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First published on .

rangifer’s diary: pt. cli: Last one.

Immanence

MapleStory, like any good game, has a certain logic to it.

As argued previously, there’s nothing special about “odd jobs”. Any job, odd or otherwise, is latent in the structure of the game itself. For example, the DEX warrior isn’t so much a “job” in its own right as it is a simple consequence of the fact that DEX does a lot of things: a certain amount of AVOID, a certain amount of damage with various weapon-types, & plenty of WAcc to boot.

Nonetheless, it’s often useful to break jobs down into a typology. I like to think that the list of odd jobs on the Oddjobs website does a pretty good (odd) job of it. But these “jobs” don’t really have Platonic existences in the way suggested by such a typology. If MapleStory’s game-mechanics are the sea, then jobs are just particular kinds of waves, with infinite possible variety circumscribed only by the physics of the water.

The result is that, to do violence to a job — again, odd or otherwise — is to do violence to the sea itself. There’s no separating jobs from one another. Each one is just another instantiation of a single, unified, underlying phenomenon which we might go so far as to call MapleStory. To do violence to the DEX warrior is to do violence to DEX itself; to character-stats as such; to the emergent possibilities laid bare by the immanent logic[1] of MapleStory.

“Nonodd” & “odd” jobs stand or fall together, as the fabric of the game remains intact or is made threadbare.

Violence

Yet truly respecting a delicate, complex, mutually self-reïnforcing thing is difficult when you don’t live within it. The closest most of us will ever get to immanence is our own bodies. The heart doesn’t exist to pump blood for its own sake. It only makes sense in relation to the lungs, the circulatory system, the nervous system, the GI tract, etc.. The whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.[2]

In this case, the failure of immanence yields not transcendence, but rather, the banal imposition of historically-specific prejudice.

dimension instance concepts/terms commodity-form
singularity [not abstract] PC, item, monster, … content, token, hyle, Real, unique, haecceïty, own, identity, particular, specific, instantiation, thing in itself thing
immanence quality game-mechanic, build, playstyle, job, … form, type, morphe, differentiation, structure, manifold, heterogeneïty, vibrancy, autonomy, purpose, means to an end use-value
violence quantity superiority forced equalisation, game balance, metagame, optimal, viable, nerf/buff, one-dimensionalisation, homogenisation, cost, zero-sum, risk/reward, expected value, total order, competition, means to a means exchange-value

Capital cannot destroy the human spirit. But it can — & does — suppress & distort it in almost every conceivable way. Premodern peoples[3] could never have imagined the violence of forced equalisation. For them, everything had its organic (like the organs of one’s body) purpose, or at least its place. There was no reason to expect a spooky relation (= fetish) of “value” or “optimality” to exist between fundamentally disparate things.

So game balance is the destruction of what makes MapleStory PCs (plural!) prismatic, special, & worth playing. By obliterating qualitative differences in favour of pure, undifferentiated quantity, balance bends (& breaks) the entire game to its unidimensional will. Any distortion of the game’s immanent logic, any imposition of a foreign logic (e.g. that of other games) — anything — can be justified if it means a more well-balanced game.

The irony is that violent equalisation rests upon everything “below” it: singularities, & the immanence within which they swim. It’s as if Taipei 101 (the real Taipei 101!) were built from the ground up and then, upon completion, the narrow spire at the top decided that it was the true purpose of the skyscraper, and autocannibalised the rest of the building to feed itself.

Healing

Hegel says that quantitative distinctions can, at a certain point, pass over into qualitative distinctions (cf. the sorites paradox). For example, one of the defining, constitutive qualitative features of archers qua archers is their superior reach (The Eye of Amazon is a 1st-grade skill). Yet this qualitative feature soon makes itself known as a quantitative one when we consider “nerfing” The Eye of Amazon or, conversely, endowing other archetypes with abilities of similar or greater reach.[4]

So ending violence against the game doesn’t mean indiscriminately eschewing quantity in all its manifestations. Instead, allow every thing — job, playstyle, PQ, or what have you — its place, its hue, its uniquenesses. This happens naturally when, and only when, we take the structure of the game seriously, as a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

As with so many other things, we mean something when we say “MapleStory”. If that’s true, then there’s something that makes it MapleStory and not, say, some other game. Has anyone ever played MapleStory? [5]

Footnotes

  1. [↑] Immanent is just a fancy philosophic term that means something like “intrinsic within, totally internal to, logically endemic to”.

    For example, when you read the Odyssey, you’re not really required to believe, in an external sense, in the existence of Odysseus as a literal man, in Athena as his tutelary, etc.. But in order to read the Odyssey and understand it, you’re nevertheless required to assent to the logic immanent to Homer’s storytelling: certain events in the story cause other events in the story (i.e. it has a plot), the motivations of the characters are intelligible, and so on.

    Likewise, when we set out mathematical truths, we don’t need to say anything about whether numbers “really” exist or not, so long as we make our axioms clear enough and provide proofs validly derived from them. Thus, the truth of something like “ℝ is strictly bigger than ℕ” is immanent to the axiomatic system in which it’s true (e.g. ZF).

    Immanence is therefore closely related to autonomy (= auto- “self” + -nomy “system of laws”) in the literal sense of “the quality of being self-legislating”.

  2. [↑] This is, by the way, why the mind–body problem is ill-posed. This “problem” only historically becomes a serious one with Descartes (see e.g. “Meditation VI” §§ 13 & 19), i.e. with the modern epoch. This is no mere coïncidence, as we’ll see below.

  3. [↑] That is, almost all peoples. Even the most advanced capitalist (= modern) countries only entered their modern epoch within the past few centuries at most. That’s the blink of an eye in the history of H. sapiens.

  4. [↑] Even this simple example is, in reality, complex. To the extent that reach can be separated out as a meaningfully independent quantity, that quantity is at least four-dimensional: forward, backward, up, & down. (This cannot be two-dimensionalised, since the PC’s position is too relevant to discard.) Just to quantify the reach of some particular attacking ability, we’re already at four times as many dimensions as are typically used for comparing entire jobs to one another.

  5. [↑] Further reading:

    MapleStory
    MapleStory jobs