Subterranean Hashtag Blues

Intel has resumed advertising on Gamasutra, bringing an end to the first and only time most people who aren't involved with videogames at an academic or professional level have given a shit about Gamasutra, advertising, or Intel. Within minutes of the announcement, cognitive dissonance--which was one of the Weekly Words not long before--set in, and an entirely plausible theory has been developed that Intel is not actually paying for ad space on Gamasutra anymore, since apparently it is common for ad-funded websites to post advertising for free.

Once again, people are happily declaring #GamberGoat dead. It's not entirely inaccurate; the mainstream coverage of #GillyGoop, for all the centrist bias our media demands, has been uniformly negative. The lone exception, Breitbart, is named for a man whose name is literally synonymous with politically motivated libel. There have been no victories to speak of, so anyone "joining" #GlimmerGong now--in the sense of taking up their iconography and collective identity--is essentially volunteering for ridicule and contempt. Mostly ridicule.

But this doesn't mean they're actually going away. They're the LaRouche Democrats of gaming: occasionally amusing, varying degrees of racist, and prone to fits of whimsy in their attempts at graphic design. They'll be around, putting Hitler mustaches on Anita Sarkeesian for the foreseeable future. Their ability to recruit has been severely compromised, but the dead-enders really do have nothing better to do. To say nothing of the neo-nazis, rape apologists, and actual honest-to-god terrorists that made up #GappaGoob before it had a name; they'll scatter when someone gets arrested, but they'll be back in some form or another. They've never not been here.

What people aren't talking about anymore is changing the hashtag. The argument for the change was that it would enable the conversation to focus on its stated purpose--ethics in games journalism--without legitimizing or tolerating its toxic origins. The argument against the change was that it would rob the group of momentum, which they needed for whatever the hell they were doing.

As with most things #GrizzleGoom, it's hard to tell whether this is ignorance or dishonesty, especially since the two can crossbreed in interesting ways where issues of identity politics are involved. The actual reason there can be no new hashtag, no separation from the hate campaign, is that the "legitimate" face of the movement is wholly dependent on the hate campaign. It's not just that the latter created the former; the former is built on a foundation laid down by the latter.

Back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, it wasn't all doxxing and death threats and stalking and slut-shaming. It was a crowdsourced disinformation campaign, and the "legitimate" movement is predicated on uncritically accepting those lies. The scandal for which #GombaGum was named--and it's frankly bizarre that so many people seem to think they can just gloss over this part--simply never happened. It's bullshit, it's obvious bullshit, and the press said as much once they'd realized it wasn't going to blow over and they had to address it. The accusations of censorship began with several websites deciding they didn't want to provide a platform for an obviously unstable individual's transparent attempts to ruin a woman's life, and continued with other websites' decisions not to publish the ensuing cover story for the entirely unfair reason that it was obviously, demonstrably untrue. The specific journalistic question raised by #GlammaGrrl concerned whether or not gaming websites were obligated to publish slander based on hearsay. (They are not.)

But it's not about that anymore, right? The ensuing accusations followed the same pattern: unadulterated horseshit, easily disproven, and widely distributed. #GanderGibb's rhetorical strategy has been to tell so many lies that people will uncritically accept at least a few of them. Jenn Frank's malfeasance? Lies. The attacks on TFYC? Lies. "Gamers are dead?" Well...

I'm not sure quite how to characterize this argument. Leaving aside the claim that a dozen articles on the same subject constitutes a conspiracy--see also the thousands of news sites who all started talking about the 2014 election results at the same time--and leaving aside that only one of those actually contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and it wasn't the famous one, you'd still have to laughably misread them to come up with anything like the preposterous, genocidal screeds #GuppyGatt claim to have been offended by. You'd have to not know that "gamer" has been a contentious term for years specifically because it denotes a large, varied, fun-loving audience but connotes a hostile, exclusionary hive of anxious masculinity. You'd have to ignore that Leigh Alexander spent much of the iconic "gamers are dead" post lamenting how embarrassing this shit is, and how the assorted anti-feminists and crypto-fascists who kicked off this "consumer revolt" are representative of a wider problem of arrested development and toxic masculinity, a pissed-off, chronically insecure clique who don't realize that Chuck Palahniuk is making fun of them. You'd have to imagine that it contained the phrase "gamers are dead," and read it as...I don't even fucking know.

Reading it literally would seem to be out of the question, because being dead is not, traditionally, a morally loaded thing. Short of a relapse of Cotard delusion, it's hard to imagine how this could be applied literally, yet the gators assert their physical alive-ness with seemingly no awareness of how ridiculous they sound. Some people seem to have read it as a threat, an interpretation it's difficult to believe is being offered in good faith. But the weirdest part isn't so explicit. The canonical #GabbaGone response to discussion of cultural conflicts within gaming culture was to act as if they were being attacked from outside, from people with contempt for a rather important part of this particular techno-cultural moment. You'd have to believe that the people who've devoted their lives to videogames--building them, experiencing them, taking them apart, putting them back together, and sharing their experiences with the world--hate the technology and culture they've helped build. You'd have to believe that Alexander, who commemorated a successful no-kill run in Metal Gear Solid 3 by permanently inscribing the Pigeon icon onto her goddamn body, hates videogames and wished everyone would just give up and get really into puppet theater or something.

You'd have to believe a lot of really stupid shit. And so they do. So do lots of people; sooner or later, I'll run into the LaRouche Democrats in Harvard Square again. Sooner or later, there'll be another manufactured scandal. Sooner or later, we'll have to do all this bullshit again.

But the conventional wisdom on this particular outburst has been set down, and it's not changing. They lost. They'll probably lose next time, too.

Screengrab courtesy of @SJWIlluminati

Gamers are alive.

Kill the gamers.

Comfort Food Gaming

Hey, everyone, I'm looking into the feasibility of writing a Thing about comfort food gaming. Before going further, some general thoughts on what seems to categorize the practice:

• Recovering the feeling of play when you're too tired, scattered, or stressed to handle novelty.
• The appeal to nostalgia, either the specific experiences you had with the game in question or what was going on in your life while having said experiences.
• The appeal to achievement, revisiting games you've taught yourself to autopilot.
• Completism, the desire to "once and for all" finish a text you've already "finished" by most reasonable standards. Predominantly associated with open-world games, which constantly provide "excuses" to keep playing.
• Perfectionism, the desire to use hard-won knowledge of the system to moonwalk though things that had previously been difficult.

I've written briefly about my comfort food gaming staples: Final Fantasy Tactics, Quest for Glory, the entire DS-mononucleosis library. I'll presumably be writing about them in some more detail. In a desperate bid to avoid that, how about you? What old games can you not seem to stop replaying, even though you probably "should" be playing something new? Has the behavior changed as you've aged? You have aged, right? Are you Fae or what?

This will look really dumb if there aren't any comments, so, y'know, get on that.

Memento Morghulis

Hey, kids. How're yez? Been workin' on some stuff.

Convergence of Masculinities in Gamer Culture

Masculinity Without Men: The Sontarans and Relational Gender in Doctor Who

Going through the backlog, might get some more stuff up soon. Need to set up a general purpose "bunch of shit I wrote" page.

In the meantime, zombie zoo, zombie zoo, who let them zombies out of the zombie zoo?

Prudence, IN

Are there advice columns that aren't terrible? You never seem to hear about them. Perhaps it's because good advice is, in practice, usually pretty obvious, and the tough questions involve choosing between several terrible courses of action.

It's neither here nor there, of course, when a professional advice columnist fucks up one of the really easy ones. Case in point, Dear Prudence's Emily Yoffe's recent piece for Slate, with the impressively on-the-nose title "College Women: Stop Getting Drunk." The article in question splits its time between asserting the title's imperative and apologizing for existing. If you're interested in reading a thoughtful rebuttal, I recommend Erin Gloria Ryan's How To Write About Rape Prevention Without Sounding Like An Asshole.

Yoffe's article is attempting to suss out a tension that seems to be inherent in the prevention model: you can only issue direct advice to people already interested in preventing rape, since they're the ones reading the damn articles, but you can't really do so without engaging in victim-blaming or undergirding complicity narratives. There's also the not-insignificant problem that most rape prevention tips aren't worth the fear they're printed on: beyond proximity, about the only reliable common denominator is that rapists like raping people and don't like going to prison. They tend to target people to whom they have easy social access, and people who aren't likely to call the police, or who the police aren't likely to believe.

So, basically, we're talking about women, children, ethnic minorities, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless, sex workers, and God's own favorites, the poor.

Don't be in any of those groups, and you should be fine.

Even if this the risk-avoidance tactics of the prevention model were reliably successful, a more fundamental question remains: who gives a fuck? Living in fear does not solve the problem. In many ways, living in fear is the problem itself. Take it from #DepressedBane, relentless hatred and defiance will wear you the hell out. Teaching our more vulnerable citizens to be strong in the face of fear is all well and good, but seriously, fuck strength. Mere safety should not require strength. My allegiance, now and always, lies with the weak. There are a hell of a lot more of us, you see, and the strong don't like those odds.

Which brings us to the retaliation model. We tend to think of law and law enforcement as preserving safety, and, when well-designed and implemented, they can do that. Nonetheless, safety is incidental; the immediate function of law enforcement is not to make anyone's lives safer and happier, but to make criminals' lives more frightening and dangerous. Clearly, there are an awful lot of people out there whose lives are not currently dangerous enough, and rather than making victims responsible for deterring the behavior of their attackers, I wonder if it might not be more productive to focus the national conversation on ensuring that every rapist is arrested, charged, and convicted: to focus on breaking the secrecy in which predators necessarily operate, punishing police that scuttle investigations, and making prosecutors do their jobs.

If nothing else, focusing on the retaliation model it might help us cut through some of the bullshit about what a woman might "expect" to happen should she find herself drinking until she's drunk--you know, the way many college students do when they aren't too afraid--by moving to an entirely different expectation: that when someone is raped, drunk or sober, we expect the state to respond with all its fury, on her behalf and our own.

I really wish this thing wouldn't auto-generate the URL from the first line of text in the absence of a title.

And anyway, whether I like something or not is beside the point. The real purpose of criticism is to explain what works are, how they do what they do, why they matter, and how they fit into broader contexts. Not to express the critic's coarse vote of approval or disapproval.

Ian Bogost, Distinguished Chair in Media Studies

File photo.

Evil, in practice, is a little dull. In videogames, anyway. Perhaps it’s because games live in the getting, while the benefits of evil have more to do with the having. Despite the adventure genre's inherent biases towards a particular vision of violent, assertive "goodness," the narrative usually bends over backwards to conceal that fact, to focus on what like about it (fearlessness, independence) at the expense of what we dislike (greed, cruelty, sadism). Antihero is one of our more popular, and widely abused, literary terms, and in common parlance it has meant Willy Loman at some times and Satan at others. These days, “antihero” is employed casually to describe heroes who lack the post-heroic niceties, the good guy who’s exactly as violent, sadistic, and immature as we’d like him to be and not even a tiny bit more. It's been suggested that Breaking Bad has effectively broken the antihero trope by inching Walter White up to that line, and then inching over it, and then sprinting so far off into the distance that the line's no longer visible. (I can't comment directly, because I'm an asshole, but you might want to bear it in mind as we approach the final paragraph.)

White is an interesting case, because in any properly moral story of violent conflict, the audience is inherently on the bad guy’s side. The villains begin the story by creating the problem to be solved, and the story ends when they’re killed off, even if we were still enjoying it. We bend over backwards to conceal that we write, read, and play stories about killing specifically because we are interested in killing. Still, there are practical limits. Power is exciting; sadism is dull. Ratchet up the protagonist’s power enough--and make it insufficiently fantastic to conceal itself--and it tends to fall apart rather quickly.

I was impressed by Grand Theft Auto 3, but was more apt to watch my roommates play than pick it up myself. Revelatory as “open-world design” was, the actual mission structure (especially early on) was mostly about driving vehicles from one location to another. Compared to the contemporary State of Emergency, GTA3 felt like a highly detailed simulation of picking up your friend at the airport. I mostly ignored Vice City, and picked up San Andreas primarily for the soundtrack. GTA4 came out at around the time I was falling out of the world, and no, bizarrely effusive GameStop clerk, I did not pre-order GTA5. I have, however, been reading the reviews, critiques, and assorted hubbub, and I find that I’m more interested in the game than I’d have expected, albeit primarily as a paratext to said hubbub.

Almost everything I’ve read about GTA5 has concerned the storyline, the inherently narrative quality of transgressive acts, and the friction between the characters’ personalities and the ludic structures of the genre. You’d barely know GTA3 had a story at all, from the reviews. Vice City and San Andreas had a kind of filmic lineage, but still kept characterization as efficiently archetypal as possible, and people wrote more about genre tropes than character. GTA4 tried for a more ambitious protagonist, which occasionally ran at odds with the anarchic playground when you stepped off the path--the unstable diachronic problem--but I had to hang out a group of game designers and academic wonks to hear anyone explore it in any detail. In GTA5, it seems to be all anyone can talk about.

This is why I wanted to make sure to write about GTA5 before I actually play it: I don’t want my readings of the critiques to be colored by my experiences with the actual game. From my unspoiled vantage point, I can gather that the writing does seem to be qualitatively different in this one, and that might be why, after seven or eight games, the series’ unsubtle misogyny is bothering people in a way it didn’t before. Alternatively, the environment has changed: who’s writing about games, and how they think about them, and what they think is within their purview as critics. We finally have a critical community, in that sense that the people who write about games for a living are finally acting like critics.

Leigh Alexander and Yannick LeJaqc emphasize the increasingly obvious predestination that shadows the genre. I'm inclined to believe this to be an endemic flaw to the genre, as opposed to a particular sin of Rockstar North's; the more freedom you give people, the more restraints they perceive. (See also: white guys.) Then again, since GTA has always seemed to specialize in the pointless and silly. We're talking about a series that was literally--literally literally, not Joe Biden literally--inspired by a glitch. Tom Bissell gets to the heart of it, going aggressively meta in the process:

One of GTA V's characters admits at the end of the game, "I'm getting too old for this nonsense." And you know what? I felt the same thing numerous times while playing GTA V, even though I continue to admire the hell out of much of what it accomplishes. So if I sound ambivalent, Niko, I think it's because I'm part of a generation of gamers who just realized we're no longer the intended audience of modern gaming's most iconic franchise. Three steps past that realization, of course, is anticipation of one's private, desperate hurtle into galactic heat death. I'm left wondering when I, or any of us, express a wish for GTA to grow up, what are we actually saying? What would it even mean for something like GTA to "grow up"? Our most satirically daring, adult-themed game is also our most defiantly puerile game. Maybe the biggest sin of the GTA games is the cheerful, spiteful way they rub our faces in what video games make us willing to do, in what video games are.

I'm excited to check out the game, although I don't expect I'll ever actually finish it. There's a strange tendency, in reviews, to keep fighting the last war; we all got sick of Mortal Kombat's stagnance at the third iteration, when its novelties were more ambitious than its predecessor. Perhaps MK was a narrativist, mystery-driven series after all, or perhaps commercial success rendered the familiar strange and let us see our boredom. I'm seeing a lot of references to the sheer economic might of the GTA brand these days, and it's true, but is it really an order of magnitude bigger than it was in 2008?

Have the games really changed, or have we?

They did not cover this shit in Cotillion.

A few weeks ago, Alyssa Rosenberg said something thought-provoking:

My outrage at stupid, sexist, racist, dumb, bad television comes from the fact that I have Kenneth The Page's level of enthusiasm.
— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) August 2, 2013

My anger at racism, sexism, homophobia,ablism, etc. in television comes from a place of humanity, sure, but also for a concern for quality.
— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) August 2, 2013

I spent a while trying to think of an adequately brief response to this, because I find the sentiment intensely familiar. And yet, it's not as simple as "what she said, but with videogames." I poked and prodded at the whats and whys, but nothing fit easily into 140 characters without seeming entirely off-topic. So I settled for a gesture of enthusiastic agreement:

@AlyssaRosenberg Bah. I keep trying to respond to this and I think it just needs its own damn blog entry. In short, terrorist fist jab.
— Peter Rauch (@Wordbeast) August 2, 2013

Meaning that I was going to write my own blog entry about the interplay of politics and aesthetics. I would then, in all likelihood, worry about whether or not it would be gauche to mention Rosenberg when I tweet the link to that entry. This is the problem with being in easy shouting distance of people you happen to admire, who incidentally could make you internet-famous for at least a little while. She responded:

@Wordbeast That, in fact, is on deck. Thank you.
— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) August 2, 2013

So now I feel like I've just told her what to write about, which is a dick move. I consider issuing a correction--"no, no, my writing is what's important here"--but that doesn't seem like a good idea either. So I resolve to just make it the beginning of an irritating blog post.

While racism, sexism, et al. are as annoying in videogames as in any other medium, they're mostly discussed at the fringes. The mainstream discourse, such as it is, is less about whether videogames are supporting (or just failing to critique) deleterious social norms, as it is about whether or not they cause mental illness and/or violent crime by existing. I'd sort of thought we were done with this debate, since even politicians barely pay lip service to media effects these days, but Sandy Hook Changed Everything, and everything old is new again. In the last week, I've seen two new headlines about publications, one on violent media in general and one on violent videogames in particular. Having poked my head in to see if there's anything mind-blowing, I don't have a lot to say.

I'm bothered by infantile power fantasies and gun fetishization because they're dull. I'm bothered by cynical, unambitious, lowest-common-denominator approaches because they result in bad game design. I don't believe bad games are harmful because they encourage people, sane or otherwise, to do bad things; I believe bad games are harmful because they're an enormous waste of human potential.

Next time you finish a AAA game, count how many designers, artists, and coders you see.

Modern videogame development is a long, expensive process, requiring the concerted cooperation of hundreds of people over a period of several years. To have put that much vitality and creativity into something dull, something cynical, is profoundly sad.

Ian Bogost writes that "[t]he debate about newsgames' value as speech turns out not to be a conflict between support and detraction but rather a conflict between the games themselves and the games as cogs in someone's favorite discourse machine." Distinctions between newsgames and any other intra-medium distinctions we might feel compelled to draw up notwithstanding, talking about value precludes talking about content. When we stop arguing about whether or not a game is dangerous, we have the freedom to write about whether or not that game is interesting, and why.

You might not know it from this particular blog, but I assure you, it's a much more interesting conversation.

Albert, Somme

Roger Ebert is dead, and were I to be called upon to spend another minute talking about whether or not videogames will ever be "art," I'd prefer to join him. A few weeks back, I made a mental note to reread John Walker's recent RockPaperShotgun editorial on the relationship between games and stories, so I could explore some of its unexamined conceits. Not a rebuttal, exactly, or even a critique--Walker seems to have handled that responsibility himself--but a vague thought on vocabulary, and what imprecision can conceal.

Story is a revered word among gamers, even if some critics aren't so enthusiastic. We're used to that. If you've spent any time reading games criticism, you're as bored with the yes/no of games and story, and have hopefully moved onto the how. What I find interesting, though, is not the idea that story is a desirable thing for a game to "have," but the assumption that story is the essential aspect of other narrative media.

[w]hat exactly is it we’re holding aloft as an example of storytelling done right? There are games whose stories I’ve enjoyed a great deal. I immediately reach for The Longest Journey, Deus Ex, Planescape Torment… um… and then I start to struggle. And the most recent of those was 2000 – thirteen years ago. [...] But of these, which do I hold up as great examples of literature? Honestly? None. That’s not to demean the best of them – stories from games have genuinely changed my life, moved me enormously, altered my thinking in significant ways. But if gaming’s ultimate goal, from both technology and development, is this spurious notion of “storytelling”, then it’s doing a pretty poor job.

 "Literature" is an interesting place to go here. The written word remains our most highbrow massively reproducible medium; as Supernatural has reminded us recently, men of letters are not to be trifled with. And as Eagleton reminds us in Literary Theory: An Introduction, "literature" is far from a stable subject. "Literature" is often employed as a synonym for "classic," or "art," or "good." People who study literature do not employ it this way, because for litnerds, literature is a descriptive term, not an evaluative one. It's a thing, not an admiring way to describe that thing. Ceci n'est pas un stick, after all.

Description is an important concept to keep in mind, given the next two uses of "literature":

My thought is whether this matters at all. Perhaps it’s time for us all to just accept that games aren’t ever going to be home to classic works of literature – it’s not what they’re for, and it’s not what they’re ever going to achieve.

And:

For years I’ve lamented this, decried the failure of this medium to mature to a point where it can match literature and cinema in terms of intelligence in design. (And to be clearly, yes, most books and movies are terrible – we’re talking about comparing the very best.) When is gaming, I would ask, going to find its great stories? I believe I was wrong to ask.

Here we see references to "classic works of literature" (emphasis mine, obvs.) and "literature and cinema," which rules out such pedestrian fare as books and movies, or even novels and film. I don't know exactly what Walker means by these terms, beyond entities in particular media that are better than most others. But I wonder how he would describe some of these works. When people talk about "story" in videogames--especially when they talk about it derisively--they go to examples, and something gets tricksy. Yes, a prose summary of a game's plot, even one of the best plots, is going to sound pretty silly, but plots invariably sound silly when you alienate content from form. As children, we're taught to use "plot" and "story" interchangeably, primarily in an evaluative sense: "story" is what movies with a lot of CGI must necessarily lack; "plot" is why grown-up movies about mediocre people fucking are better than kids' movies about exceptional people killing. I'll not dwell on the technical definitions, because the comprehensive definition is one of the most beloved lies we tell to schoolchildren. Suffice to say that a description of a story is not that story, a plot summary is not a plot. If games are not a narrative medium, then "story" is an element extricable from the rest of the experience, identical to its own summary. If games are a narrative medium, the story isn't a thing that the player is drawn into, nor is it a thing the player creates by interpreting the text, but the experience itself. The decisions you made, and the ones you were forced to make, and the ones they pretended to let you make, and the way you felt about the experience. Granted, those distinctions might still be useful to make, as they are in other media, and that's a conversation I'd be quite interested in having. But we have to start with the text, the thing. If you want a story that's easily communicable in text, you're going to have the experience and then write about it afterwords.

That's right; videogames are just as depressing as real life.

Oh, bee tee dubs, if you opened up the first Walker article, I advise you to break the first rule of the internet and read the comments.

Whips, chains, whistles, dildos, and a book.

So, I was on Twitter the other night. building my brand, developing relationships with fans ("influencers"), and talking about the problems of "correspondence" epistemology with @DoritosOntario. A number of my feedlings, notably the loudly thoughtful @HULKGAMECRIT, were discussing some scandalous doings over at Destructoid, with which I'm only barely familiar. But I followed the breadcrumbs to this essay by one Ryan Perez. It gave me pause. Afterwards, it gave me quit, and soon after that it gave me watch Arrested Development.

You see, dear reader, this essay is a piece of shit. It's that uniquely gamerly combination of defensive, self-pitying, and self-congratulatory. It's utterly unremarkable, in that way, but the material it covers was fresh in my mind from something else I'd been working on, and it happened to be in front of me, late one Saturday night. I wanted to make a joke about it, but found too many opportunities. It deserves better than 140 characters of mock. It's so bad that it deserves to be taken seriously.

This is a terrible essay. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I'll skip the opening paragraph, because fuck you. If you clicked the above link, you already read it anyway. So I'll rejoin the essay already in progress:

What instantly draws my gaze toward these oh-so-common floggings is the most common factor: those carrying the whips.

Wait. It's always the same people? I assumed it would be a general assemblage of garden variety liberals. But if it's the same dozen people who are mounting these vilification campaigns against you and your colleagues, and they're not famous enough for me to have heard of them, it seems like you could probably indemnify yourself by just blocking them so you won't be tempted to respond to their criticism.

Like clockwork, they labeled Allistair “transphobic,” demanded that he be punished, and seemingly dusted their hands off for what they perceived was a good deed. This is not the first time they’ve done so.

Well, he'd done something that was apparently offensive to the trans community and their allies. These individuals were offended because they believed his actions were motivated by, and likely to inspire, antipathy toward transsexuals. "Motivated and/or likely or intended to inspire antipathy towards transsexuals" is the definition of "transphobic." By organizing public sentiment against a perceived injustice, it's entirely sensible that they would think they were engaged in "a good deed." Public sentiment is important; it's less accurate than it used to be, but most humans intuitively think of their popularity and reputation as matters of life and death. This is why people often react very severely to what are, from our pleasantly distant perspective, quite minor. But props on the whole "lurking horror" connotation there.

Ironically, they are the biggest proponents for positive change, yet they seem so consistent with their own negative behavior. Their usual approach is far from persuasive, and is even potentially damaging. An eye for an eye, if you will.

Leaving aside that "positive" and "negative," in this context, are utterly meaningless terms employed to create an illusion of moral distinction: an eye for an eye? Really?

How one gets from "far from persuasive" to "retributive violence" is difficult enough, but "eye for an eye" refers to using exactly the appropriate amount of retaliatory force and no more. In the Hammurabi Code, and later the Law, the principle was employed to prevent feuds from escalating into bloodbaths. It does not gesture towards reconciliation, but it does settle the issue as far as everyone is concerned. So it's not just a matter of hyperbole, it's also fucking stupid. (In all fairness, Perez refers to his "devoutly religious beliefs." Just because his beliefs are devoutly religious, we cannot assume out of hand that he is as well, and it's possible he just knows fuck-all about what the Sermon on the Mount was actually about.)

I can’t really avoid pointing this out here: In the past, I made a stupid mistake on Twitter that cost me my career and a lot of respect.

Considering that the stupid mistake in question was almost a year ago and he's still being published, it's hard to see how it can be said to have cost Perez his career. Perhaps he had a second, unrelated career, and now must fall back on writing about games.

Similarly to Allistair, I had a significant (and somewhat unjustified) amount of hate and criticism hurled my way. I admitted my poor actions, and also accepted much of what resulted from them, but it made me raise a brow toward similar instances of public scrutiny that others have faced. Leaving my own experience out of the equation,

That is not what this paragraph does.

I looked to others whom were “burned at the stake” for their trespasses, both minor and extreme. In the process, I made two inquiries: What is the intended goal of those with torches, and what lesson are the ones aflame supposed to learn? Not enough people ask these questions.

Congratulations?

In fact, too few individuals even bother considering every potential result when it comes to their actions, particularly those convinced that they are doing something noble or good. It’s a damn shame, because some of the worst offenses anyone can commit are often perpetuated by God, “justice,” and a personal sense of absolute morality.

Actually, almost all violence is deployed for the purpose of asserting or maintaining social norms. I'm not sure it's really worse than the minority of violent actions inspired by greed, sadism, or simple boredom. I'm even less sure what this sweeping moral claim has to do with being yelled at on the internet. Nevertheless, having established a line of argument popularized by middle-schoolers, we continue:

Nevertheless, those two questions remained, and the answers I found are as follows:

1. Concede, you piece of shit! Disagreement is almost always accompanied by a desire to persuade. The main reason we enter debates, discussions, or arguments is to potentially convince someone to see things from our point of view. Even those who present their case with exposed teeth aspire to have the opposition kneel before their passionate conviction. 

Sometimes, sure. But we don't execute people because we think it'll help them learn a valuable lesson, and we don't respond to embarrassment with rage because rage is an effective rhetorical strategy. Here's a hint: did you and the aggrieved party have your dispute in person, in a room that contained no other people? All the examples provided here happened on the fucking internet, the most public forum in the history of ever. People were watching, and there were more of them than there are of you. Which means that, in terms of influencing opinion, they matter more than you. This is going to be a theme, so I hope you're taking notes: not everything is about you.

When this piece goes up, maybe a dozen people are going to read it. Perez is almost certainly not going to be one of them. The rhetorical "you" situates the preceding paragraph for the people who are reading, for whom it's largely irrelevant whether Perez actually exists at all, or is just someone I made up to represent a point of view.

Many people seem to forget two things: Opinions are only worth the amount of thought that goes into them, and a part of getting others to consider them is a matter of presentation. Yes, the “tonal argument” is indeed a logical fallacy, but let’s be real: People don’t like being spoken to like they are inferior … or evil, in this case.

I'm not sure about the first one. Statesmen, scholars, and clerics have put an enormous amount of thought, over the centuries, into arguments for white supremacy. It takes a lot of thought, because the idea is counterintuitive to a lot of people. Non-whites, for example. Also, lots of whites. Whereas some opinions don't require very much thought at all, but nonetheless remain correct under scrutiny. Epistemology does not have participation trophies; you have to actually be right about shit.

As for the second, I'm somewhat sympathetic. I think the tonal argument is quite appropriate when discussing marketing, public relations, propaganda, or any other persuasive pursuit. When the issue is "how," talk about how. Where the tonal argument becomes irrelevant and/or intellectually dishonest is in discussions of "what." I'm not interested in how our friend the white supremacist makes his argument. I disagree. If I believed that I could be convinced by a better presentation, it would only be because I already agreed, in which case I would need no convincing. Furthermore, I'd much prefer that the people who are amenable to white supremacy reject it. Our friend would have to be very stupid to think I was legitimately interested in helping them improve their sales pitch. A smarter interlocutor would be insulted.

Your argument is your product, and you are its salesperson. No matter how compelling and valuable your commodity may be, if your sales pitch consists of vilifying language and a condemning regard for your hopeful customer, they will not feel inclined to give two steaming shits about what you’re selling.

Your ethical argument has a lot of merit, but I'm not interested in being a better person if you're going to be mean.

When people stumble — myself, Allistair, and even greater authorities like David Jaffe and Jim Sterling — the goal is to make us learn from our mistakes, but what do we learn if the lesson is delivered by a figurative bat to the head? Treating offenders like dirt not only gives them a reason to ignore you, but it can also reaffirm their original position, as well as reinforce any negative preconceptions they had about you and your case.

Who gives a shit? The lesson is for the onlookers. We're the present, they're the future. They matter more. And while humor, derision, and spite might make you like your opponent less, they sure can help get the crowd on your side. Every retweet counts.

2. If you don’t yell, they won’t plug their ears. Do you want to know how to gain a valued, loyal customer?

Dude, you're writing an essay about how you got fired. This is not a time to brag about your salesmanship.

I was raised in Bakersfield, California. For those who don’t know, “Bako” is quite conservative … and a bit of a shithole [...] This, coupled with a Christian upbringing, meant I retained a relatively non-existent knowledge regarding gay people. I don’t hide the fact that, when I first moved to San Francisco nine years ago, I was genuinely homophobic. I hadn’t a single clue about how to feel or behave when it came to gay men and women.

While my Christian upbringing was considerably more liberal than most, I didn't knowingly meet a gay person face-to-face until undergrad. I had no clue how to act around anyone, so if there was any specific awkwardness relating to gay students, it got lost in the general terror. I don't recall ever having a lot of questions for them. I never found it particularly mysterious that some people wanted to fuck different people than I did.

I didn’t hide it then, either. Given my inquisitive nature, I was open and honest with gay people when it came to my devoutly religious beliefs, what I was taught, and my confusion regarding their sexual orientation. Considering my exposed Christian tattoos, I couldn’t hide it, even if I wanted to. All I desired was to gain some perspective, some understanding. An odd thing happened, though. The gays I spoke with weren’t angry. They didn’t despise me for knowing so little about their ordeals. They didn’t lambaste me for being raised to believe that their way of life was wrong or immoral.

That Perez feels it worth pointing out that these things didn't happen  implies that he had reason to suspect that they might. He didn't. People you've just met have not spent their lives thinking about how you feel about them. Their emotions are tied up in people and things that they care about.

They heard my case, considered my misinformation, and carefully answered with some of the most valuable and level-headed responses that I’ve ever been given in my life. Due to their kindness and patience, I was sold. I had absolutely no excuse to be repelled by homosexuality or the issues it faces in this country, and I never will.

Woohoo!

Though I’m no longer religious, I can’t help but feel a sense of amazement that people could go through such trauma, yet never bother to use my past faith and upbringing against me.

This is a really weird thing to say. It's like bragging about being petty.

So many of them (particularly gay women) were incredibly grateful that a straight, white male would actively desire to learn what it meant to be a gay American, and I was equally thankful that they didn’t scold me for not knowing in the first place. For several years now, the gay community has had one more supporter because of it.

Great that it worked out that way for you, but it's not incumbent upon them to convince you to be a decent human being. That's your responsibility. It sounds like they felt your heart was in the right place, and were willing to be patient with you on your behalf, but I suspect your account leaves out a great deal of eye-rolling and condescension.

The paradox of shelling a munitions factory. It’s not difficult to understand how some can feel so hurt that they resort to armed retaliation.

Dude, that's aggravated assault. Call the fucking cops.

But to fire back at the “bad guys” is to equalize the battlefield. In that instance, villains and victims become grayed. Treating anyone like they are subhuman is equally as deplorable as whatever behavior may have instigated it.

Forget the cops, call the UN. When you insult Felicia Day, the internet strikes back with motherfucking genocide.

This industry certainly has its issues, and I dare not deny that its transgendered, gay, and female members have and will face an unfair amount of problems. But their target demographic — those who do not fall under the three aforementioned categories — will rarely provide their patronage if the service being offered is laden with glass shards and caltrops.
We all desire for others to understand us. In the process, though, we so often become the new embroiderers of scarlet letters (“M” for misogyny). We claim to have the high ground, yet voluntarily remain in the piss-soaked dirt of the struggle below.

Who is this "we" of which you speak? The ones who are mistreated, or the ones who aren't sufficiently insulated from criticism when they mistreat the first group?

That provides nothing substantial or positive to the games industry we claim to serve, and it perpetuates an even greater disconnect between social groups.

I'm glad Perez is looking toward a broader understanding of ethics in a complex and interdependent society. I was beginning to worry this was just self-serving whining justified by false equivalencies.

“Goodness” and “kindness” are not subject for debate, nor are they anyone’s to redefine.

Three thousand years of moral philosophy would like to have a word with you.

If you still feel that fighting fire with fire is a reasonable and justifiable strategy for extinguishing a societal blaze, then perhaps you should spend more time off to the side, watching the flames burn everything to the ground.

As of press time, the internet is still here. Destructoid is still here. Perez is still here. Pinsof is still here. Aside from no longer maintaining writing gigs at one particular website--and apparently having sewn large, garish Ms into their clothing, for some reason--Perez and Pinsof seem to be doing ok. They aren't in jail, they haven't been doxxed, and they aren't regularly threatened with rape and murder. They embarrassed their employers, and will try harder not to embarrass future employers.

I, personally, think Perez and Pinsof were thoughtless and stupid, and are unaccustomed to being called on it when they had done thoughtless, stupid things. That said, when you do stuff in public, you will be criticized. Some of it will inevitably be unjustified.

This is ok.

Total strangers--the ones who might be convinced by things they read about you on the internet--aren't ever going to have an entirely accurate picture of what kind of person you are. Hell, an entirely accurate picture might not even be possible. But your friends and loved ones won't care. Your fans, if you have them, aren't going to be easily swayed either. When someone accuses you of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any other recently discovered sins, you are not actually facing imminent violence. If you find yourself on the privileged side of any of those -isms or -obias, you're still basically protected. You really do have the option of just saying, "Yeah, that was inappropriate. I'll try to be a better person" and letting it go. You can think it over on your own time, decide whether or not you feel it was valid, and make changes accordingly. Talk about it with your friends. In private. Don't worry about being unfairly maligned, worry about being hurtful and deserving to be maligned, irrespective of whether or not you get called on it.

Remember those gay folk that so impressed Perez? Want your own heroic narrative? Then show a small fraction of their fortitude that you claim to admire, and endure. Don't let your pride get in the way of what you believe is right. Your feelings are not more important than social justice, and you are not so fragile that you need to be kept in the dark about your fuck-ups. Own it. If you have a soapbox, stop justifying your behavior and work on preventing other people from making the same mistakes.

Who knows? If you do it right, if you're influential enough, the people now lionizing you for standing up to the forces of political correctness will be sending you death threats. And then you can talk to us about moral fucking authority.

What a bunch of assholes.

Oh, and while we're on the subject: Osama bin Laden had ten daughters to David Jaffe's two. Just sayin'.

In which I write about BioShock Infinite, like an asshole.

I'm working on a longer piece about BioShock Infinite at the moment, but first, I wanted to take a moment to summarize a number of things I've read about it, and throw in my two cents, because it's unlikely it'll fit anywhere else. (It's also more or less spoiler-free.)

Why did it have to be a first-person shooter?

It didn't. Genre and milieu can operate fairly independently of each other in game design. There are, no doubt, some aspects of the narrative that would have worked better in a different genre; there are others that wouldn't have worked as well. The story told in BioShock Infinite is not, itself, BioShock Infinite. But fundamentally, the narrative component--which people seem to be employing as synonymous with the game as a whole--was realized in the first-person shooter genre for the same reason that the earlier Contra Galt story did: because Irrational was designing a first-person shooter when Ken Levine and his minions worked out the details of the story. Genre preceded story here, as usually happens. The disconnect is more obvious when the audience gives a shit about the story, but it's always there.

Why did it have to be so violent?

Primarily because it's a first-person shooter. That said, even if the Columbiad had been a graphic adventure, it would have been pretty violent. Horrific, brutal violence is a constitutive element. Yeah, that skyhook-to-the-face is gratuitous, even by genre standards, and it comes up awfully quick. But this is a story about slavery and genocide, and how brutality doesn't become less brutal because of social agreements not to notice it.

Elizabeth is a lot of fun, and could probably have made any genre or milieu quite entertaining. Maybe we'll get them someday. But this particular story was written for this particular genre, with this particular level of senseless brutality. It would be nice if it could have been something that wouldn't put off non-gamers, and it would have been nice if it had been something that wouldn't alienate people who hate FPSs. Either of those would have been good games, but neither would have been the story Irrational wrote, or the game they built. There seems to be an idea that Infinite is so good that it has a responsibility to grow the medium, to transcend its childish genre, to shun the aesthetic sensibilities of teenage boys, and to eschew any more violence than is strictly necessary. In short, there seems to be a sense that BioShock Infinite is just plain too good to be a videogame.

It isn't.

It's a masterpiece, mind you. It is also a videogame. That's ok.

Meanwhile, for the designers, artists, coders, testers, actors, and musicians involved in the production, it has to feel pretty good to have made a game so impressive that people who were disappointed in it seem to feel personally affronted that you didn't make it with their tastes in mind.

We Are Different, And We Do things Differently

In the wake of Newtown, I'm noticing a weird trend, among those who write about videogames, to be Mature and Rational Adults. It's refreshing. Honestly, the self-righteous faux-martyrs of our little club are far more numerous, and annoying, than the pundits and congressmen they so stridently oppose. Leigh Alexander penned an alarmingly sensible essay here, and I suggest you go read it. I'll wait here.

Selah.

Now then, I didn't spend the last few hours writing this up just to link to the blog of someone who's already famous, and in general, this trend has been a welcome one. The discussions of industry politics have also been enlightening, even where I disagreed. But then there's Robert Brockway's "The Truth about Guns and Video Games," which seems to demand a response by virtue of its sheer obnoxiousness. It's possible my response doesn't make much more sense, of course; perhaps this is how a certain subset of the population chooses to grieve in these situations. Regardless, there was so much to kvetch about that there was basically no way to avoid fisking it, so...here it is. Not in its entirety, and noted where deletions have been made, but here it is.

The thing gamers absolutely hate to admit is that modern games probably do have some connection to gun violence. It's just a matter of correlation, not causation.

Go on.

Listen: You can't say games are causing the violence. Yes, we are playing increasingly graphic and violent video games, and yes, there is something kind of disturbing about that fact --

Is there? Because I've never been clear on it. Is there some reason videogames should be expected not to have violent texts? It seems to me that you could reach this opinion by way of the following assumptions:

1. Fiction in general ought to be non-violent.
2. The videogame medium presents violence in a way that is entirely unlike any other medium.
3. The videogame medium is inherently suspect, and ought to be an object of concern if it fails to adhere to arbitrary content restrictions.

None of these are exactly intuitive to me.

but the far bigger issue here is a pretty basic one that I haven't seen anybody in mainstream media discussing:
Americans are, and always have been, an incredibly violent society.

You do live here, right? Because I hear this every fucking day. I hear it from liberals bemoaning our lack of gun control. I hear it from conservatives explaining why the lessons of other first world nations' struggles with violent crime are in no way applicable to the middle bit of the North American continent. I hear it when people try to explain away the fact that prisons in the United States hold 25% of all prisoners on planet Earth. I hear it when people insist that thirty years of coordinated violence against abortion providers are spontaneous outpourings of individual zealotry, and not the workings of a well-funded domestic terrorist group. I hear it whenever anyone suggests that trying to improve things is worse than useless.

So I hear it a lot.

[...] Everybody is standing there aghast, wondering which of our media caused all of this violent thinking; nobody's asking why we made them all in the first place. We're a nation of warriors, and most of us don't have a war.

In that case, we ought not be unique in that regard. We have comparatively relaxed standards for violence in mainstream commercial media, just as we have comparatively strict standards for sexual content in mainstream commercial media. But I assure you, with all the confidence my prose can inspire, that Americans produce enormous quantities of pornography, even though our networks won't air it. Media production is a transnational game these days, and citizens' participation in violent media production doesn't easily match up to either that nation's media restrictions or that nation's violent crime. It is perhaps a cheap shot to note that the primary developer of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, the iconic violent videogame series for the better part of a decade, is Edinburgh's Rockstar North.

Ask anybody -- go down to Whole Foods and dive-tackle the most liberal-looking person you can find. [...] Put that sucker in a headlock and only release him if he answers the following question truthfully: What do you think of the troops? Just before he passes out, he'll choke out one word: heroes.
The troops are heroes. They protect our freedom. They're making the great sacrifices so we don't have to.

Ok, I'm just going to go out on a limb here and assume that you've never actually met a liberal, but surely you've heard them described in right-wing media? We loathe the troops. We spit on returning veterans, and then erased any historical record of this widespread behavior ever happening. Hell, Massachusetts liberal John Kerry volunteered for service in Vietnam, just so he could come home afterwards and accuse soldiers of war crimes.

Granted, none of these things are true, but I find that American liberals' feelings about the military are pretty complicated. Individual soldiers may be noble patriots, hapless dupes, or kids pushed into a bad situation by endemic poverty. The brass might be soulless monsters, well-paid servants of big business, or a profession like any other, in which people with specialized technical knowledge try to solve complex, dynamic problems, with mixed results. The odd civilian massacre or gang-rape may reflect only the army's failure to sufficiently screen applicants for murderers and rapists, or it may reflect a more insidious tendency toward sadistic violence inherent in all hierarchical social structures. Many of us believe several of these things simultaneously, because we're like that. But I've never met any self-described liberal who would say those last three sentences without irony or qualification. Not one.

[...] But we as a society worship our soldiers as icons, the pinnacles of noble sacrifice, and what is their single identifying trait? Guns. Violence. We're not wrong to praise and respect our soldiers, but in idolizing them, of course we end up wanting to emulate them.

First of all, that's two single identifying traits. One of them is going to have to go. More to the point, there's a reason we refer to soldiers as "men in uniform" rather than "men with guns." Guns are freely available. Any asshole can have a gun, and "men with guns" and its variants are more likely to be applied to criminals. The uniform gets the synecdoche high-five for a highly sensible reason: under the laws of war, the guy in the uniform is legally the only guy you're allowed to kill. The uniform is a target. The difficulty in unpacking these symbols is owed, in part, to the fact that soldiers are not admired for the same reasons they're employed. The function of an army is power, violent coercion as collective action. Soldiers are valuable, in terms of statecraft, for their lethality, and their willingness to employ it impersonally. What is generally admired about soldiers is not their willingness to kill, but their willingness to die trying. Soldiers are venerated because war is scary, dangerous, and traumatic. We're finding, in the last few decades, that neither technological development nor military superiority can entirely alleviate these problems: the shortest, "cleanest" war is still going to ruin an awful lot of lives.

At risk of repetition, "good" is what you want other people to do.

"I wish I were a battle-hardened soldier," thinks the frustrated barista, as disgruntled customers whip room temperature coffee in his face -- not because he wants to shoot people, necessarily, but because soldiers hold the highest societal value to us. His life would have more meaning if he were in the heat of battle instead of crying in a Starbucks bathroom on his breaks.

I've worked in retail before, and in my experience, the ability to commit mass murder is the only sensible reason to fantasize about being a soldier whilst at work. At no point, amid being yelled at by customers over unfair textbook buyback price schedules, did I think to myself, "This would be a lot better if I were in great physical danger, had surrendered a significant portion of my civil rights, and faced jail time or execution if I stop showing up." Which is a needlessly snarky way of saying that this is a very immature way of thinking of war. It sounds very much like the kind of sentiment I would have entertained in my early teens. Looking back, it had less to do with societal value and more with a childish infatuation with death, from either side of the weapon.

We place almost as much value on our doctors, and they, too, save lives, but when it comes time for fantasy, who do we cast ourselves as? When that asshole in front of you in line at the movie theater starts shoving people around, do you imagine knocking his lights out, or rushing up to tend to the victims? Hey, maybe you fantasize about both -- but what's the order? We're punchers first and healers second.

To be fair, it's hard to heal them before you punch them.

Because, like it or not, that's our subconscious archetype of the word "hero": somebody who solves problems with righteous violence.

That isn't our subconscious archetype. That's the literal definition of the word. The etymology goes back a ways, through a few different languages, but "hero" has meant "skilled practitioner of the military arts" for much longer than it has meant anything else. It's since taken on connotations less martial, though sadly no more venereal. This sort of things happens a lot. Two thousand-odd years in, Christianity is still trying to work out a way to synthesize the lamb of God with the Davidic warrior king. This is a philosophical problem, and it's not just older than the assault rifle, it's older than the fucking longbow.

That's what video games are: They are emulators for the systemic violence inherent in our culture. They allow us to hurt a lot of people, to feel that we are effective problem solvers and prolific distributors of sacred punches, all without actually harming anybody.

Even if we restrict the field to action games, this is still a pretty bold claim to make. It's not wrong, but it implies that the near-infinite functions of a game can be reduced to one, and I'm not sure why they ought to be reduced to this one in particular.

Yes, that's pretty fucking sick.

Is it? Really?

But so are human beings in general. Video games are just a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that basic, nasty little idea: "Heroes hurt bad guys."
That's the problem.
That's the idea that gets twisted. Who the villains and the heroes are is a malleable concept: Everybody's the protagonist in the story in their head, or at least the relatable antihero. If they're not Die Hard, butchering terrorists for freedom, then they're the Count of Monte Cristo, doing awful things but for perfectly valid reasons. The roles are flexible, but the way they deal with one another is not.

The identities of the heroes and villains are only malleable from a third-person perspective. Outside of an "objective" frame, they're as immalleable as can be. The second-person is the villain. The first-person, in retaliation, becomes a hero. The fact that this kind of heroism necessitates an a priori villain is, in fact, a problematic thing, and it weighs heavily on the structure of our fiction. It has a lot to tell us about how people looking for an excuse to dominate and oppress might find one, but I think it's a fundamentally different issue than why domination and oppression might be worth doing in the first place.

It's violence. And violence escalates. Somebody shoves you, so you throw a punch. When your back is turned, they throw a rock. You retaliate with a board; they come back with a knife. You come back with a gun, and they -- oh hey! Looks like that confrontation is over. You don't come back anymore when the gun comes out. So confrontations are most easily solved with violence, violence escalates, and right now, guns are at the top of the escalator - all waiting to shoot folks in a nice neat little assembly line.

This is actually pretty sensible, and comes close to something important before veering off into self-congratulatory apologia. He's describing an arms race of sorts, non-fictional processes that do, in fact, happen. Usually between nations or nation-states, or competing species. Usually taking place over generations, or millions of years. Real interpersonal violence rarely plays out so neatly. Similarly, the concept of proportionate response--I'll retaliate with this severity, and no more--can really only be done in the abstract. Human beings are not physiologically equipped to feel "this much fear and no more." So, while we can re-read Graham Allison and ask whether arms races make war more or less likely, we should also be able to agree that this doesn't make any sense at the individual level. Interpersonal violence is inherently unpredictable. The memes described above are not a useful description of how hostile individuals interact with each other, but they are a very useful description of the tropes by which we traditionally dramatize those interactions in fiction.

The solution seems obvious: Why don't we just ban guns? Shit, that was easy. Right?

It's been suggested, yeah.

Well, no:

Shit.

Guns are only the easiest of the final solutions. Bombs are harder, more technical, and less certain. But ban guns, and you'll find bombs will have taken their place.

Probably not in the same numbers, though. I usually see this argument start with the opposite claim: that bombs are easy to build, and any idiot can do it. And it's true, but for the following caveats:

1. Any idiot can find instructions to build bombs very easily, but instructions are not a bomb. I can give you a competent explanation of how fission bombs are built, but I still can't build a neutron gun at home.
2. Bombs are inherently single-use devices, so the only way to know if it's going to work when you want it to is to prototype and test. This is, empirically, a surprisingly effective sort of deterrent. Even evil people generally don't like to do more work than they have to, especially when the work is inherently dangerous. And then there are the evil people who don't mind putting in the extra hours, but aren't that good at math, or aren't quite as dextrous as they'd believed prior to being killed in explosions.

It's a bit of a one-off, though. Moving on.

People love to point out that most other First World nations have a near blanket ban on guns, and their murder rates are so far below America's that you need to lean way back from the chart just to see both of our relative positions.
But that's supposing that America is like other First World nations. We're not. Break those murder statistics down and you'll see that the vast majority of them are gun crimes, but not all. Americans murder with everything -- with cars, with knives, with frozen fish -- whatever's at hand, we'll kill a motherfucker with it, because he needed killing and we're a nation of go-getters.

I'm curious which particular stats are being cited here, but as far as I know it's more or less true. However, without the gun crimes, the difference between the U.S. and the Brand X nation-state is a lot smaller. And, unless I'm mistaken, about what you'd expect from a country with our relative deprivation and lack of a social safety net. As discussed earlier, it's a hell of a lot more complicated than gun control, but it's not fundamentally different than any other violent crime issue. (As there are no numbers in this paragraph, you may, if you like, assume I am mistaken and move on.)

So if the problem isn't our video games or our media, but rather the stories and the roles we idolize, how do we address something so abstract? Well, we can start by consciously thinking about the ways that we teach children moral lessons. No more conventional heroes -- no more knights slaying dragons with swords, or gunslingers dueling at high noon, or martial artists split-kicking time-ninjas in their underwear. Our heroes need to start solving problems with polite but firm discussion and careful planning.

No, our heroes can keep murdering each other, because the murder is half the reason we want heroes in the first place. (We're making some headway on how we feel about heroic rape and heroic child slavery, though, so progress is being made.) We should probably do a better job of explaining that these are works of fiction, and owe their popularity to their ability to provide compelling mediated experiences. I think it would help a lot more to spend some time talking about how non-fictional people solve problems, as well as what the historical outcomes tend to be when people forget that they don't live in a goddamned Michael Bay movie. But he's setting up a joke here, and we'll let him finish.

All right then, I guess we as gamers have only one recourse: We stop denying our role in the larger problem of gun violence altogether.

As citizens, sure. I think that's what why we're all doing these hang-wringing blog posts. As members of a community that seems to produce more than its share of entitled sociopaths, sure, and I hope fans of hard sci-fi and libertarian politics will do the same. But as members of a community that produces media...I'm not sure there's any responsibility left once you've exhausted the first two.

Nobody's buying it anyway.

Really? Because even the politicians can barely manage to pay lip service to the media effects paradigm these days. I mean, there's Conservapedia, and you. And the NRA. But I think LaPierre made it quite clear that, for some reason, only violent media from the early 1990s has a causal relationship with gun violence.

You can spout studies and statistics all you want, and your debate partner will turn around and see a 10-year-old in his living room mowing down a village full of Arabs with a technically accurate machine gun, proudly rattling off the virtues of its fire rate and reload times.

Admittedly, this does sound pretty disturbing. Primarily because it sounds like Robert Brockway has actually met the kid from Looper.

Gamers look ridiculous when we flail about, trying to deny that a fourth grader who understands the benefits of burst fire and knows to hold his breath while sniping is a bit disconcerting.

Are we actually worried that this fourth-grader is going to grow up and become part of a team that engages multiple armed assailants at distances between 200 and 300 meters? Because that's the situation in which understanding the benefits of burst fire is actually going to matter. Ironically, one of my persistent issues with FPSs is that the mode of play is fundamentally ill-equipped to handle anything but Daleks. FPSs are built around iron-sight aiming at a distance--although not so much distance that friction or gravity come into play. the Metal Gear Solid series, while certainly running uncomfortably close to pure gun fetishism in some of the cut-scenes, seems to drill into you pretty quickly that weapons are tools suited to specific situations, and that the avatar is the protagonist, not the weapon. I'm not sure whether or not it's a coincidence that MGS is also famous for crafting puzzles with multiple solutions of varying lethality. I can only say that, after cutting my teeth on the FPS boom in the 90s, it's so refreshing to play games where a machinegun actually feels like overkill. But that's neither here nor there.

Our collective response, as gamers, to the accusation that video games have some connection to real violence should not be: "Nuh uh!"

That would be fantastic. I'm easily seventy or eighty years old these days, and this isn't my first moral panic. I've seen this movie before. Hell, after Columbine, I was in that movie for a while. But "Nuh uh," while perhaps not the best we can do, also isn't inaccurate. The vague talk of a "connection" between a technical process, an artistic medium, and mass murder, isn't particularly harmful, beyond the point that it's a waste of time. It's nonsense, in the sense that it says nothing of substance. What videogames--particularly videogame narratives--share common cause with isn't the problem of persistent gun violence in the United States, but cultural traditions concerning the management of violence, terror, and death. Some aspects of these traditions, like the tendency toward hero(-killer) worship, are as much physiological as they are cultural, and we aren't the only primate species with complicated, hierarchical social relationships. The issues Brockway is talking about here are older than homo sapiens. American gun violence isn't. Neither are any of the other political issues to which it relates.

We need to cop to it, and start thinking of ways to mitigate the consequences.

I'll keep at it. I hope you do, as well.

It's 4/20 Somewhere

A few months back, I went to MIT's GameLab symposium, ran into old friends and new acquaintances. The content was interesting, of course, but aside from finding myself suddenly in the same room with Peter Molyneux--and becoming very self-conscious of all the smack I've talked about him all these years--I mostly remember the breaks, and the reception, and the repeated catch-ups and introductions. I was exhausted, having been up late reminiscing with an old Tori room friend until the wee small hours of the morning, and found that I lacked the enthusiasm to be embarrassed about how things were going. So when people asked how I was, I didn't find a way to change the subject, or inflate pipe dreams into viable projects. I simply answered, in as friendly and earnest a manner as I could manage, "I'm terrible. How're you?"

The feeling is strangely liberating. Doris Rusch, of Akrasia and Elude fame, advised me to write a novel. It's a tall order, but I suppose she does have credibility on the topic. Tell you what, Doris. You make a game about writer's block, I'll throw 60,000 words into something from the Goofy Vampire Shit file. Who knows, if housewives can masturbate to it, I could finally be writing for a living.

If you'll bear with me, you'll find that you've been bearing with me for the last two paragraphs, because I haven't bothered to introduce the topic of this post, which is the Newtown shooting. I begin with the symposium to bring some context to my initial reaction: shock and disbelief. Specifically, shock and disbelief that people were rending their garments over a rampage shooting in America. The fault here is clearly mine; my capacities for shock and grief have been stretched a bit thin recently. To put it succinctly, I feel badly.

The thing is, even had I not been operating from a place of sullen amorality, I think I still would have been surprised at the extent of the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending. Because, honestly, if I reacted to every rampage shooting with the pity and anger and incomprehension of Columbine, I'd have either moved out of the U.S. or stopped reading the news years ago.

I promised to post exactly two things about this, because, as noted here, I gave at the office, and don't have a whole lot to say on the subject that's either original or interesting. The first was this, because it's the logical starting point for what interests me about the current cultural moment. There are a lot of issues in play right now in American politics, but gun control really isn't one of them. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it hasn't been in play for the decade or two; we'll have to see how the current kerfuffle plays out. If I'm not mistaken, the most significant changes wrought by the Columbine shooting, aside from the ongoing militarization of our schools, was a change in Wal-Mart's inventory. Since then, the most notable gun-related policy shift has been the expiration of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly (and oddly) referred to as the Assault Weapons Ban. This is not the brutal, gunless dystopia we were promised, and like his failure to crash the stock market and cripple American capital, reflects badly on Obama's willingness or ability to destroy America as he promised.

This has not stopped gun control opponents from making impassioned, heartfelt, deontological arguments, but I admit that I'm not entirely certain who they're hoping to reach, because gun rights are under no real threat. Congress can barely pass popular legislation, let alone "culture war" shit. Not only are "guns"--the entire broad category of ballistic weaponry, apparently, from the flamelock onward--not going to be banned, but no congressman is going to even introduce legislation to that effect. The most that's going to happen, barring a massive sea-change in Congress' perception of the electorate, is a ban on certain high-capacity magazines, and possibly the return of the PS&RFUPA. (That law is a lot of fun to type.)

I am, as a rule, deeply suspicious of principle, so when I see people making wide, generalized deontological arguments about present-day politics, I start asking whether the application of said principle can be defended on any grounds other than the authority of the principle itself. There are plenty of reasons one might prefer to live in a society that has few restrictions on private ownership of weapons. Hunting and home-defense remain perennial rhetorical favorites. Less commonly asserted is the value of corpse-free recreational shooting itself, which is to say, pleasure. A lot of people think guns are fun. Pleasure is a legitimate social good to be considered and weighed alongside others. This is an issue that can be dealt with through standard, boring democratic means.

What I find more concerning is the obfuscatory argument-by-invocation, the assertion that the second amendment takes democratic processes off the table. We can live in a society of freely available weaponry if we want to, but the second amendment does not obligate us to. At least, nobody claimed that it did until the 1960s. Regardless, it would be disingenuous to say that this ties our hands. The 18th amendment made alcohol illegal, but we didn't throw up our hands and say that the Constitution prevented us from drinking. We repealed that motherfucker. Ok, first, we continued drinking alcohol in huge quantities, helped subsidize aggressive organized crime syndicates that would then proceed to infiltrate our law enforcement operations, and started wearing really wonderfully fashionable clothing. But then we repealed that motherfucker. We, collectively, can do what we want. Some of those things might require more than a simple majority vote, but nothing is forever off the table. That is ok. That is how republics do things. The Bill of Rights is not the Decalogue. God will not wither our souls if we make bad policy choices. We will simply have to live with bad policy choices until we decide to change them. The argument from authority is not sufficient. If the Founders are worth listening to, we can discern that fact that the policy merits of their ideas, not the fact of their capitalized mythic identity.

This is not to say that we should take constitutional restrictions lightly, nor do I mean to suggest that more restrictive gun control policies would have uniformly positive, predictable outcomes. Conversely, that is not to say that trendy nihilism is the appropriate response. Yes, it is true that we cannot prevent all violence, all evil, everywhere. It is true, it is obvious, and employed effectively, it can add a meaningful rhetorical flourish. It seems to have every quality but that of being useful. We also can't prevent death, not indefinitely. But I still take the trouble to eat every day, and I take care when I make left turns. That utopia is unavailable is not, in itself, an argument that the status quo is the best for which we may hope. Chalking it up to original sin is not a policy prescription. Despair, like hope, is not a strategy.

Related, arguing that it's in poor taste to discuss policy, that it's "too soon" and sensitivity to the victims demands that we stammer awkwardly and change the subject, is a classic small-c conservative move, the first and most beloved argument to obstruct the democratic process. Yes, the media coverage is sure to be traumatic to many. This can be mitigated somewhat by consideration on the part of individual journalists, but in wake of a tragedy of this magnitude, I sincerely doubt that our contribution to the survivors' misery is more than negligible, in terms of total abject horror. If you're interested, you can test it out yourself. Find a parent who lost a child to accident, suicide, or murder, and tell them how lucky they are that they didn't have to see references to their pain in the media. I'm sure they'll agree that they have much to be thankful for.

As nice as it would be to bend the entire culture to sympathy for the victims, there are many, many children who haven't been shot yet, and they matter too. It would be nice if we could collectively and unobtrusively sit shiva with the victims' families, but we do have stuff to do. The supplication for sensitive silence is a specific application of the more general use of "politics" as a dirty word, denoting arguments over outcomes that are meaningless to all but the players directly involved. Politics, says the meme, is for politicians, a species of humanoid insect in flesh masks. It's despicable the way people keep trying to polticize the ongoing threat of random violence, as if the means by which we make collaborative decisions about how best to ensure our well-being could possibly have anything to do with preventing violent crime.

Thankfully, we are having that discussion. Sadly, in the main, it's not going terribly well. The gut reactions seem to mostly involve "banning" things that are already illegal, a matter not helped by the bizarre insistence that a problem that is partially technological be dealt with at any level of technical specificity. Semi-automatic and automatic are not synonymous; fully automatic weapons are already illegal, and have been for some time; the term "assault weapon" is a vague term describing semi-automatics that look like assault rifles. We've been playing first-person shooters for twenty fucking years now. It's not unreasonable to expect people to know a bit about guns.

On the other side of the aisle, Prohibition and the drug war are not the only times the government has attempted to ban things. As far as similarities go between alcohol, marijuana, and semi-automatic rifles chambered for .556 rounds, the fact that people have wanted to ban them is pretty much it. The risk factors, means of production, and moral economy differ entirely. Similarly, the argument that "criminals can always get guns" is somewhat specious, in that the availability of illegal guns is a function of the availability of legal guns. I rather doubt that criminals have set up underground factories into which they import raw materials and produce illicit weapons. It seems like that sort of operation would be much easier to find than, say, a grow house. (It is worth noting that, yes, 3D printing might make this reality in a few years. The meme might be more true by then.) The trade in illegal guns does raise some concerns about the efficacy of state laws in a country with 48 easily-transgressable internal borders. It also suggests that, if such a policy were enacted carelessly, we do run the risk of disarming the criminals last.

Ah, but here we hit another vocabulary roadblock. It's not insightful to point out that only criminals use guns to commit murder; it's tautological. Unless we legalize murder, it is not possible for non-criminals to commit murder. But people do commit murder, without first conducting a syllogism to see if it's ok. It seems that our definition of "criminal" errs heavily on the identity of the "career criminal," an odious symbolic individual who, for all his faults, isn't usually interested in getting himself killed for no particular reason. Criminals--those ruthless, rational, career criminals we're concerned about--tend to want to live. If they didn't, the money wouldn't matter very much, and they could just find inexpensive ways to kill themselves, like being insufficiently deferent to police.

Right, the police. The state's instruments of democratically authorized violence, a vitally important job that we've decided should be treated as a low-skilled, low-paying position. Conservatives and anarchists alike espouse the importance of being able to shoot it out with the police; curiously, the conservatives also eagerly argue that police should have no checks on their power whatsoever. The anarchists have the edge on this one, ideologically, but it's not a solution to the problem of a culture that too frequently allows bullies, vigilantes, and psychopaths to wield coercive power. I'll head off my mother-in-law's objection early, by noting that, yes, fewer than 100% of police officers are perjurers, rapists, murderers, etc. In fact, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'm willing to bet that it's much, much less than 100%. The problem is that anything north of 0% is way the fuck too much. A state-authorized criminal is extraordinarily well protected, and their existence undermines public safety much more dramatically than comparably violent free agents. Furthermore, systemic problems in our legal system perpetuate rape culture, and poorly conceived, poorly implemented laws have created an underclass in which sex workers, immigrants, the homeless, etc. can expect no police protection whatsoever, putting them at an extraordinary risk for abuse both public and private. There seems to be no lobbying offensive aimed at making it easier for these folks to arm themselves, to defend themselves from violence at the hands of police, just as the shooting of Trayvon Martin did not lead to an NRA statement urging black teenagers to carry firearms to avoid street harassment. This absolute right to self-defense seems oddly haphazard in its application. But making it easier for people to shoot cops, or to shoot cops and get away with it, is not actually a solution in any reasonable sense. 

That the most egregious, unthinkable acts of violence cannot be entirely prevented is not a reason to give up on addressing the more prolific, ubiquitous acts of violence in American life. I think, should we actually do the work, we will likely find that the two are not entirely unrelated. I see no reason we couldn't have a sane, reasonably safe society and relatively unencumbered access to firearms for those that want them--there are fewer examples in the world than there used to be, perhaps, but, as Chesterton said, society is a human invention. "Could" is a very, very wide word. The question is what types and qualities of risk we're willing to tolerate, by binding or loosing. We can deal with this at the level of actual trade-offs, goods to be weighed against one another.

Finally--I swear--the emphasis on the more grandiose episodes conceal as much as they reveal, and aren't likely to lead to good policy. Rampage killers are, by definition, the most difficult to deter. They can be made less deadly, which would certainly be a worthwhile goal. But preventing rampage shootings is going to involve a hell of a lot more than vague generalities about mental health. It will involve dealing with the general patterns of violence in our culture, the role of privilege, and an awareness of the amount of psychopathy we're willing to let slide as long as you're a white guy from a decent neighborhood. It will involve economic justice, improved law enforcement, and a reduction of a hundred different risk factors. It will not happen overnight, and we'll need to make adjustments as we go. Fortunately, we have a technology for doing exactly that, and it works pretty well when we don't live down to our representatives' suspicions of us. It is the work of politics.