The Balancing act of Malaysian Politics and writing for public consumption

For the non-Malaysians, The five keris and the four stripes represent the nine Malay states with sultans.

Dignity or Efficiency: Malaysian Royalism at the Fringes (Project Malaysia). Click to be redirected.

This is another supplementary blog post on another article I wrote for a platform that is not Kent Ridge Common. Project Malaysia is aptly subtitled, “an experiment in nation building”, and headed by prominent human rights lawyer, Malik Imtiaz Sarwar. They explain that, “Project Malaysia was created to respond to a need for solution-driven, informed opinions on issues affecting Malaysian society as a whole… Through these essays and commentaries, we aim to inform and persuade readers as well as writers, to engage with the Malaysian audience at large – in seeking viable solutions for this non-profit, nation building exercise.” I’ve also made some commentary about their articles in some of my previous posts.

I’ve always wanted to do some research and write something on Malaysian royalty, especially from the political science perspective. I initially wanted to do something like this for Ferrara’s class on Political Institutions, but he was not keen on Malaysia. This is my way of making up for it. I spent the last few hours of my NUS library membership using the material there writing this article. I only hope that it is up to snuff in the real world.

Saying that is weird, because the “snuff” of the real world is SO different from academic writing. Academic writing caters to the academic mind. These are people who have spent years of their life refining their thought and studying the thought of others and one can safely assume that your reader is familiar with some popularly-unheard-of theory. If the average person has something to say about subject x, a decent professor would know how to argue it from several perspectives. If not, a professor would at least have an armload of arguments justifying his dogmatism. If you’re writing an essay, you’re coming up against that and you need to do your research against that.

The worse you could get academically is a near-fail grade (granted that I wrote the essay coherently). The worse I could get in the real world, depending on where and when I was born: imprisonment, torture, death. It’s a balancing act. In Malaysia, the worse is an ISA arrest for the individual and then a civil unrest afterwards. That’s what I have in mind when writing the piece above on the Malaysian sultans.

I wouldn’t say that The Malay royalist-nationalists love their culture, that would open up a lot of philosophical questions about the nature of love. However, I would say that they would go to great lengths to defend it from perceived threats, and their emotions perhaps run too deeply on the subject. On the other hand, non-Malays are also short-sighted in criticizing monarchy in the sense that it’s not what the royalist-nationalists are going to accept on face value.

So therefore, this piece. The real goal is to foster an objective understanding of a political institution that is considered archaic and unnecessary in the modern world but remains with many South East Asian countries today. Most people could ignore it if the institution was symbolic. However, the sultan, the conference of rulers and the Yang di-Pertuan Agong have real constitutional responsibilities in politics today — as the constitutional crisis in Perak has highlighted. It would be intellectually irresponsible for us to consider monarchy without knowing where they have failed. This is a valid model of inquiry — For instance, on democracy, South American studies have focused on why some democracies there have failed and reverted back to authoritarianism.

But talking to my dad, he also said something quite relevant: it’s topical. It will never be something mainstream. There are my S Factor articles, and there are the articles that nobody will read. Moving on.

Some Simple Thoughts On Meritocracy

Paul Barter, Ups and Downs in Plaza Singapura. Edited. http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbarter/2878161851/in/photostream/

Meritocracy: Look at the method, not the substance
(Kent Ridge Common).

Another piece at Kent Ridge Common. This was a relatively fast piece done on Tuesday. It stated out pretty slow as I tried to get a good introduction. I’m still not entirely happy with it because I’m not sure if its catchy enough for the first paragraph. I’m also quite afraid that the debate has been there before, and I’m just independently arriving at the same conclusions as everyone else.

It was also written in response to Kelvin Teo’s article, “Multiple Intelligences and A Redefinition of Meritocracy”, also at the Kent Ridge Common. I’ve had more recent thoughts on meritocracy, and I wanted to bring that to the table. With my humble photoshop skills, I did some photo manipulation of a creative commons piece to show some people going faster and slower on a walkalator. Not terribly happy with that either but its not worth spending that kind of time for perfection.

Under that article, I argued for two different kinds of meritocracy, egalitarian-survival meritocracy and elite fast-track democracy. Each type of meritocracy, while upholding the primacy of talent and skill, have different ideas about how to train people to that level of skill required. Meritocracy looks an ends, when we haven’t talked about the means. I’ll leave the explaining of the two types of meritocracy there on Kent Ridge Common.

One sort of “means-to-a-meritorious-end” I have mentioned before about egalitarian meritocracy is that there isn’t a way to be pro-meritocratic. By that, I mean that under egalitarian-survival meritocracy, you cannot actively promote meritocracy. You can only passively support a meritocratic system, what I clumsily term being “anti-unmeritocratic”. Under that sort of logic, actively helping a set of people is not meritocratic because its done under artificial circumstances.

Such groomed under elite fast-track meritocracy people might seem to have merit, but we can’t tell if they have any true demonstrable innate talent or merit because of the extra privileges granted to them. If you’re a supporter of social darwinism, it’s also a bad position to take because we might be allowing bad vestigial habits to form under privileged circumstance rather than exposing it to open competition.

Still, what is the relationship between meritocracy and pragmatism? Is there philosophical harmony and sufficient justification of support by both concepts by each other? If the relationship is qualified by some reason (i.e. pragmatism implies meritocracy under x conditions), what are the conditions where meritocracy is NOT qualified?

Making a game on South East Asia

Max Payne and its sequel, Max Payne 2 are two games that I truly look up to. It was one of the first games ever to use the slow-motion bullet-time mechanic — the ability to slow down everything else in the game so that you can aim better and watch the bullets in slow motion.

However, even though the developers are Finnish — as in from Finland — they’ve decided to set it in New York. I’m sure they’re as proud of their own Finnish culture and they probably know more quirky little things about Finalnd they could show off in a game. So why New York? Is it to pander to their target audience? Are games only as successful as their source cultures are successful in being a politico-economic success?

On the other hand, Max Payne, while set in New York, has never struck me as set in New York. As a non-American, I didn’t see the popular landmarks of New York — the Empire State building, the World Trade Centre (the game was released mid 2001), or the statue of Liberty. So there was no in-game significance of it being in New York. It was just something familiar for the American masses to latch on to mentally to situate the characters in.

So how do you make a game based on South East Asia (SEA)? It’s certainly much easier to make a film on SEA or any particular narrative that is set in SEA. It’s because its difficult to create a game — in the purest sense of strategic interaction of players — informed by local cultures that is meaningfully reproduced in a game. After that, its internationalizing the content so that as many people can relate to it as possible without diluting the unique influence of SEA.

For example, let’s take spinning gasing. The problem with spinning gasing is something like playing a sport game on a keyboard. Imagine the last time you played golf or pool on a keyboard — something’s missing. The control is simplified to smooth the learning curve. It’s not as exciting or awesome as actually watching a pro play golf.

Something more ideal would be like Crusader Kings, or Europa 1400 which are games specifically informed by the politics of feudal Europe that sets it apart. Sid Meier’s Colonization, draws from the Colonial experience of the American settlers. (it is also an excellent game.) The last game I want to cite is Oregon Trail, which is not only educational in immersing the player of how early Americans travel from the eastern colonies to their new home in Oregon, but also very fun to watch your travel party die from dysentry. It was popular in the 80s amongst schoolchildren.

(On a sidenote, did I mention how many Romance of The Three Kingdoms titles Koei has published already? Apparently, eleven and an MMO.)

All these games prove that it is possible to be informed by culture — more specifically, a historical experience — and make a game. The question is, what historical experience and culture do we wanna choose?

Of course, we can just cop out, and make a 3D shooter in exotic locales in South East Asia like Bali, Bangkok, the Petronas Twin Towers and Orchard Road, and at the end of the stage, our hero be able to bang all them hot exotic Asian chicks. Talk about orientalism, it would sell like hot cakes but be forgotten in two months. That would be TOO easy.

The ultimate game is programming

This was the game I made after a week. It’s pretty crappy, actually.

Two weeks ago, a week after my last exam at university, I disappeared from my social life. No lunches together, no meet-ups, no IM, no facebook. Just hermiting it on my little netbook. I would wake up close to noon, turn on the computer, bang away for 24 hours straight into the night and morning and then sleep until the next cycle. Repeat several days in a row. It’s a horrible experience that I don’t want to experience again, and it was all to do some programming.

I will never try that again, and I will probably never be as motivated to do that again ever. But when I was in the cycle, it was so… addicting. Almost as addicting as a playing a really, really good game.

Over the course of my last year in university, I got my foundation in Java and mySQL (and thus a bit of PHP as well), and now I’m looking at Game Maker Langauge, the language for a 2D game-making suite called Game Maker 7. I set my sight on writing a 2D turn-based combat engine similar to Final Fantasy-style battles. Not that it was any original, althought I had thought of a few new mechanics, but it was good to practice using the engine I had designed other games for.

I would wake up fresh from dreamless sleep. With new eyes, I would try to think of a solution to a problem I was having the day before. I reminded myself that I still have had a feature to implement, like different character classes or a tool-tip style mouse-over. Worse of all, I would take a look at bugs and glitches. I would think over the data structure and how variables would pass between objects and how game maker would accept one syntax over another.

So I’d make the necessary modifications to the code. I’d type for about half an hour. Once I was satisfied with my code, I’d try to compile and run the game to see if my new feature would work. It never does the first time, so I’d go hunt down what I’m doing wrong. I would look again at the manual. I would look again at the code.

Eventually something like a working feature would emerge. I would go like, that was cool, but what if it also did something else which was cooler. So I’d get back to modifying the code, and trying out again. Repeat several times, with each cycle taking 2-3 hours until I was too frustrated or too tired to code any more, where I would grab something to eat and go back to sleep.

What was really getting to me was how it is like playing a really good game. In a good game, there would be multiple ways to defeat the current level. In a sandbox-styled game, you would set your own objectives and try to achieve them. Programming a game by myself is very similar: I would set the objective of implementing an objective, and find a solution within an uncertain environment.

When it would actually work, it was such a relief; I’d feel like I had achieved something. Not just a gaming achievement, but something I was proud to learn to do in real life. So I’d try to pick up on something else that could potentially work. And I was stuck in this risk-reward structure for DAYS.

After about a week and a half of embarking on the project, I finally decided this was a terrible way to live. I was completely obsessed, and I was not eating, exercising or talking to people. Suddenly, I began to sympathize with computer science majors and its perceived that they lack social skills. I’m not saying that every single one of them do, but I now I can certainly see why the nature of what they do tends to make them lose social skills.

It’s just so rewarding to program and have immediate results, and that cycle doesn’t need human interaction. As a political science major and an participant of organization, human interaction’s not always as great as we think it is. All activists and organizers know that to get what they want, they have to beg, wheedle, and politick their way to where they want to be. Why do that, when the computer can offer you meaning without giving you lip?

I have a small little program now. My non-programmer gamer friends look down at it, and they don’t appreciate how many tears and hairs I’ve torn out from my head just to get it where it is. On the other hand, they’re completely right: a lousy game is not worth playing.

What have I learnt from this? I have a newfound respect for programmers and hackers now. They have an intuitive sense of the logic that a cold, unyeilding machine poses and tames it, shapes it and builds it into something beautiful. I’ve quit working on that program for the moment, going back to my political science roots to research and write an article I’ve been meaning to write for some time. I’ll probably not work on the turn-based battle for some time. But I have been dreaming about another game…