While watching Inception, I could not help but think of all of the ways its subconscious playground compared to the experience of playing a videogame. I believe the film is just a valuable as an exploration of gaming and affect as it is dreaming.

Below is a list of similarities I generated:

(Please note that I realize none of these similarities only apply to videogames. However, I do think that when taken as a group they form a convincing argument for Inception’s game-like qualities.)

1. The film is heavily invested in a set of rules and logics which guide the action and events. The first act is focused on helping the viewer, whose surrogate is Ellen Page’s Ariadne, understand the system.

2. Similar to theories about game avatars, the people within the dreamworld are projections of the users’ subconscious.

3. There’s a heavy focus on the navigation of space. The architect/designer building the world is tasked with creating appropriately challenging labyrinths.

4. The worlds have their own physics engines.

5. The ideas being quested for are locked away like treasures.

6. Time is sped up. (This particularly reminds me of the quick clocks in sports games as well as first-person shooter characters running 15-20 mph.)

7. There are different levels of increasing difficulty.

8. Frequent and/or addicted users have a hard time distinguishing between dream and reality.

9. There are single player and co-op modes.

Can you think of any others?

It was an intentionally exaggerated but honest and innocent question and one I had been thinking about a lot lately. In the past few months, I had unscientifically noticed there was a a new topic trending each day supported by tweets from predominantly black users. (And let me note here that my trends are geolocated and cover the LA metro area so this may be different, or perhaps not even apply, depending on where you’re living. If so, please leave a comment.)

A few examples of the trends I took note of in the past week or so: #bottomlineis, #1thingaboutme, #whyyouattheclub, #laughatem, #oldassnames, #thingswesaytopolice, #blackmamaquotes

I imagine the reason why my friend sent the message to me privately is the reason why no one has written about  this: we’re worried that making this claim is somehow racially insensitive. However, it’s quite the opposite. Taking note of, and understanding how, black people are using Twitter  as a form of public discourse is important to combating inaccurate narratives about minority participation on the internet.

The Digital Divide and Black Technocultural Production

Allow me to explain. The rhetoric of the digital divide— that is, a gap in access between the haves and have-nots of cyberspace—continues to dominate discussion about minority use of computer and internet technology.  And while this divide does exist (according to Pew, in 2008 56% of whites have broadband access vs. 41% of blacks and 55% of English-speaking Latinos), many have complicated this simplistic narrative of access and exclusion. Thuy Linh N. Tu,  Alondra Nelson, and Alicia Hedlam Hines emphasized in the introduction to their foundational Technicolor collection that we need to think beyond simplistic solutions of access and consider the politics of access, i.e. what kind of access is granted and in whose interest is it being structured?

Also, as Anna Everett has argued, the rhetoric of the digital divide tends to devalue, defame, and discount a robust tradition of black technocultural production. Along with Everett’s critique, many writers (see Ben Williams’ chapter on Detroit techno in Technicolor and Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies) have worked to expose the proud, novel, and influential ways African diasporic cultures have expertly manipulated and innovated digital technologies, particularly music production, but are often forgotten amidst the focus on white dominated modes of production (such as computer programming).

Digital Dozens: Twitter Trends and Signifyin’

The overwhelming participation of black users in the creation and proliferation of Twitter trends is yet another example of the well documented history of black use of technology. But what is especially fascinating about the discourse of Twitter trends is its similarity in tone and content to African American rhetorical traditions, particularly signifyin’. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. defines signifyin’ over the course of his book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. According to Gates, signifyin’ replaces semantics with rhetorical style stretching and doubling (even tripling, quadrupling, etc.) the meaning of signifiers in an effort to parody, misdirect, and/or encode. Perhaps the most recognizable form it takes is in the irreverent vernacular verbal confrontations called the dozens (e.g. “Yo momma’s so ______, she(’s) ______!”  duel). The importance of the exchange of the dozens is not in the denotative meaning of the exchange but in the creative manipulation of style within the defined rhetorical tradition. A very similar exchange occurs within the bounds of the Twitter trend topic. The hash tag and phrase that compose the trend provide the framework within which participants can play with style.

Signifyin’ and the dozens are most often associated with street corners, school yards, and barbershops and are defined by a very distinct rhetorical tradition and set of codes and practices that are protected and safe from surveillance and policing by those outside of the discourse community, i.e. women, men, whites, etc. To account for the protected discursive exchanges within these public placesVorris Nunley has expanded the definition of the hush harbor, a secret place for African American slaves to engage in religious practice, to these other spaces defined by the rhetorical traditions of black culture. Within this context, signifyin’ is not simply a play of language but a rhetorical performance that provides access to a politically protected discourse community. Within this community, using this rhetorical tradition, black people have employed the dozens and other modes of signifyin’ as a means of entertainment, communication, and political negotiation. Consider the trend #shutyobrokeassup. While it’s clear this discussion is meant to engage in the humorous one-upmanship of the dozens, the subject is of class interest and the language is distinctly black vernacular. It might be easy to dismiss these tweets as silliness but within the context of class struggle they also serve as a coping mechanism and shared acknowledgment of political inequality, however slight or unconscious that intent may be.

The Not So Hush Harbor

But given those similarities, Twitter seems to be fundamentally transforming the traditional safe physical space of the hush harbor. For one thing, the trend discussion is explicitly public, so much so that it’s a point of pride to get a discussion so popular that it begins to appear on the left hand side of the Twitter main page. In this way, Twitter trends are less a traditional hush harbor and more in line with mass market reconfigurations of black culture wherein other discourse communities have access to the performance but not necessarily the code or lived experience that makes the performance politically or culturally significant. Here I see some alignment between commodified forms of black discourse (for example, blaxploitation film) and queer camp which provides a distinctly different experience to audiences depending on their subjectivities and social identifications.

Twitter facilitates a large scale, distributed, and exponentially more populated arena in which to signify but at the cost of greater surveillance and, it seems, less discussion between participants. But, just as in queer camp, the codes which provide a barrier of access work to maintain the appropriate discursive boundaries within which to communicate. Without the walls of the barbershop, rhetoric becomes even more important as a proof of authenticity.

Thus, Twitter, as new configuration of the barbershop, is a prime example of how black people are not invisible on the internet but are emblematic of the tightrope of privacy we all walk in taking our sociality to the net.

Kick-Ass is an important film for videogame scholars to see, especially with an audience. Many have made the claim that videogames have influenced film, but this influence has never been more apparent to me than in Kick-Ass. However, my concern is not with tracking the obvious visual/stylistic similarities (e.g. the first person shooter sequence featuring Hit Girl); rather, what  I am interested in is how the apparent but not functionally established connections between gamic logics and filmic logics can actually lead to serious ethical misunderstandings by the audience. Even though Kick-Ass and games are alike stylistically, there are still significant affective and logical differences that, if confused, can lead to ethically troubling audience responses. This ethical confusion, wherein audiences misread a film by applying gamic logics to film, demonstrate the desperate need for better videogame literacies that teach viewers how to interpret and understand games.

Disclaimers: 1. I have not read the graphic novel yet so these reactions are based solely on how I interpret the film (and I would love to hear from someone who has read the graphic novel). 2. I do not believe that games are making people violent. See my chapter in The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto for how violence in games can be productive. 3. Beware there is a mild spoiler ahead. 4. I understand my argument is based on one anecdotal experience. The point is to throw an idea out there and see what people think.

To Laugh or Not to Laugh

Let me illustrate what I mean by this ethical confusion. Early on in the film, the hero, Dave Lizewski, debuts his Kick Ass persona and is beaten up by thugs, violently stabbed and then hit by a car and left for dead. The purpose of this truly brutal and jarring scene is to disrupt the lighthearted tone of the film’s opening and confront the viewer with the dire consequences, as well as the incredible stupidity/bravery, of what Dave has chosen to do with his life. The entire film relies on this balance of extreme violence, humor, and very real consequences. Each “hero” is introduced with an emphasis on the fact that, while fighting and violence can be dazzling and fun, ultimately pain hurts (Hit Girl via the bulletproof vest sequence and Red Mist’s jump down into the alley) and that things can—and probably will—go very badly. Significantly, Hit Girl and Red Mist’s scenes do not have the presence of danger and the pain they endure is funny, while Kick Ass’s scene is incredibly dangerous and not funny. The decision to show Kick Ass in deep trouble is key to the plot of the film since Kick Ass is the everyman the viewer is meant to identify with. Kick Ass’s asskicking also exposes the fantasies of unrealistic violence in comic books.

Yet the majority of the audience in my theater laughed when Kick Ass was stabbed and laughed even harder when he was hit by the car. They also laughed at many other moments I felt were not supposed to be funny but horrific. From my perspective, and that of the person I saw it with, the audience’s response was disturbing. The inappropriate laughter  is the effect of the transposition, by some viewers, of videogame logics and ethics to other media—in this case, film.

Violence as a Mechanic in Videogames

Here’s what I think is happening: it can be assumed that a lot of the audience for Kick-Ass, especially the predominantly 17-25 year old male demographic of my screening, are videogamers. Death, destruction, and violence are a nearly pervasive element of all videogames and hold, for most games, very little consequence. Games are often allegorical and thus violence can take on a host of different meanings that’s more often than not is reduced to its function as a mechanic of the game. To be reductive, violence is a way to score points or to accomplish goals. As a result, violence in games can almost always be interpreted as funny and in most games pain is just a mathematical value with little affective response from the characters or player. Consider the player of Grand Theft Auto who runs around in a world that resembles real life but those resemblances conceal gamespace that essentially functions as a complex system of obstacles to impede free movement. In this situation, getting hit by a car is structurally equivalent to being hit by a hammer as you try and jump between platforms in a Mario game.

For those audience members at my screening, Kick Ass getting stabbed and hit by a car was funny because they are viewing the film as if it was a videogame. This is a fundamentally incorrect way of understanding what is happening in the film and a detriment to the experience. To look at the character of Kick Ass as a videogame avatar/crash test dummy corrodes the humanity and fragility of Kick Ass that provides the emotional center of the film. I acknowledge that viewers can and should interpret a film differently but to laugh at that scene represents a destruction of the narrative architecture of Kick-Ass. Moreover, the laughter exposes an ethical disposition that is troubling. (NOTE: I do think some videogames have characters that need to be understood as fragile and draw their power from that fragility but they are few and far between. Since games have extra lives and life bars, etc. it is difficult to have a player invest much in their well-being. Of course, permanent death of characters (e.g. Aeris in FFVII) do famously affect players but that is different than emotional concern over injury or brutality.)

The study of videogames is still in its infancy and public discourse around videogames is still painfully immature and reductive. If I am correct in my theories here then there has been no better example to me of how far we still have to go than the reaction to this film. It’s important that we talk about the ethics of games, especially when those ethics begin to creep into other media and everyday life. Games aren’t bad for you and like all other media some games are ethically sound and others are not, but they must be understood on their own terms and the differences between games and other media must be acknowledged.

Unveiling the video at the National Press Club on Monday morning, Assange said the helicopter crew approached its job as if it were a video game, not something involving human lives. Their desire was simply to kill,” he said. “Their desire was to get high scores on that computer game.”

Included here below are my introductory remarks and links to his presentation and Q&A.

Last year the Mellon workshop on Affect, Technics, and Ethics, your hosts today, presented a talk by Tracy Fullerton, game design professor at USC. Her presentation situated videogames within a historical lineage of play from board games to sport and beyond in order to expose the rather limited and reductive set of thematics, motivations, gameplay mechanics, and narrative concerns of contemporary digital games. These restrictions are often a product of a fundamental mischaracterization of who exactly a “gamer” is or should be and thus games often appeal to this stereotypically masculine, competitive, and immature “hardcore” gamer. The phenomenal success of the Nintendo Wii and DS, however, demonstrate that interest in the excessively hardcore, that is, complex, realistic, and violent gamic structures with difficult to navigate interfaces and control schemes, is not only alienating a large portion of players but also does not make good business sense.  It seems now that videogames are on the verge of a creative evolution facilitated by a full-scale revision of their expressive possibilities enabled by intuitive technological design married to the exploration of their affective possibilities.

In order to demonstrate the potential for disrupting what she termed the “hegemony of play,” Fullerton proudly demoed a product of her students’ efforts at USC that was based on a simple and relatable playful mechanic – creating shapes in the sky. That game, Cloud, was the first of three extraordinary releases from the developer, thatgamecompany, including flOw and Flower. Our speaker today, Jenova Chen, is the creative director and one of the principle visionaries behind these games which have garnered numerous awards and resounding critical acclaim from both enthusiasts and academics. But beyond their success in the market, Chen’s work is quite literally opening up new expressive space within videogames and forging ahead into new counter-hegemonic frontier. His daring and refreshing violations of the hegemony of play in a work like Flower refashion the gamic act as a predominantly affective and emotional experience. Flower rediscovers that play doesn’t have to be destructive or competitive but instead can be patient, reflective, poetic and meditative. And what his efforts yield are deeply ethical games that are environmentally concerned, bearing striking similarity to the legendary animator Hiyao Miyazaki’s films. And it is the way in which Chen’s games tap into the gamer within everyone through the discourse of progressive politics that will have a welcome influence on the future of game design and culture. Cloud, flOw, and Flower each have productively revised the field of possibilities for what games can do and what they feel like. And if what critic McKenzie Wark says is true—that it is not games which represent the world but the world which is becoming more gamelike—then we are all lucky to have Jenova Chen making games.

It is with that that I am pleased to introduce to you our guest speaker for this afternoon Jenova Chen, creative director of thatgamecompany. 

Video Part One 

Video Part Two 

Video Part Three 

Video Part Four 

As Roland Barthes argues in Mythologies, the power of myth is in its erasure of contradiction in history through the manufacture of a coherent and often nationalistic narrative that escapes past violence, inequity, prejudice, strife, struggle, and so on. Goewey connects this to the contradictions inherent in the SUV’s identification, through advertising and marketing, as the choice of rugged individualists, people interested in exploration, nature, etc. while simultaneously participating, through this identification and choice of vehicle, in the destruction of the natural world they claim to love. (What’s even more fascinating is how people turn to SUVs for security in a threatening world that is becoming more threatening via the carbon emissions created by the very vehicles they seek refuge in.)

Furthermore, Goewey points out how these vehicles are often given names connected to Native American culture or the wild west, e.g. Cherokee and Wrangler. Thus the manifest destiny virtue of America expansionism used to sell cars appropriates and neutralizes the figure of the Native American as part of, and complicit in, the ideology that lead to their destruction. Native Americans are divorced from their history as the victims of racist violence and, through the depoliticized speech of myth, semiotically connected with American frontierism.

This peculiar twist of signification that Native Americans have undergone in the popular culture imaginary now facilitates a perceived affinity between conservatives and the image of the Native American to the point where it wouldn’t be surprising to see someone with a Chief Joseph tattoo putting a Bush/Cheney sign on his/her lawn.

Which brings us back to how odd this license plate is given it was on an Iraq War veteran’s truck alongside a bumper sticker that said “Veterans are not terrorists.” Well, perhaps not now, but…

The license plate fascinated me because, on the one hand, I found it appalling that a bloody conflict between Native Americans and the U.S. Army would be something a state would want to identify itself with and, in some sense, fashion as an emblem of pride (I mean that is what license plates are about – state pride), and secondly, because I was trying to figure out what exactly the person driving the truck was thinking was worth celebrating about the battle (as futile an exercise as this might be). I find it hard to believe that he identified with Sitting Bull and the Cheyenne and their victory over General Custer since his other bumper sticker is representative of a complete failure to recognize the parallels between the Iraq invasion and the conflict between the U.S. army and the Iraqi “insurgents.” Furthermore, the license plate is from the Custer Battlefield Museum which, given its name, is playing favorites.

This can only lead to the conclusion that, in keeping with Goewey’s analysis, troubling political events like the Battle of Little Big Horn have been completely revised and now simply represent some perverse form of historical frontier action adventure. For the patrons of the Custer Battlfield Museum, purchasing that license plate has no potentially troublesome political connotations; rather, the license plate merely celebrates some kind of rip roarin’, gun slingin’, hootin’ and hollerin’ American past where genocide is, if even acknowledged, nothing more than unfortunate byproduct of an expansionist/capitalist project that had to be done.  A necessary evil.

Here is a game that could be considered an extension of Alexander Galloway’s countergaming project. It allows complete visibility and modification of the code of the game.

]]> http://www.tannerhiggin.com/2008/04/naked-game/feed/ 0