Archive
Why?
My joke, non-answer is “Why not?”
To be serious, though: I’ve been thinking a lot about these questions for a very long time now, starting with whenever it was when I first started thinking about the role of the individual in society.
I keep trying to answer questions as they arise, and no matter what I say, it doesn’t seem quite right. I never know why it doesn’t feel right, exactly, but every answer I’ve given—and received to my questions—feels flat. It doesn’t matter how in-depth my answer to a question has been, it always seems like there’s just one more dimension that I could be utilizing.
To illustrate, it’s like every conversation on ethics, government, religion, philosophy, or whatever, is part of an interstate. Each conversation—more importantly, each answer—is like that part of the interstate you’re on when you’re going from Point A to Point B. It may seem like you’re arriving at a destination, but you know that, beyond that exit, there’s another one. Further, you know that they’re interconnected, and that if you went one step further, you might feel better about where you end up.
Some people don’t seem to have this dilemma. Well, no, that’s not right. Most people I talk to don’t seem to have this dilemma. That, probably, is because I spend a lot of time observing and off in my own bubble—moreso than a number of people who are out doing instead of thinking.
Point is, I always walk away from a conversation with a person who disagrees with my standpoint very underwhelmed. They may have made very salient, intelligent points, but something about what they say inevitably leaves me disappointed.
That kind of sounds like a prick thing to say, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t mean it like that. I fully recognize that my understanding of what constitutes “fun” is more at home in, say, a philosophy course than a bar, and this is why I’m a huge downer at parties. I tend to try and have arguments about existentialism or objectivism when the other party would rather be trying to hook up with someone.
Once again, I’m a huge downer.
Careening back to the above points: I think that the reason I walk away from an argument more perplexed than anything else isn’t because the other party has changed my mind—though, of course, that happens—it’s more that I often come away thinking, “How could they possibly think that way?”
For whatever reason, I try to see the entirety of an Interstate than the few miles between exists. You could say I’m a big-picture kind of guy, I guess, though that’s usually a term reserved for coked-out producers in Hollywood.
See, I think that ultimately, when I have an argument about what sort of tax structure we need in the U.S., I’d much rather be having a discussion that boils down to “What, at the base of it all, do you believe? What do you think about the ‘nature’ of man? What do you think about what that says about how man should interact with the world? Is that your definition of ethics? Why should we act that way?”
That’s right: If you want to have a conversation about Real Things with me—and not, say, whether or not Mordin Solus is the best professor in the history of all fiction—then you’d better be ready to define your entire bloody worldview, starting with what makes up the human body.
This, also, is why I have a very small, but robust, group of friends: It takes a long time for me to get a very good judge of character.
This, then, got me to thinking about what it is that I believe about everything. Of course, I didn’t think that in one swoop. It hit me as a series of shouts by those different parts of my brain, all screaming at once.
I spent the entirety of my bus ride ignoring high school kids screaming, state workers muttering, and then, after I left the bus, the whooshing of traffic as it whizzed by me, thinking about all of that. How it all fit together, whether or not I could easily get it all down in one blog post.
Of course, no. I can’t. That’s a ton of thinking. That’s a huge amount of topics.
So I started thinking some more. This time, I thought back to what little I remember about proofs in algebra and geometry. Break everything down, step by step. What causes “ethics?” What is the role of humanity? How does humanity relate to the world—all of the questions from a few paragraphs before, just in reverse order.
So, I then thought about how to implement that without spending several years doing so and pulling a Montaigne—who all of you should read if you haven’t. Even just a few of his essays. You can find Best Of collections all over the Internet. Go! Read him! He’s much more interesting than I am!
For those of you who stuck around after that flurry of exclamation points, hi.
I’m going to try to break down what makes my philosophy what it is. When I can, I’m going to back it up with links and citations (further reading, you see), but my main focus is going to be just getting everything down in writing. Apologies if something I write comes across as thin. If I don’t have anything to back it up, I like nothing more than to have a nice, long, protracted discussion over Guinness.
So, that’s what I’m doing with this. That’s why I’m doing this. It may not be interesting to you, and if it’s not: Sorry. The six entries that follow this one will probably be over pretty quickly, and after that, if I haven’t alienated you, then I’ll go right back to faking e-mails, yammering about video games, and writing shitty one-act plays about how inept Tennessee is.
But I’d like to end this first post by trying to get you to think down to the root of whatever you believe. Why do you believe that? What made you that way?
As Socrates said: “…the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living…” (Apology, Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates)
On Ownership and Mass Effect 3
I’m going to take a break from writing fake, passive-aggressive e-mails to stand-ins of coworkers and come at you about a very interesting topic Ownership of an artistic/creative franchise.
Put another way: I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means in the modern era to be a fan of a medium that is, intrinsically, an interactive experience. That’s right! I’m going to be talking about the snafu with the ending of Mass Effect 3. Now, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers in this, but it might be difficult to remain vague, since the ins and outs of the debate have very much to do with the specific events of the ending of the game. So, you know, don’t flame me if I let something slip.
For those of you who don’t know, Mass Effect is a trilogy of sci-fi games. They’re hybrids of the RPG, third-person shooter, and adventure genres. Think Star Wars, Star Trek, Call of Duty, and the old Baldur’s Gate games—if you’re nerdly like me and played them.
Criticisms of the video game medium include things like brainless action, excessive violence , poor dialogue, and “they’re for kids.”
Now, Mass Effect stands apart from a vast swath of games on the market because the installments are very well written, very immersive without seeming to try, and—thank God—have great voice acting. In many ways, the franchise is a great counterargument to people who look down at video games.
(Of course, that’s not to say that they’re perfect. There are plenty instances of clunky dialogue, gore, and plot holes—not to mention the unique problem of glitches. However, I’d argue that you’d be hard pressed to find any film or novel that is flawless. Dickens is long-winded; Hemingway lacks willingness to create complex, impressive sentences; and Joseph Conrad—the shithead—should have stuck to sailing.)
I’d go into why the franchise is a great example of what can be done with games, but this is a blog post, and not a dissertation. Suffice it to say, Steam runs fantastic sales every season, and the first two games would be well worth the $15 you’d end up spending.
The games have amassed a huge following, with a whopping number of players immensely invested in the game. When the third game launched, the anticipation was staggering. Bioware, the studio that developed the game, released copies into space, for God’s sake. They also promised a large amount of endings, all based on the player’s in-game decisions.
See, that’s another thing that highlights Mass Effect is the importance of choice. Through the three games, the player has the opportunity to import and use a character from the previous game, thus allowing the choices made in-game to carry over to the next.
This results in vastly different playthroughs for different people. For example: I was out at dinner with a couple people last week, and one guy had made a habit of killing characters who I did not know could be killed. It, uh, well, it’s got more of an impact when you play the games. Trust me.
Anyway, it’s all built up to expectations in the community that the end of the third installment would be—and I’m using this word in the proper sense—epic. If we lived in the Viking age, it would have been expected that a skald would have sung of it in a mead hall.
What happened, though, was something entirely different. Rather than an epic ending—the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example—we got the ending to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy. A very oddly-placed-in-tone conclusion to the saga that may have been a better fit in a game on rails instead of a relatively open-world adventure trilogy.
That said, the ending wasn’t bad—at least, I don’t think it was bad. I thought it was underwhelming and asked questions where there should have been answers—not to mention that it felt that the writers were really trying to be memorable instead of doing what was natural.
But, if you look online on comment boards and reddit, you’d come away with the conclusion that the ending was a crime against humanity. Yes, the developers promised varied endings, and, ostensibly, the ending does not deliver that. However, as Mike from Penny Arcade pointed out, you can otherwise take the view that the third game is the ending. And, well, there’s truth to that.
Trans-species wars are resolved; individuals gain redemption; others gain prestige within their people; robots are destroyed or saved; daddy issues are resolved. All of those are significant plot points in the series and, based on your choices as the player, they are wrapped up in the third game. Thus, you could say that ME3 is the ending.
But the interesting thing about all of this is the reaction the ending has garnered from the fans. Yes, it’s enraged in many cases, but there’s one that struck me as incredibly symbolic of what the Internet has done to the gaming community:
As you can see, it’s a charity drive with the aim of getting Bioware and EA’s attention, with the end goal of getting some more solid closure out of the ending of the ending. And, further, as you can see, it’s a charity drive donating to Child’s Play, the organization started up by the guys at Penny Arcade to benefit kids in hospitals by giving them video games.
First off, I think this bit of semi-altruism is incredible. Too often you see the stereotype of enraged gamers as a variant of The Simpsons’s Comic Book Guy—and it’s often reinforced by the community. But with this drive, we’re seeing a group do something very smart—getting attention via positive action.
While what the group wants may seem trite, it’s something that matters a lot to a large group of people. And while it may seem like they don’t know what they want—there are a lot of variations on what “closure” means—it’s a striking example of a pretty fractured group acting as one(ish) voice.
(I could make a connection to the Geth here, but—AAAAH FINE! They are coming to a consensus.)
But even more interesting is the implication that the game has changed.
In the modern era where the community has unprecedented access to developers in the form of forums, interviews, e-mail, Twitter, and facebook, the question has become: Has the idea of creative ownership changed?
I think we’re going to see that, at least when it comes to video games, it has. The point is often made in this movement that since Mass Effect is so dependent on player choice, the narrative is as much the player’s as it is the developer’s. There’s room for debate on either side, but there’s more backing on the side of the player than ever before.
As the idea grows that the community owns the game just as much as the developers, the belief grows that the community is entitled to some sort of acknowledgment of that ownership from the developers. Now, that’s a very tricky subject, and in many ways, you can see parallels between it and the severe hatred of the prequels in the Star Wars series.
So, what do I think?
I’m somewhere in the middle, I think. While I was disappointed by the ending, I acknowledge that we, as gamers, are playing by the rules of the creators. We don’t have an intrinsic right to demand the progress of a work any more than a reader of, say, Harry Potter would demand certain things of J.K. Rowling.
Would I like a “happier” ending? Or even one that eschews the messy contradictions of the game’s heroism and willingly ignores the whole organic vs. synthetic resolution that my Shep accomplished? Hell yeah I would.
However, I recognize that this isn’t my baby, no matter how much I’d want it to be. It’s Bioware’s baby, and they’re the only ones—well, EA, too—who have the final say.
So, protest on, dudes. If you guys win out, that’s great. If not, well… sorry?
I wrote some super happy endings you could read if you want…
Things That Grind My Gears, vol 4,301,209
Yeah, it’s that time. Things have cheesed me off so much that my only recourse is to blog about it. And I’m gonna.
1. The Misuse of the Word “Epic”
It’s en vogue to call anything cool or interesting “epic.” To wit, a sandwich I once made was called “epic.” It wasn’t epic because it was worthy of an extended narrative verse wherein a hero overcame vast odds to save a world, or anything like that. It was epic because it contained corned beef, roast beef, pastrami, lettuce, and tomatoes.
Now, I can vouch for the deliciousness of the sandwich, because I ate it. However, it certainly was not epic. It was a sandwich. Bards will not sing of it in times to come, and a cult of hero worship will not form around the sandwich.
Of course, this criminal misuse is not limited to gastronomy. A good friend of mine, whose opinion in most matters I respect, once called dancing the conga “epic.” I told him that he was wrong. That the conga has never been, and never will be, referred to as “epic,” and the fact that he did so betrayed his ignorance of the actual meaning of the word.
Surprisingly, we’re still friends.
So, pals, chiefs, the invasion of Normandy was epic. The Star Wars saga is an epic. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is an epic. My sandwich is not epic. That chain backstab you got in Team Fortress 2 while wearing the Ghastly Gibus is definitely not epic.
Not epic.
HERE ARE SOME FUCKING WRITING PROMPTS!
One of those days today. Weather outside’s like England, if England were much warmer due to hellish humidity. Can’t get any momentum on the book, and just kind of blurgh today. So, I ran a search for “I NEED SOME GOD DAMNED WRITING PROMPTS.”
When nothing came up, I decided to just make up a list of writing prompts for people who, much like me, turn to Google in their desperation and type-scream for prompts.
- Bob Dylan just walked into your office. He walks to your desk, pulls a chair out of thin air, and straddles it. He glares at you. You can tell he hates you, but for what reason, you have no idea. He proceeds to insult everything you hold dear, everything you think you’ve accomplished, and everything that you hope to ever accomplish. All in one breath, one uninterrupted stream of hate. Your prompt: Write down exactly what Bob Dylan said and then write down your response.
- Think of a band you despise. Everything they create grates on your ears and drives you ever closer to madness. Whenever you hear one of their “songs,” you are reminded of all of your regrets and wish for nothing more than to dive to the closest bottle. SURPRISE! They’re your new roommates! Write a TV pilot for a whacky sit-com where you and the band live in New York, Chicago, or Atlanta.
- You suddenly turn into anti-matter. The only thing keeping you from obliterating everything you touch–and, by proxy, the universe–is a weak magnetic field. How do you react? Pay special attention to the fact that you will no longer be able to eat or drink, as imbibing or ingesting would require you to bring matter into your special magnetic field.
- Oh no! You’re caught in a black hole! The good news is that, for some reason (let’s go with magnetic fields), the phenomenon’s gravity isn’t ripping you apart, atom-by-atom. However, the bad news is that time in a black hole moves so slow as to essentially not progress. Now that you’re eternal, what are your plans?
- You read a blog post about how the blogger wants nothing more than people to just relax and understand that, at the base of every struggle and competing worldview, everyone just wants to be happy and to not hurt others too much in order to be happy. Being a good, red-blooded American, this makes you sick. Who is this disgusting, anti-American hippy to claim that you don’t want to hurt people? You want to hurt people! That’s why you have three shotguns! In the proud tradition of the Founding Fathers, you decide to write a letter to your local media outlet. What’s in this letter? Make sure not to use any basis in fact–facts are for liberal snobs.
- Create a religion. Make sure to write the entire religion’s Bible, complete with creation myth and litigious chapters detailing what sorts of clothes your followers are allowed to wear. Bonus points for creative and gruesome end-of-the-world scenarios that are vague enough to be interpreted for any point in the future.
- Choose an ethnic group you know nothing about. Say, I don’t know, the Kurds. Write a hate-filled diatribe against them. Then actually do some research and say why everything you just wrote is full of crap.
- Everyone has what I call “Vault Jokes.” Vault Jokes are bits of humor so abhorrent and disgusting that you would never say them in public. Even moreso, you wouldn’t tell them to anyone you hadn’t known for less than five years. They typically involve race, religion, class, or all three at once. What’s your Vault Joke? Amplify it by a power of ten, write it down. (NOTE: It is fully acceptable to drink yourself into oblivion after completing this exercise.
- Someone on the Internet has just insulting something you kind of like. Write down how much they suck.
- Uwe Boll is the executive producer of a film directed by Michael Bay, with help from M. Night Shyamalan. It’s based on the premise that Atlantis is actually the home of a demonic army led by Loki and Hades. They have tapped YOU to write the screenplay. What’s more, they’ve set up a meeting with FOX studios for tomorrow morning at 9 AM. Write the treatment to get that sweet, sweet Hollywood money.
- While there’s very, very, very, very, very little evidence for anything resembling an objective morality, and because of the observed nature of the universe, we can pretty much guarantee that every bit of matter in the universe–including humans–was created through long processes involving combinations of particles leading up to creation of elements and, eventually, matter including planets and life as we know it, there is no real imperative to be good, most people still decide not to go around killing each other. Sometimes that’s because of religion, but even religious people can be dicks. Same with people who buy into that whole scientific evidence stuff. Yet–YET–there are plenty of good people out there, and humanity is progressing towards an accepting, tolerant worldview. (Even though pockets of resistance refuse to acknowledge the inherent equality of every human.) There’s no prompt in there, I just felt like sharing that.
- Burning out, or fading away. Discuss. Use examples when necessary, emotion otherwise.
- Your dog has suddenly started talking. What shenanigans do you get up to?
- The Galactic Empire suddenly finds a wormhole that leads to Federation Space. Vader vs. Picard. Emperor Palpatine vs. … er… Worf. Who will win? Write a novel about it.
- I woke up this morning and had a feeling of imminent, crushing doom. What’s up with that?
