Back in August, Penny Arcade did a comic that some people found offensive. And pretty much everyone agrees that the way Penny Arcade handled someone taking offense to their work was pretty much the least-sensitive way they could have dealt with it. I don’t really want to talk about either the comic or the response. If you want to know what I think, just pretend that I, rather than Amanda, wrote this. Also, Leigh Alexander, and Ashelia have some interesting things to say on the topic. I think that’s the last I’m going to say about the controversy per se. If you’re an absolute glutton for watching train wrecks, here’s a timeline.
What interests me is this: there are at least 10 million, and perhaps as many as 27 million, people in the world for whom panel 2 is nearly-literally true*. In this entire conversation, we seem to have ignored or forgotten the slaves. No one is speaking of them, or for them. In 2011, slavery is as real as a punch in the gut. This is not a problem confined to the 3rd world.
What shocks me is the fact that I didn’t think about the slavery implications of the comic. Slavery is a fairly major hot-button of mine, both in and out of games. I don’t ever talk about “p0wning” people, and I’ve never been one to turn away from a “free the slaves” quest. Slavery is something I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about in my life. Yet when it came up in this context, I allowed myself to forget about it.
War. War never changes. Those are the first spoken words in all of the canonical Fallout games. Which is a bit odd seeming. The war is over. The nuclear apocalypse came and went, taking humanity down to the basic survival level– in many cases below it. Even in the story presented by the narrator, the war for the Hoover dam ended about 4 years previously.
The government was– all governments were– smashed to atomic rubble. In the absence of government, Hobbes tells us that we are left with “A war of all against all”. There are those who take this as a good thing, and those who take this as a warning. The inevitable, bloody war between those philosophies is the focus of the Fallout games.
As alluded to in the introduction cutscene above, your character is a courier. You’re not sure what you were carrying, nor it’s importance, nor why you were shot for possessing it. The main quest of the game is trying to track down the person who stole it from you, though your motivations for this are entirely dependent upon what sort of character you wish to play.
One of the interesting things the game does mechanically is to give players a reputation ranking with various factions. Do nice things for a town, and that town will like you. If the New California Republic (NCR) sees you as an ally, they will give you a radio with which you can call for help. When the NCR representative told my character “you are not alone out here”, I was moved; the Mojave Wilderness is a lonely place. Alternately, if you go on a killing spree, your reputation will greatly diminish and factions will be ordered to shoot on sight.
One way or another, a player will choose a faction. The game pushes players towards the democratic New California Republic. If you don’t like the NCR, but want to go the “good” rout, the humanistic Followers of the Apocalypse offer another alternative. Players who want to be rewarded for slaughter, yet align with a government can play nice with Caesar’s Legion– an organization which sees physical dominance as the just reward of the strong over the weak. And anyone who wishes to devolve into simple thuggery makes a de facto declaration that they are a raider.
It’s an interesting way of meshing game mechanics with an overarching philosophy. As a player, I only spend a small fraction of my time thinking about this in mechanical terms. As I gaze into the wilderness, seeing people with problems that need solving, I ask myself what kind of world I want to build. This has lead me to siding with the New California Republic. They’re doing their best to create an orderly society– but one grounded in some principles of justice and self determination. They can be a bit heavy handed and tone deaf, but where the NCR has control, people are free to live lives, trade, and be fear from slavery.
Naturally, because I side with the NCR, I’ve been trying to clean up their mess with the escaped convicts known as the “Powder Gangers”. My policy is simple: shoot on sight.
After seeing Powder Gangers storm into several towns, killing the innocent, I decided to get more proactive. My friend Boone and I wandered into their base and started shooting. Some of them tried to flee, but we chased them down and coldly murdered them where they hid. We were methodical, we were quick, we were merciless. Every last one of them died at our hands.
As I started looting their hovels, the game informed me that I had lost Karma. As the blood-fury left me and I finally looked around at the bodies of those I’d slaughtered, the full gravity of what I had done hit me.
How was I any different than them? For all my vaunted morality, for every notion of fair play, for all that I wanted to build up a society… I walked into these people’s homes and destroyed their society. I offered not peace, but the gun.
Is that all I am? Am I just a bulldozer hoping that someone will come along behind me to build a better future after I knock down the rotted old infrastructure? Must I become a monster in order to protect people from evil?
I’ve got dozens of hours left to go in this game; I don’t have answers. I do know that I won’t consider this game over until I get an answer to those questions that I like. War never changes, but I cannot believe that the memes that push us towards armed conflict are the strongest ones.
I’m currently obsessed with Dragon Age:Origins*. The game play is old school, and story is deep. I’m about 17 hours in and I feel like I’m just beginning to get a handle on the shape of the story. When they say this is an 80 hour game, that’s not just marketing…
In this game, there is a type of magic which requires the use of human blood for energy. In the society as presented in the game Blood magic is evil, and when (in the past) it it had been left unchecked, slavery and tyranny were it’s inevitable outcomes. So, Blood Magic= Evil. Indeed, many of your companions like you more if you kill those who practice it.
Also, well, this game is dark. The first time I was forced to murder a demonically-possessed child, I (the player, me) was haunted. Was there anything I could have said or done differently so as to prevent that outcome? I congratulated the game makers on producing an actual emotional response in me. The second time, though, the game asked me to kill a possessed child I was livid. There has to be another way. There was.
Blood magic, of course.** The game asked me to make a moral choice: was I willing to sacrifice the child’s mother (who bears part-blame for the child’s possession), use forbidden magic, to save the life of this child? Or was I to let the child die? For me, the choice was simple. There was no way in hell I was going to murder another child. None. The pure visceral reaction I had surprised me, but again– the game had succeeded.
And I succeeded also. The child was saved. Sadly, mom did die. And yes, that blood will forever stain my virtual hands…
*Note to Cristian Game makers: I would totally buy a game called Church fathers: Origen. The selling your library, and visiting the sick chapters could be an awesome examination of early church life. I admit that the self castration mini-game wold make this an M rated game, however.
**I wouldn’t have set that up in the beginning without the payoff, would I?
From what I can tell, there are 3 forms of what I’ll call “narrative entertainments”– Books, TV/Movies (film), and Video games.* Each type of narrative makes a different type of shadow on Plato’s cave, attempting to capture a different aspect of reality.
Books are fantastic at creating rich worlds, and showing how people live and think while within them. Books by their nature take place within the mind of the reader. They are, in this sense, an almost pure form of imagination, unconstrained by a need to produce actual artifacts. Books, then, are great at showing the microcosm how an individual mind works, and also very good at simply stating the rules by which a society operates. And yet, the fact that they take place within a reader’s mind has it’s own inherent drawbacks– A poorly described commonplace item, can lead readers to have a wildly different idea of what’s going on than the author intended. This isn’t always the author’s fault– try this exercise:
Take the sentence “Tom sat atop the elephant”, and rework it for someone who has never seen or heard of an elephant. Make it interesting, concise, and fit the tone of the story. 10 different people will come away having drawn 10 different pictures.
The other end of this is film. Film cannot exist without showing the viewer “things”, “artifacts”, “pictures”, “etc”**. Its language is that of camera work and forced angles. Narrative “voice” is controlled not simply by the words used by actors, but also by how the camera responds to various actions. The biggest strength of film (other than it’s communal nature) is that it can take the great writer’s axiom literally: “show don’t say”.
What film doesn’t do very well is show us the interiority of a person’s experience. All actions must exist as shown, with none of the self-justifications and denial that real people experience regularly. Evil is nearly always presented as “other”, and morality is very often shallow.
Games are a very new art form, and are still seeking a universal expressive language***. For now, this certainly counts as a major weaknesses. The strengths of gaming lay in it’s ability to place a player in the middle of an experience, forcing them to make decisions. Granted: players are making decisions at a remove from how actual persons might do them. Still, players aren’t reading someone’s thoughts about balancing a budget, and they’re not seeing someone balance a budget, if they’re playing SimCity or Dawn of Discovery, they’re having to make the choice between guns and butter. Most of us don’t want to slaughter civilians in real life… but it can be interesting to explore the life of someone who has to make the choice of kill or be killed.
All of this is prelude to tomorrow’s post about the movie version of Nine. Stay tuned…
*I feel that I should say something here about audio entertainment. But Alas! I just don’t know it well enough to make intelligent comments. For our purposes, we can think of books and audio as being much the same, though I know there’s a lot of room to call BS on that..
**Yes, yes, I did that on purpose
***Speaking of not having a universal expressive language! English sucks: by all the rules of grammar, that should have been “an universal”, but it sounds funky.
“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”
When I first read about this comment, my immediate reaction was that I couldn’t think of a single country club that would admit a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Then I thought Rove was doing his usual shtick, i.e., take his greatest weakness and ascribe it to his opponent. In other words, I felt that he was describing George W. Bush at the club, not Obama. Makes much more sense that way, given Bush’s history with alcohol — and his smart mouth. It was much the same technique Rove used to destroy John Kerry’s Vietnam war record in 2004, all but accusing the nominee of being a liar and a coward. All this while Bush was hiding his “war record” in plain sight.
But a commenter at Talking Points Memo unpacked Rove’s comments differently than me and I think he nails it:
The key to the statement is that (in the image) he is with “a beautiful date.” Not Michelle Obama or, in the abstract, his wife, i.e. a wife like Michelle Obama. When you think of a “beautiful date” specifically at a country club, do you picture an African-American woman? Would Rove’s target audience?
Or do you picture him there, a black man, smoking a cigarette indoors at a country club, with a white woman on his arm?
When I thought of this, I got a chill. When you think of Obama’s vulnerability, I think the primaries showed that race remains a real and very serious obstacle, particularly with white Americans over 50. When you think of where we are with racism in this country, I think its a pretty safe bet that the final freak-out factor to overcome may be black men dating white women, in particular, one’s daughter.
If I were a completely amoral Republican operative, I’d try to find some white women that Obama dated before Michelle and get them into the public’s stream of consciousness anyway I could. Its a tactic so vile I don’t even like speculating about it, but if you want to be ready for the worst, I think Rove just tipped his hand at where they plan to go.
In all fairness, I have to ask if there is (or isn’t) the analogous scenario that an “amoral Democratic operative” could spring on McCain? Remember, in order for it to work, it has to resonate at the emotional level and be absolutely radioactive in the extreme. It has to address a fundamental fear that the electorate has about McCain.
PSP hackers have added a ton of functionality to the handheld device. They’ve let it play games that cannot be purchased in stores, play movies that otherwise owners wouldn’t be able to watch (at least, not on the PSP), every time I’ve thought about buying one, I’ve had the hacked-on features.
Naturally Sony wants to stop this. They can’t stand the idea that they’re selling hardware at the expense of losing control of that hardware. Somehow, the idea of “giving the customer what they want” doesn’t seem to enter into the picture.
It’s a turn based resource management game where the object is to win the US presidency. You do this by pandering to the public, begging for money, and giving speeches. It is a surprisingly fun game for one built around electoral math.
You get to build and control a bobble head-like avatar in a bunch of different scenarios. Wanna win the Election of 1860 and prevent the civil war? Go forth! The election of 2008 is the main feature, and there are a couple others. I’ve been fighting the ’08 battle as me, slagging the evil Republican U.S. Grant. Not the real grant who knew that fighting terrorists was a police job. The fake Grant who wants to rape our environment. Also, he hates the economy. At least, that’s what I’m telling people…
The only real criticism I can offer is that it’s not always clear what buttons do. Why should I want to take out an attack ad vs one lauding my own stances. What do some of the icons mean? Why can’t I put together a web machine to pull in money automatically? I may be able to mod some of these things into the game
It’s US$20, so even if you only get a few hours of entertainment out of it, it’s a better bet than a movie. I highly recommend the game. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Grant has just gained 6pts in 3 weeks and pulled even with me. Should I go after independents? Or try to win over my base? We’ll see…
