tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54486135497820528682024-03-08T12:43:07.972-08:00The Nintendo Project: An 8-Bit PsychochronographyI'm playing through the Nintendo-licensed NES games, in alphabetical order, and producing strange memories, philosophies, and understandings from them. Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.comBlogger129125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-86383748398439143822022-04-26T10:21:00.003-07:002022-04-26T10:21:24.192-07:00All That I Can To Keep Track of Time in My Head (Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Hook)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD5__x54urd5UvfdyiFSnRiFE9e8PphKalUvPvLzWwMhymIrmK6v198k9VDVhow5VEVmafVIreFbrk-vWzGNDo0R4_IgS4CEO2HAcBebQte4qgHzjwJz-cprfxNoGFNeVveR85ePBAqeGiTQj-AS3TWi-V98zDU6mn6HGbXi6pPrt1GAhdK4ny3acq4w/s2920/Home%20Alone%202%20Lost%20in%20New%20York%202022-04-26%2013.17.37.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="2920" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD5__x54urd5UvfdyiFSnRiFE9e8PphKalUvPvLzWwMhymIrmK6v198k9VDVhow5VEVmafVIreFbrk-vWzGNDo0R4_IgS4CEO2HAcBebQte4qgHzjwJz-cprfxNoGFNeVveR85ePBAqeGiTQj-AS3TWi-V98zDU6mn6HGbXi6pPrt1GAhdK4ny3acq4w/s320/Home%20Alone%202%20Lost%20in%20New%20York%202022-04-26%2013.17.37.png" width="320" /></a></div></div>As with <i>High Speed</i> we have here a swath of my childhood in the wrong medium. Two thirds of these were based on movies I saw and loved as a child; I had the quasi-board game poster that came with the <i>Home Alone</i> VHS on the wall behind the TV I played most of my Nintendo games on and it stayed there for decades of no longer caring about the movie or indeed living in the house until the the entire basement got torn out and redeveloped. <i>Hook</i> meanwhile was a deeply beloved sort of film—a hot mess that nevertheless had all the ingredients to be deeply enjoyable by a nine-year-old. (The <i>Home Alone</i> sequel, on the other hand, was not good enough and too young for a ten year old.) These are not necessarily pleasures that have aged well; I remember <i>Home Alone</i> ageing to a sort of charming cringe last time it was on some Christmas, and while I haven’t seen <i>Hook</i> in over a decade I suspect it’s a softly charming film whose flaws are a lot more evident. Not bad as early 90s popular culture goes, but certainly not the white hot thrill of youth.<p></p><p>But of course, this is not an essay about the films. It is an essay about the games adapted from the films, all of which are, in a pattern designed to remind me why I didn't update this blog for a decade, absolutely fucking terrible. Tie-in shovelware designed to be forgotten the moment the sting of having spent money on it fades. In this regard it resembles <i>Home Alone 2: Lost in New York</i>, the shitty cash-in sequel on a coherent original idea, these days more remembered for a Donald Trump cameo than for actual substance.</p><p>Ironically in the world of Nintendo games <i>Home Alone 2</i> is the stronger game—a banal sidescroller of the "there is no rational reason why all of these things should be dangerous to me" variety that has you dodging bellhops, suitcases, and oddly homicidal hotel receptionists. There's an interpretation to be spun here, the homicidal hotel prefiguring its 1992 owner's later career, but for fuck's sake, I don't want to. The game fundamentally isn't interesting enough to merit an argument like that. It's not even interesting enough to justify this essay, but I've taken <strike>two</strike> nine months already to write it, so here we are. This is simply an arbitrary collection of symbols arranged into a game-like shape in a broadly bare minimum way. </p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIPe79PrlXEdlt_JC3Bg0O4zGELRnbHo-_vPBBPVrBbBWckVzICwuZceTxmuuuTzs0bA7G2Uxj6_mxbwlbNm6N4TEdMlgh2Qjb6v8ISq5iXLNDeyEF9aixesFuIx6EDQcl72VbHF_2dBLT14quR-lt7MsTv0Z_hRVdHLmQIdG0zFcViUMWABpUWzKOw/s2920/Hook%202022-04-26%2013.17.10.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="2920" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIPe79PrlXEdlt_JC3Bg0O4zGELRnbHo-_vPBBPVrBbBWckVzICwuZceTxmuuuTzs0bA7G2Uxj6_mxbwlbNm6N4TEdMlgh2Qjb6v8ISq5iXLNDeyEF9aixesFuIx6EDQcl72VbHF_2dBLT14quR-lt7MsTv0Z_hRVdHLmQIdG0zFcViUMWABpUWzKOw/s320/Hook%202022-04-26%2013.17.10.png" width="320" /></a></i></div><i><br />Hook</i> is similar—a side-scroller game in which questions like "controls" and "gameplay" are entirely secondary, the point of the exercise being to simply arrange some iconography recognizable as film-adjacent on the screen in a roughly playable fashion. In this case you play as the most inept Peter Pan ever, wielding the world's least effective knife as you use a series of janky and alarmingly loose controls to navigate Neverland. It's vaguely a Zelda II clone, but in the sense of one of those mad scientist laboratories full of failed specimens with monstrous bodies that cling to an agonizing and unholy life.<p></p><p>What is interesting about these two games, however, is that they are almost wholly indifferent to the matter of being games. I've mentioned their flaws, but it's worth stressing just how far-ranging they are. These games fundamentally do not play. Their controls are sloppy to the point of parody, their mechanics are tedious (in both games your only real option is to dodge virtually everything), and none of it is organized around a notion of human interaction. There is nothing here save for the cold reality of the iconography—symbols of the properties these games are really just marketing for. The emptiness here is abyssal.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjmyUk1lSLpzNLhhEC4Q-9cQNP-owmVjsLJrdEOpXBkFi_NE9p-RdptCSwBgFCFcmj_m9cvD012teRhBAAPDu-7mO2jnjjySY0kq8ly1BN14-CqYztsgCHINY8WKpt_q52ob96mQnCKmK3_cbD9ronN6jEtS43BK14unzG971Njf1uiX0buJv3yBEssg/s2920/Home%20Alone%202022-04-26%2013.15.32.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="2920" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjmyUk1lSLpzNLhhEC4Q-9cQNP-owmVjsLJrdEOpXBkFi_NE9p-RdptCSwBgFCFcmj_m9cvD012teRhBAAPDu-7mO2jnjjySY0kq8ly1BN14-CqYztsgCHINY8WKpt_q52ob96mQnCKmK3_cbD9ronN6jEtS43BK14unzG971Njf1uiX0buJv3yBEssg/s320/Home%20Alone%202022-04-26%2013.15.32.png" width="320" /></a>In contrast, then, sits <i>Home Alone</i>, which is also a bad game, but which at least has some vision of being interesting. It is a tight and claustrophobic thing—its hook is simply that you must survive in the house for twenty minutes while being chased by the bandits from popular kids movie <i>Home Alone</i>. As with many NES games it plays terribly if you simply pick it up, but has a weird appeal that might well have been grasped through obsessive replay due to lack of other options. It is counterintuitive, confusing, but has depth to that, and the central setup of “survive for twenty minutes” is so immediately striking as to carry it through. There are children who loved this, or who at least came to enjoy their dislike of it.</p><p>In practice you can glitch it, enacting a foolproof strategy that removes all skill from the game by abusing the limitations of its AI. The old promise of magic, then: that there is a cheat, somewhere, deep in the secret sediment of the world, waiting to be uncovered.</p>Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-42031021116804526002021-05-12T07:45:00.004-07:002021-05-12T07:45:52.298-07:00No Such Thing as Society (Hollywood Squares)<div class="separator"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5nMI7Xf8Wew/YJc71MXMXvI/AAAAAAAALCM/DK5nzrHyA9oWx9gOMyUNW-7SsdO038XeACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Hollywood%2BSquares%2B%2528U%2529%2B2021-05-08%2B21.32.27.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1683" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5nMI7Xf8Wew/YJc71MXMXvI/AAAAAAAALCM/DK5nzrHyA9oWx9gOMyUNW-7SsdO038XeACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Hollywood%2BSquares%2B%2528U%2529%2B2021-05-08%2B21.32.27.png" width="320" /></a></div>Guy Debord writes in <i>Society of the Spectacle </i>about how “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”<div><br /></div><div><i>Hollywood Squares</i> has existed, in various forms, since the 1960s. Its format is one of bland simplicity: nine celebrities of varying levels of actual fame sit in the titular squares. Two players take turns picking squares. The celebrity is asked a trivia question, and the player must decide if their answer is right or wrong. If they guess correctly they claim the square; if they guess incorrectly their opponent does. Beyond that the game is one of Tic-Tac-Toe. </div><div><br /></div><div>This banal setup is, in reality, simply a frame to hold the real and equally bland dynamic, in which the celebrities came up with humorous wrong answers, called “zingers” by the production sta. Which is to say that the core dynamic of the show is simply celebrities making dumb jokes with a broad structure of a game show to guide proceedings. In truth, all of these interactions were functionally scripted; the zingers were supplied along with a right and plausible wrong answer, the celebrities relied upon only for entertaining delivery, which, to be fair, was in fact many of their jobs. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Nintendo version strips even more of this away. The likenesses of actual celebrities are, after all, expensive. So instead there are nine sprites given arbitrary names—only nine sprites, to be clear, although there are more names than that, so that these fictive celebrities seem in fact to cycle through an endless number of identities, all of them less distinctive than their actual animations. One is left to think of them in these terms: the annoying bro in the center square, the granny underneath her, the one Black dude in the upper right. Their names become meaningless, empty non-signifiers. Meanwhile you answer trivia questions for money that does not exist, and get an opportunity as a bonus to try to win a car that also does not exist. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is a simulation of a simulated situation with all of the markers that gave meaning to the original simulation stripped away. Looked at now, nearly twenty years since any version of <i>Hollywood Squares</i> has been on television, its vapidity becomes a hollow, frightened thing. Nine haunted visages of a spectacle so comprehensively unreal that it is impossible to imagine it demanding, over and over again, to know if they are lying to you.</div>Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-15993262392536226212021-05-07T13:04:00.001-07:002021-05-07T13:04:25.983-07:00ACAB (High Speed, Hogan's Alley)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qDQyVGVs29Q/YJWHqL-flVI/AAAAAAAALB0/0ERwsi6NIuIsIL7_qwx9H2JnMDQZdI2QQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/High%2BSpeed%2B%2528U%2529%2B2021-05-06%2B20.04.39.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1683" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qDQyVGVs29Q/YJWHqL-flVI/AAAAAAAALB0/0ERwsi6NIuIsIL7_qwx9H2JnMDQZdI2QQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/High%2BSpeed%2B%2528U%2529%2B2021-05-06%2B20.04.39.png" width="320" /></a></div>My mother was a woman liked overly big, showy Christmas presents, and one year she decided to outdo herself and buy me a pinball machine. She did her homework on slightly older machines she could get a good price on, and settled on the classic Williams table <i>High Speed</i>. Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. She hid the pinball machine in plain sight with a blanket over it and insisted it was the surprisingly oversized toy kitchen my sister was getting and I bought it because "there's a pinball machine hidden in your playroom" is simply not an outcome I was equipped to imagine.<p></p><p><i>High Speed</i> was a 1980s machine with a pleasantly frenetic pace and soundtrack. Its plot, such as it was, involved hitting a series of targets around the table to steadily illuminate a traffic light, then made a ramp shot to "run the light" setting off a high speed chase; successful completion of a few more targets constituted getting away and launched multiball.</p><p>It's probably too much to ask for moral lessons from a pinball table, and I'm pretty unconvinced by "run red lights" as a lesson in the first place. And yet there is something about the impish anti-authority leaning here that is easy to respect. "Fleeing from the cops is fun and should be rewarded" has an easy charm to it, fitting into the long tradition of the noble outlaw. </p><p>Interestingly, the game's sound effects are from the perspective of the frustrated cops—"Dispatch this is 504. Suspect ran a red light. Over," and the like. Which means that the player is positioned not with the driver whose actions they are nominally controlling via the ball (although the question of avatars in pinball machines is to say the least vexed) but with the cops who exist in a state of endless frustration, always missing the perp. In a pleasant detail, there's literally no victory dialogue: when you lose a ball the cops don't say "we got him" or anything. And so the game is simply an endless recitation of defeated authority that can only ever be revealed as impotent and useless, with the player's pleasure always allied with that revelation. </p><p>The NES port is reasonably faithful as a table—I was able to pick it up quickly and was broadly speaking almost as good at it as I was on the actual table the last time I played it, which was admittedly some eight years ago. It makes the irritating and non-optional decision to add a bunch of gimmicks—little threats that show up on the table and disrupt play, along with random collectable bonuses that tricker extra rounds. From a design perspective, a "Normal" and "Enhanced" mode would be nice touches. But as a pinball port it's reasonable, an entertaining bit of nostalgia that I legitimately didn't expect to find on the NES. (Honestly, if I'd realized I had this coming in just two posts I probably wouldn't have quit the project when I did.)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zSGDFUKSpeQ/YJWHviV6ziI/AAAAAAAALB4/EAzif08oL-E7ZU19Vun5naiBCDJ438cbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Hogan%2527s%2BAlley%2B2021-05-06%2B20.05.32.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1683" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zSGDFUKSpeQ/YJWHviV6ziI/AAAAAAAALB4/EAzif08oL-E7ZU19Vun5naiBCDJ438cbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Hogan%2527s%2BAlley%2B2021-05-06%2B20.05.32.png" width="320" /></a></div>I remember one evening when my father came to get me. I don't remember what I was doing—statistically speaking it was probably playing video games. He walked me down the front lawn to where a traffic stop was taking place; some teenage girl had been speeding or run a red light or something. And we stood and watched. Eventually the cop decided he didn't like this, and asked my father to go back inside. And my father replied, very calmly, "I believe citizens should watch their police." <p></p><p>There are no shortage of bad games on the NES. Still, it is hard to think of a more straightforwardly evil one than <i>Hogan's Alley</i>. Another light gun game, this one functions as a shooting gallery in which a mixture of criminals and innocents pop up and you must quickly identify and shoot the criminals. The name dates back to 1920, when the NRA and the Army collaborated to create a training range in Ohio after determining that an insufficient number of cities had dedicated firing ranges. This was presumably named after Richard Outcault's <i>Hogan's Alley, </i>widely credited as the first newspaper comic strip, although as usual the word "first" turns out to be extremely vexed here. The Hogan's Alley range was notable for being a broad simulation of a city, with targets popping out in unexpected places as the officer walked through. This eventually became a generic name for that type of shooting range; two years after the NES game came out the FBI established a range of the same name in Quantico in which actors were hired to portray a mixture of civilians and terrorists for the purposes of training. </p><p>There are multiple levels to this sort of training. On one level the presence of "civilians" constitutes training in threat assessment. But these ranges are also known as surprise ranges, with the idea being that threats might jump out of any corner. The end result is to keep police on edge, paranoid, always afraid that something bad could happen to them. This is the logic that would eventually evolve into Dave Grossman's horrifying notion of "killology," a set of police training seminars that can be boiled down to convincing cops that they need to learn to kill without hesitation or moral qualm. The lethal consequences of this are, I imagine, self-evident. </p><p><i>Hogan's Alley</i> avoids the worst baggage of this with an entirely white cast of criminals, who are generally in the mafioso style. But its basic logic is still the same. All runs at the game ultimately end the same way, with a failure to clear the room of criminals leading to the player's defeat. Perhaps they're defeated by hitting a civilian, but more likely they miss a criminal. The lesson is still that cops are under constant siege, always threatened, and thus that violence is inevitable and necessary. Ultimately, the goal of the game is still to shoot all suspects on sight.</p><p>My father's lesson was one that I was not entirely prepared to absorb at the time. Grounded in realities and systems too abstract to grasp, an insufficient counterweight to the copaganda of D.A.R.E. All the same, it is the lesson that has held; an understanding both of citizen and police that steadily grew to a worldview. The real secret history in all of this,</p>Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-19475505561624952092021-05-05T16:17:00.005-07:002021-05-05T16:17:38.251-07:00The Head That Wears The Crown (Heavy Barrel, Heavy Shreddin')<p><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qiZAkdJKSC0/YJMcQn7W3XI/AAAAAAAALBk/duP4qmaMci818tMJ8nj1ikckMpK-sIsIQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Heavy%2BBarrel%2B2021-05-05%2B18.27.04.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1683" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qiZAkdJKSC0/YJMcQn7W3XI/AAAAAAAALBk/duP4qmaMci818tMJ8nj1ikckMpK-sIsIQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Heavy%2BBarrel%2B2021-05-05%2B18.27.04.png" width="320" /></a>The obvious question—the only one that makes any sense in context, is what exactly is heavy here. Or perhaps more usefully, what is the nature of the weight? The 2.6 ounces of an NES controller are essentially immutable, after all—in a strictly literal sense these allegedly heavy games weigh no more than <i>Bubble Bobble</i> or <i>Airwolf</i>. All pixels are weightless. Clearly, then, we are in a realm of something else; a metaphoric weight akin to moral obligation. </p><p>There certainly is a morality at play in <i>Heavy Shredding</i>; that old familiar logic of <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/10/hail-set-i-mean-glycon-shit-whatd-i-say.html">cobra command</a>. Here we are on an island, tasked with destroying the enemy's underground artillery base. Who are we? Who is the enemy? The game remains wholly silent on this. We are a man with a gun and they are an island military base; these things combine like knight and princess, plumber and weird mushroom thing, The manual clarifies slightly; <i>terrorists</i> have done this, and the base contains a nuclear weapon. But this is not knowledge—merely further trappings of cobra command, a symbolic system that exists to compel run-and-gun action. It is only in the larger context of Reagan/Bush America that these isolated and compulsory symbols acquire any sort of moral dimension—one of neoliberal militarism and American economic imperialism. Even still, this morality is meant to be automatic—a simple and reflexive symbology. A terrorist implies a commando to shoot him. These things must be. </p><p>This is not weight but its opposite. The entire point is that these are not heavy moral decisions; merely the reflexive consequences of politics as aesthetics. (So politics, then.) The bullets, the tanks, the death tolls, ll of these are as insubstantial as the pixels. Heaviness is forbidden, suspect, probably queer or commie. Once again we reach a dead end.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4qtdiSQZ910/YJMgh3nSZuI/AAAAAAAALBs/G4t7aXqiPK8TtSy80pcNcycahnFXItH8QCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Heavy%2BShreddin%2527%2B2021-05-05%2B18.47.26.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1683" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4qtdiSQZ910/YJMgh3nSZuI/AAAAAAAALBs/G4t7aXqiPK8TtSy80pcNcycahnFXItH8QCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Heavy%2BShreddin%2527%2B2021-05-05%2B18.47.26.png" width="320" /></a></div>Of course, had the alphabet run the other way we'd never have made the mistake in the first place; clearly <i>Heavy Shreddin'</i>, a snowboarding game that can be described as a sort of proto-<i>SkiFree </i>only with a snowboard. This is a game of blissful amorality; there is simply the hill, the snow, the exhilaration of speed. Moral heaviness lies self-evidently outside of its system, an irrelevance, perhaps even the thing this game is meant to be a tonic to.<div><br /></div><div>A third sense, then—something akin to what is heavy in heavy metal music. This can be understood as a heaviness of aesthetics. Heavy metal is excessive music, a genre whose promise is that it gives too much. The pleasures it offers are explicitly ones of overstimulation. This is, of course, a difficult thing to judge about thirty year old video games. It was bad enough a decade ago. Are these games overstimulating? Were their simple and heavily abstracted graphics and tinny soundtracks a blast of thrilling sensory overload? It's possible in the abstract, but it's hard to imagine either of these being among them.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the useful way to think about this, then, is to ask what run-and-gun military action and snowboarding have in common. Once that's determined we can move on to figuring out how this thing might be heavy. The obvious answer is a sense of coolness. Shooting terrorists is cool. So is snowboarding. Indeed, snowboarding is on some level defined precisely by the fact that it has a coolness to it that skiing lacks. These things are heavy because they have a sense of swaggering grandeur.</div><div><br /></div><div>In this regard "heavy" might be understood as a synonym for "super" (the term that would eventually be used for the cooler successor to the NES, but already used for ten separate NES games) or "power"—prefixes that serve simply as intensifiers. But in this case the two objects in question point towards more concrete terms. Snowboarding and the military are not simply cool—they are masculine. This is boy stuff. And that's true in a way that the other intensifiers aren't. Sure, video games and the NES had a certain masculine aesthetic to begin with—the sleek cyberpunk grey and red design wasn't exactly playing for the same crowd as Polly Pocket, y'know? (There's a lot to be written, incidentally, about the way in which Nintendo console design evolved versus its competitors.) But Power and Super do not suggest the sort of masculine bravado as this suite of heavy games.</div><div><br /></div><div>One could point out the fragility of this—the way in which the heaviness of these games feels defensive, a point undermined by the ardency with which it's made. But the true is a moment of the false, and this is no exception. And if the secret history of masculinity is that it's a burden to bear, well. What more is there to say on the subject?</div>Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-13714827169396574342016-05-22T23:24:00.002-07:002016-05-22T23:26:23.869-07:00Of Illusions (Wario's Woods)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: right;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JCGQx1lqNzI/V0KiA4CctZI/AAAAAAAAGyc/k7lswweFHvEkOO74W6d-g2Ofyt0cMHSOQCK4B/s1600/Wario-Woods.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JCGQx1lqNzI/V0KiA4CctZI/AAAAAAAAGyc/k7lswweFHvEkOO74W6d-g2Ofyt0cMHSOQCK4B/s320/Wario-Woods.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.24px; white-space: pre-wrap;">And then, in December of 1994, it ended. The writing had been on the wall for a while - the last releases had been all the way back in August (<i>Disney’s The Jungle Book, The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Park,</i> and T<i>he Incredible Crash Test Dummies</i>), but <i>Wario’s Woods</i> was the last licensed game for the Nintendo Entertainment System.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">The history of the game is slightly strange. It came out in Japan in February of 1994, the sixth-from-last game for the Famicom. That it should come out in a different order in the US isn’t strange, of course. What is strange is that it came out alongside a SNES version that never saw Japanese release. On top of that, the SNES version was slightly more elaborate, introducing a handful of new mechanics absent in the 8-Bit version. The result is that, when looked at from a 1994 perspective, without the ability to simply summon up a production history of the game from the Internet, the last NES game looks like a stripped down port of a Super Nintendo game, which, given the amount of stuff that was coming out in both NES and SNES versions at the time, was an entirely plausible interpretation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet in practical terms the SNES version is irrelevant. The game’s claim to historical significance is entirely that it was the last NES game. It’s been released in emulation for four separate Nintendo systems, including as a launch title for the Wii’s Virtual Console, and every time it’s been the NES version. In spite of the fact that the SNES version is prettier and more feature-rich, which, by most definitions at least, means that it’s “better.” (In reality one of the features is a randomly appearing block that screws the player over arbitrarily by provoking a flood of blocks when it lands, and the game is better off without it, but that’s neither here nor there.) </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As last games go, though, it’s a pretty good one. The list of classic falling block games is fairly short - indeed, it’s about six letters long, and two of them are T. (No, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dr. Mario</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is not a classic falling block game - its mechanics are dreadful.) </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wario’s Woods</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> isn’t quite classic - the difficulty curve is wonky, and the latter levels are far too dependent on the luck of block distribution. But it’s got an addictive charm to it. The conceit of controlling a character running around amidst the falling blocks and rearranging them is interesting, changing the dynamic from the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tetris</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-standard “move blocks as they fall” to one where you usually have a several step plan in mind, but have to execute it among shifting circumstances that may require revision of the plan. You have just enough different ways of interacting with the blocks (pick up/put down one, pick up/put down all, jump to the top of whatever stack you’re holding, and kick the block in front of you) to allow for complex tactics, and more to the point to allow for a real learning process about tactics as you go. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And of course it would be a lot to ask for the last NES game to be an outright classic. To call the NES in decline in 1994 all but misses the point. Its continued status as a thing was largely down to the class striations of the video game market - a low-cost option for families that couldn’t afford the Super Nintendo. Its reason for existence was specifically to be not as good as the SNES. In that regard, the fact that the final game is a credible lesser classic has to be taken as an unexpected bonus - a last hurrah that in no way </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">had</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to happen. And it didn’t really for any subsequent consoles. The last Super Nintendo game was </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; the last Nintendo 64 game was a Tony Hawk title. Even the last Nintendo-published titles for the consoles don’t have the odd posthumous status of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wario’s Woods</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kirby’s Dream Land 3</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> eventually made it out on the Virtual Console, but all the way in 2009; </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dr. Mario</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">64</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has never seen rerelease. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And it is, in many ways, this latter life that is most interesting about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wario’s Woods</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. By definition, after all, it could not be a game with much impact in its time. Perhaps it’s a game that never had impact in any time. It’s not like I have sales figures in front of me or anything. But its long afterlife gives it, if nothing else, an opportunity for impact. Or perhaps I’m just talking around the fact that this is a game I’ve fallen for hard, and more than once. I think it was actually the Wii game I played the most at first, which was admittedly easy given that the Wii launch titles were mostly pretty shit. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wii Sports</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> entertained for a week or two, but </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Twilight Princess</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was a lesser Zelda to say the least, and past that the initial slate aspired to mediocrity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which left the Virtual Console, which wasn’t exactly long on classics either to start. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Donkey Kong</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Legend of Zelda</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> were the two A-list NES games, with </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mario Bros</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pinball</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Soccer</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Solomon’s Key</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> rounding out the launch. The SNES had </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">F-Zero</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">SimCity</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the Nintendo 64 </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Super Mario 64</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and the Genesis </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Altered Beast</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sonic the Hedgehog</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. In other words, a list of games consisting of things I’d either played tons of times before and things nobody cared about. Plus </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wario’s Woods</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so I fell down a rabbit hole. My first NES-based rabbit hole in years, actually. It was in no way my first serious dip into retrogaming, but that’s another story and another blog. All the same, though, it was a good rabbit hole, with hours spent on the sofa diligently grinding away at the upper levels. Which were frustrating in that classical video game sense that made you want to hurl the controller violently through the television.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s not a ton to capture about this experience that I haven’t already recounted. There’s definitely a point in the game’s progression where it suddenly becomes much harder, and the dumb luck of what order things fall in becomes absolutely crucial. One short stretch of bad luck early on or a small error in block placement can effectively doom you. So the potential for anger is there - when the game gets into its upper reaches death often feels capricious and unfair, not least because 1-Ups are few and far between at that point, and reaching a new continue point requires beating five consecutive levels, which makes the fact that you start with zero extra lives deeply harsh. But the actual thrill of play - running around inside the level setting things up - and the elegance of design whereby big chains of blocks can be set up and destroyed with a reasonably good plan remained captivating enough to glue me to the couch for a week or two. And I’ve had at least two relapses in the decade since, one of which has been gloriously unhelpful in getting this post done.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But perhaps looking for an explanation is the wrong way to go about it. Perhaps a rabbit hole can only be explained in terms of possibility, and the only question that can be asked of a game is whether it’s good enough to create one, not how or why it did. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wario’s Woods</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has what it takes, yes. But nothing necessarily follows from that. The fact that it enthralled me gives it a certain weight and heft, but is not itself content.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let us, then, approach the basics - a simple dualism implicit in the title. On the one hand, Wario - a mocking perversion of Nintendo’s mascot. If this were another blog, you’d even call him qlippothic. This is his sole appearance on the NES, having debuted on the Game Boy two years prior, and there is something strange about him plowing onto the scene here, at the end of things. A strangely atavistic impulse - an instinctive and barely explicable desire to end on an unsettled note. Even more revealing is the fact that Wario is the title attraction and most prominent figure on the cover, despite the fact that it’s Toad’s game. It is as though there is, in the final moments, an urge to tear down, embracing the negation of all that the brand stands for. Taken in the context of larger industry trends, it is as savvy as it is disturbing.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the other, Woods. Being a concept with millennia of history as opposed to two years, they are rather tricker than Wario. But broadly speaking, words like “mysterious,” “forbidden,” and perhaps even “libidinous” seem apropos. Forests are things to be explored, or better yet to be lost within. They are where magic and discovery take place. They are fraught with possibility. It would be overstating the case to say that these two words conflict, but there is a tension here between the vast possibilities offered by “Woods” and the strange collapse offered by “Wario.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But if we are to approach this tension from the perspective of history, it is, at least, clearly resolved. In 1994, it was Wario that held sway: the collapse of the NES into technological obsolescence, the rise of Nemesis, and the sense of Nintendo as something rotting away into history. And yet in hindsight, for better or for worse, the NES did not rot. It survived, through emulation, retrogaming, and an endless program of rereleases. And </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wario’s Woods</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> proved in practice not a tombstone for the NES, but the door to the vast future it opened onto.</span></div>
Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-34476819567665992792011-06-14T06:44:00.000-07:002011-06-14T06:44:00.071-07:00The Persistence of Mercury (Harlem Globetrotters, Hatris)<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qi372ONI4cE/TelsQaZd0SI/AAAAAAAAAhs/Lt0fd5oL5XU/s1600/harlem.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qi372ONI4cE/TelsQaZd0SI/AAAAAAAAAhs/Lt0fd5oL5XU/s1600/harlem.png" /></a>The Harlem Globetrotters make an odd subject for a video game, given the degree to which their history consisted of kayfabe basketball. Not that there is anything wrong with this history. The Harlem Globetrotters were, by any reasonable measure, a celebration of numerous aspects of African American culture. But they were not basketball as such. Rather, they were a simulation of basketball designed to focus on the moments of maximum fun and trim out the others.<br />
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In other words, the Harlem Globetrotters are themselves basically a video game. That is, after all, what basketball video games are about. Trimming the boring bits and getting to the fun bits. It's basketball without tedium, at the frankly fairly low cost of also being without point. But given that sports are already kind of inherently pointless, this just isn't that massive a problem.<br />
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The process involved here, alchemically speaking, is one that we would associate with Hermes, also known as Mercury. His name is also given to a planet and metal. Or, rather, all three of these things share the same name because, for a period of thought during which quite a few linguistic roots developed, they were the same thing. The metal, god, and planet were all simply manifestations of a larger concept.<br />
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This concept, broadly speaking, was change, but change in a very specific sense. Mercury is not the change of the passage of time. Rather, mercury is change in the sense of creation. Mercury was viewed, classically, as essentially the stem cell of metals - the inchoate chaos from which anything can form, along with, crucially, the process of that formation. Mercury, in other words, is the act of creation itself.<br />
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We cannot survive in a world of pure mercury. Some system is needed. Neal Stephenson, among the most brilliant living writers in English, wrote an entire trilogy that ends up with this observation as its main conclusion. But we equally cannot survive in a world that is fixed. There must be mercury - inchoate moments of unfathomable creation. There must be sparks. This is what the various dunks and stunts of the Harlem Globetrotters are - the moments of inspiration and passion and beauty that make basketball worthwhile. They are pure mercury. But they are not the world.<br />
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Still, a video game based on it turns out to be kinda dumb. It turns out not to be possible to take something that is already a distilled simulation of an object and create a distilled simulation of it. All you get is a generic basketball game with a lone "stunt" that you can pull to get an automatic basket. There is nothing to it. All is fixed and determined, and there is no room for chaos.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R13W5eZhh6I/TelsQuEtIaI/AAAAAAAAAhw/6NJMI-LRUQY/s1600/hatris.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R13W5eZhh6I/TelsQuEtIaI/AAAAAAAAAhw/6NJMI-LRUQY/s1600/hatris.png" /></a>There is not enough mercury in the world, however. Case in point, Hatris. From the creator of Tetris, Hatris is another falling objects game in which you try to stack sets of five identical hats with six columns to maneuver in and hats falling in pairs. It demonstrates a key facet of game design, which is that just because you came up with one brilliant concept it doesn't mean you can do it again. Hatris isn't bad, but it lacks all of the spark of Tetris.<br />
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Ironically, of course, hats themselves lack that vital spark of mercury they once had. For some time mercury was a vital ingredient in manufacturing felt hats, leading to lots of toxic vapors and the phrase "mad as a hatter." Broadly speaking, mercury in general is something we lack today. Where once it was something everyone encountered, whether in thermometers or toys, now the fact that it's horribly dangerous and toxic is used as a pretense to remove it from as many things as possible. The resulting lack of brain damage and death is, admittedly, nice.<br />
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But something is, as we can see in Hatris, lost in the conversion. There is no spark to the game. Which is a problem. The falling objects genre, after all, depends on the dynamic of the game slowly but surely spiraling out of control until you die. This requires mercury - a formless chaos to which you descend. This is the problem with Hatris. Death may be inevitable in it, but there is no sense of things getting out of control. Usually you die because there aren't enough slots for the hats - six slots and six varieties of hat means that it is basically certain that you will be unable to maintain a stack for each hat type. But this dynamic never feels like spiraling out of control. It just feels like bad resource management.<br />
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Tetris, as we'll talk about in the Ts, avoided this. The dynamic that kills you in Tetris is subtle. You don't quite know why you always die. Thus there is a sense of chaos. In Hatris, you know why you're dying, and get no opportunity to be driven mad by it.<br />
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Mercury will kill you, sure enough. But so will life. In the end, the cause of death is always inevitability. Better to live in a world where that fact remains strange.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-39273757304877541882011-06-09T07:20:00.000-07:002011-06-09T07:20:00.346-07:00The Widening (Gyruss)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wxfmi87LlbU/TeWBKVoO9sI/AAAAAAAAAhc/F8UmEWWRX5M/s1600/gyruss.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Wxfmi87LlbU/TeWBKVoO9sI/AAAAAAAAAhc/F8UmEWWRX5M/s1600/gyruss.png" /></a></div>I've been down on video games lately. Admittedly, I've been down on life lately. But I'd be lying if I said I enjoy this blog as much as I used to. Much of this may be down to the fact that I've been pretty hostile to video games lately. Some of this may in turn be down to the fact that NES games are largely a bit lackluster. But in any case, this blog is feeling like a chore, and I dislike that.<br />
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So let's take my own advice.<br />
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One of the things that I've been contemplating as I teach the handful of sections of courses I can get is the fact that we've really done an awfully cynical job of teaching people to read. Not necessarily a bad one - actually my students are very good at following plot and comprehending the reading. Apparently we've gotten that down. No, where we fall flat is that we've somehow created an army of cynical readers who go looking to dislike things.<br />
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It's our own fault. The unfortunate downside of the wave of "ist" and "X studies" approaches. Not that these have been by and large negative - the work they did in opening up how we think about art and power is invaluable. But so much of the work that all of them - feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, post-colonialist theory, the lot of them - was to show us the seedy and uncomfortable underbelly of "classic" texts. The problem is that now we know to use this approach, and it becomes increasingly difficult to actually enjoy anything.<br />
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The actual ists and Xes have long since sailed past this problem into new territory with their approach of finding marginalized literature worthy of more attention than it's been given. This does not mean the "liking the bad thing ironically" approach of hipsters, which is really just what we've been calling "camp" for decades now, only with more cynicism and patchoulli. Rather, it means finding literature that gives voice to people the classics often ignore.<br />
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But there's another tactic I've been thinking about lately. What I call redemptive readings. It hit me while watching Love and Other Drugs, a film that is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. But watching it, I found that I could watch the film and enjoy it by focusing on a narrow, somewhat idiosyncratic, but largely valid reading of it in which the film is about playing Anne Hathaway's bland starlet characteristics off the fact that she actually can act and provide a compelling portrait of someone with a fatal illness, and how it makes it very difficult to support a for-profit medical industry in the context of the film. Whatever its myriad flaws, that bit seems good.<br />
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I call this redemptive reading. Going into something with the active goal of liking it, and trying to find a reading that makes it work. Ideally this shouldn't mean ignoring any obvious flaws, but it should mean trying to find reasons to like something. The appeal of it is that it's charmingly subversive. People are going to watch television. Television, by its nature, is never going to actively give voice to oppressed and silenced minorities, because it's a corporate-controlled broadcast medium. Finding good things in it is, more often than not, going to involve taking something that might not actually be good and thwapping it upside the head until it behaves.<br />
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So let's try that with NES games. Here, most of the time, we don't have terribly large racial issues, we have very standardized and entrenched gender issues, and the class issues are... well, OK, that's where we're going to need to be working.<br />
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Thankfully, for our purposes, Gyruss is not half bad to begin with. It's a rotational shooter. By which I mean that it basically functions in the shooter mould that I'm running out of things to say about, except instead of constantly scrolling forwards you move in a circle around the playfield. Enemies come in along the Z-axis, and cluster at the center of the screen for you to destroy them.<br />
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The gameplay is pleasantly pacey, the controls are at a nice midpoint between intuitive and frustrating, and almost every time I died I felt like I deserved it. The minimum threshold is thus cleared. But, for once, there's <i>more</i> than that!<br />
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I mean, one thing I am increasingly coming to believe is that the interesting parts of video games are the play mechanics. This does not mean I am becoming a hardline ludologist, as I still believe play mechanics can tell a story, but, for instance, if we take my favorite game in recent memory - <a href="http://braid-game.com/">Braid</a> - the story extends from the gameplay. It's a story about the passage of time, memory, and regret, but all of the aspects of the story are simply thematic meditations on things about the gameplay. When the game introduces time-locked objects, the story introduces the idea of mistakes that cannot be undone. When it introduces the ability to have a shadow Tim carry out one set of actions while Tim carries out another, it introduces the idea of regret for lives unlived.<br />
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The thing about Braid that I think a lot of people miss, despite it probably being the most important thing about the game, is that it is one of an increasing number of games to operate in a lyrical mode as opposed to an epic mode. Implicit in this, of course, is the idea that the nearest textual medium to video games is poetry. And so Braid, instead of telling a narrative story about rescuing a princess, instead offers an extended poem in which video game mechanics, growing up, the apocalypse, and love are all intertwined into a... well... braid.<br />
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It is impossible to port this approach directly to Gyruss, simply because there's not enough formal complexity to have the multiple moving parts that so enliven Braid. And yet all the same, there is something to it. These endless loops and circles that stretch the solar system as an infinite tunnel straight through the back of my television. The spinning about in giddy circles, dodging and destroying wildly as all the cosmos lifts off my screen and through me. This is what games are for.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-35633279396594946472011-06-07T06:08:00.000-07:002011-06-07T06:08:00.231-07:00Indentured Servants In Disguise (Gyromite)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gd_6c2mYWQM/TeVYYq-rjpI/AAAAAAAAAhI/keKzlerkpSw/s1600/Robotic_Operating_Buddy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Gd_6c2mYWQM/TeVYYq-rjpI/AAAAAAAAAhI/keKzlerkpSw/s320/Robotic_Operating_Buddy.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="284" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The Other Nintendo Generation always seemed cooler. Long after reason had concluded it couldn't possibly be as cool as I thought, it still seemed cooler. How could it not? It had a robot.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The Robotic Operating Buddy, or ROB, was actually just a bit of marketing. After the 1983 crash, no retailer would touch a "video game" system, seeing them as a dead fad. As the legend goes, Nintendo created ROB so that they could sell the NES as a "toy" rather than a "video game system."Obviously it worked, but once it worked and the NES was launched as a viable product, ROB was quietly relegated to that most ignoble dustbin, completely being ignored forever.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The Nintendo Generation is used to this dustbin, lingering as we do in this abandoned space before the crash. Somewhere, without our consultation, there is the sense that a decision was reached as to where it was decided which generations would be able to live out their lives in a functioning society and which ones would be left to rot, and that the cutoff hit us squarely in the face. This is the driving engine of a society in which the marriage rate is plummeting. Why start a family with no prospects?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Of course, there are perils in chasing this analogy too far. For one thing, it leaves us as the equivalent of ROB. Which is to say, a temperamental piece of plastic used to control a lousy video game like Gyromite. This is, by many standards, a degradation too far. Tens of thousands of dollars of debt spent earning useless college degrees, moving, as far too many of us have, back home, the complete abandonment of any future, these are things we are gradually coming to terms with. Saying we're as bad as ROB? Ouch.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The biggest problem with ROB was not that it sucked, which is an impressive accomplishment for something that sucks. It's biggest problem was that it was actually a viable robot. This is what those of us who were not in the ROB end of the Nintendo Generation did not realize at the time, and still to some extent resist fully wrapping our heads around. Robots, in video games, serve a very limited purpose. They are giant killing machines. This is literally their only function. Yes, in Mega Man Dr. Light screwed up and made a bunch of robots that were not giant killing machines. Then Dr. Wily helpfully came along and repaired them all.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">(There is admittedly a slight window for helpful sidekick robots, but let's face it, that's basically just Rush.)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But ROB is actually a robot of labor and utility. ROB's function is... well, actually, he just moves objects around among several stacks. But still, this fits in with our understanding of the world fairly smoothly. He's a glorified forklift. He is less a buddy than a source of cheap - free, even, labor. And in Gyromite, that's basically what he is - the robotic assistant who helps a scientist get his laboratory back under control.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Not that slave labor dynamics are terribly unusual in video games - it's why I was able to mine <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/05/pataphor-of-academia-gradius.html">Gradius</a> for comedy. But generally it's the <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/04/number-you-are-calling-has-been.html">player who is forced to work for free</a>. The player doesn't usually get to join the ranks of the bourgeois. Certainly the player is not encouraged to take home a friend and exploit their labor as part of the gameplaying process.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Which is perhaps why ROB was ultimately doomed. Designed as he was to make video games masquerade as toys, once the basic deception was completed and people liked video games, he served no purpose. Or, worse, he served a negative purpose. Nobody wants to force toys into a life of cheap labor. Toys are things we form emotional bonds with. Things we love. It is not good to love the face of your slave.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">But perhaps the problem is that we ever had a distinction between "toy" and "video game" in the first place. If both are modes of leisure, why the effort to distinguish them? Surely the appeal of something like Katamari Damacy is that it's a video game that acts like a toy, just as the appeal of a Nerf gun is that it is a toy that invites a simulated game. The flaw with ROB - other than sucking, of course - may never have been the frisson of inappropriatness generated by an enslaved toy. It may just have been that the video game required a slave in the first place.</div>Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-17746866985695762902011-06-02T07:01:00.000-07:002011-06-02T07:01:01.321-07:00Welcome to Warp Zone (Gun Nac, Gun Smoke)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZAiMyhygWG4/TeFc29SylPI/AAAAAAAAAg0/827Ubu0VNSQ/s1600/gunnac.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZAiMyhygWG4/TeFc29SylPI/AAAAAAAAAg0/827Ubu0VNSQ/s1600/gunnac.png" /></a>Gun Nac is one of those games of glorious weirdness. The sort that just sail gamely past "sense" into that bizarre twilight realm of juxtaposition and absurdity. On the one hand, it is a bog-standard shooter of the sort that the NES had far too many of. I'm nowhere near enough of an afficianado of the genre to identify gradiations of quality. This one seems pretty good, but honestly, I don't know that I'm the one to comment. What's interesting about it, frankly, is how often you're attacked by giant rabbits. As is kind of implied by the screenshot, which is one of the most surreal moments in an opening crawl.</div><br />
These willfully strange games - often the ones that prompted us to declare the non-existence of Japan - play an important part in the Nintendo generation. The pieces of childhood that endure in our memories are, after all, the bits that we cannot quite make sense of at the time. I remember vividly a single image of a picture book in which, if my memory serves, a forest full of animals was possessed by some unsettling presence. The image was of a forest with numerous pairs of pale blue eyes staring out of it sinisterly. No context of this book remains for me, and I am at an utter loss for what it was. I remember only the bit that was too strange and too scary for me to quite make sense of.<br />
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Gun Nac, although not scary, belongs to this tradition - the sort of bizarre and incomensurable game that occupies mental space out of sheer weirdness. These are what we should demand of our games, frankly - that their images and play mechanics entrance and drive us mad long after we play them. Video games shouldn't be disposable entertainments, but permanent mindwarps. They should change who we are forever, like any art. This need not be universal. Not every game need warp every person. But every game should be able to warp someone.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zjlpYUklu_o/TeFc3NKA11I/AAAAAAAAAg4/C2AIPuiKODI/s1600/gunsmoke.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zjlpYUklu_o/TeFc3NKA11I/AAAAAAAAAg4/C2AIPuiKODI/s1600/gunsmoke.png" /></a>For better or for worse, Gun Smoke is a game that does that for me. It's an oddly difficult game for me to get a clear critical bead on. I think I hate it, but I'm utterly unconvinced that I have any good reasons for it. It's entirely possible that my reasons for disliking this game come down entirely to the person who introduced me to it.<br />
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See, my main Nintendo phase was in elementary school. But I had a secondary run at the NES in college, and in the course of that, I had a very close friend. This friend was one of the few people I've ever met that I felt intellectually awed by - a seeming virtuoso in several subjects with an intellectual certainty that I found appealing. Plus he was one of the most popular people in my larger social circle. Never being one for mass popularity, I'd long since learned (and still from time to time exercise) the trick of being a close friend of the most popular people as a far more efficient path to social acceptance.<br />
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(There is a cold strategism here that even now leaves me uncomfortable - a cynicism to the way I approach social circles and friends. All I can say is that people came to me much less easily than how stories work or arsenals of facts. I had to learn social interaction consciously, and I approached it like I approached learning anything. Yes, it's left me as a weird and kind of fucked up person. It's still preferable to crippling social anxiety.)<br />
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And so I became, for lack of a better word, entranced by him. I wasn't the only one. The intellectual falling out with him I'll describe shortly was not the only falling out I had with him. The larger one involves personal matters that are not mine to tell about.<br />
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Suffice it to say that I was enormously invested in this friendship - with an investment that, much more through my own fault than his, made it a very one-sided friendship and not an entirely healthy one. (This is not to say that he was blameless - merely that I clearly was in part at fault for any unhealthiness in that friendship.) And in my defense, I still care about many of the things I first came to care about through that friendship - absurdist theater, aesthetic philosophy, Kant, a particular band of film, television, and, as it happens, video games. He, after all, shared my love of the old NES, and we enjoyed exposing each other to games. One of the ones he exposed me to was Gun Smoke - a novelty in that it was effectively a Gun Nac style shooter in which you were a cowboy and cold only fire on very precise and defined angles. It was a pretty good game. But I can't separate it from all the other feelings I have about him to judge it.<br />
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Which is odd. It is not like the game was an important part of the friendship. It wasn't. It's just that that I have never really heard the game mentioned by anyone else, and so I have no other associations with it. In truth, the bulk of my entrancement was intellectual. The result was an unfortunate flirtation with what amounted to a fusion of Kantianism and Objectivism - a combination that should amuse anybody who, like me, had a longer Ayn Rand phase than you want to admit to.<br />
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What it came down to was a very standard sort of libertarian anarchism. Believing in the supreme importance of individual free will, any restrictions on it whatsoever came to seem unjust. The end result of this logic, if followed with ruthless consistency and a prioritization of the ethical over the practical, is pacifist anarcho-capitalism. I understand very, very well how one gets to the conclusions that declare that taxes are an unjust threat of force on the part of the government and amount to theft at gunpoint, and how one decides that one has an inalienable right to say no to someone begging you for help because their life depends on your sacrifice of something.<br />
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After all, I reasoned, there was something fundamentally unfair about the social contract. I had never signed off on it, and never consented to be a member of this state. Why should it have power over me? Why was I never given any alternative to fealty to it?<br />
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Over time, as I said, the friendship crumbled. I took issue with some decisions he made about his life and about his relationships with people I cared about. He did not so much take issue with my objections as not care, which was certainly his prerogative. This coincided with my changing my mind on a lot of intellectual matters as I got to reading more extensively than he had on several topics. In time, alienated from him both personally and intellectually, the friendship by and large withered.<br />
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What this means, however, is that I can point to the specific essay that made me a liberal. Appropriately for my overall status as the <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/11/nintendo-world-order-demon-sword-and.html">embodiment of all that is evil</a> it was by a French Marxist who (seemingly consensually) murdered his wife. Louis Althusser's "<a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm">Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses</a>," which everyone really should just read.<br />
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To condense a lot of philosophy, what that essay ultimately made me realize is this: it is impossible to have a conception of the self or of "I" absent a social order. There is no way to exist or experience the world in the first place, to conduct any observations or theorizations about the nature of the world, or even to think without the existence of a society. Our sense of who we are, the language in which we think, the entire structure of our minds, these things come from existing in a community - from responding to other people and to often unstated norms and structures of society.<br />
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If there is no way to imagine ourselves separate from our neighbors and our community, suddenly the virtues of libertarian self-interest crumble. If I understand myself not as the divine center of the universe but as something that only exists as part of a larger society, suddenly it becomes a lot harder to justify personally profiting at the expense of that society. Combine this with more realizations like that social anxiety not withstanding, life is generally improved by a sense of community and by having people you care about and you get... well... liberalism. If I, and with me my entire sense of reality and everything I have ever loved or enjoyed, exist only because of the rest of the people in my town, state, country, and for that matter planet, then it suddenly becomes very difficult to come up with any compelling explanation why we would ever allow one to die of a treatable illness or be bankrupted forever by the bad luck of getting sick.<br />
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Or, put another way, I no longer saw the social contract as some irritating burden foisted upon me. Rather, I saw it as a pre-requisite for "me." I did not consent to the social contract because I couldn't exist to consent without it. Through circumstances utterly unrelated to my free will, I was part of a culture and society. I've still not come close to working out the consequences of that, but it's very clear to me that they are far more complex (and fascinatingly wonderful) than those I had previously embraced.<br />
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And that is, in the end, how I moved on from an emotionally destructive friendship that still troubles me in some ways to being a liberal. I stopped being able to accept the idea that my health and well-being should come at the expense of somebody else's.<br />
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Some day that sort of progress might include liking Gun Smoke.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-79496459322848678042011-05-31T08:28:00.000-07:002011-05-31T08:28:00.451-07:00Behaving Idiosyncratically (Guerilla War, Gumshoe)<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X9-6Uvzc1iQ/TeAojOM9E0I/AAAAAAAAAgs/K0Rs0XnC1JA/s1600/guerilla.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-X9-6Uvzc1iQ/TeAojOM9E0I/AAAAAAAAAgs/K0Rs0XnC1JA/s1600/guerilla.png" /></a>Before we say anything else about SNK's 1987 video game Guerilla War, we should first confront the fact that it is literally impossible that this game would come out today. This is not a commentary on its play mechanics, which are actually quite solid. No, this is far simpler. Guerilla War is a port of a Japanese game entitled Guevera. The playable characters are Che Guevera and Fidel Castro. This was only narrowly hidden when the game was ported to the US, with the opening screen still being a picture of someone who looks exactly like Che Guevera and the caption "Hail the Heros of the Revolution!"<br />
<br />
This game simply could not exist in 2011. Just imagine the ferocious media shitstorm that would be whipped up if a company were to release an overtly pro-Cuban revolution game in 2011. Even if it were lightly redressed, just think for a moment of what the speech where Michelle Bachmann rails against these Marxist multinational video game companies and their indoctrination of our youth. Think of what it would look like when Glenn Beck got his teeth into this. I mean, dear God.<br />
<br />
Playing the game, this mostly seems like a terrible shame. It's quite a good run-and-gun game. What's particularly novel about it is that it gives the player a sensation that it is possible to believe might in some way resemble the feeling of being involved in a guerilla war, except that you generally play the game as a privileged American instead of as a revolutionary in constant mortal danger crawling through the mud to kill people. But other than that, I'm sure it's the exact same thing.<br />
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That sounded more cynical than I am about this. Guerilla War really is a pretty great game. I find myself stopping the blog to go play another round of it with some frequency (twice in under four paragraphs, in fact), which, if I'm being honest, rarely happens. But this just makes whatever changes have happened since 1988 that rendered this game unreleasable now all the more aggravating.<br />
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The problem, and this is something that should seriously disturb anyone who is interested in video games as an artform, is that video games are, along with most mass media in the United States, intensely filtered via a level of de facto censorship that puts the overt efforts at censorship in other countries to shame. Consider - it is functionally impossible to distribute a video game with an Adults Only rating, despite the fact that content that would only pull an R in the movies gets an AO in video games. Only 24 games have ever been released with an AO rating, in fact. An AO rating was given out for the "Hot Coffee" modification to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, despite the fact that the content was not accessible to a normal user and wasn't all that explicit.<br />
<br />
But beyond that there is the fact that the video game industry, along with television and film, are trapped in the horrific censorship of "voluntary" ratings. The way this system works is this. First, some complete fuckface in Congress - usually Joe Lieberman - begins complaining about moral corruption and children. Then, fearing Congressional hearings, whatever industry is being criticized comes up with a voluntary ratings scheme. The thing is, these "voluntary" schemes are <i>wildly</i> more censorious than anything that would be legal for Congress to enforce. Stuff that attempts to censor legally would be laughed out of any courtroom gets censored freely, and it's all OK because it's "voluntary," where "voluntary" means basically "at threat of gunpoint."<br />
<br />
The result is a de facto censorship far more chilling than legal censorship. An overtly Marxist video game could not exist in 2011 simply because the distribution mechanisms for games wouldn't touch it. Gamestop wouldn't distribute it, none of the three console digital platforms would take it. That's it. Game over. Because the video game industry, like television, has choke points on distribution (you can't make television, after all, without a channel to show it on, and those are owned by a handful of companies). Yes, independent distribution for PC gaming exists - hence Super Columbine Massacre RPG! But let's face it, the PC is a dying gaming platform.<br />
<br />
What's interesting about the impossibility of Guerilla War in particular, though, is that the game itself serves in part as a manual against this censorship. Guerilla warfare itself is a style of warfare evolved to deal with grotesque mismatches of power - when one side, for instance, has an impressive array of tanks and fighter jets, and the other side has a couple of angry dudes with guns.<br />
<br />
It is important to define our terms with at least some care here. Guerilla warfare is not equivalent to terrorism. Terrorism is the willful confusion of military and civilian targets in order to spread fear and chaos in a population. Guerilla warfare is when a rebel force within an occupied territory engages in hit and run attacks on military targets while avoiding ever having direct confrontations. Terrorism, while potentially effective, has massive ethical downsides. Guerilla warfare, on the other hand, is the exact right tactic to use when a massive mismatch of forces exists.<br />
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Given our relatively revolutionary theme at present, this is of interest to us. We should start by noting, for those with particularly radical inclinations, that it has been decades since a meaningful attempt at a guerilla insurgency in the United States was tried. Of course, the lack of an overt military presence in the US itself makes it difficult to stay on the guerilla side of the guerilla/terrorist line, but the fact of the matter is that it's been disturbingly long since we've had any acts of leftist aggression in the US, and disturbingly short since we've had any of right-wing aggression.<br />
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But the fact of the matter is that paramilitary tactics are the boring part of revolutions. I mean, yes, it's basically an inevitability that as our generation bankrupts itself paying for the retirement of the baby boomers while the richest 1% continues to horde resources forcing the other 99% into a doomed game of scarcity economics that violent insurrections are going to happen. It's just...<br />
<br />
OK, look, I don't know about you, but I'd make a fucking terrible paramilitary insurgent. I'd be the most rubbish rioter on the block. I'm a fat bastard who grew up playing video games. However grouchy I may have been about always being picked last in gym class, I had to admit the tactics involved in trying to avoid me were sound. So violent revolution may be on the cards, but the fact of the matter is, I, and I expect most of my readers, are not going to be the central figures in this one. We're going to be the ones holed up under our tables whimpering for our mommies.<br />
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But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have our own tactics in mind. Or that those tactics should not, broadly speaking, be modeled on guerilla tactics. We are, after all, hopelessly outgunned by the institutional structures of power. Society as it exists is not going to help us. If you are in your late 20s or 30s and working a low rent job with no benefits, you are very probably fucked and it is not going to get better for you. The standard advice is that if you want a comfortable retirement this is when you need to be putting money away. So basically, if you're more than 30, even if a good job with benefits drops into your lap, you'll have to work it until you die.<br />
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This means that we are going to have to fend for ourselves. This is not a disaster. As we've already observed, happiness is cheap. Once you solve the happiness issue, it's just food, shelter, and medical care. Two of those three are easy. So let's look through the major approaches to dealing with the problem of fending for yourself.<br />
<br />
First off we have survivalism. Several problems exist here. First, we are geeks. We are going to make very, very bad survivalists. We will get eaten. Possibly within seconds. Second, survivalism is a really stupid idea anyway. Planning for the utter collapse of society is a poor idea. As others have pointed out (though the one I am remembering is <a href="http://www.birdsbeforethestorm.net/">Margaret Killjoy</a> in the pages of Alan Moore's sublime underground magazine Dodgem Logic, to which this entire revolutionary jag owes much), you will not survive the apocalypse. This is why it is the apocalypse. If the way this all shakes out is the complete collapse of civilization, frankly, most of us are in fact going to die and there's not really much point in planning for it. (There is a third massive problem with survivalism, namely its deeply flawed conception of individualism, but that's another post.)<br />
<br />
No. Let's assume that we're going to have to function within an existing civilization. What are we going to do? One answer, and an answer worth taking seriously, is "behave idiosyncratically."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1y9ZFgg6la8/TeAojezYPJI/AAAAAAAAAgw/xqF29DKUm34/s1600/gumshoe.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1y9ZFgg6la8/TeAojezYPJI/AAAAAAAAAgw/xqF29DKUm34/s1600/gumshoe.png" /></a>Which brings us to our other game, Gumshoe. There is no particular reason why Gumshoe should be an obscure game. But it is. The game is a straightforward platformer - you try not to fall off or get hit by bad guys. Except that your avatar progresses inexorably towards the right, and you control the game with the Zapper. And there's the problem - other than the title that comes with it, almost no peripheral has a meaningfully played catalog of games. The usual reason for this comes down to simple math. Even the most successful games for a given platform have relatively small sell throughs - the best games for the Gamecube, for instance, managed about 33% sell through. (That is, 33% of people who bought a Gamecube also bought Super Smash Bros. Melee) So even if your peripheral does blockbuster business, and then your game for the peripheral does phenomenally as well, your absolute best case scenario is that 11% of console buyers will buy a peripheral game. In practice, the math never actually works out that well. Especially because any video game company can do that math, and so they never devote serious resources to peripheral games, leading them to be poor-selling shovelware.<br />
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With, of course, a few exceptions. Such as Gumshoe, an improbably difficult but strangely fun game. It's a game of the sort I have referred to in other entries as rabbit holes - games that only a relatively small number of people have played, but that are quite beloved among those who have played them. They are thus objects of intense fascination that nevertheless put their players somewhat apart from everybody else because of a lack of larger social context.<br />
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Rabbit holes seem to me a good goal. The creation of objects that seek not so much a mass audience as an effective audience. Whether these objects be artistic, pragmatic, or otherwise. I am, essentially, calling for a smarter, leaner version of communes - groups of people with relatively compatible ideas of happiness and interests pooling resources both to accomplish a defined goal (albeit possibly one of limited interest outside the group) and to survive.<br />
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The trouble, of course, and what will have to sustain this "8-Bit Revolution" thread for at least another post in the future, is this: history is littered with failed utopian communities. They seem not to work.<br />
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Can we make them?Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-65090990809126564712011-05-26T09:43:00.000-07:002011-05-26T09:43:00.277-07:00Climbing the Starting Blocks (Gremlins II: The New Batch and Guardian Legend)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KT6F42p2I-M/TdxIYLHBJiI/AAAAAAAAAgY/aIvkItBNjOA/s1600/grem2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KT6F42p2I-M/TdxIYLHBJiI/AAAAAAAAAgY/aIvkItBNjOA/s1600/grem2.png" /></a>At some point, these blog entries collapse towards solipsism. It's bad enough when this happens purely because the games in question are so mind-wrenchingly bad that there is nothing to say about them. It's far more annoying when it happens on basically decent games. I mean, here... one of the games is Gremlins II! If nothing else, I ought to be able to bash out a nice bit of autobiography about the Gremlins movies, how they were my first horror movies, and how good they are at being first horror movies because they give you a throughline of something to enjoy other than the gory spectacle. Even though the Gremlins movies are really about the comedy of putting a cute fuzzy Mogwai into a horror movie, they are also, by extension, about the comedy of putting a horror movie into a kids movie full of Mogwais. The most traumatic scene for me, then, was the one where the Mogwais start to turn, because the cute things were going away and they were the best part. (Accordingly, think how horrible the movies would have been if not for Gizmo remaining unchanged. That decision is what makes those movies.)</div><br />
Instead of that analysis, we crash towards this pathetically masturbatory nested structure of posts as if neo-Borgesian structure games make up for a lack of definitive insight. I mean, look at this crap:<br />
<br />
<hr />The line one has to walk with these more political posts is one between stridency and useful engagement. Sure, I can fire off a great blog post about the fundamental flaws of the Less Wrong crowd. I can even agree with it, since I think the Less Wrong crowd is chasing a poorly defined dead end that is siphoning energy off of actual pragmatic social justice to create what amounts to a manual on how to live a consumerist middle class life as robotically as possible.<br />
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But why? Who does that benefit? I mean, I'm genuinely concerned that this is an essentially narcissistic and masturbatory act. I mean, let's look at what I was writing before I gave up:<br />
<br />
<hr />I wrote several hundred words of this entry before I stopped and realized something wasn't working in it. This happens every once in a while, and since I'm banking entries hardly even counts as a problem - no real time pressure was created by my dead end. The problem with this dead end was this - I was largely confident in the basic angle. What I wanted to talk about in these two games was definitely the problem of the rough start in NES games.<br />
<br />
We'll use the example from Gremlins II, since the draft material of the original entry is mostly Guardian Legend. Gremlins II is a perfectly nice Zelda-esque overhead game. Actually, the nearest cousin I can think of is Startropics. But man, the early difficulty is lethal. Mowgli is just a bit too fragile, the enemies a bit too durable, and the tomatoes you throw a bit too puny to make it a fair start. And it's discouraging, and that interested me. Because there was nothing wrong with either game - they just pissed me off to the point where I didn't want to play them. And that was what I wanted to talk about. But as I said, clearly it went wrong. So let's look at what I had and see where it went wrong:<br />
<br />
<hr /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wIvUMZ7NiNg/TdxIYQNuIbI/AAAAAAAAAgc/q8rNL5KEmP4/s1600/guard.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wIvUMZ7NiNg/TdxIYQNuIbI/AAAAAAAAAgc/q8rNL5KEmP4/s1600/guard.png" /></a>The largest tool of oppression that the universe has ever created is inertia. On every level and in every effort, whether it be a large scale political movement or a small scale personal improvement campaign, intertia is the absolute bugger all. To some extent, this is a statement of such blithering obviousness as to not be worth making. If oppression is simply defined as a bad situation that requires change, then the fundamental tendency of objects to resist change is, from a social justice standpoint, basically the worst thing in the world.<br />
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But picking up on the theme from Tuesday, if we are to take as our fundamental revolutionary act deciding that we are not obliged to earn our happiness and we may simply opt to create it, it is inertia that proves the most immediate barrier.<br />
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So far as I can tell, neither Gremlins II nor Guardian Legend are bad games. I say so far as I can tell because in half an hour of trying, I made very little progress in either one.<br />
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From what I gather, however, Guardian Legend is quite the classic game with a wide variety of genres effectively blended. But the first of those genres - the <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/05/pataphor-of-academia-gradius.html">Gradius</a> style shooter - proved a fairly insurmountable barrier. Half an hour of trying and I still couldn't quite clear the boss.<br />
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The big philosophical question here is simple - the declaration that we will be in control of our own happiness is not equivalent to an absolute right to be happy. The entire point of the exercise is that happiness is not going to be treated as a commodity that we must earn, but rather that it will be treated like a craft project or a work of art - something that we are entitled to build. There will still be work required to make ourselves happy.<br />
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The question is what degree of effort ought be spent trying to overcome inertia.<br />
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This problem is worsened by the fact that inertia and momentum are actually basically the same thing. Just as it takes an unusually large exertion of energy to get something to start moving, it takes added energy to stop it. Thus we have a Scylla and Charybdis situation going - we both are disinclined to put in effort to start doing something new and are disinclined to stop doing something old, leading to problems like "throwing good money after bad."<br />
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Much as I would like to declare an easy and obvious solution to this, it is an intensely intractable problem. Even if we ask it only on the level of basic happiness, it proves surprisingly difficult to straightforwardly resolve. Exactly how much time should I spend trying to beat the first boss on Guardian Legend once I begin to get frustrated?<br />
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Part of this, though, is a matter of bad design. The first boss of Guardian Legend is surely no harder than most of the levels of the recent indie game <a href="http://www.supermeatboy.com/">Super Meat Boy</a>. And yet I am happy to spend large amounts of time flailing at Super Meat Boy in a way that I don't want to with Guardian Legend. This is because Super Meat Boy tries to minimize the penalty for death - you splatter and there's a half second delay before you get to try the level again, and each level is fairly small. Whereas in Guardian Legend, a single death results in a game over such that I have to start a new game and play for 90 seconds before I've earned the right to die again. (Amusingly, when I went to time how long it takes to get to the first boss, I beat it finally and got to the next bit of game. Where I flailed for a bit, then died. Somewhere in here is a lesson.)<br />
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In game design, the concept in question is the death penalty. Basically, it's the matter of how you punish players for failure without getting them to give up playing the game. For the most part, in most game design, it turns out that low death penalties make for better games, and most games have progressed towards that.<br />
<hr />The problem with all of that seems to me this: unless I had intended for the entry to be a mocking parody of the Less Wrong crowd - which, to be fair, would not have been out of line as an entry - it's complete rubbish. It falls into the same trap that the entire "lifehacking" movement seems to me to fall into - an obsessive focus on optimizing functionality wildly out of proportion to actual utility.<br />
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I mean, let's use a real example. I just pulled up Less Wrong, and picked not quite at random the following article: "<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/5r9/suffering_as_attentionallocational_conflict/">Suffering as attention-allocational conflict</a>." Now, let me be honest - I more or less like the Less Wrong crowd on a personal level. But jeez. Ostensibly the post is a lot like ours from Tuesday - a piece about cognitive approaches to making your life a more pleasant one.<br />
<br />
But I think there's a rather key difference. I point out that there's a fundamental flaw in our ideological construction of happiness from a childhood level up, and suggest a contra-social approach to remedying the problem, or at the very least, suggest that pursuing our own happiness and demanding good compensation for willingly being unhappy is a good idea. Mostly I view this as post-consumer ideology 101: do not approach late capitalism as if its end goals are equivalent to personal happiness.<br />
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The Less Wrong essay reduces the entire concept of human suffering to an analogy about error messages on a personal computer, and determines that suffering comes from failing to adequately acknowledge an expressed desire by part of your overall psyche.<br />
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The problem with this... well, it's tough to articulate. Especially because any time you try articulating something like this to the Less Wrong crowd they just start whacking you with "can you be more concrete about that" like they're trying to see if you slip up and they can declare that you fail the Turing Test. Not that they'd ever accuse you of it. They'd just make some snide comment about how you clearly don't know enough about Bayesian Inference, then strip naked and worship at their big giant airstrip in the jungle waiting for the Cargo Singularity to come.<br />
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But the problem is this. Less Wrong far too often consists of a bunch of middle class technocrats coming up with clever Wittgensteinian word games to play in order to optimize happiness, and they are far too willing to engage in these games even on concepts like human suffering. The entire piece is about an attempt to rework how you think about things in your life to make you happier. It's Doctor Phil for the techno-libertarian crowd. Even before you get into their odious dislike of postmodernism, there's something wrong here. And it's the word choice. "Suffering." I mean, they're not just offering tips for working with depression. No, no. They're tackling human suffering - a problem usually more associated with things like starvation, lack of adequate medical care, and the fact that we willingly divide the world into an isolated and rich elite and a vast poor underclass.<br />
<br />
I mean, let's be blunt here. The root problem of Less Wrong is that it's a bunch of privileged technocrats discussing lifehacks to optimize their happiness. And that this may be an acceptable way to spend your time, but that it is in no way an acceptable activity to describe as meaningfully utopian or focused on human progress. The basic message of Less Wrong - try to be more rational - is a fantastic one. But rather ignores the pressing matter of what one should be rational <i>about</i>.<br />
<hr />So basically, aren't we just prissy mc-authorpants here. But look, the point stands. Anyone using the word "suffering" for the purpose "blogging about how sad conflicting social engagements makes me" is so spectacularly out of tune with the actual material conditions of people in their world that one wonders if there is any remedy beyond simply abandoning them in one of the urban slums of our "emerging economies" (Mumbai or Sao Paolo would be fantastic choices) and seeing how that goes for them.<br />
<br />
When asked this way, one starts to wonder about this whole concept of individual happiness in the first place. Certainly it doesn't seem to be working out very well for us. All we've managed to produce is a massive wealth gap where the people who have wildly more than everybody else on the planet then sit around and write blog posts about how if they could only optimize their decision making algorithms they could stop being so unhappy. If we're thinking on a remotely big picture level, the fact that depression appears to exist as a recognized problem only among technologically and economically "advanced" western people should be a big honking warning sign. (The answer to this warning sign may well simply be that "depression is less of a problem than dysentery," but this begs the question of why any medical research at all has gone into SSRIs while the whole dysentery thing is still going on. Oh yes. Because health care is a consumer commodity. Somewhere, someone quietly points out that when you can actually use the same measurement of value to cover flat screen TVs and chemotherapy and can express a round of chemo in "how many televisions that cost," you have basically gone so completely wrong that merely being "less" so isn't gonna cut it.)<br />
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I mean, here we are consuming finite resources with no plan B and in wholesale disregard for the fact that we are actually cooking the planet to death by doing so, and <i>it's not even fucking making us happy</i>. Surely whatever solution we cook up to that silly little "inertia" problem in the original draft of this entry would say that when you are throwing sufficient effort at a problem that you are quite literally going to KILL US ALL with your efforts and you are still not actually getting anywhere meaningful on it, maybe, just maybe, it's time to back off.<br />
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Or at the very least to ask again whether we are simply too hard on games. Returning to Guardian Legend, which, in between attempts to figure out where this blog post is going wrong, I've been playing, I find I'm actually getting the hang of this Zelda-esque section in between space fights. I'm completely lost and sure I should have been <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/02/embodied-gruesome-band-dungeon-magic.html">drawing a map</a>, but I'm increasingly realizing that this is a game I would have really enjoyed at the time. And yet I'm not going to beat it. I'm going to give up on this fun thing and move on to something else. Why? That something else will likely cost money - whether it be a comic, a book, a movie, at some point I am going to expend money to have fun when I could just play Guardian Legend.<br />
<hr />Seriously, cry me a fucking river. The underlying problem is that my entire lifestyle is supported by cruelly exploitative labor practices while I piss and moan about my lack of a cushy academic job? I've got virtual slaves stitching together my clothes and picking my food so I can survive long enough to write witty remarks about video games, and I'm unhappy that I can't get paid to stand in front of other middle class fucks and tell them about literature?<br />
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Never mind Ben Stein's bullshit about the have-nots hating the haves. I'm perfectly willing to be the <i>haves</i> hating the haves. Perhaps depression is a wholly appropriate consequence. Here we are, cooking the planet, and what do we have to show for it? Who wouldn't be depressed to realize that?<br />
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More money went into producing Guardian Legend than some people will see over their entire lifetimes. In the face of stark reality like that, does whether the game is good or bad even have any bearing on whether or not we should suck it up and play it thoroughly before we move on to other things?<br />
<hr />I made it to the next space shooter bit, but got eaten by a giant fish.<br />
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But then I hit continue.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-26650510116912067362011-05-24T07:07:00.000-07:002011-05-24T07:07:00.233-07:00Shiny Happy People (The Great Waldo Search, Where's Waldo?)<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vo8JwZqhOHU/TdgLOCnxlCI/AAAAAAAAAgM/QtPNRSw7phs/s1600/waldo2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vo8JwZqhOHU/TdgLOCnxlCI/AAAAAAAAAgM/QtPNRSw7phs/s1600/waldo2.png" /></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span>The idea of doing two entries on Where's Waldo games did not make me happy. So I decided to only do one, pulling the W-starting game forward. Also, just as a note, between now and June 15th, I am banking posts and writing ahead so that I can take a week off in June without disrupting the posting schedule. This, for instance, was written back on Saturday. </i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>This shouldn't affect you in any way, but if for some reason a blog entry posts that seems like it should be responding to some world event and isn't, it's probably because I wrote it days or weeks before you saw it. </i><br />
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Here's a question for you. Did you spend a lot of your childhood staring at a souped up television screen feeling bad about yourself?<br />
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No?<br />
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Me neither. Which begs the question of why Facebook has now become the most visited site on the Internet. Not that it's not possible to have a good time on Facebook. Just that so few of us seem to actually get around to the step where we do it. I'm as guilty as the rest of you here, using it primarily to refashion my own sense of self-loathing and political anger into bon mots to see if I can bum a few precious "likes" from my friends.<br />
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How the fuck did we get here? What diseased aspect of our childhood left us confusing clicking on a few pixels arranged in the shape of a human thumb with meaningful social contact? Where did we, the Nintendo generation, go wrong? How did we learn this absurd excuse for behavior? And what else did we learn?<br />
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In school, of course, the answer is a bleak truism: we learned obedience. Regardless of the quality of one's teachers - and let's face it, most of us had a mixture of good and bad - this is the content of much of our instruction. My public education is littered with monuments to this process. A fourth grade teacher who advised me that I'd be more popular if I stopped acting so smart. A high school math teacher who treated "if" and "only if" as equivalent statements, marking me wrong on a logic problem that I was right on, and who, upon my producing a college textbook from my parents' library establishing that I was unequivocally correct, told me that since I didn't learn it in her class it didn't count. A substitute who openly admitted his educational philosophy was "the nail that sticks out should be hammered."<br />
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These lessons are unambiguous. Truth is determined by the people with power. You are not a person with power. So you should just shut up and obey.<br />
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Perhaps the best example of these perverse structures of authority comes in the form of the age-old punishment of having your name written on the blackboard. Let's look at this punishment for a moment. What, exactly, is the disincentive? Why is having your name written on a blackboard a bad thing? Some argument about social stigma might be made, but public shaming hardly requires the mythical totem of the blackboard scrawl. No. The blackboard scrawl is far simple. Its lesson is this - here is an authority. Obey.<br />
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With obedience comes the other lesson: the acceptance of tedium. Public education, especially on the primary school level, is based on a curricular structure called the spiral curriculum, in which each lesson is approximately 80% reiteration of past lessons and only 20% new material - if that. Accordingly, each lesson is designed to be boring, designed to teach you things you already know, designed expressly not to challenge you or enliven your life in any way, shape, or form.<br />
<br />
Happiness is a reward that must be earned. A commodity. The default state is misery, and you must strive to get out of it. This psychological abuse is codified in America's founding documents. "The pursuit of happiness," as though having a good time is some obscure thing that requires an elaborate quest instead of, say, grabbing a book and kicking up your feet in a patch of sunlight.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qBuQH6J40_w/TdgLN4rfPrI/AAAAAAAAAgI/6gd1NLXmD4Q/s1600/waldo1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qBuQH6J40_w/TdgLN4rfPrI/AAAAAAAAAgI/6gd1NLXmD4Q/s1600/waldo1.png" /></a>Our freedom from this rat race was video games. Which is what makes Where's Waldo so galling. Widely recognized as one of the worst NES games ever, Where's Waldo consists of moving a cursor around some indistinct 8-bit graphics attempting to find Waldo. The seeming problem is jarringly obvious. As a concept, the "I Spy" game depends on a level of visual clarity and on an object with a reasonably well-defined color scheme and silhouette so that a prospective searcher can find it. In the books, this is accomplished by giving Waldo a distinct color scheme (red and white stripes) and body type (lanky, and with accessories such as a hat and cane) that make him recognizable. When the game, instead of detailed cartoons, consists of a bunch of pixelated smudges, the game loses more or less its entire point. And I'm really not exaggerating. This game is less about "finding" Waldo than it is about clicking to see if the thing you are looking at is Waldo or not. Generally, when one finds Waldo, it is a mild surprise. "Oh! That was Waldo! Who knew?" (Seriously, look at the picture. Can you find Waldo?)<br />
<br />
In other words, the game is a mind-wrenching exercise in abusive tedium ostensibly masquerading as "fun." Needless to say, of course, there was a sequel.<br />
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It's arguably the case that nothing more horrific than the title screen of The Great Waldo Search, a memorable entry into the canon of "the terrible things that happen when white people attempt to insert rap into things." Bad chipset music with a bad synthesized voice shouting "Where's Waldo" at frequent intervals. In that exact tone that evokes "Oh God, white people hired a black guy to add a brief moment of rap to this in order to make it cool." For other examples, try R.E.M.'s "Radio Song" or, of course, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/10/love-is-law-love-under-floppies-crash.html">Don't Copy That Floppy</a>.<br />
<br />
Past that... see, you'd think that by making Waldo actually in any meaningfully sense visually recognizable they'd be improving on the original Where's Waldo game. You'd think that, but, astonishingly, you'd be wrong. It turns out that the complete lack of fun has nothing to do with the game being impossible, and everything to do with the fact that staring at a screen trying to find where the magic pixel is is just bloody stupid.<br />
<br />
But here we should perhaps stop and look at the entire idea of Where's Waldo. I mean, yes, the first game is legendarily bad on its own merits and in its own special ways, but if we're being honest, the entire concept is a bit dodgy. The books offer nothing but displaced pleasure. We are encouraged by them to stare for hours at a single picture that tells no story and offers no pleasure in an effort to find Waldo. Our reward for doing so is the sense that we have earned the right to turn to the next page.<br />
<br />
To be clear, my objection here is not to the idea that a book should require patience and extended study. Far from it. My objection here is that a book should not be long stretches of nothing happening punctuated by a brief and token rush of accomplishment which earns only the moral right to go on to the next boring stretch, or, if one reaches the end of the book, make your parents buy you another one. I will happily celebrate anything that gets children to spend hours with a book just so long as they're actually <i>doing </i>something with the book for most of that time. But <u>Where's Waldo</u> falls afoul of this. It just teaches us, once again, that fun is about earning it.<br />
<br />
Simply put, this is a lesson we must unlearn.<br />
<br />
Have you seen every Academy Award nominee for Best Picture? Read all the books on the Modern Library list? Played all the games on any of the best games of all time lists? Of course not. Hardly anyone has.<br />
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This begs the question of why we tolerate boredom in the first place. It is something that nobody ought endure without being well compensated for it. In a world where a cheap netbook can readily be picked up, either for actual retail value or just from someone getting rid of one to replace it with a newer model, there is literally no excuse for boredom. Stock up on media at a Starbucks and knock yourself out. Not a books and movie kind of person? Perhaps walks outside are more your speed. Or some creative pursuit? It hardly matters. Not much in the way of things that make people happy is actually very expensive. Hardly anyone has as their hobby "sitting naked in a ten bedroom mansion." Most of us can get by for much cheaper.<br />
<br />
So how do we even manage boredom? How is it, in a world where there is more good free or nearly free entertainment than can actually be consumed in a lifetime, that we are ever bored? Other, of course, than that we are so inured to boredom by thirteen years of public education that we forget to avoid it. We have, in other words, a horrific case of Stockholm Syndrome in relation to our own happiness.<br />
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This is not to trivialize the very real phenomenon of depression. But with the rate of depression among the adult population of the country being somewhere terrifyingly close to 100%, one starts to wonder why we are so depressed. Is it really the case that every past culture just suffered in abject misery for most of the day because nobody had yet developed the SSRI? Or is our depression a consequence of something very obvious like the fact that we endure thirteen years of education that have as their primary lesson the fact that we should shut up, listen to our elders, and be miserable?<br />
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Not that the SSRI isn't a tremendously effective device in dealing with depression. I've loved my SSRIs when I've been on them, and I only stopped because I hit the end of my prescription and, having no health insurance, found the logistical hurdles of forming a relationship with a primary care physician or psychiatrist in order to get a new prescription to be daunting. They're great stuff. So is therapy. But in the end, nothing quite beats actually doing things that make you happy and avoiding things that make you unhappy.<br />
<br />
And we should stress that this is a revolutionary act. What makes you happy? How much does it actually cost to make you happy? What are the actual minimum material conditions necessary to achieve happiness in a regular basis?<br />
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What would happen to your life if you started making yourself happy? The answer is surprisingly larger than you might think - much more than just "well you'd be happy." Think of how much of our economic system is based on people accepting misery as a fact of life and treating happiness as something that has to be earned. Why is it minimum wage jobs are all particularly miserable ones? Surely if we're actually expecting people to sit in toll booths taking quarters from irritable commuters for eight hours a day we ought reimburse them more for the abject misery involved than we reimburse people who, say, get to play with computer code all day.<br />
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What if the people with power couldn't lord our own happiness over us? What if we were in control of whether we were happy?<br />
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</div>For most of us, I suspect, it would be downright... revolutionary.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-85021960736956399922011-05-19T12:16:00.000-07:002011-05-19T12:16:29.417-07:00A Camel Screaming At An Onrushing Piece of Straw (The Great Gatsby)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_Ipxzoozj20/TdVsY_lqgTI/AAAAAAAAAgA/27co4DSxiuE/s1600/gatsby.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="288" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_Ipxzoozj20/TdVsY_lqgTI/AAAAAAAAAgA/27co4DSxiuE/s320/gatsby.png" width="320" /></a></div><i>Haven't heard of The Great Gatsby NES game? Check out <a href="http://greatgatsbygame.com/">this site</a> for information on this exciting recent find in NES history.</i><br />
<br />
This post is going to be political.<br />
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There's a school of thought that says I shouldn't do this. That this blog is, in the end, a form of entertainment, and that politics have no place in it. It's the same school of thought that goes into criticizing the backup story in Action Comics #900, of which Chuck Dixon bewilderingly said <a href="http://www.newsarama.com/comics/the-q-supermans-citizenship-110502.html">"The expression of personal politics has no place in mainstream superhero comics."</a><br />
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The trouble is, this is rubbish. Politics is the practical system by which we manage the structure of society. Anything you do that involves society at large - say, publish a comic book that thousands of people read - is political. Stepping out of your house in the morning has a wealth of material political consequences. How do you choose to visually represent your identity, including gender presentation? What sort of house did you walk out of? How big? How much of that house is conspicuous consumption? What is the grass you are stepping on like? What is used to fertilize it? Once you are outside of your house, what is your mode of conveyance to your destination? Car? Bicycle? Foot? All of these are decisions that are impossible to separate from politics. Indeed, anything you do in public is political, because anything you do in public by definition a claim about how relationships between and among people should be conducted.<br />
<br />
While we're on the subject, can we also rubbish the inherent goodness of agreeing to disagree? I'm firmly pro-choice, but I in no way see why someone who genuinely believes that a fetus is a living human being should simply "agree to disagree" with me on this point. In their eyes, I support the systematized murder of babies. Frankly, if you genuinely believe someone is providing material support to the mass murder of babies and are still willing to have a drink with them, there is something seriously wrong with you. Similarly, if one believes, as many on the pro-choice side do (I am not actually among them) that abortion comes down entirely to an issue of a woman's autonomy over her own body, it is difficult to come up with a compelling account of the ethics of casually breaking bread with someone who believes that the government ought strictly regulate women's bodies and that if a woman gets pregnant she is nothing more than a breeding slave for the next nine months. Which is, let's face it, what the opposing positions amount to if you actually firmly and unwaveringly believe in your own initial premises.<br />
<br />
As the extremely smart and quite fetching JD I'm running bits of this entry by points out, however, this viewpoint, although potentially logically consistent, would have the unfortunate result of reducing our society to thuggish tribalism. The smart and fetching JD is half correct. Certainly this is one of the major and obvious ways of handling the ethical obligations of political viewpoints. There is, however, another that is worth taking very seriously: that the consequences of this observation ought to be a pronounced skepticism towards moral certainty. Not a complete ruling out of moral certainty - without that we'd be really ineffectual humans - but a skepticism towards it whereby one remains open-minded to the possibility that other ethical worldviews might be accurate and seeks actively at all times to test one's own viewpoints and see if they require adjustment.<br />
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Here, then, is a testing of mine. As Tuesday's post might have indicated, I am in some ways deeply unsatisfied with the progress of my life vis a vis my decision to spend eleven years in higher education, seven of them working towards a PhD. My objection, roughly, is this.<br />
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I got a PhD out of a desire to spend my life in public service. I want to spend my life engaging in research and teaching people. Make no mistake, committing yourself to a career teaching at a public university is a life of public service every bit as much as a commitment to armed service in the military is.<br />
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In pursuit of this goal, I spent five years making wages equivalent to what I'd get in a minimum wage job. And it was a job. Yes, I took classes as part of it, but the classes were in pursuit of a PhD in English - a degree that literally qualifies you for exactly one job: college professor. An overwhelming majority of college professors are hired by state governments. So far from being a service bestowed upon me by the University of Florida, let us treat my classes as what they were - training for a public service career for which I was given token living expenses while I conducted.<br />
<br />
Let us also admit the reason my PhD program existed and was the size it was. PhD students in English teach two to three courses a year for wages of, for most of them, around $11k. That's $3667 a course. Starting salary for a tenure track professor of English in Florida is $48k for four courses a year. That's $12,000 a course. At less than a third of the cost, any courses you can offload to PhD students are a money saver. So universities build large PhD programs specifically for the cheap labor.<br />
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In an even remotely fair system, then, in exchange for five years of my working life at minimum wage while training for a career in public service, the state that exploited me for those five years would return the favor subsequently with, say, a job. But, of course, the entire point of exploiting me was that I was far cheaper than hiring someone they were done exploiting at an actual reasonable wage. And so, after spending my 20s making minimum wage while training for a job, I now reach the point in my life where no such jobs actually exist.<br />
<br />
Except it's worse than that. These are not the normal budget cuts that are done with some patina of regret where politicians pretend they don't want to cut jobs in my field. No, now we are at a point where one of the major political parties in America actually actively demonizes public employees as "freeloaders." (Yes, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201102170027">this happened</a>.) In other words, it is not merely that budget cuts have left few jobs in my area - a situation that would be gallingly unjust considering the five years of cheap labor I have already given the states whose budgets are being cut. It is that my entire willingness to work in public service is now the actual grounds on which I am being declared undeserving of a job.<br />
<br />
So when I suggest that I have snapped in my previous post, this is why - because I have given eleven working years of my life to a system that has exploited me and abandoned me. Now, in practice, and I feel obliged to stress this, I'm OK. I've got a support network in place and am working actively on transitioning into freelance writing. (We call this "portfolio building." That and "acquiring the discipline to write an average of 2000 words a day so that when you reach the end of either blog you can transition seamlessly into bashing out stuff for money." Speaking of which, we do accept paid writing gigs. And do birthday parties. Though really, hiring a writer for your kid's birthday party is a surefire way to lose Dad of the Year.) But the thing is, my situation is not even remotely unusual.<br />
<br />
So the question is, what degree of moral certitude is appropriate here? I find it fairly difficult to escape having some degree of it. There is something fundamentally unfair about building a system that solicits people to work at substandard wages for five years to train for a public service job, and then uses the existence of people willing to accept those terms as a tool to reduce the number of public service jobs of the sort they train for. Creating a charade of training people for a job that doesn't exist and then using the marks you draw in as cheap replacements for the job itself is wrong. In a functional system, the state of Florida would actually hire its own PhDs, using its PhD programs as training for its own job rosters.<br />
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In other words, I am left with the inexorable sense that I have been deliberately conned and swindled by, most directly, the state of Florida, and, more broadly, the entire American education system and thus, by extension, the entire country. And I am angry about it. The most obvious manifestation of this anger is an increasing inability to deal with Republicans (the party most visibly seeking to ensure that I can never be hired in the field I trained in for eleven years) on a social level. Sorry, guys. But you've kind of been engaging in a massive and deliberate campaign to leave me unemployed, and frankly, it makes me want to cause you intense physical pain.<br />
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All of this, however, amounts to little more than one angry shouty man with a blog. Let's look at things that have little to do with me. First of all, there is money that used to go towards things like hiring tenure track professors at state universities. Where is this money now? The answer appears to be that the money is where most of the money is now - <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4#the-gap-between-the-top-1-and-everyone-else-hasnt-been-this-bad-since-the-roaring-twenties-1">in the hands of the wealthy</a>. In fact, at present the wealthiest 1% of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. To ground that in numbers, that means that for each of the wealthiest three million you can line up over ninety people and that one person has more than all of them combined.<br />
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This is a new situation. Incomes among the wealthiest 1% have been skyrocketing since, actually, the heyday of the NES. Incomes for everybody else have been stagnant. This is the grand legacy of trickle down - a phrase that has always seemed more suitable for an outhouse than a global economy. Radical gains for the wealthy, fuck all for everyone else. The result of this is that, as a practical matter, there are people with miles more than they need or can ever plausibly consume in a lifetime who are hoarding it while others can't afford health care.<br />
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The math here is telling. The per capita GDP in America would have everyone making about the $48k of an entry level college professor. The very existence of people with an income of, say, a million dollars a year means that the equivalent of 20.83 people need to have their incomes zeroed to allow that to happen. Everyone making six figures is zeroing at least one other person. This is the chilling, callous math of scarcity economics. So when you have a runaway wealth gap where 34% of the wealth is concentrated in the top 1% and 2.5% is among the poorest 50%, well, that means there's a lot of other people who have hit around 30 and realized that their country has no investment in their ever being able to make a living.<br />
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Which, after what has to be some kind of a record for how long a post has gone without mentioning a single video game directly, brings us to The Great Gatsby. I suppose I should give up the joke and admit that this is in fact just a flash game in the style of an NES game, but really, where's the fun in that. Especially because the central joke of the game - the fact that Fitzgerald's baroquely modernist dialogue fits relatively seamlessly with the conventions of Engrish-laden NES games - depends on that knowing misdirection. (On the other hand, the end of level two, which I cannot bring myself to spoil, is flat-out hilarious like nothing I have seen in a video game since the original Portal.)<br />
<br />
But more to the point, let's pause and look at the novel the game is based on, at least briefly. At its heart, it is a book about conspicuous consumption and the unsustainability of it. Written in a time period with a wealth gap comparable to that of 2011, the heart of the novel is the question of whether money alone accounts for the difference between the wealthy and the ordinary. Its answer is that it doesn't - that there is still something fundamentally different about the old money of Tom and the new money of Gatsby, and that Gatsby can never truly bridge that gap no matter how much money he has. In other words, the novel establishes that there is, in the realm of conspicuous consumption, no such thing as "enough." And, equally crucially, it does not establish this as an absolute condition. Nick, after all, turns his back on the world of conspicuous consumption and returns to the midwest in the end. But he remains pessimistic about the possibility of the destructive rat race ceasing, saying "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning --"<br />
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Notably, the ending crawl on the game uses this as well. The thing is, Fitzgerald was wrong if he saw this as futile. Since it's very difficult to view the Great Depression and World War II as anything other than a complete and revolutionary transformation of American society. This is because there is a relatively straightforward causality to revolution. Contrary to the beliefs/wishes of many, revolution, broadly considered, is a wholly straightforward phenomenon that has nothing to do with the supposed apathy of a population.<br />
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Take any population and give them high unemployment, particularly high unemployment among younger and more educated citizens, remove all evidence of a long-term solution or even that the government cares about this, add in rising food prices, and crank up the temperatures to summer levels and you will have an explosion. So how are we doing on that?<br />
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<a href="http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2011/05/19/rich_splurging_others_scrimping_report_says/">Oh. Oh dear.</a><br />
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Now, of course, revolution is not inherently a violent process - although violent revolution is a very easy and DIY process requiring only a brick and the window of a corporate office to commence. Bullets and billionaires are two tastes that someone is bound to decide might go well together. But this is hardly the only route available.<br />
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Remembering that avoiding political action is essentially an impossible task, we might ask what the Nintendo Generation's revolution would look like. If, as seems increasingly inevitable, a flashpoint is coming, our concern should be one of steering it. In other words, how do we, scattered children of the NES that we are, understand our relationship with broad social change? Or, to put it in pragmatic terms, why is it that putting The Great Gatsby on the NES is so strangely apropos? What is it about the NES that leaves it with a strange suitability to the task of commenting on a novel that is about a society on the cusp of collapse?<br />
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This entry is not the one that gives the answers to that. But it is the one that inaugurates the theme that interests me at the moment. 8-Bit Eschatology. Let's have ourselves a fun summer, shall we?Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-30931182874788319812011-05-17T16:37:00.000-07:002011-05-18T14:25:21.548-07:00A Pataphor of Academia (Gradius)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pSaPPxB1xcI/TdMGg__VLII/AAAAAAAAAf4/VCDi6IfgQ5U/s1600/gradius.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pSaPPxB1xcI/TdMGg__VLII/AAAAAAAAAf4/VCDi6IfgQ5U/s1600/gradius.png" /></a></div>Don't saunter in like you own the place. Why would you? You're not here for glory or fame, nor even for thrill. It is not that you don't enjoy it - only a lifelong love of reading and learning leads one to strap one's self into the cockpit of Vic Viper and single-handedly defend Gradius from the unceasing onslaught of the forces of Bacterion. But that enjoyment is not that of a cheap dilettante, but rather a calling - a duty.<br />
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No. Remain humble. Think about the weight of expectations. How proud your undergradius mentors and family are. Resolve to stay in touch with your mentors, and seek their wise counsel even as you learn more about advanced theoretical concepts in your field like "Option" and "?" and to, as necessary, embrace them in lieu of the neo-Aristotelean principles previously instilled upon you.<br />
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Be puzzled at the lack of significant orientation, but not too puzzled, as this might be misconstrued as not being up to the task. It's just like undergradius, surely. You show up at your classes, do the reading, pay attention when it's not brain-sporkingly banal, and bash out some papers. Remain puzzled why the minimal orientation there was seemed mostly there to get the Marxist stoners in your department girlfriends, but figure that Marxist stoners by their nature have it fairly rough and leave well enough alone. Select "1 Player" and get on with your course schedule.<br />
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Flail about. By and large this is acceptable, at least for now - a tap of the reset button and you're back to square one. Grades don't come in until December, and it's all riding on the boss battle anyway - one final 20 page seminar paper where you have to shoot the core. May as well use these early days to work out the kinks. Call it a post facto orientation.<br />
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Eventually make some real progress. Feel almost confident as you go into the boss fight, laden with upgrades and ready to roll. Get knocked flat on your ass with a B-, which you are reliably informed is basically a failing grade in Gradius.<br />
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Worse, discover the black hole of error. How one error sets you up for more. Flub anything and be set back ten paces with all your upgrades taken away, told "Try that thing you failed at again, only this time start from a worse position," and sent on your way. Realize that this describes your life - that the C you got in a high school math class because you were a depressed teenager and blew off your homework did keep you from the Ivy League college that would have gotten you into a top tier graduate program. Marvel at the insanity of a gameplay mechanic in which early errors metastasize that aggressively.<br />
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Start over, enjoying the illusion that "Spring Semester" and "Fresh Start" are synonymous. Take it slow. Be methodical. Cut out distractions.<br />
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Eventually realize that if you'd just stuck around and looked puzzled instead of confidently signing up for Dismantling Heteronormative Fortifications: The Dialectic of Laser and Double, someone would have explained something. Belatedly find yourself getting oriented. Remain puzzled why this apparent mentor figure gets to start out with considerable advantages that you don't. Especially because he is apparently incompetent, since you figured out that you want to pick up the power-up items ages ago and not just blaze past them.<br />
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Narrowly survive the boss fight this time. Decide you've got the hang of this. Wipe out on level two.<br />
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Year two. Begin to question the basic structure here. Wonder why the good people of Gradius are so opposed to giving you decent armaments to start. Why is the military defense of a planet subject to a scarcity economy in the first place? It's not like you're out in deep space getting blown up for your own good. You could be working a nice corporate job and making four times the $11k you're pulling out here. You wouldn't even need loans to feed yourself. Instead you're pursuing a career in public service. The least they could do is give you free speed ups. And photocopies.<br />
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Become increasingly politically active about state cuts to the planetary defense budget. Wonder why giving corporate tax breaks to attract business is preferable to having an educated pool of workers. Wonder how these supposed businesses are going to succeed on Gradius with Bacterion hordes marauding them constantly and no basic composition skills in their workers. Impress Marxist stoners with your determination, and be invited to their parties. Accept. You can get a girlfriend there.<br />
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Discover belatedly that the system has a built in "cheat code" that enables you to continue where you left off if something goes wrong for you, thus at least removing the possibility of ultimate and cataclysmic failure. Ask at the next Marxist stoner party why nobody told you about this. Be told that everyone already knew you could take an incomplete.<br />
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Realize that you hate Marxist stoners and become a hermit who doesn't leave the house except for library books. Write e-mails to your department chair suggesting needed reforms to the departmental system. Be thanked for your feedback. Mistake this as an accomplishment.<br />
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Armed with your newfound cheat code (and nothing else because you just died again), begin preparation for the big one - a continual assault, taking incompletes as needed to get to the prize at the end - defending your dissertation, beating the final boss, and getting a tenure-track job as a planetary defender.<br />
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Bog down in basic research, trying to figure out the extent of your task. Discover that there is no optimal path on the upgrade curve. Wipe out in an awkward spot from which even with continues you cannot effectively recover without more weaponry.<br />
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Discover to your surprise that you have passed your exams anyway.<br />
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Learn that budget cuts mean that there is no funding for planetary defenders past their fourth years. Rush to graduate. Finally learn about the cheat code that gives you a decent set of weapons on command. Wonder why the fuck there's a cheat code to get to where the game is actually playable. At last feel capable of making a serious and determined effort to finish.<br />
<br />
After more deaths than you can count, stagger into your dissertation defense and discover the final boss is basically a complete wimp that you never needed any weapons or skill to defeat.<br />
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Beat game.<br />
<br />
Graduate.<br />
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Discover that post-graduation life is just the same thing again with faster enemies.<br />
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Discover that planetary defense on the professional level is still a scarcity-based economy and that they are moving towards a model where part-time defenders defend against large swaths of bactereon invaders via "online sections." Discover that there are no jobs.<br />
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Discover that you are thirty and unqualified for any meaningful job and will reach middle age without health care or significant savings.<br />
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Snap.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-3448551815369350022011-05-13T10:22:00.000-07:002011-05-13T10:22:53.367-07:00The Adventures of the Spychild (Golgo 13: Top Secret Mission, The Goonies 2, Gotcha!)<b>Episode 1: His Exciting Origin</b><br />
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The spychild slips unheeded around geographies borrowed from other childhoods. Behind enemy lines without so much as a concept of what emnity meant except in the post-scarcity economy of suburban public schooling, he winds his way through decor that is not his and that, not being his, serves no understandable function. The finer points of interior design are not so much lost on him as denied shipping in the first place, marked with insufficient postage and held at the central office for later pickup. Allowances are made for his own house, where painting or statue exist to occupy the space in which they are placed and do not require further explication. But here, ensconced in the contours of a social order that is not his own, each rug or coffee table gadget requires interrogation.<br />
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Absent an understanding of the state as anything more than the determination of what flag is the object of the meaningless recitations of his daily pledge, he moves without assignment. Under no flag, and unaware of a purpose for flags beyond providing pledges with objective correlatives, the spychild lacks even the idea of assignment. His intelligence gathering serves no purpose other than his own.<br />
<br />
He does not even, as a rule, consider the collection of intelligence as a task. With a plastic imitation of a boom mic, he siphons away adult conversation not out of any interest in the banalities of middle age, but out of a commitment to the very task of intelligence gathering. There is no data mining operation here, no sifting through of intricacies in pursuit of greater knowledge.<br />
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Sleuthing his way through unstated mysteries for reasons unrelated to their solution, the spychild's life is an undifferentiated mass of codes without plaintext and dead drops without mail - a ciphertext without translation, ink so invisible it never leaves a mark. The dialectic of history is indistinguishable the progression of dinner from the wrong brand of tins bought from a grocery store incorrectly laid out into food that, while appetizing, is never quite right. All things are either familiar or strange to the spychild, the former category unconsidered, the latter spied upon.<br />
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</div><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6xEQP7BY47I/Tc1oyNLW3tI/AAAAAAAAAfs/DO_Xa5xcHcA/s1600/gotcha.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6xEQP7BY47I/Tc1oyNLW3tI/AAAAAAAAAfs/DO_Xa5xcHcA/s1600/gotcha.png" /></a><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span>Episode 14: His Laser Tag</b><br />
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Working carefully through analogy the spychild can see paintball as the more totalizing version of a video game, or more obliquely as a visceral laser tag. War allegorized into, basically, a slightly more colorful war. The spychild is admittedly puzzled, not entirely getting the juxtaposition between combat fatigues and militaristic weaponry and being shot with hot pink balls of paint.<br />
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In truth the spychild flits around the edges of the experience, recognizing it as the uncomfortable midpoint of video games and gym class. The experience can be modeled. Stalk inadequately through half-familiar basement playrooms with dayglo orange handguns firing dime-sized plastic frisbees, or lay down suppressive nerf fire. Conscript furniture as defensive structures, ducking and weaving your way around simulacra of danger.<br />
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Or Zapper in hand, unload imagined clips of digital ammo at a smear of pixels rendered in deflected beams of electron. The spychild is aware that the furniture, comprised as it is of physical particles instead of defracted electrons, is of no use here. And yet he still crouches behind chairs and sofa, shielding his body from the hail of bullets imagined into being, blown forth from the chamber of these guns of vapour by an explosion of metaphoric power.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5cat9G5NTpI/Tc1ox666kbI/AAAAAAAAAfo/ggwBrg9UDPg/s1600/goonies2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5cat9G5NTpI/Tc1ox666kbI/AAAAAAAAAfo/ggwBrg9UDPg/s1600/goonies2.png" /></a><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span>Episode 27: His Kidnapped Sidekicks</b><br />
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The spychild surveys each location for hiding places, these being the most intelligible currency of his espionage. The obvious possibilities of closets and underfurnitures are noted instinctively. It is the deeper patterns of hiding – the elaborate prisons that must be meticulously sealed up behind you lest you give the game away – that the spychild searches for.<br />
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The life of the spychild is such that accomplices are in short supply. Although an ally can sometimes be found among the proper inhabitants of these houses, the path of the nerdy kid sneaking around with a boom mic is not one of broad socialization. More time is to be spend designing hideouts in improbable detail than hiding out. With no gang the point of the exercise is lost.<br />
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The spychild has little use for a gang. Already his intelligence gathering provides him with more data than he can deal with. The value of a gang to the spychild is instrumental. Mapping their hiding places over a terrain and exploring it to get them back, their value to him is in their absence, their disappearances at last a motive to understand these terrains.<br />
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But even here there is the problem of rescue, the maddening corpus of reality left behind with real play. Better the virtual, imagined people, sequels to an assumed original, whose existence does not alter the landscape beyond motivating it, and whose rescue carries no obligations, can be undone with the press of a button. These are passageways he knows better than any real life.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cc-23OIU73M/Tc1oxuzeeII/AAAAAAAAAfk/url6G__XlA0/s1600/golgo13.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cc-23OIU73M/Tc1oxuzeeII/AAAAAAAAAfk/url6G__XlA0/s1600/golgo13.png" /></a><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"></span>Episode 32: His Introduction to Foreign Relations</b><br />
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The Condor’s four and a half +/- 1.5 days irrespective, the spychild stalks down the street. A miasma of genre tropes distill to an experience much like any other – a street, dotted with foes, that must be walked from left to right.<br />
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The spychild does not know of source anime, or of changing character professions from CIA assassin to CIA spy. He does not know what city is signified by stations such as Potsdam. The KGB are recognized at least, but only as the generic opposition. The spychild recognizes that the CIA are his good guys and the KGB his axiomatic foe, but has no sense of what this means.<br />
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The Cold War plays out relentlessly in the zeitgeist, but the spychild does not see himself in it. His life is the hunt, the working of paths, and perhaps, someday, the understanding of the purposes of those paths. The genealogy of an oriental rug looms larger in his mind than Yugoslavia. The shibboleths he seeks to know are virtual. The appeal of a real gun is negligible – lead is far heavier than the sleek orange plastic he favors.<br />
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He is unaware of the cave, or the warmth of the fire behind him. He does not distinguish between shadow and thing, nor even know that two such things exist. For all his data, this fact sits beyond knowledge, in ciphertext he may not read.<br />
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Inevitably, his adventures continue.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-35644677770589629102011-05-10T19:52:00.000-07:002011-05-10T19:52:20.006-07:00A Line of Flight (Gold Medal Challenge 92, Golf, Golf Grand Slam, Greg Norman's Golf Power)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--kT08-BMSTc/Tcn5olxZQlI/AAAAAAAAAfQ/RBh6vFC-qi8/s1600/gold.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--kT08-BMSTc/Tcn5olxZQlI/AAAAAAAAAfQ/RBh6vFC-qi8/s1600/gold.png" /></a>The subject is the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. But as with any attempt to capture a subject on film, the resulting image is framed by background. Any instant is held taut in the overall weave of personal history and memory by other threads. The subject morphs into the lens itself, its background becoming a foreground anchored by the thing. Suddenly our map links Barcelona to Mahopac, the golf course to the graveyard. Remove it, avert your eyes, and the weave unravels, the ordered skyline of associations and moments dissolving back into disordered chronology. Tack back to Seoul or forward to Atlanta and the illusion is gone, the coherence of the metaphor shattered, and Barcelona is as far from Putnam County as Spain is. To disentangle this edifice is to watch it crumble to undifferentiated noise. Instead we must work along the individual strands, traveling this rhizome from within.</div><br />
By 1992, the NES was dying. We all had Super Nintendos, or at least I did. I got mine in fourth grade, the school year that ended in 1992, and by fifth grade was running what was, for a ten year old, a reasonably successful side business selling off NES cartridges for $10 a pop, a process I'd begun at my grandparents' moving tag sale the previous summer before they moved from Mahopac, New York to Newtown, Connecticut in tacit admission that my grandfather was getting sick (although to be fair, it had been planned since my parents bought the Newotwn house), although it would not be until 1993 that we gave up on the prospect of pretending it wasn't Alzheimer's.<br />
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The Nintendo generation winds its way through my grandfather in odd ways. The height of the NES era, from an objective and historical perspective, was the summer of 1990, which I spent much of living at my grandparents' house while the Newtown house was vacated and readied for our moving in. The basement was converted into my bedroom, with the cot I was used to sleeping on following Christmases and other major family holidays becoming my bed. But more importantly, my NES was hooked up to the television there, and my mother, as ever pragmatic and knowing her way around a major retailer, loaded me up with a fresh stack of games so as to make the prospect of a summer with no friends living with my grandparents something that appeared vaguely survivable.<br />
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Follow either string and eventually you come to me studiously attempting a legitimate, IDDQD-free clearing of Map 30 of Doom II, holed up on my PC. It is the fall of 1996, a scant few days past my birthday, and both the Nintendo generation and its odd second wind on the Super Nintendo have given way to the brief interregnum of PC gaming that would hold way from there until 2001. This is the uncertain space of adolescence, cut off from my history by technological obsolescence and, as we will eventually see in my <a href="http://tardiseruditorum.blogspot.com/">other blog</a>, Paul McGann.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8qkuHhIlmYU/Tcn5ooEiZ5I/AAAAAAAAAfU/Fh8ZPlfWE5c/s1600/golf.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8qkuHhIlmYU/Tcn5ooEiZ5I/AAAAAAAAAfU/Fh8ZPlfWE5c/s1600/golf.png" /></a>There is a hand on my shoulder, and a tangible silence. It takes a second to realize that I should pause the game, and in that second I know the news that is about to come. My father, clearly having through through the words in his head, simply says "it's over." Before I have processed this - an oddly momentous task given that I knew what was coming and that my grandfather has been dying in a nursing home for some time, given that I saw him a week ago and fled the room in awful horror at the gasping, frail shell impersonating my grandfather from a hospital bell - the silence is cut by the wail of my still three-year-old sister from downstairs as she processes the same news. Some hours later, I realize my computer is still paused. Mute and dumbfounded, I make another failed attempt at legitimately killing John Romero.<br />
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Here on the fringes of the event, the threads go everywhere, lines of flight linking more and more disparate pieces of my life.<br />
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Summer of 1992 was squarely in the middle of this. My sister gestated determinately. The spring prior I skipped a school field trip to the Natural History Museum, which I'd seen in memory, in favor of a day off and a copy of the new Zelda. The fall after, my sister was born. Focusing in further we can pin the moment down in other terms - the golden age of comics, at least if you were conveniently nine when it happened, with Marvel publishing what at the time seemed like its sure classic The Infinity War, in which evil space duplicates of Marvel heroes... ummm... attacked things. And there was an evil version of Adam Warlock. And more to the point, we cared that there was an evil version of Adam Warlock, which gives you a good sense just how fucked up things were getting over there.<br />
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We might ask what significance can be granted to the fact that my sense of these times is based entirely on family and media. There is no point in lying and pretending this is anything other than a character trait on my part. By and large video games were what I opted for in lieu of friends. I can think of one I had at the time, the very definition of a good bloke, Eric Richter. I ran into him at the Newtown Library Book Sale last summer, shortly after I moved back here, and exchanged pleasantries. If I recall, he's involved in making cell phone games now. He seemed well, if, given the age at which we were closest friends, eerily unchanged.<br />
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But even here my social memories are hazy reconstructions. I can take it as a given that I was not yet friends with the people discussed <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/08/there-is-better-world-well-there-must.html">here</a>, as they were in different elementary schools - Newtown at the time had four, which only pooled together in sixth grade. Now they pool at fifth grade, the town having built a 5/6 school to alleviate the pressure on the middle school, which, for plot-related reasons, cannot be effectively expanded. This is part of the town's bafflingly incompetent strategy for handling demographic trends, simultaneously requiring an expansion to the high school only ten years after the last one. How exactly they did not notice the very large Kindergarten class that would eventually become ninth graders and realize they would need the expansion is somewhat beyond me. More puzzling is the town's ability to simultaneously try to close the smallest of its elementary schools, Hawley (actually the one geographically closest to me, but not the one I went to) while simultaneously expanding the high school, a maneuver that indicates nothing so much as a bewildering lack of long-term planning.<br />
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Being the gap between fourth and fifth grade, my sense is that I was not yet close friends with Tom Zimmerman, who I would later impugn as the person who hacked into the new girl's AOL account. In truth, the fact that she was openly obsessed with dragons made guessing that her password might actually be "dragon" surprisingly effective, causing me to have one of those heart-sinking moments when the mischievous and naughty thing you expect to fail actually works. I went on to date the girl in question as I graduated high school, and tend to think of her as my earliest in-some-sense-remotely-mature relationship, a status I strongly suspect she does not endow me with in return, and quite right of her.<br />
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I am under no illusions that this is not a character flaw. The entire reason The Infinity War is a tentpole is that when I moved to Newtown, the latest fad was the first series of Marvel Universe trading cards - the set where Arthur Adams and a young Mark Bagley, among others, do their damnedest to draw like George Perez. Being wholly incapable of any strategy for social integration beyond obsessive knowledge, I proceeded to get into Marvel cards, along with Marvel comics, and, with minimal effort, blew completely past all lines of actual social chic into pathetic nerdery as Marvel cards went out of style. Thankfully, I actually liked Marvel comics, so this was not a particularly high cost investment.<br />
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The technique, of course, is the nerd equivalent to the spoiled kid whose mother simply buys him whatever the cool thing of the moment is - a phenomenon I encountered with staggering efficiency a few years later when I went to a trading card store with a friend and watched in shock as he proceeded to buy hundreds of dollars of Magic: The Gathering cards. Given that my mother was, as I've already mentioned, no slouch in the strategic retailing world, the sudden realization that it was possible to be beaten at my current geeky hobby not by virtue of actual skill but purely by virtue of the size of one's allowance was, to say the least, a bit of a downer.<br />
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But it is worth zeroing in on exactly why I had this character flaw (eventually reverse engineered by realizing that a token amount of effort in learning to be effective at social niceties was both wholly within my MO and a bloody good idea). The Magic: The Gathering anecdote is strong evidence here. The central feature of my geeky completist approach to life (And seriously, knowing me at age ten makes the existence of this blog as obvious as can be) is that knowledge was a matter of skill. I could know more about Marvel superheroes, Magic: The Gathering, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or, in my more spectacularly useless move, Doctor Who than anybody else. And I understood implicitly that this was a matter of skill. That in a measurable sense, I could be better than other people.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zsHiGFp7Ag0/Tcn5o2r7hBI/AAAAAAAAAfc/bdG5e9fnXhU/s1600/greg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zsHiGFp7Ag0/Tcn5o2r7hBI/AAAAAAAAAfc/bdG5e9fnXhU/s1600/greg.png" /></a>I have a vague sense that "normal" people encounter this phenomenon via sports. The obvious problem with this is in the word normal, which by definition has trouble applying to people who are good at something, "good" generally being definable precisely because of its departure from the mean. But obvious problems have never stopped the patriarchal march of society before, so it's probably optimistic to hope that they might wake up and give it the old college try on this issue. Instead we have the form of institutionalized torture recognized as gym class. I will be the first to recognize that instilling kids with healthy living habits such as nutritious eating and exercise is a noble goal. What I am more skeptical of is the proposition that dodgeball is remotely useful for this task. And I say that as someone who was reasonably good at dodgeball, given that its basic skill - avoiding overt efforts at violence towards you - was one I practiced more or less constantly through the school day. (In point of fact, of course, Dodgeball is the very definition of bad game design. It is a game played virtually exclusively at the elementary and middle school levels, where the primary goal of sports is to cause kids to engage in physical activity. Given this, a game that rapidly eliminates the less fit players and makes them stand impatiently on the sidelines is possibly the biggest pile of steaming failure ever to become an institutional fixture since *insert punchline here*.)<br />
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I have spoken before of my intense desire to maintain the sensible line between those who were good at sports and those who were good at video games. This line is oddly reinforced by games like Gold Medal Challenge '92, a button mashing track and field game from Capcom in the style of the more famous Track and Field 2 from Konami. Gold Medal Challenge, which goes aboslutely as far as it is legally possible to go to pretend to be an actual Olympics game without actually paying the IOC money. The genre of game relies on modeling sports via the experience of rapidly trying to mash the A button at as high a speed as possible.<br />
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These games have what is either a staggering flaw or a transcendent virtue. Which one you view it as comes down entirely to whether you're actually trying to enjoy the games as fun, or whether you are a mildly sociopathic existentialist. The thing about these games, you see, is that they are completely impossible. Even fewer people are actually physically capable of the level of fast button pushing necessary than have gotten anything worthwhile out of playing dodgeball. On the surface, this seems like it is clearly a problem, in that it renders the games functionally unplayable. But given the existence of a sports/video game divide, an unplayable video game about sports is, if you are completely and utterly insane, quite nice.<br />
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The only trouble is that it was an Olympics game. The Olympics, after all, are the sporting event that even pathetic nerds can safely enjoy. Given that it has no sports of any social prestige to a nine year old American, it can be watched and enjoyed without any of the pesky expectations that come with watching, say, American Football, where one feels a vague sense of obligation to, for instance, understand the rules. (It is worth noting that, in terms of complexity of rules and amount of the game in which absolutely nothing happens, football is far more like cricket than Americans would like to pretend.) The 1992 Olympics, however, remain the high nerd watermark, because that was the year of the Olympic Triplecast.<br />
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The Olympic Triplecast was one of those tragically ahead of its time ideas. NBC reasoned that the rise of cable meant that people would pay a bunch of money ($95-170) for three cable channels for the duration of the Olympic Games that would show all events live and without irritating touchy-feely features about the athletes. The service was a legendary flop that has kept any similar service from being offered in future Olympics even though they're now the complete norm for other sports. Needless to say, my mother ordered it in a heartbeat. The thing about the Triplecast was that it was a flop for being ahead of its time, not because it didn't work. It worked brilliantly. It was the one year I actually followed the Olympics. I made detailed study of the scheduling tables and what would be on when, and made a detailed schedule of everything I would watch, then promptly ignored it and played video games when I realized that, actually, swimming was boring.<br />
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These were the summers where our swimming pool was oft-used (these days it's mostly the dog in there), our air conditioning was non-existent, and summer camp was a thing. Mine were usually in the vein of drama camp, failed stabs at craft camps, and, in one memorable disaster leaving me with an ankle with chronic tendon problems and a tendency to twist out from under me, track and field camp. These were the days when my grandmother made me french toast every Saturday morning, I grudgingly went to church every Sunday morning, grudgingly then because it was boring. Later grudgingly because of an intense and visceral rejection of a god who considered being bored for an hour a week to be necessary in order to avoid eternal torment. Still later I would realize that the Catholic notion of salvation is miles weirder than that, sparking an ongoing quest to see just how far from being Catholic I can manage to be without quite tripping the "going to hell" alarm just in case I have another relapse.<br />
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These were also the time my grandfather was going to church. I'm not sure anyone quite knows why he had a late-life religious revival. And so we circle back to the unsettling flip side of this entire time period, which is that I spent, for no particularly good reason, my entire childhood afraid of my grandfather. There is no good reason for this. I cannot stress this enough. In hindsight, I realize he was an intensely loving man who adored me. But staring at each other from opposite ends of the twentieth century, there was simply no way to communicate that for either of us.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zv74eHzW69A/Tcn5o_oCi3I/AAAAAAAAAfY/wr0pLR34Hv4/s1600/golfgrand.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zv74eHzW69A/Tcn5o_oCi3I/AAAAAAAAAfY/wr0pLR34Hv4/s1600/golfgrand.png" /></a>I was still years away from understanding the reasons I was bored in church, and thus to comprehending a reason why they made me go that didn't involve them being in some fundamental sense objects of fear. But I was well past the point where I couldn't stop trying to understand why I had to be there. Boredom was a problem like social interaction, and the only hammer I understood was trying to outsmart it. The cultural divide - the fact that they were simply, unlike me, not people with a fundamental mistrust of authority because of the growing suspicion that authority just meant that you had to do things even though they didn't seem like the right things to do.<br />
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And where my grandmother was in some sense comprehensible - we spoke the shared language of baked goods such that I could translate a given piece of booger cake into "I am fundamentally unable to understand you but think you're pretty awesome," and she could translate my peering under her door on Saturday mornings to see when her light turned on so I could pounce in and get a time estimate on the french toast into "I really wish you'd shut up about the God thing, but I love you anyway" - my Grandfather and I lacked the common tongue in which to adequately communicate these essential concepts.<br />
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Well. There was golf. A sport my grandfather played with some avidness. My father even briefly picked it up, quitting after getting a hole in one and realizing that he had almost surely peaked. Golf was the thing I could understand about my grandfather. And so when I, in the basement of his house played with my Arnold Palmer putting set (a truly bizarre game with no visibly intelligent sense of audience in which you hit a miniaturized golf ball with a club held by a plastic Arnold Palmer who was at the head end of a golf club and controlled by a lever and string at the top of said club), this was in some sense an act of love.<br />
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The problem was that I was rubbish at it. No particular reason. Just sucked at it. It's not even a very physical sport, as things go. Didn't matter. I was complete shit. It's just another blind spot in my capabilities to be made up for via exhaustive knowledge in other areas. Like video games.<br />
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There are three golf games in the G section of the NES library. Nintendo's own 1984 Golf game, Atlus's 1991 Golf Grand Slam, and, pulled from the future of the alphabet, Virgin Games's 1992 Greg Norman's Power Golf. Greg Norman's Power Golf is the easiest to deal with because, hey, glitch game. Apparently it's an early example of procedural gaming, generating a custom course with each play. So that's cool. Or would be if I could play it. Golf Grand Slam is a golf-lover's game, with a play mechanic dependent on hitting the ball in the right place on the ball as a dot moves around it. And Golf is a nice, classic Nintendo simple game about timing power meters.<br />
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I suck at all of them. That's just how I roll when it comes to golf, it seems. The incompetence is deeply seated. I can understand the games intellectually. I can see the way they are structured with narrow corridors of successful actions with penalties for going out of the ideal path, and, perhaps more importantly, a low prospect of recovery. Thus games tend to either be outrageously successful (wholly on the success corridor) or outrageously fail-tastic. Which, actually, sounds not dissimilar to golf as I experienced it from my miniaturized perspective. And with this knowledge, as with so much else of adult life, there is finally a language for the misunderstandings of childhood to be spoken. The sense that the unknowable and thus scary figure of my grandfather could be known, that I could now talk to him, and that in some sense we could communicate what we both already knew.<br />
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But there is no shared language with the dead.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-60460258935102847912011-05-05T16:43:00.000-07:002011-05-05T16:43:24.668-07:00Dialectical Radioactive Lizards (Godzilla: Monster of Monsers, Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters)Thesis<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">Antithesis</div><div style="text-align: center;">Synthesis</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: auto;"><br />
</div><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mCbL_Q1rHsY/TcM2A0C_23I/AAAAAAAAAfE/-o8Xt6aQ-rQ/s1600/gojira.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mCbL_Q1rHsY/TcM2A0C_23I/AAAAAAAAAfE/-o8Xt6aQ-rQ/s1600/gojira.png" /></a>To get a sense of how gobsmackingly weird Ishiro Honda's 1954 film <u>Gojira</u> is, you would have to imagine an American film released in 2010 in which Islamic terrorists summon a djinn who then rampages through New York City, including lots of shots of devastation. You may be thinking <u>Cloverfield</u> here, but that misses the point. <u>Gojira</u> is not remarkable just because it was instrumental in creating the genre of the disaster film. It's remarkable because the source of the disaster - nuclear explosions - is the same thing that already destroyed two Japanese cities nine years earlier. <u>Cloverfield</u> was just a return to the great American passtime of watching New York explode. <u>Gojira</u> is explicitly recreating a disaster, not in some half-assed metaphorical way, but in a literal "absolutely everybody with a brain cell sees what you're doing there" way, and then taking pleasure in the disaster. Except even that doesn't quite cover it. To really nail down the metaphor, what you'd need is an American film released in 2010 in which a djinn destroys New York that is then followed by a lengthy franchise in which the djinn fights other creatures from Arabian mythology and steadily turns into a hero character.<br />
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So to note that Toho's two Godzilla games for the NES are really weird seems almost unnecessary, given the sheer depth of weird that the character brings to the table. A far more alarming start would have been "Toho's two Godzilla games are bog-standard NES games."<br />
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<div style="text-align: right;">What do we expect from our second tier of games? This is an important question, given that it's 105 games from here to Legend of Zelda, in which the highlights are Gradius, Adventure Island, Kirby, and Kid Icarus. Not that any of those are bad games, but they are by and large not the absolute tentpoles of the NES era. Rather, we are making our way through the great ordinary - the banal day-to-day of the NES. This can be, at times, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/04/in-which-something-finally-snaps.html">exasperating</a>. Indeed, after that entry, a commenter expressed concern for my ability to finish this project, and suggested I take a break. But as kind as that suggestion was, it misses the point - the turgid slog of generic and pointless video games with no meaningful bearing on humanity is part of the Nintendo Project. And if the Nintendo Project thus becomes an exercise in self-abuse, well, at least it's only a two-day-a-week exercise. </div><br />
The games are not bad. Perhaps short of good, but intriguing nevertheless. The first game, Monster of Monsters, is a turn-based strategy game alternating with button-mashing monster-fighting. Set in that classic NES date, 2XXX, when Planet X declares war on Earth, (The appearance of Planet X is, it seems, related to the crossing of Neptune and Pluto, suggesting that the year is one of 2227, 2475, 2723, or 2971. So not really a rousing success at hiding the date there.) you control Godzilla and Mothra as they fight off waves of other monsters, oddly generally ones that are native to Earth, to defend the solar system.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NGinwNDuJJk/TcM2AflKL2I/AAAAAAAAAfA/ziht0H7cdU0/s1600/god2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NGinwNDuJJk/TcM2AflKL2I/AAAAAAAAAfA/ziht0H7cdU0/s1600/god2.png" /></a>The second game abandons the action sequences of the first game in favor of a pure turn-based strategy game in which you control military forces trying to destroy Godzilla. Less flashy, but considerably deeper, the game is surprisingly strategic and technical for a game that is about a giant lizard with atomic breath.<br />
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<div style="text-align: right;">But what are expectations of this tier of game? What does it mean to exceed or differ from expectations when no meaningful expectations exist? Below the tier of games that are the big ticket, unquestionable classics - those major cities in our psychic maps of our childhoods, there is this larger tier of ballast, the broad foundation forming the landmasses upon which we rest. But what does it mean to pick a signal out of what was intended as undifferentiated background noise? </div><div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The games sit at an intersection of several well-developed themes in this blog. The foreignness of Japanese culture (from which Godzilla was, ultimately, co-opted) pushes against this game oddly. Made by the Japanese company that owns the rights to Gojira, the game sits orthogonally to the main thrust of the NES. Toho's game division has a <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/01/doctor-who-and-healing-of-death-dr.html">couple</a> of <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/09/we-built-it-just-for-you-circus-caper.html">other games</a> to their name, but they are hardly big hits - in fact, they're absolutely terrible. But more to the point, this is a Japanese company releasing games featuring Japanese movie icons. That the games got ported to America is an anomaly, making them games that seem to resist engagement or contextualization.<br />
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<div style="text-align: right;">As do most unimportant games, surely. That's why they're mere background noise - lacking any ways to integrate themselves in the larger geography of this mental space, they cannot be engaged in except inasmuch as they fill up the space in the games drawer left vacant by the fact that there are only six Mega Man games, and really only four of them worth playing. </div><div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">But on the other hand, there is something genuine to these games - a memorable eccentricity that is lacking in a "better" game. For one thing, who actually played all of the classics? For every Super Mario Bros I played, there were far more Milon's Secret Castles and Rygars. I know a game like Gradius or Kid Icarus from Nintendo Power telling me it was a classic game, not because I know a damn thing about them. It is not as though these games were unplayed - merely that they lacked a culturally imperialist paratext that told us what we were doing when we played them, leaving them as the actual experience of the Nintendo era.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: right;">And yet, as with every other game, you are left with little but either a limp attempt to defend their playability or a mildly amusing critique of the games, not that you've had a new amusing way to describe ropey controls and dodgy hit detection in the last four months. So these are the lived experience of the Nintendo generation. It's not your experience, and the entire idea you've just developed - that the classic games are the ones with a shared cultural experience that tells us what we have in common - undermines the entire idea of talking about the games.</div><div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Shush up, you egotistical right-justified interlocutor. If the point of this blog were to reflect primarily on known shared cultural experience, there would be no point of the blog. The entire idea of psychchronography is that we are mapping the spaces between what we "all know." So the fact of the matter is that it does matter here, far more than it will on a classic game, that we figure out what this game is.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: right;">But if the answer is just "inscrutable," you've done nothing. You've done the literary equivalent of Family Guy style humor - hey, do you remember that thing? *rimshot* So there's a Godzilla game. If it's inscrutable and foreign, it's ultimately wholly pointless. You may as well just say that "giant lizards are awesome" and call it a day. </div><div style="text-align: right;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">Giant lizards <i>are</i> awesome.</div></div>Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-39029798146345035662011-05-03T14:36:00.000-07:002011-05-03T14:36:33.594-07:00Come On You Pixels (Goal!, Goal! Two)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yI-QcFTyABs/TcB1RVx-0NI/AAAAAAAAAew/cIuDpQ-K3BU/s1600/goal1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yI-QcFTyABs/TcB1RVx-0NI/AAAAAAAAAew/cIuDpQ-K3BU/s1600/goal1.png" /></a>Fifteen to the hour in Barcelona and the twenty-two men comprising the first teams of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid CF are glaring down an immaculately coiffed stretch of grass at each other as the second half of their semi-final match in the UEFA Champions League kicks off in a spirit that can only be described as "mind-wrenchingly hostile," a state of affairs that doubles as a description of every other match in recent memory between these two clubs. Holding the dubious honor of being the only major sports rivalry in the world to have had a civil war fought between the two sets of fans, El Clasico serves as a biannual re-enactment of the Spanish Civil War, though thankfully toned down from the days of 1936 when Franco's forces kidnapped and murdered Barcelona's club President, Josep Sunyol, and two years later, the Barcelona grounds and club offices were bombed by the Italian airforce. Things have toned down since then, and nowadays players like Luis Figo, who switched from Barcelona to Real Madrid in 2000 and, when he returned to Camp Nou playing for Real Madrid, had a pig's head thrown at him.</div><br />
Figo was just following the path tread by Alfredo Di Stefano, whose transfer to Spain was hotly contested between Barcelona and Real Madrid, who managed, improbably, to both sign him, forcing FIFA to enforce a bizarre timeshare agreement where Madrid and Barcelona would each get him in alternate seasons. At least, until the Franco-appointed Barcelona club president decided they didn't need the legendarily good Argentinian player, and they'd let Madrid have him.<br />
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Di Stefano, sadly, never really played much for his native country, switching to Spain for his short international career, and never making it in the World Cup. Which means he never got to participate in the second most heated sports rivalry, the Argentina/England rivalry, which, in the immediate aftermath of the Falklands War, served as a proxy when Diego Maradona, one of the game's best players ever, managed to in one match score both one of the greatest goals in the history of the game and a flagrant handball of a goal he described as "un poco con la cabeza de Maradona y otro poco con la mano de Dios."<br />
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As an England fan, the latter incident is the key one. Not that, as an England fan, I can persuade myself it would have mattered. England, unable to win a damn thing since 1966, are a masochist's football team, one you watch for the glorious spectacle of seeing eleven of the best players in the world faff about on a stretch of grass as though they've been watching 80s Cybermen episodes of Doctor Who in lieu of actual football matches to train, and are this committed mostly to a turgid and ineffectual march punctuated by periodic falling down or, occasionally, bursting into flames.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ih43CVUb6ew/TcB1RmhHsbI/AAAAAAAAAe0/pTNs-tLB6rA/s1600/goal2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ih43CVUb6ew/TcB1RmhHsbI/AAAAAAAAAe0/pTNs-tLB6rA/s1600/goal2.png" /></a>Still, it's better than rooting for my native country, who are so wretched at the sport they can't even get the fucking name right. This still puts them ahead of Japan in 1988, who, fourteen years before they would co-host the tournament, managed to produce Goal! for the NES, a puzzling rendition of football in which the game is divided into two fifteen minute halves with a clock that counts down. This is still better than Goal 2, in 1992, which asserts the existence of a US football league, which is puzzling given that NASL had disbanded some eight years prior.<br />
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Like any 1980s sports game, playing them now is a bizarre experience. The passing mechanics of both games are arcane beasts that make the basic strategy of "pass the ball" more than a little tricky. Still, inasmuch as one plays the games with a growing sense of rage and frustration, it captures the boil of emotions characterizing the inside of a football stadium during a game. The raucous celebrations of the winning team, or, more often for England fans at least, the agonized anger of the losing side, always defeated not by the opposing team but by the ref, or, on a truly wretched day, by ourselves.<br />
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Without it, how would we engage in that age-old football fan practice of demanding that the manager be sacked and our star players be sold and replaced with other people's star players or our own mediocre players. Which brings us to Liverpool fandom, or at least, does for as long as one can talk about Liverpool as a team without simply beginning to drink heavily.<br />
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Liverpool, you see, are lions of the game. Still the most successful club in English history, the fact of the matter is that Liverpool can beat any team in the world. The only trouble is, they can also lose to any team in the world, and pick that latter option with frustrating regularity, making them by far the best team in sports to languish midtable accomplishing nothing. But merely sucking is not sufficient to explain the glories of Anfield. No, no. We are capable of far more than merely losing games. We are also gifted at, once a season, like clockwork, going into a lengthy tailspin of turgid 0-0 draws in which, no matter the team, we are unable to do anything remotely good. It's not even that we lose. If we lost, we could at least, in theory, lose to a team that plays well. No, our ability is far more nefarious - the ability to completely drain all style, fun, and beauty out of a game in favor of a sort of raw physicality that is as memorable for its complete lack of utility as it is for its prowess.<br />
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But this captures the heart of English football, which longs constantly for the good old days of the sport (generally the days long before anyone currently watching was alive and from which no recordings of games exist) when the game was eleven thundering brutes of men who would go out onto the pitch and kick each other and, when necessary, the ball. Those halcyon days where the game amounted to good old-fashioned brutality, when you could properly tell a player "Oh shut up and play, you still have one leg that isn't broken."<br />
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It's only when those annoying, fiddly tactics came into it that the game started to turn to shit. Nowadays it's all money and details, taking away from the simple fun of bone-shattering kicks. Not bone-shattering tackles. Just good, proper kicks, preferably in the face, chest, or genital area. And the misery of constant defeat. Dump it into a blender and whip up a glorious protein shake of homoeroticism.<br />
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And in this regard, Goal! and Goal! Two have an odd appropriateness. Clumsy, endlessly frustrating, and ugly, it is unquestionably my beautiful game.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-19760575119003786662011-04-28T15:46:00.000-07:002011-04-29T08:50:42.509-07:00In which something finally snaps (Gilligan's Island)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nKRpOo1ihFo/TbnuPfluIYI/AAAAAAAAAeo/JStWM8tvUrM/s1600/draft_lens2020398module10100486photo_1214032855Gilligans_Island_Nintendo_NES.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nKRpOo1ihFo/TbnuPfluIYI/AAAAAAAAAeo/JStWM8tvUrM/s320/draft_lens2020398module10100486photo_1214032855Gilligans_Island_Nintendo_NES.JPG" width="235" /></a></div>The observation that no man is an island, aside from being only slightly more obvious than the fact that no man is a rutabaga, serves to overlook the simple fact that...<br />
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Oh, fuck it. What am I doing here? I mean, really, what has my life come to that I'm trying to come up with anything remotely intelligent to blog about the fucking Gilligan's Island NES game? I mean, what sort of pathetic and self-important ass would I have to be to suggest that there is anything remotely worthwhile to be said about this festering pile of digital feces? There isn't. The very suggestion that this game in any way matters to humanity - that it is even theoretically possible that this game has some larger metaphorical significance - seems mostly like a crushingly rude snub on humanity.<br />
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It is not that Gilligan's Island is an unusually bad game. I mean, it's absolutely wretched, but let's face it, wretched is the norm on the NES. That's part of the reason the theme of this blog is rapidly developing into "crushing misery." Well, that any my growing realization that a PhD in English actually makes me functionally unemployable and that, given the general state of things, I will probably die penniless of a treatable illness in the richest country in the world. But don't worry. Mostly it's just that NES games really suck. I wouldn't want you to think I have a warped set of priorities or anything.<br />
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Rather, it's that Gilligan's Island flaunts its complete lack of effort like no game I have ever seen. Through and through, in every last aspect of the game, whether it be the repetitive "sitcom dialogue" apparently written by writers fired from Joanie Loves Chachi for being insufficiently funny (and let's face it, who knew such a thing existed), the clunky controls, the shit AI, or the fact that it's a fucking Gilligan's Island game, despite the fact that absolutely nobody in the world was clamoring for such a thing.<br />
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I mean, there's a famous story of market research that says that the electric knife was almost not brought to market because research showed that nobody would actually use one. Until someone noticed that, although nobody wanted one, tons of people would buy them as gifts for other people. And so, despite the fact that there was no actual demand for the product, the electric knife was launched.<br />
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But that somber indictment of capitalism seems like an <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/continued-existence-of-edible-arrangements-disprov,19856/">Edible Arrangement</a> compared to Gilligan's Island, the NES game. Gilligan's Island, off the air for twenty-two years at the time of the game's release, was hardly the model of a property beloved by youth and college kids with disposable incomes. Nor is "Oh bugger we're stuck on an island and bloody incompetent" the image of an exciting action game. Even Dallas would be better - characters clearly have extra lives, and you can at least shoot JR.<br />
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And so it's not that the game isn't good. It's that the game, in all its stultifying wretchedness, is actually every bit as good as it has to be to satisfy its design and purpose. It's that the game knows full well that it doesn't have to try, and thus doesn't try. It is a game made out of sheer disdain for its players and its audience, a lame cash grab for the bargain bins marketed to parents who will remember the show and not know better.<br />
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And, I mean, we should hardly be surprised. One's heart sinks the moment "Bandai" appears on the screen, given that Bandai's video game division basically spent the NES years releasing an unrelenting torrent of shit upon the world. Their games list is a fucking who's who of games I've previously complained about - <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/03/monster-at-end-of-this-post-formula-one.html">Frankenstein: The Monster Returns</a>, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/09/stumbling-about-recessed-folders-of-my.html">Chubby Cherub</a>, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/12/now-i-have-blog-entry-ho-ho-ho-dick.html">Dick Tracy</a>, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/01/doctor-who-and-healing-of-death-dr.html">Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</a>... the list does not just go on, it goes on while actively torturing dark recesses of my brain with searing memories of playing this shit for half an hour at a stretch. Bandai is, let's face it, a company that exists, at least in NES terms, for the sole and express purpose of releasing crappy games. Actively. As a matter of policy, they clearly prefer to cheaply release shit than work to give the player a remotely entertaining experience.<br />
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And in the end, there's no metaphor here. There's no deep secret mystery that unlocks my childhood or anyone else's. There's just dodgy controls, stupid licenses, and pointless video games, and the sense that as an eight year old, I was being financially exploited by late capitalism.<br />
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So fuck it. I have nothing left on this one. Tomorrow is another game. Well, Tuesday. Tomorrow is another episode of Doctor Who, which is guaranteed to be better than this game. I can't even be bothered to fire it up again to get a screenshot. Screw it. Let's just slap the crappy box art up at the top of the entry and call it a day.<br />
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Meh.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-7218053576507291962011-04-26T16:24:00.000-07:002011-04-26T16:24:41.881-07:00An Imaginary Lithuanian Hero (GI Joe, GI Joe: The Atlantis Factor)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BPEXwqIib7I/TbdUJJr4U7I/AAAAAAAAAec/TzX6jkAGS4M/s1600/gi.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BPEXwqIib7I/TbdUJJr4U7I/AAAAAAAAAec/TzX6jkAGS4M/s1600/gi.png" /></a>I remember vividly and guiltily how, in the lead up to the Gulf War, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/08/coppola-made-his-name-by-writing-script.html">I longed for war</a>. It was natural. A view of history that treated war as the interesting bits, reinforced by a view of mass media that taught me that wars were where fun things like cartoons and video games happened meant that by 1990, at the age of 8, I was positively bitter that my life had dragged on without a proper war to keep things interesting.</div><br />
The viewpoint is, like so much of being eight, barbaric in hindsight. It is not quite bloodlust, but rather a sort of blood blindness - the complete failure to recognize war as something other than the skeleton upon which a textbook is draped.<br />
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Despite this, growing up, I avoided the Scylla and Charybdis of gender roles, eschewing both <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/03/when-we-dont-play-games-bandai-golf.html">Matell's pink offerings</a> and Hasbro's GI Joe line. It is not that I was not properly socialized into the commodity fetishism of cartoon voodoo dolls, but mine were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and He-Man (and even then, my previously stated <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/04/boys-drool-gauntlet-gauntlet-ii.html">disdain for my gender</a> showed - I much preferred She-Ra, and searched long and hard for an April O'Neil figure). GI Joe always seemed vaguely alarming to me.<br />
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Part of this is perhaps the marketing. Little appeals to me less than the prospect of real American heroes. Nationalism has never been a comfortable ideology for me. There are articulable reasons for this, but those are mostly the products of a 28-year-old liberal coming to terms with a sense he has always had. At the end of the day, my sense is rather that nobody ever got around to making a compelling case for the greatness of America, instead leaving the world to make its unsettling case against us.<br />
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I am not anti-American so much as more or less neutral American. Given the choice between loving it or leaving it, I opt mostly to bet that whoever is shouting that at me is not actually going to pop back around in a few and see if I cleared out. I neither love it nor dislike it with sufficient passage to make departure a priority. (Yet. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't seriously considering fleeing for a place with a health care system.) The result is a sense of anti-patriotism that is mostly perfectly willing to sulk in relative silence, but every once in a while comes face to face with loud nationalism and is compelled to make bitchy comments.<br />
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But I'm straying too far forward here. At the age of eight, the calculus was far simpler. Advertising something as a real American hero meant nothing to me. No, that's not quite it either. It meant something to me, but what it meant was unsettlingly and indistinctly sinister. Too much of the phrase seemed over-earnest. Was there an excess of artificial American heroes? Was America somehow lacking in heroes compared to other countries? What about the phrase "real American hero" exactly was intended to signify, and what?<br />
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This dilemma seems to me the bread and butter of childhood, a period that it is more or less impossible to look back on without wondering how, exactly, anyone thought it was a good idea to simply turn us loose in a world of signifiers and media and expect us to find dry land. Without some explanation of the interplay between the real and the imaginary, and a firm sense of the geopolitical implications of American heroism as compared to the other hundred and ninety-four choices (fewer then, to be fair, as Eastern Europe was still fragmenting).<br />
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Although my instincts, as I said, were to circle warily around these signifiers, the nature of the Nintendo Project is that such evasion cannot last forever. Eventually it becomes necessary to confront the abandoned remnants of childhood. Eventually one must face a real American hero and decide for once and for all what it is.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-db6JT_m43Kw/TbdUJWkncII/AAAAAAAAAeg/JFcWUaZTL24/s1600/gi2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-db6JT_m43Kw/TbdUJWkncII/AAAAAAAAAeg/JFcWUaZTL24/s1600/gi2.png" /></a>Based purely on the 1991 and 1992 GI Joe video games, the answer is not much. Tedious run-and-guns of the most banal sort, inasmuch as these games seem to make any comment about American heroism it suggests that American heroism consists of the Protestant ethic as opposed to any thrilling bravado. If there were games to indoctrinate children into the foolish ideology of warmongering, this is hardly the game to do it with, making the <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/09/fnord-cabal-caesars-palace-california.html">Army of One</a> an unappealing slog. I would do the games the basic courtesy of separating them into two paragraphs, but there's no real reason to do that - they're the same generic action game.<br />
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What is most striking about them, however, is their sense of the enemy. This is endemic to GI Joe, in which Real American Heroes are contrasted with nothing except for, tellingly, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/10/hail-set-i-mean-glycon-shit-whatd-i-say.html">Cobra Command</a>. I do not mean to be so megalomaniacal as to suggest that this organization was named for the concept I defined off of an unrelated video game, but if they were, they did a great job. As a fictional concept, Cobra Command is a staggeringly vague assemblage of concepts, basically being a paramilitary corporation. Although the temptation is to draw some sort of equivalence to Xe Services or something, the truth is that Cobra Command is altogether more ambiguous, a sort of lurking villainy happy to slot in and be evil in a given situation.<br />
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This sticky tack and string approach to villainy, in which there is not so much a set of principles and an ethos as there is a twirling moustache that will tie Pauline to the railroad tracks when called upon to do so, is a chilling reduction of the world that is enough to make one long for the Frankfurt School conspiracy theories of the culture industry. There, at least, there is some sense that the strings are being pulled in pursuit of some greater evil. The sense that one is opposed by something significant.<br />
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The world of GI Joe is far worse. A world in which heroism is a banal and rote opposition to a nebulously defined evil, where the wheels turn and the bullets fly without any larger interest being served. Looking back, we can see that the greatest sin of real American heroes is not blind patriotism, or any jingoistic brutality, but the far more banal evil of base nihilism. We do not fight because we must, nor because we can, nor even because we want to. Indeed, we do not fight because. We simply fight, real heroes that we aren't.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-77856245657314910052011-04-21T17:00:00.000-07:002011-04-21T17:00:06.112-07:00Strange Doors That We'd Never Close Again (Gargoyle's Quest II, Ghouls and Ghousts, Ghoul School)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DRiUoLhDxSE/TbDEyXe533I/AAAAAAAAAeE/qthrxKo1QeE/s1600/gng.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DRiUoLhDxSE/TbDEyXe533I/AAAAAAAAAeE/qthrxKo1QeE/s1600/gng.png" /></a>A larger, more monolithic experience in video games than Ghosts n Goblins seems impossible to find. Surely one of the all-time classics of the NES era, the game is through and through brilliant. But playing it, it is strangely difficult to pin down why. Other than the music, an admittedly brilliant piece, there is some sense of futility here - a game with oddly clunky level design and oddly unfair enemies. But as with many classics, there is something else - some undefinable trace that nevertheless cannot be ignored or reduced out. There is no reason this game should be great, and yet, despite all of its flaws, it is. In the end, this turns into a paradox. The game is monstrously hard for a classic, far harder than any massively popular game seems to have any right to be. There is no reason why it should be beloved in a world where few can clear the second level. The game is sheer brutality, positioned in plain sight, and strangely accepted despite it. But this is, perhaps, an important lesson - monsters, in point of fact, rarely lurk.</div><br />
All the same, a sense of ineffable fascination is necessary to the function of a monster. It is not that we must want to gaze upon the monster - in fact, it is in some sense essential that we wish the monster to be unseen. Rather, we must not want to look away from the monster. Whether it is an artfully rendered or stuck in a clumsy video game with pathetically bad graphics, we are compelled not to avert our eyes. This is the basic dynamic upon which the monster functions - we must want always a sort of stasis. Whether the monster is seen or unseen, we want first and foremost for it to stay that way.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MSkj2mzFxiI/TbDEy_HUfoI/AAAAAAAAAeI/uon5UdnwjUo/s1600/gqt.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MSkj2mzFxiI/TbDEy_HUfoI/AAAAAAAAAeI/uon5UdnwjUo/s1600/gqt.png" /></a>An unnecessary redemption of a sequel, Gargoyle's Quest 2 manages the odd feat of being a completely unnecessary game that's still pretty good. On paper, it's a train wreck - a pseudo-RPG sequel to a classic arcade game that fuses light RPG elements with wall-jumping/gliding action gaming featuring the game's main villain as the protagonist. Even if any part of this works, the combination is so bloatedly unnecessary that something has to go wrong. And yet somehow it works, perhaps because it development appears to have been conducted with no second thoughts or hesitations, plowing gamely forward to produce a game that works in spite of itself.<br />
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For it to stay that way, of course, one must move. None of this is because you want it. You had what you wanted, before that damnable Red Arremer swooped down to take her. Your armor sitting there, mere feet away, crumbled in a post-coital heap as she was stolen. Now you have no choice but this endless forward march. No second thoughts or hesitations, compelled by lust or duty not to avert your eyes, you march on, up these horrific towers, pushing desperately for an unnecessary redemption.<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Uimewvq_5Co/TbDEyEwK0kI/AAAAAAAAAeA/Nb8_DKGTisw/s1600/ghs.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Uimewvq_5Co/TbDEyEwK0kI/AAAAAAAAAeA/Nb8_DKGTisw/s1600/ghs.png" /></a>In its loathsome form, the alien is eye and bubbling flesh. These are the monsters that make up the bulk of Imagineering's 1992 NES game Ghoul School. Imagineering was the in-house development studio of Absolute Entertainment, which means this is a game from the people who brought you the classic <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-want-to-see-people-and-i-want-to-see.html">A Boy and His Blob</a>. (Now <i>there's</i> an entry that merits a complete rewrite and expansion for an eventual ebook version of this blog) Which means about what you'd expect - pathetically bad graphics, incredibly clumsy controls, etc. Avoiding getting hit is a matter of dumb luck, with nothing to insulate you from your environment. And yet despite this, like A Boy and His Blob, there is a sense of ineffable fascination.</div><div><br />
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In spite of itself, the monster holds strange power. Inevitably disappointing as it may be, we cannot do without its visage. What is a hallway without the possibility of unknown footsteps behind you? What use are shadows that do not flicker in the corner of your eye? What use is the faint trace or echo if it is not a portent of far worse possibility? We depend on the gnawing knowledge that something has to go wrong, that in some gap or stammer, some repeated bit of data, some awful fiend shall emerge.<br />
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Its arrival is necessary, the inevitable culmination of a stretch of graves and zombies. Whipped aloft on leathery wings adapted to ride the thermals of this awful place, its fur burns a brilliant crimson that is not of this world. It is not the rusty thrush of blood, nor the rich purple of wine, nor even the incinerate glow of embers, but rather the heat of some other awful fire from a place mercifully far from here. Its hair crackles and pops, a million tongues of fire spasming across its skin. Even before the acrid stench and unholy glow can be seen, you know it is there. This fur is not designed to insulate this creature from its environment. Already the incandescence within its fell gut generates such heat that from the beast's mouth spits searing flames. Rather, this fur insulates the world, imprisoning the balefire in its loathsome form.<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Monsters, in point of fact, rarely lurk, at least not unexpectedly. The entire reason a monster is scary is because it is expected. The monster is only scary if you know it is there. Where this turns into a paradox is that the presence of the monster drains its fear even as the inevitability of its arrival is necessary.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Some awful fiend shall emerge. That is the way these things always end. A stretch of mortal peril interrupted only by the emergence of larger mortal peril. This feebly armored life builds inexorably and constantly towards this inevitable end. And yet there is some sense of futility here. Some part of you knows that you are not the first nor the last to trod this ground. Or, a far worse possibility, that this is neither the first nor last time you yourself have trod this ground. That this entire affair is some ghastly encore, a repeat performance in an epic that will go on to rival Cats for sheer frustration. That even if you survive, it will all turn out to be some fiendish trap, a game within a game, your past performance a mere echo, disassembled out of any sensible order, if such a thing ever existed, embedded in a larger, more monolithic experience.</div>Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-42119884412866987982011-04-14T17:14:00.000-07:002011-04-14T17:14:21.596-07:00The Number You Are Calling Has Been Disconnected Due To Lack Of Payment (Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h_jZQZY9PGI/TaeNtfPo6BI/AAAAAAAAAdg/GF7P7nDUWPY/s1600/gbusters.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h_jZQZY9PGI/TaeNtfPo6BI/AAAAAAAAAdg/GF7P7nDUWPY/s1600/gbusters.png" /></a>The essential premise of the film Ghostbusters, when you get down to it, is that three upper middle class academics have to slum it in a working class job like exterminators. Yes, it layers all sorts of wacky paranormal goofiness onto that, but at the end of the day, that's what it's about - the absurdity of working class paranormal experts. </div><br />
Class issues are perhaps the most overlooked aspect of video gaming. Reams of text exist on gender and video games. Smaller reams exist on race and video games. Very little exists on the issue of class and economics in video games.<br />
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Those approaches that do exist focus on things like Farmville. I'll take Jonathan Blow here, the creator of <a href="http://braid-game.com/">Braid</a>, the best video game of the last decade. (The website fails to mention that Braid is also available from the Mac app store. This blog gets about 200 readers a day, so far as I can tell. I assume some of you have played Braid before, but if Braid does not get 150 purchases within the next 48 hours from you lot, you have done it wrong. Go buy Braid. If you like this blog, you will like the game. Period.) But in an interview with <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6224/catching_up_with_jonathan_blow.php?print=1">Gamasutra</a>, Blow says:<br />
<blockquote>It's about "How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity" -- but it actually makes people worry about it when they're away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it's about, "How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?" And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that's all those games are, basically.</blockquote>In other words, and I think Blow is absolutely correct here, the point of Farmville is to treat the player's time as labor. Fun is given as a reward for investing sufficient amounts of labor into the game. The games thus work specifically by deferring the player's fun - by promising them that in the future they might get to have fun, just so long as they play more.<br />
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In a way, this is a regression towards the old arcade stimulus - insert a quarter to die again. But in practice it has merged with the equally disgusting trend towards "gamification," a word that cannot have enough scare quotes put on it. In the arcade mode, fun is dished out in increments. Skill allows you to buy fun more efficiently. But when you insert a quarter, you are definitely buying 25 cents of fun. But the gamification model removes fun from the occasion - instead, you invest your labor as labor and get a reward - victory. The point of Farmville is not that crop harvesting is fun, it's that crop harvesting is the labor you have to invest to get shinies.<br />
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(Yes, I am conflating social gaming and gamification. Why? Because they're the same fucking trend.)<br />
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But for all that Farmville is an extreme example, once you take the step of equating gameplay and labor, overt Marxism is difficult to avoid. With bad games, that's downright easy - it's next to impossible not to read something like <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/03/monster-at-end-of-this-post-formula-one.html">Frankenstein: The Monster Returns</a> as anything other than a game in which you experience endless misery for the arbitrary prize of "winning." But it's true of good games too. It's hilariously easy to read <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/04/boys-drool-gauntlet-gauntlet-ii.html">Gauntlet</a> as a chilling parable of the underclass working themselves literally to death (as their lifeforce ticks away, they desperately try to eke out just a few more kills). Video gaming is a medium about class. That's why we don't talk about class - because the nature of the game is the exploitation of labor as a mechanism of producing more labor. You play a game to be taught to play more game.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tZrVadhfvXY/TaeNtIaOYeI/AAAAAAAAAdc/h50lkU2tlZ0/s1600/gb2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tZrVadhfvXY/TaeNtIaOYeI/AAAAAAAAAdc/h50lkU2tlZ0/s1600/gb2.png" /></a>What, then, do we make of Ghostbusters, a game adaptation of a movie that is already about the exploitative nature of labor under late capitalism? Well, let's start with Ghostbusters II, because it's by far the simpler angle. Ghostbusters II is a completely shitty game in which you flail about ineffectually platforming. Being a tie-in game, it exists mostly to prove that the ethical bankruptcy of Farmville is not a new phenomenon in video gaming, rather the existence of intelligent people like Jonathan Blow who believe that video gaming can and should be better and are willing to be vocal about it is a new phenomenon.<br />
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Ghostbusters II is a masterful piece of cynicism. On the back of a reasonably successful (due to being pretty darn good) licensed game and a new movie, Ghostbusters II is nothing more than an attempt to argue that your enjoyment of the film creates in you a moral obligation to buy and play a game regardless of its actual content. That is, after all, the central rhetoric of the licensed game - the content doesn't matter, because you buy the game on the basis of its branding. The gameplay is simply the labor you must endure in order to fulfill your existing contract formed only on the basis of your appreciation for the movie and previous games, i.e. fun that you have already paid for but that somehow was in excess of what you paid and thus amounts to a debt on your part.<br />
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Ghostbusters, on the other hand, is a supremely not-half-bad game, at least for half of it. (The concluding portion of the game, in which you climb Zuul's tower, is easily one of the worst gameplay mechanics ever, and unless you engage in some radically postmodernist reading in which the misery of this experience is a commentary on the relationship of the gamer and the product of his labor, you should simply ignore it as a trainwreck) But what is interesting about it is specifically that it is a good game that plays on a mechanic of labor.<br />
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See, the Ghostbusters have exactly the problem you'd expect them to have - they have virtually no money and still have to defend the city from a siege of ghosts. Even though the city direly needs them to solve its ghost problem, it's still going to charge them. Perhaps most ludicrously, there is an entire store dedicated to selling ghost catching supplies. The world is on the brink of ending, and they are still charging in a business-as-usual fashion. There is, in fact, a minimum $4000 investment to have even an abstract chance of helping the problem.<br />
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From there, you spend most of the game balancing cash flow - trying to catch enough ghosts so that you can actually afford to catch ghosts, while simultaneously trying to build up sufficient "savings" to buy the equipment needed to survive Zuul's Tower, which, of course, you won't. Perhaps most tellingly, Ghostbusters is the only game I am aware of in which the world can end because you were too poor to buy gas. In other words, the game is about the need to have sufficient quantities of money in order to play the game effectively.<br />
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Ghostbusters, then, is a rare game - a game that allegorizes labor and class, as opposed to simply using those concepts for the further exploitation of the player. There are better games, for sure. But there may well not be fairer ones.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-71317728363822433232011-04-12T17:21:00.000-07:002011-04-12T17:21:02.370-07:00This Entry Is Not About the Homoerotic Connection Between George Foreman and Genghis Khan (Genghis Khan, George Foreman's KO Boxing)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MqVGQQg5ftM/TaTsQbUlZPI/AAAAAAAAAdQ/dw5QDTZsEkk/s1600/geng.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MqVGQQg5ftM/TaTsQbUlZPI/AAAAAAAAAdQ/dw5QDTZsEkk/s1600/geng.png" /></a></div>But that doesn't mean I won't make sure that it becomes the first Google hit for anyone looking for Genghis Khan/George Foreman slash fiction. In any case, it's been a while since we've <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-pushed-through-screen-door-and-i.html">talked about fighting</a>, and I don't think anyone actually read that entry anyway. (For very sound reasons, nobody progresses to the beginning of the archive) So let's do it again. Or shall we say, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/10/insert-playing-with-yourself-joke-here.html">conflict</a>.<br />
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Genghis Khan, depending on who you ask, is either a conquerer who amassed the single largest empire of any human being ever, or what is widely recognized as the best strategy game of all time. In his former guise, with a set of brutal tactics that included the routine massacre of civilian populations, which does make it easier to conquer huge swaths of the world, people generally being the major problem with ruling the world. But the Mongol empire, at the time of his death, included parts of what are now Iran and India. At the height of the empire, it included parts of what are now Poland and Vietnam, which I encourage you to stop and think about in terms of scale, given that it was a contiguous empire.<br />
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Part of the shock of this fact is that in a world currently divided into individualized nation states that provide a sense of microculture that is heightened by the fact that mass communication is such that a subculture can exist. The odd effect of this is that we tend to marginalize the genuine strangenesses of ancient cultures. It took a surprisingly short amount of time for globalization to set in, with light Sino-Roman relations existing, as well as the wonderful example of the Indo-Greeks.<br />
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The unfortunate reality of the world being that the sword, through most of human history, has been a relatively effective mechanism of cultural exchange. But even there, Genghis Khan is oddly out of place, since he was extravagantly destructive of cultures. The Mongol Empire was cosmopolitan in a weird way, in that it was brutal in breaking the backs of existing cultures, but positively progressive in its tolerance for the cultural quirks of the survivors so long as the money still flowed to the capital.<br />
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But this gets at the fact that military conquest is a genuinely complex affair. Which is why in most regards the primary genre for war video games has been, for most of the history of video gaming, the turn-based strategy game, of which Genghis Khan is an example. I've talked about the difficulty of these games for this blog before - the fact of the matter is that half an hour is nowhere near long enough to get into a game that depends on enormously complex game mechanics.<br />
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At its heart, the turn-based strategy game depends on the tension between a game mechanic that is trivial to use - "Pick something off a menu" - and a game mechanic that is enormously difficult to use well. This is oddly suitable to the art of war and combat, in which the act of shooting someone in the face is unsettlingly easier than balancing the competing desires of multiple nation-states in an attempt to ensure a stable geopolitical situation.<br />
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Indeed, there is a strange tension between Genghis Khan and George Foreman (that could possibly, but in all likelihood will not, lead to passionate sexual congress between them) in this regard. Genghis Khan's primary genius as a military leader was in his ability to organize the complex machinery of war. In other words, his genius was specifically in his ability to distance himself from the actual mechanics of fighting and battle in favor of the mechanics of geopolitical motion. George Foreman, on the other hand, was a master at the art of defeating people.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-33KCWS1ElAE/TaTsQrjpf_I/AAAAAAAAAdU/W4QPJ_Ofvxg/s1600/george.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-33KCWS1ElAE/TaTsQrjpf_I/AAAAAAAAAdU/W4QPJ_Ofvxg/s1600/george.png" /></a>It's difficult to comment on a game like George Foreman's KO Boxing prior to the primal scene of boxing video games, Punch Out. At the end of the day, these games are rhythm games with violence, about the pace and tempo of the fight. George Foreman's KO Boxing is based on dodging punches at the right times and landing punches at the other right times.<br />
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This is not actually any worse an approach for a boxing game than turn-based strategy is for a war game. Just as war is about the vast complexity of its moving parts, boxing is about the intimacy of combat in that classic homoerotic way. It is about the intense physicality of the experience every bit as much as war is about the intense abstraction of it.<br />
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But what occupies the space in between the intimacy of combat and the theory of war? What fills the gap from soldier to general? That void between the experienced reality of combat and the unknowable but equally, if not more true and more important reality of the abstract systems that war fuels. In the fumbling coitus of boxer turned kitchen appliance salesman and vicious historical warlord, this mysterious point of contact between the two seems to be everything - the unknowable spark of battle and forbidden love.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-45225654382374108062011-04-07T13:28:00.000-07:002011-04-07T18:59:57.882-07:00Am Error (Game Genie, Gemfire)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tDJAs-j-wX4/TZ4eN9a4ZJI/AAAAAAAAAdE/6OxlwPBwmx8/s1600/gemfire.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tDJAs-j-wX4/TZ4eN9a4ZJI/AAAAAAAAAdE/6OxlwPBwmx8/s1600/gemfire.png" /></a>My copy of Gemfire is a bad ROM, displaying random text in lieu of an actual game, replacing known content with that mainstay of digital media, the glitch. Far from being an aberrant error, the glitch is a central part of the experience of the NES, an era where the games frequently existed on a spectrum between function and breakdown. The entire intrigue of the infamous "I AM ERROR" man in Zelda II is that it is not actually as far a step from "DODONGO DISLIKES SMOKE" or "PAY ME FOR DOOR REPAIR" in the grand interpretive schema of things. Minus World exists as a meaningful phenomenon within Super Mario Brothers, gloriously restored in the Virtual Console re-release, providing the retrogaming experience with new authenticity consciously lacking in previous releases. It is not separate from the experience of the NES, but rather a real and genuine part of the experience, just as the accidental oversight of infinite 1-Ups in World 3-1 is a part of what Super Mario Bros is. </div><br />
When video gaming is assumed to happen in these lawless gaps, what do we make of it? I'll advocate up and down for video games as the medium most suited to the long-term preservation of poetry, but to say this claim has unfortunate consequences for the original medium of poetry is an understatement. Suddenly we are forced to attempt a strange new sort of backwards compatibility, applying concepts before their time. Do the Four Quartets have an unspoken Minus Quartet? Is there a cheat code for the Goblin Market? Is the apparition of these faces in the crowd not petals on a wet, black bough but rather just sprite slowdown?<br />
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The Game Genie, I realized an entry too late, required an entry as well. If only because it was at the center of one of the few landmark intellectual property disputes in video gaming history, the Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. case, or, as we tend to just call it when we're being lazy, Galoob v. Nintendo. See, the Game Genie was a Nintendo cartridge, like an other unlicensed Nintendo cartridge.<br />
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Actually, I suppose we should start with the phrase "unlicensed cartridge," because it reflects a completely different mentality of how video games work. Unlicensed cartridges existed because hackers existed. The same crowd that now designs the Homebrew channel for the Wii and mod chips for the XBox then worked through almost charmingly brute-force measures - chips that provided a voltage spike that scrambled the 10NES region locking chip in the system, cartridges that you could plug another cartridge into in order to use it to get through the 10NES chip, or, in the case of Tengen, elaborate theft of intellectual property and reverse engineering. All of which was a grand tradition marred only by the fact that virtually no unlicensed games were even remotely playable. Only Tengen, really just Atari in disguise (its name is also a term from Go) ever put anything of quality out, most notably the legendary Tengen Tetris cartridge.<br />
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Once you understand that, you can understand the Game Genie. Sold by Galoob, it depended on a very simple sales logic. Because Galoob was a titanically large toy company, and in those days sales of NES games focused more heavily on toy stores (with what is now Gamestop then being a motley of distinct mall stores - Software Etc, Babbages, and Electronics Boutique, most notably - which focused at the time on actual computer software, not console video gaming), even though it was unlicensed, it had significant distribution. And unlike every other unlicensed cartridge, the Game Genie had a purpose, which was basically hacking for the masses.<br />
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See, what the Game Genie did was take as input a series of characters - no different in appearance than a normal old <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/03/robert-frost-would-probably-dislike.html">video game password</a> - that altered the games code subtly. Basically, you could take an arbitrary portion of the game's ROM and replace it with a value of your choosing. The vast majority of the time this had no useful result, either changing the game in an essentially imperceptible way or simply breaking the game. But every once in a while - mostly in ways carefully sought out by and compiled by Galoob - the Game Genie functioned as the cheat codes the games didn't have - infinite lives, invulnerability, level selection, and other such modifiations.<br />
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Nintendo, perhaps unsurprisingly, was less than fond of this and sued Galoob, arguing that the Game Genie illegally produced a derivative work that was copyright infringement. Mercifully, this argument was laughed at, with the situation being compared instead to playing a board game with house rules. (The lawsuit is surprisingly significant precedent, most notably coming up in the attempt by TV companies to prevent SonicBlue from implementing commercial skipping technology in their ReplayTV product. The TV industry was eventually able to win that one by default by lawyering SonicBlue to death even though what they did was unquestionably legal, but not before Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner managed a legendarily horrifying piece of verbal diarrhea when he claimed that skipping commercials meant you were stealing television, but that "there's a certain amount of tolerance" for going to the bathroom during commercial breaks. The temptation for a joke about how presumably number one is fair use, but number two is copyright infringement is too high, I'm afraid.)<br />
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The Game Genie, then, reduces game to code, although calling this a reduction when in fact the two have always been equivalent in reality. It is only in the fantasy of actual play that some distinction emerges between the code and the game. But here, perhaps, is where the poetry re-emerges. The code as "experienced" by the system is not even the machine language of ones and zeros, but rather a system of electrical pulses and magnetic fields that a human can no more read as "the game" than the Nintendo can understand the eternal longing for the displaced princess, endlessly elided to another castle. When we bind these pulses together to the compromised form of code, a strange twilight realm that neither man nor machine quite interpret, we create something that approximates poetry - an abstracted metaphor finally subjected to proper postmodern rigor by the burgeoning and brilliant <a href="http://criticalcodestudies.com/wordpress/">Critical Code Studies</a> group.<br />
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If we associate contemporary poetry with the lyrical tradition, which is fair, then the central move of code - to capture an ineffable event in a structured form that bestows it with meaning via metaphor - is the central move of code-writing. But by this standard all video game is lyrical, operating via the encoding and decoding of abstract systems into formal semiotic systems. To play a video game is to engage in poesis.<br />
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Gemfire, ostensibly a game about medieval warfare back-ported from the SNES, is in some ways more authentically experienced as a screeching glitch, <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/02/embodied-gruesome-band-dungeon-magic.html">interminable and inaccessible</a>. The magic smoke turns out to be little more than a puff of characterset, a voltage spike of grapheme to shock our region locking into accepting the bad data. That the game should be mis-translated is common - after all, the entire mode of play of the NES is the Engrish mis-translation of the non-existant cultural heritage of Japan.<br />
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This is the shadow realm of our metaphors, qlippothic and unseemly. As a medium that trades on the frisson of metaphor and thing, of sign and object, the NES is oddly more at home in these spaces of glitch and cheat. We must admit in some sense that Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A B A Start has an ontology and a presence that transcends that of Contra or Gradius, that is real and present in a way that the endless translations of event and sprite and code and pulse can never be.<br />
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To what end is the decay of meaning to language to code to an unneeded restlessness of air molecules or an ejaculation of ink even suitable to this task? Do we capture some greater meaning if the process is disturbed? If, NES-like, we allow for the inevitable mistranslation, taking the fact that pulse and glyph can never understand each other? What would our understanding look like misunderstood? If we turned back the translation of the Nintendo Generation, returning to our fictional motherland and translated ourselves anew, recompiled if you will.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OB75R2T1PlI/TZ4eNsfZcdI/AAAAAAAAAdA/vSC0gyzyHdI/s1600/game_genie.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-OB75R2T1PlI/TZ4eNsfZcdI/AAAAAAAAAdA/vSC0gyzyHdI/s1600/game_genie.png" /></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span>Gemfire my copy of the digital media, replace the main content that is known to glitch, to display random text instead of the actual game, a bad ROM. So far, the errors are unusual, NES glitch is the heart of the experience of age on the spectrum that existed between the game and failure is often a function. Zelda II's infamous "I am error" Reference conspiracy whole man, it is "DODONGO smoke hate" as a step away from, in the schema interpretation of magnificent things and that is not actually "repair door I pay for "is. Minus world, in an earlier release of the new conscious and lacking credibility retrogaming provide experience in the Virtual Console re-release of the brilliant, the phenomenon exists as a meaningful recovery in the Super Mario Bros. I. This is not different from the experiences of NES, but rather experience the real and genuine, a world infinitely 3-1 - UPS Super Mario Bros. and director of the contingent will be part of something . </i><br />
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<i>Video games, do we do that, you will be expected to occur in these lawless gap? I'm in, most suitable for long-term preservation of the poem, I'll stand down for a video game, this claim is a conservative with the unfortunate consequence of the media saying that the original poem. Suddenly, when we apply the concept before his time, is forced to try strange new sort of backward compatibility. Four Quartets, do you have an implicit negative quartet? Goburinmaketto cheat codes available? These shades, the crowd, not wet, you are facing a slowdown in the sprite in the petals of a branch just black? </i><br />
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<i>Game Genie, I realized it must have an entry too late entries. It is the history of video games, Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. Nintendo and the United States, Inc. If so only if it is the heart of one of intellectual property disputes breakthrough some or we are lazy when we tend to call it, Galoob is Nintendou pair ' again. See, the Game Genie was like ライセンスニンテンドーカートリッジ Nintendokatorijji others. </i><br />
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<i>In fact, I have completely different ideas to reflect on how the video game business that we are "unlicensed cartridges" and must begin with the phrase. Because there was a hacker, there was an unlicensed cartridges. Currently, Xbox's Wii mod chip to design your own channels with the same crowd appeal nearly worked through brute force protection at the time - lock in the system chip that provides a voltage spike 10NES chip area scramble, cartridges Then, another cartridge to be able to plug, 10NES you can use to get through the chip, Tengen, for the elaborate theft of intellectual property and reverse engineering. All in the game essentially unlicensed grand tradition was ruined by the fact that only the remote play. Tasty The only really just disguised the Atari (Its name is a term Go) of something by far the most remarkable quality, Tian Tetorisukatorijji place of legend. </i><br />
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<i>Once you understand that you can understand the devil's game. Galoob in sales, it relied on selling a very simple logic. And software, Babbages, Electronics Boutique, in particular - Galoob is, titanically was so big toy company, then sales of the NES games and is currently being mixed for the individual mall Gamestop store what is (and toy store more focused - it was that even though unlicensed, it had an important distribution), rather than the video game, computer software in the actual concentration at a time. And unlike all other licenses cartridge, the Game Genie, had been hacked for the public purpose principle. </i><br />
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<i>The password is regular old video games are different in appearance - - What the Game Genie codes to change the game slightly, please do not refer to was taken as the input sequence of characters. Basically, the ROM of the game can take any part, replacing it with the selected value. Most of the time it had a useful result, destroying the game by simply changing the game can not be perceived as essentially one or. But all are once in a while - find a carefully compiled Galoob focusing method - unlimited life, immortal, select the level of such and other modifiations - The Genie of the game, the game code Inakatsu have function as cheating or. </i><br />
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<i>Nintendo is probably no surprise that, like less than this, Galoob appeal, the Game Genie to create derivative works claiming copyright infringement is illegal. Situation is to play board games instead of internal rules, to be compared Fortunately, this argument was laughed at. (Litigation mostly to prevent Sonic from implementing the technology skipping commercial products replay it, especially coming out in attempting to TV companies, the television industry will set important precedents Surprisingly, to win the final By default, they are one of lawyering Sonicblue could not die even though it was what he was unquestionably the Sukippukomasharu is legal, but that the toilet you had to steal TV to go "there is a certain amount of tolerance" when it is not Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner is claimed, before managing the work of the grisly legend of verbal diarrhea, while the commercial . number one, but probably the way to the fair use of the two copyright infringements, but I fear the temptation of jokes is high.) </i><br />
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<i>Game Genie is, then, actually two, the reality is always to call this reduction is equivalent to the code, the game is reduced. That it comes out the distinction between code and a few games, the real fun is only a fantasy. But here, perhaps, the poem is the place to re-emerge. The system "experience" instead of machine language code is 0 and 1, such as electrical pulses and magnetic field of the human system can also Nintendou eternal longing to understand the other "game" that can be read as The shelter is not for the princess, by omitting the castle and on. Form invasion of code with these pulses bind when men both machine area in the evening a strange interpretation of a very, we have created something close to poetry - critical brilliant fast-growing and eventually The research group code, an abstract metaphor for the rigors of post-modern subject as appropriate. </i><br />
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<i>To capture events unspeakable form structured gave it meaning through metaphor - - We traditions lyrical fair, if associated with modern poetry moved to the center of the code, the code the center is moved to write. However, this standard for all video games, working through the encoding and decoding system of abstract formal semiotic system, and lyrical. To play a video game is to engage in poesis. </i><br />
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<i>Gemfire was ported from the SNES back in the medieval war, ostensibly more faithful about the game glitches Shima Seki is experienced in some way inaccessible forever. The character turns out to be more than a little puff of magic smoke, have an impact on our region locked to accept bad data writing voltage spikes. The game should be translated into common mistakes - after all, in all modes of play NES, English is a translation of the Japanese mistakes not nonexistence of Japanese heritage. </i><br />
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<i>This is the shadow realm of metaphor is ugly and we qlippothic. Parable with that sign, the object of trading shudder NES glitch strangely at home in these spaces as a medium that is more cheating. Baba Left Right Left Right Ppudaundaun Appua Start that we have a presence that transcends the present in ways that are real and that the ontology and contrast buttons and Gradius The pulse can be infinity and the translation of the event and Supuraitokodo need not accept in a sense. </i><br />
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<i>Finally, even unnecessary anxiety of air molecules and ink, meant the collapse of the coding language for this task to ejaculate something? If we disturb the process, you can capture some of the major implications? If you like the NES, we take the fact that we can not understand each other and glyphs pulse, allowing the inevitable mistranslation? Look at what we understand, do you wish to misunderstand? The glitch, after all, the meaning - the entire circuit bending electronic music glitchpop hinge on this movement. If there is a prospect of hacking techniques of poetry. Burroughs, provides a route to such a cut-up of our approach.</i><br />
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<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bQqx-dxXs8s/TZ4eNLiEuKI/AAAAAAAAAc8/ie3froiP2cE/s1600/444px-CutupGenerator.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bQqx-dxXs8s/TZ4eNLiEuKI/AAAAAAAAAc8/ie3froiP2cE/s320/444px-CutupGenerator.jpg" width="320" /></a>0 and 1 are electrical pulses phrased. Because there was a hacker, there was form that structured it, that gave it meaning through metaphor. The phenomenon exists as a meaningful recovery of what is "Nintendo," an eternal longing to understand the other "game," where the contingent will be part of something logic. And software, Babbages, Electronics Boutique, in particular video game.<br />
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This claim is a conservative one, steeped in traditions: lyrical and fair. If associated with the game, should we be translated into common mistakes and pulses? Should we be allowing the inevitable mistranslation? Look at what modern poetry moved to the center of the toilet you had to steal. Look at TV working through the encoding and decoding systems of smoke, having an inevitable impact on our region locked writing.<br />
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However, this os standard for all video games, as a video game is to engage in poesis. Fortunately, this argument was laughed at. (Litigation mostly, by default). They are one of those lawyering Sonicblue's hatred as a step away from the Galoob.<br />
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See, in the sales, it relied on selling a very simple get through chip, Tengen, for the elaborate Gemfire. My copy of the digital media replaced what was taken as the input with a sequence of characters. To accept bad data is to write voltage spikes, the pulse of infinity and translation. The unfortunate consequence of the media says that the chaos of cut-up and mistranslation imposes the public purpose principle. The password is a regular way to the fair use of the two cartridges, the Game Genie, hacked for company, the NES games, and the Gamestop store. What is, and toy stores offer more Atari (Its name is a term Go) commercial products.<br />
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Replay it, unknown, applying will and fire to burn away the commercial. Number one, is the grisly legend of verbal diarrhea, inaccessible forever. The character turns out to be mixed for the individual mall to go "there is a certain amount of time." We lock in the system and set important precedents to win the final. But once in a while we capture some of the major implications.<br />
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If you use the Game Genie to create derivative works, claiming copyright you are unquestionably the Sukippukomasharu. This is legal, but we can not understand each other. We creed glyphs on how the video game business is, made of air molecules and ink that mean the collapse of game into a bad ROM. So far, the errors code, the code is the center moved to games instead of internal rules.<br />
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To be compared is to be reduced. That comes out the distinction, the black Game Genie I realized it must have. Galoob is titanically big - a toy in a sense. Finally, even unnecessary anxiety is lazy when we tend to call it. Jamie Kellner claimed, before managing the work history of video games, that Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. will be expected to occur in these lawless magnetic field of the human system. We can also know of the event and Supuraitokodo.<br />
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We need not accept that is it preferable to pry meaning from the theft of intellectual property and reverse engineering. All are ruined by the fact that only the remote game cannot be perceived as essentially one. Attempting to TV companies, the television industry will make video games. Do we do that, you two? The reality is always to call this something. If we disturb the process, you can see what the Game Genie code change.<br />
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Nintendo and the United States are the original poem. Suddenly, when we apply the 3-1 UPS Super Mario Bros. as directors, it has an important distribution. We would rather that the infringement be illegal. The situation is to play board games and other modifications. The Genie of video games, the computer software in the actual concentration to prevent Sonic from implementing the technology.<br />
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Skipping Tetorisukatorijji, the place of legend, you understand that new consciousness lacks credibility. Retrogaming provides experience. "Repair door, I pay for" is the game code Inakatsu. You have functional tolerance when it is not Turner broadcasting CEO copyright infringements. But I fear the temptation of it is the heart of one abstract formal semiotic system. It is lyrical to play not for the princess, but by omitting the castle, critical, brilliant, fast-growing.<br />
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Eventually the research group are "unlicensed cartridges" and must begin with the these spaces as a medium that is more than what you have. An implicit negative quartet? Goburinmaketto gap? I'm in.<br />
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Most suitable for long-term preservation after all, are all modes of playing the NES. To stratum we have a presence that transcends the ability to plug a 10NES you can use to in the Virtual Console re-release. The brilliant joke is high. Game Genie is, then, actually an entry too late. It is the area scrambling cartridges.<br />
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Then, another cartridge has by far the most remarkable quality. And unlike all other licenses you can understand the devil's game. This is Galoob in the medieval war, ostensibly more faithful about the game glitches. Shima Seki is experienced to display random text instead of the actual. It could not die even though it was what any part would replace it with the selected value. The post-modern subject was appropriate to capture events unspeakable. The main content that is known to glitch, the poem is the place to re-emerge.<br />
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The crowd appeal nearly worked through brute force, a protection like the NES. We take the fact that experience is real and genuine, a world infinitely unlike Super Mario Bros. This is not focused - it was even unlicensed. Reference conspiracy, the whole man is DODONGO smoke, a schema for the interpretation of magnificent things. That is wet. You are facing a slowdown in the the experience of age. This is the spectrum of a strange new sort of backward compatibility. The Four Quartets are only a fantasy.<br />
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But here, perhaps, cheat codes are available? These shades, the crowd, not is probably not surprised. The pulses bind when men and machine form a sprite in the petals of a branch just of the poem. I'll stand down for a the present in ways that are real. A concept before his time, I am forced unlimited life, immortal. I select the level off and on. I form an invasion of code with these Gemfires, ported from the SNES back in the evening, a strange interpretation of a very strange game.<br />
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Please do not refer to trading, the shuddering NES glitch that is strangely at home in the coding language. An ejaculate of intellectual property disputes breakthroughs.Wwe we have created something close to poetry. The ontology and contrast buttons, the Gradius Game Genie was like ライセンスニンテンドーカートリッジ Nintendokatorijji<br />
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In between code and a few games, the real was more than a little puff of magic fact. I have completely different ideas to reflect that. Galoob appeals to the Minus world in an earlier release of the function. Zelda II's infamous "I am error" is an unlicensed cartridge. Currently, Xbox's and Wii's mod chip are unusual. The NES glitch is at the heart of code, an abstract metaphor for the rigors of the chip that provides a voltage spike to the 10NES chip that can be read.<br />
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The shelter is most of the time. It had a useful English translation of the Japanese" "Baba Left Right Left Right Ppudaundaun Appua." This result, destroying the game by simply changing essentially unlicensed grand tradition existed between the game its failure is often to find a carefully compiled Galoob. By focusing on method, reduction is equivalent to the code.<br />
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The game is a shadow in the realm of metaphor. It is an ugly system we "experience" instead of machine language code. It is play disguised the qlippothic. The parable of the sign, the object of nonexistence with Japanese heritage. This is the time to design your own channels. Basically, the ROM of the game can take old video games. They are different in appearance, different from the experiences of NES.<br />
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We understand. Do you wish to misunderstand?Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448613549782052868.post-3671062650339941742011-04-05T15:46:00.000-07:002011-04-06T09:50:51.217-07:00Boys Drool (Gauntlet, Gauntlet II)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4lttCcM6YUQ/TZubJBu2kSI/AAAAAAAAAcw/FAKDxJ9uZUU/s1600/gauntlet.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4lttCcM6YUQ/TZubJBu2kSI/AAAAAAAAAcw/FAKDxJ9uZUU/s1600/gauntlet.png" /></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span>Gargoyle Quest is being held back a few entries, since its so close in the alphabet to the other NES game in its series.</i></div><i><br />
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Gauntlet and Gauntlet II represent in many ways the ultimate in arcade games - a steady march towards death as your body decays around you, limited health items, and a lot of buttons to mash. And there are great entries to be had about death and mourning and shooting the food. I mean, shooting the food. How good is that? Limited health items in a game where your health steadily falls no matter what you do, and you can shoot them!<br />
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But that's not what I want to talk about. Because the thing I remember about Gauntlet is this: I always played the Valkyrie.<br />
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Actually, this is true of a lot of games. Diablo? Always played the Rogue. Knights of the Old Republic? My character was female. Wing Commander III and IV? Always picked the female wingman. In pretty much any game where the option is available, unless playing the girl is an infuriating process (I am looking at you, Super Mario Bros 2) I picked the girl.<br />
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I assumed everyone did. It's always been, for me, "Valkyrie needs food badly," not the Elf or the Wizard or the Warrior. They could bloody well starve. Who wanted a slow-moving brute that just hit things, or a weakling magic user, or a fast-moving elf that really just mostly ran into things. (I remember with an avid lack of fondness the one time I did play the Elf. I tried to run and gun, and was disturbed to find that I passed my arrow.) Though the appeal of Valkyrie wasn't just her defensive capabilities - the tank was never my role of choice anyway. It was that she was the girl.<br />
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We're talking about video games I was playing in the first and second grade here, so the obvious reason of "scantily clad women are nice to have on screen" doesn't hold water. And I'm pretty confident in the chaste nature of my character choices through adulthood. I've just always felt more comfortable with women avatars.<br />
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Part of this is my <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2010/09/best-defense-is-probably-cup-of-tea-and.html">stated discomfort with masculinity</a>. I played video games because I was a scrawny geekboy, and I play them now because I'm a fat geekman. The rippled shirtless Fabio muscles of the Warrior were never going to be for me. A far better fit might have been the Wizard, but I was never fond of the idea that intelligence was necessarily bonded to physical frailty - a conceit of game balance created by Gary Gygax with, to my mind, unfortunate overall implications. And the Elf... I mean, look, the Elf was cool. But why would I play the Elf when there was the Valkyrie? I didn't even know what a Valkyrie was. All I knew was that she was blue, a woman, and the coolest character in the game.<br />
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The male options all seemed to offer some commentary on me - some sense of selecting my identity. If I picked the Warrior over the Wizard, I was committing to some sort of ideological selection about brains or brawn (though how, exactly, brains and a capacity for unleashing massive fireballs were linked - either my second grade education was seriously lacking, or, more likely, there was something not quite right about the ideology of the Wizard. There's a post in that someday). Playing the male characters meant making some sort of claim about who I was. Playing the Valkyrie, on the other hand, was a step towards alienation. I'm usually loathe to link Penny Arcade, as I've been reasonably persuaded by the incomparably brilliant <a href="http://projectnes.blogspot.com/2011/02/at-least-loki-did-it-on-purpose-faria.html">Anna</a> (whose previous entry on Faria is a must-read and a major inspiration, in its own way, for this one) that it too often crosses the line from funny to just plain mean (the fact of the matter is that their handling of the dickwolves controversy was flat-out appallingly bad), but the fact of the matter is that <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/4/1/">Tycho's post of a few days ago</a> (made well after I'd already decided on this entry topic) captures it brilliantly.<br />
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I've never played video games to put myself into an imaginary world. I have my fucking imagination for that. I play video games to see other things. I don't need to project myself into a dungeon to be chased by ghosts. I'd rather, as with any work of fiction, see an interesting person do it - to see the Other on the screen, and to connect to it without being it.<br />
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And the fact of the matter is, I have always found femininity preferable to masculinity.<br />
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It's not that I have gender dysphoria. I am definitely male. It's just that, if I were given the opportunity to design myself from scratch, I'd pick the female character. Life just doesn't work that way, so I'm a boy, and I don't care nearly enough to change it. I'm male less because it's a meaningful part of my identity and more because it'd be an awful lot of work to be anything else. I have enough trouble with laundry and keeping a fresh roll of toilet paper going. I have a beard because I realized eventually that with how rarely I remembered to shave I might as well just give in to follicular entropy. Maintaining a different gender presentation is way out of my league.<br />
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And, I mean, I'm not stupid enough to treat this as some sort of awful cross to bear. I recognize that I have it wildly easier than I would if I were a woman. The fantastic scene in Queer as Folk where Nathan accuses his best friend of being "part of the fascist heterosexual orthodoxy," and she replies "I'm black. And I'm a girl. Try that for a week"? Yeah. I get it. Being a man who thinks girls are cooler than boys is really, supremely, utterly not that hard.<br />
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The term, as coined by people like Joss Whedon, is apparently "male lesbian," but there too I find myself unsatisfied. I mean, surely masculinity has already done enough damage co-opting lesbianism as a fetish designed for the male gaze. We don't need to actually co-opt the entire concept too, do we? A male lesbian is just a straight man. I mean, I'm never going to be one to knock Joss Whedon on feminist grounds. But...<br />
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The problem with the term is that it needs paragraphs of explication and disclaimer to work. But thankfully, we've got Greg Rucka, who has done so in a <a href="http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/04/05/greg-rucka-wondercon-panel-dc/">fantastic interview</a>. (Incidentally, Greg Rucka? Amazing writer, and one of the best writers of female characters in action/adventure type genres working. If you have not read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401226922/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=taer-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1401226922">Batwoman: Elegy</a> then get thee to Amazon, preferably through that handy Amazon Associates link, and buy it. I promise you that you will not regret it.) So let's get Block Quoty.<br />
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<blockquote>It's two-fold. I've said this before and people don't actually take me seriously when I say it – there's that joke about being a male lesbian, but I female-identify, and I always have since I was very young. I am not transgendered; I'm not looking for gender reassignment. I clearly have more testosterone flowing through me than most men need, and you can tell just by looking at me. I'm comfortable with my maleness, but for whatever reason the way I'm wired, I have always female-identified.</blockquote><div>And I'm loathe to take the male lesbian route specifically because I'm loathe to make this some matter of pride. But at the end of the day, I'm more socially comfortable in a room full of women than I'll ever be in a role full of guys. And that's been true since I fired up Gauntlet on a Commodore 64 years and years ago.</div><div><br />
</div><div>My preferred phrasing is that I have a feminism fetish. I find feminism a major turn-on. And I take pains to make a real investment in that. Which is touchy in spots, as that involves recognizing the importance of spaces I am not a part of. It involves accepting that the male privilege I don't particularly want in the first place still means I have to be excluded sometimes to create female spaces. It involves an investment in the fact that women have stories and narratives, and an investment in learning to listen to them. The really good bits of the Rucka interview aren't the bits I quoted. They're the five paragraphs that follow about him learning to translate that into writing female characters, and about the life experiences he'll never have that he had to learn to write anyway. </div><div><br />
</div><div>But I love those stories. They're moving and funny and insightful in a way that no story about male identity I have ever seen is. It's the old "Ginger Roberts did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in heels" observation. Give me a female protagonist over a male one any day of the week, because the female protagonist starts off with a dozen more problems with being a hero than a male one does, and is immediately more interesting for it. It's why Wonder Woman is by miles my favorite superhero. Because find me an iconic male superhero with that many ambiguities and contradictions that is still instantly recognizable and iconic the moment she steps into frame. There isn't one. I see the complaints about the upcoming Wonder Woman TV series and the fact that Wonder Woman has body image issues, a ridiculous costume invented for PR purposes, and sometimes pigs out eating ice cream in front of the television, and I don't get it. Of course Wonder Woman does those things, and of course they sit in contrast to her strong and powerful female character, because <i>that's what's interesting about her</i>. The fact that she doesn't just get to put her hands on her hips and be Superman. The fact that even though she's the third best-known superhero in the DC stable, she hits the sales glass ceiling and never gets the promotion she deserves. (And incidentally, as soon as this or <a href="http://tardiseruditorum.blogspot.com/">TARDIS Eruditorum</a> wraps up, I am so starting a Wonder Woman blog.)</div><div><br />
</div><div>And over time, I learned what may be the key part about always picking the girl in video games. The girl isn't an identity. Compare the irritating dilemma about which vision of masculinity to pick to the even worse dilemma faced by a female gamer who wants to see a character who looks like her on the screen. We get to pick the strong guy or the smart guy or the gay guy. They get to pick the girl - the one size fits all identity for 50% of the world. An identity with a chain mail bikini.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Border House has a <a href="http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=2027">fantastic send-up</a> of this problem they did for April Fool's, switching real explanations for why games don't have female characters over to why they don't have male characters. And it's true. Both because female gamers deserve to have a choice if they (as apparently most gamers do) choose to play a representation of themselves in games, but more importantly, because male gamers need to see women as more than the third tickybox on the character creation screen. </div><div><br />
</div><div><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ppeojCFQ12s/TZubKw0sXhI/AAAAAAAAAc0/nWVk48PEPDQ/s1600/gauntlet2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ppeojCFQ12s/TZubKw0sXhI/AAAAAAAAAc0/nWVk48PEPDQ/s1600/gauntlet2.png" /></a>Growing up, I knew that women's stores were better than men's stories, and that most men's stories got better if they were women's stories. I deserved better though. They deserved better. Nobody should ever have to take until high school and college and a lot of smart and patient female friends to get that there's no such thing as the female perspective, and that if you're going to append the definite article to a gendered approach, the male gaze is a far saner phrase. I should never have been allowed to play the girl, as if that's a defined identity in and of itself. (And the fact that in Gauntlet II I could be a Valkyrie of four different colors doesn't count. Everybody knows that Valkyrie is blue. Red Valkyrie is just Valkyrie dressed as Warrior. Although Blue Warrior is, by extension, satisfying.) That, more than anything, was male privilege.</div><div><br />
</div><div>But lacking that option, I played the girl. Not for the chainmail bikini, or for the defense, or for anything other than the simple fact that the Other was preferable. And for all its flaws, Gauntlet was the first and defining game where I got to do this. My initial interest in Norse mythology wasn't based on Thor or Loki or anyone I knew from Marvel Comics. It was based on the fact that it was where Valkyrie came from. The imcomparable, beautiful, amazing Valkyrie, who introduced me to the Other, and to the idea that the best stories might not be my own.</div><div><br />
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In the end, it comes down to this. Girls <i>never</i> shoot the food.Elizabeth Sandiferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18337209180846868581noreply@blogger.com6