Rebelde

I’ve been on the bus for just over two solid days now. I have slept for a total of perhaps 4 hours, owing largely to my personal inability to sleep upright. Much of today has been punctuated by accidental microsleeps, closing my eyes and following my mind down some irrational track.

I traveled out of New Orleans on a bus headed for Shreveport, wide eyed and bushy tailed. The bus was crowded, but quickly became less so as people left. In Shreveport, though, the connecting bus to Dallas was about 2 hours late as the earlier bus broke down and a new driver had to be found to make the trip. More delays in Dallas meant the trip through texas had much smaller breaks than indicated on the little itinerary slip. Consequently I was able to see much less of Texas than I wanted.

What I did see a lot of was poverty. Greyhound serves millions of travelers each year, but thanks to its low price, long travel time, and simple amenities, Greyhound also serves what is essentially the lowest classes of people, the homeless, the destitute, the working poor. The construction and execution of air travel has always been an upper/middle class endeavor, with servants and in-flight entertainment. Even the modern conceit of commuter air still holds the trappings of former affluence; food amenities drastically pared but still extant.

When airline travel is threatened, it becomes national headlines. When these symbols of decadence are twisted and used against still other symbols of decadence, it sparks war. Air travel is the bourgeoisie, air travel is a target. No one assaults a bus line, since there’d be nothing to prove. There’s no message in killing the oppressed when you yourself are oppressed. No one ever looked into my bag, despite large regulations thereof. No one checked my carryon. The driver is “protected” by a frame of plexiglass and a door and the same legal statues that protect your municipal busdriver.

Compare this to traveling across New Mexico, in the highway closest to the border. We were stopped en route at a specific border patrol checkpoint. Other cars and automobiles simply have an officer stand outside and glare into the car, hoping to determine citizenship with a piercing glow and gut instinct (and license tags). He then waves them on, those droids being not the ones he was looking for. For our bus, though, two armed men entered the bus and began down the row on either side asking each passenger one simple question: “Are You a U.S. Citizen,” only slowing to look at the one Canadian passenger’s details and to glare more thoroughly at the handful of Hispanic passengers. Then they left, our freedom obtained and secured, jobs protected, taxes mad sacrosanct. A large wooden sign advertising for people to join the border patrol and a handful of shiny less-than-three-year-old cars painted in the green and white of the force closed out the scene.

The most common rhetoric in anti-immigration literature and arguments is some kind of variant on “they’re going to take our jobs” which is a fear generally based on the fear of loss of resources. The sheer poverty of the border fuels this fear, since there is so little success to be had, giving up any must feel like a zero-sum game, where any loss on your part is at a clear gain to the other and vice versa. But even still, even as the dead empty scrubland of Texas cringes softly at the concept of an invading force (of people who originally owned and occupied the land, and who constitute the majority of its residents), the destitution persists and the unequal relationship between the maquiladoras of Chihuahua and their NAFTA enabled goods shipping across to El Paso and massive warehouses and onward to supply America with things to buy maintains a steady parasitism. No amount of border patrol agents are going to stop the influence of money and tantalizing hopes of a middle class American lifestyle.

One of the things I notice most about New Orleans as a whole is the utter lack of Hispanic people and the ensuing paucity of Spanish being spoken in public places. Churls and pedants will be quick to note that the city does have a Hispanic population, though largely relegated to suburbs or generally marginalized by their low proportion of the population. Louisiana in general is not much different, Dallas similarly so, but as our bus crossed Texas the concept of what was “American” and what was “Mexican” blurred and merged and created whorls and eddies of symbolism. Former Spanish Catholic missionaries became town halls and meeting sites, rancheros proudly advertised their allegiance to the U.S. of A. Midland, Texas has a sign celebrating the town as the hometown of President George W. Bush and Laura Bush; the town is comprised of at least half Hispanic people.

By the time we arrived in El Paso, the transformation was complete and I was the only white monolingual I saw for the entire hour I aimlessly wandered outside the station. The rhetoric at this point becomes useless. If there’s an invasion, they’ve won. If it’s a hostile buyout, they’ve made the best offer. They don’t just take American jobs, they’re making the jobs in that part of America. The city itself is very nice and clearly has had a good deal of effort put into transforming it into a major player, with tourist destinations and nice hotels and fairly clean streets, all of which serve as a jarring contrast to Juarez, just on the other side of a very persistent fence . Juarez is a scrabbled together city built out of adobe houses erected on top of and to the side of dirty, ungreened hills. Juarez is the city famous for pancho villa and famous for a perpetual and ongoing gang war that leads to weekly shoutouts on public streets. The police are either shockingly corrupt or obviously afraid and the entire town is built on a framework of hoping and praying that the next day isn’t the last.

It’s poor, and it’s the kind of poor that we as Americans like and need, since they’re poor enough to make our clothes for dirt cheap while we deport their families and maintain the system that keeps them in the maquiladoras. A day later we drive by the American Apparel factory with a big sign that declares it to be “la compania rebelde.”

Parents

My dad once told me that the reason he quit facebook after his very brief time using it was because he wasn’t a narcissist and didn’t think anyone should care to hear about whatever random thing pops into his head or whatever. This is sort of fitting with his generally reticent and private approach to life and is not something I really on any level understand. I know some people do eventually end up becoming great friends with their parents and I imagine some even learn to comprehend their reasoning, but that’s never really been an option as far as I’m concerned. My dad is a bit scary and unfathomable and I always feel guilty and odd and generally uncomfortable around him. Not really a Kafkaesque terror of him and his virility or superiority or anything like that, just the sort of unease around someone who is or was or has been something of a distant relative for most of your childhood while you were raised by someone who was vituperatively in opposition to him, popularly blaming him for behavioral mishaps or occasionally summarily labeling you as “just like your father” when you don’t think you did anything particularly wrong but anyway it creates a lot of odd tension there.

It’s not to say I don’t like my dad, in fact I like him very much. It’s not to say I don’t emulate him either, it’s just a weird uncomfortablility. Like a scar that didn’t really heal right so now you can’t quite flex your middle finger without some awkwardness or you can’t fully curl your toes or putting your knees on the ground just so causes you intense pain.

Personal writing gets compared to masturbation a lot, with the same connotations of the sort of thing you should do in the privacy of your bathroom or not at all and sharing it is kind of privately looked down on. It’s a sort of “keep it in the family/stop snitching” thing that serves as a social force actively preventing expression. The idea that no one wants to hear what you have to say or that you’re just repeating other people but worse or the idea that you’re whoring yourself out for attention and on and on. They’re all constructs of the mind; excuses and rationalizations and justifications for the sublimation of your self or your ego or your character or your internal monologues.

And they’re understandable. Nothing in the world is more understandable than insecurity. Literally every being who has ever lived on this planet grapples with some form of insecurity. Insecurity is just the difference between your mental idea of what you should be and who you are and no one lives up to their internal idea of who they are. And we can only blame ourselves, ultimately. Every single day we wake up and go literally or metaphorically outside and expose ourselves to image after image after icon after symbol of perfection and beauty and moral rectitude and every single day we go outside and get ourselves into vicious knife-fights with each other about how badly we’re failing to live up to standards and we invent news standards by which to appease ourselves about the other being that much worse so at least even if we’re failing to be perfect we’re more perfect than they are and it goes on and on until we’re all aged and infirm and judging each other in the gated communities right up until they find us dead in the kitchen trying to eat a 100 calorie yogurt cup or sitting in front of The Real Life mouth open midway through complaints about the imperfections of kids these days.

It’s a wonder anyone gets out of bed at all and not at all surprising when many of us don’t or would like not to except for our need to feed ourselves and cover our surroundings with distractions from our imperfection.

So I don’t know what to tell you. Insecurity is a force in your head and it’s a force that paralyzes you with fear, more or less, and stops you from achieving the full expression of your personhood. Yes it does bad things but it’s not like it’s for me to tell you that you should stop it or anything so trite as the idea that since it’s only in your head then it’s somehow any less real or physical or deadly. Conceptually this is just me describing the problem, attempting to find its true name so it can be bound or banished like any other demon or spirit.

Personal writing has benefits, chief among them being the sort of organizational power they can have for your thoughts. Through personal writing you can discuss a certain set of emotions you feel and read them back to yourself on paper and think about them in a new way and come up with new conclusions. With personal writing you can synthesize information that flows through your brain on your daily slog through underachievement world and turn it into something coherent and meaningful. With personal writing you can escape the flesh and bone and keratin shell you’re trapped in and at last interface with the world around you, if only in an instantaneous, photographic way.

It’s also a weak point. A vulnerability, a sort of handing keys to your car to whoever happens by except those keys are to your feelings, or if you’re at least a little more guarded it’s like exposing a tiny bit of yourself underneath the armor you wear out of doors as you walk through the hell-world that is social interaction, not enough to get seriously wounded but enough to hurt and enough to bleed and enough to keep you awake until you bind that wound or eventually forget about it or find yourself attentively deleting every attack and rationalizing away every attack and booting them all out of your restaurant because they hurt you and your world. It’s admitting to the world that beneath your armor and behind your façade and below your cool you are “only” human and “only” human in a way that denies or disrupts or destroys your pretension otherwise. You are “only” imperfect, despite all the attempts to say and prove otherwise and everyone is there to steal your perfection from you, cutting you down and making you that other because it’s the way to become more perfect.

I understand, I know there are things about yourself don’t say. You don’t say them because you don’t want to deal with their implications or their complications or their consequences. I am bisexual and I don’t say it to gay men because it turns into a conversation about inevitability and I don’t say it to straight people because it becomes an inevitability and I don’t say it to the progressive enlightened because it becomes a conversation about the injustice rendered by what they assume to be bisexuality, the transphobia that they insist it implies, so it becomes another conversation about inevitability, that ultimately I must not be bi but homo/hetero/pan. So I say nothing and let what assumptions will pass wash over me. Better this than to listen to an endless litany of nonsense and overt erasure. Dan Savage would be mad, but then Dan Savage thinks I don’t exist anyway, since Dan Savage has invaded my brain and determined for me who I am or am not attracted to.

But that’s not really much of a thing. Depression is another one of those things. You don’t tell friends or family members about your suicidal ideation, really, because it’s not likely a ton of people are really going to understand it and their attempts to do so are usually inadequate at best and it’s not like they can actually do anything other than suggest debilitating drug regimens and a cavalcade of well-meaning but ultimately terrible professionals that act out a devised script based on a handful of academic theories loosely derived from a crackpot with way too much influence. People who do talk about depression are inordinately brave, since there’s always always always someone in the crowd who is gonna yell “why don’t you just get over it, loser?” or you grow up with a parent who thinks you should just willpower your way out of all the problems she described you as having and all the problems you actually had and then later a pre-jilted lover tells you “wow it’s a wonder you don’t hate all women” because all of literary criticism theory and much of semiotics is based on that same crackpot and his weird obsession with children’s relationships to their parents.

View

I climbed slowly up the cliffs, my hands grasping cold stone in the moonglow, the road below me further and further away. The snow hadn’t touched the cliff, fortunately, and after a few terrifying moments my hand grasped the plateau and hoisted my body up and over. There before me lay the temple I sought.

Surrounded with snow-covered ornamentation—a fountain and some decorative steps—the temple was grand in its scale and yet simple in design, hearkening to Greek design. I knew not what I would find inside, yet I would not have been surprised to find a massive statue of Zeus or a smaller statue of Lincoln.

As I walked through the ornamental steps and ascended the pathway, I was struck with an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu. I’ve been here before, I thought to myself. But it was different now, covered in snow and forgotten on a cliff-side.

I stepped into the grand archway that marked the temple’s threshold and found myself in a small room softly lit by a golden glow that resonated well with the room’s gold leaf and red velvet walls. It felt an infinitely warm and comforting contrast to outside’s dark indigo and silvery-white moonlight reflected on the cold snow. The room and the room beyond it were filled with dioramas housed in glass cases gilt with gold trim. 

They each depicted a different sort of battle scene, playing out silently in mechanical clockwork. Here tiny golden tanks fired glittering explosive shells into a field. There small airplanes dropped golden bombs onto a small dingy city. In the next room tiny soldiers fired tiny machine guns into each other, mortar exploding around them and grenades being thrown, all perfectly quiet.

At the end of the second room was a door, simple and brown compared to the splendor around me. As I saw the door I realized I had indeed been here before, in another time, perhaps another life. I recalled beaming with pride at the diorama here, having built it to demonstrate the genius and inevitable success of the Third Reich. Before, these walls lay bare and rooms empty. He was someone else, though. From somewhere else. Still, the door remained.

I opened the door only to find a yet smaller room, just wide enough to hold a couch and a computer desk and a small television with nondescript images flickering across the screen. The room was brown with cheap particle board paneling, the couch a nondescript grey-yellow-green color. Inside the room was an older man, hair white but still standing tall and proud. I barely paid attention to his outfit, which appeared to be a dark blue robe with silver trim. He spoke to me and asked if I had found some evidence for humanity’s continued survival, for its redemption. I thought for a moment and as my attention wandered I found myself at the crest of a hillside overlooking a quiet coastal town, night illuminated by the sharp moonlight, city glowing softly with human lights.

The port, I could see, was at the end of a ship-filled lagoon, beyond it a glittering ocean. The sight was beautiful, the small wooden ships gently rocking to the waves, the town below me laying in silence. I found myself walking to a nearby building, a restaurant, small and well-worn, a light layer of grime attesting to its habitation. Inside, I knew, was a woman I also knew and loved from the lowest depths of my heart. But she was not there, and in that moment I was returned to the study. “Well Belphegor?” said the man to me. “Have you found it?” As he spoke what I was not aware was my name, his appearance changed, becoming something less human and more indefinably alien. I saw myself change as well—into a reflection of him.

I sat on the couch, brainstorming what I would say, what argument I would give. As I did the door of the study opened and in walked the woman. My heart yanked as she smiled her beautiful warm smile at me, said a few quiet words to the man and then left again. “Have I always known her?” I asked myself. The man stared expectantly. I drifted over to the computer desperate to build an argument that would satisfy his questioning. I mulled over reports of human kindness, human hope, human courage, human love. I built my case thoroughly and meticulously and began to present it soberly and intensely.

But as I spoke my mind began to drift and I thought of the cruelties and the injustices and the greed and the malfeasance. I thought of war, of perpetual endless war. I thought of hate, justified and rationalized and reproduced again and again. I thought of fear and loss and grief and wounds and scars and destruction. I began to weep, to cry openly. I choked with fear and sadness, I stopped my argument and spoke instead: “I don’t know. I don’t know if humanity deserves to continue. I don’t know if it’s redeemed. I don’t know.”

The man smiled a warm, knowing smile.

Porn Review Special Report: Breast Expansion

One of the operating assumptions of this series and of erotic materials in general is that the female body is sex. The form of a woman is designed to entice, the function of a woman is to arouse and ultimately climax the other party, male or female. Breast expansion as a paraphilia is an expression of this idea in terms of breast paraphilia. Since boobs are one of the most popularly sexualized body parts in modern western society, it should come as little surprise that the modification (specifically here the growth of breasts. Breast shrinkage or deflation is a separate and much less common paraphilia) of those parts is one of the most popular paraphilia.

Breast expansion is exactly what it sounds like, the expansion of breasts on women. This is sometimes presented in a “before and after” fashion, sometimes depicted as it happens, and occasionally is applied as a label to characters depicted with larger breasts than is canonically known. For this special report I’ve selected two comics and a handful of related gifs to discuss the impact and creation of this paraphilia, as well as elements of the community formed around it.

Surprisingly, I am not an expert in sexuality, so take what I say with whatever grains of salt you wish. I’m more of an expert in the construction of online cultures than a person who has performed significant research into the areas of human sexuality. What I’m here to do, however, Is present and critique a handful of viewpoints and use my experiences to deconstruct the paraphilia as a whole.

Trigger Warning: Nonconsensual body modification, general reduction of women into objects

Transfuture Allstars - A Porn Review

 

In this day and age, old notions of gender and sexuality are challenged daily by individuals across the country. Every day I can get up and go outside and walk a few blocks and bump into at least half a dozen proponents of queer desire. I live with a drag queen, an embodiment of an often unspoken acknowledgement that gender is a performance; if not necessarily a refutation of that performance (opinions are divided).

It’s a great time to live in and I and my blue fingernails and desire to be objectified and pursued are quite happy about it as a whole. What does this mean in the porn world, though? The queer has always been the exotic, and thus erotic, and as such “tranny” and “shemale” porn has been rampantly popular for at least the last two decades. Much of the erotic desire in this particular branch of porn comes from the unexpected and interesting juxtaposition of a penis being on a person who behaves and is arrayed as female. Much in the same way that racial porn works, the actual character or portrayal matters little. The person’s sole erotic interest is in their unusual features.

However this is only one branch of queered pornography, and one that appeals to a certain set of western straight men primarily. What I’m about to cover here takes an entirely different approach to the concept. Instead of exoticizing queer desires, Radio’s artwork normalizes those desires in a setting that emphasizes the consent and safety of all participants. It’s transgressive in the best sort of way and should be interesting to look at. I’m going to cover three of her short comix, which I believe can all be found at Slipshine for subscription money or elsewhere if you’re patient/determined. Slipshine is a great outfit in the vein of topatoco, providing another revenue source for the talented and interesting sort of people who typically write or draw webcomics. It also has a notable bent towards a progressive concept of sexuality, where it should be fun and appealing to everyone rather than a narrow group of straight men. I have more to say about the movement later.  

Trigger Warning: Literally nothing. This stuff is cute as shit.

Captain’s log stardate June 3, 2013

 I’m sitting on my bed in an empty 15’ by 20’ rectangle that contains a whole buttload of stuff I neither need nor particularly want. Also food and musical instruments and cloth genital coverings. The power is out. I don’t know why it’s out this time, but I assume it has to do with the complete disregard for financial stability the roommate property manager drag/welfare queen drug dealer has. 24/7 he runs the A/c in the front room. 80* in the winter, 68* in the summer. It’s obscene. I paid a bill for him one, in that I motivated my self to the bill paying place with money he gave me. $382 for a month’s electricity. I assume this is why the power is out, but this is new Orleans still and basically power is optional.

A Mind Forever Voyaging review

Click here for the Amazon page

My Racist Neighbor - A Porn review.

To be fully honest with you I’m not sure why I downloaded this. If I recall correctly I was herpin’ and derpin’ on the pirate bay and clicked over on their top 100 drawn pornography section and the title caught my eye for being silly and whatever. Imagine my surprise when I downloaded it and found out it was some godawful nonsense No, I wasn’t surprised. Shitty crap is the norm for this stuff.

Let’s get the trigger warning here out of the way, because I want to put up the cover for this.

Trigger warning: Racism, Incest, almost certainly nonconsensual sex, more racism. Really this whole thing is just bad racial porn with incest and rape thrown in to differentiate following issues from previous ones.  

Porn Reviews: a Plan

Hey so I crowd-sourced an opinion the other day¹ and it seems like there’s some marginal audience for a review/reading of terrible pornography. As an adult person, I consume a great deal of pornography willingly or otherwise and a great deal of it is of varying quality, so I felt like it’d be interesting to try and dialogue² with that pornography in some small way.

Some ground rules about how this is going to work:

1. I am capricious. I’m not going to do a rigid review of a specific overall genre of pornography, unless I feel like it. I’m open to suggestions and submissions, but I’m doing this for fun! On my own time! The pornography won’t always be terrible. Perhaps it will just be rare and interesting.

2. Pornography can be and frequently is some of the more thoroughly offensive and demeaning constructs of art. A large part of “terrible pornography” here is going to be discussing some of the rather awful stereotypes and situations depicted in pornography. As such I will be putting trigger warnings before the jump and I pre-emptively apologize for the general horribleness of humanity.

3. That being said, I’m not in the business of judging people who consume whatever pornography. It’s a waste of time. We are all terrible in our own unique ways and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. I will happily judge the deficiencies of the authors of terrible pornography, but I’ll try to do in an expansive way that isn’t just petty name-calling. It’ll be cool, I promise.

The goal of this side project is to have an outlet for me to express my feelings about the pornography I encounter without having to rely on anonymity or whatever to have ultimately meaningless conversations with random people over the internet. The less personally motivated goal is to educate you, dear public, on the wide vagaries of human sexual expression. Frequently discussions of “freaky” pornography look sort of like this:

And that’s a paradigm I want to break. Middle stick dude should be totally able to talk about the hardcore BDSM humiliation pornography he consumes and not be afraid or ashamed or terrified to do so, even with his vanilla friends. Diverse sexual tastes are not mental illnesses and should not be social stigmata.

I want to close this introduction with a short definition of what pornography is. The law has had a lot of problems with this³ but I think we can use a pretty short and serviceable definition. Pornography is any material designed in some way to cause arousal. This is a fairly broad definition, and undoubtedly covers a great deal of advertising material and things people would consider softcore or simply window dressing sexuality. It also covers certain marginal parts of larger works whose themes might not be explicitly arousal, but feature some form of erotic material in the middle of it. What it does not cover is material that certain people find erotic, but was not designed with that audience in mind. This can get a bit fuzzy because you have to assume authorial intent and generally divine people’s feelings, but I think for a lot of things it can be clear. Diaper fetishism, for example. Diapers themselves are not pornographic, but attaching them to (usually) an adult human can be pornographic with other markers of pornography attached (nudity, titillating looks, exaggerated sexual features) but can also simply be comedic by not having those markers attached, yet still sexually appeal to a certain subset of people. So perhaps the specific intent is determined by the presence or absence of erotic markers.

This combined with society’s aggressive sexualization and objectification of the female body has created the problems in legalistic society. Do we consider all titillating images to be pornography? This suddenly includes every photograph of a woman, since the expected standard of sexuality is that men will be attracted to that photo and capable of being aroused by it. So instead of dealing with the broader implications of the fucked up headspace popular sexuality is in, we develop contextual markers to indicate when an image is designed to be used as pornography and when it’s not, and then we back those contextual markers with the force of legalism as a hopeless and futile attempt to prevent eroticism moving into or blending with the mundane. A definition using intent here is good though, since among other things I want to talk about those pornographic markers.  

I should have the first review up within the week.

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1 You should totally also get in the habit of using internet buzz-words. Saying them in casual contexts makes them sound ridiculous and destroys their business jargon power. Words are magic, by the way.

2 Seriously it’s fun.

3 Read about obscenity laws! It’s really interesting. Generally the way legalism interacts with sexuality is interesting.

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/