocahontas treated the main character like a magic forest elf, Coco completely treats Miguel's extended family like antagonistic-members of a dystopian society. There is literally a scene where the family forms a mob and bust Miguel's guitar, as it symbolizes their hate of music/ all occupations that aren't shoe-making. The movie intentionally makes them terrifying so that you root for Miguel who naturally doesn't want to submit to them. The executives/ writers were so afraid of the possibility of the audience disagreeing with Miguel, that they felt the need to turn his family into monsters.

Listen man, I don't need to think every last decision Miguel makes is the logical thing to do in order to want to follow him. Ash Ketchum is a piece of shit person/ Pokemon trainer who caused damage and trouble everywhere he went because he didn't have his life together, during season one of Pokemon, and you know what, I found it easy to root for Ash; his heart was in the right place and he was always working towards a concrete goal. Likewise, Team Rocket is a group of very sympathetic lost souls who do evil things but make it look charming and do it for misguided reasons. Most episodes, they get to say funny things, but their actions have consequences. Sometimes, I just want to give them a hug and beg them to change their ways. Guess what? They work well as antagonists because they oppose the protagonist for reasons that are easy to comprehend (though not agree with). 

Anyway, the consequence is that all the main characters of the movie, with three exceptions total, are dislikable, unrelatable, and weird to anyone who didn't grow up with Hispanics (until the end of the movie where they kinda sorta have character growth and change their ways). One thing Pocahontas did right was open the door for other cultures to understand the minority. This movie is very edgy about displaying Mexican family culture at it's thickest and most divisive, and if you've been paying attention, that should sound an awful lot like the modern racism I described earlier: exaggerating divides to make other human races seem interesting.

For Christ's sake, we're all human beings first and foremost! We need to approach writing characters from this mentality. If you want to add a black guy to your sitcom or your action movie, start be writing him like a person, and then make tiny adjustments for complex racial differences, then see how that character would naturally react to your plot. Don't fucking start by making him a template black person then molding him into something a little less cookie cutter. And you know? I wouldn't be talking about this if media like Coco agreed with my way of writing. You should never reduce characters to just "evil," or just "Mexican grandma."

Second, when you have characters bend to your needs, they lack consistency. Spoiler: Miguel's real great-grandfather goes from cross-dressing in a mad dash to get to Earth (followed by lying constantly to everyone he sees to get his way), to an innocent, soft-spoken, loving father with a good moral compass. Don't tell me he changed in the many years he stayed there because the movie never establishes that fact.

So in closing, I want Paper-Soul Theater's vaguely-Native-American-people to be a series of individuals that stay true to themselves. Yes, they all belong to a nation of people, but they also divide in more ways than can be counted. Some found religion. Some are quite proud of their occupation. Some are shitty people. Some happen to be masculine or feminine. Some are going through trauma. Some are quite social. Some lost a limb during a war. Some are quite intelligent. Some have interest in very specific things. ...But no matter who they are, they will always by dynamic people first and foremost. Even the background characters who have a small role should feel as if protagonists of someone's story briefly passing through. That's real life: no person left two-dimensional. None.

The Sad State of Player Retention

 I've been playing Jak and Daxter over again recently, and I noticed something peculiar about the trophies for that game. Because some trophies track progress by percent, and the percentage of those who get the trophy, I was able to make a graph of the number of players who made it to different points in the game over time. I knew that players would drop off over time, but the actual data for this random game example was shocking.

50% of all players, people who purchased the game for PS4, have never made it past the first 7-ish power cells out of 101! Getting 7 power cells is as simple as completing the tutorial (first 4 of them), talking to someone twice, and walking around the nearby beach until you found 2 more. For the average person, that would take about 25 minutes. I think this initial spike of people "noping" out of the game has many reasons. First, there are the players who quickly realize they made a mistake buying the game and that it isn't for them. These people are the type who get a refund after buying your game within the same day. Next are the shallow people who only bought the game because they wanted to, for a quick moment, be reminded of their childhood. That to them is all the game needed to do, and so they put it down forever. They already beat the game, so they don't bother me. Those are probably most of that cliff. Next are people who probably tested the game out, said to themselves they would come back and finish it one day when they made time for it (then never did). A tiny handful of people are making their way through this part of the game these days.

Notice that difficulty is not a reason for the dropoff; the game was quite easy right around that point in that you only need to walk around avoid slow-moving crabs, not to mention jumping on a rare occasion. Many people stayed just a little longer, and probably found a challenge they didn't like or just needed a little more time to consider quitting. People who beat the first section of the game (The Green Sage's domain) were incredibly motivated to keep playing for a couple more power cells, which meant that the excitement of exploring new locations kept leaving players at bay. I phrase it like that because after exploring this new area, a horde of people left before beating the local boss and moving on to Section 3. After that, very few people left, but by now, the damage is done: only one-third of the people who own the game get this far. The game becomes harder from this point on, and I think that is the only reason most of the people who kept leaving left. At this point, the game becoming a bit brutal isn't stopping people from leaving because they came to win, and maybe be guessing that the end is near.

80% of people who beat the game were completionists who collected everything they could. How many of those people loved the game, and how many of them felt the need to beat the game compulsively is unknown, but what this means is that about 10% or less of the players decided to beat the game with flying colors for reasons other than an abnormal need that is true for all videogames they play. Imagine you're selling a novel you wrote and you ask all who buy your book to call you on the phone when they finish reading. Imagine selling 100 books but only getting 10 phone calls in your lifetime. That's devastating: years of work for only a tiny fraction of eyes to see. Sure, this is a bad example game to use since it is the second re-release, but all the same, if you look at any traditional videogame (most of which are way longer than Jak and Daxter), the player retention is still abysmal.

The painful thing for developers like me to accept is that this is just a fact of life, and complaining about it won't help, and people shouldn't be accommodated for quitting your game either. Unless you are making a short game that practically plays itself (Telltale Games), the majority of players will not finish the game. I think this is the genius secret to Telltales, that their games are designed around high player retention, but an episodic casual game will not sell in most genres like it will for adventure games. When people buy an RPG, they violently demand it to be an absurd length (90+ hours in most cases, which is a little shorter than a Pokemon game). This is natural in that RPGs are about feeling apart of an expansive world, rather than just a visitor. You want to be surrounded by an RPG, and I get that. What I don't understand, and what I despise, is how dishonest players are with themselves when they vocally ask for longer RPGs but only play the first few hours and quit, regardless. In truth, those aren't the same people, but the watch guards of RPG length are the vocal minority, while most players listen and agree with those people on game length but will never last long enough for it to matter. What I'm saying is that the echo chamber of "Yeah, your right, it is a bad thing that this RPG
is short." among people who don't make it far into their games, really have no business allowing that to influence whether to skip a game.

This creates an interesting dilemma: Do we put a lopsided effort towards the front of the game, or do we keep the quality equal to reward the "true" fans? If we focus on the start, players have a better experience, and so we get better user reviews. The reverse is true: equal quality means maybe a better score from critics, and a much happier core, small fanbase. Either way, with Paper-Soul Theater, we'll have to tread lightly and do our best to draw people in at the start of the game to avoid that common huge falloff at the start of the experience.

KH Chain of Memories Inspires Me

Listen, Chain of Memories is dope. When I was a kid, I thought the whole damn thing was obtuse, but the problem was simply me being too young to appreciate it. I went into it young with unfair expectations, and it prevented me from seeing that CofM stands up by its own merits swimmingly. It was a hardcore game when the casual fans of the first game weren't ready for the sea change. It was a roguelike before the term existed. CofM revolved its plot around abstract concepts like emotion, memory, and existence while most action games are simplified versions of action flicks/ action anime. Therefore, CofM was ahead of its time, but beyond that, it's simply a damn-well constructed game! CofM has few flaws: A lackluster new game plus, the shortness of the soundtrack, and the blatant recoating of each world. That's all that I find to be even remotely egregious.

This all eventually led to Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories becoming my biggest inspiration. Let me explain:

1. CofM is a master at cutting corners. In any other scenario, I would have been livid upon discovering that the places I go to are the same damn thing every time, but by getting the locations out of the way early, they were able to spend the rest of their time polishing everything else and adding content to it in other ways. By streamlining the gameplay everywhere you go, CofM created a very focused experience. This is an action/ strategy, not an adventure game. It is not a JRPG or a 3D platformer about collection 101 Dalmatians, and it stays that way throughout the entire game without even the slightest compromise. Many people say the fun in Mario 64 is in playing as Mario, rather than exploring the locations in the game. CofM has the same kind of focus. Each battle (unless you become overpowered) is so fundamentally great that grinding no longer feels tedious, that each world can afford to be the same thing, that boss battles and friend cards are all that's needed to keep things fresh. It can be easy to get lost in ambitions for a game, but I believe CofM demonstrates how a simple game can outclass an ambitious one by having a healthy focus.
2. CofM knows how to balance action and strategy. Frankly, whoever managed to combine card game strategy with fast-paced action battles without watering down either genre is a genius. Sure, card games are all about stopping to think about how you're going to respond to the other person's cards, but you still have time to do that, it's just truncated, and relegated to before a match begins based on your last encounter with the character when you lost. In that way, it managed to retain its strategy by making use of the meta way players know what to expect from foes after they lose to them. A good action game needs moments to allow players to catch their breath. This avoids becoming monotonous through having the player work on their deck. Because both genres are accommodated equally, the player needs to like both aspects of the game (one doesn't carry the experience), but I think this is worth it in that it offers a unique, complex experience to write home about. I think that's the fate of games that combine genres or dare to be complex: the target audience shrinks, but the retained audience find an opener experience.
3. CofM is earnest and confident--specifically graceful in being earnest. There is something insanely satisfying about seeing an organization 13 member get violently, and suddenly decked in the stomach by Goofy from out of nowhere, to save the day. Out of context, having an oldfashioned Disney character violently attack a major, serious half-existing villain character sounds disastrously nonsensical and tonally imbalanced, but by using good story structure and caution, the writers managed to do the impossible, which is to make the world's weirdest fan fiction work as an ordinary story. Many stories attempt being earnest but have that backfire because it makes its flaws shine brighter, like in the case of Wonder Woman (2017) which was earnest in a way that comes off as oblivious to its flaws and unrealistic stance on optimism (AKA overconfidence). I find it very hard to describe with words why Kingdom Heart's setting works against all odds, while something equally as earnest as Wonder Woman falls on its face, but it might be that Kingdom Hearts exists because an artist had a loving vision, while Wonder Woman was a corporate blockbuster aiming abnormally hard to appease the largest audience possible while also desperately trying to seem progressive. In other words, Wonder Woman The Movie exists because society demanded a Super Heroine movie, while Kingdom Hearts flowed naturally out of a deep admiration for Disney films, and from undisturbed intuition as a storyteller. So maybe Wonder Woman is a foil from being made with paranoid second-guessing.

Here is how I hope to apply all three motivations to Paper-Soul Theater, our own RPG with strategy and action:

1. Paper-Soul Theater will not have cutting-edge graphics because pre-rendered Nintendo 64 era graphics are capable of delivering the experience we want. The main character will move in 6 horizontal directions, and on a hexagonal grid because free movement is not something that would add to our intended experience. We hope to cut plenty more corners as we create new prototypes, so I hope you get the picture that we are happy to remove any and everything from our videogame that isn't important to us, regardless of what players have come to expect from modern games. They don't see what we see, and as such we would be making a mistake coming to them rather than the other way around.
2. Most traditional RPGs are as dry as text adventures in so far as their action is represented with the imagination as if a lesser version of a table-top experience. With most RPGs, I don't feel present in the action. The reverse is true for action RPGs. In those games, I don't feel as if I'm experiencing an RPG, but instead a cheap imitation. An RPG isn't an RPG without the bitter, slow, calculated back-and-forth of battle. in Paper-Soul Theater, we present a world in which customs dictate that the key to battle is patience, and all actions, violent or not, have a satisfying build-up and release. It's a world where even monsters know instinctively that moral victory can only be achieved through a strict back-and-forth, like gunslingers who agree to a duel. A battle of life and death should require a very active participation from the player, even in a situation where both parties have silently agreed to take turns, as is the case in our world. In our game, all physical actions during battle must sync between the player and playable character so that they feel invested and responsible for the execution of their self-defense.
3. In the same way that Kingdom Hearts cares very dearly about making its psychopathic setup work well, so will we refuse to hold back on our ideas. Aponi is deeply religious. That alone is incredibly rare in videogame protagonists, but the norm was the last thing on my mind when this story came to me over time. In almost every case, censoring ourselves would be flippant and portraying our intuition. We want (arguably need) to show nudity for non-sexual, non-erotic reasons. Drugs, realistic bleeding, harsh opinions, and intimacy are all fair game NOT because we are trying to be controversial or to call attention to ourselves but because these things shouldn't be controversial in the first place among an adult audience, and are things that can easily be justified for use in ways that are moral. We look at antique paintings and call them art, regardless of if they portray sexual intercourse, deadly killing, etc because those aspects do not logically expel them from being artful, inherently. We simply want to tell a specific story. If we shatter outdated cultural norms in the process, then so be it. In the same way Kingdom Hearts sounds weird on paper, so will our game, but I want to give my ideas a chance to win over the hearts of our players, as Kingdom Hearts once did.

A Videogame Life for Me

Listening to an oracle foretell how I'll spend the rest of my life would be a terrifying, existential history lesson. Sometimes it feels as if I'm trapped inside a body that makes all of my decisions for me. This body takes me along, as I'm kicking and screaming internally. Other days it feels as if I reign supreme, bound by no one, especially myself. When I look back on the path I've taken, I wonder if I've been following my dream too closely. Sometimes in those reflections, I feel ashamed. I'm ashamed of my love for videogames, and I wish I had a love for something like architecture instead—something productive. I wish that my blood wasn't so hot, or to have nothing to prove to the world. I wish that my creativity wasn't so frivolous and off-the-wall.
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I am who God made me, what my parent's internalized, and what I've reinforced. The past has set sail, and with it, the grass that always seemed greener. Put frankly, I know now that I love videogames in a way that I don't feel most people do. They have a potential that other mediums don't, yet in all my time as a player, I've rarely seen the potential realized, and I know in my heart, that cannot go on any longer so long as I have a means to interject. I think it is this core desire that will destine me to be a starving artist whose execution never lives up to his dreams. My desire to be heard may never be fulfilled as I say things not often spoken through what isn't just words. Yes, I bet an oracle would shake his or her head in pity at me by the merits of my future stress, and Prometheus boulder-rolling.
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I've fallen on my ass more times than I care to admit, but God has always been there to pick me up and remind me that my story doesn't end down there. In my life, I will use videogames to spread wisdom, knowledge, and perspective using the interactive, the surreal, the logical. Along the way, I will search high and low for games that dare to be high art. I will look for games made by those who reject power fantasies in favor of experiences. Then, if I find the time, I'll vomit my raw reactions to the world, so that maybe they can get a feel for how meaningful I find all of this. I hope you will join me for that, the vomiting, and I hope you do so with the same open-minded civil attitude all well-meaning people deserve.