Elizabeth Smart Takes on the Deep Evils of the Purity Myth

At a recent panel at Johns Hopkins university, Elizabeth Smart asked us all to approach victims of kidnapping and human trafficking with compassion and empathy—imploring us to offer them safety and support, rather than merely gawking at the grisly particulars of their ordeals or getting lost in the callous, irrelevant question of why or when a given person did or didn’t run.

Her comments are especially worthy of our attention right now, given the horrible ordeal that just ended for those three women in Cleveland. It’s worth thinking about why people (mostly men) do these sorts of monstrous things to other people (mostly women), and why victim-blaming (of which the why-didn’t-she-run question is certainly a facet) remains so pervasive.

Smart talked very openly about her experience being kidnapped and held captive for nine months, during which time she was repeatedly raped:

I was raised in a very religious household, one that taught that sex was something special that only happened between a husband and a wife who loved each other. And that’s what I’d been raised [to believe], that’s what I’d always been determined to follow—that when I got married, then and only then would I engage in sex.

And so, for that first rape, I felt crushed: who could want me now? I felt so dirty, and so filthy. I understand—so easily, all too well—why someone wouldn’t run: because of that alone. I mean, if you can imagine the most special thing being taken away from you, and feeling like that—not that that was your only value in life, but…

Can you imagine turning around and going back into society, where you’re no longer of value? Where you’re no longer as good as everybody else?

Smart then immediately, explicitly traced her feelings of shame and worthlessness to abstinence-only education.

I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about—well, about abstinence. And she said, “Imagine you’re a stick of gum. And when you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And then, if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum. And who’s going to want you after that?”

That’s terrible. Nobody should ever say that. But for me, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m that chewed-up piece of gum. Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away.” And that’s how [easy] it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value.”

There are lots of problems with abstinence-only education. One problem is that it doesn’t seem to work at all. It doesn’t produce teenagers who are more abstinent, but only teenagers who are more ignorant. For another thing, then, children without sexual information are easier targets for sexual predators; how can they know what inappropriate or threatening behavior looks like when they have only the foggiest idea of what safe, healthy, appropriate behavior looks like?

But Smart’s comments also address something bigger than abstinence-only education, bigger than rape culture: the idea that a woman’s value derives from her virginity, from her purity—that whereas a man becomes incrementally more awesome (and thus more valuable) with each sexual conquest, sex renders a woman sluttier (and thus less valuable). This means that a woman’s first sexual experience markedly, massively, irretrievably reduces her value.

Let’s begin by agreeing about how fucked up that concept is.

We construe a woman’s virginity as, in Elizabeth Smart’s words, “the most special thing” she possesses. Smart stops just short of saying that virginity is a woman’s “only value in life.” If a woman isn’t a faultless sexual gatekeeper, then she’s nothing, whatever else she may have going for her. As Jessica Valenti outlined in The Purity Myth, sexual “purity” is held up as the cardinal virtue of female life, over and above actual virtues like kindness, intelligence, creativity, and integrity.

Now, this crap does make some semblance of sense, in an “evolutionary history” kind of way: before the emergence of birth control as a technology and genetics as a science, the only way that a man could guarantee himself children that were biologically his own was to exert total control over his reproductive partner’s sexuality. Even as women achieve greater measures of equality—and even as science strips old gender configurations of all utility—men and women alike continue to believe that female sexuality must be policed, restrained, reigned-in (and worse, that this inequity is somehow the natural order of things).

Peggy Reeves Sanday pinpoints this as the founding cultural myth of victim-blaming and female non-agency, expressed most succinctly in the work R.F. von Krafft Ebing and Havelock Ellis—who, following from Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection, attempted to find a “natural” explanation for rape. “Ellis conceives of human sexual behavior as a game of combat,” Sanday explains. “Playing the role of the hunted animal the female conceals her sexual passion by adopting a demeanor of modesty in order that the male may be more ardent and forceful.”

More specifically (and also more creepily), Ellis argued that female resistance is eventually, inevitably met with “an element of real violence, of undisguised cruelty,” and that this combativeness-unto-violence “[puts] to the test man’s most important quality, force.”

So on Ellis’ account, aggressive coercion is a valid tactic for men perusing sex, and female sexual gatekeeping is a performance: really, she wants it, but it’s her responsibility to withhold it, except that she won’t be able to, because she’ll find the sheer virility of her increasingly coercive paramour to be just that damn irresistible.

This tangled knot of misogynist non-logic helps to explain why we think of sexually active women as less virtuous, and why we think this even when the sex-acts in question occurred against their will—and also, why so many men who rape do not think of themselves as rapists. The cultural script tells us that women are supposed to resist, and that men are supposed to overcome that resistance. Nothing wrong here. Just sex-as-a-zero-sum-game, forever.

Succinctly and without exaggeration, this idea is one of the deepest and most pervasive evils ever to riddle the human psyche. This is what leads us to ask what rape victims were wearing when they were raped. This is what makes it possible to regard “honor killings” with anything other than open horror.

This is also what makes it possible to use a rape as a weapon of war. Rape is self-evidently monstrous in itself, but it couldn’t tear societies apart if the members of those societies refused to shun and despite its victims—if they reserved their disdain for the perpetrators of the crime, rather than those against whom the crime was purpotrated.

I’m not claiming that I know how to untangle this knot, but I do know that we won’t get anywhere while so many of us persist in beliving—obstinately, confrontationally, and against all available evidence—that the whole problem is fictional or long since solved. We need to begin by noticing these malignant assumptions in ourselves, and fighting them whenever they emerge.

I’m not claiming that’s easy. Just that it’s necessary. We stand to make the world an infinitely more humane place, if only we can all see sexual “purity” for the pernicious, corrosive bullshit that it is and supplant it (bit by bit, thought by thought, interaction by interaction) with a better and saner cultural script.

Playing Our Parts in Monaco

Monaco is a game about pulling heists. You move through the floorplan of whatever building it is that you’re breaking into, viewed top-down in abstracted black-on-black. What your character can hear, you see, Marauder’s Map-style. What your character can see appears in sunbursts of luminous full-color—still abstract, but information-complete. You get in, you steal something, and you get out (optionally collecting coins along the way, both to unlock new heists and to earn additional ammunition).

A successful multiplayer run is like clockwork, everyone in tune with everyone else, everything timed down to the split-second. When things go wrong (and things do go wrong), the result is a lot less elegant and a little harder to define, but no less fun. My good buddy Adam and I eventually settled on “Ms. Pac-Man by way of Benny Hill,” and that’s about right: the Pachinko machine psychedelia of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX set to the honky-tonk equivalent of Yakety Sax. The game oscillates between those two utterly different tones and paces, seamlessly and without breaking stride.

The game’s characters are specialists, drawn from heist movie archetypes. The Locksmith can pick locks and crack safes with uncommon speed. The Lookout can detect guards even when they’re well out of eye- and earshot. The Pickpocket has a pet monkey who steals stray valuables on his behalf. The Gentleman, a kindly-looking fellow, and can be seen for a few seconds without being suspected. And then there’s The Mole, who can tunnel through walls, and The Redhead, who can beguile and distract.

I prefer The Hacker, who can spread viruses through computers and power outlets, disabling security measures and spreading consistently advantageous chaos. Adam usually ends up being The Cleaner, who can perform non-lethal takedowns on guards and innocent bystanders alike, accompanied by a marginally disquieting sound effect that suggests a brief, fruitless struggle, possibly involving chloroform.

Those two guys work damn well together, with The Hacker disabling the machines while The Cleaner disables the people. They can cut a clear path through rooms as long as they can stay in sync with one another.

If my hack runs out, or if one of Adam’s victims wakes up, then there could be trouble. But often the guard will woozily come to, or the security camera will blink back to life, just was we’re making our escape to the next floor, and that feels like million bucks.

But there’s more than that. The Hacker and The Cleaner inspire crisp, snappy, pulpy role-play, Adam calling out to Hack that camera, hack that camera! and me saying I’ve got it, but quick, clean that guy! and Adam responding OK, we’re good, that guy’s cleaned! in an earthy growl. I don’t even think the game itself uses the word “clean” in quite that way. Adam and I were just getting into the spirit.

Monaco makes it pretty easy to get into the spirit, is what I’m saying.

There are these snippets of story in between the levels, you see, with the game’s various thieves disagreeing on the specifics of the capers—and these sequences do more than add flavor. They echo the tenuous trust and emergent narrative chaos that comes across in every in-game heist: What are you talking about? I didn’t get us killed on the ship. You did.

Like the rest of the game, Monaco’s player relationships have two speeds, well-oiled machine and runaway train, and it’s impossible to say which mode is more compelling. It’s the combination of the two that makes the game such an engrossing creation.

Here’s Why We Should Stop Using Review Scores

Late last year, Jim Sterling made an argument in favor of review scores that I think is worth refuting. As Sterling points out, lots of people like review scores, and the first few major outlets who eliminate their scoring systems will probably see a decrease in their readership, at least temporarily. Given those facts, he argues, why rock the boat?

The thing is, MetaCritic scores are widely (if mysteriosuly) respected, and sometimes used to determine game developers’ compensation. As such, Sterling misunderstands the problem, and also underestimates his own culpability in it. His main assertion is that review scores are not inherently evil, even if they can be put to evil uses. This observation is both unassailably true and face-palmingly beside the point.

Look. Movies get scores. TV shows get scores. But no one takes those numbers half as seriously as we all seem to take game review scores, specifically because there is a widespread cultural understanding that movies and TV shows can’t be boiled down to some set of objective evaluative criteria. By approaching videogame review with such reverence, we’re reinforcing the idea that videogames should be approached primarily as technology, as software—that a new Call of Duty is more like a new release of Photoshop than a new Bond movie.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with valuing games as technology, nor is there anything wrong with wanting a review to cover a game’s more objective, more technical aspects—does it run well and render nicely?—and yes, it does make a certain kind of sense to rate those qualities numerically, or with letter grades, or whatever. But the exercise becomes silly once we’re assigning quantitative values to “story” or “fun factor,” or for that matter, to aesthetics as well as graphics.

More to the point, it’s heartless and nutty to address game developers (who make pieces of software that run on computers, yes, but who also make narratives, experiences, and other squishy things) and say, “Hey, this clock you made? It doesn’t function properly,” and feel that those developers therefore should, objectively, be paid less for their labor. Hey, you can’t argue with the numbers!

Paying someone less for their work because that work didn’t sell is the kind of coldly logical capitalism that can be hard for mere flesh-and-blood mortals to swallow, ethically and empathetically speaking—and so wanting to take the quality of their work into account, regardless of raw sales, is a commendably humane impulse, and a potential counter-wight to the often unaccountable cruelties of the market.

But believing that MetaCritic provides an objective measure of quality—wantning the numbers the do your work for you, even though no one really even knows how MetaCritic arrives at those particular numbers—takes us right back into in the realm of hardhearted pragmatism, with the additional drawback that (unlike pure, balance sheet-driven, Adam Smith-flavored exploitation) it isn’t even logically defensible or strategically sound. In short, it’s bad, and also stupid.

Sterling says “The argument that we should abolish review scores hinges on the belief that all reviewers secretly loathe them, and would jump at the chance to be free of their numerical shackles.”

Eh, not really. The argument is more that, whether you like using review scores or not, you’re doing harm my using them. By attaching a score to your review, you’re knowingly feeding the snarling, shambling, bonus-garnishing behemoth that MetaCritic has become. None of the misconduct outlined in that Kotaku piece is reviewers’ fault, of course, but it’s within their power to stop it from happening. If game reviewers would simply stop affixing scores to reviews, then they’d starve the beast, and that would be that.

Sterling’s own metaphor, over-the-top though it may be, is actually the best way to explain this problem. “If somebody stabs,” he asks, “do we punish the knife, or the psycho holding it?” Here review scores are a knife, and the developers denied their bonuses (for example) are the stabbed, and those who denied them their bonuses (again, just for example) are the madmen doing the stabbing.

But it would follow that reviewers using reviews scores are the ones handing the madmen the knives. A stabbing isn’t the knife’s fault, sure—but if you hand someone a knife, knowing full well that they intend to stab someone with it, then the stabbing is at least partially your fault, isn’t it?

So really, the argument against review scores is: put away the stupid knives, Jim. We know they’re fun to play with, but it’s just not worth anybody getting hurt.

Kentucky Route Zero by Night: Act 1 (Lucid Dreams, Hysteria)

I’m not sure what time it is, exactly. I’m somewhere over the Atlantic, skipping from timezone to timezone without thought or consequence. If I could go to sleep right now, then I would wake up in Munich, Germany, all seven timezones traversed, and time would be fixed again.

So I try to sleep, but can’t, try again, still can’t. It’s hopeless.

I occurs to me that this could be the perfect time (the middle of the night) and the perfect place (no place in particular) to finally play the first act of Kentucky Route Zero. So I do. And you know, in my present state (blearily enraptured, half-awake and hypersentimental), I am probably this game’s ideal audience.

Right now, it’s a fine replacement for sleep, this game. Playing it feels like a lucid dream, not least because my agency as a player is at once frighteningly limited and borderline-omniscient: my choices are surreal and abstruse, and they seem to be as much about making the world as moving through it.

A character asks me about a dog standing behind me, for example, and my chosen one-sentence answer pithily establishes the dog’s name and gender (her name is Blue), and my relationship to the him/her (she’s a sweet old hound). The game remembers these things, takes my answers as canon, embracing dreamy improvisation—giving me a confident yes, and where so many adventure games, as Quentin Smith indelibly griped to Leigh Alexander, say “No, you can’t do that. No, that doesn’t work. No sir!”

And to take the connection a step further, that Smith/Alexander letter series centers on The Walking Dead and the kinda-sorta rebirth of adventure games—games that progress toward the outright abolition of rub this thing on that thing puzzles as a design crutch, focusing instead on atmosphere, characterization, and decisions.

Both The Walking Dead and Kentucky Route Zero pull this off so successfully, I suspect, because of how they leverage Zižekean hysteria—that is, how well their gameplay mimics, simulates, and evokes psychological uncertainty. “The Freudian unconscious is very much like what one does in front of the computer screen,” Slavoj Žižek explains, “this helplessness, where you are talking to someone, but at the same time you do not even know at whom it is addressed exactly. You are radically not sure.”

Games are often hysterical without meaning to be. You tell Shepard to say one thing, and instead he says some other thing, subtly but significantly different in meaning. You tell Cole Phelps to accuse Mr. Suspect of lying, and Cole Phelps kicks Mr. Suspect’s chair out from under him in a sudden fit of near-murderous, quasi-psychotic rage. You’re never fully in control of how the machine will interpret you.

The difference here is that, to an even greater degree than The Witcher or Portal, The Walking Dead and Kentucky Route Zero are in complete control of how out-of-control they make you feel. These kinda-sorta adventure games know that their interfaces are unwieldy. They know that they’re asking you to make decisions without a thorough understanding of what’s at stake. These aspects are dissonant, and they’re meant to be. They’re not dissonant like an out-of-tune violin, but like an in-tune violin playing Shostakovich.

When I land, I’ll take a look at these thoughts I’ve scribbled down. There’s a decent chance they’ll make some kind of sense, right?

I’ll say this, in any case: if at all possible, I’m going to play the next four episodes of Kentucky Route Zero on overnight flights. Noise canceling headphones at the ready, I’ll let you know where else this game takes me.

For now, though, I think I might be ready to get some sleep.

On Loving Starseed Pilgrim

I’m awfully glad that I don’t have to write a proper review of Starseed Pilgrim.

It’s not that it’s hard to say whether the game good (it is) but it’s good at things that are difficult to describe or quantify: it encourages you to discover rules for yourself, it confounds your expectations without ever exactly misleading you, and it serenely gives back in direct proportion to how much you’re willing to put in. I don’t envy anyone who is tasked with distilling those qualities into an apples-to-apples comparison with some cinematic AAA production, or deciding where it belongs on a top ten list, or whatever.

The game lives outside, and stretches beyond, the world that reviews were invented to describe. Like Super Hexagon before it, Starseed Pilgrim is gleefully self-contained—an autonomous object first and foremost, art and/or commerce a distant, disinterested second.

Starseed Pilgrim works by breaking the rules of game design, using beauty and mystery as (or perhaps even place of) conveyance. It’s long on invitations but short on instructions. It barely ever teaches, and rarely even hints.

You’ve really got to trust your players if you’re going to try something like that, because what if a player tries it once, doesn’t learn any of the game’s secrets, and stops playing? Well, then that player hasn’t put much in, so they can’t expect to get much out. Starseed Pilgrim is at peace with that possibility. It’s Zen like that.

The toolset may always feel unruly and unhelpful to you. You may never learn that what seems like a grave threat is in fact an eventuality from which you can profit, if only you plan ahead. Maybe the worlds beyond and behind the one you first see will remain hidden from your view, even if you do come back again and again. Fine. So be it. But the game will be ready and waiting for you if you change your mind and decide that you want something more.

Starseed Pilgrim feels more like a world in a box—more like Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous “miniature garden that [players] can put inside their drawer”—than any game I can think of, Proteus or Minecraft included. It offers a literal garden, of course, but more than that, it engages you where other games would merely indulge you, demonstrating patience instead of panicking at a perceived lack of rapt player attention. It’s a bold and quiet videogame that takes bold, quiet liberties with the very form of videogames.

So much of what Starseed Pilgrim has to say is untranslatable into text, and inhospitable to Best-Game-Ever/Worst-Game-Ever tribalism. I love it for that.

Phrenology! (and Other Stuff BioShock Infinite Isn’t About)

Even if you have yet to play BioShock Infinite, you’ve probably heard that it takes place in “an idyllic, cartoonishly racist Disneyland” called Columbia, and that it involves alternate realities. The folks Irrational Games have had the admirable, mischievous audacity to set a game in 1912 and fill it with the period’s least savory aspects (ask me about Columbia’s phrenology museum sometime) as well the expected funny hats and barbershop quartets. When it engages with American history, this game makes me feel like the world’s nerdiest kid in the world’s bleakest candy store—but when it engages with phenomenology and determinism, not so much.

Look, I know, the story’s historical and metaphysical strands are both about rebuilding the past in our own image, and realizing that there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Elizabeth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And yes, quantum mechanics were as much a part of 1912 as eugenics and phrenology, so it’s all nice and period. And whenever Rosalind and Robert Lutece were talking, I could just about convince myself that Columbia was a richer place for having had its reality frayed and contorted.

But BioShock Infinite isn’t about Columbia. That’s key, and it’s frustrating. In light of what turns out to be the game’s central premise, Columbia is just a single roll of the dice God is playing, a payout from the narrative slot machine of inventive historical fiction. However vivid it might be, it exists purely and simply to be vivid, not to argue a political point of view.

This time around, the matinees who write Family Guy pitched 1912, the sky, American Exceptionalism rather than 1960, the ocean, Objectivism. Next time it could be 1820, a vast system of tunnels inside a volcano, missionaries in Hawaii. Whatever provides the most engaging backdrop against which to shotgun a procession of crow-harried psychotics, let’s go with that.

When people say that BioShock Infinite is too violent, I don’t think they’re reacting to the arresting severity of the game’s violence so much as the incongruous scale of it. It makes all the thematic sense in the world for Booker to be a strikebreaker, a thug, a mercenary, and even a dehumanized instrument of the-only-good-Indian’s-a-dead-Indian Jacksonian genocide.

But it makes no sense for Booker to be a one man army, plowing through wave after wave of policemen and cultists and revolutionaries (not to mention ghosts and robots) singlehandedly, like they’re nothing. The game’s individual acts of violence—from the thing with the baseball, to the thing the skyhook and the guy’s face, to the Baroque forms of medicialized torture employed by the Comstock’s cossacks—reflect the rampant totalitarianism and horrific technological ingenuity that characterized the preeminent wartime atrocities of the 20th Century. But that loses its sting in a haze of buoyant, endlessly repeated, thematically vacant candy apple arterial spurts.

By portraying so much ugly history in such loving detail, BioShock Infinite seems to say please remember that this happened; it’s worth remembering. But Elizabeth’s ultimate solution—this is my one observation here that might qualify as a SPOILER—is to literally erase Columbia, so that its troublesome history “never happened in the first place.” Which means either that we shouldn’t remember our history after all, or that we real Americans (who cannot in fact erase the past) are screwed, locked into violence and oppression that, once set in motion, can never be stopped.

But that reading assumes a single cohesive reality, and BioShock Infinite is more interested in iteration, multiplication, and possibility. So here are a few of the alternate realities I’ve found myself dreaming about since I finished the game.

• A BioWare or Bethesda game that takes place in Columbia. I want to talk to these horrible sky racists. I want Booker and Elizabeth to have to make decisions about how they’ll treat the city’s minority population. At the very least, I want the two of them to talk about race, which they don’t do in BioShock Infinite, really.

• A game where Booker and Elizabeth go through that first big tear and find that they’re suddenly both black. Or Chinese. Or that they’ve swapped genders. (If you’ve collected all the voxophones, you’ll know that the germ of that last idea is already present in BioShock Infinite).

• A game where you, the player, can mess with the politics and ontology of Columbia, instead of just observing while Columbia gets messed-with all around you. (Achron has proven that time travel can make sense in gameplay, and some of Patholigic’s NPCs are people that the player might have been but isn’t).

BioShock Infinite left me wanting to play those games, and all sorts of other games that don’t currently exist. Like the first BioShock, it’s a game that asks us to think about where videogames can go next, and what games can do. For exactly that reason, I wish it argued more forcefully that videogames can be about things other than themselves.

Religious Freedom Requires a Secular Government

This recent attempt in North Carolina to establish a state religion was a little too dumb and a little too doomed to actually be scary. It fails on its face, because it violates the very first line of the very first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America—”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—and much like Kansas trying to ban abortion in spite of Roe v. Wade, it was never going to result in anything more than a costly public spectacle at the state taxpayers’ expense.

But it does reveal a genuinely troubling strain of ignorance among our duly elected representatives, who apparently do not realize that devoutly religious people, perhaps more than any other group, need secular law. Secular law is not a decadent intellectual luxury, nor is it by any means an attack on anyone’s religious freedom. Quite the opposite, secular governance is a necessary precondition to the free exercise of religion.

Let’s assume that the hypothetical theocracy in question is an Abrahamic one (even though that’s not necessarily a given). Is the government Christian, Jewish, or Muslim? If Christian, is it Catholic, or Protestant? If Catholic, does it adhere to the principles set forth at Vatican II, or those that were in place beforehand? Even if we assume that the state religion is exactly your own, does it operate according to the teachings, interpretations, and rhetoric of your religious leader, or of someone else’s? You only have to have been to two houses of worship in your life to know that the differences between them can be substantial, even within the same sect/order/denomination/faith. And those particularities, so fussily esoteric to an outsider, are often intensely important to a practitioner.

In other words, if you’re devoutly religious, a theocracy would be far more likely to impede, disable, and criminalize your faith than to support it. As I’ve argued in past posts, religious people are demonstrably more free to practice their religion under a secular government than they are under a theocratic one.

If your religious beliefs align precisely with the those of the theocrats du jour, then you are in a certain sense free to practice the state religion, unpersecuted. But that’s not religious freedom. It’s merely a false and accidental approximation of religious freedom, a dart thrown in the dark that so happened to hit the sweet spot on the Venn diagram of your beliefs and your government’s. The moment that your conscience compels you to change your beliefs in any way, or that some new elected or appointed official changes the law of the land in the slightest, your illusory freedom evaporates and your faith has no protection whatseover.

Secular law protects all of us, whatever religions we do or do not practice, from falling into so precarious a situation. This means that you and your religious beliefs are protected, both from the tyranny of the majority and from the vagaries of bureaucracy. But it also means that your personal morality is not and can never be one-to-one with local, state, or federal law.

As Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion for Loving v. Texas (the case that established the unconstitutionality of sodomy laws), the United States cannot outlaw “private conduct not harmful to others” purely because one religion (or even all religions) might find that conduct objectionable (or even wrong).

If your religion forbids homosexuality, then the law protects your right to practice that religion, but those very same laws can and must (and will, sooner or later) protect gay rights. The opponents of same sex marriage have categorically failed to explain what harm committed gay relationships will somehow do to the institution of heterosexual marriage, or to adopted children, or to the stability of family units, or to anyone or anything else—so their moral revulsion is not a valid legal argument. (We all have the right to keep Kosher if we want to, but we also have the right not to keep Kosher, so however much we may want to, we can’t criminalize cheeseburgers).

We can believe in religious liberty, or we can believe that one particular religion’s morality should be the law of the land. But we plainly, clearly cannot believe both of those things, because they are mutually exclusive.

The Cost of Saying That a Given Game Is Not a Game

Richard Terrell recently argued at legnth that Proteus is a “cool digital musical experience” rather than a game as such. While I have tremendous respect for Terrell’s overall project—he’s “nobly wrestling with the limits of language,” as Michael Abbot once put it—I still can’t shake the feeling that he sometimes applies his considerable efforts to the wrong questions. Because in this case, the right question is, what do we actually gain by deciding that Proteus is not a game?

Proposing a narrower definition of games means making one of three statements:

    1. When I say game in the following piece, I mean x.
    2. Whenever I say game, I mean x.
    3. Game means x.

That first one is a valid, practical, and frequently necessary gesture. The second is potentially limiting, but also potentially liberating; if you can stop sweating the vocabulary, then you can move on to new, exciting, probably unmapped territory.

The idea of defining games once and for all, however, is completely unworkable.

Please understand, I’m coming at this as a former art history major. For about four years, I had the what is art? discussion more often than I had hot meals. And while it’s important to know how various critics and practitioners have defined art (just as it’s important to know that Sid Meier defines a game as “a series of interesting choices”), it’s a costly mistake to fully embrace any one definition or definitively drink any one theorist’s Kool-Aid. There’s always a cost, and that cost is never worth the benefit, even if there is a benefit, which there usually isn’t.

Say you decide that art has to exist primarily as art. It can’t be utilitarian, so a table isn’t art, even if it’s well made, expressive, and beautiful. Art for art’s sake, this idea is sometimes called.

The problem with this definition (or one problem with it) is that it manufactures a crisis of classification, wherein African art, for example, isn’t art at all—and not only because you’re dealing with so many tables, and water jugs, and textiles. More importantly than that, when viewed in the cultural context of animist traditions, medicine societies, and ancestor worship, representative sculptures can also be construed as functional objects. They’re at least considered ceremonial, and often considered magical. So their purposes are metaphysical, yes, but also utilitarian. Meaning they don’t count as art.

Oh, but it’s O.K. that African art isn’t really art. That doesn’t diminish it. It does mean, of course, that African art is worse than European art at being art. But it doesn’t follow that European art or European culture is better. Just that it’s more advanced and artful and—

See the problem?

You could argue that something isn’t art, or isn’t a game (or isn’t music, or isn’t literature) for an infinity of reasons. But whatever you’re trying to do, and regardless of whether you succeed at doing it, you’re also explicitly excluding those works that push hardest against the boundaries of a given medium. You’re leveling things off.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is an argument with a target, and that it naturally tends to target those who are least in need of being taken down a peg: it naturally and automatically targets marginal voices. That means denying someone a place at the table, and denying their work a place on the syllabus. Saying that’s not a game means putting forth a bold and dickish hypothesis about whose work is worth discussing and whose work isn’t.

And to what end? What’s the point? Well, the point is clear, specific language. Using a word, knowing what it means, and knowing that your audience knows what it means, too. It’s not hard to see why this goal is so appealing to Terrell, who is after all writing a freakin’ glossary.

But here’s the thing: when we use words with increasing frequency and breadth, it becomes increasingly foolish to try and pin those words down to singular, canonical definitions. In past posts, Richard Terrell has gone into great detail about his working definitions of games and gameplay, but when defining the word game in his glossary, he simply quotes Jesper Juul’s Half-Real and moves on. By contrast, Juul’s own “Dictionary of Video Game Theory”—in a gesture akin to the entry about the word is in the Oxford English Dictionary—provides eight separate and sometimes conflicting definitions of game. (Nine if you count Wittgenstein’s notion “that what we call games have nothing in common.”)

Which is the right approach. We should be cataloging and exploring, but not resolving. Because resolving the word game into a single definition, even if it weren’t completely impossible and a little dangerous, would still be thoroughly pointless. If we did somehow manage to agree on some unified definition under which Proteus is not a game, we would still want to talk about how it relates to games. So we would most likely need a broader term that could encompass all of these games and non-game gameoids we wanted to discuss, wouldn’t we? So hey, maybe that bigger, looser word could be something like, I don’t know, game.

It’s insufficient and unconvincing to declare, without qualification, that specific language is good and that unspecific language is bad. Games and art are open-ended concepts, so it’s not a linguistic crisis to describe them in open-ended terms. It’s acceptable, and maybe even preferable, to describe nebulous things nebulously. We do it all the time.

To use the squishiest possible example, love is an inescapably inexact concept. When you say “I love you,” to someone, your words are a contract currently being written. You are building an understanding, but always a provisional and contextually specific one. Other people say those same words and mean completely different things, and you know that, and knowing that diminishes the meaning and importance of your own words in precisely zero ways.

A word can be maddeningly vague in isolation, yet clear and powerful in context, is my point.

It’s fine and even necessary to use broad terms in narrow ways. But when you insist that your newly narrowed definition is the definition—when your goal is to pin the word game down to a single, universally applicable meaning, for example—then, nobly wrestling with the limits of language becomes tilting at windmills. It’s noble, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s productive.

The Head and the Heart of Song Choruses

“My songs are filled with hope,” Bruce Springsteen once told Terry Gross in an NPR interview. (Actually, I’m quoting Sarah Vowell’s transcription here, just to make the attribution a shade more complicated. But anyway).

“My songs are filled with hope,” [Springsteen] answered. And in ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ he explained, “The pride was in the chorus… In my songs… The hope part is in the choruses. The blues… your daily realities… are in the verses.”

That’s a pretty common configuration, in Springsteen’s songs and elsewhere. The verses do the thematic heavy lifting and go to the darkest places, and and then the choruses provide some relief. The verses inhale, the choruses exhale.

Macklemore’s “Same Love” employs a similar verse/chorus relationship, but does so for the sake of structuring an argument. The verses contain all manner of rational advocacy for gay rights—relevant personal anecdotes, pleas to social justice, clear examples of how prejudiced language can blunt our emptahy—and the choruses punctuate these intellectual points with a purely emotional appeal in the form of Mary Lambert’s sung lines: “I can’t change, even if I tried, even if I wanted to,” and “My love, my love, my love, she keeps me warm.”

In this case it’s less breathing in and breathing out, and more a one-two punch.

“Same Love” is a song that wants to convince you of something, but the verse/chorus relationship I’m describing is equally effective in the mouth of a character trying to convince himself of something. Think about most of Guiteau’s parts in Assassins, or more recently, “I Believe” from The Book of Mormon.

Or consider one of my favorite recent examples, Captain Ahab’s song “Pornography.” (As the title implies, we’re now officially in NSFW territory). This is a song about a guy trying to convince himself that a terrible idea is, in fact, the best idea he’s ever had. The choruses convey the questionable notion in question: that making porn with his barely-described significant other, and/or with unknowing participants via a “secret camera,” will solve all of his financial problems—and rather than repeating or embellishing a single melody, the verses shift and change along with the protagonist’s rationalizations.

He eventually loops back to where he started in the first verse, both lyrically and melodically, but not before working out the increasingly grandiose particulars of the plan and, with more pathos than the jokey premise initially seems to deserve, explaining the aspirations/desperation behind his present line of thinking. (Again, NSFW).

That reveal right before the repeat of the first verse—”I just want to treat you the way that you deserve”—has so much going for it. There is the aforementioned note of pathos, yes, but the protagonist of the song is also doubling down on his creepy, possessive, just-this-side-of-misogynistic attitude. Then a muted chorus, with steeled resolve (yes, this is a good idea!) and a final one with renewed abandon (yes, yes, yes, this is a great idea!) Then that wandering, noisy ending that seems to say eh, whatever. It was a dumb idea anyway.

In each of these examples, the chorus conveys a single idea, a single point, and each verse is a divergent path (direct or indirect) to that same point. These verses depict minds going miles per minute, while the choruses state a unifying theme that, whatever is in motion around them and regardless of the ideas themselves, somehow stay utterly fixed, reassuringly solid, endlessly convincing.

When that central, repeated idea is a beautiful one, you get an ode to progress and a plea for action. When the idea is shaky or absurd, you get comedy. When it’s a little of both, you get gallows humor (literally, in the case of Assassins). But what you get regardless is a viscerally, subliminally affecting mode of persuasion.

The whole verse, chorus, verse thing doesn’t just stick around because it’s convenient and familiar. It also sticks around because, in all sorts of ways we might not consciously realize, it works.

On Being Offended (by The Onion or by Anything Else)

I want to talk about The Onion, but first I want to talk about the boob song.

At last Sunday’s Oscars, there was this bit about Captain James T. Kirk traveling back in time to tell Seth MacFarlane how not to be the worst host in the show’s history. Among the fatal missteps that Kirk wanted to help MacFarlane avoid was singing “an incredibly offensive song that [upset] a lot of actresses in the audience.” On the off-chance you didn’t hear the song or read about it, dear reader, it’s called “We Saw Your Boobs,” and it catalogs the films in which Naomi Watts, Charlize Theron, and numerous others have appeared bare-chested—complete with shots of those actors looking grumpy and defeated, and of Jennifer Lawrence looking victorious because “we haven’t seen [her] boobs at all.”

Get it? Because she wins. Because you see, “sex is a contest,” and “men win and women lose when sex or nudity happens. It’s an archaic, prudish, creepy concept that derives from twisted notions about female purity and women-as-property.”

Plus, to celebrate the act of cinematic mammary-ogling while simultaneously slut-shaming the women to whom those breasts belong—in direct proportion to how naked they’ve gotten, and how often—is both manifestly regressive and spectacularly moronic. Besides which, MacFarlane was more or less daring the women he name-checked to do anything other than play along, because hey, they totally asked for this by being naked on camera, the dumb humorless floozies. (Headdesk forever and ever).

But what I found equally irksome, if I’m being honest, was the way the song was declared “offensive” first and foremost, as though that quality alone justifies its existence and assigns it comedic value. The mechanics of jokes matter, so I’d like to use this one, with its hoary premise and its lazy framing, as evidence that we all need to stop leaning so heavily on “offensive” as a category.

I’m not saying that we need to banish the word offensive from our vocabularies, exactly. Being offended is a valid reaction. It’s just that it’s not a particularly informative one. You can be offended by earnest, mean spirited hate-speech, yes. But you can also be offended by prescient, valuable satire. Or you can be offended by button-pushing attempts at incisive commentary that come up sort and thereby come out muddled. All of those things are equally likely to offend you, and the fact that you are offended will not help you to tell them apart.

In other words, nothing is objectively offensive, but lots of things are objectively problematic. And problematic things can spur useful dialogue, whereas all we ever seem to want from offensive things is a Big Old Apology (which all too often means very little and accomplishes even less). The time and effort we spend talking about whether something is offensive could, therefore, be better spent talking about whether it’s harmful, or immoral, or tone deaf. Even if the cultural object in question is all of the above, you can still like it—and you can like while still acknowledging that, in some respects, it’s kind of fucked up.

Which brings us to The Onion.

As Maryann Johanson points out, this joke is problematic for a whole host of reasons, “like how women of color come in for extra bonus disrespect and misogyny, and how little girls are inexcusably oversexualized.” Very, very true.

“But that’s not what this tweet was about,” she continues. “I didn’t see Wallis as the butt of this joke. It seemed completely obvious to me—to the point that I didn’t even have to think about it—that the butt of the joke here is people who say such things about women.”

Again, the mechanics of the joke matter. This is parody by exaggeration. Say that same bitchily misogynistic thing about Jennifer Lawrence, for exmaple, and it wouldn’t even register as satire; it would just register as the the kind of thing that people constantly say about women, especially but not exclusively on the Internet. Say it about an indisputably adorable and irrepressibly ebullient little kid, however, and the hatefulness of the sentiment becomes freshly obvious and sharply visible—which is supposed to make us ask why it’s OK to talk about anyone that way, if we can all agree that it’s not OK to talk about Quvenzhané Wallis that way.

Jonhanson concludes by conceding “that if you have to explain a joke, the joke has failed. So The Onion screwed up. Just not quite in the way that a surprising number of people seem to think they have.” We can appreciate that The Onion was taking aim at a valid target (that target definitely not being Quvenzhané Wallis), while also acknowledging that they missed the mark pretty severely (hence the widespread, perfectly understandable misunderstanding that their target was Quvenzhané Wallis, which again, was not in fact the case at all).

The Onion’s own apology calls the tweet “a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire,” but I think it would be a mistake to decide that this joke, because it is so problematic, has no value—and to some of you, that statement will mean that I am taking The Onion’s side, explaining away their error, and telling their detractors to shut up and stop being offended. The comments section of Johanson’s post (which, as with so many comments sections, I would strongly encourage you not to read) contains a whole lot of outrage along those lines.

But look, I’m not making excuses for The Onion, nor am I telling anyone not to be offended, and I don’t think that Johanson is doing any of that, either. Rather, I’m saying that it’s pointless to talk about who is and is not on the The Onion’s side, because everyone in this discussion, including The Onion, is on the same side.

That’s what we stand to gain when we stop using offence as our primary unit of measure. We can eschew the reductive, self-congratulatory fiction that the world is neatly divisible into an enlightened, empathetic Us and an ignorant, boorish Them. We can see that Seth MacFarlane’s shtick is fundamentally different from The Onion’s in terms of form, intent, and effect, even if both end up being offensive. And most importantly, we can move past the idea that being good is a fixed state rather than an ongoing process, and that it’s more important for offensive parties to seek absolution than it is for all of us to seek understanding.

Personally, when I’m offended by something, I try to approach it as the beginning of a potentially meaningful conversation, not the end of one.