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RG3: A Disputed History: Attack of the Friday Monsters
NOTES
Article Discussed:
A Disputed History: Attack of the Friday Monsters
Austin Walker
http://clockworkworlds.com/post/56557215335/a-disputed-history-attack-of-the-friday-monsters
Music:
“Yarn Ball” from Love ZZZV.
Support Zan-zan-zawa-veia at https://www.patreon.com/zzzv. Find out more about Zan’s music at https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.bandcamp.com or http://aanaaanaaanaaana.net/
Other Links:
Me, On The Screen: Race in Animal Crossing: New Leaf http://clockworkworlds.com/post/53240010750/me-on-the-screen-race-in-animal-crossing-new
Critical Distance, which provides a weekly roundup of videogame criticism https://critical-distance.com/
Grundrisse, Ch1.2 reference to [Consumption and Production] segment https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
Rough Script:
I think I discovered Austin Walker’s writing through a link on Critical Distance to his essay about Animal Crossing: New Leaf. It’s a very good one. I chose A Disputed History, though, because I think it stands up as an exemplary piece of genre criticism. As someone who went on JSTOR in college and downloaded every academic article with the word cyberpunk in the title, I don’t say that lightly.
The game in question is a Nintendo 3DS title called Attack of the Friday Monsters. It was released as part of a suite of games by fairly well known designers. This model is exceedingly rare in games, but it pokes its head out occasionally. The game is a bucolic mixture of adventure and roleplaying game. You are a young boy and the world is quiet; you interact with your neighbors and play a diverting card game; suddenly, your dad must save the town and transform the television industry while he’s at it. I’ll let Austin take it away.
“The game probably wouldn’t be called a ‘life sim’ because it doesn’t include any resource management, balancing of character ‘needs,’ or shopping, but it evokes a life in a way that those sorts of games rarely do. It’s an endearing and devoted recreation of the way a long summer afternoon feels as a kid.”
Even in this descriptive moment, A Disputed History is performing genre criticism. This isn’t a definition of “life sims,” but it makes clear how fraught categorization is within the videogame space. It almost sounds like saying that a story wouldn’t be called science fiction because, despite being set in the future, full of technology, grounded in physics and chemistry, and a plausible extrapolation, it doesn’t adhere to Asimov’s laws of robotics. But that’s a flawed comparison. Because in videogames, a genre needs to convey a different set of information. You need to know what you will be doing, as well as what it looks like visually or the themes of the story. That is, of course, assuming that we’re positioning genre as primarily a consumer-oriented classification.
Before we get into that conversation, however, we should continue with the essay as it stands. Austin gives a very strong explanation of the game’s tone and of its materialist reading of genre.
“Despite all that charm, though, Friday Monsters is actually built on a bittersweet foundation. What if some of this joy we get from the entertainment we love comes at the cost of criticality? Friday Monsters is a game about a genre in dispute, unsettled. How do we frame our stories in a given genre? Who are our villains, our heroes? What is at stake? Friday Monsters is a look at how real, historical circumstances determine the answers to those questions, and how over time those circumstances themselves change.”
It’s hard to overstate how apt a description “a bittersweet foundation” is for this game. It’s set in a small town that is transforming into a Tokyo suburb, in a period where the war still looms large and the real estate bubble is just around the corner. This is reflected in how the kids play: on the one hand, they “cast spells” on each other according to an ad-hoc hierarchy that mostly means the recipient has to fall down until they’re told otherwise. On the other, they play an elaborately illustrated collectible card game. The consumer creep intersects with folk games. Most of the industry seems to be transitioning from factory labor to service and spectacle, but the neoliberal ideology that fêtes and systematizes that transition is not solidly in place. The moment is one of industrial decline and huge societal shifts, but in a way that is driven by capital rather than people. On top of that, the game itself is a weird proto-suburban pastoral, where dirt roads cut through green fields under a clear blue sky, and the Ramen stand is manned by characters named Ramen and Ramen’s Dad. It’s also full of fart jokes.
The tone flows from the setting, in a certain way, but the setting is a conscious choice. A decade or two earlier, the story of the military stand-ins beating back monsters in a small town is almost definitely metaphorizing the American Occupation of Japan. A decade or two later and there’s a good chance it is right wing nostalgia for when the nation had a belligerent military. This is what Austin means when he talks about the circumstances changing over time. He goes on to say,
“a genre’s subtext implies a specific history. Works in a given genre are often reduced (by fans and by critics) to their most obvious components–whether those are giant robots, neon lights, or star-crossed teens gazing tautly at each other from across a cafeteria.”
You can slot in your favorite signposts here; rayguns and aliens for Golden Age science fiction; castles and vampires or zombies and gore or ghosts and psychological uncertainty for various permutations of horror; meet-cutes and happily ever afters for romantic comedy; horny, adulterous professors and extended ruminations on sociopolitical phenomena for an era of literary fiction. But the piece goes on,
“To be a ‘genre’ is to implicitly–that is, by definition–be a sort of history. While some seek to remove questions of context and history from media analysis, there is still fruit on those trees.”
This quote goes on to discuss how the “Death of the Author” is, in Austin’s word, more of a dethroning. It moves criticism from a place where the context and feelings of the writer of a poem or piece of fiction were paramount, believed to supply some sort of master key, to another tool in a kit that included things like close reading of the text, reader response theory and, eventually, genre analysis.
The point, though, is that both of these reductions – of the work to its component genre elements, and of the work to itself without context – are paradoxical. Because even the act of reducing a swath of art to neon lights, for instance, produces neon lights as a sort of history, a context. In being consumed as indicative, they become productive. Marx says, in the Grundrisse, that “Production is also immediately consumption. Twofold consumption, subjective and objective: the individual not only develops his abilities in production, but also expends them.” Similarly, “Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.” For our purposes here, this twinned movement takes place in order to produce another twofold understanding; subjectively, of how to interpret and enjoy a new piece of media, and objectively by chaining those works to signs that recategorize them as being in discussion with one another. To explain: cyberpunk’s association with neon allows us to see neon and to say, “is this cyberpunk, that thing I enjoy?” They also allow us, theoretically at least, to search a database or google for films that feature neon lights and find things we have enjoyed in the past and might enjoy in the future.
None of which means that anything is settled in stone. Neon isn’t exclusive to cyberpunk; its use in bars, and especially honkytonks, means it is an occasional staple in country music (most of those words are embedded links to YouTube videos). That complicates the objective production. But it also speaks to the way that, had Attack of the Friday Monsters been set in a different time, the same genre signifiers would have had entirely different meanings. Austin explains,
“Genres are disputed ground, where new works, the criticism they inspire, and the social and economic structures that we encounter them on all work to map out the boundaries of what ‘counts’ and what doesn’t … There is no permanent ‘settling’ of this dispute–there is always room for reinvention. There is no Platonic ‘Western’ that we’re getting closer and closer to with every new piece bashing The Lone Ranger. There are key moments, though, when disputed forms take and hold shape, finding some degree of stability for some amount of time.”
This is not a new argument, but it’s a well-said one. Think about this in relation to the earlier quotation about whether or not Attack of the Friday Monsters qualifies as a “life sim.” The implicit promise is that you will be playing a thing that simulates life, from the small moments of triumph and humiliation to milestones like jobs and marriages and reproducing. Plus, it will be done with certain systems that govern how you interact with a character’s needs and the resources, emotional and material, they have access to. The term suggests its own Platonic endpoint; life itself. But that isn’t true. A simulation of life must necessarily not be life, else it isn’t a simulation. It can only ever have an asymptotic relationship to its aspiration. As it gets closer, the systems and aesthetics will develop to reflect that. But sometimes our understanding of life shifts, and so must the game. One of the milestones in these sorts of games is almost always marriage. But marriage is different now. The thing must change.
Beyond the potential genre, there is also the game as it is. A Disputed History largely talks about how it being set at a certain point in time allows it to discuss the shifting material conditions that unsettled one set of genre conventions and lead to another. But the game was released in early 2013, another somewhat pivotal moment. Looking forward, we are just over a year prior to #G*merG*te. Occupy has wound down and Trump is on the horizon. Looking back, we’re a few years past the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami. We’re also a couple years into the 3DS lifecycle, and it is arguably at its peak. We’re about a half-decade removed from the codification of indie games through things like Indie Game: The Movie, Xbox Live Arcade, and games like Geometry Wars, Braid, and World of Goo. We’re about equally far from the housing market crash that instigated the Great Recession, and the new economy that reclassifies many young workers into shift work is consolidating. The previous year, Level-5 had released the previous game in this compilation series – Guild01, which featured contributions from Suda51, Yoot Saito, Yasumi Matsuno, and the comedian Yoshiyuki Hirai. 2012 also saw Shinzo Abe return to the Prime Minister position after a period of instability in political leadership beginning around 2007. All of which is to say: 2013 was a weird year. Or, more specifically, one that could reasonably be looked back on as another moment of codification. At the individual level and at the structural. That reflection on the way a moment of instability was resolved, in other words, seems about as timely as possible. Stay tuned for the final quotation of this episode, which does a fairly good job of being absolutely relevant to both periods, as well.
There’s an argument to be made out of these last two points, regarding the genre and the temporal positioning of the game. The “key moments” that Austin referenced only arise out of flux. The genre must be stabilized when it no longer conveys what it was once meant to. That is to say, when the world changes around it. And the world changes around it, most often and acutely, in the periods after explicit crises of capitalism. That is, when things have finally contracted to their new normal in order to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
This is why I call this one of my favorite pieces of genre criticism. Not because it is full of original arguments, but because it takes this game, a third of a compilation, released on hardware that was not at the cutting edge, and distills certain important arguments. We’ve gone far afield here, but lets go slightly farther, briefly. In these first three episodes, the major thread has been authorship. This series, the Guild games, does not exist without at least a nascent belief that games have authors of one kind or another. It trades on the appearance of Suda51, creator of Killer7 and No More Heroes, in the first game, and Keiji Inafune, most famous for Mega Man, in the second. Attack of the Friday Monsters exists because Kaz Ayabe, the designer, was famous in Japan for a series of games whose title translates to My Summer Vacation. That lineage doesn’t start with Shigesato Itoi, but he’s an important inflection point. Were it not for Mother, with its opening credits and its mountain, this game may very well not exist.
To get back to the essay at hand, though. Austin brings up the opening title card to the game, which reads, in part, “The giant monsters of the era were ‘kaiju’ that often symbolized the effects of pollution, such as radiation and hydrogen bomb experiments. In the 1960s and 70s, the ‘hero show’ was born. Brave heroes challenged the kaiju on prime time television, and the entire nation tuned in.” His take on this,
“Here, Kaiju films aren’t being ‘reduced’ to readings about ecological concern, but those readings are being recognized and reintroduced alongside their eventual displacement by the fantastic and the heroic. From this starting point, Friday Monsters stages the moment of that displacement from within the realm of a Kaiju story.”
What I find of importance here is never explicitly stated in the essay. Austin has done the work up to this point to establish that genres themselves are history. They’re history in the sense of trace elements that repeat across texts, which become capable of becoming a story in retrospect. But they’re also history, as in things that happened in the past. This genre signified one thing, and of course it also signified others. But the conditions shifted, and Attack of the Friday Monsters positions itself within that shift.
In describing that shift, Austin begins with the previous era.
“Friday Monsters divides the Kaiju genre into two eras. For most of the game, Fuji no Hana is a town of misdirection and illusion. No one is ever really hurt. The ‘monsters’ aren’t just a sign of ecological concern, they are literally industrial creations: smoke flowing up from factories into our air. Our hope against the monsters is dispersed, governmental, as they are battled by the fantastically named, ‘Guardians! Blue Planet Defense Force,’ a (fictional) military force. The ‘pilots’ of the space age warplanes are never on screen, themselves, but their planes roar through the air to attack the monster. They are actors, standing in as assurance that we as a people can fight off whatever disaster comes our way–even the ones that sprang from our own assembly lines.”
He then goes on to describe the way in which that shift happens, at least according to the game’s narrative. You are playing a young boy named Sohta, discovering the truth about these monsters. Your father, you find out by the end of the game, is a hero. And there’s a character named Frank, who is a businessman from beyond the stars sent to make sure your hero father provides a proper return on investment. He ends up summoning a real monster to force Sohta’s dad out of hiding.
“Megami, the local TV producer[,] gets it all on tape. She sees the children’s excitement for Cleaner Man and realizes that this isn’t just an incident that will make a good episode for her current show, but that it’s a new model that will set precedent for a whole new take on the genre. In the game’s epilogue she tells Sohta that in her new show, Cleaner Man will be the center of the action. She has, says the game’s narrator, ‘[discovered] that her career was about providing inspiration to children.’ Instead of focusing on the giant monsters–and all the pollution, nuclear war, and terror that those call to mind–this new show will be optimistic, focusing on great individuals overcoming adversity.”
This, then, is where that shift actually takes place. And it happens to fall into place for a variety of interests simultaneously. Intergalactic investors want a return. Sohta wants the truth about his new town, and his father. The television station wants ratings. All of these things manage to come to pass. But this is a bittersweet game, after all. The piece goes on,
“There is clearly a double movement here. At the textual level, things become brighter. Sohta’s father lives up to his potential and realizes his dream of being a hero. Frankasaurus is driven away for good. The personal dramas that Sohta has been involving himself in … all find resolution: the bully opens up emotionally and integrates with the other kids; a father and daughter reconcile; the aliens that are in town decide to assimilate instead of leaving.
“But there is a second more sinister movement, as well. As one of the game’s characters stares out at the sunset after the game’s climax, she wonders aloud ‘It’s a kind of a blood covered sun, isn’t it?’ Sohta’s response, ‘What kind of blood?’ is hard to read–is it a child focusing on specific details instead of the big picture, or the voice of a young boy stepping towards maturity, considering the costs of change? ‘The human kind,’ she says. She’s right immediately, of course: Actors have been hurt in the battle, town property destroyed. But the exchange can be read in terms of a long term cost, too–especially given that the epilogue chapter is titled ‘A False Peace.'”
At this point, I’m largely done editorializing. The end to this piece stands on its own very well. I do want to say, though, that the integration of the story with the genre elements is not as rare as I might have made it seem. If you go just by this podcast, you’re missing a significant thread in the original essay. Consider that my recommendation to have read it, or to read it now.
As is now custom, we’ll close out this discussion with a quote from the original piece.
“What is this new world we’re left with? It’s one that replaces ecological concern with optimistic individualism (and which does so for the sake of TV ratings.) It’s one where special effects aren’t enough, where real human blood is spilled in order to establish heroes. Perhaps most frustrating of all, it’s a world where a hero rises to prominence on a con. Cleaner Man is only necessary because interstellar machinations created a worthwhile threat from whole cloth. We’ve replaced works that are concerned with weapons and technologies of mass destruction with ones that idolize a wholly unnecessary one.
“It is to Attack of the Friday Monsters’ credit that this second movement doesn’t overwrite the first. Another game might luxuriate in these dark connotations, erasing any sense of charm from the game’s world in order to really hammer home the point. But Friday Monsters recognizes that the more interesting position to take is that the two are inseparable. It complicates a simple genre history by recognize what gets left behind, but also by recognizing the endearing qualities of what comes after.”
Next Time:
Into the Dive
Emilie Reed
https://archive.org/details/Arcade_Review_Issue_2/page/n11
