I've noticed that traffic to this site is noticeably up since I joined Google+. Relatively speaking. A 65% increase over "I think my mom reads it" is a substantive increase.
I feel a bit piqued, however, that it happened shortly before the least productive chunk of my life. There are lots of big, blank spaces over there on the Archives tab, but even when nothing ended up here, I scratched out my share of academic publications, journal entries, emails, grocery lists, death threats, slash fiction, and rock operas.
Lately, there has been nothing.
When there is no writing, unsurprisingly, there is little to no gaming. Casual games, so I've read, are ideal for this sort of situation, when time and attention are limited resources, but casual games suffer a peculiar weakness that is little remarked upon: when played in a state of severe depression, a hardcore game is still something like a game. Even if you know every beat, and are playing it entirely from the autonomic portion of your skillset, it still moves at your pace, and responds to your whims. Not a story per se, but more like a satisfying walk taken many times before, as Espen Aarseth once suggested to me. Genre conventions, sufficiently codified, can allow this experience even in "new" texts. Casual games, on the other hand, when played under sufficient duress, cease to feel like anything at all.
The more-than-casual stuff usually holds up. Which is why I found it quite surprising, shortly after helping Kratos to pull--not cut, but pull--the head of Phoebus from his body, that I found myself too depressed to continue playing God of War III. It became clear, at this point, that I had no choice but to dance.
As Jane McGonigal wrote in Reality is Broken, dancing is a) a reliable source of happiness, b) an extraordinary display of vulnerability, which is why our brains so often refuse to consider a) sufficient reason to do it. Personally, I am overweight, uncoordinated, and self-conscious about both my appearance and my taste in music. So naturally I try to find opportunities to dance in public when they present themselves. Same reason scared-to-death undergrad me joined a theater group that would soon have me (diegetically) jerking off onstage. Eventually you just run out of shame. If you're going to feel afraid anyway, it feels better to act in such a way that being afraid is more reasonable.
Which is the confusing part about Dance Central, for me: the utter shamelessness involved in playing it takes the experience far out of the realm of game-playing as I usually experience it. I suppose, by Jesper Juul's criteria, the mimetic interface would classify it as a casual game; perhaps I don't think of it as such only because playing it requires preparation (moving furniture out of the way, tranq'ing the cat) that I recognize as the precise opposite of "casual." As a vocal proponent of non-stupid theory, I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Simple, intuitive interface, pleasant fiction, short time commitment, juicy...it's a convincing case. But it's a bit more than that, as the activity required/depicted isn't changed significantly by the game's feedback. In fact, what Dance Central actually does is apply the tools of fixation--game-like apparatuses--to a fundamental expression of the joy of being embodied.
God of War is many things, but at a narrative level, it's compelling because of bodies. Impossible, inexhaustible, superhuman bodies, and the ways to break them. At one level, it's fun because it's fun to be Kratos. (At another level, it's fun because the game constantly reminds you that you're not Kratos, which is the post I was trying to write when I opened up blogger.) Without emotion, there is no meaning, and without narrative, there is no goal. What is admirable, what is exciting, what is interesting about Kratos is about the experience of being embodied.
When you don't want to be in your body, or any body, it's difficult to enjoy...anything. It shouldn't be surprising that this includes action/adventure games. I find that Dance Central helps me circumvent this problem by making enjoyment of the body the game itself.
I can't wait to see what happens when Harmonix decides to do a game about fucking.
Monday, October 8, 2012
Friday, August 31, 2012
Naked Snake and the Philosopher's Stone
Like the rest of the series, MGS3 begins with a fucklot of cutscenes. My first mistake, it seems, was paying attention to the dialogue.
Not because the dialogue is bad, mind you--it isn't--but because the MGS series uses the dialogue both to describe the diegetic world and to poke holes in the plastic film of the fourth wall. The map is not the terrain, and the narrative is not the game. The diegetic gameworld has little concept of Continue, of course, and we all accept that any sentence that ends with "...or you'll die horribly" should be read to mean "...or you'll have to restart from the next checkpoint." Stealth games carry their own suspension of disbelief, that searches for an intruder will eventually be called off, as opposed to escalating into the kind of concentric search-and-destroy operation for which security forces are trained. The consequences of getting caught have to be severe enough to be interesting, but forgiving enough to be fun. But Major Zero really lays it on thick with the stealth stuff, exclaiming that you musn't engage the enemy at all, must leave no ammo casings, blood spatter, or any evidence at all that you were ever there. It's a lot to ask, even from a Metal Gear standpoint. Even with the (interesting, but not all that different) non-lethal options available in MGS2, nobody would look at an area Solid Snake had passed through and have any question that a heavy armed and highly trained special forces operative had been in to visit.
Still, I found myself wanting to do a full-on stealth thing, to actually avoid foes entirely, and the new camouflage functionality, combined with my old tricks from the previous games, seemed like it would fit the bill. (It didn't.) So I got seen, a lot. I tranq'd (tranqued?) a lot of people, and felt vaguely guilty for doing so. I broke necks and slit throats when I got annoyed. And I got seen. A lot. To the point that, fifty years later, there ought to be folk legends in Russia about the clumsy CIA agent who kept bumping into guards by accident.
You can imagine how gratified I felt, having tried to hard to be inconspicuous and play to Zero's specifications, when Volgin fired a nuke into the valley. Unlike the knife, the garrotte, and the needle, the Davy Crockett portable nuclear missile has never really been considered a "stealth" weapon.
Perhaps the story was playing a joke on the unrealities of the Tactical Espionage Action genre. Perhaps Zero was merely alerting the player, in a roundabout manner, of the types of things the NPCs would notice that they hadn't in previous games. Perhaps he was underscoring the diegetic point that it's 1964, FOX-HOUND doesn't exist yet, and the entire concept of Low-Intensity Conflict is still finding its legs. Intelligence and counterintelligence are older than dirt, of course, so at times it's difficult to remember that the shadow wars that made up American military operations through the latter half of the 20th century were breaking a lot of new ground. JFK might have been James Bond's biggest fan, but "James Bond" was hardly something that could be made into Standard Operating Procedure.
At any rate, at the commencement of Operation Snake Eater, I'd remind myself that this was still a Metal Gear game, and Zero could go fuck himself, because I'd be engaging the enemy violently and often. Which brings us to the second major point of confusion: the alarm system. More accurately, the lack thereof.
1 and 2 have a pretty simple, standardized, game-like approach to alarms. They go off, you break the line of sight and hide until it goes away. MGS2 added a few things like radio check-ins for dead/unconscious guards, but basically the pattern held. Worse came to worst, you could always just leave the area for a clean slate.
Most of MGS3 is outdoors, and there are very few alarms to pull. Reinforcements are handled by radio and person-to-person contact. So if somebody sees you, even if the Alert is blaring in the upper-right of your HUD, it goes away as soon as your observer does. There is no "general alarm" to worry about, just the guy who saw you, and anyone in range of his voice. The guy with the radio has a very long voice, but the principle holds, and logic compels you to disable him first. The logic of stealth in MGS3 is in this way more brutal than its predecessors: when you've been seen, hiding is useless. You survive by eliminating witnesses, and making sure you don't leave any living bodies, corpses, bloodstains or bullet-casings lying out where people might stumble onto them and get suspicious. (This last point leads to the more hilarious and/or horrifying moments of MGS3 when you're panicked and killing too quickly to hide the evidence, eventually leading to a badly injured Snake standing atop a pile of corpses like Frank Castle in Born.)
I was nearly finished with the game by the time I "got" this at any intuitive level, and consequently I missed a lot of weapons and items along the way. I'm replaying it now, and it's both thrilling and dull to move smoothly through a game that confounded me at every turn for so long. I stumble upon an AK-47, and wonder, why? Knowing for a fact that I can complete the game with a tranq pistol and my bare fists, why would I bother with this clumsy, unpredictable, score-killing death machine?
Which brings me to the third point that confused me for so long: not only are there redundant solutions to every conceivable problem in MGS3, but the solutions learned from the previous games are almost invariably impractical. The heavier weaponry is almost always more fun than it is practical, and I suppose that's a substantive achievement for the genre. Confusing as hell, but substantive.
In summary, 1) genre conventions override narrative conceits, 2) fight, not flight, and 3) prioritize the new shit. One could easily make the argument that these lessons, and my failure to learn them, comprise a neat allegory of my professional malaise. One would not be me, because me has one last to add: the most important red flag, when dealing with depression, is inability to enjoy things that usually bring pleasure. If I've learned one useful thing from the past five years, it'd probably be that it's harder to notice that flag when the things you do for fun are so closely linked with the things you do professionally. When you think of yourself primarily as someone who writes, games, and writes about games, it's not an occupational hazard when you find yourself unable to muster the interest to do any of those things for pleasure. It's a yawning chasm, a bright black void.
I've fucked up. A lot.
And thus, I Continue.
Not because the dialogue is bad, mind you--it isn't--but because the MGS series uses the dialogue both to describe the diegetic world and to poke holes in the plastic film of the fourth wall. The map is not the terrain, and the narrative is not the game. The diegetic gameworld has little concept of Continue, of course, and we all accept that any sentence that ends with "...or you'll die horribly" should be read to mean "...or you'll have to restart from the next checkpoint." Stealth games carry their own suspension of disbelief, that searches for an intruder will eventually be called off, as opposed to escalating into the kind of concentric search-and-destroy operation for which security forces are trained. The consequences of getting caught have to be severe enough to be interesting, but forgiving enough to be fun. But Major Zero really lays it on thick with the stealth stuff, exclaiming that you musn't engage the enemy at all, must leave no ammo casings, blood spatter, or any evidence at all that you were ever there. It's a lot to ask, even from a Metal Gear standpoint. Even with the (interesting, but not all that different) non-lethal options available in MGS2, nobody would look at an area Solid Snake had passed through and have any question that a heavy armed and highly trained special forces operative had been in to visit.
Still, I found myself wanting to do a full-on stealth thing, to actually avoid foes entirely, and the new camouflage functionality, combined with my old tricks from the previous games, seemed like it would fit the bill. (It didn't.) So I got seen, a lot. I tranq'd (tranqued?) a lot of people, and felt vaguely guilty for doing so. I broke necks and slit throats when I got annoyed. And I got seen. A lot. To the point that, fifty years later, there ought to be folk legends in Russia about the clumsy CIA agent who kept bumping into guards by accident.
You can imagine how gratified I felt, having tried to hard to be inconspicuous and play to Zero's specifications, when Volgin fired a nuke into the valley. Unlike the knife, the garrotte, and the needle, the Davy Crockett portable nuclear missile has never really been considered a "stealth" weapon.
Perhaps the story was playing a joke on the unrealities of the Tactical Espionage Action genre. Perhaps Zero was merely alerting the player, in a roundabout manner, of the types of things the NPCs would notice that they hadn't in previous games. Perhaps he was underscoring the diegetic point that it's 1964, FOX-HOUND doesn't exist yet, and the entire concept of Low-Intensity Conflict is still finding its legs. Intelligence and counterintelligence are older than dirt, of course, so at times it's difficult to remember that the shadow wars that made up American military operations through the latter half of the 20th century were breaking a lot of new ground. JFK might have been James Bond's biggest fan, but "James Bond" was hardly something that could be made into Standard Operating Procedure.
At any rate, at the commencement of Operation Snake Eater, I'd remind myself that this was still a Metal Gear game, and Zero could go fuck himself, because I'd be engaging the enemy violently and often. Which brings us to the second major point of confusion: the alarm system. More accurately, the lack thereof.
Most of MGS3 is outdoors, and there are very few alarms to pull. Reinforcements are handled by radio and person-to-person contact. So if somebody sees you, even if the Alert is blaring in the upper-right of your HUD, it goes away as soon as your observer does. There is no "general alarm" to worry about, just the guy who saw you, and anyone in range of his voice. The guy with the radio has a very long voice, but the principle holds, and logic compels you to disable him first. The logic of stealth in MGS3 is in this way more brutal than its predecessors: when you've been seen, hiding is useless. You survive by eliminating witnesses, and making sure you don't leave any living bodies, corpses, bloodstains or bullet-casings lying out where people might stumble onto them and get suspicious. (This last point leads to the more hilarious and/or horrifying moments of MGS3 when you're panicked and killing too quickly to hide the evidence, eventually leading to a badly injured Snake standing atop a pile of corpses like Frank Castle in Born.)
I was nearly finished with the game by the time I "got" this at any intuitive level, and consequently I missed a lot of weapons and items along the way. I'm replaying it now, and it's both thrilling and dull to move smoothly through a game that confounded me at every turn for so long. I stumble upon an AK-47, and wonder, why? Knowing for a fact that I can complete the game with a tranq pistol and my bare fists, why would I bother with this clumsy, unpredictable, score-killing death machine?
Which brings me to the third point that confused me for so long: not only are there redundant solutions to every conceivable problem in MGS3, but the solutions learned from the previous games are almost invariably impractical. The heavier weaponry is almost always more fun than it is practical, and I suppose that's a substantive achievement for the genre. Confusing as hell, but substantive.
In summary, 1) genre conventions override narrative conceits, 2) fight, not flight, and 3) prioritize the new shit. One could easily make the argument that these lessons, and my failure to learn them, comprise a neat allegory of my professional malaise. One would not be me, because me has one last to add: the most important red flag, when dealing with depression, is inability to enjoy things that usually bring pleasure. If I've learned one useful thing from the past five years, it'd probably be that it's harder to notice that flag when the things you do for fun are so closely linked with the things you do professionally. When you think of yourself primarily as someone who writes, games, and writes about games, it's not an occupational hazard when you find yourself unable to muster the interest to do any of those things for pleasure. It's a yawning chasm, a bright black void.
I've fucked up. A lot.
And thus, I Continue.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.
Last week, I finished Metal Gear Solid 3. It was bittersweet. We have a history, MGS3 and I. Fortunately, unlike the women I met in undergrad, MGS3 cannot be annoyed or offended by my writing it up here, and it can't file a restraining order should I attempt to play it again.
I'm old enough to remember the end of the Cold War, but not old enough to understand what it meant or why it mattered until years later. Which is to say that I am also too young to remember Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, or Snake's Revenge. I played Metal Gear once on the NES, and spent my time being confused why I was in a combat zone with a pack of cigarettes and no weapons. That was Metal Gear for me: unarmed, with addictive, carcinogenic drugs, and no clear idea what to do.
I got older, the wall came down, and Metal Gear Solid came out. I was seventeen, living in the phantom world between middle school and college, and I finished it in two sittings. Which is not to say I was particularly good at the game, just persistent. I learned the rules slowly, in the face of constant failure, but the Game is good, and the Game is kind, and I learned. Stay under the cameras. Break the neck if you're unarmed. Shoot from behind with a silenced pistol if you're not. The FAMAS for close- and medium-range firefights, the PSG-1 for long-range combat, the stinger for hard targets. Chaff grenades to make their attacks less accurate. Cigarettes and valium to make my own more accurate. MGS is a marvel of parsimony; a place for everything, and everything in its place.
I grew up a bit. "Watashi no senkoo wa seijigaku desu," is how the kids would describe it. MGS is a good thing to love if you're studying poli-sci, it turns out. The limits of deterrence theory, the ins and outs of modern weapons systems, the challenges posed by actor proliferation: all good stuff to have a handle on before you step into the classroom, especially if you haven't been there in a while. MGS stuck to me deeply in adolescence, and I suppose it sticks there still.
At 20, I acquired Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and played it manically, usually with an audience. The sheer craziness of the narrative was well-paired with the brutal sanity of the gameplay, and I died and died and died until I won. I didn't go for a lot of the secrets--I shot birds, sure, but I was never good at robbing guards, and I didn't think to look up the hostage's skirt--but I played it to death, and when I started working on my undergrad thesis, armed with a novice's knowledge of postmodern literature, I played it again. MGS2, and its progenitor, ended up being the centerpiece of my first significant academic work, my writing sample for grad school. Columbine taught me about CMS, but MGS2 got me there.
But that hadn't happened yet, so when I met Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I was living surreptitiously in my girlfriend's college housing. Like the Democratic party at the time, I was disorganized, weak-willed, and completely without direction. So when MGS3 didn't "grab" me right out of the gate, it might have been my own lack of focus that presented the problem, rather than that of the designers. We cannot blame the snow, after all, for being soiled by the earth. (We can also infer from Ms. Edison an alternate explanation.)
I'd return to MGS3 periodically over the years, sometimes with high hopes for figuring out what I was missing, sometimes out of dull determination to get it over with. I bought a DualShock 3 controller, in the hope that it would make the AP sensor more useful. I ignored entreaties to buy the enhanced re-release Subsistence. I'd pick it up, get confused, and put it back down. The rest of my life was working out much the same way. Looking back with the smallest amount of distance, I can see the sundry errors, near-misses and general-purpose fuck-ups of the last eight years mirrored in my relationship with, and my approach to, MGS3.
Next post will pick up the thread from there: how I learned to stop worrying and eat the snake, and how frustrating it is to have already used that joke on an entirely unrelated post title.
I'm old enough to remember the end of the Cold War, but not old enough to understand what it meant or why it mattered until years later. Which is to say that I am also too young to remember Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, or Snake's Revenge. I played Metal Gear once on the NES, and spent my time being confused why I was in a combat zone with a pack of cigarettes and no weapons. That was Metal Gear for me: unarmed, with addictive, carcinogenic drugs, and no clear idea what to do.
I got older, the wall came down, and Metal Gear Solid came out. I was seventeen, living in the phantom world between middle school and college, and I finished it in two sittings. Which is not to say I was particularly good at the game, just persistent. I learned the rules slowly, in the face of constant failure, but the Game is good, and the Game is kind, and I learned. Stay under the cameras. Break the neck if you're unarmed. Shoot from behind with a silenced pistol if you're not. The FAMAS for close- and medium-range firefights, the PSG-1 for long-range combat, the stinger for hard targets. Chaff grenades to make their attacks less accurate. Cigarettes and valium to make my own more accurate. MGS is a marvel of parsimony; a place for everything, and everything in its place.
I grew up a bit. "Watashi no senkoo wa seijigaku desu," is how the kids would describe it. MGS is a good thing to love if you're studying poli-sci, it turns out. The limits of deterrence theory, the ins and outs of modern weapons systems, the challenges posed by actor proliferation: all good stuff to have a handle on before you step into the classroom, especially if you haven't been there in a while. MGS stuck to me deeply in adolescence, and I suppose it sticks there still.
At 20, I acquired Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and played it manically, usually with an audience. The sheer craziness of the narrative was well-paired with the brutal sanity of the gameplay, and I died and died and died until I won. I didn't go for a lot of the secrets--I shot birds, sure, but I was never good at robbing guards, and I didn't think to look up the hostage's skirt--but I played it to death, and when I started working on my undergrad thesis, armed with a novice's knowledge of postmodern literature, I played it again. MGS2, and its progenitor, ended up being the centerpiece of my first significant academic work, my writing sample for grad school. Columbine taught me about CMS, but MGS2 got me there.
But that hadn't happened yet, so when I met Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I was living surreptitiously in my girlfriend's college housing. Like the Democratic party at the time, I was disorganized, weak-willed, and completely without direction. So when MGS3 didn't "grab" me right out of the gate, it might have been my own lack of focus that presented the problem, rather than that of the designers. We cannot blame the snow, after all, for being soiled by the earth. (We can also infer from Ms. Edison an alternate explanation.)
I'd return to MGS3 periodically over the years, sometimes with high hopes for figuring out what I was missing, sometimes out of dull determination to get it over with. I bought a DualShock 3 controller, in the hope that it would make the AP sensor more useful. I ignored entreaties to buy the enhanced re-release Subsistence. I'd pick it up, get confused, and put it back down. The rest of my life was working out much the same way. Looking back with the smallest amount of distance, I can see the sundry errors, near-misses and general-purpose fuck-ups of the last eight years mirrored in my relationship with, and my approach to, MGS3.
Next post will pick up the thread from there: how I learned to stop worrying and eat the snake, and how frustrating it is to have already used that joke on an entirely unrelated post title.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Detritus
This is a really shitty essay on ethics and evolution, and I felt compelled to respond. Then I read it again and found the prospect of responding too dull. Then my partner got a phone call and I needed something to do for a few minutes.
At its heart, it seems--along with the usual anti-materialist concerns about "how dare you use our idiotic prejudices about bodies and physicality against us"--is a complete failure to distinguish between descriptive and normative ethics. That some scientists study how moral decisions are made seems, to the author, to lead inexorably to the conclusion that he must be an insect or a computer or something. Because after all, if ethics really did involve conscious decision-making at any level, surely it would be impossible to study how various animal species behave!
So, I'm going to skip largely over what the author is saying, because what the author is saying is stupid, stupid bullshit. But it's worth spending some time on what the author is implying, that the very idea of descriptive ethics is not only pointless, but actually offensive to the legitimate field of normative ethics. I'm not sure what the antipathy is, exactly, although it probably doesn't help that advances in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have led to white-coated scientists empirically verifying things that Enlightenment philosophers pointed out three-hundred years ago, to wide cultural acclaim. We like scientists. Scientists make things. We are not, culturally, as enamored of fancypants professors. Nobody is more pissed off about this than I am; fancypants professor would be a good career path for me, whereas my science education is woefully inadequate, and my technical skill has so far served me to write some papers and code a text-based game about Kant's murderer-at-the-door scenario in C++.
The decisions made by ants are, in some ways, similar to decisions made by humans. They are also, in other ways, very different. They're primarily interpreted and executed via written/spoken language, an evolutionary technology so bizarre that only primates could come up with it. They are also orders of magnitude more complex, as our species has nested our fundamental concerns behind so many layers of interpersonal bureaucracy that we often lose sight of them entirely. But if ethics is to be merely a study of what we ought to do, it's worth pointing out that nearly every ethical philosophy already agrees on what any given person ought to do on a day to day basis, and argument tends to arise over issues that are either extraordinarily complex or hilariously rare. Still a worthwhile use of one's time, but there's beauty, and useful data, looking at it from the other end once in a while.
We can shake our fists at the blind, pitiless unvierse and bellow "I am human!" if we like, until Sheldon Cooper asks us why we're yelling tautologies at the sky. Of course we're human. This is not something in dispute. But we are also primates, and every part of us has some similarity to chimpanzees and bonobos, and we have a little less similarity to the gorillas and orangutans, etc. We didn't pop into the universe from nothing. What we did was develop a technology that radically accelerated our differentiation from the non-hominids. We walked into this movie in the middle, to paraphrase Stephen King. So we have a lot of work to do to get up to speed.
And it turns out there's a lot to learn from ants, and primates, and computers, because every metaphor we can develop for how humans function gives us new data to work with. And while "cooperative animal behavior" might not precisely equal "human virtue," it is worth noting that humans are animals, and all of our virtues (as well as many of our vices) involve cooperating with someone. More to the point, the cooperative animal behavior of ants isn't human virtue in much the same way that a cell isn't a person. They're different things. Still, get a few billion (?) cells together and weird things happen. Things you wouldn't have predicted. One of the things that can happen is a person, with awareness of moral law: an awareness just as certain as the fear of pain.
Big things are made of small things, to quote Gaius Secondus, and if you want to understand the big things, it helps to look at the small things. Free will is only a useful concept is we assume there are a) decisions to be made, and b) criteria for choosing one thing over another. While the gene theory of evolution, or theories of kin selection or group selection in general, might not be descriptive (human) ethics per se, they do suggest some fine candidates for where b) come from, and why they matters.
In Alien, the malevolent AI--who may or may not have any sense of "ought" in his synthetic brain--expresses admiration precisely for the titular xenomorph's lack of said "ought": "I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded my conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." And perhaps he's right. Primarily what the alien does to the crew of the Nostromo is kill and eat. Eating, as being part of that whole "urge to not die" thing, might be considered to be somewhere on our moral radar, but it might not. And besides, if we consider Alien to be a closed universe, unencumbered by the stories developed in sequels, the alien might not need to eat. It might be outside our rules of thermodynamics, or it might feed on starlight. Who the hell knows.
I bring it up because, if we do include the sequels, we see aliens working in groups to ensure the survival of their group. In particular, we see them making extraordinary sacrifices to ensure the protection of the queen and the survival of her eggs. What we see, in Aliens, and again in Alien Resurrection, is family. They likely don't "know" that's what they are, and they have no way to justify their actions as morally significant. I would question whether this is an entirely black-and-white distinction between cooperation and ethics. Animals don't have to "know" that fucking will prolong their species, but this ignorance doesn't make it any less effective. Perhaps a better question would be, can actions that reliably produce what we would determine to be moral outcomes be definitely said not to be moral actions?
At its heart, it seems--along with the usual anti-materialist concerns about "how dare you use our idiotic prejudices about bodies and physicality against us"--is a complete failure to distinguish between descriptive and normative ethics. That some scientists study how moral decisions are made seems, to the author, to lead inexorably to the conclusion that he must be an insect or a computer or something. Because after all, if ethics really did involve conscious decision-making at any level, surely it would be impossible to study how various animal species behave!
So, I'm going to skip largely over what the author is saying, because what the author is saying is stupid, stupid bullshit. But it's worth spending some time on what the author is implying, that the very idea of descriptive ethics is not only pointless, but actually offensive to the legitimate field of normative ethics. I'm not sure what the antipathy is, exactly, although it probably doesn't help that advances in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have led to white-coated scientists empirically verifying things that Enlightenment philosophers pointed out three-hundred years ago, to wide cultural acclaim. We like scientists. Scientists make things. We are not, culturally, as enamored of fancypants professors. Nobody is more pissed off about this than I am; fancypants professor would be a good career path for me, whereas my science education is woefully inadequate, and my technical skill has so far served me to write some papers and code a text-based game about Kant's murderer-at-the-door scenario in C++.
The decisions made by ants are, in some ways, similar to decisions made by humans. They are also, in other ways, very different. They're primarily interpreted and executed via written/spoken language, an evolutionary technology so bizarre that only primates could come up with it. They are also orders of magnitude more complex, as our species has nested our fundamental concerns behind so many layers of interpersonal bureaucracy that we often lose sight of them entirely. But if ethics is to be merely a study of what we ought to do, it's worth pointing out that nearly every ethical philosophy already agrees on what any given person ought to do on a day to day basis, and argument tends to arise over issues that are either extraordinarily complex or hilariously rare. Still a worthwhile use of one's time, but there's beauty, and useful data, looking at it from the other end once in a while.
We can shake our fists at the blind, pitiless unvierse and bellow "I am human!" if we like, until Sheldon Cooper asks us why we're yelling tautologies at the sky. Of course we're human. This is not something in dispute. But we are also primates, and every part of us has some similarity to chimpanzees and bonobos, and we have a little less similarity to the gorillas and orangutans, etc. We didn't pop into the universe from nothing. What we did was develop a technology that radically accelerated our differentiation from the non-hominids. We walked into this movie in the middle, to paraphrase Stephen King. So we have a lot of work to do to get up to speed.
And it turns out there's a lot to learn from ants, and primates, and computers, because every metaphor we can develop for how humans function gives us new data to work with. And while "cooperative animal behavior" might not precisely equal "human virtue," it is worth noting that humans are animals, and all of our virtues (as well as many of our vices) involve cooperating with someone. More to the point, the cooperative animal behavior of ants isn't human virtue in much the same way that a cell isn't a person. They're different things. Still, get a few billion (?) cells together and weird things happen. Things you wouldn't have predicted. One of the things that can happen is a person, with awareness of moral law: an awareness just as certain as the fear of pain.
Big things are made of small things, to quote Gaius Secondus, and if you want to understand the big things, it helps to look at the small things. Free will is only a useful concept is we assume there are a) decisions to be made, and b) criteria for choosing one thing over another. While the gene theory of evolution, or theories of kin selection or group selection in general, might not be descriptive (human) ethics per se, they do suggest some fine candidates for where b) come from, and why they matters.
In Alien, the malevolent AI--who may or may not have any sense of "ought" in his synthetic brain--expresses admiration precisely for the titular xenomorph's lack of said "ought": "I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded my conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." And perhaps he's right. Primarily what the alien does to the crew of the Nostromo is kill and eat. Eating, as being part of that whole "urge to not die" thing, might be considered to be somewhere on our moral radar, but it might not. And besides, if we consider Alien to be a closed universe, unencumbered by the stories developed in sequels, the alien might not need to eat. It might be outside our rules of thermodynamics, or it might feed on starlight. Who the hell knows.
I bring it up because, if we do include the sequels, we see aliens working in groups to ensure the survival of their group. In particular, we see them making extraordinary sacrifices to ensure the protection of the queen and the survival of her eggs. What we see, in Aliens, and again in Alien Resurrection, is family. They likely don't "know" that's what they are, and they have no way to justify their actions as morally significant. I would question whether this is an entirely black-and-white distinction between cooperation and ethics. Animals don't have to "know" that fucking will prolong their species, but this ignorance doesn't make it any less effective. Perhaps a better question would be, can actions that reliably produce what we would determine to be moral outcomes be definitely said not to be moral actions?
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The X-Men Theory of Human Relations
It's hard to imagine how homo
sapiens managed to do “myth” without the benefit of cross-media promotional
tie-ins, but they managed. We have our modern myths, we are told—big, sprawling
projects by fat, bearded white dudes. We have films people want to live in, and
worlds people want to play in, and behave like jerks. Myth is four letters long
and a mile wide, and it's one of the things we're pretty great at. Give
yourselves a hand, people.
The second paragraph demonstrates a purer form. Property comes from a prior agreement to honor the concept of property with violence. In its absence, it amounts to whatever you can seize, whatever you can hold. Whatever you can carry off. The word in Latin is raptus. Historically, the opportunity for mass rape is part of how mercenaries are paid. The prospect of owning a woman motivates car-buying and mercenary warfare, in these examples, but neither of these things is about women, unless you've already accepted the idea that the defining characteristic of women is that men want them.
It applies for basically any group that can be seized, carried off, exploited, enslaved, or generally exploited by another, but X-Men seems to dramatize it in a way we're all comfortable with, so that's the label I go with. The X-Men theory of human relations is this: if your value as a thing that is wanted exceeds your value as a thing that acts--if what you are is seen as more important than what you can think or do--you're fucked.
My metaphysical ideas are confusing,
but if I were to settle on a particular myth or mythic structure for our
present day—not so much a religious pantheon as a collection of symbols we all agreed
to behave as if our anscestors used as a religious pantheon—it would be the
X-Men. Not so much for the inherent cleverness of the concept, or the writers
who've ably employed it over the decades, but because it's flexible, renewable,
and strong. In the sense that, with a cast that big, it has to hold an awful
lot of fuckin' weight.
In the most
famous of the various stories that circle through the various media of the
franchise, such as the Mutant Registration Act, the Weapon Plus project, the Cure, the
rise of the sentinels, etc., there's invariably one particular villain who
anchors the action, and a bigger, vaguer villain painting the scenery. The
government, the army, men in black. Frightened teenagers all over the world,
many of them with hilariously silly names and fashion choices, cowering in fear
that some unstoppable entity is going to take them out of their homes and away
from their families, to be put in a cage where...
...where what,
exactly? What exactly is the concern with any large-scale investigation into
these loveable superbeings? Why does Sanctuary need to operate in secret? Why
do the diamond-realdoll vampires of Twilight give a shit if people find out
they exist? Why all the hiding?
Sure, people want
to kill them. But that's not the fear. Plenty of our supernatural heroes face the prospect of violent death every day; so do plenty of people here in the really real world, and the supernatural heroes are a hell of a lot better equipped to deal with that fact. Cassandra Nova's inspirations aside, the sentinels aren't interested in genocide. There's no profit in it. Whereas there's quite a bit of profit in a prison full of properly licensed, corporate-owned mutants? Now that's something special. Not in the sense of being interesting to read about, as it ends the story. But there's money to be made.
The common element of all of our fabled supernatural warriors--the reason we like reading about them, dress up as them for Halloween, etc.--is that they're unique and useful. They can do things we wish we could do. Which means they can do things we wish we could have done for us. Often, there are things we'd like to do to/with them. Many of the people in their diegetic worlds feel the same way. People want them. And when people want something, there's an awful lot of money to be made in procuring it for them.
At risk of going in way over my head, things aren't valuable because of inherent qualities, or because they're useful, or because they're rare. Market theory holds that things are valuable because someone's willing to pay for them, i.e. make a sacrifice proportional to the assigned value. I need not have an opinion on the theory, which is fortunate, because I am untrained and it wouldn't matter anyway. For my purposes here, however, I will amend it to say that what ultimately makes things valuable is want. People sacrifice for things they want, and you can make a very nice helping to assuage that want.
There was another plagiarism scandal today, so I'm going to have to link to the generally execrable article I'm going to be quoting:
Go look outside. See those cars driving by? Every car being driven by a man was designed and built and bought and sold with you in mind. The only reason why small, fuel-efficient or electric cars don't dominate the roads is because we want to look cool in our cars, to impress you. [...]
How one gets from the first paragraph to the second without noticing a rather disturbing analogy, I can only presume. Suffice to say, the car isn't about women. It wasn't designed to impress women. It was designed to be sold at a profit. In this case, sold to men, who tend to have more money. And who tend to want women.
All those wars we fight? Sure, at the upper levels, in the halls of political power, they have some complicated reasons for wanting some piece of land or access to some resource. But on the ground? Well, let me ask you this -- historically, when an army takes over a city, what happens to the women there?
It's all about you. All of it. All of civilization.
The second paragraph demonstrates a purer form. Property comes from a prior agreement to honor the concept of property with violence. In its absence, it amounts to whatever you can seize, whatever you can hold. Whatever you can carry off. The word in Latin is raptus. Historically, the opportunity for mass rape is part of how mercenaries are paid. The prospect of owning a woman motivates car-buying and mercenary warfare, in these examples, but neither of these things is about women, unless you've already accepted the idea that the defining characteristic of women is that men want them.
It applies for basically any group that can be seized, carried off, exploited, enslaved, or generally exploited by another, but X-Men seems to dramatize it in a way we're all comfortable with, so that's the label I go with. The X-Men theory of human relations is this: if your value as a thing that is wanted exceeds your value as a thing that acts--if what you are is seen as more important than what you can think or do--you're fucked.
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Batman Will Have Had Begun
People often ask me how I got into this line of work. There's lots of answers that'll answer them satisfactorily, in the process parting with only a portion of the truth; I skipped high school and learned this shit instead; the Columbine shootings had a profound impact on my understanding of media and society; I had a lot of money and no real sense of how to prepare for adulthood. But the real answer is simpler, and more painful. One night, when my parents had extended my bedtime for a showing of The Mask of Zorro, it all began. On the way back to our car, they were murdered by an unexamined bit of media theory. My destiny became clear to me at once.
So, there's a new Batman out, and I'm giving myself permission to completely ignore the Colorado shooting, because I gave at the office. I have done my part for interpreting the lessons of Colorado-based rampage shootings, and will withdraw from the topic at the end of this sentence.
Batman, however, deserves a few words. The peculiar skill of Nolan's Batman films has always been finding ways to incorporate comic storylines and characters in a way that didn't make them completely fucking ridiculous. The line between awe-inspiring dramatic scale and completely fucking ridiculous is difficult to walk in any medium, but excruciatingly tricky in live-action performance, especially live-action performance that isn't comfortably insulated by the respectability shield of period drama. Nolan's ability to walk this line is at its most impressive in The Dark Knight, which seems destined to be everybody's favorite portion of the series. Obviously Heath Ledger deserves enormous credit for having apparently based his performance on my imagination, but whenever we laud actors, we do so at the risk of ignoring the writing and world-building that gives them the opportunity to act.
In Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis' thought-provoking novel on the inextricable connections between democracy, civil rights, and internet pornography, an author stand-in makes a highly instructive point about the nature of media. Osama bin Laden, mass-murdering fuckhead though he may have been, was fundamentally in the business of making videos. The collective damage of the Al-Qaeda ops under his tenure is dwarfed by the global impact of terrorism as potential threat, and the impossibility of satisfactorily dealing with entirely passive-aggressive forms of warfare. Similarly, the Joker kills a whole lot of people, but his ambitions always tend toward making Gotham's citizens kill each other. The bombs advertise the videos; the videos nudge the public toward chaos. Bin Laden, having had the disadvantage of being a real person, was ultimately participating in power politics, but the Joker is more of a Platonic ideal of terrorism: a one-man cell with a few strategic partnerships and no actual wants or goals beyond terror itself. He comes from nothing, and is exceptional for no reason except that he always, always, has the element of surprise, and as such is immune to game theory or any other method of prediction. As Wayne notes that anyone could be behind the cowl, the Joker insists that he's only ahead of the curve. Not only can anyone be the Joker, everyone can be the Joker. He plays his Killing Joke experiment with Dent, and appears to be triumphant. Batman's decision to conceal the Joker's victory to preserve the propaganda value of the heroic Harvey Dent is presented in The Dark Knight as a victory of sorts, although on reflection is feels more like a stalemate. The Dark Knight Rises is more or less a two-hour reflection on the previous film's ending.
Which is why I started with The Dark Knight here, because Nolan's Batman trilogy is difficult to parse as a trilogy. The trilogy comprises Batman's battle with the League of Shadows, broken into two iterations: Before and After.
And herein lies on of the weirdest parts of the trilogy: the Joker, the closest thing to a "supervillain" persona in the series, is in some ways the most realistic of the villains. We don't have motiveless ur-terrorists here in the really real world, but we do have terrorists. What we don't have are Bond villains, or vengeful gods dressed up as Japanese ninja clans.
One of the reasons I've never been able to entirely grok the early buzz about Dark Knight Rises as being about class warfare is that it's so difficult to reconcile with the Sodom and Gomorrah vibe that underlies the first (and, it turns out, the third) film(s). The League of Shadows stand as a transcendental judge over sinful Gotham, and Bruce Wayne makes a devil's bargain with the Bat to buy it time. He tries to fight crime with crime, and Gotham survives another day, but it's obvious that it can't hold forever. So Bruce, like Abraham, hopes to find one good man to stay God's hand. He finds such a man in Harvey Dent, but that remember that whole "devil's bargain" bit from before? The Batman symbol--an icon that cannot be bought, intimidated or killed--calls into being an equally uncompromising opponent, and the unintended consequences of Bruce's bargain corrupt the man who was to be Gotham's salvation.
Eight years later, it happens again.
Which brings us to Bane, and the main question I brought into the theater with me: how does Bane relate to the Joker, and al Ghul, and Batman?
Well, he's a terrorist, self-evidently and diegetically. But that's a little vague, isn't it? He's practical and theatrical, but he's sure as hell not running on a shoestring budget. In fact, most of the film's plot hinges in the non-superheroic events that occurred in the eight years separating the second and third films. He lies, almost constantly, which the Joker does from time to time, but I think it's misleading to put too much stock into Bane's similarities with the series' most popular villain, because diegetically, the Joker matters a lot less than Harvey Dent, and Dent holds the crucial key to Bane's plan, and how it differs from al Ghul's. The Joker's machinations are ultimately focused on the fate of one man; Bane and al Ghul want to wipe a city and a cultural identity off the face of the planet.
In short, Bane doesn't give a shit about shadows. He wears a mask, of course, but it's not concealing anything. He has no secret identity to protect. Whereas Batman is somebody who could be anybody, Bane is nobody who could be anybody, or everybody. Bane does everything as publicly as possible, not to provoke a response, but to blind the public. He tells people what they want to hear, and perhaps they know it's not true, but they're used to lies. They're happy with lies. And, as Ozymandias claimed in his day, an awful lot of them seem enthused to see the whole thing end, one way or another. The Joker's offhand prophecy turns out to be the League's final weapon: even in Gotham, lots of people don't want Gotham around anymore. They've cast their votes for fire and brimstone. And whereas al Ghul planned to use Gotham's citizenry to tear the city apart in a cloud of weaponized hallucinogen, Bane just needs the life's work of Bruce Wayne to do it.
This makes it quite appropriate that the series ends/breaks as an ensemble piece. Batman can't do this one alone, and it could be argued (though not without getting into heavier spoilers) that he can't do it at all. Blake does more than his share, as does Catwoman. Even the cops, those loveable target dummies of the genre, get their moment to shine. After eight years of waiting for salvation from on high, the citizens of Gotham, inspired by Batman, stand up and...well, deserve it.
On an unrelated note, glad to see the Venom thing was dropped. The anaesthetic drip makes much more sense, and as someone intimately familiar with chronic pain issues, it's nice to see fibromyalgia presented in such a positive light.
So, there's a new Batman out, and I'm giving myself permission to completely ignore the Colorado shooting, because I gave at the office. I have done my part for interpreting the lessons of Colorado-based rampage shootings, and will withdraw from the topic at the end of this sentence.
Batman, however, deserves a few words. The peculiar skill of Nolan's Batman films has always been finding ways to incorporate comic storylines and characters in a way that didn't make them completely fucking ridiculous. The line between awe-inspiring dramatic scale and completely fucking ridiculous is difficult to walk in any medium, but excruciatingly tricky in live-action performance, especially live-action performance that isn't comfortably insulated by the respectability shield of period drama. Nolan's ability to walk this line is at its most impressive in The Dark Knight, which seems destined to be everybody's favorite portion of the series. Obviously Heath Ledger deserves enormous credit for having apparently based his performance on my imagination, but whenever we laud actors, we do so at the risk of ignoring the writing and world-building that gives them the opportunity to act.
In Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis' thought-provoking novel on the inextricable connections between democracy, civil rights, and internet pornography, an author stand-in makes a highly instructive point about the nature of media. Osama bin Laden, mass-murdering fuckhead though he may have been, was fundamentally in the business of making videos. The collective damage of the Al-Qaeda ops under his tenure is dwarfed by the global impact of terrorism as potential threat, and the impossibility of satisfactorily dealing with entirely passive-aggressive forms of warfare. Similarly, the Joker kills a whole lot of people, but his ambitions always tend toward making Gotham's citizens kill each other. The bombs advertise the videos; the videos nudge the public toward chaos. Bin Laden, having had the disadvantage of being a real person, was ultimately participating in power politics, but the Joker is more of a Platonic ideal of terrorism: a one-man cell with a few strategic partnerships and no actual wants or goals beyond terror itself. He comes from nothing, and is exceptional for no reason except that he always, always, has the element of surprise, and as such is immune to game theory or any other method of prediction. As Wayne notes that anyone could be behind the cowl, the Joker insists that he's only ahead of the curve. Not only can anyone be the Joker, everyone can be the Joker. He plays his Killing Joke experiment with Dent, and appears to be triumphant. Batman's decision to conceal the Joker's victory to preserve the propaganda value of the heroic Harvey Dent is presented in The Dark Knight as a victory of sorts, although on reflection is feels more like a stalemate. The Dark Knight Rises is more or less a two-hour reflection on the previous film's ending.
Which is why I started with The Dark Knight here, because Nolan's Batman trilogy is difficult to parse as a trilogy. The trilogy comprises Batman's battle with the League of Shadows, broken into two iterations: Before and After.
And herein lies on of the weirdest parts of the trilogy: the Joker, the closest thing to a "supervillain" persona in the series, is in some ways the most realistic of the villains. We don't have motiveless ur-terrorists here in the really real world, but we do have terrorists. What we don't have are Bond villains, or vengeful gods dressed up as Japanese ninja clans.
One of the reasons I've never been able to entirely grok the early buzz about Dark Knight Rises as being about class warfare is that it's so difficult to reconcile with the Sodom and Gomorrah vibe that underlies the first (and, it turns out, the third) film(s). The League of Shadows stand as a transcendental judge over sinful Gotham, and Bruce Wayne makes a devil's bargain with the Bat to buy it time. He tries to fight crime with crime, and Gotham survives another day, but it's obvious that it can't hold forever. So Bruce, like Abraham, hopes to find one good man to stay God's hand. He finds such a man in Harvey Dent, but that remember that whole "devil's bargain" bit from before? The Batman symbol--an icon that cannot be bought, intimidated or killed--calls into being an equally uncompromising opponent, and the unintended consequences of Bruce's bargain corrupt the man who was to be Gotham's salvation.
Eight years later, it happens again.
Which brings us to Bane, and the main question I brought into the theater with me: how does Bane relate to the Joker, and al Ghul, and Batman?
Well, he's a terrorist, self-evidently and diegetically. But that's a little vague, isn't it? He's practical and theatrical, but he's sure as hell not running on a shoestring budget. In fact, most of the film's plot hinges in the non-superheroic events that occurred in the eight years separating the second and third films. He lies, almost constantly, which the Joker does from time to time, but I think it's misleading to put too much stock into Bane's similarities with the series' most popular villain, because diegetically, the Joker matters a lot less than Harvey Dent, and Dent holds the crucial key to Bane's plan, and how it differs from al Ghul's. The Joker's machinations are ultimately focused on the fate of one man; Bane and al Ghul want to wipe a city and a cultural identity off the face of the planet.
In short, Bane doesn't give a shit about shadows. He wears a mask, of course, but it's not concealing anything. He has no secret identity to protect. Whereas Batman is somebody who could be anybody, Bane is nobody who could be anybody, or everybody. Bane does everything as publicly as possible, not to provoke a response, but to blind the public. He tells people what they want to hear, and perhaps they know it's not true, but they're used to lies. They're happy with lies. And, as Ozymandias claimed in his day, an awful lot of them seem enthused to see the whole thing end, one way or another. The Joker's offhand prophecy turns out to be the League's final weapon: even in Gotham, lots of people don't want Gotham around anymore. They've cast their votes for fire and brimstone. And whereas al Ghul planned to use Gotham's citizenry to tear the city apart in a cloud of weaponized hallucinogen, Bane just needs the life's work of Bruce Wayne to do it.
This makes it quite appropriate that the series ends/breaks as an ensemble piece. Batman can't do this one alone, and it could be argued (though not without getting into heavier spoilers) that he can't do it at all. Blake does more than his share, as does Catwoman. Even the cops, those loveable target dummies of the genre, get their moment to shine. After eight years of waiting for salvation from on high, the citizens of Gotham, inspired by Batman, stand up and...well, deserve it.
On an unrelated note, glad to see the Venom thing was dropped. The anaesthetic drip makes much more sense, and as someone intimately familiar with chronic pain issues, it's nice to see fibromyalgia presented in such a positive light.
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