The Far Shore

[droqen]

Regarding Adam Hammond's
"The Far Shore"

[droqen]

P167..168

I never did become a gamer. . . . For the first couple of months. . . I loved how designed and purposeful the worlds felt. Everything was there for a reason: if there was a piece of fabric on the ground, it was so that you could use it as a kite; if a tower could be climbed, it was so that you could use your kite to hang-glide off to another land. It struck me that this was what it must be like to really believe in God.

[droqen]

P168..169

But the games were also frustrating. If I got stuck, If I got lost, if I couldn't beat a boss, if the God of this world seemed indifferent to my adventures, I would lose my temper. . . later I'd lie awake in bed, adrenaline pumping, wondering why I hadn't just read a book instead.

Eventually, that's what I started doing. I remember the sheer relief . . . I didn't get mad, I learned some odd new words, and eventually the act of reading put me to sleep.

[droqen]

I'd almost like to say Hammond misses the point of games here but he doesn't—he captures it, part of it, well. But I expect he is about to contrast JETT against this image of games, this limited perspective... If JETT can have freed Hammond from his idea of games as artifacts only for submitting to the values of a system and feeling wrong for going the other way, then that's a success, of course. And maybe it can do the same for others.

[droqen]

P190-191

The reader of a modernist novel complains to its author, 'I don't get it. It's confusing. I'm not sure how I should feel about it. I don't know who to like or which characters are good or evil. I'm not even sure what's happening.' To which the modernist author responds, 'You're welcome.'
     Accepting complexity doesn't lead to statis --- to the reader throwing up their hands in despair, giving up --- but to a new form of action. Once you've seen that uncertainty is inevitable, the next step is to navigate it. What modernist literature teaches its readers to do, in the words of the philosopher, Chantal Mouffe, is to 'decide within an undecidable terrain.' The world is complex and ambiguous; there are no simple answers, no absolutely correct paths. But still, some decisions are better than others, and you need to have the intelligence and the strength and resolve to identify those, commit to them, and carry them through. That is the lesson of modernist fiction --- the process that it models.

[droqen]

There's a part earlier on between some of these quotes that I thought was worth pulling out, really reflected how I feel about this book as a whole, for better or worse:

P.164

[Andy said,] 'Vacation from work for me is just working on a different thing.' This was the working artist's perspective --- the perspective of the ones who stick with it, who keep making art . . . It was also the perspective of Craig and Patrick. They wanted four things, all related.

• to feed their families
• to feed their compulsion for making stuff
• to make the stuff that they wanted to make
• for the stuff they made to be good.

This . . . was to be distinguished from the journalist's imperative --- my imperative, as Andy repeatedly implied in the politest manner possible --- which was to place neat labels on the stuff that artists made, to build an efficient filing cabinet for their productions. It was also to be distinguished from the fan's imperative --- also mine, as Andy also politely implied --- which was all about identity, about building a community for yourself, finding out who you are by finding other people who like the same stuff as you. Andy didn't care about labels and he didn't need a fan community to tell him who he was.

Hmm.

[droqen]

I can't tell if I disagree with Andy at the end here (which Andy is this, anyway? I know some Andys) or if I disagree with the version of him as 'neatly labelled' by Hammond but this entire last paragraph is all about labels -- those people, filed away neatly in "Andy's" mind, have been labelled. Maybe he doesn't explicitly place a label on himself, but that's very different from not caring about labels. To run away from is still to care about.

Is Hammond not also an artist in his own right, feeding things, making things, hoping to make something good? Adam Hammond, are you reading this? Do you think you're not an artist, or are you presenting Andy's thoughts here with an irony that I'm only too hesitantly picking up on?

[droqen]

JETT doesn't sound like my kind of game. Sword & Sworcery wasn't, either.

I hope it's somebody's.