Tommi's Way - Chapter 4 of 30
Tommi's Way: The Video Game That Doesn't Exist - Chapter 4 of 30
The following is a series of chapters from the novel Tommi’s Way - The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist. Each chapter will be uploaded on pilleater.com until the novel comes out with everything in it (that also entails revisions and reformatting). You can catch up by reading the first or previous chapter. Otherwise, each chapter can be read as an isolated article with not context of the past and future. Reader criticism and influence plays a huge part in shaping this future novel. Just like Fantasy Flight’s “Living Card Game” model, this project is also a “living novel,” where the novel changes form as the reader base influences the author’s direction through comments and criticism until it is finished. This is what makes this work of art a true “novel,” where this innovative artistic device (i.e. the living novel) determines “the new” in the novel, akin to the reader’s gaze in Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose.
Chapter 4: Copying Forms
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I understand video games as games, and not as virtual reality. When understanding game design, we look at what makes a machine work and what form of leisure it can make through uncertain play. Play is expressive, just like the artist and the canvas he works on.
What I told my friend about Tommi’s Way was something about forms. I don’t remember the exact words what I said to him. Rather, I’ll write what I know now.
A form is not exactly art. And “signs” is not what I am writing about either (as Umberto Eco thinks fascism is everywhere, even in his closet!). A form takes a visible presence, in that it also brings together “things” in a particular way. A form can be a silhouette, a shape, an ideological meaning that represents itself. Again, not to digress into “signs,” as semiotics often plays into psychological warfare and liberal assumptions on what they think is racist at face value. I would like to think about forms and how forms are used in order to create and emulate art.
The bed is not a “successful, understandable form of communication” because the bed doesn’t communicate anything or assumes one should sleep. The bed never talks, nor is it talking to the viewer with “communication.” This is the implied euphemism that tries to find racism within nothing. And as for the “paradigm,” it defuses a subculture and it’s curated semantics. Something is unfair here.
Forms are often copied from code. The code is already written. If you want to make another Super Mario Bros. clone, copy the code and paste it. In the virtual world, there is only data and the code that creates the physical. Art becomes “presets” of forms we choose from then to actually make original art. We lose expression in favor of forms, and this is an issue I see currently in art and the obsession around “object oriented ontology.”
Electronic music has became nothing more than a template sharing medium, where one form is copied and presented as original. The latest from “analog horror” to “liminal spaces,” these templates create ideological forms of being pretentious. These forms are caught up in the present and are made to woo the smug elite who are ideologically hostile against originality. Technology is understood the same way a science would be studied, in that the artist pretends to be lost the 1990s, as if one would be authentic. Video game collecting and mastering seems to be rooted in this fallacy as well. To mention Tommi’s Way to the hardcore gamer is the same as proclaiming that “my favorite poet is Raymond Kertezc.” It is a complete fabrication to hint at being the only gamemaster in the room and to have that very PhD printed as a status symbol for it. This is the delusion of forms, as forms replace our quest for self-discovery and negates expression.
"Semiotics" is a liberal ideology that tries to spot anti-liberalism in everything through euphemisms and psychoanalytical assumptions. The error that everything "communicates" is a bias found in solipsism, rooted between human and non-human worship. It displaces humanity altogether. Everything is rooted out, filtered, and devalued if it contradicts the regime. The death of the novelist began with the death of it’s own medium; the paperback book.
Sam Austen created “The Meow Library” series of books, where the humorous novelty is that the text in these cat parody books contains nothing but the words “meow” over and over again. The reason is because they were meant to be read by cats, for cats. There is War and Peace (For Your Cat), Crime and Punishment (For Your Cat), and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (For Your Cat). All with the words “meow” written in all of the pages! The reason is not just as a simple joke, but as a reflection of the consumption and ownership of books as objects with no value in that text whatsoever. The “content” becomes subjective, as the ownership of the trinket represents the perceived intelligence of that consumer. The novelist is no longer a writer, but a designer working with the medium of the book and what text of English could be arranged on the pages. It is at this endpoint that “what is new” reaches beyond writing English and rather becomes a choice of artistic imagery. If any communication is going on here, it’s a statement about deconstruction and the nihilism of reader subjectivity.
National Public Radio recommends a 2024 “novel” by Honor Levy called “My First Book” that graces ASCII text art from the 1990s and conflates it with the normal internet culture of the 2020s. An anime girl with wings and a cat makes a strong connection to the nature of Asian worship, and yet this is a subconscious theme in the text by using 2020 words like “edgelord,” “doomscrolling,” and “zoomer.” This child of an elite liberal family is trying very hard to assimilate to the yesteryear nerd culture of the 1990s, and yet the eclectic confusion of ASCII text art, 4chan lingo, “social media” clout, and Y2K worship is what she gets wrong. Thus “My First Book” becomes an object about herself, as if it’s another Instagram post taking the form of the paperback book, becoming the “novel.” The insecure awareness makes sure that there will be a “second book” in the making or that everyone has a cool “first book.” The outrageous irony that this could of been a post on an obscure website becomes a hipster trinket that represents an authentic outsider subculture she is supposedly apart of. The novelist further dies when they rely on forms to construct their art.
I see the same influence in Tommi’s Way as taking the form of a book, that I am admitting defeat where I am painting a picture from my memory onto the typewriter (that is ironically a computer keyboard). Tommi’s Way will have “cool art” not done by me and yet influenced by things I see. It becomes a book that the reader will purchase on Amazon’s print on demand service, and it is a pretty object that has no analytical substance other than the aesthetic preference what I write in English. At this realization, I might as well stop writing and move onto another serious project. I am becoming the fallacy I am writing about.
No. I shall keep writing about Tommi’s Way, even if it’s not a video game.
Tommi’s Way could be an audiobook and could be read aloud to an audience. But why so? I’m not Quentin Kilgore, Micheal Dalton, Sebastian Guzman, Marcus Sloss, Virgil Knightley, Jack Bryce, Annabelle Hawthorne, Chuck Tingle, or any of these artificial constructed American hentai sadist novelists that print only on Amazon. I admire the subculture, but hate the denial of desire. Images of hentai women exist on the covers, and it’s up to the reader if he gives into his desire for Eurasianism and embrace the forbidden fruit of Asiansexuality. I’ve written the same genre of pornography before and deeply admire the romantic genre. But not once did I think I would do it as a pulp the same way Danielle Steel manufactures her conveyor belt products. All of it is show for the sake that someone is willing to spend $20 for the word “meow” and then posting the artifact on Instagram.
The divide is between literacy and illiteracy.
The printing industry is owned by Jeff Bezos, and all “writers” must submit to working with him. All paperback books are manufactured by Bezos and there is no competition. To write on any topic, one must submit to Bezos. If one want’s to self-publish, a chunk of that profit goes straight to Bezos. What then are the value of books if the technology has superseded the medium? It’s better to collect .pdf files and read from there. It’s even better to just read from our smartphones!
The only use for a book now is to write in them with a pencil; in order to take notes and write our own commentary against the text. You could do it by digital means, but the authentic way of drawing in books will remain with the medium. The book industry is no longer for the readers, but for independent researchers willing to write in the text, make a citation, and respond with their own ink.
It then becomes obvious that book collecting is a type of power-knowledge, hoarding away private information against the masses. What the collector knows is what he has. But does the collector exactly know what’s in the inside? Has he read anything that he owns?
People are illiterate for buying pretty books. Literacy is becoming an exclusive skill for the elites. It is power-knowledge by definition. What the elites write, read, and talk about are from the concealed books in their dark libraries. The latest “literary” trend is about depopulating the world, degrowing the economy, and making sure everyone below them dies off. Literacy is a niche leisure for a niche audience that doesn’t believe in the medium of paperbacks anymore. And why should anyone? If their was a nuclear fallout, books would only exist as physical records. But as technology progresses, what is defined as a “book” will change. Because all those “meows” mean something else to the archeologist.
The hyper irony found within copying forms is erasing it’s origin of ideology and presenting the zeitgeist as pretentious servants for the kingdom of sameness. To cover the dust off a collection of vaporwave tapes reeks of an incredible detachment. The only act of authenticity found is the subconscious desire to become Japanese (or to make anime real). Video games are copying preexisting codes and hiring cartoonists to create works of visual art than actual games. Pretty books are no different as the illiteracy found in “visual culture.” It is a staggering revelation.
I’ve had these thoughts even back in 2009. It’s quite bizarre that now the nostalgia regime is trying to comfort “good” feelings from 2009, psychologically operating a new generation to have feelings of irony around materialism and consumption from an age that was already ironic in “gamer culture.” This error relates back to the fallacy of video games and objects as superior descriptive when the speaker can’t use universal terms of language. Entire express words replace what is being said. That’s how I feel about Tommi’s Way replacing sophistication, as my own selfish first person account defeats any other detail that should be explained to anyone. If something is like the arcade game Qix, and the reader has never played Qix, why should it be used as a surrogate word? The same surrogate operations are found in artificial intelligent technology and generators that ideologically mimic what users think they would like.
The fad of “hauntology” is not only pretentious, but cannot explain itself in relation to electronic music or nostalgia. If one so desires borrowing past forms in their art or being reminded of something they think of, is it really something that “haunts” us, or, is it an ideological insistence that a submission to hedonism is the only truth? I present this question to anyone picking up Tommi’s Way and assuming they would get these same feelings from other popular forms found in this work of art.
What I am against is copying forms. It sounds impossible. Humanity has been mimicking and emulating forms into art since it’s conception. We start with a mold of clay and try to make the body of Adonis out of it. What I care about is expression and passion that goes into the mold and not the form is copies.
I said something like this to my friend. And he didn’t quite understand. What are games with the video or the visuals? That’s what I care about. It’s like reading a paperback book, where the reader must construct the instructions and “programming” to visualize what they see. At that point, the reader is truly free from all constrains and can think for himself.
…To be continued…
