Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor

by Peter Watts

  Of course, for all the brilliance of games like Half-Life and Bioshock, the flexibility of the narrative is an illusion. You don’t really invent the story; you just find your way through a preprogrammed maze, shooting aliens and mutants along the way. And while sandbox worlds like Skyrim and Fallout certainly deliver the feel of an open-ended, off-the-rails environment, isn’t it a bit unrealistic that people you were supposed to meet outside the castle at midnight are still waiting there to pick up the story, uncomplaining, even after you’ve ignored them for six in-game months? Doesn’t Lydia’s conversational range look a bit limited after, oh, five minutes?

  Just bumps in the road, thought I. They’d be smoothed out soon enough. For now it wasn’t possible to code realistic narrative complexity into a game that fit into the average PlayStation, but surely all those constraints would recede further towards the horizon with every iteration of Moore’s Law. In another ten or fifteen years we’d have games that you could really play instead of just solve; characters who’d live and breathe and evolve dynamically, in meaningful response to the actions of the player.

  It took a game in which characters actually did live and breathe and evolve to make me see the folly of that belief. I’m talking about The Last of Us.

  On first glance, The Last of Us looks like just another generic post-apocalyptic survival shooter. Civilization has collapsed. There are zombies. Mortal injuries are magically patched up in mere seconds by “health kits” cobbled together from rags and bottles of alcohol. You scavenge a variety of weapons during your travels across a shattered landscape; if something moves, you shoot it. Yawn.

  On second glance, it’s fucking brilliant.

  To start with, the zombies aren’t zombies: they’re victims of a mutated strain of Cordyceps, a real-world fungus that does, in fact, rewire the behavioral pathways of its victims. Good people turn out to be bad; bad people turn out to be ambivalent. Cannibals and child-killers and sociopaths all have their reasons. The moral dilemmas are real and profound, and the relationship between the two protagonists is so nuanced, so beautifully realized in the voice-acting and the mo-cap, that it literally brought me to tears a time or two. And nothing brings me to tears, except the death of a cat.

  Only a video game so perfectly balanced, so emotionally involving, could convince me that video games will never be so perfectly balanced and so emotionally involving.

  All that wonderful character development, you see—all those jeweled moments that exposed the depth of Ellie’s soul, of Joel’s torment—aren’t part of the game. They’re cut-scenes, unplayable, noninteractive. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game with such extended cinematic interludes. Sometimes it takes control in the middle of fight, to ensure it plays out the way it’s supposed to. Sometimes the whole damn fight is a spectator sport, start to finish. (Sometimes I think they go overboard. At one point you lose the game if a secondary character gets killed—even though that character dies anyway, during the cinematic that immediately follows.)

  These are human beings, you see, not Gordon-Freeman one-size-fits-all templates into which any player might pour themselves. They’re damaged creatures with their own personalities and their own demons. And because they’re fully-realized characters, we can’t be trusted to inhabit them. Oh, sometimes we’re granted a token nod to participation at vital moments—a prompt to trigger a bit of preprogrammed dialog, or the choice of whether to walk or run during the course of a conversation—but all that really does is rub our noses in how irrelevant our participation really is to the story being told. We can’t touch their souls; all we can do is move their arms and legs during those shoot-and-sneak intervals that come down to basic animal-instinct survival.

  And how else could it be? How could anyone entrust such complex creations to any doofus who slaps down forty bucks at the local games counter? How many players would be able to conjure up, on the fly, dialog worthy of these protagonists—even when Moore’s Law makes that a feasible option? How many could be trusted to keep their actions consistent with motives and memories that have twenty years of tortured history behind them?

  It’s not the technology, it’s the player. We’re the weak link. We always will be.

  Video games can be art. The Last of Us proves it better than any other title in recent memory; but the only way it could do that was to stop being a game. It had to turn back into a mere story.

  And that’s why I’ve changed my mind. Interactive may be the future of pop culture, but it’s not the future of fiction. Dungeons & Dragons is fun to play, but a bunch of role-players making shit up as they go along are never going to craft the kind of intricately-plotted stories, the nuanced characters, the careful foreshadowing and layers of meaning that characterize the best fiction. I actually feel kind of stupid for not having realized that all along. The tech may get magical. The tech might get self-aware, for all I know. But until someone upgrades the players, we old-school novelists will still have jobs.

  They just won’t pay very well.

  Martin Luther King and

  the Vampire Rights League

  Blog Jan 31 2012

  Some of you may remember my ruminations on the evolutionary significance of sociopathy, my tentative musings that it may be not so much a pathology as an adaptation1, and my almost pathetic relief when people with actual credentials wonder the same thing2 and thus make me look like less of a wing nut. In an attempt to regain that status I’ve gone further, describing autistics and sociopaths as entirely different “cognitive subspecies”—only to have Marnie Rice out of Penetanguishene one-up me by describing sociopathy as a process of “speciation”. (It won’t surprise anyone to learn that Echopraxia continues to play with this theme— even going so far as to steal a line from cognitive neuroscientist Laurent Mottron, who claims that describing autistics as people who are bad at socializing but good at numbers makes about as much sense as describing dogs as a kind of cat that’s bad at climbing but good at fetching slippers.)

  As everyone agrees, the word for getting rid of a whole subspecies is not “cure.” I’m not quite sure what the right word might be, but it’s probably somewhere between extermination and genocide. (Let’s call it cultural genocide, in deference to the fact that the biological organism persists even though its identity has been eradicated.) We’re even seeing the flowering of something like civil rights advocacy, in the form of the neurodiversity movement that’s been picking up steam over the past decade or two.

  From what I can see out here, though, that movement seems to be an Autistics-Only club: what’s lacking is any sort of pro-Sociopath lobby along the lines of, say, the American Vampire League from True Blood. One would think that both groups would warrant the same kind of advocacy; the arguments of cognitive subspecieshood apply equally to both, after all. You’re stepping onto a pretty slippery slope when you claim that the occupation of a distinct neurological niche warrants acceptance of one group, but this other group over here—no more responsible for its wiring than the first—should still be wiped ou—er, cured. After all, only a small proportion of sociopaths are actual criminals; most of them operate entirely within the limits of established legal, religious, and political systems. Hell, it’s hard to look at the Citizens Uniteds and Rupert Murdochs of the world and conclude that sociopaths didn’t play a major role in building those systems in the first place. And after all, both sociopaths and autistics tend to be lacking in the whole empathy department. [Late-breaking edit: it has been brought to my attention that the word empathy is an imprecise beast which contains at least two different processing modes; and that autistics can actually score higher than baselines along the affective scale3. Thanks to Andrew Hickey for pointing out the problem.] So where’s the neurodiversity community when you need it, hmm? Where are the advocates speaking out on behalf of sociopath interests (beyond Goldman Sachs and the other 0.1-percenters, I mean)?

  Here’s one: SociopathWorld.com.

  I do not know the name of the person behind
“Sociopath World”; doubtless that’s by design. She (I think it’s a she) refers to herself merely as “The Sociopath” on her contact page, as “M.E.” on Twitter, and as me@sociopathworld.com when she hands out her address (which makes me doubt that the “M.E.” Twitter handle is an actual set of initials). No matter. This is either a labor-intensive hoax, or your one-stop-shopping center for the interested empath (they call us “Empaths,” apparently, which I find both more precise and less condescending than the “neurotypical” label the Autistic Spectrum types seem to prefer). The most popular posts end up on the FAQ list: Do Sociopaths Love? Are Sociopaths Self-Aware? Am I a Sociopath? Can Sociopaths be “Good”? There are helpful how-to pointers: How to break up with a sociopath, for example.

  There are pop-culture observations: whether the new twenty-first-century Sherlock really is a sociopath in the world of fiction, whether Lady Gaga is in real life, the potential infiltration of sociopaths into Occupy Wall Street drum circles. There’s a forum, rife with trolls and assholes and deleted posts; but there’s also legitimate debate there. And surprisingly, it also seems to function as a kind of support group for people in emotional distress.

  You can even, I shit you not, order a Sociopath World t-shirt.

  So. ME is out there, fighting the good fight. She’s getting noticed (at least, her blog gets shitloads more comments than mine, not that that’s a high bar to clear). She shows up on the occasional psych blogroll. So now, I’m going to sit back and see if the neurodiversity community is willing to pick up the torch. If she is trying to kickstart the American Vampire League, though, I think she’s fighting an uphill battle.4

  Which only makes sense. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t have an easy time of it either.

  1 http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/02/interview_peter.html

  2 http://boingboing.net/2006/10/11/is-autism-a-disorder.html

  3 http://www.cog.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/papers/2007/Rogers%282007%29_JAutismDevDisord.pdf

  4 She’s well aware of this, of course. She discusses that double standard in her post “Am I My Asperger Brother’s Keeper?”, in which she points out that the most obvious difference between Aspies and sociopaths is that the latter group has better social skills. So why compassion for one group, and vilification of the other? Is it really that the social awkwardness of the Aspies allows us to regard them as children, and therefore unthreatening? Are we really such condescending assholes? Of course we are. But pretty obviously, sociopaths with charming smiles and firm handshakes are also more likely to prey on us than is someone who has trouble even making eye contact; sociopaths are more dangerous, empirically. ME is not beyond pushing her own agenda. (She points to studies suggesting that autistics can be serial killers too—Jeffrey Dahmer gets cited as a case in point—but there are too many gaps in that claim for me to accept it at face value. As I understand it, Dahmer did okay in the social skills department.)

  Black & White

  Blog Feb 8 2012

  If you got itchy when I started talking about civil rights for vampires/sociopaths, you’re gonna love this: civil rights for killer whales.

  Or perhaps more accurately, civil rights for killer whales. Literally. One of these guys, Tilikum by (Human-ascribed) name, killed one of his jailers in broad daylight and, according to the BBC, has been “linked to two other deaths”1. Regardless, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has launched a lawsuit in the US District Court in San Diego, on behalf of Tilikum and four other SeaWorld orcas, charging that their incarceration violates the 13th Amendment against slavery—and the judge, while skeptical, hasn’t yet thrown out the case. A bemused fourth estate is all over the story for the moment2, although it remains to be seen how much traction accrues to any PETA action that doesn’t involve naked women in cages.

  This issue is especially resonant to a fallen marine mammalogist such as myself. I’ve worked with captive marine mammals on occasion, even done a bit of theoretical work on orcas. Over my short-lived and ill-advised tenure with the North Pacific Universities Marine Mammal Research Consortium I grew familiar with the toxic backstage political environment at the Vancouver Aquarium (which, for all its toxicity, was significantly better than anything I ever heard coming out of SeaWorld). Back in the nineties I presented an intervenor report at the Vancouver Parks Board hearings on ending the Aquarium’s captive whale displays, which nearly got me a job until I remarked in those hearings on the obvious hypocrisy of the Board itself. (That also resulted in the appearance of the misleading and inflammatory story “Mercy Killing suggested for Aquarium Whales3” in the Vancouver Sun. Say, if anyone out there happens to encounter Petti Fong standing on a curb by heavy traffic, do me a favor and push her under a bus?)

  All these experiences even inspired my co-authorship of a behind-the-scenes story in which we finally crack the orca language and discover that they’re even bigger assholes than we are. One of the few intentionally funny stories I’ve ever written, and lemme tell you it reeks of verisimilitude right down to the names of the characters.

  So here we are, with the animal-rights movement putting their money where their rhetoric is and actually trying to get Tilikum et al classified as slaves in a court of law. I’ve gone over the lawsuit itself, and in terms of orca biology and behavior it’s pretty tight. Para 17 goes a bit overboard in describing orca feeding as “social events carried out in the context of an array of traditions and rituals,” which implies some kind of cross-species mind-reading technology that certainly wasn’t in wide use back in my day. Para 41 commits a small lie of omission when it states “In nature, aggression between members of a pod, or between pods in the same resident clan or community . . . is virtually unknown”; true, but relations between resident and transient pods are somewhat more antagonistic. Still. The stuff on social bonds, brain structure, habitat requirements—not to mention the generally barbaric treatment of orcas in captivity—is pretty much spot-on.

  Significantly, SeaWorld doesn’t challenge any of these facts. They’ve stated that charges of abuse are utterly irrelevant as far as they’re concerned. From what I’ve seen reported, their defense boils down to two basic claims: 1) The whole case is bullshit because the Constitution only applies to people, which killer whales aren’t; and 2) if PETA wins this case, it’s open season on everything from zoos to the law-enforcement’s K9 programs. “We’re talking about hell unleashed,” their lawyer is quoted as saying.

  I have problems with both those points.

  First, the Property-not-people angle. PETA argues that dismissing orcas as property “is the same argument that was used against African Americans and women before their constitutional rights were protected”. SeaWorld rebuts that that’s an entirely inappropriate analogy because “both women and African Americans are people for which the Constitution was written to protect.” This being yet another iteration of the founding fathers know best argument so beloved by the Tea Party: the Constitution is gospel, and cannot be changed.

  Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the original Constitution define blacks as less than human, too? As in, one slave equals three-fifths of a “real” man, at least for purposes of political representation? Citing African Americans and women doesn’t exactly bolster SeaWorld’s case—although they’ve also made the claim that the whole whales-as-slaves argument “defies common sense,” so they’ve always got the Spluttering Outrage and Handwaving defense to fall back on.

  More telling, though, is Argument #2: that if the tewwowists win, “All hell breaks loose.” Which is another way of saying “It mustn’t be, so it isn’t.”

  Don’t even think about the abuse of the organism, they are saying; it pales in the shadow of the carnage and inconvenience that will be brought down upon us if the whalehuggers have their way. How will the hundreds employed by zoos and marine parks make ends meet? How will the police protect us from evil-doers without furry canine slaves to do their bidding? What about the innocent middle-class family with the pet cock
atoo or the beagle in the back yard? Will their doors be the next to get kicked in by PETA’s stormtroopers? The only argument I haven’t heard yet—and I heard it often enough from the mouths of the Vancouver Aquarium’s PR hacks, so I suppose it’s only a matter of time—is Won’t somebody think of the CHILDREN?

  I don’t know why we should have to explain the implications of the law to a lawyer, but: if PETA wins, then captive orcas will be slaves. Legally. And good luck making the case that we shouldn’t free slaves because it would force the manager of SeaWorld to look for another job.

  Of course, whether we even can free the slaves—after decades of atrophy and chronic wasting in captivity—is a whole other issue (one dealt with at greater length in that intervenor report I mentioned earlier). Rehab certainly didn’t end well for Keiko. But that’s a logistic issue, not a logical one. We’re not focusing on the nuts and bolts of extended physiotherapy for a creature the size of a school bus; we’re focusing on whether a creature whose emotional and cognitive circuitry is at least comparable to ours, whether something capable of complex problem-solving, complex community relationships, and complex suffering warrants at least as much respect as some brain-dead hydrocephalic on life support—even if it does have flukes instead of feet. You probably know where I stand on that: just two posts back I threw my lot in with the bonobos over the illusory interests of Terri Schiavo.