On Anime, Walled Gardens, and Maximizers

I have been thinking about why there are some people who only seem to watch - to take a random example - anime as their primary form of intake for dramatic fiction. Because even if it were a genre (which it isn't, even though I can see why people would think it is given that it does have its own occasionally quite bizarre set of idiosyncrasies), then I would still have trouble understanding that tendency because having an intense passion for a particular genre has never seemed very...eh, healthy to me. It just seemed artificially restrictive, a manacle you have forged for yourself.

But in giving it more consideration I did sort of come to understand the impulse, which I connect with what we might call the minimizer's impulse. The basic concept is that we can broadly split up human decision making tendencies into two extremes with everyone at different points on the spectrum between them. Maximizers really cannot make a decision until they have seen every choice and analyzed all the opportunity costs involved, whereas minimizers are perfectly happy with an artificially restricted set of choices because it makes the decision making process feasible and sometimes even easy. If you are a minimizer, you have cut down your range of possible decisions on the possibly quite correct and yet frequently unconscious assumption that even if there is a better choice available somewhere far off among the countless possible choices you have neglected, chances are it will not have been sufficiently better than what you ended up with to compensate you for the time you would have sunk into trying to divine which of several choices might have been the best one. That said, I tend to fall into the maximizer's category, not because I think it is necessarily more logical, but rather because my personality does not admit any other possibility.

A similar impulse applies to my view of art, which is why I am never going to stick to one medium or one genre, and consistently try to absorb and process them all, find out what makes them all tick, and then try to use those principles in my own work.

I also tend to reject - in Warren Ellis' terminology - walled gardens. Ellis used the term to describe the chat rooms in the early days of the internet that people tended to stick to even after the internet opened up, largely because it was easier and more comfortable for them. And that isn't necessarily a judgment, it just means that there is what we might call a minimizing tendency there, an impulse when faced with a mountain of choices to artificially restrict your choices to a manageable range.

In the case of anime, there are a lot of internal genres so you can get the illusion of having the full range of choices while staying within that walled garden. While, again, I can't say that I entirely approve of this, I acknowledge that it is not entirely my place. What I will say is that devotion to particular genres or artistic mediums leads inexorably to apologism for those categories, which is really not good for the state of those forms.

What do I mean by that, broadly? Well, let us take the example of horror, particularly American horror. When something comes along like All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, everyone goes crazy because it tweaks the formula just a little bit, but in reality it doesn't move anywhere outside of its comfort zone. It is only fresh to someone who has stayed inside the walled garden of American horror cinema for so long that they begin to mistake the slightest bit of storytelling spice for groundbreaking innovation, and it is only really by stepping outside that walled garden that you acquire the necessary perspective to see that.

It is maybe a little too easy to use a sick man as a straw man, and American Horror has indeed been the sick man of the cinema landscape for so long, so let me instead pick something a little closer to home - musical theatre.

I do know people who are, and I hate to say this, almost pathologically obsessed with the musical theatre, and those are the people who are most likely to say that, for example, Legally Blonde The Musical is great, which it really isn't. Oh, it's perfectly entertaining, but it is only really good within the walled garden that is the modern musical theatre, and it is only by going outside and looking at the other forms of storytelling that the story might have been better-suited to that you begin to see how lacking that particular work really is. So my own favorite genres are hardly immune to this Apologist's Syndrome, as I have just now decided to call it.

And to be fair, I see a lot of these walled gardens breaking down a bit, especially in fields like music, and I really do credit the iPod with this. A lot of kids of my generation now listen to a little bit of everything. Sure, we might have our preferred genres and artists, but you are going to be much more likely to find a country fan with some rap on their iPods or a rap fan with some Johnny Cash on their iPods than you would have been to find roughly equivalent music fans with roughly equivalent anomalies in their record collections in earlier years.

Just to give you some background, I am generally convinced that anyone who claims that the internet has either saved or ruined the world is talking out of their arses. The internet has not changed anything. Email has replaced snail mail, texting has replaced telegrams, twitter has replaced muttering to yourself after you've finished eating or whatever; it really has not changed all that much, it has just moved everything into another arena.

That said, I think in this case there is an argument to be made for this movement from the physical to the virtual having enhanced the cultural landscape. To be sure, that is partly to do with accessibility and cost, but I think it has far more to do with communication. So, instead of getting a local music community or publication which will tend to exclusively review the things that are popular around where you are, on the internet you can access reviews of any record from any genre you care to mention. You are not limited in your cultural outlook by the region you happen to be born in.

The obvious downside to that is that there is now a lot more competition for your attention, and again we run into the maximizer's problem, in that suddenly we have everything available to us, so how do we choose anything? The answer, as we have seen, is usually that we restrict our attention to the inside of that walled garden.

The flip-side of this positive movement, therefore, is the extent to which the internet has enabled the survival of niches that might not otherwise have survived. Trading card games used to have a rather short shelf life, and a lot of games had the misfortune to die before the internet really kicked off, but the major three - Pokemon, Yugioh, and Magic The Gathering - experienced a resurgence, and I personally attribute that to the rise of the internet. Even as local game shops died or stopped hosting tournaments, the online community supplanted the local communitya and thus saved these particular communal pastimes from extinction.

These entities that the internet saved are very niche, so niche, in fact, that in what I might tentatively call the real world - which is in itself artificially restricted by geography - these niches would not have survived. Instead, they are flourishing and peacefully coexisting, and the online community is responsible for that.

Incidentally, this tendency towards the maintenance of niches online is not necessarily a bad thing either, at least in comparison to the analog world. The analog world is restrictive too, and all the internet has really done is to replace restrictions of geography with restrictions of personal preference. They are still restrictions, and restrictions are generally bad, but I think it is at least a baby step in the right direction.

So, in a sense, the internet can promote walled gardens, but the walled garden concept is not an inherently pernicious thing. It is really just a method of cutting the otherwise overwhelming myriad of cultural choices down to a much more manageable set from which to make your own personal selections.

Again, I would assert that this is not entirely healthy, but I at least understand the psychological necessity for it. So while I would feel comfortable nudging them into areas they might not have contemplated exploring previously - for example, I might present a serial musical humbugger with a curated selection of musicals for them to sample, because I think they might enjoy them and would be gratified if they did - I am not at all comfortable with condemning the walled gardens. It may not be my thing, I may tend to think it is very unhealthy for the individual consumer and the broader intellectual landscape alike, but I definitely understand how necessary it is for a great number of people, and understand that to reach out to those people, we should gently nudge and shift the borders of the walled garden rather than unilaterally decide to tear those walls down.