Racial Harmony Day – Because not being dicks to each other is a cause for celebration

Race is not a real thing. It most certainly exist, but not in the physical sense, and is an idea that we have willed into existence while continuing to strengthen racial divisions. And because of that, racial discrimination becomes a real thing, and that is just disgusting. I recently learnt from a doctor friend that the only way to get rid of a bad wart is to cut it off; for a wart as deadly as racial discrimination, we are applying nonsensical ointments such as racial laws and policing hate crime and wish that the wart goes away. That never works.

The term racial harmony needs to be deconstructed and dissected before any proper discussion of this topic can be held. To me, the term is simply ironic. Race is a construct invented for the sole purpose to divide and differentiate in order to assign different social roles and rights to other members of the human race (which is a real thing) based on bogus research studies that are, sadly, still being funded and conducted to this day. Harmony is the opposing force that is supposed to bring people (back) together, and for the most part it is a desirable state of being. Except if you enjoy the chaos brought about by people fighting over stupid ideas, such as racial uniqueness, otherwise we can mostly agree that harmony is a good thing. I like harmony. I do not necessarily care for peace, but I like it for the fact that people in this imaginary harmonious world are smarter and more logical than those in our world. So when we speak of racial harmony, I like to think of it as a world where people do not fight over racial issues. When you choose to employ a candidate over another, you do so because of their gender, class status, their merits or simply the way they look, and never because they are of a certain race. When a man tells you her wife is a dentist, you do not ask whether they are Chinese or Malay, but instead make comments like “so she is a nurse at the dentistry?” Because eliminating racial divide will be the end of all our problems, and therefore racial harmony is of utmost importance and needs to be made into a special day for celebration.

Jokes aside, I do think the intention of having such a day for celebration is good, at least partially, depending on how you view nations and nationalism. It is definitely not pure and sincere in any sense, but good. Despite being ironic how we can celebrate unity in diversity, the end goal is at least unity, a fairness in treatment to all despite being told that we are different. Like most scientific projects that end up being part of military weaponry, good intentions do not always yield merits nor intended results. Perhaps it is out of pure naivety of our socio-political scientists, perhaps it is simply required for the grand plot of the nation building story which has not been updated for 50 years, as we were painfully reminded last year. But again, the intention to try and create equal grounds for everyone is faultless unless you really despise the idea of nations. It has certainly not solved racial discrimination, but I cannot find myself to hate on a program that tells kids to not be assholes to other kids because their skin colour is different or they talk funny or something. On my end I will make sure my kids learn about the very basics of linguistic and accents develop from the language other kids speak at home, and not go down the easy path of telling them people speak differently because they are of another race. I will be quite disgusted if educated university friends, especially those who majored in that major where they do nothing but talk about social problems, if they decide to raise their children as lazily (intellectually) as our parents did. I still immediately assume all the ‘Malay’ people I know are Muslims because of my upbringing, and it annoys me to no end even though I am aware that it is a major misconception.                                                                                                                                                         

And after all that setting up we can finally talk about the Yishun Secondary School incident, where students were apparently told only those that are eligible for JC are going for the Racial Harmony Day celebrations. (The original Mothership.com post later updated that it is not in fact the celebration itself that is practising this discrimination but a half day off to prepare for the celebrations, but nonetheless, still differential treatment in relation to this Racial Harmony Day, thus this discussion still needs to be had.) If anyone has not read the web comic On A Plate on class privilege then I do recommend you read it and tell me whether this discrimination of students by results is a class issue, because I most certainly think it is. The rest of this post will be a very angry rant on the idiocy of flaming discrimination in public schools, so I will preface this by saying two things. First, I believe the intention of the school to be good. Selfish, but good. They want the students who are not doing as well and pulling up the school’s ranking to have half a day more of lessons, because that will most certainly help them get into JC. But I can at least where the school is coming from. Secondly, I do not believe the students’ demands are pure. They just do not want classes. But in this case their selfish reasoning is the one I will side on because our goals align despite having different starting points, like how I will stand with people who are against social welfare because they do not want to pay more taxes despite knowing that they are being assholes.

What is the point of sending children to public schools? For me it is to place them in a harmonious fantasy where you are supposedly judged base on your merits and nothing else, so that when time comes for them to rule the world, they will run their world like how their public school society was like. But alas, the ‘real’ world that everyone speaks badly but does nothing to change it will not be moved by such idealistic wishes. There are two ways to go about it. The first way is the easy way; you let kids know that their teachers are discriminating them based on arbitrary favourism, and are focused to help the good ones get better, all while hiding behind the rhetoric of “I cannot help you if you do not want to help yourselves”. You teach them the rules of that ‘real’ world we so proudly uphold, where being of a certain gender, sexuality, skin colour, language group and/or religion determines whether you serve coffee or receive coffee in a meeting room. The second way is the harder way. You raise the future generation into one that can change our twisted world. You do everything you teach them in the first method, and you make the children think about what they can do for a better future. You force these children who have lived through that fantasy create solutions to turn that fantasy into reality. The worst thing that can happen now is that Yishun Secondary School backs down and lets everybody get the day off for Racial Harmony Day. It certainly solves the problem at hand, but similar to the first method, you simply expose the children to the fault lines of discrimination but do not request a solution out of them. I believe a majority of children at that age would want a day off. What about making them abandon that selfish thought for the sake of equality? I think, give them a chance to vote on it. Give them three options, continue with the current plan, make it a day off for everyone, or let everyone go back to normal curriculum. Inform the children about your concern for the students who are not doing as well in class that you need them to carry on with classes on this day. If there is any hope left for the future, I think the third option will win. And if it does not, I guess we just need to try again when my kids and their generation grows up.

I believe that there was a question I was trying to answer with this post, on the importance of dedicating an entire day to celebrate Racial Harmony Day in public schools. The solution that I have provided above is what I think we can do for now, because you are not going to resolve all the issues with the system in a single day, through a single event. But we can take a step towards that better future. And if the upcoming generation cannot balance the need of their establishment (the school, in this case) for the non-JC eligible students to not have the off and continue with their normal curriculum (I am not saying I agree with the method, but neither do I know how to run schools), and yet ensure that equality is maintained by not discriminating anyone with any arbitrary markers, then they need the idea of harmony beaten into them with as pompous a celebration as possible. So yes, if Yishun Secondary School decides to let everyone off in preparation for Racial Harmony Day together after this backlash, then they need the celebration so very much to hopefully turn them into better adults who will not be dicks to each other.  

I will like to hear someone from that generation provide me a rebuttal with a better solution to this crisis – tell me my ideas are outdated and the future requires solutions that I am unable to think of – that will make me really happy. 

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and False Advertisement

Three games in recent memory come to mind whenever I think of the question, "What exactly represents the worst in video games these days?" The first is Valiant Hearts, a mediocre game loved by fans and critics alike because they are surprised that Ubisoft decided to put out a non-shooty shooty killy killy game and people want them to make more of it instead of their usual stuff. Perhaps the high praises that Valiant Hearts received resulted in Ubisoft giving more support to initiatives like Grow Home and Grow Up, but judged on its own Valiant Hearts is an utter piece of garbage which I have torn apart in an earlier post. The second is No Man's Sky, a game recommended to me on Steam because it is popular. Let's break it down. An ambitious game which people know very little about, that has been recently delayed and is launching at $60 full price, is the top selling Steam game that is at the top of my queue. The damn thing is not even out yet and people are pre-ordering a digital copy of a game that they know shit about. I would love to delve more deeply into criticism but I cannot, because there is no game to criticise nor play, but go ahead pre-order the damn digital copy because they will most certainly run out of those. 

The third game, regrettably, is Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate - or as I like to call it, Monster Grinder. There are many problems I have with the mechanics of the game, but I want to focus on the parts of the game that makes it qualify for this 'worst of video gaming' award, and that is false advertising, and how people are putting up with this bullshit year after year. 4 main points I want to go through here. One, the Field Of View. While the previous installment benefited from being on the Wii-U, a home console which means your FOV is the size of your TV, this version puts you on the tiny 3DS which makes everything so hard to spot. I guess it is time to upgrade to the XL. This would not have been such a big problem if the camera controls were a bit better, and you will say, well get the New 3DS then, it has a second thumbstick to control the camera. And thirdly, there is framerate dips and input lag because my system is the oldest of oldest of 3DSs, so I guess getting a New 3DS would make sense... until you realise none of this is actually stated on the box. MH4U is a shameless game that was designed for the New 3DS like Hyrule Warrior Legends, and is clearly not optimised for the normal 3DS, but refuses to state that limitation on the box itself because it fears not being able to sell more copies to people who own normal 3DSs. Nintendo's whole retarded move of calling the New 3DS literally the New Nintendo 3DS, similar to the failure of a name that is the Wii-U, does not exactly inspire people to upgrade their handhelds, nor encourage third party developers to push games on the new console. I will not blame Capcom (and Koei Tecmo in the case of HWL) entirely for Nintendo's failings, and it is just saddening that the optimal marketing strategy amidst failure of the console's marketing is obscuring crucial information that affects gameplay and enjoyment in order to sell games like MH4U and HWL. With Sun and Moon coming out this November, I'm hoping they don't pull the same nonsense here because even thought I will be eventually getting my upgrade to the new 3ds, I hope that friends can continue to play games together on their old systems too.

And this brings us to my fourth point about false advertisement, the focus on multiplayer. Jumping onto the MH4U bandwagon now is bad, because most friends who like the franchise are just waiting for generations to be out and have stopped playing this version for a long time. Monsters are extremely grindy on single player mode, and everyone in the world is telling me the multiplayer is more fun, I would like to point out that this game again, was not advertised as a multiplayer only game. Just admit it, if you need people to play with to make the base game even bearable, then clearly the single player campaigned is not properly scaled and balanced and it should be stated that the single player mode is simply a tag on. And the reason why this is important is that this means in order to get a party of 4 to play, we need 4 New 3DS XLs and 4 copies of this game, that's about $1600 for 4 people to enjoy this game. I recently spent $40 buying 4 copies of Papers, Please for 4 of my friends and made them really happy; so not thanks I will rather buy 160 copies of Papers, Please and make 160 people really happy instead. For what it does, the value proposition just is not enough to justify this game as enjoyable because it costs so god damn much.

Strangely enough, I am enjoying the game but mostly because I am really bored and have nothing else to play. But I am disappointed, perhaps by the hype surrounding it, but more so by the willingness of gaming carrotheads to be chopped by AAA developers, spending more money and blaming their own systems for being not good enough when in actual fact they have been screwed by obfuscation of information, marketing schemes and poor optimisation and design of games. I will probably criticise the game design one day, but as free and bored I am writing is still much of chore.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, MH4U, more like Me Has 4 Unstated problems that border on false advertisement and you should totally read reviews before buying this game that plays like crap on anything but a New 3DS XL. 

80 Days and the 'New' way to read

For a student of the humanities, I really dislike reading. Most of my friends from other faculties will disagree, because I do read a lot, but firstly I don't read enough for what I do, and secondly I don't necessarily enjoy the process. There are three ways that this issue is usually circumvented. First, I will try and read the damn thing, and if the writing is intriguing enough I will read on. If that fails, I will find a video or an audiobook of sorts that reads and summarises the material I wish to read about. Or lastly, I will wait for the book or essay to be presented in a more interesting format, such as the abovementioned video or audiobook. Poorly written books are, in my opinion, the lowest denominator of the written artform. Books that are unable to draw in its readers through its language are unworthy of read, and for that I'd even argue I like my books to be bias and heavily emplotted than treating me like an idiot by being overly expository. Mangas, for instance, is a higher artform than books, using visual images, intentional framing and placement of those frames for visual story telling, that often prioritises dynamic dialogues and character interaction over narrative and commentary. Visual novels and RPGs on the other hand, allows the player to be part of the narrative by giving player's choices to affect the outcomes and endings in the story. Both games and manga creates a stronger bond between the reader and read, providing immersion that I would say even the greatest of written novels are unable to achieve simply because it is so easy to enter this world via the visual representation and in RPGs, actually being part of that world.

80 Days, a choose-your-own adventure game created by Inkle, and writtten by Meg Jayanth and Jon Ingold, is a step forward for the interactive fiction genre for people not so enthusiastic about books like me. As I am writing I am on my third playthrough of the game, and it surprises me because the game is almost entirely text driven and I generally don't like reading as stated above. It may be because of the topic - Journey to the Centre of the Earth remains one of the books I remember fondly from my childhood to this day, and 80 Days is adapted from another of Jules Verne's famous novel - but I think there are things that 80 Days does more that allows for my attention to be held for so long.

The first aspect has to be the 'choose your own adventure' element present within the game, something derived from text-based MUD games in the earlier days and heavily inspired by pen and paper board games like D&D. And because of these choices, players will be exploring new towns and unlocking different story pieces each time they play - if they choose to do so, that is (I did) - and through that allow for multiple read through of the same adventure with very different stories. By taking on the form of a game, 80 days took the best of both world's of books and visual novels and created an unique experience that is neither dull and linear like books would be, nor so focused on character interaction that in is on telling the story and being an adventure piece. As much as I enjoyed the Zero Escape series written by the genius that is Kotaro Uchikoshi, it relied heavily on the characters and mystery to drive its plot, and the tightness in the world building and narrative kept it constantly interesting and enjoyable. 80 Days differs from Zero Escape by having very few memorable characters, (with Passepartout and Fogg being the only ones with any personality) hence sacrificing the chance to use well written dialogues to drive the narrative and plot, and relied solely on exposition - and it did that amazingly. 80 Days also differs from games in general by removing that more 'game-y' part of visual novels and focuses solely on text, instead of environmental story telling elements present in Bioshock and the upcoming We Happy Few, again, falls back on its strong writing to keep the reader enthralled.

Making this post any longer will be an ironic thing to do. Let me just say this, I am not quite sure whether 80 Days is a game, I definitely cannot say it is a good game, but it is an amazing read. I paid $15 for a book, and I read it 3 times. I had my friend read it while I watched and managed to see some new stories from that run too. It is a fantastic book and I do hope more of my future reads can exist in this very format.