News You Can Bruise for 2012 August 14

Tue Aug 14 2012 09:11 Constellation Games Bonus Commentary #3: "Dana no Chousen": It's Tuesday, time to turn over a rock and uncover "Dana no Chousen", the most violent story I've ever written. My very first concept for bonus material was an excerpt from a sleazy, bloody Dana Light tie-in novel, illustrating the source material from which the Dana we see in chapter 35 took her personality. But I can't really do a long-form pastiche of a totally foreign style (that would be Kris). I don't even enjoy reading such pastiches (sorry, Kris).

And I'm less interested in Dana's source material than in Dana herself. There are a lot of unanswered questions and just plain plot holes in Constellation Games, but the only ones that still bother me have to do with Dana. As Brendan points out, Dana gets a really raw deal in the book—not just from humanity but from the Constellation. Why did Curic agree to uplift Dana in the first place? It seems like asking for trouble. Why did Smoke agree to send one of its subminds to be a human's girlfriend? And why does Dana never come out of the sandbox at the end of chapter 35?

I tried out a number of explanations: 1) Hypotheses about the behavior of fictional alien anarchists cannot be tested. 2) Back before the Greenland Treaty was a sure thing, Dana 2.0 looked like a good opportunity to land a spy on Earth. I did not like these explanations. The explanation I used for background in "Dana no Chousen" is that Dana is caught between different conceptions of identity.

Daniel Dennett's multiple-drafts theory of consciousness suggests that human minds, like Dana's and Curic's and Smoke's, are made up of subminds. Human psychology makes the simplifying assumption that the subminds add up to a single "person". But Curic and Smoke accept persons as the emergent properties of other, smaller persons.

To Ariel, splitting Dana out of Smoke feels like creating a new person. But as far as Smoke and Curic are concerned, that person already existed within Smoke. When Curic looks back on this, she's going to think her big screwup was trusting the human socialization of Smoke-Dana to a couple of videogame-obsessed flakes like Bai and Ariel.

(This is hard to square with Curic's guilt-trip of Ariel in chapter 9, the first time he asks for an Edink-English translator. I wrote that section very early, and I should have come back and revised it after adding Smoke to the story. But I think the problem is a lot smaller if you read Curic as suggesting the creation of a brand new AI for purposes of the guilt trip. Sometimes when we don't want to be bothered we exaggerate how much work it really would be to do something.)

A person can function even if some of its subminds are unhappy or psychotic. Sometimes an unhappy or psychotic submind can even help the larger mind get something done or come up with new ideas. But an unhappy submind of Smoke might be as big as a human, or bigger. Should you worry about that?

Curic doesn't worry because she doesn't believe Smoke-Dana is all that big. Smoke will worry if it feels a problem, but Smoke is the size of a society. It doesn't have the computing power to police the happiness of its entire tree. But Ariel, uh, knows Dana. And Ariel can't let this go. A person went in there and didn't come out.

So Ariel puts on his pith helmet and goes into Smoke with his human outlook and his human standards of morality, and it turns out there's a problem with the sandbox. Dana found a way to game the system without her supermind finding out. Ariel goes in and rescues Dana from her own cruelty and Smoke's complicity. A happy ending! By human standards.

• Yeah, for the record, Jack Stout is Ariel, not Bai. Among other things, Jack quotes Curic on sentience, and says "un-be-fucking-lievable", which Ariel says in chapter 22 of CG. To me the real tip-off is "seduced by a fucking spreadsheet." But I didn't decide this 100% until writing the "someone who fixes software" line at the end of the first draft.
• The title is a reference (and the story itself a tribute) to the Japanese workplace satire Game Center CX. In a segment called "Arino no Chousen", comedian Shinya Arino is required to play old video games for up to sixteen hours at a stretch, racking up hundreds of in-game deaths to meet a pointless goal through sheer determination. I consider GCCX a workplace satire because of the way Arino acts like a terrible boss to his more skilled underlings, and because of the clear implication that office work in general is no different from "Arino no Chousen".

  Tangent: the segment is called "Arino no Chousen", but the GCCX DS video game is called Arino no Chousenjou. "Arino no Chousen" itself is a reference to the first game so challenged, Beat Takeshi's infamous Takeshi no Chousenjou. What's the difference between "Chousen" and "Chousenjou"? With the Portuguese stuff like Pôneis Brilhantes I was able to run my machine translations past a native speaker, but no such luck here.

  At the time, Google Translate translated 挑戦状 as the meaningless "letter of defiance". There's a GCCX where Arino, having clearly tried the opposite translation, says that the English name of his game is "Arino Challenge Paper." But now Google Translate translates 挑戦状 as "challenge", "letter of challenge", or "gauntlet." I'm pretty sure "Arino no Chousen" means "The challenge Arino undergoes" whereas "Arino no Chousenjou" means "The challenge Arino issues to you". Thus, "Dana no Chousen" is the correct title. I think.

• For obvious reasons, I use light as a symbolic mood-setter throughout the story, but it's not light vs. darkness (which Ariel uses in CG); it's just different kinds of light. The sunset over the harbor and the melancholy pier were inspired by Ivan Cockrum's 1997 IF game Sunset over Savannah, which I haven't played since 1997, but which was clearly very effective.
• This is not a thing you're really supposed to notice, but it is the sort of thing I'm supposed to point out in commentary. This story shows most clearly my bonus-material technique of taking tons of details from the novel and recontextualizing them from the POV of a character whose POV we haven't seen before. In particular, look at Dana's subminds.

  The Dana-Marcos submind is more or less equivalent to the virtual girlfriend software we saw back in Chapter 7, a dumb simulation designed to "eat popcorn and follow directions." I was going to say I don't know where the name came from, but I just figured it out. That program wanted new accessories all the time, so I named the submind after Imelda Marcos.

  Dana-Svetlana is Dana 2.0, the uplifted version of Dana designed to "decipher dead languages", the one who could have been happy with Bai if Bai could have been happy with her. Dana-Svetlana is also Svetlana Sveta, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Ariel invented so he could talk about Dana 2.0 publicly.

  And this story's "Dana", the one who becomes Svetlana-Dana, is the cruel part of Dana's personality, the part modeled after the canonical Dana Light. This Dana first flares up in chapter 23 ("the fucking Cayman Islands computer program"). By chapter 34 canonical-Dana has taken over completely, and by the end of the novel she has consolidated control of the "Dana" personality from within the very environment designed to rehabilitate her.

• Finally, one more thing you're not supposed to notice, something I was reminded of when I mentioned the sunset earlier. The line "like living under two suns, one pale and weak" is a callback to chapter 29's "One bright distant star and a dim one that's really close". The bonus stories are full of these textual callbacks, and I haven't been listing them because I think you'd find that boring and I don't remember a lot of them anymore, but I hope they've proven effective on a subconscious level.

We're almost done! Come back in two days for the Leonard/Adam joint commentary on "Pey Shkoy Benefits Humans," when Tetsuo will say, "Hot damn, it's business!"

"Dana no Chousen" banner by Brendan Adkins. Savannah photo by Scott Oves.

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