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.

Laziest Generation

The whole point of these missives, this writing exercise, those monographs is to share some kind of knowledge, some wisdom, some truth hard fought and hard won. You’re supposed to come away having a better appreciation for life and your place in it. The problem is, of course, that there needs something to be said before that writing can occur.

It’s 2:13 a.m. and I’m eating pepperjack and townhomes and feeling as lost and overwhelmed as I always do. If there’s some kind of truth in this, I don’t know where it is. If there’s wisdom, it’s not mine to share. All I can give you is my experience, which is all I can ever give you when it comes down to it.

There’s a narrative in anthropological academia, a narrative that implies that the reason anthropologists get into anthropology in the first place is because anthropologists don’t fit in well with their own culture and have the urge to explore other cultures to better understand why they’re personally wired that way. It’s a good narrative, one that describes a number of major figures. On top of the whole “reformer’s science” subtitle, a great many anthropologists are argumentative contrarians.

It’s sweet and sort of sentimental to read about these figures and discuss loosely what’s going down at the AAA convention, but it’s the sweet of nostalgia and daydreams, since it’s a culture that’s dying out every day – or rather it’s reverting to a pre-G.I. bill era where academia is a locked tower filled with overly wealthy dodderers. I’m supposed to graduate this semester, and really I’m getting out just in time. The budget cuts are deepening and major services are being slashed. The Children’s Center, an entire building on campus, is getting cut. There are fees for withdrawing from classes. There were talks of changing requirements to require transfer students to have to take something like 75% of their courses here; boosting tuition from otherwise (apparently) flighty transfer graduates.

On every campus in America there’s a bunch of clubs and activities designed to engage college students in some sort of collective spirit-building exercises. These constructs are designed purposefully to help ease college freshmen into college life, where they might feel suddenly isolated and uncomfortable removed from the high school they were previously attending. It’s a justifiable goal, though it also serves the purpose of extending adolescence and obscuring the financial cost of college through misdirection. For these clubs and for many Americans, college is just another step in the path to becoming a middle class adult. The thing is: college is also an ancient and erudite institutional method of intellectual development designed to acculturate and reiterate an intellectual class. Even further college is a road towards greater economic security, negotiated by ambitious individuals who still believe in class mobility. College for them represents a contract where in exchange for a series of individually pointless tasks they’ll earn leverage over their employers.

I’ve probably said this before (and I’ll gladly rant about it a dozen times more in person, willing didact that I am) but modern college is some kind of mutated aggregate of an assumed adolescent stage that’ll bottlerocket you off to middle classdom. Combined with our most recent “millennial” trend of victim blaming and the stagnant economy, college is actually a pretty bad deal. You’re paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend a place that treats you as an over-developed horny child in exchange for a piece of paper whose value drops every commencement. Then you’re jettisoned into the “real world” where your vain attempts at demanding recompense for your labors as per the implied social contract are met with cries of “entitlement” or “homeless with iphones” or “laziest generation.” It’s a catch-22 because the world loves catch-22s.

It’s not really worth it to go to college, but the biggest and worst problem is that it’s even less worth it to not go to college, to languish in entry level world as employers use arbitrary notions of “skill” to justify paying as little as they can get away with. Basically we’ve made college the modern indentured servitude, leading straight to the wage slavery constructed in the world.

There’s some argument out there that all the things that capitalism constructs are the same; that the story it tells is the same one over and over again. There’s some argument that all stories we tell are the same story. I don’t know if any of that is true and I don’t know what wisdom there is to curdle from them.

Creative Content

Oh man a lot of stuff has happened lately, yet I haven’t written at all. I don’t even know what writing is any more. I’m just hitting buttons and this little counter on the bottom corner keeps going up. I’m already at 42! “Word” is the best game Microsoft has made since “solitaire.”

I keep reading these articles (I read all the articles) about millenials and the generation gap and junk like that and reading about the ways that millenials are terrible or like the world is going to become a hellish collectivist totalitarian state and all individual identity will be absorbed into some kind of freakish union. Dave fucking eggers just put out a book about this. Apparently in some kind of dystopic future privacy will be theft from the people and some megacorporation is going to eat us all. The WSJ, a Murdoch mouthpiece, is hailing it as a The Jungle of our times (while simultaneously promoting policies that created the situation the book described, naturally) and is really excited about it. I think it’s pretty clear that this is some kind of Randian break-point for Eggers, who is probably just pissed that writing is worth shit-all today and totally blames it on some amorphous collection of internet entities disrespecting the individualist right of ownership of ideas and the ability to profit off of those ideas.

Depending on who you’re talking to we’re either on the teetering edge of a massive conservative/capitalist backslide or we’re watching the death throes of capitalism and its mealy-mouthed adherents. I’m leaning toward the latter, as the industry of packaging and selling thought is less and less profitable according to a capitalist system and these are not small industries. They’re too big to fail, or more accurately if they collapse a lot of our economy collapses with them.

Recently there was a government shutdown, a shutdown that was initiated by a group of radical conservatives elected in based on racially charged anti-government fanaticism and a successful system of aggressive gerrymandering. Those conservatives did what they said they’d do, which is oppose the black man in the white house at all costs. They finally did it, the bastards. They damned that dirty ape. Seriously none of what just happened is even remotely okay. This is a situation where in a modern era a group of politicians attempted to seize control of the entire government through rule-changes and absolutely insane stubbornness. The double-talk is just as crazy. Every one of them is either citing this event as a victory or as a painful tragedy invited upon them by a stubborn white house+supreme court+senate that refuses to kowtow to the minority. It’s crazy. They’re terrorists. Everything they say is carefully designed to create more terror to the benefit of their party. They’re not interested in you. They’re not interested in anyone other than their party and their power and they’ll tell you anything they can get away with to maintain their positions. Come 2014 they’re not going to lose the elections. Come 2014 they’re going to win even more seats for their moral courage and ability to believe the shit they’re saying. Come the next debt ceiling or other manufactured crisis, they’re just going to push a little farther, since this has barely hurt their chances of re-election thanks to the insane gerrymandering. We need a new system. We don’t need to fix the old system with incremental reforms or whatever the democrats might push for. We need to throw the system out and start designing a system that from the start recognizes that politicians are people and not rational automatons (or fuck, even neutral advocates for their constituency) and people will find ways to abuse the system in their favor.

Speaking of the breakdown of capitalism, I’ve been reading a handful of stuff by prominent older musicians condemning streaming music sites for paying shittily. Pretty much all of these articles follow a certain tone, one where the primary issues with these site’s poor pay is that it’s hard for new musicians to make any money from them and consequently people who are musically talented will have to pursue their art as a part-time hobby instead of a full time occupation, leading to a dearth of creativity. Or something along those lines. People aren’t being paid what they’re worth is the general gist of these. It’s really odd to me because all of these articles seem to rely on this idea that capitalism can and should be compassionate, that it should pay musicians enough to make a living and acquire food and shelter and so on (say, 40k a year per person). From a purely rational standpoint this makes no sense. If music is not worth 40k a year according to the market, it’s simply not worth it. There’s no such thing as a basic income guarantee under a purely capitalist system. So there’s nothing actually wrong happening here. Music has simply become less valuable owing to its more frequent creation and distribution. The creators of music are more often than not already wealthy so they have the time and energy to learn and create music, but this has literally been the history of all music since the time of poets and lyrists and people like that. Beethoven wasn’t exactly some urchin off the streets. Gottschalk didn’t just up and decide to leave his life farming and go music. So I’m not seeing what’s changing here, other than the profit margins of the handful of prominent older musicians.

It’s especially telling when none of these older dudes decide to actually question the system that creates the situation they seem to be mad about. At the most they’ll make some flippant statement about how terrible the recording industry that made them moderately rich is while ignoring any and all of its influence or the fact that they’ve made a number of conscious decisions to stay in the business and help it thrive. These aren’t just anyone, but people who’ve made their names as “alternative” musicians who hate all that nasty injustice stuff, names like David Byrne and Thom Yorke and Bono. It’s an act. It’s an act borne from a need to protect a system rather than create a new one. Solving the problem where musicians don’t have the time to create music is easy: you create a basic income guarantee, allowing musicians to work on providing their craft without having to worry about providing food or shelter for themselves. It’s a galling idea, but it’s a galling idea only under a capitalistic premise that all money is a zero-sum game and everyone has to fight for it or get crushed (or the premise of the actual system we work under, which is that rich people are born rich, stay rich and die rich, and the poor likewise are poor from cradle to grave). Under a system that gave a shit about people (i.e. not designed by the sociopathic wealthy) this would make perfect sense. Everyone gets to live at some basic level.

Part of this goes back to a complete (and deliberately cultivated, on the part of those with an investment into a capitalist system) misunderstanding of the premise of communism. The idea isn’t that no one works and the state gives you everything, the idea is that you get everything you work for. Sounds kinda weird, right? It’s not nearly as weird once you recognize how badly you’re paid for your actual labor. Say you work at McDonalds, right? You make burgers. Those burgers sell at a rate of around $400 an hour averaged out over the day. Those burgers (and coke and fries and electricity and stuff) cost the store maybe around $100/hour. So between you and your four co-workers, you generate $300 an hour in profit! So that comes out to about $60 an hour, yeah? Oh but there’s the manager, so let’s make it $50 an hour for everybody. Pretty sweet, huh? Oh but hang on the mcdonalds is owned by someone else and he decides to pay you guys as little as possible, since after all he owns the place. You did the work, the manager ordered the food and regulated hours and handled disputes, and the owner did… jack shit. But the owner knows he can get away with paying you guys literally as little as he can because that’s what makes rational economic sense, so you all make $8 an hour and the manager makes $15 so you’ll listen to her and the owner pockets the other $245 and calls it a day.

Massively injust? Maybe, but it’s only rational for the owner to do this. It’s a great way to make money. It’s rational to not provide health benefits, rational to skimp on customer amenities, rational to do literally anything it takes to make more money. The owner put forward the money to open the building after all. The basic premise of communism is to do away with the owner controlling the building and providing the opportunity for people to, if they so choose, work at Mcdonalds and receive /all/ the fruits of their labors (here, $50/hr). Pretty crazy, huh? Anyway that’s the general premise of Marxist communism. There’s a lot more interesting ideas in there (paying women for domestic labor, for example, or paying parents for the work of raising children) but this isn’t really what this post is about.

In this heady modern era, we’re watching all of our information become easily and cheaply translatable to a handful of machine signals, and not just all of our modern information but all of every form of information that can be put into a machine language. One of the core concepts of Marxist theory is that industrialization needed to be able to produce goods on a massive scale, that systems needed to exist to be able to sell millions of burgers per year. At the time of writing, which saw the tripling of crop outputs and an insane influx of available goods, this was a perfectly good prediction. Numbers that were going up were going to keep going up and so on. Here 100-odd years later, anyone with a computer and some spare time can produce a song, anyone with a computer who’s literate can write a book, and anyone with a camera can get their videos uploaded to a potentially gigantic audience. The cost to create and transmit media has dramatically fallen in the last two decades and this is the result of that: a complete collapse of capitalism in the face of virtually nil value for its products. The reality that stuff can be supported solely through advertising and data-mining shitty quantitative userdata reflects the alternate economic reality the internet lives in. The recent phenomenon of not paying writers or artists or photographers for their work isn’t because the internet has made people evil, it’s because writing, art, and photography have no scarcity value and minimal cost to transmit. There are millions out there sharing their stories, drawings and photos simply because they want to be heard and to participate, not because they want money. Millions of people derive value simply in being a part of something greater than them. That attitude does not mesh well with capitalism, and it certainly doesn’t mesh well with prominent older artists who made a living under the old rules and are now defenders of the status quo.

My argument? Pay those motherfuckers for their contributions to society. Don’t pay them what their contribution is “worth” but what they need to survive and keep contributing. Pay them because they worked hard and they work hard every day and there’s no good reason for life to be some kind of rigged competition. Kill the rich and kill your heroes and burn everything down until it’s better.

I was asked to write this

A long time ago in the hoary old ages of time when I still shaved regularly and wore even stranger outfits and personally communicated with as few people as I could get away with (colloquially known as “the years I had to move my mid-tower from room to room searching for a wifi signal I could airsnort into”) I got involved in local politics. Mostly I did it out of some residual respect I had for Michael Moore’s blue collar liberalism and a desire to follow through on Moore’s suggestion that every individual should try to get on every ballot they’re eligible for. I still don’t think this is a terrible idea, if only to drive home the weight of the forces guarding that particular gate for those without means. The first campaign kickoff party I ever went to was a by-donation affair ($30), and I agreed at the door to spend some time canvassing for the candidate: a man whose name I can’t remember (Jeff something) but who looked remarkably like Mark Hamill and had a phone number that was super easy to remember (4, followed by 4 fives, followed by a 7 for the total amount of numbers, followed by a fifth five).

This was my whirlwind introduction to (local) politics, a hugely thankless affair where the minimal amount of work I had to do was to hand out cutesy brochures shaped like a cowboy hat (Jeff, the white hat, opponent, the evil greenbelt violating black hat) still lead a ton of people (who had previously agreed for me to visit, apparently) to believe I was there to sell them something or talk about Jesus.

Last week I went to the most recent campaign kickoff I’ve been to and I managed this time to duck both financial and canvassing obligations. Ernest “eddy-baby Freddy” Charbonnet held a pretty ritzy-doo high class affair at the top of the Basin Street Station, a sort of quasi-museum/office building/meeting space at the foot of the particular I-10 overpass exit that gets you to the French Quarter. The party was on the fourth floor overlooking a ton of landmarks, from the Mahalia Jackson Theater to the police station to one of the cemeteries to the old Iberville projects (the new projects down Orleans are obscured by the one windowless facing). The banquet room was marvelous and understated and ultimately a bit small, the six-odd indoor tables occupied by the time I arrived (punctually). There’s some really marvy skylights and an interesting series of paintings with a silhouetted black woman wearing dresses inspired by various famous paintings (mostly van gogh). The open bar was friendly, if a little oddly stocked, and they poured to rival a christmas party. Asking for mixer was a formality, just a willful attempt at deceiving your true beverage from yourself.

I biked to this event wearing black jeans and a Zephyr’s t-shirt along with sandals and my ratty old Goorin bros’ sorta army hat with some serious holes in the brim fabric. Most of my tattoos are covered, anyway. Still have glittery red and silver polish and three fingers of black and the yellow I impulsively put on half of two of my toenails, though. As usual I have no idea if anyone notices, but I’m by far the most casually dressed person there. At some point a few young-ish couples (relatives of other attendees, as far as I gleaned) come in with the guys wearing the bare minimum of a button-up and slacks, but I’m the only t-shirted individual. One guy did have a blazer and what appeared to be a track suit underneath. Professor Chervenak, inexplicably oft-interviewed political science professor at UNO, was wearing exactly the same thing he does every day thereby meeting the obligate monowear standards of professorhood (it’s in their tenure agreements). I had a lot of time to reflect on this and decide whether or not to be embarrassed. By the second drink I decided to simply be serene.

As far as substance, I don’t remember much. I came to this kickoff largely because I still follow a candidate from a previous race who is still heavily involved despite having lost his bid. Oddly enough, he actually remembered my name, despite my only personal interaction with him being a somewhat rude question about his age shouted in a crowded hall. I blame facebook, but I’m at least in part frightened by the prospect of anyone of any importance remembering who I am. It’s jarring, even though it’s something I’ve been interested in for quite some time. Funny enough, Eric Strachan ended up being the only person who knew even remotely who I was (it didn’t help that I botched the nametag) with the man of the hour Eddy Charbonnet very much not paying any attention to me. Which I must emphasize is totally fine, since I was still variegating on whether or not to be embarrassed and by the time I chose to be serene I was wholly uninterested in further human interaction. The point here is that this is all filtered through my head because it was a fairly alienating interaction that I had to stare at through my skull instead of getting lost in interpersonality.

I did spend a little bit of time chatting with a wife of a lawyerly looking guy and some time apologizing to Ed Chernevak for doing so badly in his course, but that was pretty much it. I couldn’t convince anyone else to come and I didn’t have any real strong ties to anyone involved in the campaign. A campaign which, if the short series of speeches was any indication, has about as much substance as my presence did. Strachan got on stage to look a little like a short Aaron Sorkin displaying his endorsement and introducing further endorsements from people I don’t know. Charbonnet got on stage to announce some really broad statements about his belief in the strength of city council as a balance to the executive office, some kind of statement about the two consent decrees concerning OPP and NOPD, and a very clear and strong statement that he’s not running against Stacy Head (who Strachan was the head of legislation for) but for the other at-large seat up for grabs on the council. He then introduced his kids and wife and got off the stage. I don’t want to say the speech lacked substance. Nothing really lacks substance, especially not the appearance of a lack of substance. What the speech did do was tell me very very little about why I should support Charbonnet. He passably hit a few popular beats he knew the crowd would react to and then got off stage. It’s a shame.

Platforms are contentious at best in politics and most major parties specifically write platforms that can be reinterpreted in some way (except of course the green party, which actually has some gonads) because nothing in politics is more dangerous than making a strong political statement. It’s even worse in local politics when nearly all of the players are dependent on a network of already existing players and a system of basic agreements with one another that there’s a certain way things are going to be done. Without Gary Landrieu’s hulking figure stalking about parties and crushing hands how can you expect to get the attention of the rest of the moneyed elite? Ideas are for idealists, the game is already locked up, etc etc. Louisiana is rife with this stuff. We practically revel in how corrupt our system is and our politicians are. It makes for books and great “character.”

It’s not really that democracy is a sham or anything. The system still works and even still produces upsets from time to time. The problem is that the people who’re most heavily invested in that democracy are simultaneously the least interested in it, which is why a person can start a campaign without a single platform or promise, just a party and a plea for yard signage. It’s going through the motions in case anyone is looking real hard but recognizing that the majority of your support is going to be won through back room deals and premeditated political alliances rather than strong popular support of an opinionated stance. That’s why everyone at a free party is in a suit, and why I’m not.

I’m not going to make some conceit about how I remember Huey Long and how awesome he was. That was some 80 years ago and I certainly wasn’t alive then. I will say this, though: for every memory that people in New Orleans have of a corrupt and inefficient government of foppish old-money lawyers and politicians, there’s a memory of a time when Louisiana was the bluest of the blue states, a haven for all the poor southerners and a beacon of public infrastructure in the south. We live in the highest tech city environment since Venice, why do we put up with cracked and broken roads and shoddy streetlight coverage? Why do we let our politicians spend millions on a streetcar line that travels less than a mile from a glut of hotels to the superdome? Why do we sit idly by while our noble leaders pretend to have moral convictions as the city crumbles around us?

We’re New Orleanais; we don’t have to put up with this shabby crap. If we can organize a fucking daiquiri festival because we’re frightened by a few provisos, we can run and elect a few candidates that don’t fucking suck.

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.