The Capital of Words

The refrain against so-called “rent seeking” always goes the same - I’m sure in the early years, when the development of written language took place there was the cry - but is this really necessary? After all, we can speak perfectly well to each other, why introduce an intermediary? And further before, writers of the pure and original will often state a case to the dawn of language itself, as some obscuring illusion that separates one from the real. A famous anecdote, Jean-Paul Sartre seething at the foot of a tree-stump - but how do I really know who you are?

The real is a concept emerging itself from alienation. The concept of there being some interior missed is one only constructed by a remove from that interior, and to be more radical, is a concept constructed by the very interior. The interior, the “real” is not the thing lost in the move to language, but the thing created for language. By constructing the notion of the real, one withdraws into the private, secondary space of language, by that very distance, speech is born. Hence the purpose of “Truth”, the ever important concept, emerges only as something that one is distanced from. The removal, the separation of oneself from the real is the act of language, to forever dance around, separate, and build second-order systems of reference-to, something that is instantly perceived at the moment of experience.

Language is always superstructural by this, secondary and above. It then mutates, develops orders of itself that then refer to the underlying previous. Written language first emerges as a set of pictograms, numerical dashes, evolving in complexity, as a tool of the leisured and ruling class, calculating economic, military, or mythic matters. It then fell, from its initial minority adoption, its infrastructure descended upon the below until the situation today where literacy is the norm in almost all of the world.

Information networks grow by this mechanism. Speech is interesting, far moreso than the “real”, as it has the potential for unlimited growth. While experience is monodirectional and single-moment, speech is infinite. One human can transmit to another, who can then uptake, reinterpret, pass on or change the message, across each node - each individual. This is the human capacity - to combine, interpret, morph - to create. That the power of “good and evil” was what got Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of the Real is no coincidence. The divide, to appraise, is to invent language, to steal the power that was solely the province of God, as the originator of the “real”.

And so - civilization - brought about by this process of accumulating greater and greater levels of abstractions. Abstractions are fascinating in their ability to talk beyond their supposed direct reference, to talk to each other without any “truthful” reference to the “real”. An abstraction is capable of dealing with itself, as language will always refer to other language, which in turn, will only construct further and further accumulations of language as the ever-growing garden continues to be watered and fertilized by every speaker and writer.

And so too, was capitalism born, as early as civilization was itself. In one of the early issues of American Affairs, an article was published on so-called “grey money”, referring to these anonymous entities, private equity firms, hedge funds, investment groups, that controlled such an outsize portion of the world’s ownership. This is not an accident. Not out of any nefarious accumulation, from an earlier era when economics was more “real”, but out of how capitalism has functioned, always. Capitalism too, didn’t originate alien from some evil wizard or out of any exceptional new era when the steam engine was invented, as many of our contemporary thinkers will say on the question of theodicy, but out of this same process. Abstractions, formulated atop material things. In language, the narrative is more direct, with that of a sole individual first philosopher who decided to abstract the real from the experienced, but identical in economics. Material manipulation, the things of the world processed, harvested, yoked, sculpted, emerged via the same social-linguistic abstraction - now via the abstraction of money or trade, which we foolishly single out as separate from other identical forms of the process of abstraction via social-communicative relations between people. The grey-money often spoken of in anger is nothing new in this regard. Economics in itself, is nothing more than another emergent system, a fruiting body from the mycelium of language, identical to the internet, art, or etiquette.

Arena Nomads

The strange thing about Counter-Strike is that you can strip yourself almost bare - pressing G to fling everything into the air, falling to the ground as an entity, stripping the character to nothing but the knife. In D&G’s Treatise on Nomadology, a section towards the end deals with this concept, that of the assemblage made by weaponry. As opposed to tools, which form an assemblage as part of a larger apparatus of work, where the tool, the product, the raw, the labor relation, etc, all form one machine, the weapon forms a self-contained machine, which operates on the pure principle of its own projection upon the world.

This then creates an interesting situation for the player, where they find their interaction with the world dynamically transformed by their movement through various systems. In Counter-Strike it’s economic, the strategy of full-buy, eco, and pistol rounds making an element of strategy where the player’s assemblage is transformed by their ability to perform within the game. Performance as a pistol is rewarded with SMGs and armor, or with full rifle, etc. In Quake, the environment forms the basis of this strategic manipulation. Duels take place in a game of timing and area control - with all things that make up the player, health, armor, and weapons, being accessed only by moving through certain points on the map, the game becomes one of optimizing self-transformation by controlling the items scattered through the game.

In RTS games, these machines are deployed in the same manner as the formal military does under state capture. The individual soldiers are made into units of a larger mass, deployed towards various goals, often economic. The meta-game of Starcraft is built around colonial accumulation, the one civilian structure being the true heart of the game. One’s army is mere protection as one seeks to continually build more bases and their attendant worker units, in order to continually expand on and on forward. The enemy is an obstacle to be overcome and accidentally win, the strategic goals of war fading behind the tactical goals of economics.

Valorant has gained popularity recently, using Riot’s skill in 5v5 pseudo-gacha multiplayer experiences, adapting the Counter-Strike format to the class based one. They try, but can’t quite recreate it, and the basis of that is in the foundations. The class system is itself an ecclesiastical one. Whereas the strategy game refines the weapon-assemblage into a piece, manipulated by the player in their role as the totally-controlling state, the class based game is an ecclesiastical recreation of the nomad experience of Quake and CS. In Team Fortress 2 or Valorant, the player is defined by their relationship to a supertext of roles, roles chosen before the game even begins, the class/character select screen being presented at the start of every round. Here, we have predestination of course, but more than that, we have the affixation of peoples so common to institutional languages. The Pyro and Heavy are signs which one molds oneself to in order to fill opportunities descended from Heaven, roles coded in latin, the AK47 and the M4A4 are coded in the vernacular, tools that form a unity with the player.

Team Fortress 2 players have plenty of ecclesiastical concepts of duty around this. The Pyro is often a contentious place for its difficulty in fitting into these traditional schemes. Most duties in classes are sourced from their purpose in directly seizing the game’s objectives. If a certain pious subset of the playerbase were to get their way, the game would be minus the Sniper, Spy, and Pyro entirely - perceived as being either useless or individualistic hallmarks of players from a lesser, more nomadic class of game. Mains of these classes are often forced to prove themselves, the Py-Bro as a sort of gimped-medic that exists to help the Engineer, or the endless walls of text produced by Sniper and Spy mains regarding their usefulness to the team. All of this is besides the point - the basis fo the matter is that the three outsider classes will never be accepted - after all, their playstyles all reflect something dissonant to the substance of the game, the brutish repetition of labor towards objectives that makes up the coveted worship of the Church’s preset castes.

Call of Duty and Counter-Strike make for an interesting comparison of the opposite. Call of Duty gives weapons in a proletarian fashion, one simply works at the “grind” and is rewarded. Weapons are chosen at the beginning of the game, earned from working through a progression ladder that’s climbed via rote repetition of the game. What Call of Duty offers is a fantasy, a commodified, structured, fantasy of the martial competition of games which offer a weapon assemblage dynamic to the player’s worth within the game. Counter-Strike on the other hand, is the aristocracy of the wilderness. Weapons are bought from kill-rewards, ones heightened for risk taking, for working as a team, for taking on extremes such as using worse weapons to achieve greater results. It’s telling then that the Call of Duty community is obsessed with imaginary systems of rules to increase “fairness”. The gamer wants a system, a perfect machine they can slot their vitality into that will deliver them up the chain flawlessly. Call of Duty players are known then for their hate for anything beyond, micro-communities of different playstyles endlessly accusing the other of pseudo-cheating for winning or gaining “unfair” advantages. For Counter-Strike, playstyle fights are always punching down, an extension of the rigid selection systems in place already. The most mocked are not rivals to the various ways to grind the latter, but those who play badly, off the highway down dead-end sideroads, the Tec-9 and P90 spammers. 

Ultimate Practice

A recurring theme in science fiction or fantasy is the genre trope of a more advanced race with some form of noosphere above them, a telepathic network by which they all communicate and achieve harmony with each other. This works in both directions, the Zerg version of an alternate, insectoid strain in evolution where a humanity-possessing species came into being in the form of hiveminded raw biology, and the Protoss version, where an advanced species has turned into the biological priests of a technological superstructure that supersedes them completely.

The Terran counter-example here of courses uses typical anthropoignorance, where authors forget that they themselves are an organism in total continuity with their technology. Humanity has all of this in spades, with the electricity, written or spoken language, economic systems, etc, making up the same function as the magically simplified psychic systems of the other two races. The idea that humanity does not have the same thing in themselves is from the twofold error of only interpreting the things of the other as being othered in their conception (ie, a Protoss would experience all things of the world not as “X” but as “Protoss-X”), thus making a sort of objectification of all things done equally by all species into only unique to them. This error occurs as an inverse of the error of self-conception in individualistic humans, wherein one cannot perceive oneself as being anything other than an individual floating in a sort of absurd vacuum, not as a part of the larger systems - the classic shock and awe of freshman year debates on free will.

The concept of “total war” was rediscovered just as it was being lost when war, inevitably, emerged under the same laws it had always followed. Previously, war was never considered sovereign beyond the regular state of things, as some separate theatre of political pomp, until the great era of separations after industry began to take over. Several ideological processes undergirded the enlightenment, the most important of which was secularization - not the process of making the sacred no longer that, but apposite - making the profane ecclesiastical. The nation-state emerged as a consolidation of the King’s superstructural central authority, growing to a whole system of superstructural orders emanating from the central authority, across the land, drawing firm national borders, stratifying power, enclosing land into legally ordered plots, etc. All of this was to construct a similar order to that of the church, a discourse which determines the map of the territory. In doing so, the map and territory were brought into sharp focus in a way never done before, where now the consciousness of oneself as territory made an alienating effect. The various movements of legal counter-facts around the world, the Russians who proclaim themselves Soviets, the Germans who proclaim themselves Imperial, the Americans who proclaim themselves Revolutionary, etc, there’s a concept of two selves, the legal fiction of the self and the actual self. There is some truth to this - the self as a part of the state’s discourse is a part of the map, while the actual ego is a part of the territory - forming just that dissonance, often bleeding over when associations are made with others as territory itself, seen in the American tendency to obsessively construct their opponents as “establishment”.

Total War then, was a new concept, as it brought into sharp focus a reunification after the cleft, where map and territory were made complete again. The functions of state had their discourses reduced to the raw systems of political-economy that the state has always functioned as, people found themselves reduced to their place in the truer discourses of self, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, where nation didn’t suffice. It was in the second world war when the last gasps of this were felt by Westerners, when all sides of the war returned to the fact of combat that modern states so often shun - that civilians are no less a part of the thing you’re attempting to inflict damage upon than the so-called “military”, that the difference between the two is of fleeting context.

In later “wars”, though I feel that’s too weighty a word for what often occurred, when a colonial galavanting collided with quasi-genocide, such as in American Vietnam or Soviet Afghanistan, there was a conflict often between the false husks of humans at the top, those unable to comprehend anything but their bishopric, the generals and intelligence agents, would balk in horror as war emerged on a tactical level, for the Kurtz and Balalaikas of the world. Their “country” abandoned them, because what else would it do? They descended through history into war, while their country only wanted intelligence gathering and police action. It was they alone who truly committed war and they were punished for it, as war was never what was wanted.

As long as the Geneva Convention is followed, war is not. After all, what is that, but the empty words of a select few nations, all in alliance with each other? A war is a game of force to make political-economic goals realized. For the upholders of empty documents and moralities, distinctions between civilian and military casualties, between justified and unjustified force - war, when it comes, as it always does, as a rending season of evil that descends and passes every few generations, will come like the Italians experienced the French invasion in the late 15th century, where the hardened brutality of soldiers trained in war met the empty pomp and theatrics of soldiers trained in parades and duels.

Treasures of Jade and Philosopher-Stone

Most intimate to the player is the season of Spring - the world forms, often in a lush green, rarely overgrown or frozen or desiccated, resplendent and peaceful. Monsters form naturally as if from the Earth, sometimes literally, as nightfalls and the darkness of the caves below the grassy firmament rise upwards to attack the player. The Season of Wood, presided over by the Azure Dragon, the color of life, in freshly growing plants and jade, in creepers. The form of life opposite the player from this is the Testificate form, villagers and illagers making an immediately accessible conflict of species known. Their architecture is similar, above-ground overworld structures with social hierarchies implied in the construction, often made of wood and nearby materials. Agriculture grows as it does in the spring season of sowing, cut wood, sheep’s wool, bales of wheat, small gardens of vegetables forming the architectural foundation for their lives. They engage in war in a primitive way, one group living in peace and the other marching out in an innocent, savage way. They live as early civilizations never burdened with language, carrying mutely on the functions of organization like children at play.

The Vermilion Bird presides over fire, the stifling heat of summertime produced not by the fact of summer, but by passion - the heat and life of motion excited in the manner of aroused bodies, plants growing far outpace of their bounds, jungles abounding in even Northern climates for a brief window of months. The pig was once mistakenly made with its Y and Z values inverted, creating the mutation for the creeper. The pig provides the linkage into the Nether, a realm of timeless violence. Flesh of the pig, the lesser form of the human, takes on a humanoid form, where man uncovers savagery. The lava makes a haze like a bloody meridian, one has to descend, living off thrown gold and wild swings of the sword. All of it’s consensual, as where else does a lust for life lead one? Destruction occurs after-the-fact of great exertion of vitality, the empire expanding so fast and joyously entire continents are burned in ecstasy - Nero’s famous lyre being only an imperial ethos turned inwards. Destruction is a whirlwind of ecstasy as it spins out from the self and strikes everyone else, as the one inside is laughing. The nether and its inhabitants are in pain, but fire laughs. Fire is passion ignited, like sexual arousal or a lusting anger.

Autumn, the season of metal. When frost creeps in at the edges and borders of the explosive life of summertime and the world silences to prepare for the long season of winter. Death comes inevitably and bodies must return to the base matter, reduced to the leaden soil of Saturn in absolute darkness, in order to be the raw matter of the next season of rebirth. Not that this is much solace of course, as the creeping chill of autumn is nothing but terrifying and only leads to terminus for all suffering it. As the player digs and builds into the world, they uncover more and more ruins. The first proper structure added was the dungeon, a single room, made of mossed-over, long crumbled stone, with treasures and mindless flesh breeding inside it. After this, came the abandoned mineshafts and strongholds - more remnants, old buildings, long rotted and now populated only by death, metallic cutting edges and falling orange leaves, turning to brown and then soil on the ground. It’s said that the White Tiger only appears when absolute peace and virtue reigns over the land - after all, once the peak is reached, the only direction to go is down.

The Black Turtle rests at North, presiding over the darkness of water and winter. Look down from your boat, into the ocean, see the chthonic depths below. It turns to darkness quickly, as you sink, even more black than night, until the depths become so crushing... We imagine shadow to have the quality of water, as we go further into an abandoned building we “sink” and the darkness is supposed to envelop, swallow, consume us. None of this happens of course, but we can’t help but feel it. Maybe there is some memory, of the water the ocean is an eternal gradation downwards, like winter deepening colder and colder, layers of ice encasing, stilling, preservation at depths. The Guardians of the Ocean Monument make their primary goal to protect the Monument itself, to act as its namesake, still beneath the water. Mining is slow beneath water and the player is further impeded by being at risk of drowning while they cast a fatigue effect. Some question if the Guardians are alive at all, or if they’re some form of stone automaton, a life-form made akin to a golem of non-cellular matter. The ocean is a terminal point for those living in it, wide basins of existence distinct from the rest of the world beyond itself, a preserved world that slows until a deathly stillness. Towards the surface, ghosts rise and dolphins attempt to help the player scram from this kingdom of unlife.

Transcendence happens in stages. A few artefacts that we all know come into possession, the Totem of Unlife, the Heart of the Sea, etc - but what truly is the final prize of the game? Transcendence. Alchemy’s pursuit of the same in all places speaks to the same need, the one magic fulfills, to transcend the mundane limits. The Yellow Dragon of the Center, the one presiding over Earth, occupying the 0,0,0 position in the diagram of the five classical elements. A black dragon rests at the base of the game, activating the credit sequence, when The End is “freed”. This is only a pretender, after all, is the author anything but a function? Transcendence - maybe you taste it when the dragon bursts into 65 levels - the dragon sure thought it had done so, before you came along. Maybe you taste it in borderline creative mode Elytra flying, cheating death with a totem, breathing underwater. In these moments - and they are moments, never fully inhabited, but passing peaks of experiences - you become the author, the Yellow Dragon. But only ever a taste, a brief visit to the throne, before the revolution unseats you and you’re forced to once again claw down the gates and break into the palace in the endless cycle of struggle for those brief, timeless instants where you are the Earth, the center, the Emperor...