Ibrahim S. Amin's Blog: The Plundered Dungeon, page 4

The Colour of Vomit: Diversity Within Creative Teams

As mentioned previously, I spent some years working at 5th Planet Games, where I helped create social / freemium games for Facebook, Kongregate, and other platforms. My official title there was "lead writer & creative director". That role involved co-managing a team of artists (alongside our art director).

Most of 5PG's employees operated out of the office in California, where they somehow survived the state's absurd heat and sunshine. But our creative team included members from all over the place -- different parts of the US, Canada, Brazil, France, South Korea etc. Lots of time zones, and a lot of cultural diversity.

The games we produced required hundreds and hundreds of assets -- characters, weapons, suits of armour, enemies to slaughter. Our business model revolved around throwing fresh content out there each week, to keep players engaged and, if possible, spending money. When you have to churn out so much material, it helps to have writers and artists who bring a wealth of varied ideas to the table.

If people grow up hearing different myths, watching different movies and TV shows, reading different books, playing with different toys, they may have different ideas of what a warrior or a monster looks like, for example. That opens many avenues.

Granted, we also experienced cross-cultural confusion at times. Apparently most nations don't have Christmas crackers, so if you ask a non-British artist to draw them, you end up with festive biscuits / cookies instead.

But my favourite example concerned vomit.

I came up with the idea of a "vomomancer" for one of the fantasy games -- a mage who crafts golems from vomit instead of clay or stone. If this disgusts you, rest assured that some of our players felt the same way. One of them entitled his forum thread on the subject "Discouraging Content".

Anyway, to accompany this vomomancer, I asked a South Korean artist to create a vomit golem. He went off and produced a sketch. The drawing looked great, so the art director and I approved it. He then painted it up and dropped the coloured image into our team's Skype message window.

The golem was red and purple. This confused me, since I knew I'd asked for it to be vomit-coloured. I mentioned this. The artist, equally puzzled, said it already was. Apparently the preponderance of red chillies in the South Korean diet influences the colour they puke. By contrast, here in England our binge-drinking usually results in an orange-brown mixture.

Sure, this may not stand as the most amazing or life-changing instance of cultural diversity in the workplace. But I loved it. The little things, the international or historical quirks, have always appealed to me.

My goal is to one day be part of a team which can, between its members, vomit all the colours of the rainbow on any given day.

Open Source Scholarship

Academic papers and journals tend to live behind paywalls. These seldom benefit the actual scholars, those who write or peer-review the materials. The money doesn't flow to them. And researchers find themselves having to pay a small fortune for access. Sure, if they're part of well-funded departments, their universities may pick up the tab. But this isn't always the case, especially for independent scholars or writers who'd like to expand their knowledge without breaking the bank.

Hence I'm a big fan of open-source scholarship. When I was researching The Monster Hunter's Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Saving Mankind from Vampires, Zombies, Hellhounds, and Other Mythical Beasts, and writing my PhD thesis, I was fortunate enough to have access to the well-stocked library at the University of Manchester. But even so, online resources such as Sacred Texts and Perseus helped a great deal.

I recently learned about Humanities Commons, thanks to a tweet from Ian D. Morris, an academic who specialises in Islamic history. As with those other resources, they attempt to help scholars around the world by providing a repository of paywall-free papers. That cause deserves support. My own foray into academia was limited, meaning I don't have a stack of published papers to share with them. But I did have my old PhD thesis lying around.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:17393

I wasn't a great academic in my twenties, when I wrote that thesis. Whilst it did earn me the PhD, I'm sure there are numerous blunders in both the scholarship and the quality of writing. But the great thing about historical research is that even mediocre work can help pave the way for other researchers to produce better work. So, it's up there for anyone who might want to check it out.

If you're into ancient, medieval, or Victorian history, in particular military, martial arts, or sporting history, it may contain something of interest.

Suplexes & Storytelling

If you read Clara Mandrake's Monster, you'll notice a bit of grappling in the fight-scenes. I like to include throws and holds within my fiction. In part, that's because I wrote my doctoral thesis on the history of grappling -- and there's no sense in letting that education go to waste. But it's mostly because of all the years I've spent watching pro-wrestling.

My grandfather wrestled during the 1940s. Back then, professional wrestling allowed an illiterate immigrant to earn a little extra money, to supplement what he made shovelling coal or peddling things door-to-door. He died when I was six, and we didn't really speak a common language (I sometimes understand very basic Punjabi, but can't speak it), so I never got to talk to him about his experiences in the ring. But from what other people have told me, in those days there were both works (staged matches) and shoots (legitimate sporting contests). Supposedly, he refused to take part in works, because he considered them a form of deception, and hence un-Islamic.

As a cynical sort of person, I realise the idea that he only did shoots may just be kayfabe, part of the mythology which surrounds pro-wrestling. But either way, it does tie into the question of what pro-wrestling offers an audience. At one time, this included the illusion of a genuine competitive sport. Clearly that no longer applies. So, what does pro-wrestling offer if we accept the fiction and judge it as means of storytelling?

Pro-wrestling has its colourful characters, of course. As a kid watching during the '80s and early '90s, those were the ones who drew me in -- the Ultimate Warrior, Demolition, the Legion of Doom, Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, Earthquake, the Undertaker, the Million Dollar Man, and a host of others. Sure, they were cartoonish. But that was part of the charm. The Ultimate Warrior made it feel as though a barbarian had just stepped out of a comic or a Saturday morning cartoon and started clotheslining people.

Wrestling also has plotlines. Some of those plots are as absurd and cartoonish as its participants. For example, battles over who got to control the Undertaker's urn and hence hold power over an unstoppable undead grappler. But others are so well done they blur the lines between fiction and reality, and invoke genuine human emotion. That's where the success of pro-wrestling lies, its advantage over most forms of storytelling.

Film actors seldom do their own stunts -- and that's fair enough. Trained stuntmen exist for a reason, and it makes sense for them to take the risks. When an actor such as Jackie Chan's known for doing them himself, he's rightly praised for how unusual and impressive that is. Well, in pro-wrestling it's standard. Every single wrestler is both actor and stuntman. They take the risks, they endure the physical pain, and they do so with a live audience surrounding them. No stopping for a second take, or for anything other than a grievous injury (even then, many will still finish the match before seeking medical attention). If something goes wrong, they have to adapt and press on.

When barbed-wire shreds their flesh, when steel chairs batter their bones, when they take a spill off the top rope, when they're powerbombed into a wall, there's a level of real physical drama which a movie can't compete with. This in turn strengthens the emotional bond the audience feels for the wrestlers. When they cheer for someone, it isn't only because they enjoy a character, and see their victory as the culmination of a decent storyline. It's because they've watched that wrestler bleed for years to earn that spot, literally and figuratively. They've experienced genuine highs and lows alongside those woven by the fiction. Torn muscles, broken necks.

By its very nature, pro-wrestling's almost always semi-autobiographical, whatever gimmick a wrestler might wrap around themselves to create their in-ring persona. Thus you have true Rocky stories, even though the matches have predetermined outcomes.

The Cleomedes Effect

“Does it make him a hero, Dr. Hieler?” I asked.

Dr. Hieler scanned the paper with his eyes as he eased into his chair. “Who?”

“Nick. If the people who survived are stronger and all about peace like the news says, does that make him a hero? Is he like the millennium’s version of John Lennon? Peace-spreader with a gun?”

“I understand that it would be easier for you to think of him as a hero. But, Valerie, he did kill a lot of kids. Probably not a lot of people are going to think of him as a hero.”

-- Jennifer Brown, Hate List

The above exchange caught my attention in Jennifer Brown's excellent novel about the aftermath of a school shooting. That final paragraph sounds reasonable enough, but it brought to mind the story of Cleomedes of Astypalaea.

I've written about him in the past, but those essays slid into the gutters of cyberspace long ago. Hence I might as well make him the subject of my first Goodreads blog post.

Cleomedes isn't one of the better-known figures from Hellenic legend. That's why I named my main World of Warcraft character after him, many years ago. Other players snatched up all the more popular ancient Greek names, including Telemachus (which I'd wanted because it was my character name in City of Heroes, my previous MMO). But no one had claimed Cleomedes, and thus it became mine. Later, during my years at 5th Planet Games, I used it as my screen name on our player-facing chats and forums.

I first learned about Cleomedes as an undergraduate, whilst ensconced in the University of Newcastle's Robinson Library. I'd often go there for research and sustenance (the cafeteria offered a good line of stotties). In this case, the former concerned an essay on Sophocles' Antigone (and the latter cheese & pickle). One of the books I dipped into was The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, and there on the page Cleomedes raged.

Cleomedes of Astypalaea boxed at the Olympic Games during the early 5th century BC. Neither he nor his opponent prospered. Cleomedes killed Iccus of Epidaurus, and the judges denounced it as foul play. One boxer lay dead. Disgrace hounded the other from Olympia.

Cleomedes returned to Astypalaea, stalked its streets, unleashed his fury on the school. Pausanias says he tore away one of its pillars. Plutarch tells of how he punched it in half. But the roof came down. The children screamed. Then they died.

The townspeople seized rocks, hurled them, tried to stone the murderer to death. Cleomedes ran. He sprinted to the temple of Athene, leapt into the sacred chest. The boxer held it shut from the inside. The townspeople couldn't match Cleomedes' strength, couldn't force the lid. They smashed the chest to pieces instead. But no man lay on the temple floor amid the shattered wood. Cleomedes had vanished.

Before Wikipedia, there was the Oracle at Delphi. Thus the people of Astypalaea went there for an explanation. The priestess of Apollo gave them one: The gods had elevated Cleomedes, lifted him above the realm of mortal men. He was now a hero. The Oracle commanded the townspeople to honour him. And so they did.

As I say, the dialogue from Hate List made me think of Cleomedes, for obvious reasons. But his story's fascinating in its own right. It illuminates the nature of ancient Greek heroism, when hero status wasn't about making the world a better place. It was about doing things other people couldn't do, wouldn't dare do, and demonstrating the unyielding fury of the heroic temper.

In one of those long-gone essays mentioned above, I coined the term "Cleomedes Effect" to denote this -- the attribution of hero status on the basis of magnitude rather than morality. Hence I'll throw it up there as the title of this post, and hopefully it might interest a sleepless reader or two.