Tricking the Mirror

You can say a lot of things about the way the world is now, but one thing absolutely baffling about it is how things that were once common sense only a decade ago are now nuggets of obscure knowledge. For instance, see plagiarism. No one takes it seriously these days.

For example, there was this video game recently released called YIIK: A Postmodern RPG that has been embroiled in many forms of controversy. First it was from the creator about how games aren't art, despite all creative works by definition being art, aside from his game being special and highly original of course. Then it was referencing the suicide of a real life victim to frame its story around (not in itself wrong, but execution is everything). Now it is about stealing whole passages from author Haruki Murakami for dialogue within the game. You can see the story here.

When confronted with this truth the studio pulled out the "homage" card, because that's the get out of jail free card these days.

“YIIK contains quite a few homages to the writer Haruki Murakami. Our intent was to include little nods to Murakami’s lesser known works as tributes. Within the game, the tributes served a narrative function,” Allanson said.

I'm unconvinced there is a Millennial who knows what an actual homage is. They should, but for some reason have discarded this definition from their minds. A "homage" is clearly not swiping passages of another writer's work and not transforming it to a new form, such as comedy or parody, or attributing the original when doing so. But that aside there is a another quote that gives the game away.

"The idea is, Alex has read After Dark, and his fondness for the novel is seeping into his reality with vocal and physical manifestations calling his attention back to the passages of the book now living in his subconscious. In that context, we thought it would not be in-character for “Proto Woman” to cite that their words hail from Murakami’s novel, since they don’t have the awareness that their words are actually an excerpt from a book."

Modernism subsists entirely on stealing and twisting the old ideas of dead men while picking and choosing what you want, and Postmodernism doesn't have the self-awareness to understand this when trying to break free of its shackles. Nonetheless, the book in question came out in 2004 and the game takes place in 1999. So this doesn't cut it, as it can't be true. But I'm sure there's some tortured explanation as to how this still makes sense. After all, (Post)modernism is all about bending reality to make what ever you want true. This is how we end up with those defending things that are obviously wrong such as plagiarism.

But that's not what this post is about. There is another angle to this problem.

Without going into the ethical and moral quagmire about why taking something that isn't yours wholesale from another then attempting to profit of it is bad, I would rather talk about why any creator that does this is never going to amount to anything. This is an interesting topic and I feel compelled to explore it, at least a little.

Plagiarism is the habit of a pretender who has no creative talent. It is the refuge of a man with no imagination, and no interest in cultivating one. It is about a man who sees the results of a real creator's work and wants in on that. In art this is the absolute worst thing you can be, far below simple hacks and even message fiction writers.

The reason I say this is because of how a creator takes in inspiration. They watch a movie like John Wick and decide to write an action story themselves, maybe about a secret assassin organization or about a lone gunman with an attitude or perhaps even about a dog who gets shot. The story might not even have any direct similarities at all aside from genre. In other words, something about the original story tickles them and causes the writer to create a wholly new idea with the original as a starting point. That's how all art works. A plagiarist takes John Wick, calls him Ron Stick, and keeps everything else in the original more or less the same. At that point it isn't even about making art anymore, it's about someone who wants attention. Plagiarists are not in it for the product, but for their own ego.

What this tells me about the above mentioned game is that the creator wanted notoriety, fame, and acclaim, and was more interested in that than he was sitting down and writing a story. Storytelling came second to ego. He was so creatively bankrupt that he needed to take whole passages of someone else's work instead of writing something of his own and didn't care about why. It's lazy and the mark of someone who either has no voice of his own or needs another to speak for him.

Which might speak well of this entire generation.

I've seen many cases of such plagiarism being labelled okay because "everyone does this now" but why aren't we asking why "everyone does this now"? No one was okay with this before.

Why didn't Phantasy Star IV swipe the battle mechanics from Dragon Quest to make it easier to create for them? Why didn't Columbo steal whole plots from Father Brown if it didn't matter? Why didn't Dragon Ball trace whole panels from Astro Boy to save time on a weekly schedule? Why didn't Dee Dee Ramone lift whole choruses and lyrics from Smokey Robinson if it wasn't a big deal? Why didn't any of these older artists need to do what modern ones do without even thinking twice? This is a question none of these people ask. And yet now we even have commentators questioning why plagiarism is so bad. We live in the 21st century, not Year Zero. You are not doing anything others before you have not already considered doing.

In less than a generation we've gone from admiring a perfectly cooked steak of creativity to coveting lukewarm comfort food heated in the microwave. This laziness is why we get so much bad art these days and accept even moderate plagiarism as good enough to spend money on. At some point we went from passively accepting lesser art to needing to spend money on it, and we don't even ask why.

So, then, why?

Much of this has come about by elevating entertainment and artists to modern scripture and scribe status. We put them up there with religions. If these people decide to put it out then it's okay. Who are you to complain? They aren't making art for you, so just shut up and enjoy it or find something else. If you deny this happens then try criticizing the newest Star Wars trailer for any reason at all and watch the reaction. This is not something that would have happened back in the '90s. At some point they became zealots for these products and have no self-reflection as to why they are and why this has changed so much in a short time.

No wonder these people want to get in on the scam. If you will buy anything from them then they can do whatever they want and never suffer for it or learn from their mistakes. Bringing back standards would go a long way to fixing this, but I digress. Fanatics don't want this. They will dance to anything, as an old band once said. It is what it is.

Disposing of those old standards to fashion cover for ourselves to do whatever we want damn the rest is a dead end. It's causing schisms where there shouldn't be. This attitude is going to destroy what little relation we have left to each other and is killing an already weak society.

This isn't a road we want to go down.

Creativity is a craft. There's a reason no writer will ever let you see the first story they ever wrote and that is because they are all terrible and not worth reading. A writer with any semblance of ability will tell you this. No one starts out great, no matter what lie you've been fed. Not just grammar or sentence structure, but creativity itself is something you train and build up with the rest of your skill set. However, it will only improve if you want it to and if you truly believe in what you're doing. A plagiarist skips this step so are missing the key ingredient to being a creator and is therefore never going to amount to anything. It shows their priorities are not where they belong. This is a fundamental error in being a creator.

The reason every writer thinks they're a fraud five seconds away from being found out is because they know where they came from and how easy it is to make a wrong turn and have your work fall apart. This is why they edit so much and spend what little cash they have on editors. A plagiarist that knows nothing of such things will never have that level of awareness about art. They do not understand the craft, and they have inoculated themselves from being able to. A society that doesn't hold their feet to the fire is also partially to blame for this loss of quality control.

In the end these plagiarists are hurting themselves most of all in a bid for adoration and applause, not audience satisfaction or for creating art. They can do this because we no longer have any standards informed by the past but whatever tickles our nostalgic appetites and base desires. We no longer even understand what it means to build on a tradition anymore so we rehash what little we know and subvert it into a corner. There's nowhere to go here.

This constant need to reheat the past with reboots, references, plagiarism, and "modernization" shows a culture that has entirely lost its connection with its roots. No one needed to do this back in the 90s or earlier. This is a modern problem. If it's always Year Zero it can never become Year One, so forever will we be trapped in this limbo or reinventing the wheel but calling it a different name, or perhaps not even bothering to do that much. Without a true connection to the past this is all you can do to avoid building from a foundation and ever reaching greater heights.

Plagiarism severs that relationship totally. When the plagiarist decides to steal wholesale from someone else he has abandoned his quest to connect with the audience via their own voice through their own art. They have instead usurped another's art for either quick fame or because they don't think much of their audience to begin with. Regardless, plagiarism is unbridled disrespect given form. Legal and moral arguments aside this is disgusting behavior.  

At the end it comes down to why one bothers with art at all. Is it because they want to understand their fellow man better, or is it because they want to hide in their own little world away from their neighbors? It is one or the other. This is the question that will decide what, exactly, art means to you and the world around you. This is what will decide what art is for.

If you don't care then you also don't understand why art is so lazy today. It's because commentators like the following from the above article let them get away with this:

"It honestly isn't a big deal. I know how much people here like to shit on bad games and their makers but... Yeah, really not a big deal."

No one would have let this fly even ten years ago. In school it was hammered in to students for decades that plagiarism is the worst thing one can possibly do. How did we go from that to this ambivalence of theft and accepting of mediocrity? How did we just let things get this bad? Are we that spiritually dead?

If allowing an important form of communication like art degrade into outright theft in pursuit of the almighty ego boost is not a "big deal" then it is no wonder it has become such disposable garbage today. This is the world we've let happen.

At what point do we start taking this loss seriously?

A long look in the mirror would do a lot of good. Find out what exactly happened to get us to this point. Then maybe we can do better than this wasteland we have now. Hopefully by tomorrow we will find our way back on track again.

That's the hope, anyway.