This video will be dedicated to the commenters
who told me that calling Nazis “sad nerds”
was the reason I would never be taken seriously.
No. This is the reason I will never be taken
seriously. Since this video is my october
essay, I wanted to cover a spoooooky topic.
So let’s discuss the spooookiest topic possible
- the exploitation of the proletariat by the
capitalist class.
Section 1: Introduction
I need to talk about a really serious issue
here, that I’ve seen in a lot of games now.
This is something that’s honestly holding
back a lot of 8 or 9 games from being solid
10s. There are pieces of media here - pieces
of art - that are compassionate and clever
and rich, but they just fall down again and
again in this one place. I’m talking of
course about the Adam Driver Creator.
It takes me sometimes 2 or even 3 hours to
make something even vaguely resembling Adam
Driver, or even in some games I never make
anything all that close, and I think we can
all agree that’s totally unacceptable.
I come into so many games so excited but I’m
playing and I’m just so distracted by what
a poor Adam Driver the game let me create.
What the fuck kind of representation is that
of the most handsome man in the world? Pitiful.
Do better Bloodborne.
Let’s get real about the Adam Driver Creator
guys. What we need here is clearly a multiple
point system to create a nose, a jawline,
and general face shape. We need to make that
specific face shape - wide upper jaw, square
chin, NASA rocket nose. I’ve never seen
a preset that comes close. A set of sliders
isn’t going to cut it in some cases. I can’t
even make his ears stick out. What kind of
Adam Driver am I going to create if I can’t
even make his ears stick out? No kind of Adam
Driver at all.
FROM Software, I’m talking to you directly
now: Ditch all of your existing facial hair
presets. I can see what you were going for,
some of them are pretty close to actual facial
hair Adam Driver has had, but some of them…
jeez. A full beard? When has Adam Driver ever
worn a full beard? Ridiculous. And the hairstyles?
I mean one or two of them… there’s a pretty
good Kylo Ren in there, but where’s the
weird bowl cut? Nowhere. That’s where. 3
out of 10.
Bloodborne was released in 2015 by From Software.
It is an instalment in the From Software “Soulsborne”
series, although it may or may not actually
take place in the same universe as the Dark
Souls and Demon’s Souls games. Unlike the
other games, Bloodborne is set in a city resembling
an 1800s European city, for example Victorian
London. The other games were set in European-Medieval-style
landscapes, or Tolkienesque fantasy worlds.
We all have things we’re afraid of, and
that’s a provable fact because all of them
are in Bloodborne. Bloodborne has some really
gross, creepy enemies. Luckily for me the
thing I’m most afraid of didn’t make the
final cut.
Bloodborne is enormously popular - it’s
almost universally hailed as totally fantastic.
Almost everywhere I’ve seen it reviewed
and rated, it has over 90% approval from the
gaming community. Let’s see if I can change
that shall we: Bloodborne is an allegory for
how Capitalism ruins everything.
Section 2: Aggressive Readings
In Sinistar or: How to Play Games Wrong, Big
Joel explains quite adeptly why authorial
intent and video games have a really strained
relationship.
I think that’s the best way to describe
it - the author’s intentions aren’t completely
absent from every game, they just have a really
strained relationship. Authorial Intent never
really got to achieve everything it wanted,
and it has this degree in art history, but
Video Games is the one paying the bills, so
they always do what Video Games wants to do,
and Authorial Intent is always trying to get
Video Games to notice something really clever
it’s done, and Video Games feels stressed
at work because it has this dickhead boss
and you’re in the back of the car while
there’s all this tension between them and
you don’t understand why, and you already
asked Authorial Intent earlier if you could
go to blockbuster and it said no but you thought
you might get a different answer if you asked
Video Games and you didn’t mean to make
them start fighting again you just really
wanted to go to blockbuster… I’m sorry,
I just need a minute…
So I’d like to talk about how I sometimes
read something “aggressively”. What I
basically mean by this is, as an extension
of the “death of the author” concept - sometimes
it’s okay to know that the author of a piece
doesn’t have the intention you are talking
about. If you can demonstrate that the reading
of that piece of media you’re putting forth
has some value, then it’s a good reading.
I want to use this term, “an aggressive
reading” separately to “death of the author”,
because the assumption that “death of the
author” sets out to counter is that the
author’s intention is the correct interpretation
of the work, and the way a lot of people use
“death of the author” now is to argue
why their interpretation is the correct interpretation.
An “aggressive reading” isn’t supposed
to be the correct interpretation, but instead
a valid interpretation.
A lot of you may be asking Isn’t this just
an excuse for you to insert your shitty political
hot takes into Video Games without any accountability?
…
Because Video Games and Authorial Intent have
such a strained relationship, I think they’re
a really ideal medium to apply this analytical
concept. The case I most want to examine today
is of course, a reading of Bloodborne. I’ll
say once again, I’m not trying to claim
this is what Bloodborne is “about”, I
just think this reading has some value. Here’s
the interpretation: Bloodborne is allegory
for exploitation of the worker under capitalism.
Before we get around to that I’d like to
look at a couple of examples of aggressive
readings to just get totally on the same page.
It’ll be easiest to get my point across
if I can relate it to a piece of media everyone
knows really well, and so of course I’m
going to talk about the mobile app game Idle
Miner Tycoon.
Idle Miner is an app game in the popular genre
known as “idle clickers” - the idea being
that the main interaction with the game is
simply clicking - at first you click to gather
in-game currency and then after some time
you use the currency to buy things that make
your clicking redundant, therefore allowing
you to be “idle”.
This is an absolutely huge game genre, and
it has been for a few years now. Youtuber
Simulator was really popular a while back
I think - I don’t know I didn’t play it,
when I want to accurately simulate being a
Youtuber I play Overwatch and say racial slurs
on Twitch.
A lot of idle clicker games are those basic
mechanics that I discussed just before, plus
some In-App Purchases for if you want to skip
ahead and not have to wait as long, dressed
up in some sort of narrative or other aesthetic
disguise. I say disguise, because the window
dressing of an idle clicker game is the only
thing that distracts you from the fact that
you’re just wasting time clicking on a screen
and occasionally handing over your money to
the developers for essentially nothing.
And that’s where Idle Miner Tycoon comes
in. Idle Miner Tycoon is a game where you
click to set up, you guessed it, a mine, and
then click more to use the profits to expand
your mine or set up more mines. Partly because
Idle Miner has such a simple premise with
no story to speak of, the mining premise seems
oddly metaphorical, as if the game is saying
that the players paying money for in-app purchases
or clicking on ads are the miners, creating
revenue for the mine owner, representing the
developers by just clicking away after the
developers made the initial effort of setting
up the “mine”. It’s also partly because
mining is an industry with a really long history
of exploitation and abuse and battles between
workers’ unions and capitalist bosses. I
guess I just want to know why all the miners
look so happy. No real miner has ever been
this happy to be getting black lung. What
world is this set in?
I actually looked into this a bit more and
I found out that the game was made by a games
company called “Fluffy Fairy Games”, based
in Berlin. Fluffy Fairy Games have only created
one other game, but they seem to still be
active so I’m guessing we may see more of
the same in the future. But Eric you can’t
just say they’re going to keep on making
the same stuff! Good point imaginary contrarian,
except that the other game Fluffy Fairy made
is called Idle Factory Tycoon. Literally just
another thin aesthetic veil over idle clicker
mechanics - again, oddly self-aware metaphor
for worker exploitation.
I did have to go check that these games weren’t
some kind of satire, because honestly, why
do they keep picking like, dickensian forms
of labour as their idle clicker premises?
But that’s exactly my point - that perfect
self-satire wasn’t their intention. There’s
an interview with the creators in which they
discuss making idle clickers as a quick easy
way to make games that turn a profit, with
one of them even describing idle clickers
as “essentially a spreadsheet with an interface”.
Hopefully with this example you can see the
benefit of my aggressive reading - definitely
not the author’s intentions, but what serves
as a better metaphor for the way that idle
clicker games like Idle Miner squeeze profit
out of users than Idle Miner itself?
Now, because I always have to be a debbie-downer,
let’s look at an example of aggressive readings
being used for eeeevil. And by evil I mean
shitty homophobic nonsense. In 1954, Fredric
Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent,
the influence of comics on today’s youth.
Seduction of the Innocent isn’t the gripping
thriller that you may have first thought it
to be. It is instead, a long screed against
comics from a pearl-clutching garbage person.
Think: all the people who today say that video
games are making young people violent only
60 years ago and about comics instead.
Wertham claimed that Wonder Woman’s strength
and independence from men made her a lesbian,
which like, no, being raised on an island
inhabited only by women probably made her
a lesbian. He also claims that there is a
subtext of BDSM fetish play in Wonder Woman,
which firstly the creators were fairly open
about, and secondly, Fredric, I thought you
were trying to make me like comics less.
He even called Superman un-american and fascistic.
Superman? Un-American? Wertham’s clearly
never read the issue were the American government
puts Superman in prison as a baby.
What I really want to talk about though, is
the claim Wertham made that Batman and Robin
contains a subtext for a homosexual relationship.
This spawned decades of cheap, lazy homophobic
jokes about Batman and Robin, and probably
forever tarred a father-son dynamic that was
supposed to be a wholesome and positive relationship
for not just children but also parents to
learn from.
The lesson to take from this example is that
aggressive readings of media have their place,
and that as a valid interpretation instead
of the correct interpretation, they shouldn’t
be attached to that piece of media for life.
If you aggressively read something, then people
can go experience the piece of media that
way and have that experience and keep it at
that.
Taking that idea on to Bloodborne I should
say this: it’s easier for an aggressive
reading to take hold as the “correct interpretation”
when there isn’t already an obvious interpretation
that it has to displace. Luckily I don’t
have to worry about that, because Bloodborne
is notoriously easy to understand, with clear
plot and obvious, uncomplicated lore. Right?
Section 3: What the fuck is going on in Bloodborne?
[bloodborne item descriptions, various]
[many whispering voices read item descriptions]
[Various quotes from Marx' Das Kapital]
[quotes and item descriptions continue]
[murmuring] no
[quotes and item descriptions continue]
[murmuring sleepily] no. no..
[quotes and item descriptions continue]
Only labour adds value. No!
No!
No!
No!
N--
You start Bloodborne by joining the Yharnam
Hunt; Yharnamites are hunting beasts. The
beasts used to be people like them, but something
called the old blood has transformed them.
The hunters are hunting beasts, and the hunters
are becoming beasts too, and since you begun
by taking a transfusion of the old blood,
so are you.
As with any Soulsborne game you get used to
just dying and dying and dying. You’ll even
be standing in the Cathedral Ward area just
admiring the view and a fucking dark portal
will just scoop you up to space, deal you
a bunch of damage for no reason and then throw
you back down, and since you’re so used
to dying you don’t think twice about it.
After you’ve killed a few different bosses
in Bloodborne you’ll make it to Rom the
spider - a big mama spider with lots of horrid
babies. Look away at this point if you don’t
want to see horrid spider babies.
Defeating Rom is a wild ride. You see, Rom
was, by some sort of magic, holding back the
true nature of the world. Rom was keeping
you all from seeing the giant creatures manipulating
you and when she’s gone you can see them.
The Great Ones.
These huge creatures, perhaps cosmic beings,
perhaps cthonic entities, have been watching
you, and everyone else all along. The spooky
dark portal that scooped you up in Cathedral
Ward? That was a Great One just picking you
up in its hand and crushing you. The truly
brilliant thing about the way this twist works
is, you can see the Great Ones before you
defeat Rom, if you have enough insight, which
is an in-game points system. However, when
you can’t see them yet and you get scooped
up in Cathedral Ward, there’s actually a
faint outline of a hand holding you up. You
just weren’t looking to see it, so you probably
missed it the first time. That’s just insanely
cool.
After the main bosses you kill Mergo, an infant
Great One. This was your mission all along.
You were really working for yet another Great
One, known as The Moon Presence or, if you’re
a real fan like me and you know it’s real,
much scarier name, Flora. At this point you
can be executed and reawaken in Yharnam having
forgotten everything, resist and defeat Gehrman
and then Flora turns you into the new Gehrman,
or if you’ve found certain special items
in the game, you can fight Flora and wake
up as a tiny alien squid baby.
Dan Olson made a video a while ago talking
about the deceptive endings of Bloodborne.
What initially seems like the best ending,
reawakening in Yharnam as yourself, is perhaps
the worst, and it all depends on your philosophical
view of the game. The game models Insight,
which I mentioned before, as a kind of madness,
following the Lovecraftian tradition that
if someone learned the deeper truths of the
cosmos they would appear mad to everyone else.
With that in mind, the ending where you reawaken
as a Yharnam hunter is one where you have
no insight any more. The ending where you
become Gehrman allows you to escape that cycle,
but still leaves you in a different trap.
The third ending, although you sacrifice your
humanity, allows you to become one of the
creatures able to actually affect change in
the world. It allows you agency, perhaps control.
There are your three endings, working in service
of the great ones, becoming a middle man to
them, or joining that upper level of existence.
An oblivious oppressed class doing what they
are told by a higher ranking middle class
in service of the interpersonal interests
of the upper class. Okay, now I sound crazy…
or do I just have a higher insight score than
you…
The rich and powerful control the actions
of the working class in myriad ways. Politically,
if you make changes to healthcare, education,
workers’ rights, the benefits system, or
anything that the government is basically
supposed to take care of, you’re going to
affect the actions of the working class.
To me, the invisible, interdimensional creatures
manipulating a group of workers into slaughtering
each other as they continuously imbibe a supposed
magic cure-all from the creatures which ultimately
only makes the situation worse, reads pretty
smoothly as a class system metaphor.
The primary currency system in Bloodborne
is “blood echoes". It's pretty funny considering
that blood, sweat and tears is the idiom we
have to mean labour when we want to conceptualise
labour infused with its product. It's funnier
than that though, because if you've read Kapital
the one takeaway lesson if you get nothing
else is that only labour can create value.
When a business profits, that's labour that
hasn't been paid back to the labourer. So
if value can only come from labour and Bloodborne’s
currency is blood… I dunno... I just think
if I had an alien ask me “what’s a class
system, how does that work” I’d say “it’s
like fucking Bloodborne”. And then they’d
say “What’s a Bloodborne” and I’d
remember they were an alien and I had a lot
more actual explaining to do.
The metaphor goes deeper than that though,
and I mean deeper - there’s a second optional
quest to the game, working through the Pthumerian
chalice dungeons. These are dungeons deep
underneath Yharnam full of exceptionally horrible
critters. In one of the dungeons there is
another Great One, called Ebrietas. Great
Ones are worshipped and revered, but for whatever
reason, she is trapped in the dungeons. Evidence
suggests that other Great Ones ascended to
a higher plane of being, but she didn’t.
I see the dungeons, which are supposed to
give you a window into Yharnam’s past, as
a perfect extension of the metaphor because
what came before Yharnam looks just like what
came before Capitalism: Serfdom, monarchy,
worship. Belief in higher powers and theocratic
societies and hereditary monarchy.
As a brit it’s my duty to see an allegory
for the monarchy in any video game I play,
but as a socialist it’s my duty to compare
the queen to a tentacle monster from space
living underground worshipped by a cult of
the undead.
It works really well for me that the same
Great Ones who were ruling over the Pthumerians
now rule over Yharnam, only secretly, because
again that just reads smoothly like what happened
when Capitalism started to become popular.
As the world industrialised, the power structures
under the top level reorganised and society
became something totally new, but the old
blood changed very little. In Bloodborne a
group of scholars who study the great ones
have a mantra: “Fear the old blood”.
There is a rich and full lore to Bloodborne,
and I shouldn’t go any further without giving
credit to VaatiVidya without whom I honestly
wouldn’t understand a single thing about
Bloodborne beyond the basic plot. I’ve watched
hours and hours of his content, which I’ve
been writing off as valid research for this
video, but he and people like him spend so
many hours more researching by looking in
game files, reading every single item description,
and talking to characters while wearing different
costumes to try to trigger new responses.
From Software don’t like to just lay things
out plainly: you could go through Bloodborne
and get to the end and not really get the
big picture. If you want to understand things
better you really have to engage, and the
more you engage the more you get out. The
game (all the Souls games too) really rewards
curious players.
It’s a strange thing to do, to deny your
players easy access to information - to create
a rich lore and then withhold it unless the
player puts in the effort to read item descriptions
and so on. Or it’s strange, until you discover
that From Software are really big fans of
J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. I mean
credit to them, they made a medieval fantasy
series where you have to do a silly amount
of just walking around, and a cosmic horror
game where you don’t understand anything
that’s going on and feel like a tiny stupid
insect in an indifferent universe, so good
job guys I’m sure they’d both be proud.
I think it’s an interesting approach to
game design - to narrative design that is
- to let people experience a limited story,
with the ability to go and discover more for
themselves that would enrich the main story
of the game. It’s interesting because that’s
how life can be. Your own experience is very
limited, and the “lore” is out there if
you want to go find it. If you don’t, you
could get to the end and say “bloody hell
what was that all about?”
See, now we’re getting towards that part
where I argue why this reading has value.
Let’s explore the allegory a bit more first.
In “White Trash: A 400 year history of class
in America”, Nancy Isenberg talks about
the conditions of the colonies during the
foundational era of America. I’ve recommended
that book before and I’ll just keep doing
it. America has long clung to a myth that
it does not “have” the class system. There
is an idea of a country founded on equality
and freedom where anyone can become totally
self-made. This is hysterically untrue.
The colonies of America were a place for Europe
largely to send people it didn’t want any
more to do labour it didn’t want to do in
order to turn land it owned but didn’t want
into profitable land instead. In 1630, John
White wrote “Colonies ought to be emunctories
or sinks of state; to drain away the filth”.
Nancy Isenberg writes that in 1608 someone
described the poor in London as “dirty and
disfigured monsters living in caves”. When
I read that, the first thing I saw in my mind
was the Yharnam members of the hunt. Around
the same time, the 1610s, someone moving to
America could gain fifty acres of land per
servant they brought, and it didn’t matter
if the servants survived the journey. Someone
would be made incredibly wealthy in exchange
for removing the “idle poor” from European
cities. Debtors, addicts or even children
could be kidnapped from the streets of european
cities and sold into the navy or into indentured
service and sent to America.
It’s worth pointing out that an enemy roaming
the streets in Bloodborne is the Kidnapper.
There are tonnes of Kidnappers, carrying sacks
as they genuinely would have done in the 16
and 1700s. There are parts of this allegory
that I think, fit really well because of the
nature of the lovecraftian genre that From
Software wanted Bloodborne to fit into - the
industrial era setting, the feeling of oppressive
conspiracy.
Another element that fits the allegory really
well is the third ending. The way you get
the third ending and become the tiny alien
squid baby is to collect three of a special
item throughout the game and consume them.
The odds of you completing the game that way
without knowing to look out for it are miniscule,
and the most likely thing that happened if
you did manage that was that you started the
game with some additional knowledge.
It’s ironic that climbing up the metaphorical
social ladder was only really achieved by
most people because they took part in a community
around the game. Most people who got the third
ending will have found out how to through
shared knowledge - therefore through people
working together.
Maybe your ratings of the three endings do
depend on your philosophy, your preference
between humanity and power, but I think it’s
pretty clear that none of the endings are
what you’d call ideal. The best outcome
would be that your new world hasn’t secretly
controlled by alien squids, that the hunters
didn’t murder each other, that Gehrmann
wasn’t trapped in a dream, never quite within
reach of real agency. Wouldn’t it be nicer
if everyone just left the old blood behind?
I don’t necessarily blame the Great Ones
by the way, even if I talk about the system
as them manipulating everyone else. Certainly
some of them are malevolent and some of them
aren’t, but I don’t hate the rich for
being rich, I hate when rich and powerful
people are shitheads. Unfortunately rich people
and powerful people are shitheads a lot of
the time.
It’s a bit anticlimactic isn’t, me not
building to a conclusion where I say eat the
rich? It would work better if I was sticking
to blaming this secret shadowy group who were
manipulating society wouldn’t it? Well the
problem is, there are some people who would
like it better if we could blame one group
who were manipulating us from behind the scenes...
Is he talking about Nazis again?
Sorry guys, I’ve gotta talk about Nazis
again.
Section 4: Madness
The secondary currency in Bloodborne is Insight.
Having more insight will reveal more to you
in the game. There's a lot of that in Bloodborne
- before you discover any messenger accessories
the tree stump behind the church is empty
and the message when you click it says “the
stump is connected to the nightmare, but there
are no messengers" which I found inexplicably
hilarious on my first playthrough so I kept
going back to check the stump and laugh to
myself.
In the lovecraftian tradition, as I said before,
madness is a perceived state of being and
not an internal condition. People appear mad
to others who simply have not discovered the
truth. In his book Madness and Civilization,
Michel Foucault points out that in the past,
before the advent of sanitariums and other
institutions to essentially remove the “insane”
population from the “sane”, the concept
of madness was seen very differently. Madness
was a state that potentially anyone could
go through at any point. With this point of
view the lovecraftian dichotomy between madness
and, as Bloodborne models it “insight”
doesn’t seem unreasonable. The mad are simply
people with a different point of view.
In Bloodborne, the deeper you dive into the
bizarre nightmare world, the more insight
you will naturally gain: When you take your
transfusion of the “old blood” you see
a vision of your beastly self reaching out
to you; after you fight the first mini-boss,
the Cleric Beast, you gain 1 insight and can
see the doll in the Hunter’s Dream as alive;
consume an item called “Madman’s knowledge”
and gain more; 15 insight and you’ll see
new enemies; 40 insight and you can see the
Great Ones even before you defeat Rom; 50
insight and the game actually changes the
musical score in the Hunter’s Dream; 60
insight and the sound of a baby crying follows
you everywhere you go; 100 insight and Hidetaka
Miyazaki watches you every night while you
sleep.
The reason to discuss and think about this
model of insight against madness, I think,
has to do with understanding why other people
have different points of view and different
political beliefs. How many times have you
seen someone you disagree with talking about
their beliefs and reached for the word “crazy”
to describe it. I certainly know there’s
a huge trend among right wing and even centrist
dickheads to describe leftism as a “mental
disorder”.
Leftist Youtuber Angie Speaks just made a
video about conspiracy culture, which is really
good. It got me thinking about how much the
actual way Capitalism functions, the oppression
of workers, would read as a “crazy conspiracy”
to someone if they didn’t believe it. It
also made me think about how easily you could
believe other conspiracy theories if you had
some of the information and not all of it.
It would be like having some amount of Insight,
enough to make the game harder and scarier,
but not enough to properly understand what’s
going on.
The kinds of conspiracies that you might be
drawn to believe in if you can see that the
world is wrong, but can’t see how, or see
that some people get all the money and power,
but don’t understand who, are often extremely
harmful. I’m talking about the Deep State
conspiracy theory, White Genocide, Nazism,
the alt-right conspiracy theories that SJWs
are taking over universities and through universities,
all of society. People who believe those things
could make the same aggressive reading of
Bloodborne I’ve made, just inserting their
views instead. They would maybe claim that
the invisible monsters manipulating the hunt
are jewish elites, or Obama, or blue-haired
SJWs, or Hillary Clinton.
I think a lot that when people learn information,
and the information changes their point of
view, it’s like the discussion around Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein. The common misconception
that the creature in Frankenstein is called
“Frankenstein” has led to lots of people
smugly informing others “Um actually, Frankenstein
is the doctor, not the monster”. I think
there are three people in this situation:
people who think Frankenstein is the monster;
people who know Frankenstein is the doctor;
people who get that Dr. Frankenstein is the
monster.
The people believing that a secret cabal of
jews control the media, or that SJWs are ruining
society with safe spaces and trigger warnings
- those people know that Frankenstein is the
doctor. They have some of the facts, some
understanding of how power, class and money
interact in the world, but the fact they know
they know something lets them think they’re
totally right. They’ve got 15 Insight and
they think they understand the whole game.
The thing is, they aren’t going to have
the whole picture. The thing is, having all
the insight isn’t even going to be enough.
In fact, it might just make the whole world
seem scarier, and leave you to draw the wrong
conclusions entirely. The lore is all out
there if you want to put in the effort, reading
item descriptions and wearing a cauliflower
head to talk to the villager in the DLC just
so he’ll recite a little poem for you. (If
you’re still wondering about this allegory,
the villager is Zizek and the poem is “I
am already eating from the garbage all the
time”.)
You have to read and learn and make that effort.
You have to share what you know and be willing
to receive ideas from people, just not hateful
ones. Some people like to pretend that feminist
ideas are hateful, that SJWs hate men or white
people, but it’s like I said before: I don’t
hate the big squid aliens, I just don’t
think the system should exist. I don’t hate
rich people, just rich people being shitheads.
Feminists and SJWs don’t hate men by default,
just men who are being shitheads.
Section 5: The Canary
Commuting is one of the times that, if you
have a job, especially a job you don’t like
very much, you really feel like a small piece
in a large machine. Some people commute in
different ways to make it more fun, and I
think a part of that really has to do with
not feeling like you’re just part of the
crowd.
The setting of Bloodborne is powerful because
the misery is pungent, and obvious, but at
the same time the system can remain hidden,
at least until the big reveal. Similarly,
I can go to a place like Canary Wharf, near
to where I live, and there isn’t really
one thing I can point my camera at and say
“LOOK! A Capitalism!”.
Canary Wharf is really bizarre and there's
a lot to do with private ownership of public
spaces and the bizarre design I could get
into but there isn't time. Just consider this:
these guys aren't police officers. Police
in the UK look like this. These are private
security. I promise, seriously, they're not
police. These design elements make places
like that really weird in ways that you can't
quite pin down because like I said, you can't
point to the source of it all.
That’s why it can be useful to find a good
metaphor, or allegory.
Places like Canary Wharf are so soulless and
grey and depressing, and the kind of architecture
that demonstrates wealth and power but also
cold efficiency is probably what our era looks
like in the collective cultural mind’s eye.
If there was a modern Soulsborne game, maybe
it would take place in a city of glass and
steel and concrete and plazas with unimaginative,
curated greenery. Maybe the stock enemies
would be men in suits. Just your own custom
Adam Driver versus a thousand haunted, demonic
Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorneys.
Doom 2016 has some explicit anti-corporate
themes, but also, the entire game could be
read in a similar way to what I did here - an
anti-capitalist metaphor. It contains the
same kind of divide-and-conquer workers-tearing-each-other-apart
nightmare as Bloodborne, and the reason is,
basically, Capitalism is that specific kind
of nightmare and so it’s a specific kind
of scary story we relate to. Hbomberguy made
a video about Lovecraft that covered this
stuff pretty well, but just sticking to “aggressive
readings” and the value of seeing this capitalist
metaphor for a second, I’d say that if people
want to understand the nightmare that capitalism
is, a lot of games turn out to be a useful
metaphor, just especially Bloodborne. When
you play most games, you and a bunch of other
low-level mooks fight and kill each other
until you rise up to the level where you can
take on the boss.
In God Bless You Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut,
millionaire adult son of the Rosewater family,
Elliot Rosewater has gone totally craaazy
and wants to help people instead of just managing
his family fortune forever. When his father
comes to find him and talk him out of it they
have an exchange that really lays bare a central
idea of the book:
Elliot: “I think it's terrible the way people
don't share things in this country. The least
a government could do, it seems to me, is
to divide things up fairly among the babies.
There's plenty for everybody in this country,
if we'd only share more.”
Mr. Rosewater: "And just what do you think
that would do to incentive?"
Elliot: “You mean fright about not getting
enough to eat, about not being able to pay
the doctor, about not being able to give your
family nice clothes, a safe, cheerful, comfortable
place to live, a decent education, and a few
good times? You mean shame about not knowing
where the Money River is?”
Mr. Rosewater: "The what?"
Elliot: “The Money River, where the wealth
of the nation flows. We were born on the banks
of it. We can slurp from that mighty river
to our hearts' content. And we even take slurping
lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.”
Mr. Rosewater: "Slurping lessons?"
Elliot: “From lawyers! From tax consultants!
We're born close enough to the river to drown
ourselves and the next ten generations in
wealth, simply using dippers and buckets.
But we still hire the experts to teach us
the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons,
bucket brigades, and the Archimedes' screw.
And our teachers in turn become rich, and
their children become buyers of lessons in
slurping.”
Mr. Rosewater: "It's still possible for an
American to make a fortune on his own."
Elliot: “Sure—provided somebody tells
him when he's young enough that there is a
Money River, that there's nothing fair about
it, that he had damn well better forget about
hard work and the merit system and honesty
and all that crap, and get to where the river
is. 'Go where the rich and powerful are,'
I'd tell him, 'and learn their ways. They
can be flattered and they can be scared. Please
them enormously or scare them enormously,
and one moonless night they will put their
fingers to their lips, warning you not to
make a sound. And they will lead you through
the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth
ever known to man. You'll be shown your place
on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all
your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try
to keep the racket of your slurping down.
A poor man might hear.'”
Vonnegut was a socialist, and a humanist.
He believed in the power of people working
together, looking out for each other. He didn’t
want us to all to carry on holding power at
the top of some imaginary system pretending
that the system was just and right. A system
quite like the system of power in Bloodborne.
I guess I’m saying if we all work together,
we can get the best ending. Not one where
we as individuals get to join the group at
the top - a better one than that.
This essay was definitely my wildest hot take
forcibly crammed into a video game so far,
but I think the full text version on patreon
is even wilder, because I had to cut it down
a lot. So if you enjoyed what you just watched
please subscribe and consider supporting curio
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Speaking of patreon, I’d like to thank my
current patrons, both for their money and
for tweeting at me night and day while I made
this video. I’d like to thank Hann the Mann
who makes the fantastic music for Curio and
who made three new tracks for the halloween
spooktacular. I’d also like to thank you,
the viewer, for watching all the way to the
end.
The next big essay won’t be out for a while,
but I have some smaller videos planned while
I make that one really polished. If you need
more curio in the mean time I’m on twitter,
where you can tweet at me that I’ve misunderstood
Bloodborne, all of politics and death of the
author. See you next time!
