Uplink 2

August 2005

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Contents:

• "A Sword Day, A Red Day"

• Middle-Earth as Game-world

• Tolkien and the Culture of Empire

• Postcolonial Middle-earth

• Mobile gaming

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Uplink 2 Introduction

This issue of Uplink takes a step back into the cinematic past, in order to descry the video future, by examining one of the most enduring well-springs of videogame culture: the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. We’ll also take a first look at the rise of the cellphone as a legitimate gaming platform – a phenomenon which will have almost unimaginable consequences for game production and consumption. Finally, we’ve updated our site with a raft of new features and links.

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“A Sword Day, A Red Day”

"Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." -- Galadriel speaking to Frodo in Lothlorien. Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson 2001.

          Future cultural historians will marvel at the fortuitous constellation of talent, technology, and sheer luck which enabled Peter Jackson’s merry band of media outlaws to create the Lord of the Rings trilogy. What could easily have degenerated into a hackneyed costume epic was elevated by Jackson’s break-neck pacing, the superb scriptwriting of Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, Howard Shore’s world-class score, and a raft of talented actors, designers, artists and studio technicians into one of the indispensable meditations on the dawning post-American world. The trilogy not only pastiched the WW I trench war and WW II aerial combat films, the Japanese monster movie, and the independent US horror movies of the 1970s, it also drank deeply from the mass-cultural well of Tolkien lore (most notably, the wondrous artwork of Alan Lee).

          Yet the films did more than just confirm the wisdom of Fredric Jameson’s comment on postmodernism, namely that in the multinational world-system, it is once again possible for great works of art to be a commercial success, in a manner inconceivable to the high modernisms. The true form of Jackson’s creation – the ten-hour odyssey of the extended-play movies – could not exist without the DVD revolution. Since the arrival of the DVD format in 1995, annual DVD rentals and sales have grown to become roughly twice as large as box office revenues in the major media markets of the US, East Asia and the EU. Whereas the restoration of deleted or cut footage was formerly a process which took decades, Jackson’s team compressed decades into months, by shooting far more footage than could possibly fit the theatrical films, and then adding post-production effects to the extended-play versions as needed. The storage capacity of the DVD format also allowed for that interesting new genre, the prepackaged film commentary and documentary, to shine as never before, in the form of a plethora of revealing commentaries and interviews with the cast and crew.

          Unfortunately, the splendor of Jackson’s achievement stands in stark contrast to the paltriness of the official Tolkien-based videogames. This is only partly due to the complexity of the storyline, or the undeniable reality of “Tolkien fatigue”, i.e. the fact that so many adventure and occult thriller games brim with overt and covert references and adaptations of Tolkien’s fictional Middle-earth. Even the best of the Tolkien games, namely EA’s licensed trilogy, despite its wealth of visuals, stellar voice-acting and a gripping musical score, stumble on the fundamental disjunction between cinematic and videogame aesthetics – namely, that the former must be watchable, while the later must be playable.

          This does not mean that games must feature non-stop frenetic action. Rather, games must abrogate clock-time, by allowing players to move at their own pace through the game-world. All too often, however, the EA games devolve into timer-based puzzles or treadmill races against the clock. This is understandable, given the enormous pressure on EA’s design team to deliver a series of spinoff videogames concurrent with the theatrical release of the films. Yet one of the fundamental pleasures of Middle-Earth is simply walking around and seeing the sights (the other is, of course, telling tales about sights unseen, or yet to be seen). A simple walk through the stone gardens of Minas Tirith chatting with Gandalf would have been a more compelling narrative experience than kicking yet another round of orc ladders from the castle walls. It is no accident that the one game episode which worked precisely as it should have was also the one which diverged the most from the films: this was the Southern Gate sequence of The Return of the King game, where the flow of enemies in the open field and the clear, additive set of goals made the sequence entertaining and enjoyable.

          Now that EA has acquired the commercial rights to the Tolkien source-texts, one hopes that they spend the time and resources necessary to create games worthy of the original. There is a hopeful model for this, namely Sony’s splendid adaptation of Greek myth in God of War, which borrows just what it needs from the existing mythologies and Hollywood costume epics, while focusing on its own unique forms of game-play (including wall-climbing and roll-dodging). A Middle-earth teeming with visual wonders would also be the perfect showpiece for the mind-boggling graphical capacities of the next-generation consoles.

Middle-Earth as Game-world

          Videogames as a genre owe an enormous debt to Tolkien’s trilogy, everywhere from role-playing and adventure games, to science fiction scenarios of social-historical gods and natural-historical monsters. Most of all, videogames inherited the notion of the post-national game-world from Tolkien – the idea of a cultural universe which creatively interpolates several different national cultures and a range of aesthetic forms into a single unified framework, into a world which must be explored and mapped out, its mythologies rediscovered, its mysteries unraveled. Yet this debt is not a license to uncritically celebrate what is positive about that legacy, while quietly discarding what is problematic. Every work of art of substance – and Tolkien’s trilogy is such a work – is ultimately accountable to its historical moment, though not in the narrow, moralizing way this is usually expressed, i.e. the view that a work of art must uphold, embody or express allegiance to a given value-structure, organization or social group or class. Rather, works of art must productively express the contradictions of those value-structures, organizations and social classes.

          Tolkien’s work is saturated with such productive contradictions, and one of the most striking of these is the contradiction between the pervasive racism, sexism and imperialism of the trilogy with its profound destabilization of all these things. The big men turn out to be frail and weak, while the little women turn out to be courageous and heroic; where the might of wizards fails, the unobtrusiveness of hobbits succeeds; victory comes not through the quantitative force of arms, but through the qualitative force of solidarity. In narrative terms, Tolkien recuperated the pastoral, the picaresque, the epic, the adventure tale, the neo-national religious allegory, the existentialist narrative, and the WW I and WW II journalistic dispatch from the standpoint of a new kind of geopolitical narrative – or what might be called the anti-colonial unconscious of the British Empire.

          This is powerfully relevant to the contemporary videogame culture, which thrives on such cultural fusions, adaptations and occasionally subversive reversals. One of the most interesting features of multinational culture is the way it promotes new forms of monopoly-national culture, that is to say, indigenous varieties of consumerism, everywhere from the consumer cultures of the new members of the European Union to the online gaming culture of East Asia, and from India’s Bollywood films to the cellphone and video culture of West Africa. These cultures are neither simple clones of Hollywood or Americanization, nor free-floating transnational entities devoid of links to national and regional cultures, but are multinational entities, aimed at a multinational audience. Thus Bollywood films have a long and successful history of being exported to the East Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Southeast Asia; South Korean producers dominate China’s bourgeoning online gaming culture; Japanese anime and videogame producers are popular all across East Asia, and so forth.

          To adequately critique these new cultural forms requires more than a superficial acquaintance with their regional setting. It requires, above all, an understanding of their occasional similarities and deep-seated differences vis-a-vis the US culture-industry which served as their template – which is a polite way of saying, a grasp of the decline of the US Empire. Today’s Bollywood musicals are closer to South Korea’s epic online games than to the classic Hollywood musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; contemporary Japanese anime is closer to Eastern Europe’s thriving videogame culture than to the 1940s Disney film.

          What makes Tolkien especially relevant today is the fact that he so effectively mapped out the anxieties of a British Empire on the verge of its mid-20th century collapse, thereby anticipating the cultural moment when the US Empire is faced with its early 21^st century dissolution. One of the genuine achievements of the videogame culture is its capacity to narrate the US decline as something other than the natural-historical catastrophes so gleefully portrayed by the Hollywood science fiction invasion and disaster films. Truly great games take a page out of Tolkien’s playbook, by rewriting mythical natural histories into an emancipatory social history, everywhere from Gordon Freeman’s guerilla war against an interstellar neocolonialism in Half Life to Max Payne’s supercharged assault on the eyrie of Wall Street neoliberalism, all the way to Dante’s repudiation of East Asia’s own uniquely demonic neoliberalism in Devil May Cry.

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Tolkien and the Culture of Empire

          That said, Tolkien’s trilogy also has a great deal to answer for, namely its qualified ratification of Anglo-American imperialism – something which is not without consequences for today’s videogame culture. Most of Tolkien’s characters are complex combinations of Anglo-American tropes or stereotypes: the elves, for example, combine Norman hauteur with a positively Gaelic penchant for song and lore, shorn of the latter’s anti-colonial wit and humor, while the hobbits are an idealized yeoman peasantry, mysteriously free of feudal landlords. Somewhat further afield, the dwarves are clearly a combination of the parsimonious Scotch and the coal-mining Welsh, while the riders of Rohan are breezily mobile Americans, without the overwhelming industrial muscle of the 1940s US.

          The history of Middle-earth displays a similar interweaving of a mythic British history with allegorical 20^th century geopolitics. The ancient land of Numenor is a rewriting of ancient Rome, the split between the northern and southern lines of the Dunedain mirrors the rivalry of the Tudors during the Wars of the Roses, the decline of Moria parallels the long decline of the British coal mining industry, while the great battle at the end of the First Age clearly symbolizes World War I.

          What is missing in all this is, of course, the overwhelming fact of 19^th and 20^th century imperialism. At its peak, the British Empire controlled one quarter of the Earth’s population, including most of the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Another quarter was ruled by the less extensive imperialisms of Western Europe (primarily those of France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands, with token participation by Italy and Germany), the US, and Japan. Tolkien’s life was intricately interwoven with the cultural and military superstructures of Empire, everywhere from his childhood in a British-controlled South Africa still reeling from the aftermath of the Boer War, to his experience as an artillery officer in WW I, all the way to his professional occupation as a first-class philologist at a prestigious British university.

          Although Tolkien’s research gave him the tools to endow his Middle-earth cultures with real-world resonance and depth, it also limited his insight into the Empire. Tolkien’s linguistic skills were formidable, but entirely limited to a European context: he knew old and middle English, Finnish, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, modern and medieval Welsh, Danish, Lombardic, Norwegian, Swedish, various Germanic and Saxon dialects, various Dutch dialects, Old Slavonic, Lithuanian and Russian. Tolkien did not know French, Arabic or Turkish, nor any of the major Eastern European, African or Asian languages. This is most apparent in the despicable racism of Mordor’s Black Speech, whose consonant clusters read like a demented parody of Turkish or Arabic – beautiful, intricately poetic languages in their own right. There are no ugly languages, there are only ugly ideologies of language, and it should surprise noone to discover that two of the primary models for Tolkien’s Elvish language were real-world Finnish and Welsh.

          In general, Jackson’s films do a fine job of repudiating Tolkien’s fantasy-linguistics of a Nordic whiteness. Though there are a few glaring exceptions – the most egregious is the moment when Gandalf refers to “the Black Speech of Mordor” at the meeting at Rivendell – the movies consistently dispel the worst micropolitical aspects of Tolkien’s trilogy. Jackson’s orcs are no longer Tolkien’s loping, leering racist caricatures of Britain’s colonial peoples, but cyborg-like demons, the mass products of a diseased whiteness, who speak in a Britannic English straight out of a pirate movie (covert acknowledgment that the real pirates of the Caribbean were the British traders who grew rich off the triangular trade of rum, tobacco and sugar produced by slaves and sold to British and American consumers). Similarly, Sauron is no longer a simple anagram of Fascism, but is now $auron, the avatar of an all-seeing Americanization bent on transforming the Earth into a blasted moonscape of burning oil wells.

          Significantly, one of the commentary tracks on the extended-play DVDs reveals that the production team even toyed with the idea of showing Sauron battling Aragorn in person before the Gates of Mordor (instead, Aragorn fights a huge troll). Sauron was supposed to appear as a stunningly handsome 14-foot warrior, clad in shining raiment – the latter-day incarnation of whiteness, rather like Wyndham Lewis’ Sammael in Malign Fiesta. While Jackson wisely chose to stick to the novel’s original ending, due to the necessity of maintaining the narrative tension of the hobbits’ climb up Orodruin, the films have a keen insight into what was hearteningly progressive and what was scarily regressive in Tolkien’s text.

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Postcolonial Middle-earth

          One of the fundamental tasks facing videogame criticism is the acknowledgment that gaming aesthetics – just like film, video, music and all the other branches of multinational culture – is irrevocably enmeshed in the political struggles and narratives of the world semi-peripheries and peripheries. The reason is that the core economies of the US, the EU and East Asia are integrated with the semi-peripheries and true peripheries of the world-system as never before, everywhere from trade and capital flows to cultural exchange, and from tourism to immigration. Videogames which do not – or cannot – acknowledge this reality, fall prey to precisely the provincialism and neo-national regression which the ideologists of Empire arrogantly condemn the periphery for. This is not to say that all videogames speak directly to the audience of the periphery; it is, rather, to argue that the greatest videogames narrate the fault-lines between the metropole and the periphery of the post-Cold War world in a concrete form.

          As it turns out, there is a model for this in Jackson’s films. One of the little-known preconditions for Jackson’s achievement was the tension between New Zealand’s ambiguous geopolitical status as an Anglo-Saxon settler colony, equidistant between a senescent US Empire and a rising East Asia, and the postcolonial politics of New Zealand’s indigenous Maoris, who have been struggling for their rights, history and language for centuries.¹ One of the key achievements of this struggle has been the emergence of a flourishing Maori aesthetics, including films such as Niki Caro’s superb Whale Rider. Based on a novel by Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, Caro’s film transforms the ecological allegory of Peter Jackson’s Ents into a riveting fable of decolonization, wherein the bodies of the whales play the same mediating role as the giant Ohmu in Hayao Miyazaki’s magnificent Nausicaa comic strip.

          Jackson’s strategy pays its greatest dividends in the opening shot of The Return of the King, which recounts Smeagol’s corruption by the Ring. In Tolkien’s original text, Smeagol’s murder of Deagol is very much the allegorical fall of the pastoral British landed gentry under the bane of the Ring, that gilded symbol of capital (if Numenor was the equivalent of Rome, then Isildur’s dominion is roughly equivalent to the Hapsburg Empire). What Jackson’s version gives us is the Maori version of the same story: the arrival of the Ring (read: British colonialism) signifies not merely the triumph of the cash nexus, but also what the official British national histories leave out – the violent disruption of a traditional farming and fishing culture and the catastrophic fall into the maelstrom of the world-market, as British imperialism used its colonial plunder to jump-start the world’s first industrial revolution.

          Surprising as it may sound, there are intriguing anticipations of this move in Tolkien’s text. For one thing, Tolkien has his own version of an indigenous or Fourth World resistance movement, namely the Wild Men or Woses, forest nomads who play a key role in helping Rohan’s cavalry to ride to Gondor’s rescue. For another, one of the iconic pleasures – and products – of the hobbit world is tobacco leaf, a.k.a. the famed Longbottom Leaf, which is also prominently displayed in the films. Tobacco was grown in the Empire’s tropical colonies, not in the middle of rural England, a climatological anachronism which suggests that the scouring of the Shire is something like is the imaginary or utopian reconciliation of the British commonwealth with post-WW II decolonization and anti-colonial revolution.

          Yet if the melting of the Ring is indeed, at its outermost limit, an allegory of the worldwide 1945-1947 Left upsurge and the onset of decolonization, then there is a way to read Tolkien’s ode to Elvendom against its own imperialist grain. Jackson gives us an important clue, in the stark cliff-scenery of the Paths of the Dead sequence. This is the same scenery he previously shot for the opening of his 1991 cult horror classic Dead Alive, where an obnoxious animal collector inadvertently transmits the blood-curse of neocolonialism to contemporary New Zealand.² But whereas Dead Alive never quite names neocolonialism for what it is, the extended-play version of The Return of the King explicitly showcases Aragorn’s promise to free the ghosts of Dunharrow from their purgatory, if they rescue Gondor. This is the belated recognition of the labor-force which defeated the Axis powers in WW II: the millions of South Asian and African soldiers who served in the British and French army, the millions of Soviet citizens who fought in the Red Army, and the millions more who fought the Japanese Empire to a standstill in China. These soldiers would later ignite the anti-colonial revolutions of the post-WW II era, and in this sense Jackson’s version of Aragorn is closer to Mao or Ho Chi Minh than to Churchill or Eisenhower.

          If Theoden’s cry to the riders of Rohan – “A red day, a sword day” – is unconscious recognition of the mighty contribution of the Red Armies and Communist guerilla movements to the defeat of Fascism, then there is indeed a real world equivalent for Tolkien’s imaginary world of Elvish song and lore. The first Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to an Asian writer was none other than Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet and author, who deserves wider recognition as one of the titanic figures of the modernist era. Tagore transformed Bengali into a world language via a mind-boggling outpouring of poetry, plays, novels and short stories, and some of his greatest contributions came in the form of over two thousand songs.

          Tolkien’s Elves, with their deep sense of history and proclivity for song and poetry, bespeak the same Orientalism which led Western Europeans to give such a warm welcome to Tagore (admittedly, for all the wrong reasons, i.e. as a way of domesticating the latter as a paragon of eternal Eastern mysticism, instead of the deeply subversive modernist he was). Tolkien’s benevolent West is really the historical East, and his predatory East is really an anagram of the imperialist West. To rethink colonial Bengal as the heart of Tolkien’s Elvendom – that is both the dialectical paradox at the heart of Tolkien’s trilogy, as well as an injunction upon all future recuperations of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Only by negating Empire and its accompanying identity-politics of racialized whiteness, militarized patriarchy and neoliberal accumulation, can the videogame culture do justice to the concrete realities of multinational capitalism.

Endnotes

1. While the Maori struggle officially dates back to the 1840s, the issue of land repatriation and compensation continues to be a live wire in New Zealand today. One of the outstanding issues in New Zealand’s 2005 general election, for example, is the question of whether Maori land claims should be limited by a certain date, past which no further claims can be filed.

2. Dead Alive was a rollicking mishmash of domestic comedy, action thriller, and lawnmower mayhem, all keyed to the registers of a deft anti-Thatcherite satire. What the movie lacked in geopolitical insight, it compensated for by a subversive micropolitics: the protagonist and his Italian immigrant girlfriend (the embryonic form of Aragorn and Arwen) faced off against an undead Thatcherism, identified with the accumulation of landed property and rooted in a settler colonialism which grotesquely deforms and colonizes all it touches. For Jackson connoisseurs, it’s worth noting that the final close shots of the chimney escape anticipate Frodo’s ordeal in Cirith Ungol.

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Mobile Gaming

          To paraphrase the G-man in the introduction of Half Life 2, the right console in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. Mobile gaming is here to stay, but the story of Nokia’s game console is an instructive reminder of why cell gaming will be different from its PC and console versions – and why, despite the N-gage’s rocky start, Nokia remains a formidable competitor in the game business.

          The original N-Gage had a variety of design problems – most notably, a clunky battery design and a limited palette of games. Most of these problems have been rectified, though, and Nokia has gone on to sell well over a million N-gage phones. Critics of Nokia’s strategy often forget that the company never had the slightest intention of competing directly with the handheld consoles of Nintendo and Sony. Rather, Nokia was more interested in creating a niche market capable of spawning innovations elsewhere in the cell market. Simply, the game culture is going online, and cellphones are going global. Nokia realized, very early on, that the cell phones of the future will be portable, online entertainment devices. Here are some of the numbers:

Table 1. The Celling of the World.

Source: International Telecommunications Union, Web: www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics

The shift to cell games has been boosted by the arrival of color screens in cellphones. Although color screens were relatively rare in 2002, they were standard equipment by the end of 2004. By 2006, cellphones will offer an unbeatable combination of mobility, utility, and world market share for videogames.

          This is not to argue that cellphones will replace videogame consoles or handhelds, but simply to note that cell games will form their own unique market niche, which will supplement the existing videogame culture in interesting ways. Id Software’s legendary lead programmer, John Carmack, has a useful commentary on the software limitations facing action-based cell games in his March 27^th entry, Cell Phone Adventures.

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