Emily Care Boss, is a professional in forestry, and a trail blazer in indie game design. She has done something that nobody before her has really done well; that is to make not one but, three rpgs about love and relationships with the Romance Trilogy. To be clear, there have been attempts all the way back to the hoary days of 1980's D&D to gamify sex, with tables to randomly define brothels, types of prostitutes, tables for physical assets, and chances of as well as effects of pregnancy on characters. Other games have dealt with it in their own systems, and whole manuals have been made to bring every deviant and perverse activity to your simulationist gaming table. Boss, has (I like to think) burned all of them down by actually making love and relationships the thing the mechanics are about and making the gamified porn irrelevant.
Why does this matter? Aside from the fact that it is a really innovative piece of creative art in gaming by demonstrating clever ways to solve a problem (what to do when you don't want to murder-hobo), she demonstrates that another problem (why aren't there more women in gaming?) might be solved by appealing to other realms of human experience.
I really love the kind of output by the indie game community, because, while I was on a gaming hiatus during the years of the Forge, I nonetheless was on my lonesome trying to puzzle out other ways of telling stories through games, and asking questions; how could I get past the grind of die rolling in a fight to get to what the meaning of the fight was narratively? How could I get to the grit of risk without having to deal with pages (and many procedural minutes) of consulting tables? How could I make the psychological, social, and spiritual harm of a life of murder-hoboing have real meaning in the game? How could I make the flaws of a character something that the player did not compete against, but relish to season a story? My questions have multiplied since my fairly recent resurgence into gaming, and the questions and stories are more interesting than ever.
But the flip side of the indie community is the repellent and overwhelming commitment by so many of the designers that I really respect creatively, to the leftist political dogmas of "social justice". In fact, it is so common that, I have often felt (*gasp!*) marginalized, or triggered by the unquestioning rhetoric and invective that flies just because I don't agree with the intellectual premises upon which those views rest. That merely questioning them has made one of the most prominent indie designers go from calling me "my friend" to a fascist "nincompoop", and a civil question to another whose games I really love leading to a near hysterical screed about ignorance and hate on my part demonstrates, and yet a third from one of my favorite games continuously demonstrating the very definition of prejudice, racism, and sexism while virtue signalling and demanding that racism, sexism, and prejudice stop makes it clear to me that the indie community is far from being the tolerant safe space that it insists it is.
It really came as a wake up call when while regularly participating in a G+ community, I saw someone who clumsily but not hatefully questioned how realistic it was for a wheelchair bound individual to be the chief engineer on a submarine in a game setting that included lots of dangerous physical risk. It was a question that seemed to me to be mostly a matter of not injecting a little creative story crafting on the part of player and GM, and I really had nothing to say to it. It however quickly invited a dog-pile on the person who asked as a hateful, intolerant, and privileged jerk. Two... only two people bothered to actually address the question intelligently and thoughtfully. One to simply ask why people couldn't just let the fiction allow for that, and just let everybody have the fun they wanted. The other was a woman and an engineer who proceeded to discuss how it might be achieved from a technical perspective. She did not resort to name calling or accusations. The questioner (a very active and regular poster of many amiable discussions) ended up being banned from the community, and the record of the thread deleted entirely. This is exactly the sort of revisionism and heavy handed, echo chamber dogma that the game community does not need.
This dogma is rooted the fashionably left handed theory of intersectionality which some know about and many do not. One wonders... if you are "woke" but don't know it... are you just really dreaming? And if you are aware of the issues as described but question their analysis or demonstrate problems in their assumptions that the advocates deny, are you actually more woke than them? If they demand that you endorse an issue even when the facts are against them, is this actually just an effort to socially put you to sleep so that you can become part of their nightmare? And if questioning, no matter how civil, is prejudicially assumed to be an assault worthy of summary exile, can we even really call it tolerance anymore?
But I digress...
I think it is great that Emily Care Boss has created new ways to play stories. What I question is the assumption that she is a shining figure against the oppression of privilege under the dreadful history of (numerically majority) white males in the hobby of gaming. Was the very cool Mike Pondsmith of Cyberpunk 2020 fame oppressed because he was not a white guy back in 1988 (or before that with his earlier games)? I think not. I think that the truth might be found in a different narrative...
D&D came out of miniatures war gaming. This was a hobby with a long tradition in drawing rooms throughout western Europe (not to be too obvious, but racially mostly white) in the century following the Napoleonic era. War has been, until very recently in the age of increasingly remote warfare, largely conducted by males. As such, miniatures war gaming in the west is probably most likely to have been a practice of white males. I suspect that it was of significantly less interest to non-white non-males because it was not so immediately connected to the activity that those other people might be conceivably doing (fighting wars). As such, culturally I daresay that Gary Gygax (a white guy by no choice of his own) living in mid-west America (demographically mostly white) just happened to be interested in zooming in on the stories of individuals on those miniature war game battlefields. Did his race matter? I doubt it... but maybe his social awkwardness that made him prefer indoor war gaming to outdoor team sports did. Had he been from a very wealthy family, perhaps we would not have had D&D because he might have taken up yachting, or collecting Feraris instead. But as a middle class, middle American nerd, he and his friends invented D&D, and other nerds like Greg Stafford brought us other worlds. Numerically, there have always been more white people, so the odds are that there would be more chances of a white person inventing D&D. The fore mentioned Mike Pondsmith, obviously puts paid to the notion that gaming was for white people and took his interest in Japanese anime as well as science fiction, and made a game that has gone on to this day. I don't see him whining about being oppressed.
What I see is a hobby that has begun to refine into an art form, that is barely over four decades old in human history. Leftist thinking is long on empathy, but short on depth in time...
Why has it escaped the left handed thinkers of the indie game community that it is in fact girls who have been role playing as a hobby since time immemorial? The men who took their boyhood imagination with them as adults like Gygax and Stafford, did so perhaps because they were the vestigial ends of a tradition of human warfare, who had less social or athletic prowess than intellectual and imaginative. That many other kinds of people followed that creativity just is. So why have there been fewer girls joining the gaming community in the past or designing games? Maybe because they already were... in different ways. Maybe it took three decades to show us the ends of one way of story telling to raise the question of how to really start asking different questions about how to make games. I believe that Emily Care Boss was one of the original leaders in the Forge, and has a fair bit of status as a designer having been critical in the development of indie thinking. Is she more oppressed, or more privileged? Or is that a stupid question? If one happens not to care for playing an rpg about falling in love, does that make them an oppressive person? Or is it only oppressive to not want to play that game if you happen to be of a particular race or sex, and exercising free agency if you are the other race or sex?
Does Emily Care Boss make interesting, cool, and fun games? That is, I would argue, a better question. I don't care that Emily Care Boss is a female any more than I care that Mike Pondsmith is not white if what I want to do is play a game about love or one about street samurai.
Games should be judged on the merit of the design, not on the color of the designer's skin. Social justice (double-speak by any other name) does not help that.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
24 January, 2018
23 January, 2018
More on the Stability of Societies
In thinking about how to attack a stable society, both for serious policy discussion as well as within a game, here are some articles related to the issue.
HERE is the grand old primer on ruthlessness, The Prince. The summary is HERE.
HERE is one of the most poisonous primers for giving a society hell on earth. The summary of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is HERE.
HERE is a discussion of how identity politics undermines social unity.
And HERE is a discussion about how we got to this point.
As I noted previously, I have tried to find ways to turn complicated issues into models in order to better be able to understand and articulate them. It has concurred with my game design thinking which, I suppose makes the unpalatable reality less awful to swallow.
But looking at the factors of unity and the things that assault those unifying factors, I have to also think that the more I see calls for growing gaming by being more diverse and more inclusive, the more it occurs to me that the intersectional philosophy of so many talented designers is bad for this as it is bad for the societies that suffer from intersectional division. Not that diversity or inclusion are bad per se. They can be either good or bad depending on what diverse idea you include, and that is the rub... there seems to be a high ideal with a really shoddy understanding of the words that shape the ideas that shape the behavior. But I suppose that begins to deviate toward another discussion, so I will leave this today with the links above.
Those and this thought: we don't need more intersectionalism to bring justice to societies (or games)... we need more fidelity toward objective Truth and it's source, and more love toward all persons. The ruthless division should be reserved for the ideas that we discard.
HERE is the grand old primer on ruthlessness, The Prince. The summary is HERE.
HERE is one of the most poisonous primers for giving a society hell on earth. The summary of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is HERE.
HERE is a discussion of how identity politics undermines social unity.
And HERE is a discussion about how we got to this point.
As I noted previously, I have tried to find ways to turn complicated issues into models in order to better be able to understand and articulate them. It has concurred with my game design thinking which, I suppose makes the unpalatable reality less awful to swallow.
But looking at the factors of unity and the things that assault those unifying factors, I have to also think that the more I see calls for growing gaming by being more diverse and more inclusive, the more it occurs to me that the intersectional philosophy of so many talented designers is bad for this as it is bad for the societies that suffer from intersectional division. Not that diversity or inclusion are bad per se. They can be either good or bad depending on what diverse idea you include, and that is the rub... there seems to be a high ideal with a really shoddy understanding of the words that shape the ideas that shape the behavior. But I suppose that begins to deviate toward another discussion, so I will leave this today with the links above.
Those and this thought: we don't need more intersectionalism to bring justice to societies (or games)... we need more fidelity toward objective Truth and it's source, and more love toward all persons. The ruthless division should be reserved for the ideas that we discard.
19 January, 2018
Essential Elements for Stable Civilizations
My single longest game design project has been political.
That is to say, that since 1993, morphing through three different game systems, and seeking inspiration from many others, I have been seeking to make a game about civilizations and politics in order to make it possible to more easily wrap my head around why people (as groups) do what they do. Certainly, all the standard adventure, mystery, and horror stories that have informed my gaming across those years has held my interest. Hero stories are, I believe, essential to inspire living a rich and full life. But heroes do not exist in a vacuum. They live connected to societies, and though they may end up not quite belonging because of their experiences, they are heroes because of what they have sacrificed for their societies. The cowboy, the ronin, the knight errant... these are the essential characters that societies can neither live without, nor allow to live within them. But I am also interested in the drama of humanity, and it is the interplay between societies that has in many ways fueled academic and personal study of history, geography, and culture.
Most of my political reading is poured after the fact into the stew of my game design brain. I am really just trying to make thought models to understand and communicate ideas like serious political scientists, anthropologists, and historians... I just want to have fun with it too.
That said, one of the issues that has simmered over time, is the foundational question:
What is essential to make a group of people draw together and become a cohesive society?
Having revised and revised this list, and pared down continuously over time, I think that the following has sufficiently held up as a rubric in my brain to warrant a formal list (bum, buuumm!).
1) Language
2) Race
3) Religion (or Worldview)
4) Culture
5) Social Structure
6) Strong Government
These are all elements that draw groups of people together, and they go from the most cohesive element to the least. They feed or draw from the other elements up and down the chain, and for every element missing, the society is weaker. From a game design standpoint, they might be viewed as the thing that holds the place of hit points for a society, as they make the society resilient.
Language
This one is the foundation for the rest, since a society that cannot broadly and effectively communicate with itself will fall apart in confusion. Those who have resources (material or immaterial) and know how to speak the language will be able to get things done while those who cannot speak the language will at best be isolated and left to whatever comforts their resources can provide. Thus it is essential that a society be able to speak together from bottom to top and across any functional divisions.
Race
This is the most paradoxical element, being both extremely superficial and at the same time a critically instinctual marker that identifies who is part of the group from who is not. In very basic biological terms, the human animal is distinguished by physical traits of size, shape, and coloration that in simple terms are what we call "race". Those traits provide an easy marker for who is related and who is not, and therefore who is safe and who might not be. As such, this is an element that on it's own, is perhaps the most ingrained to the human animal for bringing together a society. However, as human interaction between races blurs lines, other elements make this potentially a very superficial element if there are explicit mitigating factors to make it so. But lacking those other elements, race is an extremely powerful force for pulling societies into distinct, cohesive groups.
Religion (or Worldview)
This is a powerful element because given the fundamental ability to communicate, the worldview of the society provides the basic thought framework for the beliefs and values the society holds. What they believe to be true and good informs behavior of the individual and the social pressure to reinforce it. The most basic type of worldview is now and has been Religion in one form or another, and this has been the most durable, since religion not only answers where we come from and where we are going also what it all means. Non-religious worldviews have also existed (e.g. communism/Communism) and held together states even when they have not done so as durably as ancient and still extant religions. However, unlike language or race, worldviews may cross groups and provide a unifying force where the others are lacking. I would suggest that lacking the language to communicate however, two groups with a like worldview are more likely to separate for more practical reasons, namely the inability to work out basic things like how to conduct trade among persons, or when one can go to the well.
Culture
This covers the day to day practices that are not necessarily explicitly and exclusively covered under the purview of another element and includes, at least, such things as the clothing, the food, the music, the art, the traditions, and the holidays that a society holds. There is clearly overlap with Religion here, but many things (like chord structure in music) are not addressed in moral or theistic terms, but nonetheless matter to identifying a culture. and culture is very much influenced by it's geography (Polynesians lack the iron culture that the ancient Persians had, but were consummate navigators). I suggest however, that culture is primarily about the hundred comfortable, familiar things that are shared by groups in common which act as a unifying force. Without them, a society has to work harder to come together.
Social Structure
This is about the organization of roles within a society that make it run smoothly as a unit. Who has authority and responsibility over the activity, procedures, and production required to make a large group function over time. It is concerned first with horizontal social relationships, and second with vertical relationships in the society. This element, like race, is a two sided issue and can be either unifying or divisive since it has built into it who has material and social resources. Furthermore, it also overlaps with religion and culture, with those potentially informing roles and responsibilities. If this element is not strong, and the society members feel it is an unfair social structure, then it becomes a liability. Note that a broad range of social structures is possible, and can well include everything from a very egalitarian society in which everyone has some authority in social decisions and shares similar wealth levels, all the way to extremely stratified societies in which a single ruler possesses 90% of the wealth and legal authority over the masses of the rest. If the individuals of the society perceive that their needs are being met, social structure can be highly diverse. Conversely, human nature can corrupt the most idealistic social structure if the people give in to their baser instincts.
Strong Government
A fair bit of overlap exists between the government and the social structure, but this is distinguished by a narrower function. While social structure is primarily horizontal, this is mostly vertical, and has little necessary relationship with the other elements. It is unlikely to be sufficient alone to maintain a lasting society, but may act where a vacuum exists in another area. It is about defined authority from the top, not about assumed or understood social contracts, and is enforced by the sword tacitly or directly. In concert with the other elements of society where they are strong, this is a far less necessary element, but where they are weak, this can act as a unifying force even if it is a unity woven of fear, desperation, and defeat.
Using this set as a touchstone, I have been able to see how the pursuit of or eschewing of each of these elements has strengthened or weakened societies that I have studied in history or observe in today's news. While not a perfect, or all encompassing model, it is nonetheless a model I have found to be consistently accurate in the broad strokes.
Seeing that, I am working on how to use it to create verisimilitude for the political game I have been looking for for decades.
HERE is my current thinking in action.
That is to say, that since 1993, morphing through three different game systems, and seeking inspiration from many others, I have been seeking to make a game about civilizations and politics in order to make it possible to more easily wrap my head around why people (as groups) do what they do. Certainly, all the standard adventure, mystery, and horror stories that have informed my gaming across those years has held my interest. Hero stories are, I believe, essential to inspire living a rich and full life. But heroes do not exist in a vacuum. They live connected to societies, and though they may end up not quite belonging because of their experiences, they are heroes because of what they have sacrificed for their societies. The cowboy, the ronin, the knight errant... these are the essential characters that societies can neither live without, nor allow to live within them. But I am also interested in the drama of humanity, and it is the interplay between societies that has in many ways fueled academic and personal study of history, geography, and culture.
Most of my political reading is poured after the fact into the stew of my game design brain. I am really just trying to make thought models to understand and communicate ideas like serious political scientists, anthropologists, and historians... I just want to have fun with it too.
That said, one of the issues that has simmered over time, is the foundational question:
What is essential to make a group of people draw together and become a cohesive society?
Having revised and revised this list, and pared down continuously over time, I think that the following has sufficiently held up as a rubric in my brain to warrant a formal list (bum, buuumm!).
1) Language
2) Race
3) Religion (or Worldview)
4) Culture
5) Social Structure
6) Strong Government
These are all elements that draw groups of people together, and they go from the most cohesive element to the least. They feed or draw from the other elements up and down the chain, and for every element missing, the society is weaker. From a game design standpoint, they might be viewed as the thing that holds the place of hit points for a society, as they make the society resilient.
Language
This one is the foundation for the rest, since a society that cannot broadly and effectively communicate with itself will fall apart in confusion. Those who have resources (material or immaterial) and know how to speak the language will be able to get things done while those who cannot speak the language will at best be isolated and left to whatever comforts their resources can provide. Thus it is essential that a society be able to speak together from bottom to top and across any functional divisions.
Race
This is the most paradoxical element, being both extremely superficial and at the same time a critically instinctual marker that identifies who is part of the group from who is not. In very basic biological terms, the human animal is distinguished by physical traits of size, shape, and coloration that in simple terms are what we call "race". Those traits provide an easy marker for who is related and who is not, and therefore who is safe and who might not be. As such, this is an element that on it's own, is perhaps the most ingrained to the human animal for bringing together a society. However, as human interaction between races blurs lines, other elements make this potentially a very superficial element if there are explicit mitigating factors to make it so. But lacking those other elements, race is an extremely powerful force for pulling societies into distinct, cohesive groups.
Religion (or Worldview)
This is a powerful element because given the fundamental ability to communicate, the worldview of the society provides the basic thought framework for the beliefs and values the society holds. What they believe to be true and good informs behavior of the individual and the social pressure to reinforce it. The most basic type of worldview is now and has been Religion in one form or another, and this has been the most durable, since religion not only answers where we come from and where we are going also what it all means. Non-religious worldviews have also existed (e.g. communism/Communism) and held together states even when they have not done so as durably as ancient and still extant religions. However, unlike language or race, worldviews may cross groups and provide a unifying force where the others are lacking. I would suggest that lacking the language to communicate however, two groups with a like worldview are more likely to separate for more practical reasons, namely the inability to work out basic things like how to conduct trade among persons, or when one can go to the well.
Culture
This covers the day to day practices that are not necessarily explicitly and exclusively covered under the purview of another element and includes, at least, such things as the clothing, the food, the music, the art, the traditions, and the holidays that a society holds. There is clearly overlap with Religion here, but many things (like chord structure in music) are not addressed in moral or theistic terms, but nonetheless matter to identifying a culture. and culture is very much influenced by it's geography (Polynesians lack the iron culture that the ancient Persians had, but were consummate navigators). I suggest however, that culture is primarily about the hundred comfortable, familiar things that are shared by groups in common which act as a unifying force. Without them, a society has to work harder to come together.
Social Structure
This is about the organization of roles within a society that make it run smoothly as a unit. Who has authority and responsibility over the activity, procedures, and production required to make a large group function over time. It is concerned first with horizontal social relationships, and second with vertical relationships in the society. This element, like race, is a two sided issue and can be either unifying or divisive since it has built into it who has material and social resources. Furthermore, it also overlaps with religion and culture, with those potentially informing roles and responsibilities. If this element is not strong, and the society members feel it is an unfair social structure, then it becomes a liability. Note that a broad range of social structures is possible, and can well include everything from a very egalitarian society in which everyone has some authority in social decisions and shares similar wealth levels, all the way to extremely stratified societies in which a single ruler possesses 90% of the wealth and legal authority over the masses of the rest. If the individuals of the society perceive that their needs are being met, social structure can be highly diverse. Conversely, human nature can corrupt the most idealistic social structure if the people give in to their baser instincts.
Strong Government
A fair bit of overlap exists between the government and the social structure, but this is distinguished by a narrower function. While social structure is primarily horizontal, this is mostly vertical, and has little necessary relationship with the other elements. It is unlikely to be sufficient alone to maintain a lasting society, but may act where a vacuum exists in another area. It is about defined authority from the top, not about assumed or understood social contracts, and is enforced by the sword tacitly or directly. In concert with the other elements of society where they are strong, this is a far less necessary element, but where they are weak, this can act as a unifying force even if it is a unity woven of fear, desperation, and defeat.
Using this set as a touchstone, I have been able to see how the pursuit of or eschewing of each of these elements has strengthened or weakened societies that I have studied in history or observe in today's news. While not a perfect, or all encompassing model, it is nonetheless a model I have found to be consistently accurate in the broad strokes.
Seeing that, I am working on how to use it to create verisimilitude for the political game I have been looking for for decades.
HERE is my current thinking in action.
16 December, 2017
Revisiting Wisdom
I posted these thoughts from two imperfect but wise men just over a year ago. I was posting more regularly prior to that. It seems that while I really love some of the creative work done by the indie game community, so much of what comes out on their social media feeds is trite, tiresome, and discouraging. I am not part of the echo chamber that informs the worldview of so many of the designers who make games I really like. And I have found that civil discourse respecting the person but questioning or, heaven forbid disputing their worldviews and politics is tantamount to sin. If gaming is such a hotbed of oppression and privilege as claimed by so many in the community, then it is largely because they create dispute and dissension with many who just want to play games.
* * *
“ Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but followed by a sense of futility.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
It is unfortunate that so many who are otherwise thoughtful and creative can be so blatantly closed-minded, intolerant, and malicious toward anyone who does not agree with them, and feed them the warm hate they want. Ironic, when so many of these are the ones who claim righteousness against the very things they practice, but somehow find themselves excused of...
Some timeless thoughts from G.K. Chesterton:
"What embitters the world is not an excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism."
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
* * *
“ Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but followed by a sense of futility.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
It is unfortunate that so many who are otherwise thoughtful and creative can be so blatantly closed-minded, intolerant, and malicious toward anyone who does not agree with them, and feed them the warm hate they want. Ironic, when so many of these are the ones who claim righteousness against the very things they practice, but somehow find themselves excused of...
Some timeless thoughts from G.K. Chesterton:
"What embitters the world is not an excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism."
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
01 October, 2016
Art And Fear
Some years back, I read the book The Artist's Way, which is a program for creativity through writing discipline. It was useful to me a couple run throughs, and one of the key points is that creativity comes from the discipline of just writing... good or bad... every day.
I read Art and Fear more recently, and the authors related a story about a college art class in which the professor split the students into two groups. The first he would grade on one project alone for the whole semester, but it had to be completely perfect in every way. The other group he graded solely on quantity; they had to produce something every day, even if it turned out terrible. What the professor found is that even though the second group produced a lot of crap, they also produced as a group, the best work by the end of the semester, even though the other group was expected to.
That is something that I find helpful if I can hold on to it.
I am going to try to set a challenge for myself with that idea in mind.
It is October.
For this month, my goal is to try to write a mini game every day. I will give myself the leeway to go back to previous games or previous ideas and re-skin them, or re-imagine them if something really interesting comes to mind, but the point is to try by virtue of quantity, to find something good in the lot... to capture creative inspiration hiding in the clutter.
We'll see how this goes!
I read Art and Fear more recently, and the authors related a story about a college art class in which the professor split the students into two groups. The first he would grade on one project alone for the whole semester, but it had to be completely perfect in every way. The other group he graded solely on quantity; they had to produce something every day, even if it turned out terrible. What the professor found is that even though the second group produced a lot of crap, they also produced as a group, the best work by the end of the semester, even though the other group was expected to.
That is something that I find helpful if I can hold on to it.
I am going to try to set a challenge for myself with that idea in mind.
It is October.
For this month, my goal is to try to write a mini game every day. I will give myself the leeway to go back to previous games or previous ideas and re-skin them, or re-imagine them if something really interesting comes to mind, but the point is to try by virtue of quantity, to find something good in the lot... to capture creative inspiration hiding in the clutter.
We'll see how this goes!
25 September, 2016
Is An Unexamined Thought Worth Endorsing?
I have a very conflicted view on the value of social media for a number of reasons, but one is that so much of human communication is only apprehended through non-verbal means making about 70% of the message lost when received by text alone. Another, is that there is so much more of it, that such communication becomes careless either by the sender or the receiver, or both. The quantity of data consumed by social media users had further become as much about sifting signal from noise, and thus actually thinking critically about a message is often lost on knee-jerk reactions, categorizing the message, and thus for expedience also all further messages from that sender, and then the sender themselves as noise. We discard thought and people for convenience. So while I see the value of not embracing Ludite conservatism, I also am continuously reminded of how poor so much social media communication can be.
Case in point... I discovered recently the page of a game designer who makes some of the coolest games in my collection. I love his stuff. But I made the mistake of commenting on one of his posts that had nothing to do with his games and was instead about an issue that he felt very sincere about, with which I happened to disagree. Being neither rude or aggressive, I merely questioned his assumptions in a polite and reasoned fashion, asking what his criteria were for his point of view. I was rebuffed instead with the statement that that was not an issue he wished to address.
The next post on his page was about this exchange with what I think he believes to be adequate evidence to prove his point. Here is what he said (italic) and my thoughts on his follow-up:
Today someone told me that they didn't believe in privilege.
What I actually did was question his assumptions about what it means vis a vis an assertion of offense he made about a game design. "Privilage" as it was used by him is a term with particular meaning in intersectional social/political theory. I know very well what intersectionalism states to be true, I have studied the philosophy underlying it, I frequently read intersectional media for insight, and I still happen to think that it is philosophically flawed at the very foundation. More on this below...
He continues:
Today, on a day when an unarmed black man waiting by his broken-down car was gunned down, murdered by police who were supposed to help him, to protect him.
This is a statement of some of the facts, and a misstatement of others in the Terence Crutcher shooting in Tulsa. Before addressing them in turn, the first big problem is that this poster quickly judged the situation without all the facts or context, and demonstrated a prejudicial preference that privileges the intersectional narrative over all others. Further facts not mentioned are these:
1) Officer Betty Shelby was en route responding to a domestic violence call when she happened upon Crutcher, not in his vehicle which was stopped in the middle of the two lane road.
2) There were some number of 911 calls just before that by people reporting Crutcher's erratic behavior, shouting that among other things his SUV was going to explode.
3) His behavior was assessed by officer Shelby as being consistent with the erratic behavior of someone on PCP (she did not know a the time but a vial was found in the SUV).
4) Crutcher was non-compliant with the demands of the officer, who then called in backup.
5) When Crutcher approached his SUV while refusing to comply with several officers, Shelby claimed she shot because he was attempting to reach inside the vehicle after having been reaching in his pockets before.
6) Video footage appears to show that at least the driver's window was closed, and possibly the rear window as well.
So without prejudiced conclusions, we can judge in light of the facts that the officer did have reason to be more suspicious of the motorist based on his behavior than usual, prompting a reasonable amount of caution which merely continued to escalate, based still on his behavior. We can also conclude that there was insufficient evidence to warrant deadly force, especially in light of the fact that one of the other officers had drawn a taser rather than a firearm, which she could have also done.
The poster also failed to note that the officer has been suspended from duty, and charged with the felony of first degree manslaughter. He also did not note that this was in the same town that a deputy that was allegedly insufficiently trained for the job was also convicted with felony manslaughter for the shooting of Eric Harris. These facts suggest if anything, that the overall tone of law enforcement in Tulsa is not institutionally racially biased against black men in Tulsa, is not protecting wicked officers, but is actually pro justice in their actions. We may speculate that there are some training issues that need addressed. The poster used the term murder rather than manslaughter, I suspect in haste. It does not prove that he is willfully deceptive, but suggests at least a moment of lazy research in his attempt to offer support for the intersectional view that he feels passionately about; but it is not excusable if his goal really is justice rather than self serving political outrage. More on this below...
Today, the day after the Republican candidate's son tweeted out a white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee meme.
This has nothing to do with Tulsa, or with police issues in general and the questionable intersectional assertion that there is an institutional oppressive bias by police (especially white police) against black men in America. It does not bring any actual salient facts on the Tulsa issue he used as an example, it ignores or is oblivious to such facts as the research that shows statistically, white police are far less likely to shoot black suspects than Hispanic or black officers are.
But if we assume this is an attempt to provide another piece of anecdotal evidence to bolster the assertion of validity of his intersectional view, I would have to point out that the meme in question is the Skittles meme, which mostly does not support what the poster asserts it does. The meme text states, "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem." The poster asserts that this is white supremacist. There is no evidence of this. While the color of the Skittles in the bowl invite a snarky response, there is in fact no assertion in the meme of a preference of any kind to any race. The poster further asserts that the meme is anti-immigrant. Again, there is no statement whatsoever about immigrants in the meme, and if we reasonably assume that it is supposed to follow Trump's stated policy view on immigration, he has generally stated that he supports immigration from anywhere as long as the immigrants are vetted for security, and do so legally. Trump does say a lot of other wacky things (oh, so many!), some of which he has changed his mind on, but this is a pretty consistent policy position in a pretty sparse field of stated policy positions. The poster finally states that this is anti-refugee. To some degree it is. However, in context with everything else Trump has actually said, he has further noted that he wants all refugees to be vetted before being allowed to come onto our soil. This position is predicated on the fact that:
1) there are a good many documented posts by terrorist organizations that they are actively seeking to insert agents onto American soil under guise of refugees from Syria, and
2) it is well known that there are multiple terrorist organizations who actively seek to harm Americans, and American interests that have received support from incompetent administration channels operating in Syria.
There is a credible threat from Syria to America, even if the choice of metaphor by Trump Jr. was grossly clumsy (and it was). But a clumsy meme does not actually prove any institutional oppression or privilege vis a vis intersectional theory... only that the analysis was clumsy, or that it was dumbed down into a straw man argument, and that some people took it seriously anyway.
I read articles like this one and I think, "How can anyone living today be paying the least bit of attention to the world and believe that privilege is imaginary?"
Because articles cited as such are very poor evidence of the validity of intersectional theory. One can believe that prejudice does occur in America (I certainly do), that oppression happens among humans (it most definitely does), and privilege exists in human societies (without doubt). One can well believe these things and still not believe that intersectional theory accurately understands any of them (I assert it does not) even if I am actually willing to respect the people who hold the views as I challenge the idea to be discussed. I just happen to find that my invitations, no matter how humble or polite, are dismissed. My experience has been either that the supporters of intersectional thinking actually want to avoid genuine discussion in favor of incredulity or outrage that fits their view, or (sadly) unproductive agreement that intersectionalism is just liberal whining, which may or may not be true, but is ultimately ad hominem and not helpful.
Football players taking a knee during the playing of a song are raked through the coals, vilified and lambasted, while police murder black men and routinely get away with it. That's privilege at work.
In the first case, while I might think Kaepernik is a twit for doing what he is (I do) I and his critics
1) also have a right to freedom of expression every bit as much as he does, and
2) predicate the opinion on the proposition that he is applying his expression with poorly thought out assumptions, and
3) am not advocating that he and members of his organization or race should be killed.
Furthermore, the poster seems to again be lazy in
1) his understanding or his use of the assertion of murder (vs. manslaughter), and
2) his misunderstanding or prevarication of the fact that officers who actually did commit a criminal breach of trust and authority have been punished.
It's time to start fixing our broken country, friends. And we can't do it with our eyes closed.
I respectfully agree with the poster on this. I likewise respectfully disagree with his diagnosis of the problem, because I question who actually has their eyes more open to the situation. Furthermore, while I am fully persuaded that he is sincere in his feelings that something is wrong, I am disturbed by what appears to be a disinterest in admitting that perhaps, just maybe, he might possibly have not grasped the situation as fully as he seems to assume, nor does he seem to feel that anyone with a challenging opinion could possibly have anything legitimate to offer to the discussion. He suggests that he has his eyes open, and that those who challenge his view do not. Where is his evidence though? I see a pretty thin thread to hang his assertion on, which I to date, have found overwhelmingly typical of intersectional doctrine...
Edit: this subject is important to me, and I take it very seriously. If you want to chime in with a clever, pithy remark, consider that doing so isn't helpful. I will delete such comments. If you want to tell me how privilege isn't real and that all this social justice malarkey is overblown, know that I consider such remarks to be actively harmful and I do not feel an obligation to give you a space to say such things. I will delete these comments too.
...and there you go, my friends. Not only does he not want to critically examine the evidence he offers, but he does not want to examine any evidence anyone else offers that does not fit his view. He is so committed to the view, that any discussion is by default assumed to be harmful and will be summarily censored. I get the principle of not feeding trolls, but I was not trolling. I did bring up the question on his public space, which I could have predicted to end thus, but gave benefit of the doubt because he is otherwise an intelligent and creative fellow from the small window I've seen through his game design discussions. Politics make people often commit to lazy thinking and bad ideas though...
It does bother me that the intersectional assumption automatically demands that I either agree, or else prove myself actively committed to oppression, racism, sexism, bigotry, and phobia; that I cannot possibly take the issues of policing, or community violence seriously or reasonably; that I can summarily be judged to be wicked because I differ on the analysis of the problem. This is bothersome further because it seems to be a view held by so many of the designers that I think are really cool and creative, who I'd love to have thoughtful creative discussions with. But I suspect, based on a pattern of behavior from some of the most forward who adhere to that view, I likely won't be allowed the opportunity because I am in the "other" camp... that group that the intersectional community is quick to accuse of the sin of "othering" others based on biases and unreasonable prejudice, yet hypocritically is so quick to condemn without bothering to even listen.
The very framework, the foundation, the skeleton of intersectional thinking, is at the end of the day, nothing more than one big, often narcissistic genetic fallacy. It serves to exacerbate grievance against others, but offers little of value to critically examine a problem, bridge the gap, and certainly not offer forgiveness and reconciliation. Considering the godless roots, it is not surprising. The cause is always more valuable than people there. Facts and respect for persons are of little consequence under this worldview. How much is lost because of that?
Privilege in the dictionary sense obviously exists in the world. It is practiced in every way possible by every human on the planet. Privilege, oppression, phobia, bigot... all of these have actual meanings, and the actual meanings are at every turn ignored and twisted by intersectional theory. The problem we have is in determining the rational criteria by which we decide that a thing is actually fair or unfair, cruel and excessive, illogically pathologically fearful, or unfairly hateful. Asking this question is flipping on the light switch at threats of the bogey man... committed intersectionalists in my experience almost always prefer the bogey man, and all too often rejoin with ad hominem attacks on the person questioning without first understanding the questioner's assumptions. This does nothing productive to solving real problems of fairness or equality toward persons.
I have a problem with that too.
Case in point... I discovered recently the page of a game designer who makes some of the coolest games in my collection. I love his stuff. But I made the mistake of commenting on one of his posts that had nothing to do with his games and was instead about an issue that he felt very sincere about, with which I happened to disagree. Being neither rude or aggressive, I merely questioned his assumptions in a polite and reasoned fashion, asking what his criteria were for his point of view. I was rebuffed instead with the statement that that was not an issue he wished to address.
The next post on his page was about this exchange with what I think he believes to be adequate evidence to prove his point. Here is what he said (italic) and my thoughts on his follow-up:
Today someone told me that they didn't believe in privilege.
What I actually did was question his assumptions about what it means vis a vis an assertion of offense he made about a game design. "Privilage" as it was used by him is a term with particular meaning in intersectional social/political theory. I know very well what intersectionalism states to be true, I have studied the philosophy underlying it, I frequently read intersectional media for insight, and I still happen to think that it is philosophically flawed at the very foundation. More on this below...
He continues:
Today, on a day when an unarmed black man waiting by his broken-down car was gunned down, murdered by police who were supposed to help him, to protect him.
This is a statement of some of the facts, and a misstatement of others in the Terence Crutcher shooting in Tulsa. Before addressing them in turn, the first big problem is that this poster quickly judged the situation without all the facts or context, and demonstrated a prejudicial preference that privileges the intersectional narrative over all others. Further facts not mentioned are these:
1) Officer Betty Shelby was en route responding to a domestic violence call when she happened upon Crutcher, not in his vehicle which was stopped in the middle of the two lane road.
2) There were some number of 911 calls just before that by people reporting Crutcher's erratic behavior, shouting that among other things his SUV was going to explode.
3) His behavior was assessed by officer Shelby as being consistent with the erratic behavior of someone on PCP (she did not know a the time but a vial was found in the SUV).
4) Crutcher was non-compliant with the demands of the officer, who then called in backup.
5) When Crutcher approached his SUV while refusing to comply with several officers, Shelby claimed she shot because he was attempting to reach inside the vehicle after having been reaching in his pockets before.
6) Video footage appears to show that at least the driver's window was closed, and possibly the rear window as well.
So without prejudiced conclusions, we can judge in light of the facts that the officer did have reason to be more suspicious of the motorist based on his behavior than usual, prompting a reasonable amount of caution which merely continued to escalate, based still on his behavior. We can also conclude that there was insufficient evidence to warrant deadly force, especially in light of the fact that one of the other officers had drawn a taser rather than a firearm, which she could have also done.
The poster also failed to note that the officer has been suspended from duty, and charged with the felony of first degree manslaughter. He also did not note that this was in the same town that a deputy that was allegedly insufficiently trained for the job was also convicted with felony manslaughter for the shooting of Eric Harris. These facts suggest if anything, that the overall tone of law enforcement in Tulsa is not institutionally racially biased against black men in Tulsa, is not protecting wicked officers, but is actually pro justice in their actions. We may speculate that there are some training issues that need addressed. The poster used the term murder rather than manslaughter, I suspect in haste. It does not prove that he is willfully deceptive, but suggests at least a moment of lazy research in his attempt to offer support for the intersectional view that he feels passionately about; but it is not excusable if his goal really is justice rather than self serving political outrage. More on this below...
Today, the day after the Republican candidate's son tweeted out a white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee meme.
This has nothing to do with Tulsa, or with police issues in general and the questionable intersectional assertion that there is an institutional oppressive bias by police (especially white police) against black men in America. It does not bring any actual salient facts on the Tulsa issue he used as an example, it ignores or is oblivious to such facts as the research that shows statistically, white police are far less likely to shoot black suspects than Hispanic or black officers are.
But if we assume this is an attempt to provide another piece of anecdotal evidence to bolster the assertion of validity of his intersectional view, I would have to point out that the meme in question is the Skittles meme, which mostly does not support what the poster asserts it does. The meme text states, "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That's our Syrian refugee problem." The poster asserts that this is white supremacist. There is no evidence of this. While the color of the Skittles in the bowl invite a snarky response, there is in fact no assertion in the meme of a preference of any kind to any race. The poster further asserts that the meme is anti-immigrant. Again, there is no statement whatsoever about immigrants in the meme, and if we reasonably assume that it is supposed to follow Trump's stated policy view on immigration, he has generally stated that he supports immigration from anywhere as long as the immigrants are vetted for security, and do so legally. Trump does say a lot of other wacky things (oh, so many!), some of which he has changed his mind on, but this is a pretty consistent policy position in a pretty sparse field of stated policy positions. The poster finally states that this is anti-refugee. To some degree it is. However, in context with everything else Trump has actually said, he has further noted that he wants all refugees to be vetted before being allowed to come onto our soil. This position is predicated on the fact that:
1) there are a good many documented posts by terrorist organizations that they are actively seeking to insert agents onto American soil under guise of refugees from Syria, and
2) it is well known that there are multiple terrorist organizations who actively seek to harm Americans, and American interests that have received support from incompetent administration channels operating in Syria.
There is a credible threat from Syria to America, even if the choice of metaphor by Trump Jr. was grossly clumsy (and it was). But a clumsy meme does not actually prove any institutional oppression or privilege vis a vis intersectional theory... only that the analysis was clumsy, or that it was dumbed down into a straw man argument, and that some people took it seriously anyway.
I read articles like this one and I think, "How can anyone living today be paying the least bit of attention to the world and believe that privilege is imaginary?"
Because articles cited as such are very poor evidence of the validity of intersectional theory. One can believe that prejudice does occur in America (I certainly do), that oppression happens among humans (it most definitely does), and privilege exists in human societies (without doubt). One can well believe these things and still not believe that intersectional theory accurately understands any of them (I assert it does not) even if I am actually willing to respect the people who hold the views as I challenge the idea to be discussed. I just happen to find that my invitations, no matter how humble or polite, are dismissed. My experience has been either that the supporters of intersectional thinking actually want to avoid genuine discussion in favor of incredulity or outrage that fits their view, or (sadly) unproductive agreement that intersectionalism is just liberal whining, which may or may not be true, but is ultimately ad hominem and not helpful.
Football players taking a knee during the playing of a song are raked through the coals, vilified and lambasted, while police murder black men and routinely get away with it. That's privilege at work.
In the first case, while I might think Kaepernik is a twit for doing what he is (I do) I and his critics
1) also have a right to freedom of expression every bit as much as he does, and
2) predicate the opinion on the proposition that he is applying his expression with poorly thought out assumptions, and
3) am not advocating that he and members of his organization or race should be killed.
Furthermore, the poster seems to again be lazy in
1) his understanding or his use of the assertion of murder (vs. manslaughter), and
2) his misunderstanding or prevarication of the fact that officers who actually did commit a criminal breach of trust and authority have been punished.
It's time to start fixing our broken country, friends. And we can't do it with our eyes closed.
I respectfully agree with the poster on this. I likewise respectfully disagree with his diagnosis of the problem, because I question who actually has their eyes more open to the situation. Furthermore, while I am fully persuaded that he is sincere in his feelings that something is wrong, I am disturbed by what appears to be a disinterest in admitting that perhaps, just maybe, he might possibly have not grasped the situation as fully as he seems to assume, nor does he seem to feel that anyone with a challenging opinion could possibly have anything legitimate to offer to the discussion. He suggests that he has his eyes open, and that those who challenge his view do not. Where is his evidence though? I see a pretty thin thread to hang his assertion on, which I to date, have found overwhelmingly typical of intersectional doctrine...
Edit: this subject is important to me, and I take it very seriously. If you want to chime in with a clever, pithy remark, consider that doing so isn't helpful. I will delete such comments. If you want to tell me how privilege isn't real and that all this social justice malarkey is overblown, know that I consider such remarks to be actively harmful and I do not feel an obligation to give you a space to say such things. I will delete these comments too.
...and there you go, my friends. Not only does he not want to critically examine the evidence he offers, but he does not want to examine any evidence anyone else offers that does not fit his view. He is so committed to the view, that any discussion is by default assumed to be harmful and will be summarily censored. I get the principle of not feeding trolls, but I was not trolling. I did bring up the question on his public space, which I could have predicted to end thus, but gave benefit of the doubt because he is otherwise an intelligent and creative fellow from the small window I've seen through his game design discussions. Politics make people often commit to lazy thinking and bad ideas though...
It does bother me that the intersectional assumption automatically demands that I either agree, or else prove myself actively committed to oppression, racism, sexism, bigotry, and phobia; that I cannot possibly take the issues of policing, or community violence seriously or reasonably; that I can summarily be judged to be wicked because I differ on the analysis of the problem. This is bothersome further because it seems to be a view held by so many of the designers that I think are really cool and creative, who I'd love to have thoughtful creative discussions with. But I suspect, based on a pattern of behavior from some of the most forward who adhere to that view, I likely won't be allowed the opportunity because I am in the "other" camp... that group that the intersectional community is quick to accuse of the sin of "othering" others based on biases and unreasonable prejudice, yet hypocritically is so quick to condemn without bothering to even listen.
The very framework, the foundation, the skeleton of intersectional thinking, is at the end of the day, nothing more than one big, often narcissistic genetic fallacy. It serves to exacerbate grievance against others, but offers little of value to critically examine a problem, bridge the gap, and certainly not offer forgiveness and reconciliation. Considering the godless roots, it is not surprising. The cause is always more valuable than people there. Facts and respect for persons are of little consequence under this worldview. How much is lost because of that?
Privilege in the dictionary sense obviously exists in the world. It is practiced in every way possible by every human on the planet. Privilege, oppression, phobia, bigot... all of these have actual meanings, and the actual meanings are at every turn ignored and twisted by intersectional theory. The problem we have is in determining the rational criteria by which we decide that a thing is actually fair or unfair, cruel and excessive, illogically pathologically fearful, or unfairly hateful. Asking this question is flipping on the light switch at threats of the bogey man... committed intersectionalists in my experience almost always prefer the bogey man, and all too often rejoin with ad hominem attacks on the person questioning without first understanding the questioner's assumptions. This does nothing productive to solving real problems of fairness or equality toward persons.
I have a problem with that too.
23 September, 2016
...fail foreward...
**sigh**
There are times that looking at progress on something makes one want to just say "that sucks", and toss it in the can, and move on to the next thing, whatever that is...
This is my five minutes of gripey, whiney bits looking at what I trying to do with this blog... the goal is to try to scrape rust off of writing, off of creativity, off of focus... putting it out in the open is an attempt at accountability.
Today it does not feel like it is doing anything useful.
But at least I wrote... right?
OK.
I am done.
There are times that looking at progress on something makes one want to just say "that sucks", and toss it in the can, and move on to the next thing, whatever that is...
This is my five minutes of gripey, whiney bits looking at what I trying to do with this blog... the goal is to try to scrape rust off of writing, off of creativity, off of focus... putting it out in the open is an attempt at accountability.
Today it does not feel like it is doing anything useful.
But at least I wrote... right?
OK.
I am done.
12 August, 2016
What Value Fantasy?...
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories
31 July, 2016
*sigh*... More Problems With SJW In Gaming...
HERE is one (of many) lengthy rants about social justice problems in gaming. Intersectional politics rearing it's ugly head? Check. White shame? Check. Male guilt? Check. Heterosexism fault? Check.
I looked at her blog upon recommendation by a game designer and developer for whom I happen to think quite positively. Now I know that he is a believer in SJ, and one of his missions in the gaming community is to promote SJ. He is also a cool game designer and project developer. I can (and do) differ with him on the former and appreciate him on the later. I can like him as a designer and still think he is just flat wrong filtering his worldview through intersectionalism which I think is philosophically garbage.
But nonetheless, I looked at this blog and I see that she has lots of issues for which she blames white, heterosexual males. She had an abusive boyfriend... she had an abusive father... she had drug addiction problems... she has emotional problems. I don't fault her for the first two, can understand though not excuse the third, and also understand the last to be a genuine human condition that we all wrestle with, some more than others, and have myself suffered from, studied, and learned how to deal with when it occurs. Somehow, though, because the individuals who were abusive to her were white, male, and heterosexual, white male heterosexuals are as a group bear the blame for her problems...
...hmm...
So because I was bullied by bigger kids when I was little, or had conniving white girls make an elaborate entrapment scenario to get me into a seduction by a gay white boy in high school, or had my teeth punched out when I was mugged by a black male a few years later then... all taller, heavier, and stronger people, white, black, strait, gay, males and females on the planet are guilty of causing my problems in life? Or wait, do the girls get a pass for being white because they are girls? Does "girl" carry more or less weight than "white"? Does "boy" carry more or less weight than "gay"? Or did he get two points off for being "white" and "boy" and only one point up for being "gay" leaving him at a net -1 in intersectional value? Did "black" and "male" cancel each other out for a zero sum, but me as the recipient being "white" and "male" for a net -1 justify his assault, making him the real victim of the mugging? Or do some values have a higher intersectional score? Does "gay" get +2, whereas "female" gets only +1 because it is "cisgender"? Does "black" get +2 and brown only get +1? Bobby Jindal is darker than Barack Obama and has two parents who are Indian, while Obama is half black and half white... who knows how that one works out.
...WOW!... I'm going to be pretty lonely on this planet trying to figure out who I should write off on my grievance list...
The sad thing is, I am not sure that I could offer what I actually think is a more critical analysis of the problem, because, "mansplaining". It does not matter the content of my ideas, only the color of my skin and my sex. Is it even possible for her to understand that her problem is not white, heterosexual males, but rather individual human beings who are sinful? Has it ever occurred to her that she herself is sinful, and has done violence to herself by her own choices? Would it blow her mind if I said that ALL OF US... every breathing human on the planet... is guilty of a whole lot? Just maybe... the answer is not blaming people for their sex or skin color but rather blaming the quality of their ideas, the content of their character, and the fruit of their actions?
She is right to note that when she as a woman has been bullied at game conventions explicitly for being a woman, it is everyone's obligation to not let it pass. But it is also every bit as right to call her a bully when she blames "white" "male" "heterosexuals" for her problems.
UPDATE:
HERE and HERE are examples of why I think the game designer of the introduction is a cool guy, and while I'm sure it would take a great deal of conversation to persuade him of it, he lays out a case for respecting human persons regardless... being civil to persons with whom you disagree is pretty much color blind and gender neutral and predicated more on their humanness than their intersectional quotient. So once again, I defy any adherence to intersectionalism and stand on my Christian values about intrinsic value of persons while being very critical about adjudicating the value of ideas and behaviors.
The further discussion on his G+ page is over 150 entries long, and includes many hard core intersectional activists. There are complaints that someone on the comment chain that provoked the whole discussion are making people have panic attacks just reading them.
This is exactly the kind of rotten fruit that comes from intersectionalism. People with legitimate anxiety problems, or who do not start with them but are taught that the world is out to get them and that they are victims under serious assault whenever someone disagrees with them, are being continuously coddled and not taught how to deal with the problem, but rather how to exacerbate their anxieties by continuing to practice an intersectional worldview.
A little secret about the internet... words are cheap. Another one... without face to face contact, people get in the habit of magnifying their bad attitudes and behaviors (like people who give in to road rage). Everyone has a megaphone and many people use it. Yet another one... saying something does not make it so, even if it is a death threat from who knows where! (see the first secret). The biggest secret of all about the internet... YOU control your own access to it, and you can decide how to respond. If you have anxiety attacks from social media posts, your biggest problem is not the social media post, or the poster, or the social media... I can sympathize with the anxiety but I cannot excuse it continuing when you don't look for help. Real help - not some intersectional coffee klatch in a "safe space" echo chamber. I recommend something far older and more practical, like coffee with grandma, where you listen when she tells you that "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you"... unless you choose to be hurt.
I looked at her blog upon recommendation by a game designer and developer for whom I happen to think quite positively. Now I know that he is a believer in SJ, and one of his missions in the gaming community is to promote SJ. He is also a cool game designer and project developer. I can (and do) differ with him on the former and appreciate him on the later. I can like him as a designer and still think he is just flat wrong filtering his worldview through intersectionalism which I think is philosophically garbage.
But nonetheless, I looked at this blog and I see that she has lots of issues for which she blames white, heterosexual males. She had an abusive boyfriend... she had an abusive father... she had drug addiction problems... she has emotional problems. I don't fault her for the first two, can understand though not excuse the third, and also understand the last to be a genuine human condition that we all wrestle with, some more than others, and have myself suffered from, studied, and learned how to deal with when it occurs. Somehow, though, because the individuals who were abusive to her were white, male, and heterosexual, white male heterosexuals are as a group bear the blame for her problems...
...hmm...
So because I was bullied by bigger kids when I was little, or had conniving white girls make an elaborate entrapment scenario to get me into a seduction by a gay white boy in high school, or had my teeth punched out when I was mugged by a black male a few years later then... all taller, heavier, and stronger people, white, black, strait, gay, males and females on the planet are guilty of causing my problems in life? Or wait, do the girls get a pass for being white because they are girls? Does "girl" carry more or less weight than "white"? Does "boy" carry more or less weight than "gay"? Or did he get two points off for being "white" and "boy" and only one point up for being "gay" leaving him at a net -1 in intersectional value? Did "black" and "male" cancel each other out for a zero sum, but me as the recipient being "white" and "male" for a net -1 justify his assault, making him the real victim of the mugging? Or do some values have a higher intersectional score? Does "gay" get +2, whereas "female" gets only +1 because it is "cisgender"? Does "black" get +2 and brown only get +1? Bobby Jindal is darker than Barack Obama and has two parents who are Indian, while Obama is half black and half white... who knows how that one works out.
...WOW!... I'm going to be pretty lonely on this planet trying to figure out who I should write off on my grievance list...
The sad thing is, I am not sure that I could offer what I actually think is a more critical analysis of the problem, because, "mansplaining". It does not matter the content of my ideas, only the color of my skin and my sex. Is it even possible for her to understand that her problem is not white, heterosexual males, but rather individual human beings who are sinful? Has it ever occurred to her that she herself is sinful, and has done violence to herself by her own choices? Would it blow her mind if I said that ALL OF US... every breathing human on the planet... is guilty of a whole lot? Just maybe... the answer is not blaming people for their sex or skin color but rather blaming the quality of their ideas, the content of their character, and the fruit of their actions?
She is right to note that when she as a woman has been bullied at game conventions explicitly for being a woman, it is everyone's obligation to not let it pass. But it is also every bit as right to call her a bully when she blames "white" "male" "heterosexuals" for her problems.
UPDATE:
HERE and HERE are examples of why I think the game designer of the introduction is a cool guy, and while I'm sure it would take a great deal of conversation to persuade him of it, he lays out a case for respecting human persons regardless... being civil to persons with whom you disagree is pretty much color blind and gender neutral and predicated more on their humanness than their intersectional quotient. So once again, I defy any adherence to intersectionalism and stand on my Christian values about intrinsic value of persons while being very critical about adjudicating the value of ideas and behaviors.
The further discussion on his G+ page is over 150 entries long, and includes many hard core intersectional activists. There are complaints that someone on the comment chain that provoked the whole discussion are making people have panic attacks just reading them.
This is exactly the kind of rotten fruit that comes from intersectionalism. People with legitimate anxiety problems, or who do not start with them but are taught that the world is out to get them and that they are victims under serious assault whenever someone disagrees with them, are being continuously coddled and not taught how to deal with the problem, but rather how to exacerbate their anxieties by continuing to practice an intersectional worldview.
A little secret about the internet... words are cheap. Another one... without face to face contact, people get in the habit of magnifying their bad attitudes and behaviors (like people who give in to road rage). Everyone has a megaphone and many people use it. Yet another one... saying something does not make it so, even if it is a death threat from who knows where! (see the first secret). The biggest secret of all about the internet... YOU control your own access to it, and you can decide how to respond. If you have anxiety attacks from social media posts, your biggest problem is not the social media post, or the poster, or the social media... I can sympathize with the anxiety but I cannot excuse it continuing when you don't look for help. Real help - not some intersectional coffee klatch in a "safe space" echo chamber. I recommend something far older and more practical, like coffee with grandma, where you listen when she tells you that "sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you"... unless you choose to be hurt.
04 July, 2016
Truth Is Awesome When You Get To Make Up Your Own!
I was reading a game review tucked in with some other game discussions and found more serpents under the rocks. In discussing a character who in the game is a Bluebeard style serial killer, the allegations of patriarchal pathology reared their ugly head.
Now the game itself is of no interest to me, and I could care less about the reviewer's interest in the game. What I am interested in is the problematic politics that informs reviewers and players interests in games, and undoubtedly feeds designers. This little gem from liberal Berkeley professor Judith Butler came out of this gamer's reflections:
"any assignment of sex or gender is irreducibly a kind of violence, an oppressive act. As she writes in Bodies That Matter:
…'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve materialization through a forcible reiteration of norms. (Butler 1-2)"
Reading her bio, she is informed by such luminaries as sexy Sigmund Freud (oddly enough), and Derrida of the meaningless words. In essence, her most notable contribution from modern feminism to academia and the world, is that gender is something that is culturally learned through practice and has absolutely no natural connection to sex. Taking her notion to it's logical conclusion, one would have to wonder how all those cave men so long ago who presumably at some point had no codified "culture" to speak of, could possibly have learned that somehow male and female were complimentary sexually, and that maybe, just maybe, there was not only a correlation between the sexual behavior of male and female, bu that by nature, they did certain things and behaved certain ways not because of a "gendered" cultural construct but because they were naturally one thing and not another... for that matter, why do animals of all kinds somehow behave as if sex and sexual behavior are naturally linked? I wonder how many of Butler's academic peers ever lived on a farm...
but then the elitist snobbery of academia tends to have a pretty blinkered view of such earthy folk, but I digress.
So what we are taught by Butler, is that rather than teach our children that there are some things that are natural and beneficial behaviors due to the natural composition of our bodies, we should instead leave them with no guidance whatsoever. Now she is specifically referring to sexual behavior and understanding, but why should we separate that exclusively? How is it not oppressive violence for liberal ideologues to force compliance with their regulatory norms on others? Furthermore, if some of our behavior as a species actually does come out of what we naturally are, then is it not only violence to truth and reason to deny that there are behaviors that should be normatively encouraged, but violence of a kind that is oppressive to the species in general? It really is a matter of showing whether there is better reason to think that nature provides clues as to how we ought to behave or if we are somehow entirely transcendent of nature. That question is problematic for either the materialist or for the neo-gnostic, but not at all so for the substance dualist. I'm not sure exactly where Butler resides, but seeing that she is a fan of Derrida, I can bet comfortably that she is in the irrational camp of blithe relativism. And yet sadly, the camp that thinks that it can make up truth at convenience is the camp with no truth in it but by coincidence.
I fear that while she and her followers make accusations of the guilt of violence, they themselves are guilty of abusive neglect, encouraging a society to refrain from guiding children to understand what is natural and wholesome through normative behaviors. Just as we ought to encourage normative behaviors with what we eat by training our natural appetites to the right kind of foods, in the right amounts, at the right times, is it not rational to encourage normative sexual behavior based on the recognition that the appetite for sex is rooted also in nature? I would also question whether Butler and her disciples are not also the violent and oppressive party considering the aggressive action to force cultural regulation on society. Her brand of thinking is exactly the kind of thinking that has metastasized into all intersectional political social justice movements, for the benefit of a few and the hinderance of many.
I have a problem with promoting this kind of thinking in serious life, and I certainly have a problem with this kind of bullying in the games I play.
Now the game itself is of no interest to me, and I could care less about the reviewer's interest in the game. What I am interested in is the problematic politics that informs reviewers and players interests in games, and undoubtedly feeds designers. This little gem from liberal Berkeley professor Judith Butler came out of this gamer's reflections:
"any assignment of sex or gender is irreducibly a kind of violence, an oppressive act. As she writes in Bodies That Matter:
…'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize 'sex' and achieve materialization through a forcible reiteration of norms. (Butler 1-2)"
Reading her bio, she is informed by such luminaries as sexy Sigmund Freud (oddly enough), and Derrida of the meaningless words. In essence, her most notable contribution from modern feminism to academia and the world, is that gender is something that is culturally learned through practice and has absolutely no natural connection to sex. Taking her notion to it's logical conclusion, one would have to wonder how all those cave men so long ago who presumably at some point had no codified "culture" to speak of, could possibly have learned that somehow male and female were complimentary sexually, and that maybe, just maybe, there was not only a correlation between the sexual behavior of male and female, bu that by nature, they did certain things and behaved certain ways not because of a "gendered" cultural construct but because they were naturally one thing and not another... for that matter, why do animals of all kinds somehow behave as if sex and sexual behavior are naturally linked? I wonder how many of Butler's academic peers ever lived on a farm...
but then the elitist snobbery of academia tends to have a pretty blinkered view of such earthy folk, but I digress.
So what we are taught by Butler, is that rather than teach our children that there are some things that are natural and beneficial behaviors due to the natural composition of our bodies, we should instead leave them with no guidance whatsoever. Now she is specifically referring to sexual behavior and understanding, but why should we separate that exclusively? How is it not oppressive violence for liberal ideologues to force compliance with their regulatory norms on others? Furthermore, if some of our behavior as a species actually does come out of what we naturally are, then is it not only violence to truth and reason to deny that there are behaviors that should be normatively encouraged, but violence of a kind that is oppressive to the species in general? It really is a matter of showing whether there is better reason to think that nature provides clues as to how we ought to behave or if we are somehow entirely transcendent of nature. That question is problematic for either the materialist or for the neo-gnostic, but not at all so for the substance dualist. I'm not sure exactly where Butler resides, but seeing that she is a fan of Derrida, I can bet comfortably that she is in the irrational camp of blithe relativism. And yet sadly, the camp that thinks that it can make up truth at convenience is the camp with no truth in it but by coincidence.
I fear that while she and her followers make accusations of the guilt of violence, they themselves are guilty of abusive neglect, encouraging a society to refrain from guiding children to understand what is natural and wholesome through normative behaviors. Just as we ought to encourage normative behaviors with what we eat by training our natural appetites to the right kind of foods, in the right amounts, at the right times, is it not rational to encourage normative sexual behavior based on the recognition that the appetite for sex is rooted also in nature? I would also question whether Butler and her disciples are not also the violent and oppressive party considering the aggressive action to force cultural regulation on society. Her brand of thinking is exactly the kind of thinking that has metastasized into all intersectional political social justice movements, for the benefit of a few and the hinderance of many.
I have a problem with promoting this kind of thinking in serious life, and I certainly have a problem with this kind of bullying in the games I play.
24 May, 2016
Essential Human Experience
I'm going to go out on a limb and make the assertion that legions of social ills would cease to be were human beings to largely go outside of themselves more. Not as one wise person put it, to think less of themselves, but rather to think of themselves less.
This is no doubt a monumentally difficult challenge in today's world, doubly so in the modern west. We live in a culture that demands at every level that we consume. It makes many fewer demands that we produce. With operant conditioning in every electronic form we are invited to consume content like corn pellets, producing selfies, and getting rewarded with likes. Like Skinner's pigeons or Pavlov's dogs.
There are a whole lot of problems to think about and write about, but I'm going to assert that there is a short list of things that are essential to a full and sane and fulfilled human life. The list is simple, but hard to accomplish. Here it is:
1) experience birth
2) grow up with your mother and father and siblings
3) graduate into adulthood - (often marked by graduating school but this has more to do with learning the basic skills needed to contribute as an adult)
4) get your first job on your own
5) get married to a person with whom you can produce a family
6) participate in the childbirth experience and practice parenting
7) let your children go
8) let your job go
9) let go of your fear of death
10) master each step and move on to the next, and do not fail to keep taking steps
I am convinced that these are all essential, and that to skip any of them is to rob ourselves of something profound and priceless, and because we do not live in a vacuum, to likewise rob others by what we fail to do.
I am convinced that each of these steps requires us to sacrifice something deeply important to us in order to take up something bigger and outside of ourselves, and the emptying of self produces giving to others as a natural consequence. The more we can empty ourselves of selfishness, the more we can hold of something greater, and the more we can give to others, so again, even if we don't take away from others per se, every bit of selfishness we hold on to is that much more that we deprive others of, which is tantamount to the same thing.
Ten seems a paradox, but I would argue that mastery of each step is a process, not a binary possession, and therefore while continuing to hone the former you can still begin the later.
I am quite convinced that many of the things that we do instead of one or another of these are nothing more than clever counterfeits, undoubtedly supported by a tapestry of sophistries to justify. Nonetheless, whether it is refusing to grow up and take up adult responsibilities, or refusing to sacrifice self to another in the full commitment of marriage, choosing a dog instead of children, or failing to let go of children and letting them live their own lives... all of these are failures to have the courage to burn your ships on the shore and go forward into a bigger, if unknown country. But that is what is demanded to grow up fully as a human being.
There may be more (undoubtedly there is) than this, but I think that is it in a nutshell... I will have to think on this and write more as I do.
This is no doubt a monumentally difficult challenge in today's world, doubly so in the modern west. We live in a culture that demands at every level that we consume. It makes many fewer demands that we produce. With operant conditioning in every electronic form we are invited to consume content like corn pellets, producing selfies, and getting rewarded with likes. Like Skinner's pigeons or Pavlov's dogs.
There are a whole lot of problems to think about and write about, but I'm going to assert that there is a short list of things that are essential to a full and sane and fulfilled human life. The list is simple, but hard to accomplish. Here it is:
1) experience birth
2) grow up with your mother and father and siblings
3) graduate into adulthood - (often marked by graduating school but this has more to do with learning the basic skills needed to contribute as an adult)
4) get your first job on your own
5) get married to a person with whom you can produce a family
6) participate in the childbirth experience and practice parenting
7) let your children go
8) let your job go
9) let go of your fear of death
10) master each step and move on to the next, and do not fail to keep taking steps
I am convinced that these are all essential, and that to skip any of them is to rob ourselves of something profound and priceless, and because we do not live in a vacuum, to likewise rob others by what we fail to do.
I am convinced that each of these steps requires us to sacrifice something deeply important to us in order to take up something bigger and outside of ourselves, and the emptying of self produces giving to others as a natural consequence. The more we can empty ourselves of selfishness, the more we can hold of something greater, and the more we can give to others, so again, even if we don't take away from others per se, every bit of selfishness we hold on to is that much more that we deprive others of, which is tantamount to the same thing.
Ten seems a paradox, but I would argue that mastery of each step is a process, not a binary possession, and therefore while continuing to hone the former you can still begin the later.
I am quite convinced that many of the things that we do instead of one or another of these are nothing more than clever counterfeits, undoubtedly supported by a tapestry of sophistries to justify. Nonetheless, whether it is refusing to grow up and take up adult responsibilities, or refusing to sacrifice self to another in the full commitment of marriage, choosing a dog instead of children, or failing to let go of children and letting them live their own lives... all of these are failures to have the courage to burn your ships on the shore and go forward into a bigger, if unknown country. But that is what is demanded to grow up fully as a human being.
There may be more (undoubtedly there is) than this, but I think that is it in a nutshell... I will have to think on this and write more as I do.
Where My Worldview Peeks Out Of My Game-As-Art Thinking
I got an email the other day with an update link to the pdf for a game world for Fate that I have, as it seems in final edit they missed something. The message with the link made great apologies for the insensitivity of using hurtful language that goes against the social justice ethic of the publisher. The reason for the revision? In the description of one adversary (a specter), it notes that if attacked, it will defend lamely, as in ineffectually. The apology makes it clear that the publisher and writer does not endorse "ableism", therefore requiring a revision.
I declined to get the previous two Fate Worlds, one of which set off a firestorm on G+ over the observation by one poster that: 1) the setting is about crews in stuffy, cramped deep sea submarines with all manner of exposed pipes, conduits, and controls, and 2) one of the pre-gens is a character in a wheelchair. There is evidently no effort to reconcile how a wheelchair bound character maneuvers in the environment described, or deals with the raised hatches through compartments. The poster began a conversation stating that it broke willing suspension of disbelief, and was initially addressed by another poster who as an engineer gave some plausible reasons to accept the conditions. The firestorm quickly degenerated into a virtual lynching of the original poster for being an oppressive white male able-bodied jerk and he was banned for 30 days to suffer his guilt which led to an excessively vile post bloated with vitriolic invective against everyone else which led to the whole thread being removed.
Go, go social justice...
As I write about games as art and game design, I have always the burner to my left the awareness of "social justice" as a priority with most of the game designers in the indie sphere that interests me most. And yet, I find that I respectfully disagree with them. The fact is, that as a Christian, I too have a particular worldview that informs how I think people should be treated and what is in good or bad taste. Very often, the actions I take are the same as those of the social justice warriors of a more leftist slant. My problem is, that I think while their actions may sometimes be right, their underlying motives are based on a false worldview. They were in the instance above, willing to viciously destroy a real person online for not holding a politically correct view of white male ableist guilt because he questioned an entirely fictitious character in a situation that was certainly not described believably. They claimed that they wanted to be as inclusive as possible to everyone, but assumed guilt from the original poster without addressing his idea (beyond the engineer who initially tried). The neo-liberal worldview of intersectional political victim claiming, is something that I cannot endorse.So as I read games and design notes and designer blogs, I am constantly thinking about how to write and design games artistically, in a way that as Aristotle would describes it, represents "not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance".
Of course, sometimes a game is just a way to relax and have fun, but I do like the notion of a game being able to transcend just that, becoming in the play, an experience as well, like a novel or good movie. In thinking about ways I might explore ideas and thought experiments I am informed by my worldview. This is not to say that I am inclined to make games that are religious per se, or require them to be squeaky clean. I do want them to be true though. Life is messy, and people are messy, foolish, selfish and sinful, and in spite of that, there are moments in which people shine and are heroic. This is part of the reason that Fate as a system is so appealing to me - it makes the failures and flaws as important as the rest to the fiction. I am interested in that quality, and I simply can't find that sort of honesty in social justice political correctness that seeks to demolish the world and whitewash the pieces.
It is perhaps because I hold the Christian worldview dear that I am not disturbed to dip into Lovecraft's mythos for games and stories. His weird fiction shows his own worldview, and while I think he is dead wrong about that, that worldview does present a consistency that promotes madness for those who follow it far enough. And that mad world is indeed one that shows something terrible and destructive, and shows those who dare to try to hold it back for another day as in The Dunwich Horror. To face and fight against that seems very true to the right way to address the problem of inimical entities who assume morality is irrelevant and are bent on destruction. My worldview grounds the action in the notion that ultimate goodness is ultimately rational, and that it is appropriate to fight monsters, and disregard the nihilists who idolize them too far. After all, if interacting with and discovering the occult reality of these immensely powerful malignant alien entities drives one mad, and the mad men tell us that the world is ultimately futile and meaningless and insane, how can we trust them? Are not the thoughts of mad men and their understanding of reality suspect?
But what of things less mind-destroying and closer to home? What of social justice? I believe that what is good and right is what a Jewish carpenter said was good and right. I don't believe that people's feelings determine what is good and right. I don't believe that writing to make sure that nobody feels unrepresented in a story makes a story good. I don't believe that including a word that might make someone feel bad and "trigger" them makes a story bad. I think that a story must be taken as a whole to determine it's worth. As for a submarine with a wheelchair bound character - I would not include that without some discussion on why the wheelchair is not more of a liability than the crew can bear, and I think the engineer in the aforementioned discussion presented some thoughts that the writer of the Fate world did not. I think that hand wringing over the use of the word lame because it might somehow offend someone with a walking disability is childish and promotes a pathological and divisive mindset more than it solves one. I think that respecting human persons does not require respecting all their ideas, shortcomings, or feelings, nor is it oppression to disagree. I do think that I can appreciate and learn from designers with whom I disagree. I wonder if some of them would offer the same courtesy?
I declined to get the previous two Fate Worlds, one of which set off a firestorm on G+ over the observation by one poster that: 1) the setting is about crews in stuffy, cramped deep sea submarines with all manner of exposed pipes, conduits, and controls, and 2) one of the pre-gens is a character in a wheelchair. There is evidently no effort to reconcile how a wheelchair bound character maneuvers in the environment described, or deals with the raised hatches through compartments. The poster began a conversation stating that it broke willing suspension of disbelief, and was initially addressed by another poster who as an engineer gave some plausible reasons to accept the conditions. The firestorm quickly degenerated into a virtual lynching of the original poster for being an oppressive white male able-bodied jerk and he was banned for 30 days to suffer his guilt which led to an excessively vile post bloated with vitriolic invective against everyone else which led to the whole thread being removed.
Go, go social justice...
As I write about games as art and game design, I have always the burner to my left the awareness of "social justice" as a priority with most of the game designers in the indie sphere that interests me most. And yet, I find that I respectfully disagree with them. The fact is, that as a Christian, I too have a particular worldview that informs how I think people should be treated and what is in good or bad taste. Very often, the actions I take are the same as those of the social justice warriors of a more leftist slant. My problem is, that I think while their actions may sometimes be right, their underlying motives are based on a false worldview. They were in the instance above, willing to viciously destroy a real person online for not holding a politically correct view of white male ableist guilt because he questioned an entirely fictitious character in a situation that was certainly not described believably. They claimed that they wanted to be as inclusive as possible to everyone, but assumed guilt from the original poster without addressing his idea (beyond the engineer who initially tried). The neo-liberal worldview of intersectional political victim claiming, is something that I cannot endorse.So as I read games and design notes and designer blogs, I am constantly thinking about how to write and design games artistically, in a way that as Aristotle would describes it, represents "not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance".
Of course, sometimes a game is just a way to relax and have fun, but I do like the notion of a game being able to transcend just that, becoming in the play, an experience as well, like a novel or good movie. In thinking about ways I might explore ideas and thought experiments I am informed by my worldview. This is not to say that I am inclined to make games that are religious per se, or require them to be squeaky clean. I do want them to be true though. Life is messy, and people are messy, foolish, selfish and sinful, and in spite of that, there are moments in which people shine and are heroic. This is part of the reason that Fate as a system is so appealing to me - it makes the failures and flaws as important as the rest to the fiction. I am interested in that quality, and I simply can't find that sort of honesty in social justice political correctness that seeks to demolish the world and whitewash the pieces.
It is perhaps because I hold the Christian worldview dear that I am not disturbed to dip into Lovecraft's mythos for games and stories. His weird fiction shows his own worldview, and while I think he is dead wrong about that, that worldview does present a consistency that promotes madness for those who follow it far enough. And that mad world is indeed one that shows something terrible and destructive, and shows those who dare to try to hold it back for another day as in The Dunwich Horror. To face and fight against that seems very true to the right way to address the problem of inimical entities who assume morality is irrelevant and are bent on destruction. My worldview grounds the action in the notion that ultimate goodness is ultimately rational, and that it is appropriate to fight monsters, and disregard the nihilists who idolize them too far. After all, if interacting with and discovering the occult reality of these immensely powerful malignant alien entities drives one mad, and the mad men tell us that the world is ultimately futile and meaningless and insane, how can we trust them? Are not the thoughts of mad men and their understanding of reality suspect?
But what of things less mind-destroying and closer to home? What of social justice? I believe that what is good and right is what a Jewish carpenter said was good and right. I don't believe that people's feelings determine what is good and right. I don't believe that writing to make sure that nobody feels unrepresented in a story makes a story good. I don't believe that including a word that might make someone feel bad and "trigger" them makes a story bad. I think that a story must be taken as a whole to determine it's worth. As for a submarine with a wheelchair bound character - I would not include that without some discussion on why the wheelchair is not more of a liability than the crew can bear, and I think the engineer in the aforementioned discussion presented some thoughts that the writer of the Fate world did not. I think that hand wringing over the use of the word lame because it might somehow offend someone with a walking disability is childish and promotes a pathological and divisive mindset more than it solves one. I think that respecting human persons does not require respecting all their ideas, shortcomings, or feelings, nor is it oppression to disagree. I do think that I can appreciate and learn from designers with whom I disagree. I wonder if some of them would offer the same courtesy?
05 May, 2016
Problems with Liberal Politics in Game Design
In the indie game design space, as well as outward from that, there is a great deal of discussion about the importance of "diversity" in gaming and game design. I agree, so long as diversity means diverse, which by definition ignores such notions as pathologies of privilege from white / male / heterosexual / able / western / Christians, and actually is agnostic of who a game design comes from. The idea counts... not the identity of the designer. Furthermore, if a game forum claims to stand against "discrimination" while shaming people for not checking their privilege in discussions, is problematic; when discrimination is based on identity while celebrating every kind of "transgressive" idea the discrimination is both actually being practiced (sometimes very aggressively) and not applied to the right thing (the thinking). Again, it is ideas that should matter in games, not the identity of the designer.
Case in point... there is a game that is in my top shelf list of indie games called The Quiet Year. The idea is that a society in the ruins of some previous society, has a year - four seasons - to confront their situation, face the challenges, and see what they can build before a bad thing happens at the end of the year (when the game ends). This is, I think a clever and universal concept piece, both timeless and applicable to potentially any human society. Furthermore, the game is elegantly simple in the mechanics, played essentially with nothing more than a deck of cards and a shared map that continues to be elaborated on collectively as play proceeds. The cards represent different kinds of events based on suit and number, and the map provides an artifact of play.
There is a followup called The Deep Forest. This one is not so well made, and the further I read, the less I liked it. It takes the same basic framework, but makes the characters all monsters who are rebuilding a tolerant society and the bad thing that is coming, is humans. The further it goes, the sillier it gets with sentimental goblins, victimized ogres, and monsters that are anything but as they prepare for the diabolic threat of humans! This is all fine and good, if subverting the trope is done for laughs as it plays with the collision of the unexpected and the unacceptable. Only, it turns out that the author, who wrote the original The Quiet Year, is now not who he says he is as he is now a she, and as explained in "her" essay at the end of The Deep Forest is his metaphor for the plight of the "Other" who is unfairly demonized by the wicked privilege and oppression of the establishment. The game is meant to be taken seriously, not humorously, and as a social activist piece it seems.
But wait! you say... what about, for example, virtually all of White Wolf's games, which put you in the skin of the monster? Why do those get a pass? Why take those seriously?
Those games (I can't speak about the latest editions), DO address the idea of being a monster, and DO address being an outsider and a sort of other... but at the end of the day, the vampires are only as monstrous as their lack of humanity, the werewolves only as monstrous as their lack of control over the beast. Humanity is not the problem... it is the cure, or at least the stabilizing treatment for the problem which is embracing the monster too far. There is in whatever imperfect fashion, the notion that there is some transcendent right and wrong that has little to do with how the monster feels about who they are. Accelerate culture through two generations of post-modern liberal education and we find designers making games that celebrate the monster because of their feelings of victimization and revile humanity in general as the wicked oppressor because they don't feel the same.
The value of monsters in stories is to show what is... well, monstrous. The mythic function of the monster is to put a shape and a skin on the things that are (and should be) harmful, fearful, loathsome, and reprehensible to humanity. It is not about how the monster feels - that is a different kind of story. Beauty and the Beast, and Bearskin are not primarily monster stories, but rather perception stories. Postmodern political thinking has made legions unable to distinguish the difference.
Now I don't argue that games can, as an art form, provide a way to play with serious ideas at a remove that allows them to be dealt with as ideas rather than unpleasant experiences. I think that the designer of The Quiet Year is in general a good designer - I have a couple of his games in my top shelf file (The Quiet Year and Perfect). Others, not so much (Monster Hearts and The Deep Forest). I dig his designer mission statement HERE. But bad politics based on bad philosophy is likely to corrupt good game design. This is a problem with so many of the small games out in indie space, the primary goal of which is to be a communication vehicle for social justice activism. The only game that I think pulls off the feat of making a smart conversation piece for more liberal political thought is one that is at least as much classical liberalism (unwittingly I suspect) as neo-liberalism. That one is Dog Eat Dog, which is about the consequences of colonialism. Now I don't agree with the fullness of designer Liam Burke's conclusions in the essay afterward, but I think the game is both elegantly designed and has an interesting high concept.
I think the biggest problem in the indie game space is not, as so often asserted, the lack of diversity or the problem of privilege, but rather that so many of the designers are consumed with intersectional political theory which assumes that unquestioningly assumes that:
1) a matrix of oppression is institutionalized in society (especially western societies)
2) the oppression is roughly defined by the dichotomies of who is privileged and who is oppressed in any given interaction
3) only the oppressed class possesses the wisdom, character, and experience to understand the
problem
4) the privileged class is inherently incapable of understanding and thus commenting on, questioning, or critiquing the theory as that would either display ignorance or oppressive behavior
5) the nature of the oppression is to shame, demean, deprive, bully, and silence the oppressed class
6) being oppressed justifies and excuses the exact same behaviors if they are committed against the privileged class
So, Power = Privilege = Oppression = Bad
and, Oppressed = Bad = Enlightened = Justified
and thus, Oppressed = Justified in taking Power to overturn the Privileged = Good
But somehow the naked greed and envy and pride in collecting more and more victim cred to justify using power to oppress is not hypocrisy?... Haven't we seen this in France in 1789, and Russia in 1917, and Germany in 1933, and China in 1958, and on and on?... only the labels change.
(Ooops... no questions allowed here... this is a safe space from microaggressions!)
That this comes out of marxist political theory, and has been shaped by the Orwellian distopian strategies of double-speak, lies and propaganda is not surprising. It feels just like it could have been elucidated by the conspirators on Animal Farm. I'm not really of the belief that many of the bright young designers in the indie game space mean to do harm - quite the opposite. I just think they don't really get the problems of the worldview that they are endorsing, and when it comes out in their designs, it really stinks. The fact that the bloodbath is merely verbal in the social media commons does not prevent it from being repellant.
Wouldn't it be better, if indie game designers were more concerned with interesting ideas than with the phantom privilege in gaming? Like Downfall, by Caroline Hobbs. She is a great game designer, and Downfall is a really cool idea game, malleable to many many kinds of stories. I don't know what her political views are marxist, or anti-marxist, or anarchist or otherwise. But she is a cool game maker. Do I care that Caroline is in the "oppressed" class? Nope, not a whit, because I am concerned with the fact that she has a great idea. If I knew her personally and was seeking hypothetically to date her, then it would matter a lot that she was a woman. But as a thinking human who designs games, she is much cooler as far as I'm concerned.
Maybe there is a good game hack in all this... an inversion of Dog Eat Dog maybe?...
Case in point... there is a game that is in my top shelf list of indie games called The Quiet Year. The idea is that a society in the ruins of some previous society, has a year - four seasons - to confront their situation, face the challenges, and see what they can build before a bad thing happens at the end of the year (when the game ends). This is, I think a clever and universal concept piece, both timeless and applicable to potentially any human society. Furthermore, the game is elegantly simple in the mechanics, played essentially with nothing more than a deck of cards and a shared map that continues to be elaborated on collectively as play proceeds. The cards represent different kinds of events based on suit and number, and the map provides an artifact of play.
There is a followup called The Deep Forest. This one is not so well made, and the further I read, the less I liked it. It takes the same basic framework, but makes the characters all monsters who are rebuilding a tolerant society and the bad thing that is coming, is humans. The further it goes, the sillier it gets with sentimental goblins, victimized ogres, and monsters that are anything but as they prepare for the diabolic threat of humans! This is all fine and good, if subverting the trope is done for laughs as it plays with the collision of the unexpected and the unacceptable. Only, it turns out that the author, who wrote the original The Quiet Year, is now not who he says he is as he is now a she, and as explained in "her" essay at the end of The Deep Forest is his metaphor for the plight of the "Other" who is unfairly demonized by the wicked privilege and oppression of the establishment. The game is meant to be taken seriously, not humorously, and as a social activist piece it seems.
But wait! you say... what about, for example, virtually all of White Wolf's games, which put you in the skin of the monster? Why do those get a pass? Why take those seriously?
Those games (I can't speak about the latest editions), DO address the idea of being a monster, and DO address being an outsider and a sort of other... but at the end of the day, the vampires are only as monstrous as their lack of humanity, the werewolves only as monstrous as their lack of control over the beast. Humanity is not the problem... it is the cure, or at least the stabilizing treatment for the problem which is embracing the monster too far. There is in whatever imperfect fashion, the notion that there is some transcendent right and wrong that has little to do with how the monster feels about who they are. Accelerate culture through two generations of post-modern liberal education and we find designers making games that celebrate the monster because of their feelings of victimization and revile humanity in general as the wicked oppressor because they don't feel the same.
The value of monsters in stories is to show what is... well, monstrous. The mythic function of the monster is to put a shape and a skin on the things that are (and should be) harmful, fearful, loathsome, and reprehensible to humanity. It is not about how the monster feels - that is a different kind of story. Beauty and the Beast, and Bearskin are not primarily monster stories, but rather perception stories. Postmodern political thinking has made legions unable to distinguish the difference.
Now I don't argue that games can, as an art form, provide a way to play with serious ideas at a remove that allows them to be dealt with as ideas rather than unpleasant experiences. I think that the designer of The Quiet Year is in general a good designer - I have a couple of his games in my top shelf file (The Quiet Year and Perfect). Others, not so much (Monster Hearts and The Deep Forest). I dig his designer mission statement HERE. But bad politics based on bad philosophy is likely to corrupt good game design. This is a problem with so many of the small games out in indie space, the primary goal of which is to be a communication vehicle for social justice activism. The only game that I think pulls off the feat of making a smart conversation piece for more liberal political thought is one that is at least as much classical liberalism (unwittingly I suspect) as neo-liberalism. That one is Dog Eat Dog, which is about the consequences of colonialism. Now I don't agree with the fullness of designer Liam Burke's conclusions in the essay afterward, but I think the game is both elegantly designed and has an interesting high concept.
I think the biggest problem in the indie game space is not, as so often asserted, the lack of diversity or the problem of privilege, but rather that so many of the designers are consumed with intersectional political theory which assumes that unquestioningly assumes that:
1) a matrix of oppression is institutionalized in society (especially western societies)
2) the oppression is roughly defined by the dichotomies of who is privileged and who is oppressed in any given interaction
3) only the oppressed class possesses the wisdom, character, and experience to understand the
problem
4) the privileged class is inherently incapable of understanding and thus commenting on, questioning, or critiquing the theory as that would either display ignorance or oppressive behavior
5) the nature of the oppression is to shame, demean, deprive, bully, and silence the oppressed class
6) being oppressed justifies and excuses the exact same behaviors if they are committed against the privileged class
So, Power = Privilege = Oppression = Bad
and, Oppressed = Bad = Enlightened = Justified
and thus, Oppressed = Justified in taking Power to overturn the Privileged = Good
But somehow the naked greed and envy and pride in collecting more and more victim cred to justify using power to oppress is not hypocrisy?... Haven't we seen this in France in 1789, and Russia in 1917, and Germany in 1933, and China in 1958, and on and on?... only the labels change.
(Ooops... no questions allowed here... this is a safe space from microaggressions!)
That this comes out of marxist political theory, and has been shaped by the Orwellian distopian strategies of double-speak, lies and propaganda is not surprising. It feels just like it could have been elucidated by the conspirators on Animal Farm. I'm not really of the belief that many of the bright young designers in the indie game space mean to do harm - quite the opposite. I just think they don't really get the problems of the worldview that they are endorsing, and when it comes out in their designs, it really stinks. The fact that the bloodbath is merely verbal in the social media commons does not prevent it from being repellant.
Wouldn't it be better, if indie game designers were more concerned with interesting ideas than with the phantom privilege in gaming? Like Downfall, by Caroline Hobbs. She is a great game designer, and Downfall is a really cool idea game, malleable to many many kinds of stories. I don't know what her political views are marxist, or anti-marxist, or anarchist or otherwise. But she is a cool game maker. Do I care that Caroline is in the "oppressed" class? Nope, not a whit, because I am concerned with the fact that she has a great idea. If I knew her personally and was seeking hypothetically to date her, then it would matter a lot that she was a woman. But as a thinking human who designs games, she is much cooler as far as I'm concerned.
Maybe there is a good game hack in all this... an inversion of Dog Eat Dog maybe?...
21 April, 2016
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
I am inclined to be a strong advocate of verisimilitude in art, by which I mean, that good art has to be believable even if it is about super heroes, or dragons. It vexes me for instance, when people discussing even so trivial a matter as a game world say, "the magic can be whatever we want it to be!" with no care as to what it is about or what it means. The "magic", is whatever the conceit of the fiction is, whether it has to do with fantasy wizards, or pseudo-science zombie apocalypse, etc.
On the one hand, they are quite right. As a matter of entertainment, you can do whatever makes you giggle. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is just a game after all, and (with rare exceptions) it does not provide you with food to eat, or clothes to keep out the cold, and all your fictions are so many paper leaves that will never love you back. Games are certainly trivial in that regard.
On the other hand, I keep recalling something about games as art that Jenova Chen (founder of That Game Company) said. Writing in his grad thesis, he reveals that it was a disturbing fact that as he got older, he found the (video) games he loved so much as a child to be less emotionally satisfying the older he got. He wanted to find ways to make them more emotionally compelling. He wanted to deepen the experience to be something that could be satisfying to adults as well. I would agree. For me as well, (tabletop) games provided a large part of my social grounding growing up, and I would add, a fair amount of grounding for my intellectual development as well. I'm not sure that I would have been so interested now in the history of the early twentieth century had I not first discovered Call of Cthulhu, and began to wonder more about the world that these cryptic terrors inhabited, for I had been exclusively steeped in pseudo medievalist fantasy games prior to that.
So I came across this interesting quote by the scintillating Mr. Aristotle in The Poetics:
"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."
He is talking about the use of possibilities and probabilities in fiction (more precisely in drama) mattering in evaluating the quality of the art (and I wondered if Theater History I would ever be useful!). In other words, dramatically satisfying fiction must be bolted to things that are believable to the human experience. Another way to look at it, is that the most convincing lies are 9/10 true. Zombies? Fine. Dragons? OK. Light speed space ships? Great. Verisimilitude must still have people that behave like people are actually known to do when confronted with dead things, gigantic scaly predators, and in a vast, empty expanse inimical to human life.
Mitigating the unlikelihood does not change this rule; it merely means that you have added subjective misunderstandings to the characters, but not to the objective "reality" of the fiction.
It has been years since I read Poetics, and I forgot that I'd read this, but I cannot recommend enough the reading of this book for narrativist minded games because of gems like this.
On the one hand, they are quite right. As a matter of entertainment, you can do whatever makes you giggle. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is just a game after all, and (with rare exceptions) it does not provide you with food to eat, or clothes to keep out the cold, and all your fictions are so many paper leaves that will never love you back. Games are certainly trivial in that regard.
On the other hand, I keep recalling something about games as art that Jenova Chen (founder of That Game Company) said. Writing in his grad thesis, he reveals that it was a disturbing fact that as he got older, he found the (video) games he loved so much as a child to be less emotionally satisfying the older he got. He wanted to find ways to make them more emotionally compelling. He wanted to deepen the experience to be something that could be satisfying to adults as well. I would agree. For me as well, (tabletop) games provided a large part of my social grounding growing up, and I would add, a fair amount of grounding for my intellectual development as well. I'm not sure that I would have been so interested now in the history of the early twentieth century had I not first discovered Call of Cthulhu, and began to wonder more about the world that these cryptic terrors inhabited, for I had been exclusively steeped in pseudo medievalist fantasy games prior to that.
So I came across this interesting quote by the scintillating Mr. Aristotle in The Poetics:
"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."
He is talking about the use of possibilities and probabilities in fiction (more precisely in drama) mattering in evaluating the quality of the art (and I wondered if Theater History I would ever be useful!). In other words, dramatically satisfying fiction must be bolted to things that are believable to the human experience. Another way to look at it, is that the most convincing lies are 9/10 true. Zombies? Fine. Dragons? OK. Light speed space ships? Great. Verisimilitude must still have people that behave like people are actually known to do when confronted with dead things, gigantic scaly predators, and in a vast, empty expanse inimical to human life.
Mitigating the unlikelihood does not change this rule; it merely means that you have added subjective misunderstandings to the characters, but not to the objective "reality" of the fiction.
It has been years since I read Poetics, and I forgot that I'd read this, but I cannot recommend enough the reading of this book for narrativist minded games because of gems like this.
17 April, 2016
Sci-Fi Tech and Humanity
I was looking at a couple articles today on BBC news and something that +Jacob Possin was thinking about on his G+ page. He was thinking about a semi-hard sci-fi setting and asking what kinds of tech others would think was important.
What occurred to me immediately, is that I'm at least as interested in how we are impacted as human beings by the technology we create as I am in just the mere capabilities of it as so often originally conceived. See, inventors mostly create new tech to solve a problem that they see. Often this has to do with a production or efficiency issue. However, what gets interesting (all too often in a distopian way) is how the tech gets used to manipulate and overcome other people in one fashion or another that has nothing to do with or the opposite intention of the original purpose. Facebook, the thing that was allegedly made to bring friends together, has also created new ways to anonymously gang up on and virtually assault people, sometimes to the point of their choice to suicide. It is also one of the largest data mining operations on the planet, and has been discovered manipulating data streams to bias political news to favor one side over the other based on whether the stories showed the party in a favorable or unfavorable light. Also, studies have shown that the highest users of Facebook have shown an overall decrease in happiness using it over time.
Not quite the invention it promised to be.
So the BBC story I was reading, also about Facebook, described the phenomenon in which as many as 30 million users who were now deceased, but still had active accounts, and sometimes, active data streams with continually updating content. The person was still "virtually alive" according to Facebook. One presumes that the content on the page over time continues to feed the profile picture of this person which generates the advertisements they get and the real junk mail and free promotional bait they get mailed to them.
The machine continues to seek for the ghost in the machine.
So what if your sci-fi Jovian moon colony, having to be self-sufficient for years at a time, and with asynchronous communication, has the latest communication and network tech. Say they have a real "network of things" in which virtually every machine of any kind from comm tech to basic construction tools on inventory all are chipped and part of the net. Suppose everybody is connected continuously to their version of Google Glass as a way of keeping records, gathering efficiency data, and providing a safety net. The Glass is likely to be a cyber implant somehow (possibly reversible possibly not) and is part of the network overseen by the Siri or Echo like AI that continues to keep the data and, like Siri or Echo, provide an internet voice to the database. The colony is sustainable enough that it is actually providing an economic return (be it ever so modest) to Homeworld, and thus has it's own modest economy. With 3D printing and aggressive, largely automated recycling factories on the moon, and the annual drone container ships bringing in new goods, there is a modest local version of Amazon mashed up with Makerbot catalogs. Because Siri tracks your social media data stream, it creates a virtual you, and a virtual profile of what you consume, so it auto orders and auto prints or delivers what it decides you want on a routine basis. Based on your profile, Siri auto-replies for you to those in your circles so you don't have to be interrupted in your personalized version of the latest Hollywood blockbuster (only a month old) which stars the CG star of your choice. "You" can like back effortlessly. Work at the colony goes on, happy, comfortable, productive...
Until the plague.
A mutated super virus that wipes everyone out in short order. As people die, their virtual profile continues to "live on", moderated and updated by Siri, continuing to have virtual dialogues with other profile users. As more die, fewer live posts feed the data stream, and their content skews the profiling algorithms, which eventually skews everyone's data stream living or dead, and thus their profile over time to some degree. But the auto conversation between virtual users continues. Siri does not care about contact... only input and ouput and data.
The moon colony continues to hum for years, though at a reduced rate, and the responses generated and resource shipments back to Homeworld become increasingly odd... repetative, sometimes non-sequitur, and in a schizophrenic fugue. When an investigating team eventually arrives over a decade later, what they find is a ghost planet, populated by the technologic undead specters of the past.
* * *
I continued to chew on this idea and had a thought experiment for a little sort-of world building game.
How does future tech versions of some modern or near future tech in the shadow of human vice change society?
So the players each take turns picking an item of future tech and these are listed down the right. Then everyone discusses each node with a cardinal sin, and they determine what society does with this.
For instance, custom organ printing. In the shadow of Envy, we might ask, first, is the printer a Sharper Image printer? Or a WalMart printer? Top dollar tissue or does it require a one year contract of anti-rejection drugs? This could be like the I-phone vs. free offer phone choice, with status being afforded to those who can pay.
Gluttony as discussed in classics does not exclusively refer to eating too much, but to consuming in excess. In the shadow of Gluttony, an organ upgrade addict is the pathological step beyond the piercing or plastic surgery addict. Or you could just go there, and call Gluttony an excessive desire to eat...
Greed easily dovetails with both the above if you are the salesman chasing the next commission selling the custom organ printers by preying on all the vices, vanities, fears and self-loathing that consume the buyers.
Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath can undoubtedly be found overshadowing their own organ printers. In a world taken one step further from our reality TV, convenience consumer culture, "re-skinning" takes on a much more disturbing meaning if you can print the bone, cartilage, and skin to look like the latest Kardashian...
What occurred to me immediately, is that I'm at least as interested in how we are impacted as human beings by the technology we create as I am in just the mere capabilities of it as so often originally conceived. See, inventors mostly create new tech to solve a problem that they see. Often this has to do with a production or efficiency issue. However, what gets interesting (all too often in a distopian way) is how the tech gets used to manipulate and overcome other people in one fashion or another that has nothing to do with or the opposite intention of the original purpose. Facebook, the thing that was allegedly made to bring friends together, has also created new ways to anonymously gang up on and virtually assault people, sometimes to the point of their choice to suicide. It is also one of the largest data mining operations on the planet, and has been discovered manipulating data streams to bias political news to favor one side over the other based on whether the stories showed the party in a favorable or unfavorable light. Also, studies have shown that the highest users of Facebook have shown an overall decrease in happiness using it over time.
Not quite the invention it promised to be.
So the BBC story I was reading, also about Facebook, described the phenomenon in which as many as 30 million users who were now deceased, but still had active accounts, and sometimes, active data streams with continually updating content. The person was still "virtually alive" according to Facebook. One presumes that the content on the page over time continues to feed the profile picture of this person which generates the advertisements they get and the real junk mail and free promotional bait they get mailed to them.
The machine continues to seek for the ghost in the machine.
So what if your sci-fi Jovian moon colony, having to be self-sufficient for years at a time, and with asynchronous communication, has the latest communication and network tech. Say they have a real "network of things" in which virtually every machine of any kind from comm tech to basic construction tools on inventory all are chipped and part of the net. Suppose everybody is connected continuously to their version of Google Glass as a way of keeping records, gathering efficiency data, and providing a safety net. The Glass is likely to be a cyber implant somehow (possibly reversible possibly not) and is part of the network overseen by the Siri or Echo like AI that continues to keep the data and, like Siri or Echo, provide an internet voice to the database. The colony is sustainable enough that it is actually providing an economic return (be it ever so modest) to Homeworld, and thus has it's own modest economy. With 3D printing and aggressive, largely automated recycling factories on the moon, and the annual drone container ships bringing in new goods, there is a modest local version of Amazon mashed up with Makerbot catalogs. Because Siri tracks your social media data stream, it creates a virtual you, and a virtual profile of what you consume, so it auto orders and auto prints or delivers what it decides you want on a routine basis. Based on your profile, Siri auto-replies for you to those in your circles so you don't have to be interrupted in your personalized version of the latest Hollywood blockbuster (only a month old) which stars the CG star of your choice. "You" can like back effortlessly. Work at the colony goes on, happy, comfortable, productive...
Until the plague.
A mutated super virus that wipes everyone out in short order. As people die, their virtual profile continues to "live on", moderated and updated by Siri, continuing to have virtual dialogues with other profile users. As more die, fewer live posts feed the data stream, and their content skews the profiling algorithms, which eventually skews everyone's data stream living or dead, and thus their profile over time to some degree. But the auto conversation between virtual users continues. Siri does not care about contact... only input and ouput and data.
The moon colony continues to hum for years, though at a reduced rate, and the responses generated and resource shipments back to Homeworld become increasingly odd... repetative, sometimes non-sequitur, and in a schizophrenic fugue. When an investigating team eventually arrives over a decade later, what they find is a ghost planet, populated by the technologic undead specters of the past.
* * *
I continued to chew on this idea and had a thought experiment for a little sort-of world building game.
How does future tech versions of some modern or near future tech in the shadow of human vice change society?
So the players each take turns picking an item of future tech and these are listed down the right. Then everyone discusses each node with a cardinal sin, and they determine what society does with this.
For instance, custom organ printing. In the shadow of Envy, we might ask, first, is the printer a Sharper Image printer? Or a WalMart printer? Top dollar tissue or does it require a one year contract of anti-rejection drugs? This could be like the I-phone vs. free offer phone choice, with status being afforded to those who can pay.
Gluttony as discussed in classics does not exclusively refer to eating too much, but to consuming in excess. In the shadow of Gluttony, an organ upgrade addict is the pathological step beyond the piercing or plastic surgery addict. Or you could just go there, and call Gluttony an excessive desire to eat...
Greed easily dovetails with both the above if you are the salesman chasing the next commission selling the custom organ printers by preying on all the vices, vanities, fears and self-loathing that consume the buyers.
Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath can undoubtedly be found overshadowing their own organ printers. In a world taken one step further from our reality TV, convenience consumer culture, "re-skinning" takes on a much more disturbing meaning if you can print the bone, cartilage, and skin to look like the latest Kardashian...
11 April, 2016
Why?: Part II
Why games in general, and role playing games in specific?
I am interested in games because I am very interested in:
- creativity
- building relationships
- solving puzzles
- play
- thinking about ideas
- stories
Playing games with a serious-fun frame of mind, allows us to both step outside of ourselves, and engage with ideas serious or whimsical in a more naked fashion. They may reveal something about ourselves to others, or reveal something about ourselves to us, but they allow us to inhabit a different mind-space.
Now I suppose that many more practical people don't see that, and when they see games they just think of the immediate result, which is something to the effect of "I just spent two hours playing and I have no more money in the bank, vegetables from the garden, or square feet of clean space in the house, so what good did that time have?"
I beg to differ. The result from games is not material, and the reward is not always immediately obvious. I will go so far as to say that not all game play has the same value; if I play a game of Candy Land with my wife, the value is going to be very low, but playing chess is a different story.
I think this has to do with how close the game can come to creating Flow which I alluded to in a previous post. There has to be the sweet spot in game play between challenge and competence, and the challenge must evolve with the players. A role playing game that is a railroad murder hobo grind is going to be far less likely to provide that Flow state than a game that explores what you are willing to sacrifice to succeed. That pushes into that territory that Jenova Chen talks about in which the game provides emotional satisfaction beyond simple excitement.
The value to the practical minded, is that it allows us to peek into the dusty corners of our minds in a way that painting the house or gardening don't. I don't deny the value of practical tasks either, and am quite of the mind that games should not be the most important or even a large percentage of our lives, but I think even the practical minded are impoverished by discounting the value of imaginative and creative play, no matter how old. With social play, comes relaxation, and with that the ability to step outside of ourselves, and with that the possibility of stepping into the head-space of others, and that takes and builds trust, and trust builds relationships. Games are not the only way to do this, but they are an ideal medium for carrying all those things.
I am interested in games because I am very interested in:
- creativity
- building relationships
- solving puzzles
- play
- thinking about ideas
- stories
Playing games with a serious-fun frame of mind, allows us to both step outside of ourselves, and engage with ideas serious or whimsical in a more naked fashion. They may reveal something about ourselves to others, or reveal something about ourselves to us, but they allow us to inhabit a different mind-space.
Now I suppose that many more practical people don't see that, and when they see games they just think of the immediate result, which is something to the effect of "I just spent two hours playing and I have no more money in the bank, vegetables from the garden, or square feet of clean space in the house, so what good did that time have?"
I beg to differ. The result from games is not material, and the reward is not always immediately obvious. I will go so far as to say that not all game play has the same value; if I play a game of Candy Land with my wife, the value is going to be very low, but playing chess is a different story.
I think this has to do with how close the game can come to creating Flow which I alluded to in a previous post. There has to be the sweet spot in game play between challenge and competence, and the challenge must evolve with the players. A role playing game that is a railroad murder hobo grind is going to be far less likely to provide that Flow state than a game that explores what you are willing to sacrifice to succeed. That pushes into that territory that Jenova Chen talks about in which the game provides emotional satisfaction beyond simple excitement.
The value to the practical minded, is that it allows us to peek into the dusty corners of our minds in a way that painting the house or gardening don't. I don't deny the value of practical tasks either, and am quite of the mind that games should not be the most important or even a large percentage of our lives, but I think even the practical minded are impoverished by discounting the value of imaginative and creative play, no matter how old. With social play, comes relaxation, and with that the ability to step outside of ourselves, and with that the possibility of stepping into the head-space of others, and that takes and builds trust, and trust builds relationships. Games are not the only way to do this, but they are an ideal medium for carrying all those things.
07 April, 2016
Politics of the Mob
Conscience is quelled by the approval of the masses.
Wickedness is made invisible by the complacence of peers.
Guilt is discarded by the indifference of leaders.
Righteousness is forgotten when self-interest is held sacrosanct.
This is how the banality of evil can come to wreck nations long before the bloodshed begins amidst the flames of revolt. Becoming used to some new idea does not make the idea right. Either it was right to begin with, or not... familiarity or comfort with it does not make it otherwise.
It rarely comes all at once, but by one compromise, after another. Those compromises become more and more common when actual Truth is discarded in favor of "my truth". There may be little practical difference between the ubiquitous human proclivity for justifying excuses for wickedness, but stepping over the line of excusing objective evil to the point that evil is a politically negotiable fiction does velocitize the avalanche cascading down the slope.
Whether we can agree to call these facts or not, history is rife with the repetition of these propositions in societies and civilizations. The plain truth, is that each new generation must relearn them, or suffer their horrors, and to learn at all means for the previous generation not to be lax in teaching.
I may write more about the increase of social consciousness in game design, and the ways in which I differ with them... but these principles are where I can agree with the notion that games can have be more than mere entertainment or distraction. If in playing out the role of a nation and it's interests, no matter what those interests are, and playing aggressively in that role, is it not possible that in addition to the entertainment of playing the game well, that the fiction may speak truth about us in fact?
That is what I want to try to get my head around in designing my political game.
Wickedness is made invisible by the complacence of peers.
Guilt is discarded by the indifference of leaders.
Righteousness is forgotten when self-interest is held sacrosanct.
This is how the banality of evil can come to wreck nations long before the bloodshed begins amidst the flames of revolt. Becoming used to some new idea does not make the idea right. Either it was right to begin with, or not... familiarity or comfort with it does not make it otherwise.
It rarely comes all at once, but by one compromise, after another. Those compromises become more and more common when actual Truth is discarded in favor of "my truth". There may be little practical difference between the ubiquitous human proclivity for justifying excuses for wickedness, but stepping over the line of excusing objective evil to the point that evil is a politically negotiable fiction does velocitize the avalanche cascading down the slope.
Whether we can agree to call these facts or not, history is rife with the repetition of these propositions in societies and civilizations. The plain truth, is that each new generation must relearn them, or suffer their horrors, and to learn at all means for the previous generation not to be lax in teaching.
I may write more about the increase of social consciousness in game design, and the ways in which I differ with them... but these principles are where I can agree with the notion that games can have be more than mere entertainment or distraction. If in playing out the role of a nation and it's interests, no matter what those interests are, and playing aggressively in that role, is it not possible that in addition to the entertainment of playing the game well, that the fiction may speak truth about us in fact?
That is what I want to try to get my head around in designing my political game.
27 March, 2016
Why this Blog?
A little over two and a half years ago, I was in Afghanistan, working 84 hour weeks for months at a time. A "grown-up" life seems to leave little time for games, and the value of play on creativity, in spite of being studied and identified as valid and important, is still not held in serious regard it seems by most adults. That hours and hours of TV is considered OK but serious thought about games is not is probably worth a whole different discussion. Watching bootleg TV on my downtime was not something I found to be especially refreshing or creative. Suffice it to say, that while I had months working in the middle of southern Afghanistan, I spent a fair amount of time when I was not at work thinking about ways to hack some things that I didn't quite enjoy anymore about rpgs.
Over the last twenty odd years, GURPS had become my go-to rpg with an odd and end other here and there. Over time, a few things had begun to consistently bother me though. Hazardous action, and combat in particular are of course long time staples of rpgs, but I didn't like that the most immediate action for dealing with most conflicts was lethal force, even in circumstances where violence was far from believable. The mechanics however reward direct and decisive results without necessarily mechanically generating consequences. I love that GURPS evolved beyond venerable games in providing advantages and disadvantages to put solid grounding for personality and motivation beyond mere action effectiveness. I hated that disadvantages were often gamed as point mines to squeeze extra points to get an extra point of Dexterity (to be more action effective). I hated that action and combat, while staples of fictional conflict, may be a few moments or even a few minutes of game time, but take many times longer (sometimes an hour or more) to resolve in real time. The breathless pace of cinema or even a good book are lost in even best practice die rolling, record keeping, and turn waiting. I was trying to find complicated probability matrices to make an ideal one roll resolution for any action so that I could focus on narrative. I wanted narrative consequences to dangerous and lethal action. I wanted the flaws of the character to be what drove the motivation for heroism rather than mechanistic power-gaming. I wanted story that felt as satisfying, at its best, as watching a movie or reading a book can be. I wanted story.
So I started digging, and looking to see if I could find anyone else who had tried playing with those same kind of ideas.
What I discovered, was the indi game design community. I discovered that I was not alone in being interested in the question of whether games could be more than just a diversion... more than a throw away entertainment... whether games could be art.
Several months before, I had read an article in a video game magazine that discussed that very question in regards to that medium. It talked about Shadow of the Colossus, and Journey as two examples of video games that met that criteria. Journey in fact, is designed quite intentionally to reflect the Hero's Journey model by Joseph Campbell, and to give a complete emotional experience that comes from making that journey as a player. While electronic games have in the last couple of decades begun to take more and more design cues from film, I had not at the time I read the article seen that level of intent taken for tabletop games. But electronic games lacked the social interactivity that was also an interest to me of games.
Jenova Chen, creator of Journey, wrote about games as a grad student. His bio notes his frustration about "games losing their appeal as he and his friends age. While studying in film school about the history of media, Jenova realized that to mature a medium, a wide range of content is required to satisfy audience's various emotional needs. Jenova wants to be part of a movement to expand the range of emotions video games can communicate" as a more fully expressive medium. He cites the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychologist that studies happiness, motivation, and creativity. He studies and writes about, among other things, Flow,the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.
I did not discover the work of Csikszentmihalyi till later, but while I was in Afghanistan, my daily news review was followed by reading The Brilliant Blog about learning, neuroscience, and creativity. I felt that I was getting mentally slow and dull. I also spent that year exploring ways to challenge that, including my first experiments with nootropics and brain games. All of these things formed a kind of stew that was on the back burner of my brain.
And then, one night after work, sitting in my dust scented tent, I found the unassuming back door.
There not only were other people thinking about story in table top games... not only asking about whether games could provide something more satisfying than a throw away distraction... not only interested in both games and art, and games as art... but they had been discussing it for years. I came a decade late to the party. But they were out there. They were trying to start parties with more people elsewhere. They had a vocabulary for what they were discussing.
There were rpgs that did not even have mechanics for combat or action scenes. And they were good.
I went to college to study theater, and came out with a minor in English lit and communications as well. I cut my reading teeth on fairy tales and mythology. That there were games where themes, throughlines, dramatic reversals, and mythic journeys were not just the inspiration but were the way the mechanics were designed to reveal was just what I had been looking for without having the benefit of others to figure it out. There were other writers who were thinking of games in mythic terms as well, like Witney Beltran, who in her doctoral studies in mythology/psychology and play, suggests that "one way to keep the mythic knowledge and stories of cultures [alive] is through narrative play via analogue and/or digital mediums." She is one of many that I have discovered in the last two and a half years taking this idea and running with it.
I'm interested in game design now, because role playing games, as a creative medium, share many elements with books and film, yet are unique in this: rpgs are the only medium in which players are both audience and author at the same time to one degree or another. What they lack in hard lined vision, they trade for social investment. Players get out what they put in, and at the finest, they get a story experience that is more than the sum of the parts. Obviously, that is not a given every time, and perhaps not even most of the time, but it can be sometimes. I am looking to make something that can evoke or reveal something through this artistic vehicle about ourselves... about others... about the world... about the myths that make us human. But I want to have fun doing it too.
I'm not really sure just what the tight focus, or purpose of this blog is yet. I know that I have ideas about a number of things. Some of those things converge in odd ways, but they matter to me in the convergence. I know that I want to sharpen the easy creativity that I recall having as a child. I know that I want to sharpen the edge back onto writing that has become clumsy. I know that I want to have the sense of playfulness that lightened my heart when I was very young. I know that I also want to explore things that blow my mind now as an adult but would have been incomprehensible as a child. I know I want to challenge other ideas without feeling that the person holding them feels threatened. There seems to be some kind of convergence, though I cannot say its name yet.
I don't know what will come of this attempt at blogging. I don't know if anyone else will ever even read it but me.
But I hope that what I am looking for are the tracks of that pale stag dancing through the woods off the map...
Over the last twenty odd years, GURPS had become my go-to rpg with an odd and end other here and there. Over time, a few things had begun to consistently bother me though. Hazardous action, and combat in particular are of course long time staples of rpgs, but I didn't like that the most immediate action for dealing with most conflicts was lethal force, even in circumstances where violence was far from believable. The mechanics however reward direct and decisive results without necessarily mechanically generating consequences. I love that GURPS evolved beyond venerable games in providing advantages and disadvantages to put solid grounding for personality and motivation beyond mere action effectiveness. I hated that disadvantages were often gamed as point mines to squeeze extra points to get an extra point of Dexterity (to be more action effective). I hated that action and combat, while staples of fictional conflict, may be a few moments or even a few minutes of game time, but take many times longer (sometimes an hour or more) to resolve in real time. The breathless pace of cinema or even a good book are lost in even best practice die rolling, record keeping, and turn waiting. I was trying to find complicated probability matrices to make an ideal one roll resolution for any action so that I could focus on narrative. I wanted narrative consequences to dangerous and lethal action. I wanted the flaws of the character to be what drove the motivation for heroism rather than mechanistic power-gaming. I wanted story that felt as satisfying, at its best, as watching a movie or reading a book can be. I wanted story.
So I started digging, and looking to see if I could find anyone else who had tried playing with those same kind of ideas.
What I discovered, was the indi game design community. I discovered that I was not alone in being interested in the question of whether games could be more than just a diversion... more than a throw away entertainment... whether games could be art.
Several months before, I had read an article in a video game magazine that discussed that very question in regards to that medium. It talked about Shadow of the Colossus, and Journey as two examples of video games that met that criteria. Journey in fact, is designed quite intentionally to reflect the Hero's Journey model by Joseph Campbell, and to give a complete emotional experience that comes from making that journey as a player. While electronic games have in the last couple of decades begun to take more and more design cues from film, I had not at the time I read the article seen that level of intent taken for tabletop games. But electronic games lacked the social interactivity that was also an interest to me of games.
Jenova Chen, creator of Journey, wrote about games as a grad student. His bio notes his frustration about "games losing their appeal as he and his friends age. While studying in film school about the history of media, Jenova realized that to mature a medium, a wide range of content is required to satisfy audience's various emotional needs. Jenova wants to be part of a movement to expand the range of emotions video games can communicate" as a more fully expressive medium. He cites the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychologist that studies happiness, motivation, and creativity. He studies and writes about, among other things, Flow,the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.
I did not discover the work of Csikszentmihalyi till later, but while I was in Afghanistan, my daily news review was followed by reading The Brilliant Blog about learning, neuroscience, and creativity. I felt that I was getting mentally slow and dull. I also spent that year exploring ways to challenge that, including my first experiments with nootropics and brain games. All of these things formed a kind of stew that was on the back burner of my brain.
And then, one night after work, sitting in my dust scented tent, I found the unassuming back door.
There not only were other people thinking about story in table top games... not only asking about whether games could provide something more satisfying than a throw away distraction... not only interested in both games and art, and games as art... but they had been discussing it for years. I came a decade late to the party. But they were out there. They were trying to start parties with more people elsewhere. They had a vocabulary for what they were discussing.
There were rpgs that did not even have mechanics for combat or action scenes. And they were good.
I went to college to study theater, and came out with a minor in English lit and communications as well. I cut my reading teeth on fairy tales and mythology. That there were games where themes, throughlines, dramatic reversals, and mythic journeys were not just the inspiration but were the way the mechanics were designed to reveal was just what I had been looking for without having the benefit of others to figure it out. There were other writers who were thinking of games in mythic terms as well, like Witney Beltran, who in her doctoral studies in mythology/psychology and play, suggests that "one way to keep the mythic knowledge and stories of cultures [alive] is through narrative play via analogue and/or digital mediums." She is one of many that I have discovered in the last two and a half years taking this idea and running with it.
I'm interested in game design now, because role playing games, as a creative medium, share many elements with books and film, yet are unique in this: rpgs are the only medium in which players are both audience and author at the same time to one degree or another. What they lack in hard lined vision, they trade for social investment. Players get out what they put in, and at the finest, they get a story experience that is more than the sum of the parts. Obviously, that is not a given every time, and perhaps not even most of the time, but it can be sometimes. I am looking to make something that can evoke or reveal something through this artistic vehicle about ourselves... about others... about the world... about the myths that make us human. But I want to have fun doing it too.
I'm not really sure just what the tight focus, or purpose of this blog is yet. I know that I have ideas about a number of things. Some of those things converge in odd ways, but they matter to me in the convergence. I know that I want to sharpen the easy creativity that I recall having as a child. I know that I want to sharpen the edge back onto writing that has become clumsy. I know that I want to have the sense of playfulness that lightened my heart when I was very young. I know that I also want to explore things that blow my mind now as an adult but would have been incomprehensible as a child. I know I want to challenge other ideas without feeling that the person holding them feels threatened. There seems to be some kind of convergence, though I cannot say its name yet.
I don't know what will come of this attempt at blogging. I don't know if anyone else will ever even read it but me.
But I hope that what I am looking for are the tracks of that pale stag dancing through the woods off the map...
06 March, 2016
There's the rub...
“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”
This is not the only reason behind this blog... but it is one of the corners.Cheers!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)