Man, I have to get around to making another long post on this blog. But today was a particularly full day, so for now I’ll leave you guys with footage of the new character from Mass Effect 2 — the Assassin!

Hi readers! Had a full day: Rewriting an article, had dinner with my batchmates at Spiral at Sofitel for Father Bernas’ birthday. So I’ll be saving my long article for tomorrow. For now, to celebrate the fact that Mass Effect still has my wife in its clutches, I bring you footage of the Mass Effect 2 demo at E3. This clip combines two of my favorite things: Mass Effect, and Olivia Munn. Mmm, Olivia…

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Hi guys! I’m settling in with the First Mate for a night of geth-stomping playing Mass Effect. She’s addicted, and I don’t blame her But that means no long entry tonight. Meanwhile, the rest of you Mass Effect fans should enjoy this treat: The Mass Effect 2 trailer from E3 2009!

Catch you later Bill and Ted!

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I think people expected me to outgrow my love for animation, for video games, for comic books, for RPGs, for all these frivolous things other people dismiss as shallow entertainment. My parents certainly did. It is, after all, what you’re supposed to do to grow up, isn’t it?

Eventually you move on, learn to hang out with people who occupy their time with sensible things like what brand of clothes you’re wearing, what car you’re driving, what shoes you wear to the golf course, what team is going to make it into the finals, which club you should be seen at on a Friday night. You know, sensible things.

Especially in my case. I’m a lawyer. At this point I should be looking into stocking up on status symbols instead of driving the same car I’ve driven for over a decade, wearing quirky no-name t-shirts and spending my weekends watching anime with my friends. I should probably be looking into looking into paying for some nubile young girl’s college tuition as a friend joked a couple of days ago.

I should. It’s what everyone else is doing.

Except I’m not everyone else. I’m a weirdo. I’m otaku. And most of you reading this are, too.

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A couple of years ago I shot a video of myself spinning around my Anakin AOTC Master Replicas lightsaber, mainly because I thought it looked pretty cool. I used my phone camera to do it and shot about a minute-and-a-half worth of footage.

Then on a whim, I showed it to my geek friend who was also a law school classmate of mine. He ended up showing it to a bunch of our other guy classmates, and I was afraid that they would diss me for being such a Star Wars nerd, especially since this was the height of the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Star Wars bashing. Instead they asked me where I got it, how much it cost, and if I could show it to them sometime. One classmate blurted out, “Dude, I just came,” when he first saw the blade extend at the beginning of the video.

A few months later I had the chance to show them the lightsaber at my birthday party at my house, which had a very marked delineation in the crowd I’d invited. One half were my college geek friends, happily making obscure sci-fi jokes and playing German board games. The other half were my law school friends, drinking and chatting and basically giving my geek friends dismissive glances.

The law school classmate who came when he saw the lightsaber video was there, with his fiancee, a stylish girl from a wealthy family. I handed him the lightsaber.

He switched it on and off a couple of times, nodded approvingly, and idly said, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool.” Then he handed it back to me.

Why was his reaction so subdued? I found out later that his fiancee disapproved of his geeky ways, his obsession with computers and Star Wars and video games, so he tended to downplay it around her.

I told him my girlfriend (now my wife) gave me the lightsaber. I said she had her own lightsaber (a Darth Vader ROTJ) and that we sometimes had mock-duels for kicks.

He said I was a lucky man.

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I’ve come to accept that my otakuhood isn’t a phase, that it’s here to stay. The reason this blog is called Project Otaking is simple. If I’m going to be otaku anyway, why not live the otaku life to the fullest? If I must drink life to the lees, do I have to drink from the same cup everyone else is drinking from? Why drink beer when you can drink sake, or absinthe, or ayahuasca?

Why be ashamed of it? Why not embrace it? Why not proclaim it proudly to the world? Because some people with pretensions disapprove? Is that a good enough reason?

Why not be the Otaku of Otaku, like Kubo said to Tanaka in Otaku no Video? Why not be the Otaking?

Why not? And why not do it now?

Why not?

(I tried to cover this topic on a previous now-defunct blog called Role versus Player. What happened to that blog is a tragic story for another day.)

I became a tabletop role-playing game otaku very early in life. My cousin ran a simple D&D session when I was six and I became hooked. Not only did I use my birthday money to buy myself the red D&D Basic Set to run for cousins and friends, but I became hooked on anything vaguely RPG-ish, which at the time meant books like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Lone Wolf (and Grey Star), TSR’s own D&D books, and J.H. Brennan’s Grail Quest. (I would have an interesting, unrelated encounter with J. H. Brennan many years later.)

By the time I started playing computer RPGs like Bard’s Tale and Might and Magic, I realized that there seemed to be two separate aspects of RPGs, implied by the name itself: Role-Playing and Playing Games.

Computers automated much of the game-playing aspect of RPGs, removing the need to check table after table, making die roll after die roll, streamlining the gaming experience. The Gold Box games and Japanese cRPGs like Final Fantasy made dungeon crawling less painful and much quicker, providing colorful graphics where previously simple imagination sufficed.

Role-playing, on the other hand, was not so easily simulated. Encounters could be scripted, but this necessitated a limited range of responses that the computer could handle. Non-player characters tended to repeat the same lines over and over again (Welcome to Coneria!), more interactive conversations simply provided you with a limited list of two or three responses, usually geared toward a black-or-white scale of good and evil.

This clashed directly with my tabletop gaming experience. I had become the default game master for most of the games I played in, and RPGs became a major outlet for my creativity, teaching me how to create fictional worlds, how to improvise and react to player reactions I could have never planned for, how to flesh out characters and give them motivations and personality quirks of their own. You could argue that even my writing was heavily influenced by my experience as a GM.

I started out running games for cousins and close friends, but going to college exposed me to running games for casual acquaintances and then total strangers. I started to skip class just to play RPGs. I ran mainstream games like D&D and Vampire: the Masquerade, indie games like My Life With Master and Dead Inside, games based on anime and scifi like Star Wars and Gatekeepers, homebrews like the previously-mentioned Reality Prime and Null Time. I would run them face-to-face, or as LARPs, or online using instant messaging and text-only role-playing servers like RanmaMUCK and KazeMUCK.

Then MMORPGs broke onto the scene. I imagined great adventures being played in cyberspace, epics of heroism and intrigue and general ass-kicking. But that’s not what happened. See, MMORPGs reflect the development of the cRPG as a separate branch from tabletop (or face-to-face) RPGs.

Computer RPGs tend to follow one of two paths. You could play a generic hero type of whatever class you choose while wading through wave after wave of monsters gaining experience and money, which you spend to help you beat stronger monsters, repeating the process just because the feeling of advancement quantified by ever-increasing numbers on your character sheet is so satisfying. Or you could be thrust in the role of a hero in a pre-written adventure, following the rails toward one or more pre-determined endings (which is characteristic of Japanese cRPGs). Each has its own pros and cons (the former gives the player wide latitude in roaming the game world, the latter sucks you into the story of the character you’re playing), but both lack the infinite flexibility coupled with the storytelling of a human-run game world.

I came to this realization while playing Ragnarok, wading through another undead dungeon with a party of my friends. Sure I was playing with a group of friends. But when I created my character I imagined a deep backstory for him. I expected more varied epic adventures instead of ‘killed the toughest boss character available to him at his current level’. I expected to save kingdoms, rescue princesses, navigate a maze of court intrigue.

I was playing the wrong games. I had the wrong mindset. I wanted human experience in a world that rested on a foundation of numbers and attributes. Although I eventually came to enjoy Ragnarok and other MMORPGs on its own terms (like a cute cross between Diablo and Final Fantasy Tactics, two games I happen to love) I disagreed strongly with the self-appointed experts who claimed that MMORPGs would eventually kill off tabletop games because they served different purposes, appealed to different markets. cRPGs filled my need to play games. But I needed to stimulate my imagination too, and pretty graphics were a poor substitute.

As far as MMORPGs went, I eventually settled on EVE Online, a cutthroat hyper-capitalistic space game where, having specialized in mining and transport vessels, I unwittingly got swept up in an epic struggle for the frontier star systems and was forced to take up arms. (Just like Malcolm Reynolds, I was on the losing side.)

So I still play cRPGs and MMORPGs. I happen to love them. I love Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic, and am looking forward to playing in Jedi vs. Sith. I’m playing a lot of Fable II these days and I’ve finally started on Fallout 3. I love the Final Fantasy and Chrono-series soundtracks. But I stopped role-playing in cRPGs, instead returning to playing or running games face-to-face or on forums or MUCKs or instant messaging.

I realized that despite the R in MMORPG or cRPGs, they’re for playing games, not playing roles.

Staggering back from my deep undercover mission as a Normal Person, I surveyed the damage to my otaku cred. I wasn’t going to be the Otaking in this state, not with my complete ignorance over most anime that came out in the time I was on my away mission. I had no idea what Full Metal Panic was. I hadn’t seen a single episode of any anime other than Initial D in a long time. And as far as RPGs went, I hadn’t rolled a non-six-sided polyhedron in years, let alone orchestrate a hypothetical scenario for multiple persons where random number generation was used in conjunction with predetermined stats to generate results and determine outcomes. (“Run a game.”)

Otaku are notoriously snobby people, see — not in the sense that they’re mean or aloof, though. It’s just that they will test your knowledge in their area of expertise. Heaven help the poser who is trying to bluff his way through a field the otaku knows by heart.

Wait.

I assumed that given the process of acquisition of otaku knowledge, which is largely a function of time and effort, there would be one uber-otaku who possessed all knowledge, and that there would be lesser otaku beneath her (let’s face it, if such a thing existed, no one studies harder than a girl on a mission) with smaller areas of expertise.

This is, of course, a ridiculous scenario. Although I’m a pretty fast learner, and I know a few mental tricks to improve knowledge absorption, there simply isn’t enough time during a human lifetime to know it ALL, at least given current non-augmented human learning technology and brain capacity.

(Science and Sci-fi Otaku basically think it’s a matter of time before we figure out this learning thing and create hyper-learning through highly efficient methods of knowledge assimilation. Or that we figure out how to live indefinitely.)

So the key was not to keep up with the J’onzzes, so to speak, but to be knowledgeable in esoteric or specialized fields. I may have not seen every episode of every Star Trek series, but I know every Firefly episode by heart. (Because when you can’t walk, you crawl, and when you can’t crawl, when you can’t do that…)

I haven’t watched every magical girl anime, but I can tell you that Revolutionary Girl Utena contains numerous references to Herman Hesse’s semi-autobiographical novel Demian that are essential to the story. (For instance, why is the organ piece that plays when the Student Council rides the elevator entitled ‘The Legend of the God Named Abraxas’?)

I’m not with the Spirit Questors and I’m dreadfully unfamiliar with the local spiritual fauna. But I’m a chaos magician and Thelemite. (Love is the Law; Love Under Will.)

I have no idea what happened during Final Crisis, and what I hear about Civil War makes me glad I didn’t follow it. Sorry. But I’ve collected every issue of the adventures of Spider Jerusalem or Lucifer Morningstar or Sophie Bangs. (“I am the Holy Splendor of the Imagination.”)

Finally, I had my one trump card: I was a Monty Python and Black Adder nut and had watched every episode of both series. (“There were zwei peanuts walking down the strasse. And one was assaulted… peanut.”) So I was still a expert in a specialized, well-respected field even after years of neglect.

This was good. I wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Plus since I had focused on physical fitness and social interaction (I spent a lot of nights clubbing and partying during my time away), as well as alcohol tolerance and a brand-spanking-new law degree (two things that appear to have a direct correlation), I was sort of a hybrid creature that straddled both races. Like Spock.

But I still had a lot of learning and watching and reading ahead of me, if I was going to make myself intelligible to other otaku with less obscure tastes.

(to be continued)

I would have to say that the radical downturn in my academic career beginning in college coincided neatly with the rise of three influences in my life: access to anime, access to Magic: the Gathering and RPGs, and access to the Internet.

All of these things would be supplemented by a community of geeks known simply as The Hill. The Hill alumni are many. You might actually know someone who was part of the Hill. We were, for all intents and purposes, a catch-all otaku group just like in Otaku no Video or Genshiken. Some specialized in anime, some in CCGs, some in RPGs, some in comic books, science fiction, tarot card reading, and so on.

We contributed to each other’s academic demise. Going to class man? Nah, just stay for ten more minutes and have one more duel. If you come with us we’re going to So-and-So’s place to watch the new Ranma OVA. Hey, study later, read this Oh! My Goddess fanfic I wrote and tell me if it’s good enough to submit to the FFML or if it needs work. Captain, I detect no intelligent life on this planet. So roll the dice already. You’re already late for class anyway.

I took more pride in my knowledge of trivia like voice actresses and opening themes and animation directors than, say, in how fashionably I dressed or if I had actually studied for the midterm I had that afternoon that I only found out about that morning.

During this unglamorous but necessary period in my life, I watched Gainax’s masterpiece, Otaku no Video. For those of you who can’t be bothered to check Wikipedia, Otaku no Video was Gainax’s last anime before doing underground, triumphantly emerging from its own ashes three years later with Neon Genesis Evangelion.

This would be the first time I had a word that described I was, encapsulates it so completely. I had always been that way, but had no name for until now.

I was otaku.

(to be continued)