I seem to have puppets on the brain these past few days. In part, it has something (in part) to do with purchasing and playing a game that I wasn’t sure I would like. But that’s not the only thing prompting the ponders on puppets.
“The Lies of P” is a videogame that is currently on sale on the Steam store (a digital videogame retailer, for those of you who are not into such things). It is a game that, while I liked the gaslamp-fantasy/Belle Époque aesthetics, I am always wary of games that promote themselves as “soulslikes” [named after the genre’s early titles “Dark Souls” and “Demon’s Souls”], those unforgiving games where you learn how to play or your avatar dies. Repeatedly. Until you learn how to play. They are largely a miss for me, although I have liked a few soulslikes and I keep trying to “get good” and “learn to play” as various titles are released that intrigue me.
“Lies” is loosely based on the story of Pinocchio and takes place in a world filled with automatons (puppets) that take over the unsavory daily tasks. Something causes them to glitch and paradise turns very dark as they murder their former masters holding their strings. The player is “P”, a special kind of puppet that has fewer “strings”, e.g., rules by which it must abide. While other puppets cannot lie, for example, P is allowed some free will and can lie — which give P more humanity, but I’m sure will have some drawbacks (including losing trust if you lie too much). And I’m guessing his nose grows…
I’m quite enjoying my time in P’s world, especially because they do have a difficulty slider for those of us less adept at action gameplay. I don’t play it at either extreme for difficulty settings, but right in the middle — which allows me a chance to enjoy the storytelling and still have a challenge to overcome.
That long explanation aside, I have been pondering not only the story of the game’s world, but I have also been thinking about a phrase from the 80s that showed up on some t-shirts of the time and follows a similar theme. I forget for certain which band had the slogan (possibly Public Image Limited, aka PIL), but I recall it being a very divisive in the so-called punk scene on a local level. The phrase: You Are A Product. The reason I think it might have been PIL is that it was a thing around the same time as their “generic” album came out, named “Album”, “Cassette” or “Compact Disc” (depending on the media purchased), but there were several bands at the time that followed those same themes and it might have been someone else.
There were some young rebels who didn’t agree with the sentiment. Quite vehemently opposed to the idea. “I am NOT a product”, someone had painted on their leather biker jacket in the same very way that several other punks did. By rejecting the idea, you became the idea. That was the double-bind that most people could not quite grasp. The only way to escape being a product by virtual of this double-bind was to not give it air, to shrug and say… “so what?”
And even that last act snared you if you vocalized it. By reacting at all to the statement, you declared yourself a “product”.
Personally, I just chuckled when I saw the puzzle and moved on, only recalling the phrase as an amusing curiosity of my teen years — much the same as getting skaters with their anarchy symbols on their boards to cheer when I would fist pump and shout, “Anarchy Rules!”
I’ll let you, dear readers, puzzle out why that was amusing for me. Wordplay has always been a pastime of mine.
Circling back to puppets: all this comes around to the idea that I’m not convinced that we aren’t all being tugged by some kind of strings and being made to dance to someone else’s tune. Even apparent rebels are subject to those strings, even as they are being reactionary to them. After all, what is rebellion but trading in one kind of conformity for another? Is that conformity more “underground”? Sure, at least until it crossed the threshold and becomes mainstream, which most solid rebellions seem to do. Is a rebellion against the puppet-masters still a rebellion when the people just hand off their strings to another master?
Is there any escape from the puppet-masters? Or are we always so bound?
Social media, political tribalism, advertising, fashion and music… are these not all strings that bind us?
Careful of that double-bind when you answer.
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