As the bars of "Under Pressure" fade, one of my
students raises his hand.
"Did she get sued?"
I shake my head.
"Who?"
"Queen. Whoever
she is. Did she get sued by Vanilla
Ice?"
I shake my head before I launch into a quick lecture on who
came first, who won the lawsuit, and how plagiarism is both a toxic force in
art, and an important thing to avoid in general. Then I have my students listen to The Beatles
"Helter Skelter," Jay Z's original "99 Problems" from The Black Album, and Dangermouse's
superlative Grey Album rendition of
the same track, which combines the two into original work.
"Borrowing from great work to create something
original, something wonderfully fresh and new that propels the genre entire
forward, is okay, even if your acquisition of previously acquired materials is
brazen or heavy handed. As long as
you're honest about it," I explain.
Half of my students nod in approval.
The others look bored. We're no
longer listening to hip-hop. The fun
part of the lesson has ended. It's a
lesson I've taught dozens of times since I started teaching composition, one
that contemporary writers and artists often lose sight of. Between high profile cases of direct
plagiarism, like Little Brown's decision to publish a spy novel heavily
plagiarized a bevy of spy novels, and reiterations or direct copies of video
games populating crowded marketplaces, especially as microtransaction mobile
games iterate on the Bewjeled/Puzzle Quest
frame to an absurd extent, it's apparent that plagiarism is alive and well.
But influence and acquisition remains a crucial part of any
serious creative process. Little occurs
in a vacuum; even digressive or discursive work has to form consciously in
opposition to the acquisition of external texts, allowing them to influence the
work by merit of avoidance or omission.
All art is built on the shoulders of what came before, and progressive
or revolutionary work doesn't do something completely new so much as it plays
on what came before in a way that allows us to see both work and genre in a new
light.
It's an odd coincidence that I started playing Shadows of Mordor the same week that my
plagiarism lecture fell on, but it's super appropriate. Shadows
of Mordor cribs heavily from a bunch of games I like, stealing elements of
its combat system from Rocksteady's Batman
games, open world climbing and stealth assassination from Assassin's Creed, non-linear plot development through world-map
missions from later Grand Theft Auto
entries, and its story from Tolkein's Middle Earth worldscape, naturally
enough. There's very little new in Shadows of Mordor on its face. It's mostly cobbled together from bits and
pieces of other video games. Granted,
they're all excellent games, games I love playing, and it has original
characters, though those characters meet some less-original characters along
the way, and strongly resemble original characters other people have come up
with an explored previously in other video games, books, and films, contained
within the universe of Middle Earth and beyond, but there's really nothing new
here.
And yet, as I move through the lush jungle and mud pits of
Mordor, I'm struck by how fresh, how raw and pulsing, Shadows of Mordor feels to me.
It's a perfect example of how you can take an array of concepts, not a
one of which is original in and of itself, and assemble those recycled ideas in
a way that is simultaneously derivative and original, combining known elements
into an unknown whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
I think part of this is owed to where Shadows of Mordor puts its focus. Where Rocksteady's Batman games are obsessed with a strange hybrid set of boxes where
combat occurs, but always feels somewhat restrainted (Batman doesn't kill after
all), Monolith's Shadows of Mordor
revels in its cartoonishly violent combat.
Where Batman viscerally maims and incapacitates his foes, Talion rips
through them. Instead of leaving them,
limping around a campfire, writhing in pain, he flashes in and out of combat,
sword blazing, fucking shit up. Batman's combos were satisfying. They let me knock goons down so I could try
my hand at puzzles, or check areas for collectibles. Shadows
of Mordor's combos let me disembowel orcs en-masse, in a dizzying array of
gore that my Lord of the Rings-film loving teenage self would've freaked out
over. The borrowed systems at work in
SoM actually feel more at home there than they do in their original titles.
Well, some of the time.
The climbing bits feel less like puzzles and more like shifty guessing games,
as if the soul was sucked out of the Assassin's
Creed-y bits. But it's difficult to
begrudge Monolith that: climbing is presented as just another movement
mechanic, another way to navigate the open world which, while we're on it,
feels kind of small. I understand that
the maps are split up, and that they're meant to be navigated back and forth,
again and again, in service of mini-missions and achievement challenges, but at
about thirty hours in, I already feel like I know this world almost too
well. Where GTA 4 had a density to it
that always kept me guessing what would come next, and Assassin's Creed's
cities presented sprawling landscapes that I don't think I could fully explore
even if I wanted to, by the time I left the first area, I felt like it had
begun to wear out its welcome, even with the sudden influx of graug that came
with the unlock of a fresh area to explore.
It's not that the landscapes aren't pretty; they are. It's just that the Tolkein-esque personality that
the landscape ably represents somehow just feels pabulum or generic. That's less a failing of Shadows of Mordor, in a sense, and more a mark of just how
remarkably successful Tolkein's work has been over the years: his setting was
revolutionary, and has been copied and modified in tiny ways, saturating our
culture so much so that when it's represented with loving accuracy, it feels
like it's been done before, even though it's the progenitor of nearly all
modern fantasy settings.
And, to be fair, there is one new thing at the heart of Shadows of Mordor: the nemesis
system. By adding a dynamic political layer
to the game, and orienting some player progress around that system, Shadows of Mordor does manage to provide
quite a bit of personality. It's
iteratively generated personality, personality that randomly emerges in the
game in ways that are equal parts eye-rollingly bad and delightful, but it is a
definite hook. And as I move deeper into
the game, I find myself becoming more invested in that system. Getting to know my orc-foes one by one, then pitting
them against one another, or butchering them all wholesale is more compelling
to me than the game itself. I've already
got a sense that Celerybramble, or whatever his name, is probably going to
Palpatine me, and that Gollum is going to Gollum, and that
weird-blonde-warrior-lady is going to be some kind of quasi-romantic interest,
so there's little to drive me forward in the main quest lines, spare a desire
to get new toys to use against my orc frenemies.
And if those toys resemble things I've seen in other games
that I loved too? Well, I won't mind.
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