On Employment

A lot of games coming out around now are Open World style, a result of Grand Theft Auto V making a billion dollars or so. Open world designs mean that objectives can’t be narrowly focused into “get from one end of this level to the other” or “beat this opponent” but instead you’re given an objective and frequently you have a small set-piece inside the larger world in which to accomplish that objective. Frequently this turns into a to-do list called a “quest list” that shows you your objectives in the open world, your progress toward completing them, where to go to complete them, and sometimes the rewards for doing so.

It’s a pretty straightforward design that appeals to a lot of people and functions well in a logical system of checks, triggers and variables. Despite this setup’s obvious popularity, there’s always been a certain amount of criticism for the relatively robotic nature of enjoyment of these games, whether it’s criticizing the rote repetition of tasks or the arbitrary way these tasks tend to decide their completion. One of the larger issues with open world design is that the bigger the world, the more limited the verbs players can perform begin to feel. Grand Theft Auto addressed this by stuffing its open world with all kinds of minigames: ownable properties, clothing options, a virtual stock market and so on. Other games are a bit more limited in scope, usually providing little more than a virtual treasure hunt or two on top of the typically combat oriented gameplay.

The reason this design is so popular – clear tasks, clear rewards, clear direction toward the next task – has a lot to do with how we set up our real world society. In an ideal presentation of life on planet earth:

• you’re born
• you age a bit until you reach schooling
• you’re taught certain things and then evaluated and typically rewarded based on your ability to remember or apply those things
• you graduate and move on into a position of employment where ideally you’re given a series of tasks
• you complete them in exchange for money
• Eventually after progressing in your career to a senior position and becoming old you retire with your accumulated rewards and enjoy a period of time before your death

This is the fundamental backbone of our society, from which all our ideology springs. And it’s not bad as a simulation goes! It works in games, no reason it wouldn’t work IRL. Except, of course, that life offers you endless potential actions you can take outside of your questlist; a questlist that itself is fallible because frequently your tasks are unclear, your rewards are uncertain, and the path to your next objective is unknowable.

What Video Games do that Work fails to do is provide a clarity of purpose, a set progression through a series of conditions that ends with you the victor, triumphant in your prowess. The closest life has to offer you to that kind of clarity is schooling, and even that is subject to myriad systemic issues that prevent it from being as proficient and objective as a machine-executed series of rules that interpret your input without bias or precondition.

So, Games are Work, yes, but Games are an idealized form of Work that cleaves more to the mental construct of what a good and functional society should look like. There’s a lot of thinkpieces and video reviews out there framing games as escapist fantasy but rarely do they bother to examine what folks are escaping into and what folks are escaping from. There’s a lot of writing out there too about power fantasies and it’s inarguable that this is a genre, but to what degree are these a power fantasy and why? Take Skyrim, for instance. You’re given a massive map full of samey-looking barrows and little medieval towns and you’re frequently employed to slay dragons or zombies and promptly rewarded for doing so. Meanwhile, as a digital avatar, you don’t need to eat, you don’t need to sleep, you don’t really need shelter, and diseases are cured as easily as tapping a shrine. You have a clear purpose: defeat king dragon and stop the dragons from destroying the world. The power granted to you is immortality, invulnerability and clairvoyance, a suspension of the normal insecurities of reality. The ability to slay a dragon pales in comparison to run up and down mountains and across plains and though vast fields without pause, shot like an arrow toward your well defined goals.

I’m gonna segue here a bit and talk about the gig economy. Presently a number of older industries are being upended ("disrupted") by relatively miniscule tech companies who can offer a similar level of service at miniscule cost by almost totally eliminating their workforce and handing the responsibility and to technically unemployed individuals who are doing little more than using an app. The app provides accountability and payment processing, the user provides the accommodations. It sounds great on paper because it frankly is great. With airbnb the prices are cheaper and the vacation experience is more authentic than anything a big chain hotel can deliver, all with little ratings-chasing perks that would be an upcharge in a cab or hotel. With Uber the cars arrive faster, cleaner, and friendlier than cab drivers have ever had incentive to be.

In many ways this is because the apps come closer to that idealized experience of Work that we expect from life. The app buzzes and sends you a quest or a list of quests to choose from, with a clear destination or guest to care for. You're rewarded almost immediately on a quest by quest basis. The ratings system provides you with instant feedback so you always have a sense of how well or how poorly you're doing the job. Currently the system lacks a real sense of progression, but there's already opportunities present to be "featured" drivers or airbnb locals and access a better pool of clientele. In a lot of ways these apps "gamify" work. It'd be great if it weren't so thoroughly tied to our ability to live. Folks who are bad at playing these new games don't just progress more slowly, they "lose" the game and get kicked of the app, putting themselves at risk of homelessness, starvation and death.

What Did We Learn

My Grandma has this belief that we’re put here on this earth to live our lives the way they unfold and for our immortal spirits to learn something from the lives we lead. It could be something very big, it could be something very small, but regardless we’re here to learn and learn we will. My friend has the belief that we’re essentially the same spirits repeated again and again, and the two of us met thousands of years ago and been friends before and we’ll meet again in the future (assuming it exists, he’s a bit of an end timesy guy when he’s down). Reincarnation is a super common belief, even in Abrahamism where the incarnations of the immortal soul are off in some new fantastic world (hell or paradise or limbo) arguably because the alternative, that our lives are incredibly fleeting and go from dust to dust in the blink of an eye not only is kinda scary to contemplate, it sets wrong with our estimation of ourselves and those around us.

Are we avoiding this on purpose? One of the many facets of modern life that seems to go badly is the obsession with preserving our selves, our money, our possessions, our will beyond the end of our lives. Whether it’s complex tax schemes to keep the money within our genetic offshoots or putting our name on as many big buildings as we can afford to fund, the screaming terror of mortality tends to manifest in these putrid displays of wealth and enforced posthumous filial worship. It’s not good! Inheritance schemes are pretty similar to bad cholesterol, in that they form plaques within the greater systems of human existence and make it harder for those systems to flow smoothly. Or in other words, it makes it harder for new people to earn that wealth while preserving a handful of folks who, by dint of their father or grandfather or great-grandfather’s efforts can just sit around at home and literally earn more than half this country will ever see in their lifetime of holding two and three simultaneous jobs.

It’s not like this is new or anything, the wealthy of Egypt would arrange to inter themselves along with their money, an arguably better system than inheritance at least. The scary truth is whether or not our consciousness persists after death everything we’ve made in this world is done for. It doesn’t matter anymore. And we all know it, right? It’s another one of those things where people are aware of this factually but it doesn’t really translate into the kind of behavioral shifts you’d expect if people really believed it was true. C’est la vie, ça ira, etc.

While we’re still on this earth though, we still gotta deal with earthy stuff. Our messy relationships, our tough decisions, our mistakes. Ideally every time you make a mistake you just, boom, you’ve learned a thing and now you know it and you’re slightly more perfect. Obviously life doesn’t work this way, and in fact a lot of things aren’t even framed as mistakes when they are. Even the concept of a mistake is tied to a personal ethical system. Maybe you think it’s a mistake to cause harm directly but indirect harms are pretty much a-ok. It makes me wonder sometimes what we could possibly be learning when the basic premises of our lives are so different. Maybe that’s the point and you have to learn something that’s buried under a facet of a facet of existence, like, maybe we need to learn exactly how to hurt people specifically. Who the heck knows?

All this gets even more complicated as trauma enters our lives and molds our ability to understand and appreciate our world. Every scar makes approaching life just a little stranger and affects the way we approach situations in both conscious and unconscious ways. Is it still a mistake if it’s a result of the emotional mindset caused by a past trauma? To what degree does your ability to make decisions really come into play with mistakes?

When I’m feeling more or less ok I’m happy to share my own take that reality lacks any real dimension of personal decision, that what we do is set in stone from the start and we’re just here to ride the emotional rollercoaster. It’s a little nihilistic, at least inasmuch as we live in a society that is absolutely obsessed with not just agency, but a sort of personal individualistic agency that makes things like “by your own bootstraps” and “welfare queens” make sense and destroys even very smart folks’ ability to understand systems as systems and not as the result of individual interaction within those systems (e.g. victim-blaming). I think it’s worth it though. All of that stuff is nonsense. Individuals don’t have any agency in the systems they’re trapped in. Stuff changes, of course. It just changes as a result of collective work that’s largely outside the hands of any particular person. You create the new culture you want to live in with your like-minded humans and it butts up against the existing culture and hopefully your culture wins that conflict.

So hey, what do you learn then if your life is basically on rails? Well heck you can learn dang anything. Your “mistakes” are just happenstance. Learn from them and try to avoid them or don’t! Whatever you’re going to do is pretty much already going to happen. There’s not a lot of sense in fussing about it. Really there’s not a lot of sense in fussing about anything. We still do it, I still do it, it’s just a human thing, but it’s not really useful in any real sense.

Re: some mario maker early preview coverage

So I don’t normally do this because a) console wars are literally the dumbest possible conflict and b) gamers in generally tend to be aggressively wrong in a way matched only by hardened rightists so the folks who need to hear this probably won't, but this particular article irked me in just the right way that I want to respond to it.

To contextualize this discussion here I want to point out that this generation of video game hardware has, across the board, sold worse than the last generation of video game hardware. The Sony Playstation 4 is the only home console currently doing well, and it’s doing about as well as the ps3 (last gen’s sales loser) did at its peak. Likewise the handheld market has decreased overall, with the 3ds doing about half as well as the DS did in its heyday. There are a couple of reasons for this, but most of them just come back to the current economic doldrums all of western society is facing as a result of a bunch of terrible neoliberal decisions.

Even so, the Wii U is firmly in third place even behind the terribly lagging Xbone, but the quote re: the system not selling as well as even the gamecube is ignoring that actually at about this point in the gamecube’s life (two and a half years in) it had sold about as many units and that overall hardware systems can’t be expected to sell as many units as the seventh generation, let alone the sixth.

Concerning the Wii being “seen as slightly faddish” this is some typical gamer rigmarole where anything that sells to “casuals” in an unacceptably high amount (literally every facebook game, mobile gaming, the wii, so on) is in some way an abhorrent aberrance to the true gaming community which only buys “serious” consoles without “gimmicks.” It’s this bullshit language that helps maintain the atmosphere where anyone insufficiently versed in gaming shibboleths (ability to manipulate complex controllers to move a character in 3d space, willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a computer that only plays games instead of a few dollars on a game for a computer you already own) is perpetually an outsider despite the theoretical definition of “gamer” being “one who plays games.” It’s both a failure of empathy and taking the skills built into gaming for granted.

The Wii sold specifically and explicitly on a platform of making games easier for average people to get into, and it’s ironically this same platform that created the Mario being valorized in this same article. That it sold tremendously well is an explicit demonstration of the validity of this approach and the Wii U’s problem isn’t that the wii’s popularity is a flash in the pan, but that the wii u is poorly positioned in the market. Instead of retaining the market that the wii successfully capitalized on, the wii u chose a terrible name and returned to a more complex control scheme that alienated their non-gamer market.

The article attempts to position the problem, as so many comments sections do, as a problem with the tablet screen, suggesting that consumers didn’t respond well to it. This is mostly conjecture, but I’d suggest the issue is less with the screen itself, which is actually broadly popular with actual wii u owners, but with the aforementioned failure to position itself on the market and more importantly a failure to interest developers in creating unique experiences for the screen. Not mentioned at all in this article are both Nintendoland and Game and Wario, arguably the two games that most significantly utilize the various features of the screen and demonstrated a variety of possible control schemes for future games, none of which have been later reused even by Nintendo itself. (That said, it looks like the upcoming star fox heavily leans on the design of the metroid game in Nintendoland)

Which brings me to the next issue here, where the article suggests that Nintendo has dragged its feet about putting out major franchises. This shit is a goddamn gamer Gregorian chant at this point, and a chant that frustratingly ignores two things.  One, Mario is their biggest franchise by a very wide margin and they won’t stop making goddamn Mario shit. Mario Kart 8 has something like a 60% attachment rate and there hasn’t been a year since the console came out that some kind of Mario shit hasn’t. What gamers mean is “why hasn’t [series that doesn’t sell as well as Mario] come out yet” which is number two: Nintendo is having to make HD games now, which have much longer development time and thus much greater development costs. So far this generation Nintendo has explicitly been trying to offset those costs by outsourcing a great deal of its design work to other companies (smash 4 with namco, wonderful 101, the new star fox with platinum, hyrule warriors with koei tecmo) and this is 100% the reason Nintendo is shy of creating new entries in franchises that aren’t guaranteed to sell  Mario or Zelda numbers (it’s also why Splatoon almost had Mario characters until the team convinced Nintendo it could be made on the cheap, and indeed they got it out in about a year with just four maps and three major weapon types, more coming on free dlc. Speaking of DLC this is why Nintendo suddenly seems to be so confident in creating and putting it out, because Nintendo’s DLC, like all DLC, is designed to offset the costs of production, which I’ll reiterate are dramatically higher than the costs for producing a Wii game.

Nintendo is literally dealing with exactly the same issue the rest of the industry is, which is that development costs have vastly outstripped the profitability of selling games at $60 and what we’re seeing across the market is publishers scrambling to deal with this paradigm in all kinds of wildly unpopular ways. This is not a case of blatantly terrible decision making, except most prominently the name of the system (market positioning), but a case where Nintendo is having to adapt to the status quo of other console-makers and is trying to still make a profit. Microsoft loses money on every single xbox sold, Sony presently is only making money through their games division as the rest of their electronics are crashing and burning. Nintendo pretty much only makes games, so they can’t afford to take a bunch of business risks, hence a million fucking Marios.

Tl;dr the wii wasn’t a fad, the controller isn’t the problem, and gamers have no idea how games get made.  And the fucking NX is a handheld.

Six Totally Unexpected Reasons Reviewing Games is Harder Than You Think

I gotta stretch this out into more of a personal blog entry to cohere this into something that isn’t just a real facile aphorism. So, I’m reading Nathan Rabin’s latest year of flops on av club, since I guess the spinoff website thing didn’t work out and Nathan is back at the site that loves/hates him. Anyway it’s a review of So You Wanna Marry Harry, a singularly puerile (and those who know me know I don’t use that term lightly [nah I’m just fucking with ya]) reality show where a handful of ladies are apparently coerced into believing they’re competing for the affections of Prince Harry, who is I guess british royalty of some sort. It’s a reality show, so it has reality show morals, so of course the standpoint of the show is the winner should be someone who “deserves” it, which means someone who is honest and genuine and unassuming and whatever other traits society has deemed love-worthy. This is the biggest thing Nathan wrote about in his review, that the typical moral construction of the reality show narrative comes across as particularly flat and tasteless when built on a construct of deceit above and beyond most reality shows; “Harry” was to be interested in the most “genuine” of possible suitors while pretending to be British royalty.

This makes for an interesting angle to talk about, and invites the reader to find value in a theme not necessarily explicit in the text. In short, it co-operates with a good review.

Naturally this got me thinking about video games. One of the more pervasive concepts in critical readings of games is ludonarrative dissonance, the mismatch of the themes presented by the narrative of a video game and the mechanics present within a video game. A good general example is when games present you with an objective that is implied to be time-limited (e.g. we must find the bomb before it blows up the city!) but in reality the game will simply wait for you to eventually complete that objective before moving on. Another common example is presenting characters within the narrative who are supposedly morally correct and relatively pacifistic (usually as opposed to morally bankrupt and deadly antagonists) who violently murder hundreds or thousands of faceless humans over the course of the game. In practical terms this is no big deal, the gameplay mechanics allowing for time for players to explore or practice without the pressure of a time limit or offering a series of combat challenges that break up the platforming sections and pad out the time spent with the game. In terms of video game thematics, though, this dissonance can create ravines of meaning that make it difficult to extrapolate coherent themes out of a game. Ultimately it fosters a certain kind of cynicism in both the reviewer and the player: the story doesn’t really matter because the mechanics are just going to undermine it anyway.

I could be wrong, but I think this is one of the reasons why the notion that game reviews should be “objective” clings to life in a way that criticism in other media doesn’t have to deal with. It is already widely accepted that game stories are bad, and ludonarrative dissonance is but one part of that puzzle (the other parts being how incredibly stereotypical most of these narratives are under guise of adherence to genre tradition and the relative disinterest most publishers have in foregrounding narrative as an essential part of the product they’re selling rather than simply a tool of market positioning) but the problem with bad game stories ripples outward and affects how we think about and talk about games.

One of my favorite game reviewers is a weird dweeb named Tim Rogers, who writes reviews not as straightforward gamepro-style 300 word affairs but as 14-20k word anecdotes about his life that usually border on shaggy dog stories. When he does write about the games in question, he mostly writes about how the game /feels/ and what the mechanics do to create that feeling. Narrative is rejected wholly as an interesting aspect of games.

Roger Ebert talked about games once and caught a really silly reputation among the gaming crowd, up there with shibboleths about Uwe Boll and Jack Thompson in those days. He suggested that games weren’t Art as he understood it, that the nature of games, the structure, the objective, the win condition, the series of rules themselves precluded games from being Art. It’s not a very unreasonable position, but it struck a nerve with a segment of folks hoping for a cultural legitimacy beyond Hollywood stereotypes of nerdy losers. Ebert only elaborated once before his death, mostly just reinforcing his position and pointing out that a lot of the counterarguments were fundamentally misunderstanding his position.

I don’t wholly agree with him, but I think it’s a worthwhile position that can be explained pretty well through the analogy of playing an instrument. While the music produced through instruments is widely regarded as Art and has been for some time, I think you’d be harder pressed to find someone who would describe chords and scales and hertz values as art, but rather as a necessary study in the process of creating art, much as learning proportions is a necessary study in doing painting. The paintings are the art, and the process is sometimes art. The rules governing both are not themselves art. This holds true for games as well. What resonates with players is the experience of playing the game, the emergent narratives they’re experiencing. The experience can be and is often shared through youtube or meandering anecdotes and these representations can too be art, but the actual process of crunching variables or detecting player input or wrapping a virtual skeleton in a bitmap? Not art.

The reason I bring up this particularly navel-gazey and moot critical argument is because it’s directly related to how narrative is often confused as the artistic part of games. Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, is often described as a sort of “Rosebud of games” owing largely to its relatively somber narrative, rare for its time. The gameplay of Shadow of the Colossus, however, is fairly typical of a 3rd person action title. You have a horse, you ride it to a boss fight, which is more accurately a platforming segment followed by tapping a button, and… that’s about it. Sometimes you perform platform action to get to the boss to platform on it.

This is definitely a reductive description, but think about the elements being reduced here. What happens to a game if you strip away the music, the background textures, the user interface, the narrative? You’re left with a series of systems, appreciable mostly as elegant objects designed to produce an outcome, which in game terms is usually just creating a functional input/output feedback loop from the player. It’s all that other stuff that’s designed to make players believe they’re an assassin in 1500s Damascus. So you can see how the two collide. On the one hand you have a series of systems designed to produce, more or less, a Skinner box response from players, and on the other you have another set of artistic systems designed to make you believe that the skinner box you’re participating in is actually driving forth a narrative about invading an alien planet in the past to save the present from being destroyed.

This duality plus the fact that both sides of the system are constantly improving makes critically discussing games kinda weird and endlessly debatable and it’s unique from other forms of entertainment in that by the very interactive nature of video games it’s difficult to achieve the kind of suspension of disbelief that foregrounds the narrative over the tools used to convey it. It’s much harder to believe that you’re a pirate when you’re conveying all of your piratical things by using tiny buttons and some sticks than it is to believe that you’re simply watching pirates do their day to day business through an omniscient window that works kind of like our dreams do.

Not terribly long ago, games were pretty incapable of presenting a convincing narrative at all and were instead more interested in simply providing compelling things to look at (this paradigm lasted about midway through the original playstation era, plus lots of later games doing it for retro reasons) and to a certain degree the present backlash against critical analysis is a nostalgic yearning for the times of yesteryear (as is most of rightism, really) when gaming magazines would simply check a few boxes and rate games based almost entirely on technical competence + audiovisual appeal. It’s this particular style of critical analysis that lead to the current Metacritic paradigm and it’s this style that quite a lot of smaller outlets are explicitly writing against.

On humans and hierarchies

There’s been this sort of interesting idea kicking around in my head that essentially the only judgments humans can make without needing a cultural reference to back it up is whether a thing is good or bad. Indeed whether a thing is good or bad is often what many descriptions boil down to. A critical review my expound on the myriad factors involved in a work, but ultimately these factors fall upon a dividing line of good or bad.

Once we get to comparative judgment our tools only become slightly more complex: we place objects as greater or lesser than their peers. We might organize one object as more in one aspect and less in another, but the result is still the same. This cup is larger than that cup. This cup is more orange than that cup.

It is through this means that humans create hierarchies or structures of existence. It’s a habit that is as close to universal as behaviors come, and can be seen across time and place and across subject, whether it’s a manga placing its characters on a number line of relative strength or Catholicism determining the importance of angels by their distance from god or a bored student arranging her writing utensils from order of shortest to longest.

Why is this so important to humans? Are we destined to be the universe’s organizers, to find and categorize all living or nonliving things? The irony is palpable, as all things are merely extensions of one continuous object.

Post-Gay

Since the dominoes are falling or the jenga brick has been removed or satan has arrived on earth to damn us all or whatever and gay marriage (that is marriage between two people of the same sex, whose sexual activities are bizarre foreign and probably disgusting to all right-thinking heterosexuals) is becoming legalized and all kinds of movements are insisting on the right of homosexuals to live as though they’re actual citizens and junk, let’s talk about the post-gay world we’re approaching. Once we’ve achieved every major ticket item on the HRC’s list what’s going to happen?

Let’s start with what “post-gay” is. In other intersections of oppression there’s a general understanding that after some gains have been achieved and the movements subside, we as people tend to re-assert a worldview that assumes that we’re beyond those movements. An example: post-feminism. Children of the late seventies and beyond were generationally removed from the struggles of feminism, and as such all of the challenges and victories were firmly placed in the past. Certainly previous feminist rhetorics didn’t have much relevance to their lives, as the decimation of the economy all but guaranteed that every household that wanted to succeed had to succeed as a two-wage household. So feminism was a thing that already happened and was over and women were cool now. Any problems that women still faced were probably due to individual choices in their lives.

Another post: post-racism. There’s a strong understanding that racism is not only placed firmly in the To Kill a Mockingbird past, but that racism that happens today is due to isolated incidents created by individuals rather than a system that actively devalues nonwhites. Thus people who argue against racism or those nonwhites who point out deep systemic problems in our society are seen at best as whiners, subversive “reverse racist” demagogues at worst.

Post-gay is going to play out similarly. The broad assumption across society is that well by gum gays can marry now and there’s some laws against discrimination in place so by George the queers have made it. Queer radicals will be further marginalized and gay rights organizations will become persnickety and superfluous. Individuals who comment that there are basically little more than token gays in media will be dismissed as unrealistic political correctness police. Not just by heterosexuals. By other gays. Eventually we’re going to run into phrases like “I’m gay, but I’m not one of those gays.” Assaults on gays will be chalked up to “well maybe they shouldn’t have been so flamboyant in front of those dudes.” Bisexuality will be totally erased.  

Sounds familiar, right? Elements of all of these things exist even today, but the problem in a post-gay world will only be more and more severe, where all of these things will come together and become the overarching norm of gay life rather than disparate issues varyingly expressed. We will come to a clear and well-defined hierarchal organization of homosexual behavior where now we only have bits and pieces of attitudes by a handful of sex columnists. The classes of queer, bi-curious, heteroflexible, metrosexual, questioning, mostly straight/mostly gay, or any other way people define the middle spaces between pure homosexuality and pure heterosexuality will coalesce into a single “mulatto” definition that is interpreted in the direction most convenient for the interpreter’s biases. “Straight-acting” will become not just a weird internal insult but an actual threat.

Shit man, maybe we are actually here already.

Whence came this Animus?

The animus is interesting, a sort of movement towards complete cultural legitimacy for video games, an industry that started very much like the movies as a product to sell to kids and impressionable young adults. Movies have achieved cultural legitimacy. Everyone watches movies and there’s movies out there for everyone to watch. Indie films are a big deal and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an aspiring filmmaker or even just a crew member. Music has achieved cultural legitimacy. Everyone, no matter what gender, how rich or poor, big or small from every culture in the world enjoys some kind of music.

The animus is thus to achieve such widespread appeal and legitimacy that games becomes a thing you can proudly and openly talk about with people around you no matter who they are, since the assumption here is that 1. You can’t already do this and 2. That you can do this with all culturally legitimate things. It’s part of a larger psychographic for “nerds” and the persecution complex therein that I don’t really want to talk about right now.

What I do want to talk about is another discussion that’s recurred lately, the discussion of “what is a game” or usually more accusatorially, “X is not a game.” I’m not going to attempt a genealogy of this one either, (gee I’m telling you what I won’t do a lot. Sorry.) but lately the discussion has cascaded out of the last gdc which was amazing and awesome and really hopeful for a different sort of future in the field of games.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/09/a-letter-to-leigh/

I’m gonna back up again because I want to talk about something that’s a little more relevant to anthropology or really just my life in general. Some basic concepts: academia is a culture. It’s a culture that values argument and knowledge and debate and that sort of thing, but it’s also a culture with specific rules for interaction and accepted norms of behavior. One of the facets of a culture that is so focused on ideas and theory and argumentation is that the culture needs a steady supply of debate. Problem is, a lot of the bigger debates in academia are usually pretty simple. Moral absolutism(or objectivism) versus moral relativism. Materialism versus cultural determinism (sometimes also versus whatever present permutation of sociobiology exists). Determinism vs non-determinism. These are all “big” ideas that can be fairly easily summarized and generally have apparent flaws that the schisms divide upon. What drives academia and fuels its own form of cultural legitimacy is this idea of “nuance.” Nuance is being able to say to someone who fundamentally disagrees with your position “I don’t think you understand my position” or “my position is more complicated than that” as a form of dancing around strict disagreement. This is but one of the many tools of obfuscation that academia uses. Another tool is the requisite education required to get involved in these discussions, a tripartite thing consisting of the wealth to pursue the education, the bureaucratic degree requirements, and the implicit education needed to read the sorts of arguments that occur.

I digress (I happen to like big words and tend towards the expectation that everyone reading this can access google or even better access me if they don’t understand something I’ve written)

Koster’s argument letter thing up there is an example of nuancing the debate. Though he’s using the same sort of language that “x is/is not a game” debates trend towards, he’s outwardly acknowledging that his position is untenable and finding ways around it so that he can express his dissatisfaction with the games he feels transgress game norms in a way that doesn’t tack to a lost argument. It’s silly as heck but boy howdy it’s pretty much how academia functions. In many ways it’s how the internet functions as well, as discussion forums were both populated from the start by academics and feature similar discursive landscapes. The major difference being that the internet has much lower barriers to entry so the “undergrad” level of discourse happens again and again as new people get involved.

I’m still digressing. Koster isn’t stupid nor is he particularly unaware of this issue. He took a lot of pains in that article to try and acknowledge that the language he’s using is and has been used as a tool of exclusion. Unfortunately he performs little better, putting his foot in mouth and slowly inching it in there with weasel words and constant protestations. The games/not games debate is intensely political, hugely because the games side tend to be the financially and socially successful and the not games side tend to be personal and transgressive and radical.

Making any statement whatsoever on what is or isn’t a game is a political statement. I could and would argue many of the popular interactive experiences offered by EA and their ilk are not really games because of how small the space for interaction is. In shooters, for example, the interaction is limited to shooting other players and devising more efficient ways to shoot and occasionally avoid being shot. RTS games on the other hand have more clearly defined space for differential strategies. Even then the strategies tend to boil down to clicks per second. Here saying that I’m using a definitional statement that insists that games with greater strategies or interactive options are more game than other games. It’s silly and based entirely on personal bias.

This personal bias is what makes those statements so political. You’re declaring a personal belief about the world that is not something that is empirically provable. A large part of this has to do with the fact that at certain level (computer) games are not actually independent things but a kind of computer program. Games in a more physical sense have a lot to do with the cultural constructs of play and leisure. What constitutes play and leisure is of course a culturally discursive thing and so what constitutes a game is a discursive thing. What that means is that games are what people think are games, so when some people think some things are not games and other people think things are games, political conflict occurs.

I digress. Games criticism is like all criticism in that it has to come from a certain point of view. I might criticize the government for being murderous warmongerers or I might criticize it for being a tax and spend bloated bureaucracy or I might do both, but those criticisms come from different assumptions about the world. When we criticize games we’re also making political statements because our criticism has to come from a point of view. If we think a game loses merit because it doesn’t adhere to whatever concept we have of a “formal” game, then we’re making a statement about what we think games ought to be. Simultaneously if we criticize a criticism of a game for being oppressively motivated to rehabilitate deviancy instead of… anything else we’re making another statement about what we think games ought to be.

This is all pretty much taken for granted stuff (though obviously not taken for granted enough if this discussion still comes up and no one begs any of the questions) and I wonder how much of it is due to me being sleepy right now, but there’s more story to go. Robert Yang addressed the letter Koster wrote with a letter to the letter (which I think is a totally schway move and I’m totally stealing it for something in the future) that did a great job of taking apart the language and still remaining respectful of the author. It’s an important step and I’m glad someone did it, since in the middle of discussions about oppression and privilege and various social constructs it’s really really easy to lose track of the people involved. Especially over the internet which reduces all of a person’s being into chunks of text and a few pictures. I don’t think Koster was trying to be mean. The opposite, in fact I think he was trying to express a conflicted feeling as nicely as possible. I don’t even think that he intentionally did any of the bad things I said about nuancing up there. What I do think is that Koster is going through a certain stage in belief that many people do, where you’re forced to confront your beliefs with the knowledge that it’s unsustainable but the emotional conviction that you’re correct.

One of the more consistent things I’ve said over the years is that each and every belief, each culture, each individual ego has to believe on some level that it is genuinely better than any of the alternatives. It needs this drive in order to continue existing and differentiate itself from an environment with conflicting ideas. This assumption of primacy is what both sustains “traditional” cultural ideas and causes the inevitable conflict those ideas have with changing social and physical environments. What Koster is going through emotionally is a sort of cry for help by the “formalist” idea of games that he harbors and the last step in eventually acquiescing to the changing landscape (or possibly forevermore being a concern troll for emotional reasons, who knows).

But back to the supposed premise of whatever rambly nonsense I’ve got here so far. The animus towards cultural legitimacy. The construction of the nerd began sometime in the 80s, though it probably existed well before then as a more generalized “effeminate man” or “coward.” In the 80s though, we learned some big primary facts about the nerd. He is a dude. He is a white dude, and a straight white dude. His parents have the money to support his expensive and stupid hobbies, which are usually centered in some fantasy or other. He needs this fantasy because he is physically frail and/or somehow slightly disabled. Usually glasses. Bullies pick on him. Bullies always pick on him all the time. He is socially inept and incapable of obtaining a girlfriend through the typical ways. Overall the nerd is a collection of disadvantages that renders him an outcast to society. In fact he pretty much has every disadvantage a straight white man could have. But by gum he’s still a straight white man, so he ends up raised with the awareness that he can speak out about these things and that society will generally listen because nerds build our computers and things and society at large is pretty reverent of straight white dudes regardless of how “cool” they are.

So bam, recipe for a persecution complex. Society isn’t living up to its bargain. This attitude spreads towards nerd hobbies. If only my family would see how awesome the anime I’m obsessed with is they’d understand and finally treat me with the respect I deserve. If only those bozos at the school and in congress knew how I’m gaining hand-eye coordination skills and learning all about history by spending all my time playing assassin’s creed.

I want to be clear, though. The sort of people I’ve been linking and talking about, indie devs and generally odd ducks, all have generally more personal reasons for wanting games to achieve cultural legitimacy. And that is also why they’re succeeding where decades of nerds have failed, since they’re genuinely interested in solving the problem, not just in assuaging their insecurities. So they recognize issues that society at large have with gaming and are actively promoting or working to change those problems and forge a newer and wider concept of what games are and what they could be so they can also forge a new concept of what a gamer is. These elements are ironically often in conflict with each other, since the concern of straight white nerds is to make life better for straight white nerds and not actually promote an artistic medium. Admitting different races/genders/creeds into gaming would erode the social environment and challenge the primacy of straight white nerds. Net good, if you ask me.

Here’s a few more articles about/with the animus:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/12/4216834/opinion-we-have-an-empathy-problem
http://www.molleindustria.org/blog/gatekeeper-and-the-rise-of-the-total-apple-consumer/

Morality in games

There was a push some time in 2005 or something, back before EGM morphed into an online-only web 2.0 hell website in the midst of Ziff Davis' collapse, for games to have real moral choices. I’m not sure exactly what the genealogy of the idea is, but I’m sure it had something to do with some influential speech by a dev suggesting that games by virtue of presenting players with choices could be presenting moral choices on top of the simpler resource allocation choices. A few games already did this. Deus Ex was famous for not only providing multiple (sometimes as many as six!) paths toward an objective but also providing dialogue options (as many as four! Truly a cornucopia of free will here) that indicated that you felt some moral way about some dang thing. Dialogue choices and occasionally their consequence were featured in nearly every adventure game to date.

But this push was new. This push was driven by an animus, a need to demonstrate games as a viable art form or as something with as much entrenched respect as movie had at contemporary times. The fact that games pulled in more money than movies was irrelevant. Lots of things pull in more money than movies. People buy more Pepsi products than all of video games put together. No what video games wanted was respect. So how do we get respect? How did the movie industry get respect? By empowering directors to make things like Rosebud or Gone With the Wind or the Wizard of Oz and continuing the tradition with challenging, complicated films like Full Metal Jacket or Memento. Games needed to leverage some kind of unique angle to make something that big crowds of people could enjoy but also the critics would like and respect and start referring to the industry as “growing up” or “maturing.” That angle was choice and moral choice specifically (and not, y’know, clearing out the old boys club the industry is).

Enter popular titles like Bioshock and Fable and Mass Effect. Shit was on like Donkey Kong and all of these games gave you as many as three alignments to choose from. You could be an asshole or you could be kind of not really an asshole but still an asshole if you think about it. Each of these games presented situations like some kind of ethical dilemma, and then made certain that the dilemma was obvious. Kill the little girl and drain her fluids or save her from her insanity? Beat up the townsfolk or generally be law-abiding? Rescue the last of an alien species that poses no threat to you or eliminate it?

What happened? Why are we looking at binary or trinary choices as though they have any relevance to the complex and extensive religious laws set down by god/the universe? Morals got translated into a system. Problem is, morals aren’t a system. Despite whatever odd ideas of karma persist, there’s no direct link of causality from your behavior to the world around you. Morals are a code, a series of discursive principles, a set of amorphous rules that are developed and ingrained by the cultures you’re a part of. Ya go online and people be talking like “we gotta keep the internet free from the corporate overlords who want to shackle it up and ruin our shiz! Down with cispa/pipa/sopa/drm/riaa/mpaa/dmc/etc!” and where do ya think they got those ideas from?

Hackers. Anarchistic hackers. Hacking itself is anarchistic, you know. Fighting the rules of the system expressed in the computer devices you purchased from that system. Anyway so morals got injected in games and before you know it there's a dozen middle aged white guys in suit jackets and jeans telling other slightly older white men that the way to the future is "Meaningful Choices." It seemed pretty true. All of the games I've mentioned have made oodles of cash and inspired insipid hordes of sycophants to claim the day of game legitimacy is here and all critics who claim otherwise are verboten. The meaningful choice distinction spread to other games as it was pretty easy to stuff a graphical progress bar in there and initialize a variable for evility but it continued to miss the point.

Anyway anyway the animus that produced this has continued despite the industry making nice and publishing more nuanced games. Today the "make games a legitimate artform" push is multifaceted, with criticisms ranging from the feminist to the pacifist and what sold a boatload and earned a game a spot next to a Team Ico title no longer flies in the face of the discerning modern critic. Games must be better! Today we release Bioshock Infinite, the third bioshock game and a long-awaited production by Ken Levine. It's basically just Bioshock with racist american nationalists instead of amoral randian objectivists. And it takes place in the sky instead of the sea. There's nothing new about it whatsoever.

But no! The critics are abuzz! The game is too violent for its message. The message is too trite for a work of art. Even the mechanics are under fire for being too Haloey. In its underlying premise it's still a first person shooter, the safest form of game designed to appeal to the widest gaming demographic. It's still a product.

Can games be art? Of course they can, they already are and always were. The question is and always has been: "Can games not be products?"

Some links about this issue:

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3733057.htm
http://kotaku.com/bioshock-infinite-is-insanely-ridiculously-violent-it-470524003
http://storify.com/avi4now/jonathan-blow-on-halo-like-shields (jonathan blow is a d-bag warning)

Timely politcal post for latest news cycle.

Once again our (wider, cultural) political response to violence in the Middle East is to ignore its source, overstate its implications, and to generalize our way towards hatred. This isn’t limited to a certain mindset or political party, either. Sneering atheists point to this violence as an inherent problem with all religion. Smarmy traditionalist Christians complain about the “religion of hatred” this entails. Even the uninvested assume simply that this is an Islamic attack following Muslim ideals. None of these approaches are concerned with the Truth.

Islam is no more inherently violent than any of the other thousands of religions and worldviews that have existed over the years. Properly practiced, all three Abrahamic religions entail a certain amount of xenophobia and cultural purity as a requisite of belief. This is a factor of cultural belief as a whole, which is necessarily ethnocentric (believes itself to be better than all others) as a component of maintaining its own existence. Without an ingrained belief in the correctitude of one’s own culture, culture becomes an incredibly fluid and unstable whim based phenomenon. Human beings do not do well with instability. When we wake up in the mornings, we generally prefer life to function similarly to how it functioned the day before.

What we’re seeing here in the Middle East, what has been the driving force between much anti-American sentiment in the region for the last 50-odd years, is a form of ethnocentrism that is dealing with a crisis in cultural change. What I mean by this is that the Middle East is dealing with the implications of globalization and addressing a U.S. cultural domination of the world. Middle Easterners feel their cultural identity being destroyed and replaced with a pervasive westernness. They feel much the same way that U.S. fundamentalist Christians feel about cultural changes in attitudes towards homosexuality, religion, abortion, the place of women, and so on. Just as fundies feel they’re losing the utopian ideal that the 1950s represented, Muslims in the Middle East feel they’re losing the way they lived, which is being replaced by obsessive consumerism and secularism. And they are, indisputably; just as fundies are inevitably losing the battle for their nostalgic concept of U.S. society.

“But Jake,” you say, “why do the ragheads keep bombing stuff and generally being so violent. Fundies don’t bomb stuff!” Good question, invisible person. In the U.S. we have a strong example of a violent movement to preserve a culture. It killed more Americans than any other conflict we’ve ever been involved in and has left an indeliable mark on both the structure of the country and on a vast swath of the country. We call it the Civil War, where wealthy southerners organized a secession in order to preserve their social and economic systems. The north invaded and asserted the right of the federal government (or essentially the republicans) to legislate the entire country. We have since labored under an extremely powerful federal government largely to the detriment of state and local governments. We legally enforce some level of cultural homogeneity, though for the 150 years since the South has done a magnificent job of maintaining de facto confederate values.

I believe earnestly that if it weren’t for the thorough demonstration of federal power (and the military paradigms that have since developed that mean that the military is perpetually better equipped to fight a war than any militia would be. In the face of military might, terrorism is an annoyance) we would absolutely have another civil war. If you pay any modicum of attention to the sort of rhetoric that came out of the Tea Party and the involved conservative pundits, you’ll quickly notice a trend towards secessionist language.

But still, why are Middle Easterners so violent? To answer that question, you’d need to reframe the situation from their point of view. From their point of view, the U.S. (and U.S. corporations) is an invading power with an installed military base in the form of the Nation of Israel and vested interest in importing oil from their nations. We have thoroughly demonstrated that we’re unafraid to meddle with their politics, deposing or installing leaders as we see fit, even orchestrating a major war to decimate an existing regime on the flimsiest of suspicions. We’re unafraid to literally occupy their lands with our troops, as we have done for the last decade. We’re definitely not afraid to criticize them, as we did recently via a documentary movie about how awful they are. Even the most “tolerant” and “Liberal” among us spend quite a lot of breath on the way they treat women and how they’re simply culturally terrible (several predominant atheists are guilty of this particular brand of ethnocentrism).

So how can it be terribly surprising that any Middle Easterner would react violently to this cultural abuse? This is an occupying empire taking any number of liberties with your population and your freedom and then turning around and telling you that you deserve it because your ways are barbaric. Does this sound familiar? I hope it does, because it’s essentially the same way we treated and destroyed the Native American populations in the U.S. No one blames the Lakota for fighting against Custer today, but back then Indians were considered horrible backwards savages who stubbornly refused to bend to god and the U.S. government.

Why is this so similar? Simply put, this is how one culture manages to rationalize the destruction of another culture. Throughout thousands of years of history when one culture decided for whatever reason to invade and subsume another, the culture goes through a process of Othering that culture (making it seem stranger, more foreign, different from us) as a necessary process to wash away potential doubts to the legitimacy of making war against a set of people who are fundamentally the same as ourselves (we all eat, breathe, feel, dream, and die) by convincing ourselves that we’re not actually fighting real people. We’re fighting sinners or people who don’t know better or abominations before god or a people who need the gift of our culture in order to become better. We’re not fighting our brothers or sisters, we’re fighting tyrants or the insane or fanatics or brutes.

To be certain, no group is innocent of this sort of rationalization. To the Middle Easterners, they’re fighting a faceless, godless, soulless destroyer, as vast as it is rapacious. To Middle Easterners, every slight or criticism is an attempt to crush their people under the heel of a larger nation. Because this is a nation of deviant, godless people, attacking them violently is a perfectly acceptable way to express your outrage.

Now is the part where we have to back up and qualify terms. Not all Americans think Middle Easterners are savage terrorists, but many do. Not all Middle Easterners think Americans are rapacious monsters, but many do. The people orchestrating violence in the Middle East are a minority of those who feel this way about Americans. They’re extremists; just as the Americans who burn Korans and make smear films are a minority of the Americans with a negative view of Middle Easterners. The best way to understand it is as a gradient of attitudes that eventually descends into people who are so fanatically devoted to cultural stability that they feel the need to commit to action to stop it. The majority of Middle Eastern leaders denounce this attack just as the majority of American leaders denounce the regular hate crimes that occur here.

So, in summary, the American embassy attack in Libya was orchestrated by a few fanatics whose actions were mediated by cultural conflict in the context of globalization and western economic and social domination of the world. The people of the Middle East view themselves as resisting the monoculture, of resisting the homogenizing hegemony centered on western consumer culture. That’s why they hate us.

Are they right? Are we wrong to demolish or criticize or denigrate their culture? Are our military actions just? Are their methods too violent, too reactionary? Is it really a minority viewpoint or do all Middle Easterners harbor an internal hatred of us and support extremist actions internally even if they don’t commit them? That really depends on your point of view. What’s out and out wrong is painting Middle Easterners as crazed religious fanatics with nothing but pure insanity guiding their actions or suggesting that they hate our way of life or freedoms or especially suggesting the absurdity that if we’re not fighting them in Baghdad, we’ll be fighting them on the streets of Smalltown, U.S.A.