Space Opera Q4: Brexit, Trump, theatre: Marry me?

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The book was written in 2018, in a context of Brexit, Trump, and many other right-wing and authoritarian movements. The book is explicitly placed in this context; does that add to or detract from the book? Does the book put forward a good response to these movements? Is theatre the opposite of fascism? Should it be?

How should people live, respond to, protest, in an age of re-emerging fascism? Are glamour and satire important?

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Comments

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    Well, I certainly understood it. A 'good response'? It just lays it out. It nicely does not comment on it, leaving the actions to comment upon themselves. Well handled I think. Is theatre the opposite of fascism? Good god, no! Hitler used theatre, as does Trump. Theatre is a tool that can be used by anyone. How should people respond to re-emergent fascism? As their conscience dictates. There is no one answer there. In combating any sort of oppression, satire is vital. Look at Soviet humor! But glamour? Not so much. Glamour just makes things more sparkly.

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    I was curious about when this book a written, because she made some very odd anachronistic references - at least one of which had me thinking "this book must be older than I though - nobody does that anymore!" (sadly, I can't remember specifically what that was - hopefully it comes back to me.)

    Fascism seems to require theatre. Satire seems to be a tried and true vehicle for criticism of politics in general, but I think that what we're seeing is that it goes over the heads of certain people, especially those with entrenched ideas. And such things can be killed if the media is shut down or discredited.

    Glamour, on the other hand, is like sports. It's something superficial you toss out there to amuse the masses, to distract them from the real problems, to control the mob.

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    I didn't really see it particularly, though there are parts that are applicable. The comments on multi-cultural backgrounds and being British for example. One thing that struck me is that it's set some years in the future rather than the day after tomorrow, and I didn't feel that when reading it.

    There were a couple of incongruous references. One early on to libertarians which didn't seem to fit the England part of the setting (though I suppose it might in the future).

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    @dr_mitch said:
    I didn't really see it particularly, though there are parts that are applicable. The comments on multi-cultural backgrounds and being British for example. One thing that struck me is that it's set some years in the future rather than the day after tomorrow, and I didn't feel that when reading it.

    I thought the setting time was particularly perniciously nebulous. Some time in the seventies to a reto-future 90s to 2021 to maybe 2030s. I hate when that is left so floaty!

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    I thought the setting time was particularly perniciously nebulous. Some time in the seventies to a reto-future 90s to 2021 to maybe 2030s. I hate when that is left so floaty!

    I'd have preferred it to be nailed down. at least to a decade too. Hey, an alternate near future where some 1970s and 1990s styles had returned would have been good for a page or two of humour near the start (though the humour mainly failed, so maybe I should be grateful we were spared).

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    I have to admit that any political references kind of passed me by (rather like the pop-culture ones of your first discussion starter). Looking back, I think my main impression was of a kind of verbal exhaustion as I read through it... the endless surfeit of words tended to make me feel weary rather than exhilarated. I don't remember having a similar reaction to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, but it's a long time since I read either.

    So for me, the verbal vehicle kind of precluded me making political connections.

    I agree that the lack of time reference was odd - half the time I found myself thinking of the book as an alternate history of the 80s or 90s, rather than a future of any kind.
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    @RichardAbbott said:

    I agree that the lack of time reference was odd - half the time I found myself thinking of the book as an alternate history of the 80s or 90s, rather than a future of any kind.

    Word!

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    Nudging the discussion back to the original question, what role do the arts have in the context of fascism and authoritarianism? Is the celebration of joy and creativity and diversity important? Are they important as a wide social movement, or as an individual response to the environment?

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    The role of arts is propaganda. Letting your citizens see the joy of surrender to the greater good behind strong, capable leadership!

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    I'm not sure the book makes the case as arts as an alternative to fascism/violence at all. If your alternative to galactic war is a singing contest, but the losers get obliterated from the galaxy, it's not really an improvement.

    The time period wasn't obvious to me, either. The references to the (human) bands felt like they were from the 70s or 80s, or what someone imagined they'd be like - I didn't realise it was set in the future at all.

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    Succeed in a singing contest to save your life. Succeed in a race to save your life. Succeed in gladiatorial combat to save your life. These are really all fundamentally the same, aren't they? The art (music, singing) in this case has nothing to do with self expression, so does it really have anything to do with art? It's basically just a skill check - save vs skill or die - dragged out over an entire session so you can gather the necessary buffs to succeed in the climactic skill check. This is a tried and true technique in gaming.

    Is it a good technique?

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    @Apocryphal said:
    Succeed in a singing contest to save your life. Succeed in a race to save your life. Succeed in gladiatorial combat to save your life. These are really all fundamentally the same, aren't they? The art (music, singing) in this case has nothing to do with self expression, so does it really have anything to do with art? It's basically just a skill check - save vs skill or die - dragged out over an entire session so you can gather the necessary buffs to succeed in the climactic skill check. This is a tried and true technique in gaming.

    Is it a good technique?

    Except... we have better tools for dealing with fights, rather than singing or racing. First, there's the investigation of the opponent to find their weakness, and then sorting out how to exploit that. In the fight itself, we follow the action round-by-round. In both of those stages, there are plenty of decisions to be made by the players. I contend that it's those decisions that make the game interesting.

    In contrast, there are very few interesting decisions to be made in the typical "singing" or "running" scene, as currently implemented in most RPGs. That's why those scenes fall flat at the table.

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    @NeilNjae said:
    we have better tools for dealing with fights, rather than singing or racing. First, there's the investigation of the opponent to find their weakness, and then sorting out how to exploit that. In the fight itself, we follow the action round-by-round. In both of those stages, there are plenty of decisions to be made by the players. I contend that it's those decisions that make the game interesting.

    Sure, more player decisions make the game interesting, but combat also comes with more dice rolls, which (in many systems) make the gaming less interesting. For me, anyway, dialogue is where the real meat of gaming is, and it hardly requires any rules at all.

    Do we follow the action in a fight because we find physical violence interesting, or because it's so very inherently risky and there's a chance of injury or death at each turn? It's the risk that makes combat interesting enough to focus on. There's much less risk involved in singing a song, so it doesn't really make sense to slow it down and focus on the details. I don't think the presence of detailed rules for violence vs the absence of them for art really says all that much about our societal preference for one over the other (if indeed that's the point you are trying to make).

    In contrast, there are very few interesting decisions to be made in the typical "singing" or "running" scene, as currently implemented in most RPGs. That's why those scenes fall flat at the table.

    True, though as you suggest it's not always that way. High Strung, for example, drills down on performance but has no rules for combat. Again, though, I don't think the mechanical heft is necessarily reflective of the value we place on these things in our life. I think it has more to do with the risk and complexity. Running, singing, playing music - these are all things we can relate to, and have even turned a hand to. Combat isn't - we can't really imagine it. So some games give us the tools to do so.

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    > @Apocryphal said:
    >...It's the risk that makes combat interesting enough to focus on. There's much less risk involved in singing a song, so it doesn't really make sense to slow it down and focus on the details. I don't think the presence of detailed rules for violence vs the absence of them for art really says all that much about our societal preference for one over the other ... I think it has more to do with the risk and complexity. Running, singing, playing music - these are all things we can relate to, and have even turned a hand to. Combat isn't - we can't really imagine it. So some games give us the tools to do so.

    I feel there's a bit more than that. Sadly, because of humanity's history, we have a readily available store of knowledge about what the advantages and disadvantages are of all kinds of weapons. So if one character wants to use a Roman retiarius style net and trident, and another is dressed up as a samurai, then I'll bet you can fairly easily find out the pros and cons of each - the effect of reach, edge versus point, how much difference skill and training makes, etc. And to a degree there's the curiosity factor of "what if these two had ever met in combat?". So my point is that setting up some rules for fighting isn't too hard (I'm guessing, and placing it in contrast to my next paragraph).

    But where music is concerned, despite the universal appreciation of this back to earlier hominid ancestors, we don't have any real understanding of what makes music good. So is a mixed Roman children's choir performing an ode of Horace at some games, better or worse than a Japanese folk song accompanied by a three-string lute? We have a lot of musical theory of an analytic nature, but none, I believe, that tackles the question of audience reception and appreciation.

    So given the lack of agreement or understanding of what makes music good, how could one begin to draft rules for playing a game?
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    @Apocryphal said:

    Do we follow the action in a fight because we find physical violence interesting, or because it's so very inherently risky and there's a chance of injury or death at each turn? It's the risk that makes combat interesting enough to focus on. There's much less risk involved in singing a song, so it doesn't really make sense to slow it down and focus on the details. I don't think the presence of detailed rules for violence vs the absence of them for art really says all that much about our societal preference for one over the other (if indeed that's the point you are trying to make).

    I pretty fundamentally disagree with this. I think you're familiar with the arguments on both sides, so I won't repeat them here.

    True, though as you suggest it's not always that way. High Strung, for example, drills down on performance but has no rules for combat.

    But. looking at High Strung, there are very few decisions to be made in a performance. By my reading, the only real mechanically-significant decision to be made in the core game is about how much Hope to commit to a new song when it's written. The rest seems to be dice rolling and table lookups.

    But in something like Til Dawn, there are at least decisions made about which PC is taking the lead in this performance, how much longer they can continue, and how it would play with the audience. They're quite abstracted away from what performers do, but so are the decisions made in your standard combat system when compared to what fighters are thinking about during a fight.

    @RichardAbbott said:
    But where music is concerned, despite the universal appreciation of this back to earlier hominid ancestors, we don't have any real understanding of what makes music good. So is a mixed Roman children's choir performing an ode of Horace at some games, better or worse than a Japanese folk song accompanied by a three-string lute? We have a lot of musical theory of an analytic nature, but none, I believe, that tackles the question of audience reception and appreciation.

    So given the lack of agreement or understanding of what makes music good, how could one begin to draft rules for playing a game?

    I think we can make some steps towards that. Do you make mistakes while playing, or is the performance technically good? Is the technique itself any good? How well does your part fit with the rest of the ensemble? How well does it go with the audience? Those are different questions from "what makes music good?"

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    > @NeilNjae said:
    > (Quote)
    > I think we can make some steps towards that. Do you make mistakes while playing, or is the performance technically good? Is the technique itself any good? How well does your part fit with the rest of the ensemble? How well does it go with the audience? Those are different questions from "what makes music good?"

    Yes, very true, and phrasing the question like that allows for social context - I assume that my hypothetical Roman audience would appreciate the children's choir more than the Japanese folk song, regardless of which might be better in some as-yet-undefined sense.

    But the technical goodness argument is an interesting one. As a rule I would agree (on the same lines as expecting good spelling and grammar in a novel) but often live music isn't technically perfect... yet we often regard live music as better than prerecorded, on grounds of spontaneity and audience engagement. And as we all know, live performances by the same group of the same piece can differ wildly from each other. Some of this is no doubt because of the personal circumstances of the group, but some as well is to do with the resonance - or not - with the audience of the day.
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    @NeilNjae said:

    But. looking at High Strung, there are very few decisions to be made in a performance. By my reading, the only real mechanically-significant decision to be made in the core game is about how much Hope to commit to a new song when it's written. The rest seems to be dice rolling and table lookups.

    Other mechanical decisions during a gig
    1. Each player in the band can TAKE THE LEAD - roll the skill check - HELP THE LEAD - attempt to give an additional success to the skill check - or ATTEMPT TO USURP THE LEAD - roll the skill check and try to wrest it away from the main player, but in any case not helping.
    2. Hope can be invested in either the performance, nothing, or an a premiered song, making that a ticklish decision.
    3. Taking a card or not can be good or bad, but can severely affect the performance.

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    @NeilNjae said:

    But. looking at High Strung, there are very few decisions to be made in a performance. By my reading, the only real mechanically-significant decision to be made in the core game is about how much Hope to commit to a new song when it's written. The rest seems to be dice rolling and table lookups.

    Other mechanical decisions during a gig
    1. Each player in the band can TAKE THE LEAD - roll the skill check - HELP THE LEAD - attempt to give an additional success to the skill check - or ATTEMPT TO USURP THE LEAD - roll the skill check and try to wrest it away from the main player, but in any case not helping.
    2. Hope can be invested in either the performance, nothing, or an a premiered song, making that a ticklish decision.
    3. Taking a card or not can be good or bad, but can severely affect the performance.

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    @clash_bowley said:

    Other mechanical decisions during a gig
    1. Each player in the band can TAKE THE LEAD - roll the skill check - HELP THE LEAD - attempt to give an additional success to the skill check - or ATTEMPT TO USURP THE LEAD - roll the skill check and try to wrest it away from the main player, but in any case not helping.
    2. Hope can be invested in either the performance, nothing, or an a premiered song, making that a ticklish decision.
    3. Taking a card or not can be good or bad, but can severely affect the performance.

    Thanks for the corrections, and apologies for not being on top of all the details. I will admit, I was confused why the Take the Lead seemed to apply to songwriting. My reading of the cards was they mainly applied to the situation outside the gig. I haven't understood the whole of the Hope economy, especially how characters gain Hope.

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    @NeilNjae said:
    Thanks for the corrections, and apologies for not being on top of all the details. I will admit, I was confused why the Take the Lead seemed to apply to songwriting. My reading of the cards was they mainly applied to the situation outside the gig. I haven't understood the whole of the Hope economy, especially how characters gain Hope.

    My job is to get it across to you, and that didn't happen, so my apologies for not making it all clearer.

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    BTW total kudos to @NeilNjae for selecting a book which has triggered such a stimulating and wide-ranging discussion.
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    @clash_bowley said:

    My job is to get it across to you, and that didn't happen, so my apologies for not making it all clearer.

    I was skimming it. I didn't dig into it as deeply as I would if I were taking the game to the table. It was a fault of not reading closely.

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    @RichardAbbott said:
    BTW total kudos to @NeilNjae for selecting a book which has triggered such a stimulating and wide-ranging discussion.

    Absolutely! This was all good stuff!

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    @NeilNjae said:
    I was skimming it. I didn't dig into it as deeply as I would if I were taking the game to the table. It was a fault of not reading closely.

    Then all is good! :)

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    @RichardAbbott said:

    @NeilNjae said:
    (Quote)
    I think we can make some steps towards that. Do you make mistakes while playing, or is the performance technically good? Is the technique itself any good? How well does your part fit with the rest of the ensemble? How well does it go with the audience? Those are different questions from "what makes music good?"

    Yes, very true, and phrasing the question like that allows for social context - I assume that my hypothetical Roman audience would appreciate the children's choir more than the Japanese folk song, regardless of which might be better in some as-yet-undefined sense.

    But the technical goodness argument is an interesting one. As a rule I would agree (on the same lines as expecting good spelling and grammar in a novel) but often live music isn't technically perfect... yet we often regard live music as better than prerecorded, on grounds of spontaneity and audience engagement. And as we all know, live performances by the same group of the same piece can differ wildly from each other. Some of this is no doubt because of the personal circumstances of the group, but some as well is to do with the resonance - or not - with the audience of the day.

    The beginning of this part of the conversation immediately reminded me of reader-response theory in literature. I assumed someone has applied it to music, and a search confirms that more than one person has.

    I think Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities is helpful here. Would it be possible for multiple alien civilizations as different as described in this book to have a cohesive enough network of shared experiences to even experience music together? Simply on the physiological level, it was pointed out that humans produce music audible only to human ears. In the various interactions Dess and Oort have with the aliens, it doesn’t appear that there are (m)any shared values. On what basis could a musical performance be a shared experience among these different beings so different physiologically and socially?

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    @WildCard said:
    The beginning of this part of the conversation immediately reminded me of reader-response theory in literature. I assumed someone has applied it to music, and a search confirms that more than one person has.

    I think Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities is helpful here. Would it be possible for multiple alien civilizations as different as described in this book to have a cohesive enough network of shared experiences to even experience music together? Simply on the physiological level, it was pointed out that humans produce music audible only to human ears. In the various interactions Dess and Oort have with the aliens, it doesn’t appear that there are (m)any shared values. On what basis could a musical performance be a shared experience among these different beings so different physiologically and socially?

    yes, I totally agree with you here - I just assumed that it was something which was so much key to the plot that one just had to suspend disbelief or not read the book at all! I suppose you could look at the idea as being a central absurdity, not unlike the infinite improbability drive of Hitchhiker's Guide. Once you have taken on board the central absurdity, all the rest seem easy in comparison.

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    The central absurdity starts even earlier, when the roadrunner appears to everyone. She describes how she's affecting everyone emotionally, using infrasound and neotenous appearance.

    But like all these things, it's a metaphor for us. We should recognise other humans as people, and looking at their art is a way to do that. And even that's a struggle for some of us.

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    As I considered the book as a whole, I thought of surrealist art as an analogue, but our conversation here has convinced me that absurdism is the better connection. I am not very knowledgeable about absurdist art, but I have read a considerable amount of Kierkegaard, who posits a leap of faith that the universe has meaning, even in the fact of lack of evidence that it does. This perhaps should fit better in the thread on the meaning of life, but it has come up here, so I've commented on it here.

    For Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, who has taken this leap, comes at a later stage in life than that of the aesthetic (or the ethical). Kierkegaard thinks that people go through stages of the meaning-making, moving along from aesthetic to ethical to religious stages of life. The knight of faith no longer finds meaning in aesthetics or ethics or religion but acts as if the universe has meaning. This absurd act itself creates (discovers? imagines?) meaning.

    In the aesthetic stage, individuals find internal and subjective meaning in the beauty and sublimity of art. In the ethical stage, meaning moves to inter-subjectivity of person-to-person engaging in acts for the benefit of others. In the religious stage, meaning shifts to subjective experience of the transcendent, which is absurd. Kierkegaard explicitly foregrounds Christianity and the absurd claims it makes, but other have applied his ideas to other contexts.

    I see the aesthetic stage all through the book. Sentient entities find meaning in the music, in the theatre and pageantry of the Grand Prix.

    Some sentient entities in the book find meaning in making connections with others. Dess is particularly bad at that.

    Does anyone in this book make a leap of faith, finding meaning in subjective experience of the transcendence of the universe itself? Or does this book argue against the possibility of this kind of meaning?

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    It's all just Deep Thought to me!

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