Virtually Conservative
Most video games—in which you accumulate stuff and/or dominate the world—are the opposite of progressive.
By MICHAEL ATKINSON
The numbers are daunting. The Entertainment Software Association reports that in 2009, 68 percent of American households played video games. According to Grabstats, 41 percent of all video gaming involves mission/action/narrative and enacted violence, while 47 percent of gaming (mostly by older people) involves solitaire, word games and the like.
The dollars spent annually on games (to play on consoles or PCs) and on online memberships (to “persistent”-environment games like World of Warcraft) routinely exceed the revenues of the American film industry. Halo 3, the 2007 best-seller, took in more revenue in its first day of sales than Spider Man 3, the highest grossing movie debut as of 2007.
Concerns about how video gaming will impact pre-adolescent and adolescent development is understandably pervasive; a 2007 Psychiatric Times article found that “it was unusual for boys to rarely or never play video games; just 8 percent of boys played for less than an hour per week.”
Adults watch children shotgunning on-screen avatars or wrecking cars in high-speed chases or chainsawing aliens’ limbs off, and we get queasy — especially when we come back in a few hours and the child hasn’t moved from the couch. But the relationship players have to the virtual mayhem, and the narrative worlds that encompass it, is far from simple. Despite scores of studies, psychologists have reached no consensus about whether violent gaming is a pernicious training experience, a healthful catharsis, or a little of both.
The ultimate impact so much gaming will have may be unforeseeable, even as our culture is subsumed by meta-activities long predicted in the fiction of Philip K. Dick. But nobody asks about the politics of the form, the thrust of social meaning inherent in the activity and in the software. In the future, virtual entertainment may take a vast variety of forms, but right now, the real money is spent on shooting games (first person or third person), like Doom, Halo and Call of Duty, or omnipotent strategy games like SimCity, Civilization and FarmVille (a Facebook application reportedly played by about 1 percent of the world’s population).
Either way, video gaming is about control. Your participation is restricted to steering and maintaining the narrative flow, altering the course of the story, using the environment for your ends, eliminating hindrances (monsters, or human antagonists) and generally being the only significant individual anywhere in the game. You are either the shooter Attila or the society-ruling God, the one-man plague or the orchestrator of a greed-based system.
Absorbing a narrative in a film or on TV or in a stage play involves observation but also an exchange of empathy, anticipation, authorial intent and thematic meaning. Playing a game is more single-minded — you dominate the world, accumulate the goods and safeguard your own ass — one way or another.
In this sense, most video games are infantile in nature, and inherently conservative. Think of them as individuated modes of authority disguised as either an escape from authority (the Tea Party esprit) or as benevolent dictatorship (in Spore, you get to control an organism’s evolution, which isn’t evolution, of course, but deism). At the core of the medium is the lust for and the rewards of unfettered control. These are the primitive precepts of conservatism as it’s practiced in the modern world. Whether they realize it or not, devotees of “the free market” (who now resemble Jehovah’s Witnesses failing to predict the world’s end over and over again) are players of a vast gaming schema — a world that they maintain is “free” yet long to dominate.
The one paradigm that differs from this pattern — the ostensibly egalitarian MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) such as World of Warcraft and Ultima — is just as solipsistic, if impossible for an individual to control. You participate in a vast social web, but only in conflict or in commerce. Apparently, this mechanical Zeitgeist has no room for a democratic idea or a genuine social impulse. Profit and power dominate the players’ modus operandi. MMORPG players can buy virtual currency with real money, instigating a subindustry in which (largely Asian) wage slaves “work” in the game for a real employer, accumulating non-existent yet resalable gold and valuables. (In 2008, the BBC reported a richly equipped avatar was itself sold from one player to another for 5,000 £.)
Could there be such a thing as a progressive virtual “game”? Or is a responsible, sustainable perspective the antithesis to immersive role-playing experiences? Let’s hope not, because virtuality is one of the largest and fastest-growing modes of human occupation on the planet. We should figure out how communal politics can be expressed in this medium, to say the least — before our culture completely morphs into one all-encompassing dog-eat-dog meta-landscape, and only the conscience-less survive.
Original em http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6115/virtually_conservative
A Soft Focus on War
How Hollywood hides the horrors of war.
By SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: We are there, with our boys, instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place.
When Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker won all the big Oscars over James Cameron’s Avatar, the victory was perceived as a good sign of the state of things in Hollywood: A modest production meant for independent festivals clearly overran a superproduction whose technical brilliance cannot cover up the flat simplicity of its story. Did this mean that Hollywood is not just a blockbuster machine, but still knows how to appreciate marginal creative efforts? Maybe—but that’s a big maybe.
For all its mystifications, Avatar clearly sides with those who oppose the global Military-Industrial Complex, portraying the superpower army as a force of brutal destruction serving big corporate interests. The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, presents the U.S. Army in a way that is much more finely attuned to its own public image in our time of humanitarian interventions and militaristic pacifism.
The film largely ignores the big debate about the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, and instead focuses on the daily ordeals of ordinary soldiers who are forced to deal with danger and destruction. In pseudo-documentary style, it tells the story—or rather, presents a series of vignettes—of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad and their potentially deadly work of disarming planted bombs. This choice is deeply symptomatic: Although soldiers, they do not kill, but daily risk their lives dismantling terrorist bombs that are destined to kill civilians. Can there be anything more sympathetic to our liberal sensibilities? Are our armies in the ongoing War on Terror (aka The Long War), even when they bomb and destroy, ultimately not just like EOD squads, patiently dismantling terrorist networks in order to make the lives of civilians safer?
But there is more to the film. The Hurt Locker brought to Hollywood the trend that accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war, Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon.
Lebanon draws on Maoz’s own memories as a young soldier, rendering the war’s fear and claustrophobia by shooting most of the action from inside a tank. The movie follows four inexperienced soldiers dispatched in a tank to “mop up” enemies in a Lebanese town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli air force. Interviewed at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, Yoav Donat, the actor who plays the soldier Maoz from a quarter of a century ago, said: “This is not a movie that makes you think ‘I’ve just been to a movie.’ This is a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been to war.” In a similar way, Waltz With Bashir, renders the horrors of the 1982 conflict from the point of view of Israeli soldiers.
Maoz said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through. “The mistake I made is to call the film Lebanon because the Lebanon War is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be political would have flattened the film.” This is ideology at its purest: The re-focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict: What was the Israeli army doing deep in Lebanon? Such a “humanization” thus serves to obfuscate the key point: the need for a ruthless analysis of what we are doing in our political-military activity and what is at stake. Our political-military struggles are not an opaque history that brutally disrupts our intimate personal lives—they are something in which we fully participate.
More generally, such a “humanization” of the soldier (in the direction of the proverbial wisdom “it is human to err”) is a key constituent of the ideological (self-)presentation of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The Israeli media loves to dwell on the imperfections and psychic traumas of Israeli soldiers, presenting them neither as perfect military machines nor as super-human heroes, but as ordinary people who, caught into the traumas of history and warfare, commit errors and can get lost as all normal people can.
For example, in January 2003, the IDF demolished the house of the family of a suspected terrorist. They did it with accentuated kindness, even helping the family to move the furniture out before destroying the house with a bulldozer. A similar incident was reported a little bit earlier in the Israeli press. When an Israeli soldier was searching a Palestinian house for suspects, the mother of the family called her daughter by her name in order to calm her down, and the surprised soldier learned that the frightened girl’s name was the same as his own daughter’s. In a sentimental upsurge, he pulled out his wallet and showed her picture to the Palestinian mother.
It is easy to discern the falsity of such a gesture of empathy: The notion that, in spite of political differences, we are all human beings with the same loves and worries, neutralizes the impact of what the soldier is effectively doing at that moment. The only proper reply of the mother should be to demand that the soldier address this question: “If you really are human like me, why are you doing what you are doing now?” The soldier can then only take refuge in reified duty: “I don’t like it, but these are my orders,” thus avoiding any responsibility for his actions.
The message of such humanization is to emphasize the gap between the person’s complex reality and the role they are forced—against their true nature—to play. “In my family, the military is not genetic,” says one of the interviewed soldiers who is surprised to find himself a career officer, in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary on the IDF, Tsahal.
And this brings us back to The Hurt Locker. Its depiction of the daily horror and traumatic impact of serving in a war zone seems to put it miles apart from sentimental celebrations of the U.S. Army’s humanitarian role, like in John Wayne’s infamous Green Berets. However, we should always bear in mind that the terse-realistic presentation of the absurdities of war in The Hurt Locker obfuscates and thus renders acceptable the fact that its heroes are doing exactly the same job as the heroes of Green Berets. In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: We are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place.
Original em http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5864/a_soft_focus_on_war/
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