Now the fight is really warming up over the "debt ceiling", and it's clear that the Republicans are going to use the threat of not raising it in order to get concessions out of Democrats. (I wouldn't be surprised if Planned Parenthood becomes one of the hostages they'll try to kill in exchange for not destroying our economy.) Paul Waldman explains the problem and some potential solutions here. One issue that keeps coming up is the public's ignorance of what this is actually all about:
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found only 16 percent of respondents saying the ceiling should be raised; a McClatchey/Marist poll pegged the number at 24 percent (see more here). It isn't surprising; after all, asking whether the ceiling should be raised sounds a lot like asking whether we should be borrowing more money, and borrowing more money doesn't sound like a good idea when we keep being told that we're being crushed by debt and that government should "live within its means." At the moment anyway, most Americans have no idea what the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling would be.
He advocates that Obama take a no-negotiation stance in dealing with this. I want to agree, but I don't think that's enough. If the problem is that the phrase "debt ceiling" is confusing, then Democrats can do something about that. Why don't we just start saying that the vote is on whether or not to default on our loans? Or to cease government spending entirely? There's got to be ways to avoid this whole problem of erroneous comparisons to family finances, though it's worth pointing out that Americans are not above borrowing money to pay for medical bills or to keep from sleeping on the street, which is what the federal government is facing right now.
Anyway, one of my promises if we made $2,000 or more for the Bowl-A-Thon was to record webcam videos answering a question asked of me on Formspring. I got two in rapid succession that totally worked, so I did both. Here they are. I'd be happy to get some feedback on whether or not these were fun for you, and if I should do more like them in the future. There is one tech problem I would like help with, if anyone has tips. The top of each video is all weird-looking and then gets better rapidly. I recorded them through Quicktime and uploaded them through the "Share" function. Is there another way to do this that will prevent that problem? The videos look just fine on Quicktime itself.
Ta-Nehisi has a good post up about the lack of female editors on Wikipedia, and refreshingly, he avoids doing what you see a lot of people do when women fail to step up in certain circumstances as much as men do. He doesn’t blame women for being weak, but instead looks at environment.
It seems to me that is not just a Wikipedia problem, but a societal problem likely extending out from families and schools. Defending your words strikes me as a really good thing. Dissuading women from doing that strikes me as just the opposite.
That said, I’m not convinced that there’s nothing that can be done. For whatever reason, I think Internet sites that allow trolling and aimless idiocy to run roughshod have a disproportionate effect on women. (Terri Oda hints at exactly that here.) I don’t know if that’s because trolls and idiots are more likely to say something sexist or what. But I don’t think the problem is aggressive argumentation, so much as its weak people saying these behind a cloak of anonymity which they’d never say publicly.
He then references the many online situations where racism runs rampant, and how this ugly reality makes him not want to go in those spaces. And that’s exactly it; even the idea of going on to Wikipedia and trying to edit stuff and getting into fights with dudes makes me too weary to even think about it. I spend enough of my life dealing with pompous men who didn’t get the memo that their penises don’t automatically make them smarter or more mature than any random woman. I don’t even have to go onto Wikipedia to tell you that it’s probably like that, on steroids, since, as Justine Cassell notes, on Wikipedia you can actually delete people’s actual words. Women spend huge chunks of our lives trying to get our voices heard. Why go into a space where men can actually erase you?
A lot of the time when dealing with this issue, it’s hard to talk to men about it, even if they don’t mansplain or get pompous, because men literally don’t see how much abuse women take online. When they’re put in the position to see it, they invariably register intense shock, in my experience, such as when Jesse had to deal with the overwhelming amount of bullshit that happened in this space when I joined, or the men I’ve spoken to that end up having to moderate comments for female writers, particularly those who make feminist points. Women get used to it, but it does wear you down, and you find yourself picking your battles before it even begins.
Which is why I was glad to see this article describing a new website called Fat, Ugly or Slutty, which is dedicated to chronicling the abuse female gamers receive because they have the audacity to think they deserve to play online games just like guys do. FUS is just the latest in a number of sites I’m seeing that just simply put the bullshit up for all to see, hoping to give the reader a small taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this crap. It’s a great trend, because all you have to do when someone doubts that you, as a member of a group who gets certain kinds of abuse, are accurately reporting your experiences, is to point them to the website so they can absorb it. It’s a funny site, too, which isn’t surprising—-humor is often the only weapon you’ve got.
I see one sign that sites like this are effective. Usually at Kotaku, when there’s a post up about racism or sexism, the comments turn into a sea of white dudes yelling, “Nuh-uh!” And this didn’t happen, probably because the evidence is just so compelling. Instead, they started to bicker about whether it’s worse on PC or console games, an irrelevancy that was nonetheless heartening for what it wasn’t.
Imagine that someone gave you the Twilight series and, for the sake of argumentation, vampires were a new thing that you’d never heard of before.
Now, imagine that you’d read through about the first book and a half to two books, and by the end of them, you almost sort of understood what a vampire was, but not quite, and the main plot development over the course of the two novels was that people really didn’t like vampires at all, except some vampires that everyone was cool with, and you weren’t entirely sure why, and you also never really got to see what a vampire did ever, so you were never entirely sure why anyone was afraid in the first place.
Welcome to the first twenty hours of Final Fantasy XIII.
At this point, I don’t really care about the game itself - you can read about the gameplay on any number of gaming sites. What I want to focus on is the plot of the game.
Because it is the worst written thing I’ve ever encountered. And I’ve read Vince Flynn novels. Plural.
Video chosen because playing this is probably my #1 guilty pleasure in Rock Band.
Via Spencer and Nicholas comes yet another tired tirade against Guitar Hero and Rock Band for the high crime of being silly games, as opposed to artistic expression. As Spencer notes, there is not a lick of evidence that Rock Band has stopped the formation of any real rock bands—-and I would point out that people who suspect this are showing, though they don’t realize it, that they are too lazy and out of it to listen to new music and therefore presume there isn’t any. In fact, the contrary in many cases. My consort actually learned to play the drums because of Rock Band. (Alas, the drum set was too big to make the move to New York.) I would also point out that Rock Band is a really great place for the talentless to have some fun without assaulting anyone by trying to play and making them pretend to give a shit.
If these tirades are so tired, why link to David Hajdu writing about it? I would say because he perfectly captures the self-contradictory, pointless arguments people make against Rock Band. His is the most explicit. He argues both that Rock Band is bad because it glorifies rock and roll’s excess, and it’s bad because it’s irreverent. In making this argument, he demonstrates that he’s not only humorless, but that his humorless means he’s especially unqualified to say anything about rock and roll, a music that is at its best when it’s excessive and irreverent. The thing that unnerves critics of Rock Band is that it’s actually quite rock and roll in its refusal to take itself, the music, or the culture of rock music too seriously. I’ve found that most people who are wary of the game because they’ve heard all the hand-wringing find it incredibly fun and perfectly pitched, but that’s because people I tend to have in my life have a fucking sense of humor.
Rock Band, much like karaoke, puts the overly reverent and humorless on edge because it interferes with what they see as a fan’s role in the entire business, which is prostrate before our rock gods. Hajdu really betrays this attitude, and makes the same error that pretty much all humorless critics make, which is that people playing the game are trying to wear the mantle of our idols without earning it:
Artistry often begins as fandom—as an aspiration, at first, not really to express one’s creative identity but to take on someone else’s. Like a zillion kids my age, I ventured into music wanting to be John Lennon, much as he had started out wanting to be Chuck Berry, who had started out wanting to be Louis Jordan. Real anxiety comes not with influence, but with the imperative to transcend it, which is another part of creative development. For me, being in that imitation Monkees cover group was different than playing air guitar but very much like taking part in a session of The Beatles: Rock Band. I wasn’t pretending to play an instrument; I was pretending to play a Beatle.
He sticks to the Beatles Rock Band when exercising this argument, because looking at the main game—-where you custom create avatars, and can inject as much silliness as you like (I’ve gone back and made all mine punk versions of Disney princesses, which satisfies my love of irreverence)—-would really undermine his ultimately bullshit argument that Rock Band is somehow lulling its audience into mediocrity. But like I said, I don’t think that’s exactly what upsets a lot of critics of Rock Band, because they have to know on some level that mediocrity needs no assistance, and that the vast majority of people who pick up instruments and learn to play are also not going to be the Beatles. No, what bothers him and other critics is that we fans take our non-Beatle selves and dare to think we have a right to engage the song in any way outside the prescribed worshipful stance of listening quietly in awe. Hitting the plastic guitar and goofing off to “Don’t Let Me Down” veers very close to making fun of the Beatles, in the eyes of the humorless—-like most critics, he flinches at the silliness of the plastic guitar, because he can’t see any pleasure in the absurd for its own sake.
Paul Ryan, dick, has decided to explain why it’s hard being a girl gamer. More accurately, he’s decided to explain why his terrible, awful fear of vagina can no longer be denied.
His piece is structure in such a way so as to explain the issue, and then talk about what a woman “might” say. An example:
Game Controllers
Why women hate this: Another thing is the female body. I’ve been told it’s a mystical, magical temple containing secrets and mysteries that no man truly understands, but the jury is still out on that - I did beat Cooking Mama. Nonetheless, women deserve a controller designed specifically for them and their special temple bodies.
Above: Yeah, but they also need non-portable console controllers
If you’re a typical guy, there’s a good chance you’re so insensitive that you didn’t know this problem existed until now. Unfortunately, that’s because you live in a world where all controllers fit perfectly into your rough-hewn man-hands and the bumper buttons are easily accessible without standing up or reaching behind your back.
Above: Sadly, two-out-of-three women can’t reach the Y-button
What a typical woman would say: You ever tried to play Wii with boobs on? I didn’t think so. I hate men.
Ha! You see? YOU SEE HOW WOMEN ARE???
The idiocy continues unabated for three pages, destroying any guise that this is somehow a commentary on the rampant sexism in gaming; it just is the rampant sexism in gaming. My personal feeling about this is that it runs along the same lines as the Resident Evil 5 reactions from many astute minds: the very mention of sexism is sexist itself, and so it must be mocked because the bitches in question are just whiny whores.
The main problem with sex, gender and videogames is that, much like Ryan does, women are treated as if they’re some bizarre species demanding illogical concessions to some non-Y chromosomed fantasy world. A woman in a chat room or in a game is a target for every horny come-on line in existence, because the gender dynamic of games is so maladjusted that it’s like walking into the locker room of a JV football team with Penthouses duct taped to your body. Women (and minorities) are dumb and ripe targets for abuse because they dared intrude on this place of comfort and flaunt their differences by having them.
To be fair, though, it’s good that he’s raised his hand-eye coordination to such a high level. One hopes he can reach his lifelong goal of stroking it to the exact rhythm of Ass Blastin’ Beauties 6.
So, Resident Evil 5 is already facing a bit of controversy for the whole playing on seemingly racist imagery thing, so what’s the best way to ramp up the promotion for the game?
I’ve been meaning to write about this Latoya Peterson column for a few days, and this story of a woman being banned from XBox Live for declaring herself a lesbian in her profile provides a perfect jumping off point.
Gaming has evolved in every way but one – the level of acceptable conversation regarding gaming and gaming critique. It never fails to amaze me how a debate can break out over the number of strings on a certain guitar used in Rock Band or other items of gaming trivia, but the very concept of talking about race or gender in videogames is considered verboten.
Journalist N’Gai Croal calls race “the third rail of gaming journalism” with good reason – his comments on the problematic racial imagery in Resident Evil 5 unleashed a firestorm all over the internet, causing major gaming sites like Kotaku and Destructoid to ask their audiences to breathe, and actually think about what N’Gai said in his piece before jumping to conclusions.
[...]
It is this idea of “the single (white) male technophile” that contributes to the myopia of both the gaming industry and the more obnoxious players and informs the assumptions that most of the people on the game boards happen to be white and male, regardless of their actual identification. It also leads to a commonly accepted culture of harassment, where those who identify themselves as women and minorities are subject to gender- and race-based harassment, simply for letting people know that they are different.
It is not a comfortable thing to play videogames online and be anything but a white heterosexual male. In the story mentioned above, a lesbian gamer was banned from the XBox Live service for mentioning that she was a lesbian - not for sexually harassing other gamers, not even for an objectionable or sexually suggestive name…just for mentioning that she’s a lesbian. Microsoft’s policy is essentially zero-tolerance: mentions of “sexuality” in any way, shape or form in naming or in your profile result in automatic banning. What Microsoft has essentially done is bow to the tyranny of the asshole, having built a community so entirely focused on using sexuality and gender as terms of attack that it’s easier to ban them than it is to deal with them.
What also doesn’t help (and is on display in some of the comments to the Consumerist post) is that in many online gaming communities (particularly on the console), any mention of non-white male heterosexual race, gender or sexuality is itself inherently racist, sexist or hetero/homophobic (except for the constant use of bigoted perjoratives, which never count because they aren’t meant in that way). It’s a crypto-libertarian world where everyone is assumed to be on equal ground free of identity and preconception, as long as that equal ground involves everyone assuming the identity of a 20 year old white (or Japanese, depending on the developer*) guy.
Games are likewise developed in this vein - minority characters are often either supplementary stereotypes there for comic relief to a steadfast white protagonist or cover for a game accused of racism, the most famous female characters in gaming are either MacGuffins or supplementary sex symbols/love interests. It’s what happens when you have very few minorities and women developing the games in the first place, but is aided and abetted by the aforementioned communities built up around the games.
The way to respond to this isn’t to shut down all mention of those categories which may result in objectionable things being said - that sends the exact message that fostered the intolerance in the first place, that difference is disruptive rather than bigotry. Instead, build games and communities with a wider audience in mind, with a sensibility towards all of these things that includes and promotes conversation rather than shutting it down to the level of who the gayest n00b is.
*In case anyone is unaware, such companies as Nintendo, Sony, Konami, Capcom, Sega, Square Enix, Namco and many, many others are Japanese and their games are often made initially for Japanese audiences.
“Online-enabled voice chat” has become my biggest videogame turnoff ever; I’d rather spend the next three days of my life whacking at overlarge forest rats with my Stick of Beating than listen to a fourteen year-old’s desperate insistence that I’m a.) a faggot, b.) a nigger or c.) a faggot-ass nigger for five minutes. Kotaku interviewed a couple of mental health professionals who revealed the obvious: it’s about the power dynamics at play, and there’s a common dynamic whereby many young white men feel most empowered by reducing everyone they encounter to demeaned scum.
The post discusses methods of dealing with the abuse, which basically focus on ignoring it and/or calling out the psychology behind the epithets. But what I’m more interested in is why the need for dominance so readily expresses itself in sexual and racial terms, particularly when such terms would be completely anathema in real life. It’s not just shitty trash talk, aggression when your everyday life calls for restraint. It’s wholesale cultural warfare, lived out through commandos, space commandos and other forms of fantasy and/or science-based commandos.
It’s striking how much the politics of cultural resentment resemble the feelings of constant victimization that accompany puberty. If you’re asking whether or not this means the Corner is a glorified reliving of the angry kids in your high school who read the first hundred pages of The Fountainhead and refused to smoke not because it was bad for them, but because it was the vice of their intellectual inferiors (read: people that were actually liked by others), then yes. Yes, it is exactly that. The blame and hatred that occurs here isn’t just about meaningless abuse, it’s about a very meaningful form of abuse that lumps together and transfers a set of real-life cultural grievances, transferred and taught, onto what functions as far more than just a game for the people in the abuser’s seat. The irony is that, despite the anger, it’s precisely because the targeted groups are so inherently powerless over a white male majority that they feel so free to heap abuse on whoever comes their way.
Reactionary social conservatism may not be best explained through the backlash to civil rights movements of the past 50 years, the rise of Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh’s call queue, but instead the nastier end of a Counter-Strike tournament.
Because I even find writing about this election increasingly grating, here’s some mind-cleansing.
I downloaded Mega Man 9 a few days ago. So far, I’m through the first three robot masters. The main question I’m left with is what the hell happened to all my old gaming skills?
I’m not particularly nostalgic for the days of yore when I could dedicate four hours a day to a new game; I’ve since replaced that with the ability to worry about how I’m going to pay bills and obsessively checking Facebook. But I still remember when I could jump from platform to platform without falling in a bottomless pit for no reason.
Mega Man games are, in a way, my weakness - the classic series (Mega Man X is to Mega Man as Cosby was to The Cosby Show) is one of the most straightforwardly pure versions of entertainment I can imagine; like little puzzles that fall into place after a few tries, the old sense memory comes back and I immediately remember that Heat Man falls to Bubble Lead like whoa. But a new challenge in the old wrapper is messing with my head, and everything feels a little bit less forgiving, a little bit less innocently fun. It’s the same issue I had after I took a film class - it took me months of watching movies without seeing the artifice behind the production of the onscreen image; I still can’t watch a horror film without missing half the movie trying to figure out how they accomplished a given effect.
On the plus side, MM9 has the first-ever female boss, Splash Woman. It’s a step for superpowered female robots everywhere.
I leave you with this, because it’s been stuck in my head every day for the past #*($&#@ week. Enjoy!
I’ve had a weirdly intense week, and so I’m pretty tired. So while I was going to post on more Republican evil shit, I don’t have the moral stamina. But I do want to highlight this interesting post Hugo put up on Michael Kimmel’s new book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, which made me want to read the book. There’s a lot to chew over, but what I found really interesting is a description of the sort of hostility towards women that’s common now in porn, and has made me question if the porn market is really driven by innocent and non-misogynist lust, as is wishfully claimed often. It just seems that misogyny is the selling point of so much of it.
Kimmel notes the ubiquity in contemporary porn of deception scenarios: in pseudo-documentary style, a group of men invite a woman for a modeling gig, promising all sorts of potential rewards. The young woman is then coaxed into first removing her clothes, and after being offered increasing amounts of money, has sex with one or more of the men. At the end, the men either escape without paying, or break the news to the model that the whole thing was a scam.
Mighty Ponygirl has posted the song list for the upcoming “Rock Band 2”, and has, as a public service, separated the songs into those sung by dudes and those sung by chicks. If you’ve played the first game at home or in a party situation, you know that the gender disparity is a major issue. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable cross-dressing their voices for some reason—-either out of fear of incompetence, or just plain fear—-and so for women who suffer this fear, they sing the three songs they feel they can do and quit. Not cool. The new game Rock Band 2 has more women, I think, and an interesting mix of badass punk (Bikini Kill, L7), pop punk (the Go-Gos, the Muffs, the Donnas), and crap that you have to smile gamely through as people clamor to sing it (Alanis Morrisette). Still, as MP demonstrates amply, the lack of parity is still appalling—-12 songs out of something like 80 have female singers, and a few of those songs are ones that you’ve never heard before. Or that I haven’t, which is to say that there’s 3 bands on there that are probably friends of the programmers, or as MG says, “a lot of crappy samey ‘if only the WB were still on the air and we could get our song played on Smallville’ stuff.” The upside—-many an 8-year-old will be singing the lyrics to “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill. The puzzling thing is that at least two of the bands on the list have plenty of songs where their female members sang, but the programmers picked male-led songs—-“Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth and “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac. It seems that if you’re going with those bands, you have an opportunity to add more female singers.
Now the fight is really warming up over the "debt ceiling", and it's clear that the Republicans are going to use the threat of not raising it in order to get concessions out of Democrats. (I wouldn't be surprised if Planned Parenthood becomes one of the hostages they'll try to kill in exchange for not destroying our economy.) Paul Waldman explains the problem and some potential solutions here. One issue that keeps coming up is the public's ignorance of what this is actually all about:
Imagine that someone gave you the Twilight series and, for the sake of argumentation, vampires were a new thing that you’d never heard of before.
Paul Ryan, dick, has decided to explain 
“Online-enabled voice chat” has become my biggest videogame turnoff ever; I’d rather spend the next three days of my life whacking at overlarge forest rats with my Stick of Beating than listen to a fourteen year-old’s desperate insistence that I’m a.) a faggot, b.) a nigger or c.) a faggot-ass nigger for five minutes. 
Because I even find writing about this election increasingly grating, here’s some mind-cleansing.
I’ve had a weirdly intense week, and so I’m pretty tired. So while I was going to post on more Republican evil shit, I don’t have the moral stamina. But I do want to highlight this interesting