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发表于 2020-7-29 01:43 · 日本
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本帖最后由 Sondheimite 于 2020-7-29 02:06 编辑
cakewalk 发表于 2020-7-28 22:05
You might want to see the documentary of the ghost of Tsushima history. These guys in SP were ver ...
My quibble with this game is, to a certain degree, derived from the exact documentary included in the digital deluxe version (which I guess is also included in the physical copy if you purchase the bulkier collector's version). Yes, he did mention his learning to distinguish Shintoist shrines from their Buddhist counterparts from developing the game. The problem, though, is that his **ion of history, or the historicity of the themes the game sets out to explore, is based on the ahistorical treatment of the subject matter, a notion that you would find in the popular theory of Orientalism by Edward Said. If you really think about Shintoism, it is as a matter of fact the product of the development of Japan as a nation state in post Meiji Restoration era, when the notion of "Japan" gradually became a unified, homogenized, imagined community. If you trace the use of "shinto" or "shintoism" in historical documents, you'll realize that it wasn't in any way specialized or juxtaposed against other religions like Buddhism, and for an extended period of time, this word was strictly limited to the description of a certain ritual. In other words, Shintoism is a fairly modern creation, a product of modernity as Japan, coming together under a strong central government, engaged with a new paradigm to reckon with their existence. So the point here is, there's obviously an intention to present what he considers "authentic" about medieval Japan through the game, and the examples you listed only go to support this argument.
The notion of authenticity is also a trap. As most college freshmen would be taught in a college-level history class, history is a reconstruction of the past from the standpoint of the present that projects into the future. Historicity, and the temporality thereof, reflects more about the "narrator" of history than history itself. This is evident in their understanding of "samurai." One of the things that he mentions in the documentary is his intention to present "Bushido" tenets. He started with "all eight" (no sure where he got those from) but quickly realized that the overwhelming information would not sit well with the storytelling, and he decided to go with two, loyalty and something else I can't think of off my head. And throughout the documentary, he was pushing the Japanese professor to give a succinct, decisive definition of "samurai," in a tone that I find eerily unnatural and disturbing. Despite the professor's effort to avoid talking in black-and-white terms and speak with nuances and in historical contexts, I don't think the developer understood why the professor was talking the way he did, the borderline Orientalist understanding of which is evidently present in the game. By situating a subject matter in the verisimilitude of its historical context only with the caveat that the context itself is mixed with other elements that serve to further a shared imagination or rumination of the said subject matter than to allow the subject matter to engage with the conditions that morphed its being, the game presents authenticity as an ahistorical common space for its consumers to revel in their fantasy of what they originally imagined the subject matter to be. Granted, a game is not required to push the envelope nor start a conversation on the topic it is investigating. Yet the illusion of "authenticity," or the feeling from gamers that the game was, beguiles the fact that, at its core, its **ion is supe**cial and structured on assumptions from their own imagination. Of course, as the producer of a **ural product, he is entitled to artistic license and creative liberty, yet to serve the goals he stated in the documentary, the end product unfortunately is stuck in the quagmire of the imagination of the "East" as an exotic, mysterious, historical, and thereby ahistorical land, a fascination that only feeds into a reconstruction of the past in the void of the past itself. |
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