Longform Crit Comp 17/1

there is a history of American temperance literature that Carousel slots into nicely. Temperance literature, very briefly, aimed to convert the drunkard from his destructive ways and onto a path of righteousness and bourgeois productivity. In many cases this was through tales of the (female) children of these intemperate men taking the brunt of their violence and, through the power of their innocent acceptance in the face of this onslaught, their weathering of the storm, allowing these men the chance of redemption. It would seem that a broken and powerless man is in need of an unflinching and unarguing object for his patriarchal control in order to be rebuilt as a man of action. The drunk is drunk because he has been denied, or has forsaken, the mantle of authority that a man must wear: alcohol is a way to avoid responsibility and for the family patriarch the first responsibility is ownership of the women (and the as-yet ungendered boys) of his household./.../
When, in Bioshock: Infinite, then broken drunk Booker DeWitt batters down the doors of a castle that he himself built in another life to rescue his own daughter, trapped there in an asexual stasis it is not the chaos of imagery and symbolism that it at first seems, but instead a direct descendent of the form of rehabilitation pioneered by temperance literature.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly then the piece of Infinite fan media that most makes sense to me is Zone’s Biocock: Intimate, which collapses the erotic tension inherent in the game and as Maddy Myers says ‘comes … a lot closer to offering me the version of Elizabeth that I wanted to see than BioShock did,’ one who ‘speaks, moans and calls the sexual shots.’
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In Zone’s game, the protagonist, this time a disembodied cock rather than a disembodied gun, as if there is a real difference, is still Booker, making explicit the incestuous undertones of the source game while neither remarking on them or judging them.
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Ken Levine, Bioshock’s lead creator, keeps telling people to stop sexualising Elizabeth because he views her as a daughter. But I cannot for the life of me imagine why he thought a young woman would neither develop or be the subject of a sexual gaze, especially when, as I keep saying, the story that is told in Infinite is the story of her sexual awakening and her emergence from the cloying constraints of a father who wants to own her and use her as a replacement for his wife, with all of the sexual labour that that implies.
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It is a fairly common mechanism of patriarchy that violence against women is framed as being bad, by and for the understanding of men, on the premise that ‘you wouldn’t want this to happen to your daughter,’ that a victim is ‘somebody’s daughter.’ Fundamentally what this says is that men can apparently only view women as an object in relation to a man, not as a person in their own right. The non-daughter is an acceptable site for your sexual fantasies because she is not owned and spoken for. Female sexual awakening is therefore posited as a process by which a man separates the bond between father and daughter, destroying the tower and building a new one to encase her and protect her from the sexual fantasies of other men.
/.../
as an industry and a society we will continue to seek our redemption in the arms of those we have wronged, whose job it is, like the little sisters of the original Bioshock, to be used to fuel our monstrous rages and to accept our caresses and desires when we break down and wish for forgiveness. We will continue to expect these women to save us with their love.
[I love how pieces like these can put something in a larger context and enrich my understanding of something which didn't make as much sense before. It's interesting how I even come to appreciate Bioshock Infinite more in some twisted way, even if it's flawed in its execution and in using this idea of temperance without my having seen them putting it in brackets or providing self-reflexivity.]



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we see Fragile Dreams trying to reconcile modern Japanese life with traditional Japanese thought. However, looking at the game on a character level complicates the aesthetic. These ways of seeing the world are not natural, as Seto (the game’s protagonist) must spend the entire game learning to appreciate the beauty that arises from a fleeting reality.
/.../
For Japanese aesthetes, the most beautiful arts would blend into the greater world around them. Anything that announced its presence was considered simple, boisterous, and to be avoided.
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in terms of mono no aware, the best way to bring out something’s beauty is to remind us of its inevitable change or passing.
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as long as technology does not supplant the feeling of change and being in nature, it’s capable of functioning within Japanese aesthetic theory.
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Over the course of the game, Seto finds various broken items amid the wreckage. When he takes those items to a bonfire, he finds out what they are, and hears a short story regarding the item’s last owner. There’s a consistent message running through these stories: one of unfulfilled desire. The protagonists of these stories regret making choices they can never fix, or they feel scared after having something valuable taken from them. They realize that their lives are short, and Seto sees that their worries outlasted them.
/.../
The game relays most of these narratives through some object the owner confided in. They intended to relieve their pain at least a little bit, but all we see is their emotional pain; we rarely see any kind of resolution. Therefore, the objects fail to serve their intended purpose of consoling their owners. The cell phone’s story displays this quite poignantly: while her intent is for the world to remember her, the tragic irony of her situation is that she leaves us nothing by which we can identify her. We don’t know her name or any details about her life, and it’s unclear if Seto can even access those details. All her story illustrates is how insufficient her possessions are for satisfying her wants, even if she can never know that.

§

If Fragile Dreams uses its environments to celebrate Japanese aesthetics, then it uses Seto, the protagonist, to complicate them.
/.../
he’s so pre-occupied on his loss that he’s unable to draw a connection between the impermanence of life and its being valued in the first place. Any mentions of impermanence at this point in the story reveal Seto’s negative thoughts on the matter. For example, he opens the game with the words “At the end of a summer that was all too short” (tri-Crescendo). On one level, these words indicate his wishes that the summer had lasted longer. Yet on another, they connote loss. This is a consistent theme throughout Seto’s opening narration, implying that he can only perceive change and passing on painful terms. We might also draw connections between the youthful connotations of summer, Seto’s adolescence, and the death of his caretaker.
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if we interpret the old man’s death as an opportunity for Seto to appreciate life’s transience, then we must also interpret the possibility of survivors as an opportunity for Seto to deny that very same transience.
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Seto’s denial is best illustrated through his interactions with Ren, a silver-haired girl who appears to Seto very early in the narrative. She runs from him the second the two meet, and he only gets brief glimpses of her throughout the story. He follows her by the drawings she leaves in her wake, and when the two finally cross paths, it’s only for a short period of time. While the story uses these facts to code her character with impermanence and uncertainty, this isn’t the meaning that Seto reads from her. Upon first meeting her, he remarks, “On my journey through the world, all the people I thought I saw slipped away like they were just a mirage. But that girl… her cheek was warm to the touch” (tri-Crescendo). So for him, Ren represents life and stability. She is the anchor against which he can verify his own experiences as real. Yet the irony is that is in worrying about whether his experiences are real, he fails to appreciate them for what they are.
/.../
the time he spends with other people shows him how it’s possible to appreciate things for their temporary nature. The first person to show him this is PF, a robotic assistant that Seto attaches to his back. The two grow close to each other as they explore the underground mall in search of Ren. However, their journey together is very brief: at the end of the day, PF’s battery drains, effectively ending her life.
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Where the old man struggled to share his most intimate with regrets with Seto after knowing him for fifteen years, PF has no problems telling him about how much she loved talking with him, despite only knowing him for a day.
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The two themes that emerge from Seto’s time with PF — death and its relation to mono no aware — carry throughout his encounters with other people. Chiyo demonstrates this the best by bringing the two into focus for him. When the two characters meet, Seto initially sees her as the ghost of a bratty little girl who demands that he does the impossible. But as he continues to fulfill her requests, he eventually learns the reality of the situation: she is an old woman on her death bed. Chiyo leaves Seto with these final remarks: "The day will come when your journey will end as well. Your greatest adventure will be over and you will make your way home. However, your journey will not be complete. The days will still go on for you. One after another they will pass, until you’ve had enough of the monotony. No new discoveries will await you. You’ll watch the sun rise and set. That’s all your days will have to offer. That’s the moment when you’ll realize the truth. The sunbeams, the wind rolling over the tall grass, the idle chit-chat with friends…These were the gems of your life. Then your heart will be carried off by the gentle, caressing breeze and it will sparkle like a jewel, fade, and grow cold."
/.../
her own life suggests that mono no aware could be a psychological state of being rather than something inherent in life’s experiences. She was able to view the same natural phenomenon (sunrise/sunset) at least twice in her life but have greatly divergent reactions to them at different times. In her youth, she viewed the sun’s movement as a dull monotony. It is only on her deathbed that she can finally appreciate it as a liberating event. That realization didn’t come to her in a moment; she had to cultivate it over an entire lifetime of thought on the matter. In relaying her message to Seto, Chiyo helps him through the process of appreciating life’s transitory nature, and hopes to shorten the time necessary to learn it.



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Silent Hill 2’s architecture, along with its iconic blend of fog and darkness, is its main antagonist.
/.../
Oddly enough, this unnerving dysfunction stems from the game’s sense of order. It has an obsession with the well-ordered spaces of institutions, taking the player from an apartment block, to a hospital, to a prison, and finally a hotel. The symmetrical ground plans for these locations, found on the game’s various maps, seems to have been pulled wholesale from life, rather than created for use in a videogame. In order to become functional spaces in a game where exploration is key, these maps have then been hacked into, with entrances blocked off and walls smashed through. The divisions, functions and even internal logic of the game’s architecture is subverted, room by room. The game constantly forces the player to turn back on herself at a dead end, to check again and again the map, and try to connect its straight and true lines with the decaying masonry around them.
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The descents of Silent Hill 2 are many. It is no coincidence that the game’s protagonist, James Sunderland, begins his journey at a rest stop high above the town, and must descend into it. This marks a preoccupation with downward gestures that recurs throughout the game, from elevator rides, to climbing into your own grave.
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In the final third of Silent Hill 2 the player arrives at the top of a staircase. Its not the first staircase in the game, or even the last, but it is the beginning of something. Projecting down into darkness, it marks the start of the game’s most exhausting descent.
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This is where Silent Hill 2’s architecture reveals itself as a psychological construct. Up above, in the town, ordered spaces stand in a struggle with the onset of decay, but here, as you tread ever deeper, the subconscious takes over.



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the beauty of P.T. is not in its basic looping structure, but they way in which it plays and experiments within that structure.
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In semantic terms, the game’s corner is analogous to the classic ghost-story phrase “and then.” It is the architectural equivalent of the shock reveal, articulated through a 90-degree turn. It’s an ancient story-telling trick, holding information back until the last possible second, but P.T.’s twist on it is to do so without speaking a word, performing its repeated reveals through the clever manipulation of space. Sometimes these reveals are red-herrings, showing you the corridor you expect to see, but in the world of P.T. even this is a cause for concern—if the corridor hasn’t changed, then something else has. It’s worth nothing that almost everything that happens, from bloody fridges to generic horror graffiti, happens on the other side of that corner. After every repetition the first task is clear—walk. This is the way the storyteller has you in her grip. “She entered the corridor,” P.T.’s storyteller says, “walking cautiously, unsure of what might be waiting for her. As she reached the familiar corner she paused … and then …”
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The clock, the phone and the radio, all three sources of information, are carefully spread, each given its own alcove. The front door is the only door that never opens, an escape to an outside world hinted at but never allowed. At the end of the corridor lies a short set of steps, meaning that for each loop you must descend a little further down. This descent is carefully offset by the balcony that hides in the darkness above the entryway, imbuing in the player the distinct feeling of being watched. These precise architectural features, twisted through an elegant play of light and shadow, are laid out with precise intelligence.
/.../
Agency is non-existent—instead, choreography reigns supreme. P.T.’s scares may follow well-worn horror iconography, but they don’t require it to function. Instead they rely on the corner and the corridor, the room and doorway, the bright and the dark. This—the idea that horror exists as little more than a series of spatial arrangements, presences and absences—is truly P.T.’s greatest trick.



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Eventually, every genre, every media, has its Ulysses. I don’t know if Kentucky Route Zero is Ulysses. It’s certainly allusive: a structurally complex, confusing, the brilliant and beautiful episodic point and click game by Cardboard Computer in which a host of characters embark on a seemingly meaningless and mythical journey through the finance and poverty ravaged landscapes of rural Kentucky. Regardless, writing about KRZ is not “easy”. Partly because of its episodic nature, and partly — I think — because of its dense and almost Beckettian allusiveness, its semantic density, KRZ seems to escape ready comprehension and understanding. Its mechanics (the word we often descend on to describe a technical process) are both simple (literally, “point and click”) and alarmingly diffuse (navigating, by symbols, the Zero itself). Meanwhile, its ‘story’ – the fabula itself – is slippery, and the formal framework around which it is arranged is complex. It’s perhaps the hardest ‘text’ – not simply ‘game’, but text, product, artefact (see? Even finding the right category word is tough) – that I’ve ever tried to write about.
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Maybe we’re not properly equipped to write long-form about video games — especially those games which excel in their own obscurity and strangeness — and are not used to it, or are standing in the primordial sludge of it.
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For KRZ, and games like it, it might be best to think with the rhizome in mind. You build your theory as you go.



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[SOMA]
These days, when we talk about being human, we’re more preoccupied with defining humanity in opposition to machines and advanced AIs. We want to reassure ourselves that we have something more than an uncanny android who looks like us, acts like us, speaks like us, and is better than us at almost everything. It’s as if we know our feeling of superiority is dwindling. Taking the Aristotelian definition to its extremes, perhaps we could say that modern-day machines, as purely rational creations, are even more human than us.
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In trying to preserve the core of what it means to be human, it’s easy to forget that this core immediately changed when coming into contact precisely with what we’re defining humanity against. The very existence of machines has already changed our concept of what it means to be human.
/.../attachment to the body as an imprescindible part of one’s identity, both in a positive and in a negative way, is one manifestation of that excess that is unique to the human. We also have have Catherine, the exception who accompanies the player for the best part of the game but who lives in a chip attached to Simon’s Omnitool. I don’t think the game explicitly says why she doesn’t go mad like everyone else who suffered a similar fate, but I believe the answer may be found in her strong sense of purpose. /.../
Catherine is the most liminal figure in this world in which every barrier is being broken. A human mind in purely mechanical hardware, she is driven by a very specific purpose, and, like a machine, she evaluates the world purely in terms of utility towards that purpose. But what she wants to achieve is precisely the recovery of a space in which to be human. As such, she is driven by a concept of what human life means as opposed to the mere survival of biological functions, a concept that the WAU never understood.
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The machine ends when there is no clear objective left to achieve. The human, as we have seen, begins with the excess: the reality of being left behind when the objective has been achieved and disappears. It’s the reality of being alive when there is nothing left to do, a reality in which the body remains in its irreducible, useless materiality.



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Brendan Vance on form, content, ideology and appropriation in modern media - a series in three parts

For a Twiney interactive context of the three texts in question, check out Brendans website dedicated to the three texts.

1.

Any designed work can be decomposed into two different kinds of features: Intrinsic features and extrinsic features. An intrinsic feature is something we judge to be a non-reducible atom of actual value that the audience wants and the work provides—that is, the work’s purpose—while an extrinsic feature is anything that exists solely to realize that purpose, providing no actual value in itself.
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The intrinsic features of Art media like literature or film, unlike those of hammers and map APIs, are not easily reducible into language. Whereas to design a hammer involves finding ways of realizing features whose value is readily apparent, to make Art is to search for value lying beyond the edges of our understanding: To capture something we know is important to us even though we cannot quite say why.
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Videogames inherit a little from Art but mostly from product design, which has been kind of a problem for us. As an industry we put faith in the idea that there is intrinsic value in the games we develop, although we don’t think very expansively about what that could be; instead we abstract it, using ugly words like “content” as placeholders for value without ever proving that it truly exists. We then set about designing incredible machines that shuttle players towards these placeholders with extremely high efficiency, which as designers is really what we’re good at. We make the interface as usable as we can because players need it in order to learn the rules. We teach the rules very carefully because players need them in order to grok the dynamics. We shape our dynamics strategically because enacting them is what will stimulate players to feel the aesthetics. Somewhere at the core of all this, we suppose, lives the “content” players are attempting to access: That which we have abstracted away so that we could hurry towards doing safe, understandable product design rather than risky, unfathomable Art.
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Problem Attic is an unfashionable game. It does not aspire to resemble that which currently exists but with a cool twist, nor to stuff all its value into the margins of a popular genre format.  It is authored, rather than just designed; its intrinsic features take the form of complex and multifaceted statements that it realizes at all levels of the modern videogame, from core systems all the way up to the user interface. It is messy and, therefore, alive.
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Everything we see is built from colourful, patterned tiles. Although there are perhaps twenty or thirty different kinds, most are not mechanically distinct from one another; all space is partitioned into two contiguous parts, ‘wall’ versus ‘not-wall’, with each patterned tile corresponding to one of the two. Our first instinct is to label this a poor design choice because its affordances are unclear. (Why should the player have to learn through physical experience which tiles can be traversed and which cannot when it could be made visually obvious?) This, however, would be a mistake. Conventional thinking conditions us to believe clear affordances are unequivocally good because we view videogame design as an exercise in catapulting people towards the mythical content unicorn lying beneath all of our systems; this belief becomes invalid, however, when unclear affordances better support some other intrinsic purpose lying elsewhere in the structure of the work, and that is the case here. The environment of Problem Attic models the mind of the protagonist, and the walls represent the tangled mess of every habit and belief he has ever internalized. Each person possesses such walls; they are the reason why we act against our own best interests, making the same mistakes over and over again.
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Here is another unfashionable choice. Punishing us for touching the Cross Guys even though that is exactly what we must do to proceed reeks of poor affordances; it seems to place the design at cross purposes, obfuscating the rules of the system and causing us to form an inaccurate cognitive model of how the game works. Again, however, Attic demonstrates that clear affordances are not unequivocally good. This game is about human beings, who result not from mythical content unicorns but from a roiling maelstrom of culture and fraying DNA. The Cross Guys are characters, not mechanics, and the game characterizes them as simple-minded horndogs who give no consideration to the protagonist’s goals and, in fact, seek solely to gratify themselves at his expense. In their role as the protagonist’s jailers they must usually be avoided; in their role as the wielders of power, however, it is occasionally necessary to exploit them even when this does us harm. (The mechanics deceive, in other words, because they model deceptive power structures.) That the world forces some among us to use the ugliest of personal traits to their advantage would, in any other context, be considered a thoughtful bit of hard-won wisdom that speaks to the human condition. In videogames we are, for many discomforting reasons, unaccustomed to receiving such wisdom.
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We may not confront the Cross directly; it cannot be destroyed or pacified. We must instead discover a circuitous route through a maze of nearly-invisible wall tiles, the room’s muddy platforming permitting us to feel the protagonist’s paralysing fear. Interestingly, pressing the magical ‘R’ key here does not reset the stage as it normally would, but instead fades the world to black before casting us out to the attic’s entry point. This particular stage, I hereby surmise, is not a place for trial and error, to learn or to grow; it is more like a wound that won’t heal, a nightmare to which the protagonist returns nightly.
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Problem Attic changed the way I think about videogames. I am now convinced that the virtues of clarity and craft, to which I had subscribed absolutely as a matter of course, impose significant limitations on our expressive potential that can be difficult to see until you play something like this.



2.

DOET [Design of Everyday Things] judges the user’s needs most important, and her perspective most valuable. It is about the apotheosis of the user; it makes her into God, and with holy might it strikes the fear of Her into objects and those who make them.
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DOET, alongside all the important research around it, culminated in something called User Centered Design, a philosophy in which “user error” does not exist and programmers are sad.
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This school teaches that if it’s not fun (or at the very least quick and painless) to be taught about some feature, we shouldn’t include it; that clarity is better than complexity; that elegance is better than messiness; that one button is better than two. It teaches that the purpose of a game is to explain itself to you, and that somewhere in the act of explaining lies that game’s intrinsic value. We have thereby converted the scariest, most contentious question of all (what should this thing be?) from an artistic decision into a design decision.
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Our belief in clarity and elegance, though it has yielded spectacular results, is not the very best way to make videogames; it may not even be a particularly good way. We suffer from the bar we’ve set for ourselves and the burdens we place upon designers. We are wrongly convinced, even in the critical community, that works like Problem Attic are unworthy of attention solely because they prioritize different features and challenge players in a way we deem to be unfashionable.
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I plan on thinking much harder about how I evaluate potential game features. “Because then the user doesn’t have to think” or “but how do we teach that?” should not be trump cards in every single argument about whether to include stuff. It’s easy to turn everything into a neat little design decision, but making a few more artistic ones would be better in the long term for users and for my sanity



3.


I develop videogames for a living, but I spent last year really hating videogames. I questioned how it was I could consume 60 hours of ‘content’ for Assassin’s Creed 3 yet feel utterly unsatisfied by my act of consumption. I questioned what it was I had consumed, other than my own time. I questioned what it was I sought from the game in the first place. I questioned the nature of the ‘content’ it claimed to offer me; privately I began to suspect it might not even exist.
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I awoke from my yearlong stupor the night I encountered a game called Problem Attic by a person named Liz Ryerson.
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This is a story about how Steam, Twitter and the App Store came to exist. It’s about how these services present themselves as our friends while behaving as our enemies. It’s about how they stole the internet from us, creating a place where everything is ‘free’ but liberty remains unavailable. Before I can reclaim my lost appendages we must first reclaim something more fundamental: Our language, the medium through which we think. Consider the power inherent in the words ‘form’ and ‘content’. ‘Form’ describes what the things we make are; thus they who define form decide what things can be. ‘Content’ is more powerful still because it defines what we want; they who define content decide what is and is not valuable. Like all powerful words, ‘form’ and ‘content’ have a political history.
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To Hegel what we want from our media is not merely a convenient way to waste 60 hours of our lives: What we want is access to universal truths.
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When we consider Art in Hegelian terms its purpose is not mysterious or difficult to grasp. For him Art is simply one of three different kinds of form (the other two being philosophy and religion) through which humans access the same content: Geist, the omnipresent mind and spirit of living ideas.
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Hegel once declared, famously and obliquely, that ‘art is dead’. Scholars do not agree on precisely what he meant by this, but my preferred interpretation suggests the art we fully understand is, by definition, already in the past. Art of the present must be alien, unfathomable and difficult to identify because it is of young mind/spirit. It is the bleeding edge of truth, reaching beyond what is achievable through discursive means to seize something new and untamed. Spelunky has a spirit I can feel as I play it. I need not feel anxious about whether its procedurally-generated elements (its Rogue-like parts) permit some kind of ‘meaningful artistic statement’. Rather, it is through enacting and observing the movement of these elements that its spirit, the Spelunkengeist, shall gradually come to life.
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I believe our intrepid capitalists of yesteryear used newspapers, and other forms of mass publication, to introduce a new politics of form and content to the world. Where Hegel used these terms to distinguish ‘the work itself’ (form) from ‘the ideas behind it’ (content), the newspaper uses them to distinguish ‘the machine that aggregates/distributes’ from ‘the writing that fuels this machine’. What once was called ‘form’ is now ‘content’, and what Hegel would call content can no longer be described; it has fallen so far into obscurity that I must resurrect a 19th century German term just to communicate it in English.
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The concept of ‘replay value’, so critical to today’s hottest newspaper-likes, stems directly from this formula: Since we evaluate ‘content’ quantitatively it follows that a publication or videogame could increase the value of its ‘content’ either by improving yield or reducing the cost of production. We have hereby come to prefer our ‘content’ the same way we prefer our pig feed: Smooth tasting, from an Ikea-branded trough. Think about how a 19th century philosopher like Hegel might regard the concept of ‘replay value’. Would he commiserate with us about how the mind/spirit of romanticism just doesn’t make for large enough murals? Or would we have to pull out a bunch of obscure 21st century English words just to explain to him what the hell we were talking about? It’s important to realize that ‘replay value’ is not some timeless virtue sought by all media for all of history. It is a political viewpoint wrapped in a sales pitch perpetuated by people trying to improve the market position of their mass-produced entertainment products. By appropriating the word ‘content’, which denotes what we want, our intrepid capitalist marketers have steered us away from the conceptual, spiritual and artistic content Hegel envisions. All we want now is more stuff for a lower price.
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As a multicast medium the internet is not a seller’s market; it is, in fact, the greatest buyer’s market of all time. The writer’s predicament no longer involves convincing some corporation to make copies of her words; that part is practically free. Her predicament now involves capturing the attention of an audience with virtually limitless options available to it, then somehow converting this hard-won attention into half of a living wage (presumably through a pagan ritual like crowdfunding).
/.../
our intrepid capitalists sought to appropriate the concept of freeness while appending a commercial twist: They planned for web services to become free as in gratis, turning “do it yourself” into “here, let me publish that for you in exchange for the right to profit from it and oh, by the way, have a look at this Chevy ad”. In the span of three or four years everything about the internet changed: The do-it-yourself, Geocities-like, weird internet of the mid ’90s became the professional, social networked, boring internet we have today. We retroactively labelled this movement ‘Web 2.0’, a term describing the set of technologies and design/business axioms that on the surface intend to anoint the user as a free (libre) contributor rather than powerless consumer while on the underside exploiting her contributions as freely given (gratis) ‘content’ to be sold as a commodity. The idea was to craft a sales pitch around the prospect of creating Hegelian content, content as libre, while simultaneously converting readers’ contributions into ‘content’ as gratis to fill the paper’s pages. They no longer intended to act as gatekeepers between producer and consumer; all consumers would now become producers, multicasting ‘content’ back and forth to one another through the ‘form’ of the all-in-one medium/product/town hall/marketplace the newspaper would soon become.
/.../
Where the newspaper transfixed the reader by telling her what happened recently the web service would tell her what’s happening right now. Where the newspaper monetized its audience through crude instruments like subscriptions and broadly-focused mass advertising the web service would seek to monetize everything: The user’s personal relationships, her attention, her demographic data, her politics, her labour, her secrets, her entire life. Our beleaguered dreamers would finally get their wish. The user would no longer be a powerless consumer. Instead she would become something much worse. She’d become ‘content’ itself, a person qua commodity whose only real power lies in her potential to be consumed. She would be a human AA battery, in other words, digested one limb at a time by the hundreds of giant software systems now descending upon her.
/.../
Gone is the HTML/CSS with which we contended in the MySpace era; gone is the bloated wall of features we encounter every time we open Facebook. Just like a videogame the Tweet™ is easy to learn, difficult to master and punctual with its feedback. (Twitter has excellent game feel.)
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When we encounter a situation like Sarkeesian’s, something outside the parameters of the sales pitch, our typical response is to blame it on some hostile other (‘the trolls’) or some fundamental defect in the internet. Though we may chide Twitter for failing to develop effective anti-harassment policies we reason the blame must lie ultimately with us users; after all, the sales pitch convinces us that Twitter makes us free as in libre, and ‘a few (hundred thousand) bad apples’ may therefore choose freely to do harm. We neglect to consider the possibility that Twitter did not fail at anything; that preventing harassment has never been Twitter’s goal because the service has far more to gain from permitting this sort of bullying than it does from preventing it (new and more interesting ‘content’, increasing entrenchment in its role as town square, more investment from users, etc…). As far as Twitter is concerned the ideal anti-harassment policy is just effective enough to prevent Sarkeesian from leaving while simultaneously permitting thousands of people to enjoy harassing her every day. In this way Twitter doesn’t need to engage directly in the Charles Foster Kane-style yellow journalism of its predecessors; it reaps the same rewards (while incurring very few of the risks) by allowing users to do so on its behalf. So long as we continue holding Twitter solely to the standard of its sales pitch the service remains free (as in libre) to preside as a ‘neutral third party’ over the very culture wars it facilitates, dropping a Promoted Tweet™ or two into our timelines between all the vicious bile.
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We ought to regard the Tweet™ suspiciously, as a glorified status update tuned more towards Twitter’s data mining business than to our ostensibly free expression. We ought to insist Twitter shape itself around our work rather than shaping our work eagerly into Twitter’s business model (and thanking it for the privilege). We ought at least to demand Twitter use some of its extraordinarily lucrative data mining expertise to fight the harassment of our peers rather than tacitly affording it. Instead we fixate on the libre hand dangling a new social appendage in front of us while the gratis hand converts all our ‘freely given’ energy into its own money and power.
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The ‘form’ of Twitter, like that of the newspaper, demands a constant stream of new things to bury all the old ones. It wants there to be cases in which we miss things so we’ll adopt the underlying assumption that work should shoot past us like a copy of The New York Times rather than stand in permanence like the Bible, awaiting our approach. The bell curve we see is not the inevitable product of posting work on the internet; it’s the product of routing our work through a host of different web services designed to consume the new and then discard it. We chide Twitter for how ineffectual its search functions are, how challenging it is to obtain any legible historical record of our contributions to the free dialog its sales pitch claims is taking place. We ignore the implicit acknowledgement that Twitter does not want us to remember this history; that in fact, Twitter wants us to forget. It wants us to depend on new ‘content’ rather than dwelling in the old. It wants us to have a presence to maintain rather than construct. It wants us to forget the name of the author we just read but remember to Tweet™ it at all our friends no more than two or three times. It wants to be a windswept desert made from a billion atoms of homogeneous and disassociated ‘content’, ‘freeing’ us to build castles in the sand. The libre hand promises us an oasis while the gratis hand c converts the whole internet into a desert.
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As developers our game can be good or bad; we can self-promote or be totally obscure; we can spend a year in development or three days. All these variables are completely non-predictive. Nobody knows how success on the App Store actually works and no one ever has; hiring some ex-Apple consultant to help us would be about as effective as ritualistically slaughtering a goat. The App Store is a madhouse in which success is entirely arbitrary. Usually when we find ourselves participating in an arbitrary selection process granting invariably low odds of success we don’t call that ‘egalitarian’; we call it buying a lottery ticket. Every game theorist knows lottery tickets are a waste of our time and money. The mistake we make when dealing with the App Store is, once again, watching only the libre hand as it offers us the chance of a generous reward for our hard work; we ignore the gratis hand tossing our name into a hat. This is why, looking upon the madhouse, our response is to assume there is some defect in the service, perhaps poor ‘discoverability’ or a lack of curation. We neglect to realize that from Apple’s perspective these are not defects. Apple presides, as a ‘neutral third party’ of course, over a lottery that generates ~30% royalties regardless of who wins. They have no reason to ‘curate’ or to make our apps ‘discoverable’. Their goal is to do just enough to keep players and developers imprisoned in the ‘ecosystem’, locking everyone inside a horrific Thunderdome of their creation (oops, I mean a ‘walled garden’) while charging admission for the privilege. When we observe today’s class of small, broke, powerless game studios subsisting from tiny mobile project to tiny mobile project, we typically attribute their existence to an apathetic audience and/or soulless business executives. We neglect to notice how convenient our ‘neutral third parties’ might find it that these developers are incapable of renegotiating the royalties they pay or, say, founding a new ‘ecosystem’ of their own. Today we see Valve travelling in the same direction as Apple, and we wonder whether Gabe Newell can ‘fix’ the madhouse. If you’re Gabe Newell the madhouse is not broken.
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Consider, most damningly of all, the ways in which the web service makes our work interchangeable. We approach Twitter, Steam and the App Store with the newspaper-like mentality that wider distribution is always better. We neglect to realize the internet is a buyer’s market: Maximum distribution means maximum competition between ‘content creators’ alongside minimum risk for the marketplace itself. Not only does this make it difficult for developers to carve out an audience; it also creates tremendous downward pressure on the value of our work. Anyone intending to charge money for their videogame faces an army of competitors willing to give theirs away for less, or for free. The audience sees little difference between one piece of work or another; it wants what the medium tells it to want, so what it wants is ‘content’.
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We do indeed face an existential threat. Our wallets, however, are the only place we shouldn’t look. We fail to realize the closer we get to ‘free’ the higher the hidden cost, and the more our intrepid usurpers profit from the ruin of everything around them.
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the change I want must resemble the form of Attic itself: A tiny fire in a mound of corporate detritus, growing a little at a time.
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For years beforehand my thinking had actually been fairly pro-capitalist; I often espoused the myriad benefits of currency and commerce. What I never did was consider the problem in terms of consumption versus communion. I realize now I had fallen for the sales pitch. This is not to say, however, that I currently advocate some bloody communist revolt circa 1917. Instead I believe in sublation as Hegel describes it. The internet is not some idyllic communist utopia ruined forever by capitalist invaders; that is not the whole truth. Without capital the internet would be a weird intellectual ghetto; without community it would be a hopeless corporate nightmare. It was the coalescence of these forces that gave the internet its mind/spirit and created the Information Age. Neither force is capable of simply erasing the other; thus, the whole truth must result from both of them. The only way forward is to let them merge together into something completely new. The heart of my complaint, then, is not merely that predatory corporations exist on the internet. It’s that we don’t recognize them for what they are. It’s time to accept what ‘free’ really means, and to demand an equitable share of the proceeds our labour generates.
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The most important tool you have against capitalist hegemony is understanding the whole nature of the transactions you perform. Remember you are not merely a ‘content creator’ if you don’t want to be. You don’t have to alienate the form of your work from its content, shaving all the edges off so it can exist as a grain of sand in someone else’s desert. Make the work YOU want to make and shove it down the internet’s throat. We who Twitter views as ‘content creators’ now live in a world where, paradoxically, the most anti-capitalist measure we could take is to charge money for things. I believe we need to do this whenever possible.
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Recall that Hegel models ideas as fundamentally historical: Free structures of thought whose lineage stretches all the way back into antiquity, guided forward by the recollection of past mistakes. Yet in the capitalist dystopia we are quickly coming to inhabit there are no ‘ideas’ anymore. There is no form, no content and no libre; we live in a world where ‘free’ means gratis, ‘form’ means Twitter and ‘content’ means Tweets™. Recall that appropriation is what capitalists do best. The goal of appropriation is to erase history entirely: To focus solely on the eternal now, divorced from all context, leaving us no basis on which to make choices.
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Your latest project does not need to exist solely as two weeks’ worth of viral bait in someone else’s ‘ecosystem’. The projects you’ve done in the past do not need to languish as half-eaten corpses somewhere in a forgotten database. Create a history for your work by interconnecting it in meaningful and permanent ways (not just in Twitter mentions). Provide paths from the new to the old. Connect it permanently to other people and ideas so that these ideas can grow. Your work is not a commodity; it’s alive. Build a home for it.

On Bioshock on objectivism

First, a dismissal, then a rebuttal, and then cake. Oops, wrong game.

I was not convinced by the narrative of Bioshock that objectivism as a philosophy ultimately leads to destruction, or that the game by utilizing narrative means is a critique of objectivism as a political theory. Others do not agree.

I argue that to criticize objectivism through the lens of Bioshocks’ narrative is similar to using the case of Soviet Russia to criticize communism. To begin with we have to agree that Rapture as a society failed in more than one way; neither did it oblige to the rules set out by a minimalist government approach to the state since law had been replaced by chaos when the player arrived, nor was it a success from the perspective of single individuals—that is Andrew Ryan, or me, and probably not you. The significance of an ideology for practical (as in possible) purposes in the future should be measured by it’s own statements and imperatives laid out by its’ theoretical framework, and not by the prerequisites and milieu of those who “abide” to the ideology or plan/execute the orders of (or outside of) that society in which the ideology takes place—insofar as the ideological statements to begin with have their basis in reality and a proper understanding of La condition humaine; otherwise the ideology is an utopia, something which I don't think Ayn Rand would want you to take objectivism for.

Now, what I can gather from the narrative and what it (implicitly) tells us in Bioshock is that in Rapture there were breaches in the imperatives laid out by the ideology supposedly adhered to. For once, religion found its’ way to Rapture, as can be seen by the bibles spread across some levels, and—arguably but not decisively—because of some citizens’ (whom I perceive as supposedly mad) knack for biblical allegories in their threats and ravings. Also, was not Andrew Ryan a megalomaniac? This is a simple pathological statement, but I think my saying this makes the point clear enough; crazy people will make crazy societies, even if they set out to make things right, and especially if they do not understand the ideological framework with which they work to begin with.

What I’m saying is that the games’ narrative didn’t give me conclusive evidence as to why rapture wasn’t an ideal society, and also didn’t hint about it strongly enough for me to perceive something along those lines. Instead, I started thinking that the city’s apparent failure could depend upon other factors, such as the individuals within it. Was Andrew Ryan a true objectivist? If ze was at the beginning, was ze towards the end of ze’s life? When Rapture started falling apart? The madness which infested Andrew’s haven could have unhinged once the breach of objectivist ideals were already underway—is objectivism to be put to blame for this?

I will leave you with these questions unanswered and instead bring up some other points and finally give you some cake. Concerning rational self-interest in objectivism: helping others is not a vice per se for an objectivist, tis’ only so when helping someone whose ethics (and/or ability, which are closely connected to ethics) are inferior to your own, and by helping that someone you are making a half-man king and mankind a disservice. Helping the little sisters can definitely be motivated by rational self-interest in this context. Killing the little sisters, on the other hand, can be motivated by the ideology of objectivism only when physical danger to someone’s person is a threat. Do the little sisters seem dangerous to you?

I argue that the ludonarrative dissonance when playing (the ludo part of the dissonance) as an objectivist and completing the game (the narrative part of the dissonance) is non-existing if you simply perceive rational self-interest from a different point of view, specifically, as in that interest being in harmony with helping others, if so only for ones own pleasure or for getting some answers. I as a player certainly wanted answers from Atlas, but since your avatar Jack had no narrative-infused motivations whatsoever, giving a narrative explanation for helping out Atlas was impossible, thus creating a sense of ludo-narrative dissonance.

I will leave it at that and propose my own theory concerning rationality, free will and the scene where the murder of Andrew Ryan and the “death-disarm” takes place. Yes, I too “… see all this as a parable about gaming" as Iroquis Pliskin put it, but also as a possible reading on objectivism. A quote from Roger Travis at Living Epic:

"By the shorthand “death-disarm” I mean to refer to the entire sequence of the cutscene in which your character kills Andrew Ryan and the gameplay sequence that follows, in which the game will not progress unless you obey Atlas and disarm Ryan’s auto-destruct sequence."

I will borrow something from Pliskin once again, namely the malignant demon which in Pliskins reading is the authour/designer. This time imagine the malignant demon having the original meaning set out by Descartes/Cartesius twisted to invoke society as looking glass. I do not want this invoked Cartesian society to be about oppression committed by the majority (as seen in classical individualist ideology), or in behaviourist analysis of mass-psychosis states (such as Nazi-Germany), but rather about social pressure as a part of La condition humaine in every society. Simply; man is not man as we know man without society as we know society.

One becomes a savage when growing up without other human beings. Is a feral child able to make rational choices? Are socialized humans able to do it? What is this elevated state which some humans seem to have, while others not, even if the biological prerequisites among people differ insignificantly? Does the act of simply being with other human beings who are more rational than oneself make someone more capable of rational thought? Is rationality a tool?

Let’s say assume that Mowgli is capable of rational thought then, but how can anyone at all make decisions independently of opinions and attitudes of the surrounding people, the generalized others if you would, when they are part of the environment just as much as anything else? The only ones who are not affected by the feelings of other people are those diagnosed as psychopaths, yet I dare say that even those diagnosed as psychopaths are influenced by their peers. An internalized peer review comes with socialization is my understanding of all this.

Now, finally, on objectivism: one of the three axioms which objectivist philosophy comes from is the one concerning epistemology, namely—reason. The first point I’ve already made to some extent, which would be how we can trust other people to inform us with rationally perceived information and logic, and how can we trust our own processing of that and different information; the problem with the moral choice concerning harvesting vs rescuing little sisters is that we simply do not know just how dangerous they are, if they are at all, and what we should do about it from a rational point of view. A may be A, but what the hell is A? Can we even recognize it? What is the meaning of the question asking the meaning of life?

The second point I will make is concerning the corollary axiom of reason—the exercising of free will—, which presupposes reason in objectivist philosophy. If objectivist rationality did not exist, and these two are so interdependent upon each-other, would not the free will disappear? What happens in the scene you kindly murder Andrew Ryan? Exactly that;player agency disappears.