The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile, ” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

Two Interviews: Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games and Carlos Bordeu of ACE Team

So I’ve been doing some interviews for The Kartel, and if I do say so myself, they’ve been going quite well. Below you’ll find an audio interview with Supergiant Games’ Greg Kasavin (who game Bastion is out now) and ACE Team’s Carlos Bordeu (whose game Rock of Ages will be out next month).

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Fresh from the success of their unapologetically trippy first-person brawler Zeno Clash, ACE Team announced Rock of Ages, a “tower offence” game about arranging great works of art from five periods–Classical Greek, Medieval, Renaissance, Rococo, and Romanticism–and then crushing them with a giant boulder. Carlos Bordeu (the C in ACE Team) sat down with The Kartel to discuss the game’s art-history-by-way-of-Terry-Gilliam look, and how the team’s process has changed since Zeno Clash.

The Kartel: You’ve said that ACE Team was somewhat “unbalanced” while making Zeno Clash, with way more visual artists than programmers. Has the division of labor changed for Rock of Ages?

 
Carlos Bordeu: In a sense, the development of Rock of Ages tended to balance itself out since we moved from Valve’s Source Engine technology to Epic’s Unreal Engine which, being a different beast altogether, required our entire studio to be actively looking for ways to improve our processes and methods while distributing this knowledge with the rest of the team. Learning to maneuver in Unreal forced us to do many small-scale local tests for several parts of the game in order to get the best gameplay and graphical experience we could deliver.

In terms of our work force, we had a more balanced team. There were three programmers who worked onRock of Ages, instead of David alone who almost entirely had to make Zeno Clash for the PC.

TK: The visuals in Zeno Clash don’t look quite like anything else, but in Rock of Ages you’re explicitly working from the styles of other artists. Has that been an adjustment?

CB: The process itself involved doing a lot of research about artists and styles we are fond of and distilling what we consider the most valuable and in tune with our game vision and we go with it. However we do believe that a certain “ACE Team” style has been applied to the game overall, and we’ve not just simply tried to only reference the art periods. Certainly using classic art as a reference for the game has given us a chance to once again produce visuals not very commonly seen in videogames.

Come to think of it, Goya's paintings do kind of look like World 6 of Yoshi's Island.

TK: Did the chronological order of the game’s levels lend itself well to introducing new game mechanics, and to a difficulty curve?

CB: Although the main game concept consists of placing your defenses, and then going to destroy the opponent with your giant boulder, the game progression is set up to slowly introduce the the player to different defensive units to maintain the focus on learning new strategies while you advance.

The level design also plays a very big part of the game’s design. Some strategic units work extremely well on certain types of levels, but not so well on others. Not all the same units are available on all levels which means learning a specific strategy and repeating it for all the game will never work. The boss levels [such as the confrontation with Michelangelo's David in the original trailer] are also a pretty big deviation from the traditional gameplay during the campaign.

TK: Could you talk a bit about the story in the single-player campaign? How does the myth of Sisyphus figure in?

CB: To be quite honest, the story is quite *as Dr. Evil would say* inconsequential. It jumps from one place to the next in a very dreamlike fashion, always in the style of old Monty Python movies and Terry Gilliam short animations.

But yes… Videogames in general are about being resilient in the pursuit of a goal, which usually means doing the same thing over and over until you conquer it (a bit like the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill forever).

I think that we can all relate.

Zip It, Mundungus: On Adaptation and Omission

So I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books–and I know, I know, that makes me culturally illiterate–but nonetheless, I went ahead and saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1: The Fellowship of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And there’s this scene in which the not-actually-titular fellowship is about to move Harry to a safe-house, and there is serious planning afoot. And some guy we’ve never seen before says something sort of off-topic, to which Alastor Moody replies, “Zip it, Mundungus!”

“Who the fuck is Mundungus?” I whispered to the Potter-literate friend sitting to my left.

“Oh, he’s been in the series since about the fifth book,” he replied. “He’s… a problem.”

“Oh,” I said. “So was he played by a different actor in the other movies? I don’t recognize him.”

“Um,” he said. “No, he wasn’t in the other movies.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I guess this is how they’re introducing him.”

I really had no idea what to say, other than “They can’t do that,” which of course they can, because they did. But this was unconventional storytelling, to say the least, and it had to mean one of two things:

1. The Harry Potter movies are meant as addenda to the books, an understanding of the latter being prerequisite if the former is to make a lick of sense. In this case, the films strive to be well-made, but not autonomous.

2. The Harry Potter movies are cynical cash-grabs, defying all manner of screenwriting logic because the intended audience already knows the plot and, more to the point, will readily pay to see the films no matter how much they suck. In this case, it makes no difference whether or not the films are well-made; if the consumer doesn’t care, then why should the producer?

Whether Harry Potter 7-1 is a quirky adaptation full of fan service, or a half-assed adaptation full of profit-motivated contempt, the “Zip it, Mundungus” moment serves as a yardstick for what not to do when adapting a work from one medium to another. In short: You’ve got to be canny and decisive about what you choose to excise, and equally, about what you choose to leave in. If you’ve left a peripheral character out of six of your eight movies, then you can probably get by without him for the remaining two.

Countless adaptions have suffered from being excessively faithful to their source material. When Zack Snyder says that the length of each shot in his film version of Watchmen corresponds to the size of a panel from Alan Moore’s original comic–that’s bad. Just because it works on the page doesn’t mean that it will work on film; indeed, the pacing and structure of Watchmen are meant to be peculiar to comics, and thus untranslatable. If there are vital things from the book that refuse to work in a movie, then you either replace them with something that will work or, as Alan Moore famously counseled Terry Gilliam in regards to Watchmen, think hard about whether you should be making the movie in the first place.

Generally speaking, the best adaptations are the ones that boldly leave things out. The film version of Everything Is Illuminated wisely leaves out an entire parallel narrative from the book. Because those who want to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book can read it, and those who want to watch Liev Schreiber’s film can watch it. One is a loving adaptation of the other, but they’re not one and the same, for goodness’ sake.

Even Peter Jackson’s massive adaptation of The Lord of the Rings leaves a fair amount out, as any Tom Bombadil fan will attest. And that trilogy would not have gained anything of value if Saruman, just before dying, had turned to our heroes and screamed, “Zip it, Bombadil!”

“Who the fuck is Tom Bombadil?” someone would have whispered to his slightly embarrassed, Elvish-speaking friend.

From Shelter to Infinity in Minecraft

Minecraft has sold over 625,000 copies, despite still technically being in its Alpha phase–which makes sense, really, because Minecraft is very much a game about discovery and possibility, a game about imagining what might be hidden around the next corner, or through the next cavern, or for that matter, in the next update. Half the fun lies in speculating about what the game could be. It could be a sprawling player-versus-player siege engine, or a community construction project, or an MMO that goes on indefinitely without ever asking you to grind your stats. By balancing elements of survival and exploration with a robust system of crafting and building, Minecraft has positioned itself somewhere between the original Legend of Zelda and an unimaginably large tub of Legos.

For those of you who haven’t tried Minecraft, the game’s world is notable for two major reasons. First, the whole thing is randomly generated, and so large as to be effectually infinite. As Douglas Adams once observed, something exceedingly large–eight times the size of the Earth, in the case of a Minecraft world–can actually seem bigger than infinity itself. Look up at the stars, and the image can be, in Adams’ words, “flat and boring.” Walk around in Minecraft, and you feel like you could walk on and on forever.

The second, arguably more important feature of Minecraft’s world is that the entire map can be torn down and rebuilt, piece by piece. The game-world is composed of 16x16x16-pixel cubes and, with a few notable exceptions, each of these cubes can be broken down into its constituent parts; trees become logs, which become wood, which becomes sticks, and so forth.

This is where the survival element comes in: As your explore and build, day turns to night, and the world becomes flooded with monsters. In only a few in-game days and nights, you can build yourself a mud hut, and a suit of leather armor, and some tools and weapons–and that’s enough to survive, since you don’t have to eat except to restore your health, and you won’t lose health while reclining comfortably in your unambitious little hole in the ground.

But if you want your mud hut to become a stone tower, and if you want your leather armor and stone tools to be replaced by nigh-indestructible diamond bling, then you’re going to have to branch out, explore, take stupid risks, get lost, get burned to death by a lava flow, get mobbed by spiders and skeletons and zombies and these bastards.

That’s the magic of Minecraft. If survival were really the point, then you’d have beaten the game as soon as you finished your stupid little hut. Thus the point is not survival or accumulation, but possibly. The point is to imagine what the game can do, and then go out and bloody do it. You can build a replica of the USS Enterprise. You can build a working computer inside the game. And most tantalizing of all, you can dream of what else you’ll be able to do by the time the game is finished.

So here’s the thing about buying Minecraft while it’s still in Alpha: You’ll be participating in these heady days of seemingly-infinite possibility, and at the same time, you’ll be helping to push the game along into its ultimate iteration–toward producing even more concrete, fully-realized possibilities.

That, in my humble option, is pretty good for about 12 bucks–and more than half a million of my fellow gamers seem to agree.

Your Opponent Is Not Your Enemy

Bill Maher frustrates the hell out of me. He’s clearly smart, he’s often funny, and his show allows other smart and/or funny people the opportunity to have lengthy discussions about important things. But he’s also infinitely smug, and Real Time–when it isn’t hosting some of the best political discussions on television–takes far too many detours into lazy, self-satisfied, Jay Leno-style late night pablum. That kind of bad writing reduces the overall quality of the show considerably, but it doesn’t necessarily contradict or weaken the substantive discussion for which I tune in.

This kind of crap does, though: “When it comes to voting,” Maher said on October 1, “you’ve got to grow up and realize that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.” In this analogy, Democrats are the “disappointing friend,” and Republicans are the “deadly enemy.”

Maher’s statement struck me as inflammatory partisan bullshit, probably because it is, in fact, inflammatory partisan bullshit. But to be fair, I heard Bill Maher say that only a few hours after hearing Jon Stewart say that we really, really need be wary of precisely that sort of idiocy.

There’s a difference between disagreeing with people–like newscasters on Fox News that I think are incorrect in their analysis of the day’s events–and people that threaten to kill you for putting a cartoon image of Mohammad in a bear suit. And that’s a line that we too often forget.

Our system genuinely allows for peaceable exchanges of power, Stewart reminds us on NPR’s Fresh Air. Even if [INSERT POLITICIAN YOU REALLY DON'T LIKE] comes to power,

we’ll be fine. You know, we had a Civil War. Just–we’re not that fragile. And I think we always have to remember that people can be opponents, but not enemies. And there are enemies in the world. We just need the news media to help us delineate, and I think that’s where the failing is: That the culture of corruption that exists in the media doesn’t allow us to delineate between enemies and opponents, and that’s where we sort of fall into trouble.

Or to put it as succinctly as possible: Al-Qaeda is my enemy, and Glenn Beck is my opponent, and seriously, there’s a difference.

And it’s a very real difference, and obscuring it is an historically situated political strategy that, according to Rick Perlstein, Richard Nixon helped to pioneer between 1966 and 1972. It is not an inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the political process, but rather a matter of “using the angers, anxieties, and resentments” of the day to unite voters against a common, essentially imagined enemy.

When Republicans suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America’s enemies, as he had come to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him.

Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way–that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland (Scribner, 2009): xii.

The imagined conflict between the forces of light and those of darkness (with light defined as whatever I think, and darkness defined as whatever I don’t) has come to dominate the American political landscape, to the extreme detriment of the nation’s public discourse. We actually forget that someone who wants to kill us belongs to a different category than someone with whom we disagree about the role of government in regulating commerce.

And I get it: A world composed entirely of absolutes would be much easier to sort out than our own messy, complicated one. But we have a responsibility to live in the real world, because we’re adults, and growing up isn’t about realizing “that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy,” as Bill Maher said the other night. Growing up is about realizing that the person with whom you disagree is not necessarily an enemy, let alone a deadly one.

There really are deadly enemies in the world, and we’ll be in no position to confront them if we waste all of our time and energy squabbling with one another along cynically delineated partisan lines.

Other People in Virtual Worlds

Let’s talk about video games, shall we?

Although there is some really excellent work being done on the subject of virtual worlds, most of it operates on a notably limited definition of what a “virtual world” is. Take Terra Nova, a cyber-aggregate of writers whose research on games is confined strictly to online, massively multiplayer experiences. While I am certainly not denying that World of Warcraft and Second Life (and EVE Online and Everquest and Free Realms) are fascinating, worthy objects of contemplation, why stop there? Isn’t Left 4 Dead a compelling virtual world, even though it isn’t massively multiplayer? Isn’t Braid a compelling virtual world, even though it isn’t multiplayer at all?

It is easy to see why massively multiplayer online games (or MMOs) appeal to Sociologists: In these games the avatars all, or mostly, represent human players. Many of the rules of social interaction from the Real World therefore carry over into the virtual worlds of MMOs.  Autonomous individuals organize themselves into economies, and factions, and so on, beholden to the rules of their world but free to express their social agency within it.

Single-player games represent a rather different, entirely solipsistic ontological situation.  In such games, Gorgias and René Descartes (and George Berkeley, and Edmund Husserl, and many, many others) turn out to have been correct when they suspected that the other people around them were figments of their imaginations rather than thinking beings coequal with themselves.  In the model they feared, only one person (Gorgias, or me, or you, or whoever is doing the thinking) is a real human.  Everyone else is a simulation thereof.   Non-Player Characters (or NPCs) are exactly the sort of puppet-like, non-human humans whose supposed semi-existence has long troubled Western philosophers.

Sociology would be a very different discipline, if not an outright impossibility, in such a solipsistic universe.  So the folks at Terra Nova have limited their field of study in the manner that they find most useful, and that makes best use of their collective skill set. And there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that, except that it leaves several fairly large gaps to be filled by other, differently-focused writers.

In my next few posts, I would like to try and fill in some of those gaps.