Jordan Pailthorpe

I am a writer, teacher, game designer, and producer. I like cats, games, coffee, motorcycles, and creative writing. This is primarily a place for my unpublished (and links to my published) writing, in first and final form depending on the post....

[jordanpailthorpe]

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. Wrote a thing that about why the patriots mean a lot to me and my family, and complicated feelings towards football in general. Link below and in bio! Go pats! #patriots #nflplayoffs #superbowl51 #tombrady #workingclassheroes #gopats #patriotsnation #football #billsimmons #colinkaepernick #family --- https://medium.com/@Jpailthorpe/this-sunday-let-us-working-class-kids-have-our-superbowl-fc3acacf0647?source=linkShare-7c62eb2778b9-1486309864

[jordanpailthorpe]

Building a community of critical game thinkers: How I started an indie game discussion group at Emerson College

(cross posted from The Engagement Lab blog)

Over the last five weeks of the semester, I started something I call the Indie Game Discussion Group.  Every Thursday night at the Emerson Engagement Lab (where I make and teach games) 10+ students, faculty, and local game enthusiasts would gather in our common space to play and discuss alternative games in a semi-formal setting.

Each week we would play a new indie/art game or collection of games and discuss theme, design (technical and artistic), and rhetoric. Through contemporary and relevant game studies readings that were specifically aligned with the games being played, we  explored the games in context of the discourse in which they were created. The games we discussed in this event series typically fly under the normal “gamer” radar and  push the boundaries of what digital games are and can be.

I had two main goals in mind when starting this group: 

 1. Generate a community at Emerson that participates in an ongoing critical engagement with the contemporary indie game discourse. 

 2. Provide an outlet for Emerson students who are interested not just in playing games together, but talking about games together, in an environment that bridges the gap between a formal class and a free form club. 

There are many meetups and workshops that help connect designers to audiences or designers to other designers, but there are hardly any local groups at Emerson and in the wider Boston community that explores surrounding culture from a critical distance . Ultimately I wanted there to be a place at Emerson for students, faculty, and local game creators/critics/designers to meet in an informal setting to play, talk, and critically engage one another. When starting this group, I had no idea if it was going to sustain itself or even do something interesting. After five weeks of a "trial run" in preparation for a full launch next fall, I feel as though the group was as successful as I had hoped and even exceeded some of my early expectations.

The Structure

At the start of each week I would create a list of games that center around a specific genre, theme, or idea. Each session would place students into a different kind of play experience, either asking them to play games together in small groups, take turns switching off hot seat style while others observed/directed, or even watching lets play videos where we would watch an online personality play through a game for us. 

For example, in week 4's discussion "The rebirth of ASCII and how mystery can make games go viral” we discussed and played  incremental games such as Candybox and Drowning. Because these are somewhat passive games that require a player to leave them running and return to them at certain moments during the day, we loaded all the games immediately at the start of the session with one persona guiding the mouse, but taking direction from the entire group. In addition to the games, I would also pair each collection with an essay from a prominent or important voice in games writing. 

For week 4 we read Leigh Alexander's Essay "Why Candy Box became more social than 'social games'" which framed our thought process and directed us towards particular questions while playing. This piece was very important to me and I think helped the participants see that this kind of discussion does not happen in a vacuum. This also worked towards exposing them to important voices in games, like Leigh Alexander or Austin Walker or Kent Sheely whose work informs and articulates this critical investigation. Therefore we were not just playing games and talking about them, but framing the discussion by pairing games with a particular theme and supporting that theme with a recent essay by a prominent voice in game criticism.

What worked? 

Starting from a base set of interested participants

Instead of trying to organize this, picking a time to hold it, and advertising, I tried to engage with the students I knew were already interested in this kind of work. many of these students came from past classes who displayed interest in game design/criticism or other teacher's recommendations. In addition, almost 75% of students who attended every week were first and second year students. To find a time that worked best I sent out a doodle survey to gauge which day and time works best for them and then picked the day with the most availability. 

The free-form, drop in/drop out nature of the group.

I feel we benefited from having isolated discussions that started and concluded each night, rather than having ongoing gameplay sessions over the course of a couple weeks. This helped bring in new students and didn't make them feel like they missed something or weren't prepared to engage. Every week had at least one new person, either a friend of a regular participant or someone who heard about the group in passing or by word of mouth. This type of "drop in/drop out" form helped establish the group as a safe space that doesn't penalize or shame those who aren't at every session.

The weekly, structured meeting time doesn't shift or change.

Students playing Fibbage during the comedy games week[/caption] A maybe slightly obvious point, but one I think worth mentioning. A group like this thrives on having consistency to establish importance. It was crucial to has a meeting every week no matter what and to keep them at the same day/time. Otherwise students might not know if it is happening, when it is happening, and therefore don't show up or bother to find out.

Attention to accessibility, representation, and game literacy.

Within the core group of students who came to all the meetings, there was a wide range of experience levels with gameplay and game thinking. It was important to keep an eye out for those who identified as “not a gamer” and took that vulnerable risk of coming into a space consisting of what they most likely felt were experts (though no one in the group self identifies that way). I made sure to invite those who wouldn't readily volunteer to play and giving them the chance to take the stage.  I especially was aware of doing this whenever noticing a student slipping away from the conversation, intentionally subconsciously. This sense of inclusion really helped to gel the group together and I think helped retention as well.

Structured, moderated discussion.

Instead of just having students speak on how they were feeling, we settled into a moderator/teacher-student structure fairly quickly. Most of the time the night would start with me posing a question and students raising their hand to enter the queue to answer, pose a new question, or comment on what they were seeing. Soon enough they were responding directly to one another without dominating the conversation or regressing into isolation. It sounds strange to have students raise their hand to speak in order of turn within an informal setting, but this allowed for all voices to be heard. Establishing this rhythm early on solidified the structure of each discussion and gave folks who were shy an opportunity to speak.

Choosing games not many have played to expose participants to new ideas.

One game we played was called asphyx, a game that asks players to not breathe when under water.[/caption] Everyone loves to talk about the things they like or know well. The first week I asked everyone what they would want to see played in this group and quickly realized if I catered to everyone's wishes the discussion would regress into already solidified opinion versus solidified opinion. though I do want to work towards student curation and explore more popular games critically (more on that below!) I feel it was beneficial to not use games many were familiar with and instead highlight those games and people that no one ever knew about. Basically, if it had a TV commercial or you could buy it in Gamestop we probably weren't going to play it!

What didn't work?

Playing one game for the night as opposed to multiple shorter game experiences 

The first week we played Lucas Pope's Papers, Please which is an amazing game that I teach every semester in my game design research writing class. Though it is such a great game that can be played and rhetorically understood in a few hours, it was just a tad too long for our group. I found that having a handful of smaller game experiences, some that could be completed in under 90 seconds, helped break up the night.

Letting the conversation delve into “it’s not a game because x reason”

Though I think its an important question to ask and interrogate, the "this is not a game" argument is loaded with political ramifications that typically devolve into problematic territory. We talked about why a game would do what it does and the reasons a creator would, in Robert Yang's example, lock out players from future playthroughs due to actions the player makes in-game, but anytime the conversation turned became negative without valid critical inquiry the conversation would come to a screeching halt. I think I could have avoided this with better leading questions or some kind of on-boarding for why this is a hard question to ask/investigate.

What do students have to say?

For the question of the night on the last week I asked each student what they liked about this experience and why they kept coming back. I’ll let their quotes speak for themselves:

 There are just so many games out there, but I didn't even know half the games we played and it opened my eyes to what you can really do with games if you aren't constricting yourself to what you would “think” to play. There is an unexplored passion for videogames at Emerson that we could do more with. 

I just like being able to talk about games without being graded on it. And the themes! The topic section is really great! I like that anyone can show up and that it is inclusive.

Games are really smart yet before this group I definitely didn't know how many applications there are for them. I like listening to everyone speak eloquently and critically about games.

I like how this group strikes a great balance between being informal and having a definite structure. I like watching other people play games. It helps give a new perspective on their design.

I like being able to think critically about games and have critical discussions about them. Before this group I only thought about how enjoyable games are. This has opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about them.

I like seeing how much diversity there is within game design, how many games are being made and how many niche concepts that I would never even imagine could exist. Its inspiring to see so many people do so many things.

The future and plans for next fall

As much as I enjoy curating the games and providing a baseline for the discussion, my ultimate goal with this trial run was to build a base of engaged students who would want to curate and lead the discussion each week, replacing me as a focal point for the group and giving control to them. 

Ultimately, I hope this will show Emerson how much of a thirst there is for the study of games within the college. At the moment, there is only a couple game focused classes that are solely interested in design and skill development. There is not one theory based class on games, not one class on the critical inquiry into the discourse of games. For the past four semesters I have been teaching a research writing course as a game design and study course. This is my attempt at filling this gap and exposing students who might not think there is much to the study or design of games. But with departmental limits and aligning content with strict course objectives, the course becomes limited in how much we can really dive into games as cultural objects worthy of study. 

Games are progressively becoming more and more embedded into our daily realities. The study of games and play is just as important as writing, literature, and film-making, and if we don't prepare creatives with the baseline of this mode we so a disservice to our students and our community.

Therefore, I hope this group makes some noise and shows the college that students want to take games seriously, as designers, as critics, and as writers. If not in the classroom, then in front of our TV screen at 6pm on Thursday nights. If not for class credit, then for sole intellectual curiosity. If not within the ivory walls, than outside them.

Click here for an archive of each week's curated list. 

[jordanpailthorpe]

A poem: "I'm Thinking of You on Sunday"

In honor of the Patriots going to the Superbowl and giving off some good vibes (as opposed to the shitty ones on the internet right now), I am posting this unpublished poem that will be a part of my thesis titled "Sea of Doors". It is still in the process of editing, but sometimes I think we get so caught up in the secrecy or worry over where our work will end up we hide it for much too long.

Thanks for reading! 

-----

I'm Thinking of You on Sunday 

As I watch them run from the tunnel with rockets

exploding in air and dad's sitting with a bud

light in his hand, watching them through the tube

charging like iron Patriots, ready with their shoulder pads

and mouth guards and god loves America playing over speakers

and my chest where twelve is stained by buffalo sauce

I spilled when Brady took us home that one time Tony was screaming

something about lost children, like Kerouac,

only later and on a stage where sports are played

by swinging fists to breakdowns, no spirals or snaps

but the same celebrations with bodies becoming piles

after pulling the mic as close to their throats as the ball

to their chests as the beer to his lips as the motorcycle cylinders

burning between my thighs as we thunder

into the bedroom on Downes 

avenue where he sleeps before dropping off stacks

of racks filled with bread after the men have left

the locker room, finished press conferences,

after the refrain becomes on to Cincinnati

and we’re in New Orleans banging our soles

against concrete stages and mom is in the kitchen

and the men are running from the tunnel and the rockets never stop

reaching and the smoke from the cigarette between her lips

is everywhere at once, and aren't all the pretty ones

always covered in it?

[jordanpailthorpe]

Linebreaker Poetry: A Pop-up Poetry-bombing project at Emerson College

Every Saturday at 10am I co-teach a creative writing poetry class to public high school students in the Boston area. It is part of a program called EmersonWRITES  (run through the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department of Emerson College)and is a free way for students to experience a college-like atmosphere while building a creative writing community outside their high schools. 

Our class is called Becoming a Linebreaker

Since we were learning about found poetry and poetry in unexpected places (through Kenneth Goldsmith and PopUpPoets respectively) I wanted to give the students an opportunity to put themselves and their words in the space they occupy every Saturday morning. I prompted them to write poetic lines on scrap pieces of paper, in all shapes and sizes, that either culminate in a larger narrative piece or simply exist as a bunch of aphoristic fragments.

We went to the 12th floor and left these anonymous lines for the audience of that space (faculty, staff, and students studying and teaching language) to find. Many students are directing the subject of the line to the presence on the 12th floor, while others used the opportunity to focus on the materiality of the project (one student created a poem/game that has a secret code you can unlock by finding all the fragments).

This project links into the larger theme of our class, which focuses on what poetry is good for, the subversive uses of poetry, and how poetry can give voice to the overlooked/voiceless. This was a really empowering project for them and had just enough of a radical edge that they embraced it passionately without breaking boundaries. 

Since they are only tacked up pieces of paper or post-it notes, It will only take a few minutes to take all these lines down, and that intentionally makes a statement about the potential vulnerability and immaterial nature of their experiences when placed within an institutional context.

Ultimately, they are putting their words into a space knowing they might not be read or seen before they go into the garbage. 

I might be over-dramatizing the idea a little, but I still think it sends a powerful message: even when your words are right in front of someones face, they can easily be ignored. 

[jordanpailthorpe]

This small game experience is called Transmissions and is one piece in a "game chapbook." This chapbook, which will be a companion to my full length MFA poetry thesis titled "Sea of Doors," is a digital collection of small games that attempt to translate poetic concepts into short play experiences. 

I am attempting to explore the concept of lost communication using a classic science fiction trope of asynchronous messaging systems that are unable to keep up with the movement of time.

I am also trying to collapse traditional narrative identifiers typically found in third person fiction and instead lean heavily on the second person, the primary mode of narration through video games. I feel this implicates the player in this disconnection, and I hope (with much more development time) the player feels this metaphorical distance between the two primary perspectives collapsing the fictional narrative and reflecting the disconnection between the player and someone they personally feel separated from, either in life or death. 

  Thanks for playing! 

[jordanpailthorpe]

On The Effort: Empathy, Resurgence, and Activism

The Effort was my melodic hardcore punk band that I played in from 2006-2011  (you can listen to and download all of our music for free here).

The band's thematic explored the sad, unfair way western culture shapes our actions, relationships, and motivations. It was about pushing each other to look beyond what we would see in the media, hear at the dinner table, or even what we would sometimes be told from the stage. The Effort was us trying to be better people and thinking that maybe others would want to share in the excitement of that journey too, even if we didn't have any of the answers (or any of the heavy breakdowns).

Though maybe a bit too didactic at times, the most important thing to me was trying to reach out to other kids who might have been feeling somewhat hopeless and lost, regardless of what lost meant to them, and help channel that energy into growth; direct activism, investment in knowledge, or even just cathartic output. In other words, it was about thinking outside the self in order to sing these lyrics and wholeheartedly believe them: "stronger than I've ever been for the betterment and the growth of our citizens." ("And to Think", Iconoclasm)

To help others, you first have to deal with your own demons, or at least recognize what they look like. You have to be vulnerable, open, and compassionate towards yourself, your loved ones, your community. To be critical, but not to confuse criticism for hatred or vitriol. To avoid perpetuating cycles of violence, physical or emotional, in order to empathize, a word that seems to be missing from so many people's vocabulary (and one that was surely missing from much of my experience in the hardcore scene). You who is reading knows all this, but I feel we forget it more often than we should, regardless of position.

Fast forward to now, after 3ish years, we are gearing up for a big announcement that isn't just about the band, but about trying to expand upon the thing The Effort was always attempting to do: bridge a gap between privileged communities and those who aren't and do so in a way that is inclusive and empathetic, not just through raising money or awareness, but through collapsing the space and mindsets that cause division and blindness.

It's grand, and we haven't hammered out all the details yet (and won't announce specifics until January) but just liking the page helps us grow our view potential (funky Facebook algorithm stuff) and reach more people. If you share this status to your friends, or even re-blog this, that would be even better.

This means a lot to me, as it does to the four other members, so of course it would mean a lot more if friends and family and colleagues would help me spread the word when the time comes help show support. It might not seem like a big deal, but it does to me, and your click actually does impact things logistically.

There are a lot of terrible things happening and everyone has their own ways of helping/coping. This is mine. It might not be the best or successful, but its something.

The Effort was always more to us than a straightedge hardcore band and i think now, more than ever, is the time to prove it.

Please reblog!

[jordanpailthorpe]

Games, Poetry, And The Purpose of Art with Jordan Pailthorpe

"Isn't that the larger purpose of art in general? To empathize with experiences outside our own, or to provide others with the ability to see things from our perspective, whether its personal, or political? Games make rhetorical arguments just by their nature. I think it is the same goal, but just a different way of getting there." This interview was published back in the spring, but I never included it here. Kristy is the best and is doing some great work in her own right. Check out her site! 

[societysucka-deactivated2015110]

Visit Original Link

I’ve been medicated my whole life clouding my mind until it’s dark at night and even on the blackest of days I muster strength to see through the haze. I’ve loathed those who don’t know what its like to be a loser in a constant fight because we’re stuck in a backwards game where no one gives a fuck if you don’t want to play. Well I’ve lost so I don’t care if anyone sees everything that’s been taken from me. I’m twenty two with nothing to loose and I’d give it all away if I had to choose.

[the-death-of-true-spirit]

Why don’t more people listen to this band?

[tobiasxva-deactivated20170810]

Probably the inevitable sadness associated with the fact that they’re on “indefinite hiatus” :( :( I have a massively impressive collection of Iconoclasm albums and their lyrics tattooed across my chest. Maybe one day we can convince the guys to do a reunion. Eh,

jordanpailthorpe

? ;)

[jordanpailthorpe]

maybe :)

[jordanpailthorpe]

'>GET LAMP' and other poems | Cartridge Lit

I have three poems up at Cartridge Lit! Text Adventures, Fallout, and Kirby. 

>look

you can barely see

through the dark

the boxes of baseball cards

a pink panther action figure

[jordanpailthorpe]

Mountain

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

                                                            -Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

  In this universe I make what death means

by my right hand, privacy becomes a stick figure

in the topleft corner, wealth is a series of overlapping dollar signs.

  I’m happy about this day of days.

I am born and was always 42

trees growing over each ridge. The answer

to life, the universe, and everything.

  I sing of textured grass and flex my wireframes beneath bitmaps.

I’m getting high on this transparent sky.

The wind whips through my speakers and ripples with scanlines.

I wait for the rain and it comes to put out barbecues and forest fires. 

  I feel happy about being alive.

I can’t think of nothing greater than this.

  I watch myself rotate.

I pull to the top and look down from above the clouds.

I pull into the floating base of small rocks and let it save.

  I keep these trees filled with flashing white dots crimson,

like blood vessels. I’m basically this new day.

I’ve taken to stretching myself within this window.

I’m at once the monitor and tree bark.

I’m a total babe.          

I’m an 81 megabyte spinning mountain and I love myself. 

  I feel at one with the universe inside this overcast day

My rotations keep constant.

The leaving of leaves, the paper cones, the white dust.

  There are millions of suns. 

Can you see them rising?

Have you stopped to watch the wind whip

paper bags or blow dirt into unsuspecting eyes?

Have you thought once of a thousand acres? The earth? 

Have you left?

  I've collected the remnants of leftovers:

Signposts dig into my spine

Boards of wood stretch across my abdomen.

Lonesome tooth, broken egg. 

A sailboat and rotary telephone.

Movie reel.

Bowling pins

Six sided die.

  What is the meaning of this? I wonder about

this misty dawn light. I can’t get enough of this warm summer.

The smoke becomes crimson again.

I want to find something outside the universe.

Scrolling further,

Saving—

I hear windchimes stuffed into square waves. 

I spell man and hear the beginning of beard hairs, 

nights in front of television sets, triangle lullabies. 

  I must endure this autumn afternoon.

I am floating alone.

I zoom out and see myself among the stars.

I feel the ripple from outside myself.

I’d love to tell someone about this.

  Hellooooo?

I fear I’m talking to myself.

I can’t feel anymore movement.

No fire ant colonies, no mountain lions.

Will I find another like me? Floating rock, lonely mountain.

  Still waiting.

I'm reminded of my childhood in this night of nights,

spinning clouds around the summit.

Just one mountain in a sea of mountains unseen. 

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.

  What is sadness?

Now it seems.

The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I have heard the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

Look for me under your fingers 

in your screens, inside your binary code.

I stop somewhere waiting to boot back up.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

Is this some kind of game?

a great communion inside this black night?

I feel I have nothing to fear in this day of days,

Night of nights, for I am mountain and I just felt god

in this blooming morning.

[jordanpailthorpe]

Make it New (again): A Game Poetry Manifesto

Over winter break, before starting the spring semester, I read Austin Grossman’s You as well as Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I read these simultaneously, switching back and forth, unintentionally blending Carson’s poetic reinvention of Greek myth with the mythologizing Grossman does with a subject that has become barely old enough to even be mythologized. Though the decision to read both these books at the same time was completely coincidental, it really does inform and reinforce the work I have been working towards; to use games, sports and all, as a lens through which I can convey why I feel poetry, at least good poetry, is important: it’s a way to make the ordinary feel new.

My ordinary is the form of the game. Most people don’t see art in games, and even though that conversation has long been dead by now with the victors raising their controllers in the air, full on revolution pose, there is still a sentiment that the culture is “low brow” or “cliche.” The thing is, I wouldn’t really disagree with them. Most narratives in games, whether they are video games, or sports, or live action games, are not very original. We’ve all heard the story about rescuing a princess or saving the world from an evil villain. Those stories are nothing new, and even if they weren’t, I’m not sure poetry would be the best form to tell them anyway.

These game narratives aren’t original because they don’t have to be. What lies at the heart of a game is not the story it tells, but how the player feels while playing it; the moments in which that person failed, or succeeded, found a secret, explored a new environment for the first time--it’s how the player feels agency in a world that’s new, not just because of language or art, but in the way the world responds to your actions. It’s about making new, not the narratives, but how those narratives feel, and how those narratives are contextualized within a system unlike the one we live in.

I want that to come across in my poetry, not to replicate the narratives of games, but how language can obscure and make new those past associations of play. I want my poems to feel like a game has come back to haunt the reader and make them uneasy. I want them to be off balance. I want to blur the line between the screen and the page and have my reader confuse pixels for pen ink. I want these poems to be reverent, but off kilter. My favorite poems have allusions to things I understand, but still hold enough mystery for me to explore a new space. My favorite games do the same. Why can’t I collapse those two things? Why can't I make new my experiences of playing games and bring them into a literary context? 

[jordanpailthorpe]

Understanding Evil: The Role of Games in the 21st Century

Games exist everywhere and in many forms:  between aluminum fences surrounded by trees, around empty dinner tables, inside our television screens; they pop up in our workplace and our bedrooms; they are played with friends, with strangers, and with ourselves. Though the contemporary consensus of the word game typically is associated with “videogame,” games have existed for centuries. Even before the written word was the primary form of communication, people used games as a way to move ideas, create cultural touchstones, and form communities.  Games even find their way into Robert Lifton’s memoir “Witness to an Extreme Century” where he writes “I remember thinking as a child that adult life must be very boring because it did not seem to include spending much time playing a game with a ball (16).”

In the 20th century the book was the main form of witnessing and activism from the perspective of a writer. Now, in the 21st century, game design is stepping up to the plate and allowing game designers to recapture that memoir spirit through the construction of an interactive medium. This is not to say that games will replace memoir or books, but that the power of games, not just through their dissemination in terms of popularity, but their strength as a medium, offers the ability to witness and express these same power relations through play. Tom Bissell once said, “Any writer who is not interested in what we are now calling ‘video games’ is a bystander to one of the most important conceptual shifts between story and storyteller in a hundred years (Bissell, Grantland)."  I want to take that further. Games in of themselves aren’t just machines for telling stories, but machines that let a player experience how stories affect them through interaction with systems and rules. The medium of games have the ability to convey the institutionalization of thought control, explore deep psychological trauma and the effects on a person, critique assumptions that people fall on a binary between good or evil, and most importantly, evoke empathy through embodying a character or situation outside the player’s own personal experience.

In his book Half-Real, Jesper Juul suggests that “to play a videogame is to interact with real rules while imaging a fictional world and a videogame is a set of rules as well as a fictional world (13).” He goes on to say how videogames allow a player to either see the representation of that fictional world as a mere placeholder for the rules of the system or to see that representation as something intrinsic to the experience of the game itself.  Yet understanding how the two work together, how rules allow us to understand a system which mirrors our real world, is important to understand how games allow us to experience situations as opposed to simply reading about them. Ian Bogost goes further to explain how the rhetoric of videogames relies on this combination of fiction and rules. Videogames, as he says, “open a new domain for persuasion, thanks to their core representational mode, procedurality…Procedural rhetoric [is] the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving images(4).” In this way, Bogost suggests that games in of themselves make arguments, but not in the same way traditional modes do through visual or textual rhetoric.

It’s not just that games allow designers to create arguments through procedure; it’s that those arguments, like memoir, are not didactic in nature. Instead, they are a lense that you the player see through in order to understand and make your own judgments based on felt information. In this way, the player experience and how that engrains in the mind of the person after the play is over is tantamount to understanding the power and impact of games.

Systems are not restricted to game worlds. The world we live in is full of systems, from large political mechanisms to small community based relationships, to the checks and balances of the individual psyche.  Exposing these systems in order for another person to understand the mechanisms and how they affect the individual is one of the key strengths of the written word. Robert Lifton’s memoir “Witness to an Extreme Century” recounts his past as a psychologist, working through the major atrocities of the 20th century. His work spans across many critical moments in history, such as recounting the experiences of survivors in Hiroshima, interviewing those who experienced first-hand the Cultural Revolution in China, the political turmoil associated with the Vietnam War, and even documenting the responses of Nazi doctors interviewed years after the war. His memoir traces a line of extremity and violence through the 20th century, one that doesn’t seem to have any indication of stopping. It is then, as Lifton would say, our responsibility to fully understand the implications of these events so we learn from the mistakes of the past in order to move towards a better world: “My work on destructive historical events was based on a specific conviction: we had to go beyond mere outrage and disgust to seek a fuller grasp of what led to an atrocity, what it did to fellow human beings, and what significance it had for the world that remained (42).” Games have the unique ability of taking Lifton’s call to show that significance and taking it further by putting the player directly in the position of experiencing those situations.

            When looking at the different atrocities and their repercussions of the 20th century, it’s clear how already established games released within the last ten years can convey, through procedural rhetoric, the same ideas and conclusions Lifton reached in his work. One of his very first projects and one that grounds much of his methodology and interests were his experiences with thought reform. Thought reform, in his definition, is “a systematic and widespread program that penetrated deeply into people’s psyches and raised larger questions about the mind’s vulnerability to manipulation and coerced change (3).”

Bioshock is a seminal game that was released to critical acclaim back in the early 2000’s. It was lauded mostly for its world building and its Randian commentary which governed its system. The narrative unfolded quite like many other first person adventure shooters: The game opens and your character stumbles into this strange world filled with mystery. This particular world is a dilapidated city built underneath the ocean. You quickly make contact with a man named Atlas who insists you help him take back control of Rapture from the monster characters that have overrun it. You trust Atlas as a character because the game’s system treats Atlas as your objective guide; Atlas not only functions as a character but also as a functional component of how you as a player understand what to do next in the game. Because the game builds on the conventions of every other progression based game in the past, it assumes you will trust him and not for a second think otherwise.

Yet this is where the game turns the expectations of the player’s understanding of the medium’s conventions into a commentary on games and their ability to control their players. Wes Erdelack articulates what happens when you finally reach Andrew Ryan’s office, the supposed antagonist of the game.

When the player finally reaches Andrew Ryan's office, the game delivers an unexpected reversal. Just before you enter, you learn that Atlas has subjected your character to a form of mind control. Everything that you have experienced in the game up to this point has been an illusion, created by Atlas through a form of post-hypnotic suggestion. His helpful direction through the game's world has been a covert form of command, all devised in order to make you kill Ryan and hand control of the city over to Atlas. When you enter his office, Ryan tells you that you have been subject to this plot; but as you kill Ryan you have no control over your character. You watch as your character beats him to death with a golf club, and Ryan repeats the same phrase over and over again: “A man chooses, a slave obeys” (Burch).

The ability for Bioshock to not only manipulate the player throughout 2/3’s of the game, but to do it in a way that goes against typical game convention, was a turning point for how players trusted the systems of gamespace. Up until this point, games always gave player’s agency over their environments and systems. If the player succeeded by defeating the enemies or obstacles in the path, the game would be beaten, the player victorious, good guys go home and bad guys stay dead. Bioshock flipped the script on its head. By simply playing, the player was complicit in a system of manipulation, each moment leading up to a stark revelation of how it handled that deceit. The game essentially argued how systems of power cannot be trusted, even if there seems like there is no reason not to. Lifton said this about the thought reform process after the Cultural Revolution:  “In the world I was studying the criteria for truth could be little more than what the manipulators chose them to be.” Though from an outside perspective it doesn’t seem like much a big deal, paired with Lifton’s observations of communist China, this turning over of conventions within the safe space of a game teaches the chilling effects of an invisible manipulating system.  As Lifton notes on page 81, “The larger truth is that mind control kills.”

Though Bioshock is probably the most popular game that exposes thought reform through gameplay, there are many other games that operate with this same impulse, but take it one step further. These games instead flip the script on the player, revealing that through their actions (though supported by the game’s rule set) they have committed reprehensible acts. The most interesting aspect of these games is how that is revealed to the player, and how the player is feels once the reveal is made, which of course has no effect on the game itself. Instead this is something that the player carries with them after the game is over.

One such game is an older title called Shadow of the Colossus. In this game, you are a young man attempting to resurrect your love who is comatose in the chapel at the center of the world. In order to do this you must defeat sixteen gargantuan colossi that are scattered across the land. Unlike typical adventure games where the environment is littered with small enemies leading up to these epic boss battles, the world is peaceful and serene. The game wants you to wander in this landscape without feeling the need for violence. This is an intentional design choice that butts up against the game’s main objective which asks you to kill these beasts unprovoked. And that is the tragic beauty of SotC:  the game gives you a win state by asking you to go out into a natural environment, seek out these beautiful larger than life creatures, and murder them, all for your own personal selfish wants.

The twist is even harder to swallow. You realize your character, even after finishing off the last beast, won’t be able to get his love back. In this way, the game is telling you to win you must commit horrible acts, and even when it’s over you will not be rewarded for it. Like thought reform, this process feels like “an apocalyptic cleansing of all the past—a psychological apocalypticism in which all prior products of the human mind give way to a new collective mind-set that is pure, perfect, and eternal (14).”

Though Videogames have the power to generate a system of unknowns that the player is susceptible to before playing, most board games are very clear-cut in how their rules operate and what is expected from the experience. Yet there is a new wave of art board games that attempt to get at a more nuanced understanding of how mechanics in games, how playing with systems, can put their players in very uncomfortable and emotionally uneasy situations, not to make the player feel guilty, but to play with that power dynamic that games afford us.

Train, a board game by leading game designer Brenda Romero, is on the surface a very simple resource management game. The goal of the minimal styled board game is to pack a tiny traincar with as many pieces as you can and move it to the goal. The board consists of simple railway images, and the traincars are typical traincars. The pieces you place inside the traincars are little yellow faceless figures, and the more you pack into the car and get to the goal, the better score you will receive. It is only at the end of the game that the real narrative framework is revealed: those little yellow meeple figures are Jewish prisoners and the goals you are sending them to happen to be concentration camps. Romero “described the moment of realization as ‘a fall from a hundred feet up,’ once the now-victorious player realizes what he or she has just done. (Burch, Destructoid).”

Yet the reveal is not the end of the game. Once the victorious player gets their Train to their station, the other players still have their turns. The game rules, typed up on a Nazi typewriter, state that the game ends when it ends, purposely being obscure. 

After figuring out where the trains are going, you can choose to stop playing or, as some players did, try to actually rebel against the rules and sabotage the game by intentionally trying to draw derail cards. When a train in the game gets derailed, two things happen: half the people go back to the beginning of the board, and the others refuse to board the train. The game pieces simply sit on the board, and can no longer be manipulated. Romero intentionally refused to explain exactly what had happened to those pieces. Some players assume that the tokens are dead, some assume that they've escaped and gone to Denmark. This process of volunteering your own narrative isn't lazy design or meta-gaming, Romero seemed to suggest, but an integral part of the game that makes the player feel complicit in what they're doing (Burch).

 Forcing the player to understand their own stake within the magic circle (the terms used by game theorists that defines the play space within a game world, the entire fictional caveat) and take ownership over not only their actions, but the way those actions are perceived, is something board games do well.

Therefore, what’s so interesting about this game is not the twist trick ending or making players feel guilty, but the way the game explores how seemingly mundane non-violent acts have deep seeded violence embedded within them. With that narrative frame the game puts a heavy burden on each player, making them feel confused and uncomfortable, guilty for participating in such a violent act. At the same time, the system is telling them that victory is making it to the concentration camp. The game mechanics themselves, and the competitive spirit players naturally take to the game upon starting, give players that dark pat on the back when winning. Winning, in this game, means you are the most efficient Nazi worker. Or does winning actually manifest through the destruction of the system itself? Romero says this experience was designed “to make players question the way they follow rules, and how they'll behave once they understand what's going on, and how complicit they're willing to be.”

Describing the motivation behind this game and her other similar art board games she has now become famous for, she says “All human-on-human tragedy works by some sort of system. And if you have a system, then you can create a game.” This quote truly encapsulates how large scale violence works within systems. If this is the case, aren’t games the best way to understand how those systems manipulate people into committing violent acts?

Though two entirely different fields, I find Brenda Romero’s work and Robert Lifton’s attempting to do similar things. Lifton, when beginning the process of interviewing Nazi doctors years after the events of World War 2, was told by a close friend that he should “avoid any contact with evil; keep one’s distance from it, just let it lie (239).” This “let it lie” mentality seems to have been gaining strength in many different forms of popular culture. Many don’t want to face tough problems, preferring to wrap up complex answers in binary ideas or decisions, or relegate specific forms of media to specific kinds of responses. Though games have battled and mostly won out in long fought history of relevance and justification for their existence, even self-described gamers are typically hesitant to see value in work like Romero’s. Many respond similarly to Lifton’s friend, to keep games out of the dark territory, to keep them fun, to avoid making people feel uncomfortable.

Train's spontaneous popularity resulted in a lot of backlash: people have told Romero to stop making games, and that she should be punched in the face for creating Train. Perhaps part of this reaction came from the fact that Train isn't "fun," by any stretch of the imagination. "Why do games have to be fun?", Romero asked. Schindler's List isn't fun. "No other medium is like, oh, it's gotta be fun (Burch).

Lifton, as a response to his friend’s suggestion, “rejected her argument and held to an alternative principle of probing the sources of highly destructive behavior in order to combat that behavior, and seeking knowledge more generally about any kind of human motivation (239).”  Lifton knew going into this work that it was going to be difficult, not only from a personal perspective, but also as a professional. He was afraid of finding vindication in the doctor’s actions, of course, but the principle of investigation and exploration was more important than the potential pitfalls. I feel these two impulses are similar in that both Lifton and Romero intend to explore a subject that is typically handled with gloves or not handled at all in order to show others how and why events like this occur; how normal people become entrenched in systemic evil.

By disconnecting ourselves further and further from tragic events, the probability of these types of events repeating themselves increases, and even if they don’t, understanding how someone could do heinous acts as a Nazi, for example, is never really explored. Instead, we rely on the flawed logic of essentialist arguments, one that suggests there are good and evil people, and that by doing an evil act they are revealing their true colors as an evil person.  That, in all honesty, is a much easier sell. Lifton even mentions this as a way for people to typically cope with the mental anguish that a fellow human being could commit such heinous acts. This is made clear in the conversation between Lifton and Wiesel:

Wiesel asks “when they did what they did, were they men or were they demons?” I answered that, as he well knew, they were human beings, and that was our problem.  To which Elie replied, “Yes, but it is demonic that they were not demonic.” He was saying that everything would have been much simpler if the evil were in some way supernatural or at least nonhuman (240).

 This reinforces the ideas many want to have: that evil is evil and is something other than human, and humans who enact evil have “something wrong with them” internally, rather than being manipulated by an external force. This is why the game Train, and games like Bioshock and Shadow of the Colossus are so powerful; they show, through action, how someone can be actively manipulated by a system without them knowing it.

Lifton theorizes this concept as the Atrocity Producing Situation. He defines this as “an environment so structured, both militarily and psychologically, that an average person—no better or worse than you or me, as I was fond of putting it—upon entering it, could be capable of committing atrocities (Lifton 171).” He came to theorize this idea through studying American soldiers who participated in the Vietnam war, specifically regarding the tragedy at My Lai.  

In Vietnam the military structure included a counterinsurgency war in a far-off, alien environment, involving a nonwhite culture, in which it was often impossible to differentiate enemy combatants from civilians; and military policies such as “body counts,” “free fire zones,” and “search and destroy missions.” For the men, psychological responses could combine fear and helplessness, angry grief in response to the deaths of buddies, and hunger for an enemy as a target for revenge (179). 

This atrocity producing situation is paramount in understand how a normal person, as Lifton puts it, can become so entrenched in the ability to commit heinous acts.

Another game that explicitly attempts to replicate this feeling is a third person shooter called Spec Ops: The Line. Following the previous game examples above, Spec Ops does not tell the player its hidden message underlying the entire experience: to make the player complicit in the murder of civilians and fellow soldiers during an excursion in the middle east. The player is taken through the 6-8 hour experience very slowly, using familiar third person shooter mechanics and narrative framing to replicate other prototypical shooters on the market. Your objectives are clear: your small recon team must infiltrate a hot zone in order to gather information on reports of a coup de grace led by an American military company. You find that, like most videogame plots, things aren’t what you expected them to be once American soldiers begin firing at you. To beat the level and advance in the game, you have no choice but to shoot back.

Spec Ops: The Line does what no other shooter on the western market does: frame the main enemies as American soldiers. Further, it makes you the player feel off balance as the level design is intended to be a downward spiral, sinking further and further into the desert sands while your action becomes more and more brutal pushing forward. Throughout each of these violent acts, the game makes it painstakingly obvious that the things you are doing aren’t good, while at the same time your character’s psyche starts to slip. As the game progresses, the voiceovers while killing other soldiers become much more vulgar and the “finisher” animations, while at first weren’t available, by the end of the game give you the ability to stop a soldiers face in, all while your character finds pleasure in the victory. Unlike other shooters, Spec Ops takes you through the destabilization of the atrocity-producing situation, minute-by-minute, scene-by-scene, so that when you face the last boss, the game informs you that you were Conrad, the antagonist and rebel leader, all along. Or were you? There is no concrete answer. The only answer, and how you finish the game, is suicide.

Of course Spec Ops: The Line is modern take on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” while incorporating elements from “Apocalypse Now!” as well. This inter-texuality is important to understand where the designers are drawing their inspiration from. What’s fascinating is how accurate the player experience of Spec Ops is compared to the data Lifton collected while interviewing Vietnam veterans. One in particular, a soldier who was there during My Lai but refused to take part, recounted an experience that is captured accurately in the game: 

You have the illusion of going great distances and traveling like hundreds of miles, and you end up in the same place. But you feel like it’s not all real…[sic] No matter how much effort you put into it…[y]ou can’t lay your hands on him. And the fact is that he might be anywhere…as though you are hunting a specific deer and you don’t know which one it is and there’s a deer herd all over you (Lifton 171).

There is a scene half way through Spec Ops where you and your two team members come across a crowded area with civilians. You must make your way through this area while being harassed by those around you. Your character is forced to move slowly, but you have full control over your weapon. Near the end of the scene, you become surrounded by these civilians. You have a choice: attempt to run through and escape, or open fire and clear a path. The game doesn’t prompt you with that choice, but your team members are feeling anxious and your player character begins violently shouting at them to move away. This descent into madness and putting the player into positions that evoke the kind of dizziness and confusion that real soldiers face in wartime situations is just one example of how Spec Ops is shifting the paradigm of shooters.

Brenden Keogh, a videogame critic who published a book length critical analysis on Spec Ops: The Line , suggests that the game is part of a new wave of shooters, one that attempts to turn its gaze back onto the genre in order to understand the kind of violence it is subjugating its players to. “The shooter genre is set for a ‘second wave’ of games that, much like the Western film genre, turn the gaze back onto themselves. These shooters won’t necessarily be trying to determine if shooters are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but will simply want to create shooters that poke at the genre, interrogate it, un-settle it (Keogh).” As a blockbuster AAA title (equivalent to Hollywood level movies), Spec Ops has the ability to show how these titles can shift the discourse surrounding shooters from one of violence to one of investigation. As Brenden Keogh eloquently puts it:  “Very few shooters are brave enough to look in the mirror—or to force the player that enjoys shooters to look in the mirror—and question what they see. Not to pass judgment. Not to ask them to change their ways. Just to understand what is going on here (Keogh).”

It would be easy to say that videogames and board games are “greater” than memoirs or movies because of their ability to allow users to interact with a system rather than just see or read it. The problem is that word interactivity is essentially meaningless. All art, memoir, movies, paintings, plays, etc. requires interactivity on the side of the user. To read, to watch, to listen, to interpret, these are all forms of interactivity.  Brenden Keogh outlines this sentiment by calling upon a seminal videogame theorist:

In Cybertext, Aarseth (1997) warns against claiming an exceptional status for videogames based on the notion of ‘interactivity’ or ‘action’[…]. He notes that ‘interactive’ is a weasel word that “connotes various vague ideas of computer screens, user freedom, and personalized media, while denoting nothing… To declare a system interactive is to endorse it with a magic power” (p. 48). ‘Interactivity’ does not get us any closer to understanding how videogames function as cultural artifacts but preemptively defends against any attempt to understand them culturally (Keogh, Across Bodies and Worlds).

In this way, Brenden argues that it isn’t the idea of “interactivity” which gives games their true potential, but their ability to meld the player experience into the critical reading of the object itself.

Such a need to focus on ‘form’ is not a call to return to the old formalism of game studies critiqued above—“That word [formalism] should be reserved for those works of art which mechanically perpetuate outmoded or depleted aesthetic formulas,” Sontag quips (1965, p. 27)—but simply to understand how in specific phenomena of videogame play the player, the hardware, and audiovisual representation come together to produce meaning (4) (Keogh).

Games like Bioshock, Shadow of the Colossus, Train, Spec Ops: The Line (and so many more not listed here) are attempting to expose systems of power and their effects on the individual by pulling the user within the web of the system itself. These games are not focused on fun or on their ability to provide entertainment, nor are they attempting to stuff a morally didactic set of beliefs down the player’s throat. Instead, they are built to invite critical thinking, either within the game itself or derived from the analysis by player afterward, by feeling implicated within them, all within a safe space. As Lifton would say, the motivation behind this work is to understand and enlighten in order to stop the cycle of extreme violence from spilling over into the next century and to show how this violence is deeply rooted within power structures that a typically invisible to the naked eye. If we take that call, and confront the fact that evil has the ability to manifest inside of us all, we will be one step closer to ending it.

Scholarship, from what I gather, is not bound by bureaucratic systems that allow you to place letters before your name, but more simply a tempered approach to understanding that engages a discourse in order to shed some light on a subject. It’s not about book awards or publicity; it’s not about fellowships or privilege. Scholarship can be published in university presses or it can be published over a series of Tumblr posts. It’s not the form or the stamp of approval; it’s your willingness to engage in a well-researched and passionate dialogue. Lifton sees scholarship as a “full intellectual probing of the most egregious behavior and its consequences.” I believe that game design, like scholarship, can be a way to approach these very real and damaging problems from a systematic perspective in order to understand why someone would oppress another, why they think it’s okay to do so, and how we as a culture can get to the root of the problem without the need for a scapegoat. Games can help bring awareness and clarity to how systems manipulate people. Game have the power to change, it’s now up to us to recognize their already very real potential.

  Work Cited 

Bissell, Tom. "Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire." Grantland. N.p., 10 June 2011. Web. 01 May 2014.

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007. Print.

Burch, Anthony. "GDC 10: The Holocaust Board Game." Destructoid. N.p., 13 Mar. 2010. Web. 01 May 2014.

Erdelack, Wes. "Versus CluClu Land." : The Game Designer as Malignant Demon. N.p., 1 July 2008. Web. 01 May 2014.

Juul, Jesper. Half-real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005. Print.

Keogh, Brenden. "Across Worlds and Bodies by B. Keogh." Journal of Games Criticism. N.p., Feb. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014.

Keogh, Brenden. "Read An Excerpt From Killing Is Harmless, A Book Sized Reading Of Spec Ops: The Line ." Kotaku Australia. N.p., 2 Nov. 2012. Web. 01 May 2014.

Lifton, Robert Jay. Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. New York: Free, 2011. Print.

[jordanpailthorpe]

Why "suck it up even if it's not fun" is super lame

"When I ask her why she thinks there’s such resistance to prioritizing and teaching writing, given its numerous applications, given its overlap with critical thinking skills, analytical skills, basic communication skills, she hesitates for a moment, then answers in three words: “It’s not fun.”

True, but then, teaching (and for that matter, learning) isn’t always fun. Changing my kid’s dirty diapers isn’t fun. Dragging my fat ass onto a treadmill isn’t fun. Helping my grandmother “fix” her computer isn’t fun. Sometimes we do things not because they’re fun but because they’re important."

While I pretty much agree with the sentiment behind the piece, that quote above is a sorry excuse. Instead, I read this as a call to arms to figure out how teaching writing CAN be fun, CAN provide a flow state. We talk about this in game studies all the time. The system is not the content. Therefore, what about learning/teaching grammar or writing construction is interesting? And how can we apply these ideas, the core aspect of learning, to a system that THROUGH doing it (..play) is fun? To say "its not fun, but suck it up because its important" is just not enough.

That said, I am not calling out writers or comp teachers, but game designers. 

Can we make a game that at once teaches the core of writing while also being fun to play? 

[jordanpailthorpe]

"No one is seen in deserted hills, only the echoes of speech are heard."

I felt incredibly disappointed while reading Xiao Di Zhu's "Thirty Years in a Red House." This comes from two places:

1. The fact that I did not know much of anything about China's modernization or the path towards it; how does history seem to let these atrocities keep sliding deeper and deeper into the abyss until they are completely forgotten?

2. The feeling of shame that derived from my own past  with my band "The Effort" 

When I was still absorbed in my early 20's and obsessed with socialist idealism (very much disconnected from context and the repercussions of its implementation),  I remember a friend telling me that he was a Maoist. Knowing very little about China or Mao, I asked him why. He said that he believed the communist revolution in China was one of the most impressive events in the 20th century, and that Mao as a figure was inspirational and less harmful when compared to other countries' modernization process.

Now, considering the fact that I very strongly reject formulating my personal and political feelings around a human figure, I chalk up a lot of those punk kids (who were usually between the ages of 17-23) who liked to categorize themselves according to prominent political figures in history as naive and ill-informed. They wanted to latch onto a counter narrative that was opposed to the american/western ideology they were born to believe in. In this way they setup a binary system where the opposite of the failing capitalist system they see at home becomes the communist systems in the east. The answers to their problems could be found across the water. 

I was right there with them. 

I put a hammer and a sickle on red and yellow t-shirts and sold them to 21st century kids across Eastern Europe. 

I pledged allegiance to the United States Socialist Party propaganda and promoted these ideas in places where those closely related ideologues were used against their grandparents, forcing them into subservience, or fear, or torture, or death. 

I condemned Nazi punks yet propped up the same talking points Stalin would use to torture and destroy thousands and thousands of lives.

Our hearts were in the right place, but we were so disconnected from the context of our historical time period, and even worse, so were the kids who were getting an earful from us Americans, the same kids whose grandparents and great grandparents lived through this torturous form of suppression we were trying to tell them would change the world...in 2010. 

Understanding that you can't choose your favorite political system like you can your favorite color, that red is made up of many different shades and displayed differently depending on context, is something that I've been learning throughout this memoir course with Richard Hoffman. When I decided to quit my band back in 2010, putting the first nail in the band's coffin, I think I was just starting to realize how ideologies can't be reduced to talking points or slogans pasted on social media pages. Still, its taken me years to untangle the deep rooted thought control that breeds through this binary thinking. Xiaodi's memoir helped to elucidate the human side of these political systems. That was the most powerful part of this memoir to me; to see the people and who they were instead of the invisible faces behind slogans, orders, and doctrines. It is much harder to hate or love when you see the real human faces rather than a mask. 

---

Most Chinese believe that to take an individualistic stand was foolish. They had learned from experience or it had been drilled into them that the only way to survive was to go along with the tribe.

Right from the beginning of the book It's really interesting to see how the early communists in China were treated the same way radicals and anti-communists were treated in the Soviet Union. If you were suspected to be a communist or you were an activist of any kind you would be eliminated. We talk a lot of history repeating itself, and this is just another example of how it's not just about political groups being evil, but systems of power and control attempting to maintain their hegemonic positions through violence. Even more complex is how the rise of communism in China came about: as a response to being occupied by another country while the government let it happen. I am wondering how violent that occupation was, and today even think about the reasons someone would feel nationalistic pride even if the opposing force was peaceful (which I doubt it was, but even hypothetically if they were, no one wants to be controlled ever).

I still suspect that my fathers unexpected death in 1990 was accelerated by the student demonstrations in 1989. Although history never repeats itself exactly, events can be very similar. Witnessing such similar social tragedies must have been deeply painful to an aged man with such wide genuine social concerns. He certainly didn't want to see the event turn out to be such a tragedy (9). It was true that a simple and thrifty lifestyle was encouraged for everyone, and especially for Communist government officials. It was considered sinful to waste, and officials were not allowed to live luxuriously (15). When the word revolutionary was used in China it meant the opposite of what it means in the west. Instead of pertaining to radical change, the word implied conformity with the authority or being politically correct (27). One of the articulated goals of the cultural revolution was to eliminate the 'four olds': old cultures, old thoughts, old customs, and old habits (37). This last quote encapsulates a terrifying idea; erasing culture for the benefit of those in power. What's even more terrifying is to mobilize youth and make them turn against older customs, to view old customs as threatening. To make anyone see their own cultures' history as an evil that needs to be eliminated, but also enact violence against those who carry even symbols of that culture, seems to me the most violent form of mind control there is.

The next passage illustrates how terrifying and far reaching the implications of these political actions are, not just on the people living in that culture, but on the skewing of human understanding. When they searched people's houses at night, some Red Guards liked to beat people. This made me believe that violence was a human instinct that would surface if it were not subdued by morals and other considerations such as punishment (39). The exposing of people based on family history or past employment suggests that in this society there is no such thing as redemption. In addition, it feels like the same kind of system that attempts to expose people based on conjecture rather than punishable actions observed. What's even more ironic are the types of actions that are punishable or shameful. It seems that many of the sinful actions are things that were against old culture, such as divorcing wives after the communist revolution. That was a revolutionary act, yet now it is punished as unfaithfulness. This all seems to culminate in the one quote on page 43:

The entire generation of youth at the time experienced a psychologically distorted adolescent development. This immediately clashes with his father's philosophy that carries throughout the book, summed up in a passage on page 45: I often heard my father say, "it was the people who had supported is in our earlier struggles against Chiang Kai-shek's government. Now we the communists are in power, we should never forget their support and abandon their interest." He would always quote Lenin to end his talk, "Forgetting the past means betrayal."

But how do we combat these types of mind control? What is better: to fight on the front lines and sacrifice yourself or to inspire and encourage through knowledge? "Even at a personal level, I wondered if it was nobler to speak my criticism of our political system and to be put into prison as a dissident, or to keep a painful silence and use the limited freedom I had in my classroom to crib are independent thinking among my students. Which was nobler? 'To be or not to be: that is the question." Time has not passed Shakespeare by, and the question he put forward is still meaningful today (211)."

It is, indeed, still meaningful today. 

"Sunlight cast back comes deep in the woods

And shines once again upon the green moss." 

- Wang Wei "Deer Fence" (699-761)

[jordanpailthorpe]

The Writer as a True Detective: Notes on Memoir, True Detective, and Nihilism: 

These are some ideas I am still working through for a longer essay I'm attempting to write. Many people applaud True Detective for being steeped in literary references and showing the strength of TV as a medium. This is something I of course stand by as well, but I am interested in a even closer reading of the show, specifically how the characters and the themes are addressing perception and truth within a 21st century context. The memoir-ish framework and the commentary on the inability to culturally change systems of oppression and power really resonate with many of the things I've been thinking about, specifically within my 20th century memoir class. 

That said, this is a longer project that isn't finished. I am posting because I feel its better I put this on my blog half finished rather bury it in a folder and forget it exists. Feedback is welcome. 

SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY!

"I don't want to know anything anymore. This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again." - Rust Cohle, True Detective 

True Detective, an HBO series about two cops who over the course of 20 years attempt to unravel a deep seeded organized crime ring in and around Louisiana, presents itself as a typical crime thriller about two partners, but quickly subverts expectations of the genre by breaking the way time is presented through the narrative unfolding. Everything that happens to these two men is filtered through a present tense lens, building towards the last episode where the past finally catches up to the future; the men, disconnected from the justice system they proclaim is compromised, attempt to close a case they later realized wasn't finished. Rust and Marty are presented as beacons of hope, realistic characters caught between the mechanisms of their own demons and the ones that pervade the culture at large, but stand up to these larger systems in an attempt to make a dent in those demons. The question I struggle with, and has been raised many times over, is whether that dent does enough to inspire real significant change. What is truth other than a story we tell ourselves over and over until we forget it was made up? 

“The strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to be at odds there was never any real fight; but denial and doubt were simply considered madness (Nietzsche, Gay Science).”

In a way, I feel the show is struggling with answering some of the same questions being raised in my 20th century memoir class. It's storytelling framework is operating "like" a memoir, reflecting on the past through the lens of the present. We are watching Marty and Rust recount their experiences in order to understand how they arrived at their current philosophical states.

Rust Cohle, the detective in the video and the one who speaks those now famous lines at the top of the post, is a traumatized man who has seen some of the worst humanity has to offer. He is introduced as mysteriously cold, someone who is strange and indifferent almost to all social norms. One of the first personal snippets you learn about Rust is that his wife divorced him after losing their daughter. Years later, his investigation into a ring of men who use children for sacrifices represents his breaking point. Those men have ties both to the larger Christian community as well as law enforcement offices; the systems that are said to represent faith and justice are enacting crimes so morally reprehensible that his own ethical and moral structure, already weakened by his personal life, eventually shatters.

Rust is a character that is built to embody an existential nihilistic approach to the world around him. At the same time he is guided by an internally true moral compass. Rust doesn’t, and never did from the beginning; see hope as something negative or useless. Instead, Rust represents our cultural struggle to define “truth” or “trueness” in relation to morality, within our own historical context.

It's easy to see write off someone like Rust as a man who has lost hope, who has lost his resilience, or who has given up. True Detective consistently frames Rust as the prototypical "crazy guy" who thinks everything is a conspiracy. The world around him continually tells him that things are different now, better; that the memories Rust and Marty recount are in the past and the case is closed. The show, through the perspective of the second set of present day young detectives who operate as our narrative justification, even goes so far as to accuse Rust of committing these crimes, seducing the viewer into believing it. The show attempts to convince the viewer, you, that to judge the systems of order is to be labeled as a conspiracy theorist.

The juxtaposition between Marty and Rust helps lead the viewer towards a conventional reading as well; Marty is the “normal” man, the average joe, the one who goes home to a wife and two daughters and tries his best to be a good cop and keep to himself.  Rust is the madman, the outsider, the one who is always writing and always gets a raised eyebrow or head shake by others when he speaks.

As their past unfolds, we find their “true” personalities and histories begin to intersect across moral line. Marty is revealed to be a violent alcoholic who is unfaithful to his wife, while Rust (who still hits the bottle hard) condemns Marty’s actions and is domestically a “good guy.” These histories are counter to the visual representations of present day Marty and Rust; Marty put together with a suit and tie and running his own private investigation business while Rust wears a landscaping jumpsuit , dons a handle bar mustache, and drinks a six pack of Lone Star. Looks can be deceiving, and the truth that is assumed through the surface is many times an illusion. 

We want to see ourselves as Rust but know in our hearts we are a herd of Martys just trying to be buried with the least amount of scars as possible.

This is True Detective's ultimate goal: convincing the viewer that the repetition of history, of violence, is so ingrained in our existence that we are unable to break these circles, even when people take on impossible odds; that one person can't actually make a change big enough to cause a systematic shift, regardless of how much impact that action might have, because the entire fabric of our being relies on a cyclical structure. 

The more one is told this is the way the world operates; how it spins on an axis, how the sun rises and falls, how man and machine gun are one in the same, the more it becomes a "truth" rather than a rhetorical argument. 

War, social injustice, economic inequality; these are things that became exacerbated in the 20th century, the past. This is the 21st century where the rhetoric is that "things aren't like they used to be"—Manipulation of the minds of citizens for governmental subservience is exposed; there is no longer any large scale warfare without clear justification; the inability to speak openly without fear of prosecution died with Stalin—we want to believe all these things are relegated to history, left behind with the 20th century. Yet all these atrocities come back around, just under different names and labels. 

"Time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again." 

This is of course counter to everything we WANT to believe; that the writer, by witnessing, helps to deconstruct these assumed rigid power systems through providing a voice to those oppressed by these systems, thereby breaking the circle open to form new pathways. The writer is then relegated to the "true detective", the person who attempts to dig into the very definition of truth itself, to reject the scripted narratives of oppression and emerge with a new one in hopes that this new story with become truth with age, even if it is only one page in a needed epic. 

In the season finale, Rust has a revelation while looking up at the stars. 

Cohle: I've been up in that room looking out those windows every night here, thinking...it's just one story. The oldest... light versus dark.

Marty: It seems to me, that the dark has a lot more territory.

Cohle: Yeah, you're right about that. But, you know I think you are looking at it wrong. Once there was only dark, but if you ask me, the lights winning.

When a character like Rust, who has seemingly lost all hope, finds faith and justice through the verification in a binary system of good versus evil, it feels like the show regresses from presenting the nuanced reality of history and instead suggests a hopeful outlook on the future; that change really can start from within.

As Rust wheels away from the hospital, and I watch him smoke a Camel cigarette for the last time, I’m wondering if he really believes it or he convinces himself of another false truth in order to carry on, just like I wonder if we really believe things are changing for the better in order to not lose faith.

I wonder if these hopeful narratives of men combating darkness are obscuring the underlying connections between power, violence, and oppression on a systemic level, and wonder if these cycles will keep resetting because of them.

Of course I believe feeling the spiritual, cosmic force of human connection through the words and lived experienced of those who survive, those who show perseverance and strength through horrible darkness, is inspiring and hopeful.

As a writer, what more can we do but tell our stories and the stories of others in hopes that we make a mark, regardless of how small that mark is? I guess I’m caught between wanting to walk away with Marty and Rust, hopes high, knowing that in a world full of dark things one person can make a difference, and the stark realization that after 100 years our discourse has changed but our actions are the same. Like most writers and artists, I only wonder if it is enough. 

Someone once told me time is a flat circle, and despite that person changing his mind, I'm failing in my attempts to forget it. Maybe I am having a Rust Cohle crisis of my own.

[jordanpailthorpe]

On Form and Purpose: Associative Meaning in Games and Memoir

Peter Balakian's memoir Black Dog of Fate is rich with imagery and symbolism that seems to naturally appear out of the past. The stories that he finds or is told begin to create this disjointed patchwork of history. It is intentionally delivered to the reader out of order, because it mirrors the way Balakian received the story himself. No one sat him down at a tender age and told him about the Armenian genocide, nor did they tell him the hardships and strength of his family; what they went through, what they go through, and how they got to where they are now.

I feel that the mode of delivery is so important here, and characterizes how many of us come to learn and understand deep complex ideas in general (whether they be personal, historical, cultural, etc.).

I had a professor in undergrad who would tell you stories like you were intimately familiar with characters and events even if you had no idea who or when or where or what the story was about. He would just thrust knowledge upon you in no real order or linear delivery, trusting in the powers of association, not worried if you understood only 10% of what he was saying or who he was reading. It didn't matter that you didn't understand the extent of the story or the poem or the history; he knew and trusted that each piece will build towards the rest of the narrative and eventually link together a deep and interconnected knowledge of a subject.

Though many of my peers felt deep compassion and respect for this professor, we would sometimes joke about his “disjointed” or “ADD” teaching style. It wasn't until recently when thinking about how poetry and even good games allow a reader/player to come to terms with the world that I realized his pedagogical style, intentional or not, embodies what I aspire to in my own teaching and art: trusting your player/reader/student to form their own relationship to the disparate pieces of knowledge you leave them.

I was thinking about him during a discussion in my game studies group. This associative knowledge construction is also a strong component of games. Instead of being limited to the linear delivery of traditional plot points (in fear of “losing” your audience) games have the power to let go of the reins and allow its players to piece things together on their own terms. Yet games can go one step further, feeling more like the form and mode of the Balakian memoir.

Yesterday I finished playing Device 6, an iOS interactive narrative adventure game, which has similarities to the framework of a memoir. The character you are following in third person is slowly understanding why she is dropped in a surreal environment while you the player are along for the ride. That said, you the player have a role in the narrative because your position as an outside observer is referenced within the game (essentially breaking the fourth wall) similar to how memoir operates from the present narrating on the past, breaking the fourth wall in order to come back to the present moment.

I understand this isn't a very sound connection between game “player” and memoir writer (I think it is much more complex and in some places doesn't really work), but I found Balakian’s memoir more like a game than the last two memoirs I read (Lifton and Graves); not in its content, but in its mechanics. The reader, like Balakian’s character, obtains small bits of disparate knowledge until it can be pieced together organically in order to fully represent how hard it is to grasp not only the idea of genocide, but also in the more general sense, connecting with your family.

This book made me reflect on how little I know about my own family and their past. The list of unknowns started building:

I don’t know my grandmother’s maiden name. 

I don’t know where my grandfather, or his father, was born or even came from. 

I don’t know what my dad wanted to be when he grew up.

I don’t know anything about my father’s mother who died when he was young. 

I think my writing has been grasping at all of these things: game mechanics and culture, non-linear narrative construction, and how to connect to something larger than myself. I think it was this quote that really hit home for me. It represents something I only realized about a year or so ago while going through that “what's the worth of writing” crisis.

“I realized that she was my beloved witness, and I the receiver of her story. When I was a boy, she had showered me with love; now as a man, I could return that love.” 

To return that love through telling, through witnessing, and through writing is something that drives all of my creative work. It gives me purpose. But maybe I am not doing a good enough job. Maybe I need to start pursuing that list a little harder, even if I only collect small pieces now and can only write my Triforce in the future.

[jordanpailthorpe]

On Defining Scholarship: Game Criticism, Activism, and Other Thoughts

Robert Lifton, a prolific radical psychiatrist/activist/scholar whose work covered many different atrocities throughout the 20th century (mostly consisting of large systematic topics such as nuclear weapons and thought reform) wrote something in his memoir Witness to an Extreme Century that really resonated with a lot of the things I've been thinking about lately. He mentions how his book Death in Life, which encompassed a scholarly investigation into the psychological damage caused by the bombing of Hiroshima by giving voice to those directly effected, was predominantly well received. One review, however, wasn't so good. In fact, it was a rejection to the book and how Lifton approached activism.

In a review by Paul Goodman from the New York review of Books, he wonders why Lifton did not simply "protest and strike" and claims he instead created a "practical philosophy of life for the American empire in conditions of high technology." I find Lifton's response to this claim so resolute and poignant that it addresses the insecurities I myself consistently face in dealing with my own role within writing, game design, and pedagogy and how they all apply to activism. 

Goodman was rejecting, or failing to appreciate, the larger principle of the importance of taking a scholarly approach to highly destructive events. I share his sense of horror and rage in connection with the atomic bombings, but I had set myself the task of exploring systematically the psychological consequences of the weapon. My work on destructive historical events was based on a specific conviction: we had to go beyond mere outrage and disgust to seek a fuller grasp of what led to an atrocity, what it did to fellow human beings, and what significance it had for the world that remained.

I understand the hesitance and skepticism that has surrounded academia. Economic inequality dictates admissions and crushing student debt is waiting for those who get there. For those who leap those hurdles, they then have the valid concern that the university system breeds a certain type of thinking that is not as radical or activist oriented and results in being  too “safe.” There is also the pre-social media idea of specific subjects within the academic discourse inaccessible to those outside the ivory walls, which complicates Goodman's own feelings towards Lifton's work. In this way, Goodman could be considered a radical voice attempting to break into the discourse that Lifton, an established researcher at Yale, might have been dominating, regardless of how well it was written/approached. In this way, I want to present a multifaceted view of Goodman in order to show that he isn't simply being a bully. Like Jeff Kunzler, who I whole-heartedly disagree with in his approach to game criticism (resorting to inappropriate personal attacks and displaying unfiltered disgust and rage without critical analysis), I imagine Goodman is a guy trying to break into academic circles he feels are holding too much power and sometimes wielding it in the wrong ways, which regardless of the approach, is an admirable and brave thing to do. 

In a piece written by Susan Sontag on remembering the seemingly forgotten legacy of Paul Goodman (a man I have never heard of before reading Lifton's memoir) she explains how influential he was to her work, despite showing signs of sexist attitudes and a generally dismissive nature towards other writers/intellectuals. 

The fact that Paul Goodman wrote poetry and plays and novels as well as social criticism, that he wrote books on intellectual specialties guarded by academic and professional dragons, such as city planning, education, literary criticism, psychiatry, is held against him. His being an academic freeloader and an outlaw psychiatrist, while also being so smart about universities and human nature, outraged many people.

Unfortunately, Lifton's definition of scholarship has been muddied by the capitalistic problems of access and the rapid democratization of knowledge that the Internet has provided in the early 21st century. This protest and strike attitude that Goodman suggests has now taken hold as the cultural norm, and in a way, Goodman got what he wanted. Activism has morphed into a mob mentality, under the name of good and bad, that manifests as a reactionary flood of tweets and posts publicly shaming and harassing those who say or do things that are either offensive, damaging, or bigoted.

Though I’m typically found on the defense against those who argue that the Internet is damaging to our culture, this reactionary impulse to become judge and jury on all things tends to dilute complex problems or issues into binary answers. Publicly outing people or resorting to personal attacks, even if the person did or said something that was not okay, damages further understanding and attempts to use that idea of protest/striking as the primary and only form of effective critique.

I've always seen the idea of scholarship as a way to approach these very real and damaging problems from a systematic perspective in order to understand why someone would oppress another, why they think it’s okay to do so, and how we as a culture can get to the root of the problem without the need for a scapegoat. Though I am personally hurt when friends and colleagues of mine are belittled or attacked due to their sexuality, gender identity, race, etc. and though I understand the very real need for response as power reversal, othering people into broad categories such as "bigots," and further more publicly harassing them, simply presents another problem of binary thinking: that "those people" are alien and harmful and need to be destroyed, rather than really looking into where their hatred or ignorance is coming from and why it is perpetuated. 

Scholarship, from what I gather, is not bound by bureaucratic systems that allow you to place letters before your name, but more simply a tempered approach to understanding that engages a discourse in order to shed some light on a subject. Its not about book awards or publicity, its not about fellowships or privilege. Scholarship can be published in university presses or it can be published over a series of Tumblr posts. Its not the form or the stamp of approval, its your willingness to engage in a well researched and passionate dialogue.

If by scholarship, Lifton is advocating for "full intellectual probing of the most egregious behavior and its consequences" then this is where scholarship is incredibly needed, not in replacement of the rapid communication and awareness the Internet has given us, but to temper these attitudes towards directed action that is couched in a "rigorous and complex approach to truth." Thankfully, there are many people  doing radical work in the game studies sphere who seem to agree. (Zoya Street and all the links you find on the blog).

Lastly, Lifton ends this chapter by returning to this idea of scholarship and its importance by quoting a dear friend who laid it out for him in a frank manner: 

I want to point out to you very strongly that if you had done nothing but protest, you could not have written Death in Life. And writing that book and others like it has much more importance for the world, and much more influence in the directions you desire, than does any political action you may take

This fired on many levels for me. For now, I can set aside many of my own doubts and get back to work hoping that I am following in the footsteps of those I admire, not just as scholars, but as activists.