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The Last Jedi

The problem with "The Last Jedi" is not that it is a bad Star Wars movie; it is that it is a Star Wars at all. "The Last Jedi" is a good Star Wars movie, which is to say it is a primer for adolescents on a range of topics relevant to one's formative years. But to the extent that the older Star Wars movies have succeeded in helping people who were adolescents in the 80s and 90s grow into adults– to the extent, that is, they have been good Star Wars movies– they have also pushed those viewers out of the nest. Now must fight them off as they try to crawl back in to have that experience again with "The Last Jedi".

If we look at what remains admirable about episodes 4-6, this description of Star Wars holds: they are good movies for young people to watch. Here are some of the things a child can learn from a good Star Wars:

Basic cinematographic literacy– how different visual transitions like wipes demarcate when scenes are happening in different locations, thus allowing for subplots.

Basic film genre literacy– Lucas famously borrowed from established genres like samurai movies, Westerns, World War fighter pilots, and more.

Basic heroic literacy– Lucas also famously used Joseph Campbell's "hero with a thousand faces," introducing viewers to what a generic heroic journey looks like.

Basic ethics– it is admirable to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others, it is bad to treat others as a means to an end.

Basic politics– empires are bad, rebellions are good.

Basic religious patterns– the force, an energy that connects all beings, is the most generic form of the mystical aspect of more or less every world religion.

"The Last Jedi" provides even better examples of some of the things a young person should learn and can get out of this movie:

Basic literary irony– when Rylo Ken "turns the light saber to kill his greatest enemy" and it turns out to be the light saber next to Snoke instead of the one pointed at Rey, this is a level of irony that should not impress a grown up but could be pretty cool to a ten year old. If Shakespeare can get away with "no man of woman born" to mean "she had a C-section" in MacBeth, then we can acknowledge this as an acceptable level of irony for a reader ideal who has not yet been assigned Gatsby.

Basic sound design literacy– When Finn is piloting into the battering ram cannon and the sound begins to fade instead of growing louder, the battle is not actually getting quieter. Rather, the situation is causing his perceptual apparatus to fail, as signified in the apparent breakdown of the film’s sound apparatus.

Basic literary reflexivity– in "The Last Jedi," Luke and Rey talk about how "Luke Skywalker" has become a legend, and how that might or might not be good for the universe. The movie closes with child slaves telling the story of Luke Skywalker to each other and rekindling the desire for rebellion from the legend of Luke Skywalker. But if one thinks about it, the story of Luke Skywalker is also "The Last Jedi" itself...pretty cool if you have never thought that a story could also be about itself as story.

Finally, to those very Star Wars-y virtues the recent films have added one more:

Basic recognition of others– that people who are not white men are also significant.

Accomplishing a general pedagogical function around narrative, cinema, and ethics, with light sabers and space ships, gives the feeling of a Star Wars worthy of the name. But what a Star Wars should be for a child and what it should be for an adult are very different things. An adult in awe of Star Wars would seemingly be equally impressed by someone who knew their multiplication tables or all the state capitals.

It seems self-evident that the the way an adult enjoys Star Wars should be different from the way a child does. And yet, because often the same person has come to it first as a child and then as an adult, they mistake the constancy of what makes a good Star Wars for a virtue they should emulate– that because the essence of Star Wars has not changed from when they first knew it, neither should they.

This practice– of making nostalgia the organizing principle of one's life– is, of course, the greatest failing a human can have in the project of being a person. What is omitted from the valuable pedagogical work that Star Wars can do, and what a child should not be expected to know but must be required of an adult, is history. Growing up means learning about things that happened, both directly to you ("experience") or indirectly ("history"), and making sense of what the hell is going on so that you can be effective in accomplishing the aforementioned basic moral duties to others. Star Wars is a fable; it has no bearing on real history. It tells you empires are bad, and that's true, but not what real empires have shaped our world or exist today. Nostalgia for Star Wars in an adult is a twofold moral failing: it displaces that historical information with the history of a made up world, and it installs the mechanism of nostalgia that returns the subject to a point in the past rather than pushing them forward through history.

All around us we can see the pollution of people who live in this world of dead echoes, people who are not borne back into the past by history's meaning but who choose to be fixated on it precisely to escape history's force. The legal doctrine of originalism, the mythologies of the ethnostate, the call for a time when political enemies treated each other with civility, the Hogwart's left, and finally the cult of Star Wars itself, all of this fundamentally nostalgic garbage that retards human life individually and collectively now surrounds us and has nothing in common with what actually makes "The Last Jedi" good. As a part of a business, the business of "Star Wars," as something that exists in history and is the product of capital, there is a more complicated story to tell about it, but there is a place for "The Last Jedi" that is good– in the hands of children.

(And again, one could even say that the need for forgetting and the basic mechanics of doing so are part of the Luke subplot when Yoda burns the Jedi books. It does not require an especially sophisticated reading to draw this out.)

Watching Star Wars as an adult should be an enviable position. You don't have to ask much of it. You don't need Star Wars to fill your teen loneliness with a community, a moral code, or a mythology. You can just enjoy it in the same way one enjoys a a Neil Young song. The melody is good and the lyrics are stupid, and you can nod along without making it your gospel. Being an adult means carrying the knowledge that comes out of that adolescent education– that you can understand the world and help other people, and there is work to do. If Star Wars ever meant anything to you, leave it in the past and move on.

Orbs and Cubes

That orbs are the three dimensional shape of the ruling class is well known. One can hardly think of an orb without it being in the hands of an egomaniacal villain. But why this is so, and how other volumetric shapes fit into its environment, is less obvious.

Orbs belong to evil men because they represent a way of organizing space that only makes sense for a perfect god or an evil man. Orbs originate from their centers. However large they grow, they always represent the same idea of centrality, and the collapsibility of that surface back towards the center.

There is only ever one orb. If other orbs exist they are merely surface phenomena freckling the face of the one true orb. Of course, in reality there are many orbs, and they are all held by madmen believing they hold the one orb.

The opposite of the orb is the cube. There are always many cubes. They are made for building, for interoperability with other cubes, for the assembly of ever larger structures that may or may not be cubes. Even cubes that are poorly designed for interoperability (i.e., they have dimensions that are not multiples of other cubes) can be integrated one place or another. Cubes can build anything.

Cubes can always work together. Orbs never can.

Nuclear Throne and the Banality of Dudes Trying to Kill You

According to Steam I have played 46 hours of Borderlands 2. I play it to relax. The cadence of moving, shooting, reloading, recharging-- I find it soothing, like bobbing in the sea with uncertain but patterned waves. Obscuring that pleasure is what the game markets itself on: the storyline and dialogue. Like the majority of shooting games, Borderlands tries to give meaning to rhythm by explaining why you would dance, and because no explanation is necessary they necessarily explain too much. "Psychos" yell in your face about eating your skin to cajole you into killing them, to give you some idea. But not all shooting games attempt to explain what they have already assumed. Nuclear Throne is one of those games, and it is good, and it can help you understand the world.

Borderlands is a game where progress ratchets up. You run a hundred yards and die, and you start eighty yards in. Respawn and repeat, getting forever closer to the end. In Nuclear Throne you die and start at the beginning. This happens many, many times. Whereas in Borderlands I have spent approximately equal time in each environment-- the optimal experience in terms of perceptual saturation-- in Nuclear Throne I have spent exponentially more time in the first environment than those that follow it. And through my long returns to that desert I have come to learn something.

The first environment is a wasteland. You fight radioactive scorpions, maggots large and small, and dudes. They are "bandits" in the lore but there is no evidence to support that description. They are dudes trying to kill you, which from a certain perspective makes sense because you are kind of a freak. But even that explanation is projecting. You are both trying to kill each other because the other is trying to kill you and you both want to survive. The game itself is a chiasmus. There's no: "it's a freak, get 'em!'" No: "I only steal to buy medicine for my baby." No: "I'm going to turn your skull into a bocce ball." Just bullets and worms.

In the second level you fight rats in the sewer and I hate them, I hate the rats so much. They run up to you and bite and if I'm freaking out it's hard to get my gun pointed at them. The guys in the desert, though, are working under the same constraints that I am. They suck. Their guns suck. Even when they shoot right at you they are likely to miss due to their shitty low accuracy low fire rate noob ass pistol, the same one you start with. There's no room for sympathy, they are the guys trying to kill you, but you can appreciate the parity of the situation. You're both just dudes trying to kill each other.

And what do you do when dudes are trying to kill you? Well, not much. I can imagine a hyper intelligent being in a state of perfect flow racing through the game, interlacing themselves into the tapestry of enemy salvos, but as someone who is not a navigator in Dune that is pretty fucking far from my experience. I mostly kite, hiding behind walls and ducking out to return fire. I dodge the bullets the same way I have since 1990, which is by moving back and forth in a very small space. Survival is dramatic for the person experiencing it but not cinematic for one observing it. It looks like someone walking back and forth in a very small space, because that is what it is.

The game gets fancier as it goes along, but the backbone is all there from the beginning and it is never lost. The game does not bullshit you. The author does not pretend to have started with a story to tell and then painstakingly have decided, like every fucking one before them, that shooting was the only way to tell their singular tale. No; the shooting came first, and nothing came second. There are just dudes trying to kill each other because there are dudes trying to kill each other.

In that world and in that world alone can you start to see the people trying to kill you as holding something in common with yourself. There is no resolution inside the video game and that's just fine. It's a game; it's code, a piece of writing, a work of art. The point is not to replace the world but to describe it as a system. The work on that system comes outside of the game after understanding it a little bit better.

Matt Yglesias and Strategically Bad Writing

The problem with Matt Yglesias' "Against Transparency" is that he is not actually against transparency.

The argument in the article was about whether particular artifact types should be treated like other similar artifacts. When confronted on Twitter, he agreed with his critics that the lack of transparency in documents obtained through FOIA requests is bad but maintained that was not what he was talking about. Those artifacts (memoranda) are the kind of thing that should be disclosed and his argument was constrained to a separate class of artifacts (email) that should not be.

One can reasonably argue for or against his conclusion, but it does not deserve that level of consideration. The tactic of claiming to be "against transparency" and then, without recanting, claiming to actually be for more transparency is an ethical violation of writing as such. It is not merely bad headlining, a defense writers can claim when unfairly summarized by an editor (and in fact Yglesias criticized another article for this the very next day on Twitter). It is not a violation of journalistic ethics, which is concerned with making evidence traceable to its sources so that claims can be reproduced. Nor is it even the problem described as "post-fact politics," which is a disregard for the the entire "evidence - warrant - claim" structure of argumentation. What we have instead is a problem with writing as a practice for conveying thought.

Donald Trump has been criticized for being full of shit, and he is, but that's not what is so bad about him. He is full of shit because, well, for one thing because he probably can't help it (a defense which I'll extend to Yglesias as well) but more importantly because it is part of a strategy of provoking attacks such that he can be the victim. The rhetorical position of the wounded defender standing his ground is indispensable to Trump's strategy. Because he is in fact a rich fascist whose main activity is to incite lynchings, he must manufacture that victimhood. Making outrageous claims that must be attacked, and then feigning surprise and hurt that he was so attacked, is how he does this.

Matt Yglesias is not Trump. He is not a fascist and he does not support violence committed by non-state parties. But like Trump, he makes statements-- e.g. "Against Transparency"-- that a reasonable person would only interpret one way-- "this is an argument against transparency"-- and then claims that he meant something else and that this misinterpretation is the fault of the reader. This strategy is designed to use outrage to first propagate the message and second provide a defensive rhetorical position where the burden of proof switches from requiring Yglesias to establish a positive case ("prove transparency is bad") to merely acquitting himself of being a total piece of shit ("prove transparency is bad in one case"). This is how he "wins."

Usually people don't get away with this because it is prickish behavior that is immediately damaging to everyone except for the author, and ultimately damaging to them too as their peers realize they should not be trusted. The reasons for the breakdown in that feedback loop are outside the scope of this article but a simple explanation would be that Yglesias' employers and peers benefit from his dissimulation and the population who suffers has no method to transfer that suffering to them. Whatever. For people who want to be good, this is an object lesson in the ethics of language: say what you mean and mean what you say. For people who don't apparently care about anything except power, it is an object lesson in how to make the weaker argument go viral.

Sanders and Socialism

Jamelle Bouie's latest article on the Sanders campaign makes a flawed argument that provides a teachable moment on socialism. His argument is:

1) Sanders is not really a socialist, he is a Democratic (big D as in the party) candidate. 2) He is not unique as a Democratic candidate, which has a tradition of strong leftists in the primaries, if not the general election. 3) As a Democrat he, like those before him, falls short... 4) Because the yardstick of the Democratic party is one's ability to appeal to many discontiguous demographic segments rather than any single uniting ideology.

I think that is not a bad argument, and point 4 in particular is sound, but it does miss almost all of what Bernie Sanders has said for the last several months and even decades before that and what socialists have said for a couple centuries. Here is a different argument:

1) Socialism is a political extension of the Marxist argument that economic relations are the fundamental driver of human society. 2) Sanders' is a socialist, as evidenced by his focus on economic relations, even to a fault. 3) As a socialist he, like many of those before him, falls short... 4) Because the yardstick of socialism does not inherently account for other axes of oppression.

Before he started blundering on every question related to race, the main criticism of Sanders was that he was a one issue candidate. Yes; exactly; there is no purer expression of being a descendant of the Marxist tradition than always focusing on why money flows from hundreds of millions of people to hundreds of people. The policies that characterize a socialist state change with the times, and so it makes sense that Sanders doesn't recommend the same ratio of wheat to alfalfa production as Trotsky or whatever Bouie's litmus test for socialism is. The way in which a socialist analyzes society does not change. It remains fixed on economic relations. Like Bernie Sanders.

The simplicity of that analysis can become a bludgeon when it is used to diminish other axes of oppression. Saying that issues of race or gender or sexuality are less important than those of class is the plague of Marxism done wrong and Sanders, along with thousands of dreadlocked bros throughout America's higher education system, has not done a great job of refuting that idea. The socialist argument isn't that free college and single payer healthcare will make cops stop murdering black people, but that there are economic drivers behind that criminal justice system. Racism and racist violence are and have been profitable in America, and that, rather than some divinely inspired or biologically innate disposition to racism, is how we have gotten here.

The socialist answer is not satisfying for people in a state as besieged by institutional oppression as America. Marxism offers a framework for understanding structural exploitation but not for particular events, not for their efficient causes and their intersectional tangle. Sanders has often lacked the nuance and empathy required to persuasively offer the socialist vision as amelioration for actual harms.

The Democratic party, on the other hand, offers no cosmology, no sense of why the past led to today or of the shape the future should hold. It will give or at least promise a series of bandaids for any problem that appears to endanger its candidates' electability. That is its concept of "accountability" and if you dig a little deeper there too you find its concept of "the people."

A Sanders presidency is not a revolution in the sense of 1917. Given the American system of checks and balances, it seems unlikely he would be revolutionary in any but the FOX news sense of the word. But Sanders' campaign has made an awkwardly principled stand for economic relations as the fundamental problem to address, and that message– and the idea that a political candidate can represent a mode of analysis rather than a selection of interests– has been heard by more people than the Democratic party would like.

Silicon Valley and the End of Architecture

The public architecture of Silicon Valley is like the interior design of a hotel that rents by the hour. Even as every company touts their desire and ability to change the world–and some do–the buildings are designed to be absolutely generic so they can welcome the next guest. The buildings lack style, not necessarily in the sense of being ugly, but simply being unstyled, like a size medium suit ordered off the internet. This dull churn works for both startups and their landlords: the startup's goal is to grow rapidly enough that they will be moving soon, and the property owner's goal is to be able to fill the space with whoever can pay the rent for the next twelve months. For companies with multi-billion market caps, the problem seems to be that style is a public good and they are not in the business of creating public goods.

Startups

Startups must achieve phenomenal growth or perish. Most perish. Success means first finding a place to work while you're bootstrapped and second finding a place that's nice enough to attract new hires after your series A. To the extent that Silicon Valley is a place of startups, it is a place of disposable office spaces.

The startup lifecycle has a few outcomes.

You can fail. If you fail, you go away, and another three guys from Stanford take your space.

You can plateau. If you plateau, operating expenses start to matter a lot more. You shop around for a reasonably priced office. The new place might not be in downtown Palo Alto–a spot in Sunnyvale just opened up when a urethral catheter sales office got consolidated with the Sacramento headquarters–but it's soooo much cheaper. After the move and a round of layoffs you'll have the runway to pivot.

You can continue to grow. You will cycle through office spaces like a hermit crab moving from V8 can to Coke can to Steel Reserve can.

Lastly, you can become huge. Here you have both the stability and the resources to make an architectural statement. It has become quite popular for huge tech companies to claim they are doing so.

The Big Ones

The startup cases can be excused for failing to present any kind of architectural style in Silicon Valley–they are at the mercy of capitalists–but for anyone in the double digit billions you'd expect more pride in their appearance. In this category I would count Apple (market cap: 759.63B), Google (381.5B), Facebook (221.04B), Oracle (192.43B), and even midgets like Salesforce (43.78B) and LinkedIn (33.43B). (For comparison to the non-tech world, General Electric has a 261B market cap.) LinkedIn is currently building a new headquarters in Mountain View. If they can afford it with a paltry 33 billion dollars then surely the others have some room to maneuver as well.

Those companies' campuses are all boring. Like Zuckerburg's Hoodie of Unassuming Status, the architecture of the buildings makes no claims except that you can probably fit a bunch of people inside. Their look avoids being dated by staying uncommitted to any present. As one of Google's new architects says, tech has focused so much on building the digital that it has neglected the material world.

The exception is Oracle, the only one that primarily sells products rather than cultivates users. Massive blue glass buildings, some cylindrical and some rectangular, showcase a unity of purpose and a scale of capacity in the rhetoric shared by every Vegas casino. The buildings can be seen from highway 101, the commuter artery of the Valley. Oracle is an old company that sells server licenses and its visual rhetoric comes from the industries that tech once aspired to rival. It is a vision of "high tech" from a world when tech was not ubiquitous, where "high tech" was different from the norm. Oracle worked to establish the sector that today's tech giants take for granted, and it succeeded. This is its monument. Say what you will about huge shiny blue shapes, at least it's a style.

Google gets a lot right in its video about the design parameters for a new headquarters, most importantly the need to include the surrounding community. Just as bad as the monotonous red brick of the SalesForce office, which looks like a ranch home development "inspired by" Monticello, is the inaccessibility and obscurity of the major headquarters. Style is transactional and social–the success of Facebook and the others named above is the best evidence of this. The demand for architectural style is not to say that private companies should create public facilities but that architecture needs to (at a minimum) be seen for it to be meaningful. These companies just don't care about their communities as much as they do about their users. They do not present a vision of the world that can inspire anyone but their employees and they do not inspire one to be anything but an employee.

The architects of the new Google buildings seem aware of everything bad about Silicon Valley architecture. Whether they succeed in making beautiful, functional, community integrated buildings remains to be seen. As a style for Silicon Valley, however, it is a little frightening that in the aerial view the Google pavilions look like great spider eggs waiting to hatch. But that is a view that few people will see. The experience of the accidental public is the one matters most for developing an architectural style in Silicon Valley.

Rather than outward facing architecture, the built world of Silicon Valley is dominated by the turn inward. Once you're inside Facebook you see graffiti from some famous graffiti guy. As Kate Losse points out, all you need to know is that it was expensive. For the largest companies, the interior space is a trophy room and recruiting device. For companies still climbing the ladder, interior design is where they compensate for the absence of, and absence of control over, architectural style. Cool bosses give $100 budget to buy faux palm leaves and end tables from IKEA. Let's make it fun and have a decorating contest! There ain't no party like an office decorating party because an office decorating party is mandatory. The pattern of introjecting design extends all the way down, from corporate murals in the lobby to posters in the cubicle to desktops crammed with action figures. No one at the company controls the public architecture so everyone gets to control some piece of the interior.

Public architecture requires an owner committed to a place. The companies of Silicon Valley so far lack either the capital, the desire, the continuity, or the vision to do anything but propagate a default light industrial anti-style. The San Jose city hall, for example, has a style. It may not be to one's liking but there were clearly decisions rather than defaults applied to its textured exterior, and I imagine the similarity to a microchip is not accidental. This building was not made to be rented but to be inhabited and viewed by a populace. Google's project runs in the opposite direction, making buildings that are entirely decomposable so that they can be disassembled and rebuilt as fits the needs of the occupants. This is the anti-style of Silicon Valley taken to its logical extreme, to a point where a visual style becomes a recognizable without requiring any anchor in time or space.

Chandler is the man without dignity.

He is a man in Hell.

Like Dante's protagonist, his journey is not merely internal or psychological but spatial. Unlike Dante's protagonist, his journey is not internal or psychological at all but strictly spatial.

He remains the man without dignity throughout. His journey is not overcoming this fact but navigating to a social space where his dignity is entirely external to him, where he can be a man without dignity but with all the affects of dignity. That is, his journey is to become a bourgeois patriarch.

Ross? You think Ross is Chandler's equal? No. Ross is Chandler's Virgil. He must know the path. Chandler is cucked within time; Ross is primally cucked, rejected as a man as such. Also, Ross has a child. He is not a patriarch but he is a father. His abjection is justified, he has completed the exchange of dignity for progeny, a ritual which returns a kind of dignity to the loser. Ross is no Chandler and everyone on the show knows it.

Every obstacle lies in Chandler's way: his personality, his cowardice, his sloth, ultimately even the biological difficulties of conceiving. Yet amazingly, without becoming someone the least bit respectable, he overcomes them all to become a married father. This is God's grace; this is the soul of comedy. Despite what we deserve, there is a happy ending.

How to answer pick up lines with the lyrics from Danzig's Thirteen

Men are bad at talking. They're even worse when they are talking to women, and worse still when they are trying to get laid. While a fair response to any horny guy would be "fuck off," you can also use the lyrics from Danzig's "Thirteen" to answer common questions.

Q: What's your name? A: I never had me a name. They just give me a number when I was young.

Q: Takes more muscles to frown than to smile. How about a smile? A: I was born in the soul of misery.

Q: What are you doing this weekend? A: Catch me with the devil playing 21.

Q: What's your fantasy? A: Pray you don't look at me.

Q: How's work going? A: The list of lives I've broken reach from here to Hell.

For traditionalists there is also the "classic Danzig": moaning and then screaming "mother....mother!" to activate his deepest psychosexual anxieties.

Can Games Teach Us To Die?

Somewhere on the list of game design truisms is the idea that players should feel like their actions are meaningful. If player inputs don’t return some patterned response, the game breaks down. The falcon is rude to the falconer.

Which is unfortunate because it puts the theme of futility at a discount, almost excluding it from games by definition. If games are predicated on respecting player agency we can’t have games where that input is silenced, ignored, absorbed, deflected. When we bump against the limits of what a game affords-- when we try to open the door that is just a flat graphic, or explore an ethical complexity that hasn’t been written into the storyline, or hit buttons that just don’t do anything-- we remember that our agency is defined within some horizon. Most games will try to persuade you that they have enabled the really important choices. Life will not. That difference can make games cathartic, but it can also be frustrating, infantilizing, and dissatisfying. If games always listen to us we can’t play with them to better understand a world that is profoundly indifferent.

When I started playing The Banner Saga I was impressed with the apparent futility of the player’s situation. The end of the world is not impending, it’s been going on for awhile. The gods are dead. The midday sun is motionless in the sky. The recent invasion of the dredge--a machinic, alien race--is very bad but in the grand scheme probably not as bad as the condition you’ve already accepted. To survive, your clan must defeat the dredge and collect supplies. There isn’t much hope that you’ll ever reach safety but it’s better than just waiting around to die.

Although The Banner Saga communicates its premise directly, the emotional ambiance is most convincingly conveyed in the gallows humor of the varl warriors accompanying you. They varl are, as a rule, very large and very old. When you talk to them they laugh and say that you’re probably all going to die.

The over-arching game loop has the structure of Oregon Trail salted with the anti-Manifest Destiny of The Road. Within that frame there are story encounters offering a couple choices of action and frequent tactical skirmishes against the dredge. Here (as in Oregon Trail’s hunting mini-game) you have full control of your warriors, in contrast to the unpredictability of the encounters themselves. The Banner Saga uses these two game modes to establish the horizon of futility. You will walk until you die, most likely, but until that happens you can fight however you choose. Like a more violent version of Passage.

By suspending the possibility of survival and the usefulness of instrumental reasoning in achieving it, the game draws you closer to the real work of perseverance: the emotional labor of keeping your shit together. You’re never really given the opportunity to give up--and playing as Rook, who becomes his clan’s leader for the sake of his daughter Alette, I never wanted to--but the game makes you feel the burdensomeness of the journey and the temptation of an early end. The battles are a welcome break from the marches during which you can only wait and worry. I imagine that sometimes Rook feels the same way.

As the game progresses, the sense that your actions ultimately do not matter gets stretched in conflicting directions. You are confronted by story encounters where a seemingly shrewd choice costs you dearly or where indulging in a fit of scruples yields riches. You aren’t pushed to be “good” or “bad” but the outcomes can verge from unpredictable to arbitrary. At the same time, the story world’s scope expands beyond that of your initial characters, gesturing toward a larger narrative in which their seemingly tragic plight might be instrumental in saving the world after all. The player moves away from the limited, strained, personal perspective of Rook and Alette. Their struggle to want to survive has less emotional kick once the player sees they might be useful in some larger exchange of pawns. That story arc is not fully paid off in The Banner Saga. After finishing the game I learned this installment was advertised as part of a trilogy during the Kickstarter campaign; I mention this fact here because it is not mentioned at all if you just buy it off Steam.

In the end, I felt that my sense of what I could affect and what I must accept was not fully reflected in the outcomes that the game had prepared. The question of whether everyone dies or something unexpected happens is unanswered, left as the material for another episode.

What I loved in the game at first blush was maybe not what its creators intended and maybe not something that will even be part of the final product. I had thought this was a game about the end of humanity as it appears to be coming to pass in real life. Our planet is becoming inhospitable for us, because of us. To stop that requires the transformation of--of everything, from our material expectations of comfort to our social institutions to our individual psyches. Perhaps it is possible, but there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that we will make those changes.

Our environmental problems are not merely the question of finding some new and better technology--though I am a sucker for nuclear fusion--that will disrupt the apocalypse. The condition of our planet is not like a game system, designed to be won, that can necessarily be pierced with pure reason. Games, the games we’ve made, have told us this because it was what we wanted to hear. They made us think that a sufficiently reasoned input would return the win condition. They were entertainment, delighting us with intelligently designed worlds. But it looks like we might be fucked. We--or rather, some small shard of humanity that has enough power to be mistaken for the all--might be too in love with the inequality and ease that are killing us to benefit from what help instrumental reasoning could provide. We may already be in the endgame.

But games, and Banner Saga might turn out to be one of them, can still provide an occasion to work on doing that well. We have a long way to go before we are all dead. We have a hard road that we can make better for each other. Instrumental reasoning is useful--just as in The Banner Saga you want to win those encounters with the dredge, we should still do what is in our power to reduce material harm--but with the horizon of futility in sight, it may be time for games to stop listening to us.

A Damn Mess

Katy Perry's "Roar" is a pretty big piece of shit as far as lyrics go. The center of the song, from which it gets its name, is a riff on the phrase "eye of the tiger," which means something because there was another song that got famous that said that. The rest of it is a collection of cliches and mixed metaphors that similarly sort of mean things, or gesture toward meaningful things, like a realtor trying to sell you on the stories in someone else's home. At every turn, "Roar" defers making statements of original poetic force in favor of pinging well-worn references--like a musical version of Family Guy, but serving doe-eyed smarm instead of white boy solace.

But does it matter? The song has a strong melody and production values, and I'm only writing this because I've had it stuck in my head long enough that I need some form of exorcism. Moreover, does it matter if media--what used to be called "art"--is nothing more than a pastiche of references that manages us to excite once more? Does art need to attempt to create something ex nihilo?

Perry's form of art is certainly better than the Romantic myth of the creative genius. Surfaces, movements, deferrals--these are all she conjures because that's all there is anyway. It is the apotheosis of what critics fought to legitimize from about 1964 (I think that's when Writing and Difference came out?) to the mid-90s.

This is commercialized deconstruction. It is the postmodernist, poststructuralist, post-you-name-it nightmare: that all the systems of thought those "posts-" modify have been done away with, breaking the exchange between the parasite and the host. Deconstruction must be a response to and elaboration of a structure. Here the position of response becomes the system with closure, and one that has been vaccinated against our best critiques of it. To criticize Perry we are stuck in Fred Jameson's Postmodernism; or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, giving up the capacity for an aesthetic critique in exchange for tying it to the perennial and easy target of capitalism. On that account, "Roar" is not bad because it is bad but because it is a subset or symptom of capitalism.

So--there's that way out. You can always exit the aesthetic conversation for the cultural one (and that door will lead you from freelancing into grad school). But this song is bad for reasons that have nothing to do with capitalism. Moreover, I am claiming more than "I don't like it." It's bad for exactly the reasons I said: the lyrics fail to meet the minimum requirements of sense, rhyme, meter, and semantic force that I can fairly expect of words in mass media.

The problem we have isn't that we don't know how to say things are aesthetically bad but that we are accustomed to attributing the wrong truth value to those claims. Since, I don't know, Socrates, the Western tradition has agreed that certain types of inquiry (math, logic, sometimes science) have access to objective truth while other questions can only result in subjective truths. Aesthetics has always been the no man's land where we want to make objective claims but accept we can not. At most we can taxonomize the range of human responses and suggest the different causes of each (see Hume, Burke, Kant). But now that art has given itself over to media and the practice of making a good song--or good image, film, book, etc--is as much a matter of technics as inspiration, we need to claim the capability to say when aesthetic objects are objectively bad.

It's funny: the post-whateverists fought well against the view that the world is a collection of measurements to be gathered--I'd even say they won the theoretical fight--but in the end it doesn't matter. The way in which we produce media has changed. The scientism is coming from inside the house. Now it's not a matter of what theory we use to look at something like "Roar" but whether we respond to the structure of the object itself or discover in it only the secret we plant there. "Roar" is a series of deflections (so it is both trivial and impossible to show that it contradicts itself, or whatever other metaphysical conclusion one might want to demonstrate) wrapped around the industrial practice of making music people buy. That includes not just the technics of recording, producing, and mastering music, but of having data on the objective state of human preferences. I don't mean a reductive, single, universal "human"--one taste to fit them all, the problem that bedeviled Kant's efforts to move aesthetics from subjective to objective--but the complex fabric of data on humans that aims, like Borges's map, to become a 1:1 of the thing it represents. (Unlike Borges's map this one is accessible from a terminal and so avoids the spatial absurdity of the map being identical to the territory).

The price we pay is that subjective aesthetic judgment--the part where we say "I like it" or "I don't like it"--has also moved toward the status of objective truths. Thanks to the existence of a shared mass media--the thing that makes it possible for "Roar" to rattle off a series of glib references that everyone will recognize as references, for us to recognize the lowest common denominator as such--the status of the pleasurable is also an objective fact. Look at a Katy Perry video: this is fun. This is objectively fun. This is a reality that transcends the individual yet has the quality of being completely historical and empirical. It might be objectively bad, and you might not partake of the pleasure that is on offer, but you don't get to subjectively determine what is and is not pleasurable anymore.

This is fun

This is the bargain we've been born into. We have more power to say what is bad or good and why, but less to say what we should enjoy. Not that there is no pleasure to be had for people who don't want to enjoy garbage; the pleasure is now in the act of destroying the garbage. And perhaps it not a coincidence that this is what was first offered by the beat-and-shoot 'em up video games of my youth. It is certainly not a coincidence that it is shared by some of my favorite writers of my--well, generation is too broad and pretentious--but maybe cohort? I mean guys like Dave Thorpe, Luke O'Neil, and Jeb Lund (and generally but not necessarily others who wasted the best years of their lives on SA) who are best at tearing down their enemies and can do it with instinctual speed. In a landscape of constant cancerous media production there is a need for people who are purely destructive.

Maybe that isn't a healthy way to approach the world--personally I enjoy it--but the people who argue against criticism are also the ones pumping out the bullshit. These positions are complementary and both contribute to the objective status of aesthetic judgments, the one by producing a statistically useful data set and keeping track of the results, and the other doing the work of Maxwell's demon and sorting it out. (It's worth remembering the appearance of Maxwell's demon in The Crying of Lot 49 to see Pynchon's paranoia as precursor to today's media clear-cutting).

So. That's where I think we are: drowning in trash and fighting for breath. Maybe it's easier with a theory explaining why things feel like this, that says you're not wrong to keep slashing your way through the waves of refuse. I don't know. This could just as well be another one for the ash heap.

on Catching Fire

In David Denby's review of Catching Fire he tosses off two interesting observations about the franchise's premise: it's absolutely nuts to think that an oppressive government could better subdue its underclass by forcing their children to fight to the death, and the metaphorical value of the contest is rather nonspecific in its evocation of the contemporary endgame which we might call capitalism, the job market, high school, or what have you. (I would quote Denby as he states both points eloquently but I let my 6 month old play with the magazine and her favorite game is eat and destroy).

The first observation, which should be incredibly obvious, gobsmacked me: how the hell had I accepted the idea that the televised corruption, torture, and murder of teenagers would make their parents less likely to revolt? Probably by implicitly accepting the second equation: that because it was ugly it was somehow a metaphor for the ugliness around me, even if I couldn't really say why.

I could jump through a couple of allegorical hoops to square that circle, but a simpler way to parse the situation is to say that Americans accept the idea that the slaughter of young people makes their parents less violent is because this is the assumption of American foreign policy. To reject that premise is to reject what America does in Afghanistan and everywhere else that it wages the "war on terror." Or, really, anywhere America acts beyond its borders. Or, if we're being really real, anywhere American policy holds sway at all. Within the fortress of America a for-profit prison industry ensures that a substantial percentage of young people must be confined to a pit that would never earn a PG-13 rating or else risk impinging on job growth (please tell me you aren't against job growth?!). Let me skim over all the young people given suboptimal educations because their local governments bet coffers and pensions on housing bubbles, as well as all those children whose food and medical benefits have been rescinded because their caretakers were bilked by financial traders whose crimes have been gerrymandered outside the scope of the law, to the college students just one rung below America's middle class. Even they must be branded with a form of debt more punitive than that carried by any other entity and at interest rates designed to benefit their private creditors. America's youth do compete in a death match--they struggle under the dead weight of capital given prematurely to a generation prior--and to live this condition is to accept that young people will be handled cruelly. Adult Americans should not care.

Hunger Games is a symptom, not a metaphor. Its premise shows that it comes from a culture struggling with the cognitive dissonance of sending its youth to slaughter but it doesn't signify the mechanics by which that culture actually operates. Snot is a symptom of a cold--mucus is a useful way to flush membranes while maintaining a protective barrier; it makes complete sense as a symptom--but a runny nose doesn't doesn't provide a model for how viruses and immune systems interact. Reading (or writing) metaphorically helps when we are trying to make a claim about how something works. Sometimes we aren't ready for that, and all we have to go on is a symptom. But at least a symptom can tell you where it hurts.

Soldiers have no place in the Anthropocene

The NYT ran a pretty good piece about death, philosophy, soldiering, and the future of our planet during massive climate change. I give it a rating of "pretty good" as the average of "excellent application of Stoicism to the present moment" and "very poor argument connecting that to soldiering."

First, the injunction to meditate on death as a way to lessen its sting is not strictly martial, and it would probably be easier to find sources supporting this technique in ethics in general. I understand that it makes a good hook to sell ad space on Veteran's Day but that isn't classically considered a valid reason to ignore evidence concerning your area of inquiry.

Second, and related, is that he ahistoricizes the experience of war. Any 10th grade world history student knows about the changes in European warfare between the 19th and early twentieth centuries. The industrialization of war changed the psychological response for both soldiers and citizens. This is not to say that there is nothing be be gained from classical philosophy--far from it--but that we need to be mindful when drawing parallels. In this case the parallelism is created to install an ahistorical figure of the Soldier, when the practices of soldiering vary widely between times and places.

That in turn leads to the third mistake of discounting non-martial positions that reflect on death. Why isn't depression his case study, when (at least in my experience) that can lead to the daily ritual of reflecting on one's death as a way to stabilize personal existence? If this essay didn't have the first two problems--which again we can trace to the injunction to market itself on Veteran's Day--it would be quite simple to see that the depressive is the better example because the Anthropocene does not present an Enemy, as war classically has, and instead offers, as he says, an inevitability. The author is correct to intuit the connection between a soldier in the war on terror and the human in the Anthropocene because both lack enemies and victory conditions.

Amazingly, his argument is correct for the reasons he goes out of his way to ignore, namely, that the war he served in withheld the possibility of victory from its inception. The relevant experience was not fighting a war--the essence of the Soldier--but waiting to die, which only makes sense when talking about this war. And it makes sense when talking about the empirical reality of small 's' soldiers who have mental health concerns that don't need to be elevated to the level of ontology to deserve our attention.

Oh, and I say the depressive is the better case not to win a measuring contest but to show how absurd such a gesture is when talking about the extinction of our species.

Intro to Unemployment

My friend Josh got laid off like a month before me. Today he gave me his advice on how to get through the day.

josh: so heres the deal. as a stay home dad, its basically like prison

josh: you set a schedule, stick to it.

josh: do your work

me: right

josh: pump iron

josh: watch dr phil

me: a mans gotta live

josh: pump more iron

josh: and treat your wife like the queen, because shes the only way your lazy ass gets to eat

josh: also, when shes home you can pump more iron

josh: she will be impressed

I. Love. Batman.

You either hear the news or infer it from Twitter: Ben Affleck has been announced to play Batman in a new movie. You better say something, and soon, or no one will know that you know.

On one hand, Ben Affleck is kind of a dweeby turd because he has done a lot of things that merit the description--like his movies, and his red carpet politics, and his smarmy face--but on the other hand, getting worked up about Batman would make you a dweeby turd. Not cool. Better to point out how silly Batman is and make fun of Ben Affleck. Heh, Batman. A guy who dresses like a bat, sort of. I mean he could be a horse with tiny ears and a super long mane. Whatever.

Not me. I fucking love Batman.

Maybe Ben Affleck will be bad. He doesn’t fit the type of Batman that Christopher Nolan has cultivated--the director who, I guess, either proposed or thumbs-uped a Batman who disguises his identity by talking like a little boy’s idea of daddy--which is actually a pretty good description of Batman--but Affleck has proven himself to be a competent actor and director in movies like The Town and Argo. He could be fine.

I’m not here to praise Ben Affleck or to bury him; I want to talk about Batman. I am here to say that, even though he is a rich guy who tries to fight crime while pretending to be a critter of the night-- again, not talking about Affleck-- Batman matters. I’ll get passionate about him and I don’t mind. I love Batman and he is worthy of my love.

Do you know Batman like I do? Specifically: have you read some of the Batman comics of the last thirty odd years? See, I think this is the critical difference between people who get Batman and people who are like, oh, a guy in a bat costume. If you only know Batman from his movies and the clippings from goofy old cartoons, he’s easy to write off. He’s a silly concatenation of wish fulfillments that adds up to a vector for Happy Meals and Mountain Dew. But that’s not Batman! Those are a fragment, a splinter, of the body of work exploring the character of Batman. If he was really a flat, nonsensical character, why would he keep coming back to revitalize the brands that live off him? Nah, see, that’s not Batman, or rather, that’s only him in his sacrificial form. Decade after decade, Batman rises up to die for America. The question isn’t why a stupid character has lasted so long but what depth drives his reincarnation.

In the 1980s superhero comics got serious. They became self-reflexive about the superhero concept but did not turn away from it, Watchmen being probably the best known example. No, they understood that though comics had been part of propagating the concept, the superhero preceded them. The superhero couldn’t be abandoned--it had to be critiqued, and no one was better equipped to do so than comic writers themselves. So you find scenes like the final conflict in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns where Batman battles a Superman who has become the resigned waterboy for Reagan’s empire. Superheroes are the guys on both sides of the fight: concentrated power fantasies that give body to abstractions like “the nation,” and our knowledge of the lie at that heart, and the belief, requisite to avoid suicide, that somehow an individual--like us, if not quite like us--can fight back.

Christopher Nolan knows this scene: his dark, psychological films draw a great deal on the four books comprising the Dark Knight Returns arc (and, most obviously, his title is nearly identical). Differences between the two, where Nolan seems to have intentionally departed from his preferred source material, are telling. In the first act of the comic series Batman faces a young, strong, populist mutant leader who is a visually similar foil to the Bane of Dark Knight Rises. The final battle of Returns also pits Batman against a physically superior populist opponent, the aforementioned Superman. Frank Miller’s four book structure gives Batman a sequence of rising challenges, with the mutant leader, while dangerous, being the least of them and Superman--avatar for the government of the United States of America--the most threatening. By putting Bane at the end of his trilogy, Nolan combines characters from Dark Knight Returns while reversing the sequence and political message. For Miller, the mutant boss (and his reminder that Batman is aging, that he is mortal) are the least of Batman’s problems. America is his true and unconquerable foe.

But Nolan, or maybe it’s Ledger, gets the Joker right. The Joker is the key--that’s why he appears in so many of the great comics during the series’ rebirth. The relationship between Batman and Joker is the reason anyone gives a single shit about Batman today. The Joker asks the question at the heart of Batman’s origin (his parents are shot dead in a robbery, in case you didn’t know) and his lifelong self-doubt: how can we know if our violence is just? That is Batman’s epistemological struggle, and encounters with the Joker are about the madness that the law must pass through while enforcing itself violently. That’s it. That’s Batman, and Joker is the key to understanding it. If you take away the agony and doubt of doing violent justice, then it’s true that all you have is a guy in tights beating up thugs. You have George Zimmerman as seen by Ted Nugent-- an ideological simpleton, an abuser empowered by the status quo.

This is why Miller ends with the Superman fight. Batman’s ultimate struggle is not to prevent the descent into anarchist violence, as in Nolan’s sequence, or even to overcome his own doubt about whether he’s just a violent psychopath born with a silver spoon. Overcoming Joker, for Miller and for Nolan, requires that he accept that they are two sides of the same coin--and Nolan does well to include Two Face as the embodiment of that self-knowledge. In the middle of both series Batman looks into the abyss and survives. The Batman coming out of that trial has a different task: to make those who would do violence in the name of justice suffer the hideousness of their existence. And that is a lesson he will teach Superman, and the government of the U.S., by any means necessary.

/// I originally included that rhetorical nod to Malcolm X to raise a specific example in American history of the ambivalence of violence as justice, but after seeing the way white people have gone wild appropriating MLK the last few days I feel like maybe I should leave it out. But here’s the point I was trying to make subtly and will now make explicit: if Batman was black-- a rich black man riding around in a really nice car beating the shit out of white teens for doing the violence they are taught they are entitled to do-- white America would not think of him as a superhero with psychological depth but as a terrorist. I mean they already try to smear Kanye as a delinquent dad for doing his damn job, and there's nothing more dadly than doing your damn job. My view, which I’ve said before, is that terrorism is a value neutral description and it is the purpose for which it is being used that is the object of moral judgment. I decided to leave it in as a prompt to consider the question, what if Batman was black? ////

My point here is not that Christopher Nolan presents a reactionary version of Dark Knight Returns, although I’m also saying that, but to show how Batman is a nexus for important, timely shit. I’ve only been talking about one comic arc. There’s still Year One and The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum and Gates of Gotham lots more, all of which start from the premise that they need to present a psychologically driven narrative about a billionaire fighting crime with brute force--which is insane, but is also literally America. (You know what else is both comically and tragically ludicrous: everything). Each writer or artist to contribute knows they are joining a conversation in progress where they need to bring something new while being mindful of responding to what’s already been said. (I mean, there are shitty Batman comics too but that doesn’t invalidate the good ones).

Of course, it’s not like Batman is the only game in town for talking about the state and madness and violence. I’m not trying to say Batman is a gospel, perfect and universal--the Batman universe tends to be assume white men are the drivers of history--but that Batman is a tradition for a critique of violence using the terms I think matter. When it fails, as it must, as it is obsessed with doing, it provides a narrative and visual language for reflecting on its failures. My investment in Batman is part historical accident, like anyone who finds themselves born into a tradition, and part out of respect for the quality and relevance of that tradition. So when there’s some news about an addition to the Batman universe, you’re goddam right I want to talk about its possible implications. I want to talk about everything Batman has to say.

Why People Aren't Their Genitals

Some, probably many, people say that Chelsea Manning is a man because of her penis. One problem with that position is that it entails that a person is identical to their flesh. There is no room for the soul in that view of humanity, or any other conception of a person as something other than a wad of meat.

If you ascribe to a religion like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, or Hinduism, you should not believe that a person is merely flesh. Likewise, if you belong to secular humanist traditions that make reference to inalienable rights or the dignity of the person, you believe that a person is something in addition to flesh. I'd guess that this way of conceiving of people is so widespread because humans often experience themselves as a conscious being that is in some way distinct from their flesh. We experience ourselves willing our bodies to do things we want, and are reminded of the separation when our bodies do not do what we want. My consciousness does not seem to be a physical thing to me. Given the long standing philosophical question of the mind-body problem, I think it appears this way to lots of other people too.

If you need to talk about the penis, you could say that Chelsea Manning has a man's body. I'm sure she is more aware of that than anyone. The disjunction between Chelsea Manning the person and the body she bears is probably why she has requested hormone replacement therapy. I don't know--I don't know her and I don't know what it's like to be transgender. If you are like me in that regard, I would recommend reading about the experiences of transgender people to better understand the Manning case.

Obama Declassifies 'War On Terror' Legal Briefs

In response to a spate of criticism, the president this week called a press conference to disclose the previously secret interpretations of the law used by the administration in its prosecution of the war on terror.

"I've got the briefs right here," said President Obama, removing his right hand from a coat pocket and holding up his middle finger. "Attorney General Eric Holder personally oversaw their writing and I have complete faith that they are consonant with the principles laid out in the Constitution," he added, slowly rotating from right to left to show the lone erect finger to the room of reporters and legal scholars.

"If you have any questions, I ask you to direct them to the esteemed jurist on my left," he added, pulling out his left hand, which was also flipping the bird.

Though shocking, op-ed columnists have rushed to point out previous examples of similar behavior. E. J. Dionne reminded readers that George W. Bush "poked his tongue in his cheek and curled one hand to give the impression he was sucking a big ol' cock" while being questioned about the invasion of Iraq, and George F. Will observed that even as venerable a leader as Lincoln would "cross his forearms in an 'X' shape and slam them vociferously upon his crotch when challenged on the wisdom of privileging the dignity of the slave over the sanctity of the state."

As members of the press asked questions, Obama would appear to discover something below the podium, then raise up his hand still in the middle finger position. "Want to ask about drone policy, or the NSA surveillance programs, or how I said I would close Gitmo?" he continued, pulling out both fingers yet again.

"Great question," he said, stroking his chin with a middle finger.

When asked about the fate of Edward Snowden the president appeared distracted by a makeup case for which his middle finger served as the lid. He used the other hand, also flicking off everyone in attendance, to apply the imaginary makeup to his face.

"It was weird, sure," said a Washington Post reporter who asked to be unnamed. "But I'm just glad the culture of secrecy is starting to break."

Dadding and Vidya Games

The Last of Us, a video game sort of like The Road but with a girl instead of a boy in the supporting role, has, as any serious video game should, attracted its share of critique concerning the representation of women. I'm not going to try to adjudicate that conversation--while I admire much of what the game does I am loath to be one of those horrible dudes who tells women why they shouldn't be mad--but it touches on a parallel topic I can talk about. The central relationship in The Last of Us of is not romantic but paternal, casting the video game mechanic of "shoot a guy before he shoots you" within the father-daughter relationship. While there are perspectives on this discussion I am not equipped to discuss, I can tell you about the part I am: what it's like to be a father to a little girl.

My daughter--our first child--is six weeks old. I am insanely in love with her. I, like most dads, would do anything for her. I would kill for her. Or die for her. I'd drink my urine so she could have the last of our water. Whatever--I'd do anything for her. Realistically, I have to do something much worse. I go to work and don't see her enough. At the end of the day I have to remember how precious our time together is when I'm already tired and irritable and painfully aware of the conversion rate between my mortal coil and her access to healthcare and education. There are difficult things that a dad does but they are more grueling than gruesome.

Poetry is a perennial companion of humans because it gives us a medium for expressing the intensity of love, a thing that defies everyday language. Fatherly love is like that too. But the trend of serious video games--well, a trend of Western culture over the last few thousand years--has been to communicate intensity of feeling and the failure of language through metaphors of violence. When we try to complete the sentence, "I love you so much that--" we don't have to land on an expression of violence. That is a habit, one that is both cause and effect of the violence we do outside of metaphor. Maybe you would walk five hundred miles, and then walk five hundred more, to express your love. Maybe you'd change a bunch of diapers or stay awake all night to make sure she's breathing in her sleep. Maybe you'd suffer the break between language and love without striking out to prove that it exists.

This is the beachhead on which stories--told through video games or other means--break one way or the other: do they require that men express love as violence? Blockbuster video games are so monoculturally dedicated to first person shooters that it is easy for an observer to conflate "video games" and "shooters," but there are already millions of other ways to engage players that don't boil down to putting a dot at the right place at the right time. Even Day Z, a brutally realistic zombie survival game, subverts its shooter origins by placing survival so unflinchingly at its core that you can never merrily blast your way out of your problems. Do that and you're low on precious ammo: a new problem. There is no pre-existing narrative there to catch you, and so you return to the kind of slow, patient, anxious work that is the real expression of care.

It's not that I don't enjoy shooters with dad themes. No, I really like the feeling these games give me. I loved the first two Bioshock games, in which you rescue afflicted little girls and either save them or harvest them for resources. When I annihilated the bad guys attacking my little sisters it felt great. That feeling is intoxicating. I can understand why violence is so seductive as a shorthand for paternal love. But, like, come on dude. You don't want your kid living in a world where everyone else is waiting to express their love of family by killing yours. (And here I can't help thinking of the murder of Trayvon Martin). It's fun as hell to mow down splicers in Bioshock but that pleasure is completely unrelated to the actual joys of being a parent.

Everything I've said so far applies equally to a child of any gender. At the point where the imagination turns back into reality--where, for example, the fantasy of honorable defense becomes the killing of an unfamiliar youth--gender and race matter again. Zombies aren't going to attack my daughter, but statistics show that it is frighteningly possible a man will. So I am wary of enjoying too much the pleasure of righteous violence when I know that there is another side to it, and that women have historically--and currently--been on the side opposite me.

I don't want to play a dad sim, and I'm not attributing to video games the kind of sorcerous power that animate pig's bladder Wayne LaPierre thinks they have. Video games are part of culture. They don't exercise demonic mind control but they also aren't separate from the reproduction of ideology (I'm looking at you, gun culture). As both a game developer and a dad all I'm asking is that fatherhood--or if we want to get crazy, masculinity--not be cast as the ability to kill a guy on the tv. Dadding is not that simple or easy. It, unlike most shooters, is not a game for teen boys. I believe in video games as a medium capable of examining complex experiences like parenthood. I think we have nailed down the part about wanting to defend our kids. Now I'd like to see us represent what dadding is really about.

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