The Persistence of Mercury (Harlem Globetrotters, Hatris)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Widening (Gyruss)

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.

So let's take my own advice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 more than that!

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 - Braid - 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.

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.

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.

Indentured Servants In Disguise (Gyromite)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

(There is admittedly a slight window for helpful sidekick robots, but let's face it, that's basically just Rush.)

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.

Not that slave labor dynamics are terribly unusual in video games - it's why I was able to mine Gradius for comedy. But generally it's the player who is forced to work for free. 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.

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.

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.

Welcome to Warp Zone (Gun Nac, Gun Smoke)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 embodiment of all that is evil it was by a French Marxist who (seemingly consensually) murdered his wife. Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," which everyone really should just read.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some day that sort of progress might include liking Gun Smoke.

Behaving Idiosyncratically (Guerilla War, Gumshoe)

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 wildly 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 Margaret Killjoy 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.)

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can we make them?

Climbing the Starting Blocks (Gremlins II: The New Batch and Guardian Legend)

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.)

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:

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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.

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:

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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.

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:

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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.

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.

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.

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 Gradius style shooter - proved a fairly insurmountable barrier. Half an hour of trying and I still couldn't quite clear the boss.

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.

The question is what degree of effort ought be spent trying to overcome inertia.

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."

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?

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 Super Meat Boy. 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.)

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.

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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.

I mean, let's use a real example. I just pulled up Less Wrong, and picked not quite at random the following article: "Suffering as attention-allocational conflict." 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 about.

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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.

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.)

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 it's not even fucking making us happy. 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.

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 drawing a map, 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.

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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?

Never mind Ben Stein's bullshit about the have-nots hating the haves. I'm perfectly willing to be the haves 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?

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?

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I made it to the next space shooter bit, but got eaten by a giant fish.

But then I hit continue.

Shiny Happy People (The Great Waldo Search, Where's Waldo?)

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. 


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. 

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?

No?

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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, Don't Copy That Floppy.

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.

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.

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 doing something with the book for most of that time. But Where's Waldo falls afoul of this. It just teaches us, once again, that fun is about earning it.

Simply put, this is a lesson we must unlearn.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

For most of us, I suspect, it would be downright... revolutionary.