Inside, new Sorcerer supplement in Daedalus

[GreatWolf]

Seth,

From the text:

This ritual [Hack] - always snapshot, with no penalties - requires a Fu vs. Humanity roll, and successes on the Hack roll are used for the ability's Power.

(Seth looks at his copy of Inside)

Are you sure that you didn't sneak into my house and add that bit of text when I wasn't looking?

My eyes must have slid right over it.  Duh.  Anyways, thanks for the answer, Clinton.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Seth,

I agree with you entirely regarding Neuromancer and Count Zero being sorcerer/demon stories. That's why one of the original versions of Sorcerer way back when was built using the Interlock system (Cyberpunk 1st edition, R. Talsorian).

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

This is my patented rant about The Matrix, specifically the first film.

I shall preface the rant very rudely: I am completely unsympathetic to counter-arguments to this rant, especially those which are based on fluffy intangibles like "But I just like it" or "It's so cool when" and similar. If you have a contrasting view to mine, don't bug me with it. I'm presenting this because people asked, not because I give a rat's ass about what anyone else has to say about it. 'Cause I don't. There are lots of internet sites where you can happily compare your view of The Matrix with a bunch of other people's, and I invite you, if you feel the need, to go there.

Point #1
I strenuously avoided all information about the movie before seeing it: I didn't see a single preview, I read no trade magazine or cinema articles, I didn't see any talk-show promotions, and didn't even know that virtual reality was involved. I had no idea what "the matrix" referred to. I saw the movie 100% blind, on purpose. Why? Because I do that with nearly all the movies I see, and my friends usually know that I will react to unwanted movie-info very negatively, not even in fun.

Halfway through the movie, I said to myself, "I'm gonna own this one." It struck me as one of the finest science fiction cinema achievements I'd ever encountered, including some humor along with its ideas, some seriously subversive imagery (the pill, e.g.), and full of just the right kind of candy to punch its points home. I decided I was sitting in on a milestone of film history, the way I'd felt when I saw Aliens in a press-only pre-release before anyone had any idea what it was about.

Point #2
Let's back up a bit. I was badly warped in my youth by 1960s and 70s science fiction. The kind of stuff that reached its peak in Dangerous Visions II ... names like Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon (More than Human), Roger Zelazny (Amber was about halfway done, at most), Ursula LeGuin (who was just breaking in), and so on. Over in England we had the New Wave with Judith Merril and Michael Moorcock, both of whom I considered entertaining but drug-addled. Remember when Richard Lupoff and George Alec Effinger were considered the Big New Stars?Anyway, without rhapsodizing or name-dropping, think of pre-X-Men (not counting the long-defunct original series) and pre-Star Wars, when Trekkies were rare and a little scary.

The guy I'm really thinking of is Norman Spinrad. One of his books from the 1980s is called Little Heroes. It concerns a pair of nerdy tech-type musicians who program up fictional rock stars, and the real-rocker older lady who blows their minds. It's not great lit; it's actually pretty shallow in some places and over-ambitious in others. Spinrad's done better stuff. But the good news is that Little Heroes does work, and in a couple of places, I found it very moving.

The most important example, for this essay, is the scene when the two nerdy types actually have sex together. You see, they're both very hung up and immature and extremely mean to one another throughout most of the story. And each one gets a lot of sexual gratification from others while "jacked in," which is to say, while grooving on an electronic fantasy while having sex with ... well, with whoever, because it doesn't much matter. So when I say "actually," what I mean is non-jacked-in.

You know what? The sex between them is not great. It's kind of grubby and, well, the Earth doesn't move. And the two characters don't fall in love, and they don't realize how much they care for each other, because they don't really care that much after all. But it's the most human and meaningful moment in the story, because they actually resolve the ego-clash issue that's been messing them both up for the whole story.

Point #3
So here I am, watching The Matrix, and really enjoying the "wake up to reality" part, and eagerly anticipating whatever there-you-are real story the character will face when he finally emerges. And it's looking good, because now he has to deal with these people who live in cramped uncomfortable quarters and eat sludge, and "reality" is looking a little grayer and a little more desperate than anyone would like it to be ...

... and you can see where I'm going with this, right? There is no real story outside the matrix. Inside, you have agents to fight, and Neo gets all buffed to do this - which is fantastic, especially because there's one in particular who badly needs his ass kicked regardless of whether he exists. Everything in the second half of the movie about that issue, inside, is pure candy gold.

But what about outside, in the real world? (a) We have this bogus trash about whether Neo is or isn't "the one," which is typical pop-SF-Dianetics messianic nonsense and may be ignored at exactly the same rate at which it's mentioned; (b) we have this whole thing about how this woman loves him (for no apparent reason) and how he doesn't grok it (ditto); and (c) we have this traitor who gets to chew the scenery a little and ...

Point #4 (getting specific)
OK, I'll start with (c) the traitor guy, whatever his name is. Get this: he shoots the cool black dude in the chest, bang! with a gun, and takes over the whole "I control the vertical I control the horizontal" control room. Fine. He has all the characters at his mercy. He shouts, "It'll take a miracle to save you now!" and ... and the cool black dude who apparently wasn't shot in the chest or rather, who suffered a nasty scratch rather than a sucking thoracic puncture (such as a bullet inflicts), stands up and shoots the guy. Fortunately, the good guy's bullets do work unlike the bad guy's bullets, and so the day is saved.

What we're seeing is exactly what the bad guy bragged about - it'll take a miracle to save you now, and a miracle happens. In the real world of the story. God comes down from heaven and it turns out the wound wasn't as bad as we thought, despite all the cinematic technique that established it. Neo is saved by the universe because Neo is important; Neo is important because he was saved by the universe. The whole traitor story is resolved, and all Neo did was stand there and look puzzled. All it accomplishes is the logistic setup for Neo and Trinity to run off and save Morpheus.

And now for (b), which is more of the same. Neo gets to meet a real, live, actual female human being. Wow! And what is she? As much of an automaton as that blonde in the matrix the traitor-guy brags over. Trinity is, frankly, a fuck-me-fantasy girl, straight out of bad anime, with no actual human decisions or features that require decisions. She moons around over Neo as he occupies himself with quizzical looks. Does this generate any conflict? Any decision on his part? No - it's just a matter of time until he notices, that's all. Eventually he does - what a surprise.

I won't even bother to rant about (a). At least Dune had the grace to copy a good story (Lawrence of Arabia) regarding this issue, but nearly any science fiction involving a putative messiah since then has been a poor copy of that copy. It's compounded in The Matrix by a low-grade and explicit reinforcement of a bogus theme in Star Wars, which is that learning and work are irrelevant to heroic performance. At least in Star Wars, the justification for this dubious claim is explicitly mystical.

Rant over
So that's my issue - the outer story is crap pseudo-drama which would be rejected as babble even for a daytime soap episode, full of arbitrary events and meaningless conflicts, none of which requires Neo's attention or any need for him to make any sort of decision. I consider this to betray the meaty potential of the first half of the story to the point of idiocy. What point would a given "good" story have made? I don't know, and in fact, it doesn't matter. It could be about how VR is better than reality, it could be about the reverse, it could be about the price you pay in one to excel in the other, it could be about real love vs. ideal love, or whatever. To be good, a story has to say something, i.e., to have a theme. The Matrix fails miserably as soon as its out-of-VR events turn out to be mere logistics to set up an in-VR set-piece about the only issue that demands resolution in the entire movie: whether Neo will or will not kick Agent Smith's ass. It especially fails because that set of events thoroughly devalues the entire first half of the movie, which is predicated on the idea that "reality is out there" and is uniquely worth discovering.

All right, I'm all done. The Matrix sucks donkey dicks because so much of it is so outstandingly good.

I'm happy to clarify or explain any of the points, if anyone's interested.

Best,
Ron

[Zak Arntson]

Ron, this is the second time you've clarified the bad taste of movies for me (the first time was when you referred to the original Star Wars trilogy as a great and unfiinished trilogy of two films).

That's what struck me the most about Inside: The way humanity is defined. It fixes the problem of the first Matrix movie (and the less said about the last two, the better).

One last thought: The Matrix owes a lot to Philip K. Dick, yet Dick's stories revolve around a regular blue-collar guy without any predestination to become the One. It is easy to emotionally invest in a human being (not a Campbellian, prophecied Hero) dealing with human troubles. It's the emotional equivalent of a papercut on film; you can relate to that much more than a chainsaw through the torso.

---

Oh, and for Inside, if you want to emulate the Matrix's bleak outside, here's a hook with more oomph than humans = batteries. The machines were created to take care of humans, and when the machines acheived self-awareness, they worhsipped humans. They came to awareness and met god, their creator. Turns out, the machines have these giant incubators because they love their creators and wish to keep them from harm.

[GreatWolf]

Hi Seth,

I agree with you entirely regarding Neuromancer and Count Zero being sorcerer/demon stories.

That's what got my antennae twitching about Inside, actually.  At first, I was thinking "Sorcerer for cyberpunk?  Huh?"  But then I started thinking about Gibson.

In general, I've maintained that Gibson's cyberspace/matrix/computer world that appears in most of his work (both the Sprawl series and the more recent San Francisco trilogy) is really a stand-in for the spirit world.  This is explicit in Count Zero, where the AIs take on the appearance of voodoo loas, but the idoru of Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties also fits quite well.

(Aside:  I am fascinated by the incarnational aspects of the ending of All Tomorrow's Parties.)

Suddenly, I found myself itching to give Inside a try.  I have long been disappointed with the RPG approach to cyberpunk and have wished that someone would make the definitive Gibson-style cyberpunk RPG.  Inside could very well be a strong contender for that title.

Now I'll have to see if my gaming group will go for it....  (Hi, Ralph!)

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[greyorm]

Just a clarification on your rant, Ron: the big, black guy isn't shot with a gun, and thus not shot with a bullet. He's hit by a blast from that electro-static discharge weapon (like a lightning-shooting gun), and hence why he has no holes. So, I wouldn't say it is all that miraculous he survives; people do regularly survive lightning strikes.

[Ron Edwards]

Bah. We see him fall over after being shot. The traitor's failure to make sure of his kill is a fine example of the "idiot plot," meaning that things won't work out as the writer plans unless the characters are idiots.

Best,
Ron

[John Harper]

Yeesh. I love all three Matrix films, but clearly we don't need to argue their merits (or lack thereof) here. Picking apart Ron's rant would be enjoyable but pointless. He's already made up his mind, and so have I -- as have the rest of you, I imagine.

So, back to Inside. I think Clinton was very smart to make "outside" a big part of the game. It's a central theme of Cyberpunk: The nerd becomes a hero in the virtual world, but is still a pathetic loser in real life. You can't run away from your problems by being a badass in cyberspace.

It's that bleak feeling that's so hard to articulate. You pull off a perfect mission with your team in Rainbow Six... and then... it's over. You feel like a total badass, but it's meaningless. Your roommate, your girlfriend -- they don't care. The victory just doesn't matter in your day to day life. I think Inside will handle that dichotomy very well.

[Gordon C. Landis]

Ron,

Can you say a bit more about why Inside makes that Matrix-stuff STOP sucking the PPP (pustulant purple penis)?  In the zeal of your Matrix rant, I kinda felt like something interesting you had to say about Inside got lost . . .

Gordon

PS - Uh, my opinion -  the Matrix/sequels coulda-shoulda been SO much better.  Does it therefore suck?  Sometimes, yeah, that's my thought.  It sometimes even moves beyond donkey dick to a quad-P (pustulant purple PACHYDERM penis!)

Then again, sometimes a diamond IS beautiful, even with some major flaws . . .

[greyorm]

The traitor's failure to make sure of his kill is a fine example of the "idiot plot," meaning that things won't work out as the writer plans unless the characters are idiots.

Note that I don't disagree.

Here's my two-second take on the issue: Outside doesn't really matter unless and until the Inside is dealt with. Bhuddist philosphy. Which is also something that we shouldn't discuss here, but it does make an interesting view for Clinton's game, and what Inside is all about -- it takes the black and white away from Outside/Inside (good/bad).

Judgement becomes more difficult, more meaningful than the simplistic question of, "When is he going to do the right thing and get out of Inside?" which the supplement, or discussion of it so far, seems to promote. The real question becomes, "When does it stop being cathartic, empowering, and positive and start being an escape?"

By example of this, the Dhammapada (XII 10) says, "Do not neglect your own welfare for another's, no matter how great: having discerned your own need, do what is really useful." Which is translated to mean that one can not help others in a real sense of helping until they have developed their understanding of their own self sufficiently. Doing otherwise is not altruistic action, but selfish indulgence (you're doing it to feel like you are doing good). It is the confusion of activism for action. But when does this detachment begin and end, when do you start helping, and how do you find the way there?

It is the same question I ask about the Bhuddist monk's pursuit of enlightenment by seclusion -- the goal is noble, the reasons are sound, but do they hold? When is it the path, and when is it simply fleeing from life, pushing one further from enlightenment rather than towards it? Where, precisely, is the path?

I think the contrast of Inside/Outside could work well to explore that issue -- you have to work things out Inside before you can deal with them Outside, to understand them...of course, the danger is that you're just fleeing from the problem while claiming you're trying to "think" about it.

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Gordon, Raven nailed the answer to your inquiry, as far as I'm concerned.

There's a reason I kept quoting that guy in The Sorcerer's Soul ...

Best,
Ron

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Man, Raven has to go and out me. I tried pretty hard to make "Inside" all cyberpunk- and Unix-ed up.

The neat thing I did try to take from the Matrix, and from the source literature is that there really is a problem Inside that has to be solved. The Outside is stated as the goal - although, as Ron pointed out, reason's not always made why it is - but Outside can't be made functional until Inside's dealt with.

Eastern philosophy and all that "the world is an illusion" business is obviously in there, but one of the biggest sources that I probably should have quoted is an old Sorcerer thread, which might have been on the old Gaming Outpost. It was about playing Sorcerer, in which your characters are people playing a role-playing game and their demons are RPG characters. (You know, all post-modern, as the kids say these days.) That thread gave all sorts of inspiration - people playing a RPG are exploring their own moral issues and self-identity, but in an imaginary fashion, not in their actual life. Those explorations, and the conclusions they bring, though, can help in their life if they choose to apply them.

Divorcing the sorcerer by making his demons only exist in an imaginary world just seemed to echo that, a question the Matrix did kind of ask, a question I think is one of the most important for declared narrativist role-players: how do I make my imaginary moral explorations apply to my life?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Here's something to agree with Gordon's secondary point and also to cut John (Feng) some slack, 'cause I've been wicked to him in this thread ...

What The Matrix does right is the following:

1. Immature male faces bully who potentially controls his life

2. Finds alternate mentor who provides an entirely different value system for him to adopt

3. Adopts value system, puts life on the line in order to apply it when it really counts

4. Saves mentor, kicks bully's ass (using new value system), and gets the girl

And boy, did it do this right! Everything from that first terrifying interview scene (remember, I saw the movie stone cold) to the training scenes, to the spectacular climactic fights ... amazing.

As pure maturation/action movie, The Matrix ranks right at the top.

For some other movies which do this just the way it oughtta be done (and with significant unique nuances), see Sidekicks, The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Dragon, Forrest Gump, The Wood, and Grosse Pointe Blank.

Best,
Ron

[John Harper]

Ron,

No wickedness detected. Even though I'm a fan of the films, I don't feel the need to defend them. If they don't do it for ya, that's cool.

Anyway, I run my Matrix games with Wushu. I think Inside will work better for a different kind of story -- i.e. "real" cyberpunk. That's my reaction to it, anyway.

[DannyK]

Hi Clinton (I missed you when you were in Seattle!  Too bad... but I don't blame you.  February in Seattle is not good for anyone's mental health).

Inside is very cool -- I like the contrast of the perky virtual Frisco and the drab deserted real West Coast -- it reminds me very much of Dick, especially "A Scanner Darkly" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

I was just wondering about the rules for Humanity = 0.  Obviously, when Humanity goes to zero in a Sorcerer game, something bad has got to happen, and I get the idea of the hacker becoming pure code himself, but what about the other, "Outside" option, where you can't log on without bursting a blood vessel?  This seems a little arbitrary to me, since the only cyberpunk characters who are exiled from the Net are usually those who've suffered severe neurological damage, like Case at the beginning of Neuromancer.  

DannyK