FFXII

Lately, I've been indulging in Final Fantasy XII. I don't normally venture into Japanese Role-Playing Game territory for the simple reason that the signification of homoeroticism is impishly lampooned as though it's necessary to pass some sort of heterosexist censorship board. Oh, and there's also the poor translation and confusing mix of hyper-sexualisation and mega-cuteness. FFXII is no stranger to this dyad.

Video Games - E3 2009 - X-Play

The absence of a "sappy love story" allows the narrative to unfurl around a political intrigue, which leaves one feeling slightly less perverse. But the homoeroticism of the game is coupled with a carnivalesque aesthetic that lets the characters and storyline firmly square off against a reading of it as merely Japanese camp. Sure, the seventeen year old protagonist Vaan has scripted lines that get on your nerves through their idiotic vanity and pettiness; but we were all seventeen once.

Perhaps the strangest feature of the game as a whole is the way that the class struggle/caste system unimaginatively conforms to a conservative Marxist reading. The aristocratic men are all mystics and perverts, the women are precocious hysterics; the working class city-dwellers' commentary seems strangely void of gender for most of the game (if ever a Maoist population there was), while the charismatic rogues are aloof and perform like knaves. No one really seems to want to change their position, and the 'struggle' of class and status is hegemonised by whatever ruling authority happens to be in power, i.e. early on in the game, when the king of Dalmasca is killed and the invading empire send their new consul, Lord Vayne, to rule the occupied capital of Dalmasca, Rabinastre, a scene ensues wherein Vayne 'charismatically' turns a potentially violent crowd into his allies with an oration lasting a few short minutes. Thucydides couldn't have wished a better oration. But what it signals is that this game is about changing the world, it's about keeping it going through its dysfunctionality. The more dysfunctional an in-game character is, the more typical they become.

And, just like capitalism, you must labour in service of the game to gain sufficient capital to spend on various lisences, elixirs, and equipment to advance in the narrative.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic

The Star Wars franchise is one of the largest pieces of cultural imagery available today. Alongside Doctor Who and Star Trek, Star Wars has garnered its fair share of cult and mass audiences. It is interesting to see the latest development: making a (another) Star Wars Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMO) in collaboration with the Electronic Arts-owned gaming industry heavyweight Bioware, of Bioshock and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic fame. The story-intensive style of Bioware games means that the Star Wars MMO has a lot of narrative emphasis. But in a gaming genre like an MMO, where many players grind away their lives, one has to wonder whether this game will do more than stop the MMO genre from amputing plot driven storylines altogether.

MMOs have been a social media space for some time now. But with the Star Wars narrative comes a new type of challenge: audience identification and sexuality. As was made infamous by the 'Mr Bungle rape' within an Multiple User Domain (MUD) context, sexuality poses a sticky issue for Bioware and Lucas Arts (owners of the Star Wars franchise rights). As one can observe in the Star Wars films, not to mention the novels and comics and wealth of other media, the Star Wars cosmology is a heterodoxic structure that errs on the side of patriarchy's underbelly: scantily clad women are paraded around while warrior-priests called "Jedi" become effectively sexless, suggesting that taboo on sex is equivalent to an erasing of gender. These are old issues for the Star Wars franchise, and hopefully we will see some progressive thought on Bioware's part in how to deal with them.