Games as Art: the argument within the argument

I had a long argument last night with my pal Graham, revisiting the old “can video games be art” debate that tends to flare up now and then. The flare in Graham’s living room was provoked by Roger Ebert’s latest essay on the matter, which was in turn provoked by a recent TED talk by Kellee Santiago.

I won’t rehash our back-and-forth, because I think I already expressed my thoughts sufficiently in a previous weigh-in. I’m on the anti side, for what it’s worth.

In any case, regardless of the substance of the two sides’ arguments, it’s the meta-issues surrounding the debate that I’m finding to be the most interesting dimension of this saga. Read the rest of this entry »

Solidarity For Their Own Good — A review

Student politics blogger Titus Gregory

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” So wrote the late great Eric Hoffer, referring to the political and religious extremists he spent so much of his life studying. It was a depressingly predictable phenomena, in his mind, that even movements of the most honorable intentions would be eventually pulled in the direction of ever-greater corruption and sleaze; an inevitability stemming not only from the caliber of control-freak leaders movements tend to attract, but also the sheer impracticality of believing an amorphous “cause” can be effectively led in the first place.

Anyone seeking evidence that the Canadian student movement is now firmly in the “racket” stage of existence would do themselves good service to read a recent essay by my pal Titus Gregory entitled Solidarity for Their Own Good. It’s a sickening exposé of the member fleecing, totalitarian tactics, and systematic chicanery routinely performed by one of this country’s most benign-sounding nonprofits, the Canadian Federation of Students. Read the rest of this entry »

No health care system is ever un-repealable. Not even in Canada.

President Obama’s health care bill has only been law for little over a week, but that hasn’t stopped the pundits of both sides from offering all sorts of grand prognoses on how the thing has already irreversibly altered the indefinite future of American politics. And to the extent the left and the right have reached consensus in their analysis, their conclusions can be summed up in one word: permanence.

So on the one hand you have liberal pundits, and indeed most of the Democratic Party, chuckling scornfully at the GOP’s newly-minted “repeal and replace” 2010 campaign slogan. Don’t they get it, they say, it’s a done deal. No right-thinking voter, especially one from the lower classes, is going to eagerly line up behind a politician who pledges to scale back their access to affordable health care, no matter how imperfect that access may be. And on the other hand you have an increasingly depressed conservative punditocracy, Mark Steyn among their most articulate, who are saying… pretty much the same thing. The final line in the sand has been crossed. We’re over the waterfall. The genie is out of the bottle. America has taken a fundamental step to the left that cannot be reversed, because no entitlement program can ever be reversed, or even substantially revised, once implemented. Oh sure, the Republicans may be hooting about it now, but soon they’ll go the wishy way of the British and Canadian Conservative parties, and turn into passionate, defensive protectors of the new socialized medicine status quo. After all, wasn’t the GOP in favor of repealing Medicare at one time, too? Read the rest of this entry »

Politicians swear too much

“This is a big fucking deal.”

— Joseph Biden, Vice President of the United States, March 23.

“We’re fucked.”

“The whole world is fucked.”

— Exchange between Frank McKenna, former premier of New Brunswick, and Paul Martin, former Prime Minister of Canada, March 28

“FUCK YOU! FUCK, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!!”

— Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (as quoted in Game Change, p. 279)

I recently finished reading Game Change, Mark Halperin’s epic chronology of the 2008 US Presidential Election. It’s an incredibly readable and riveting behind-the-scenes account of everything that colored that fantastic race, from Hillary Clinton’s arrogant sense of entitlement (she began planning her cabinet before even winning the nomination) to John Edward’s psychopathic egotism (even amid the most lurid revelations of his affair, he still believed Obama would tap him for attorney-general) to Palin’s insecure breakdowns (almost all of McCain’s people quickly realized she was not emotionally or intellectually stable enough to handle the job, including the weepy governor herself).

But the revelation that most surprised me, in all honesty, was just how much the politicians swear. Perhaps I am just astonishingly naïve about this, but I really did not imagine McCain, Obama, Hillary et al to be the kind of people who throw around language like “fuck him” or “I don’t give a shit” or whatever when talking to their staff or family members. The fact that McCain is portrayed as the most prolific curser of all was particularly unsettling. This from the guy representing the family values/good-Christian-morals party? Read the rest of this entry »

Why are politicians so afraid of wearing ties?

Uruguayan President Jose Mujica

Here’s a prediction: within the next two decades politicians are going to stop wearing ties.

Richard Nixon was so fastidious about his dress that he wore a suit and tie every single day he was president, and every subsequent day as a former president, too. In the book Fraternity, when the author meets Nixon, he presses him on this point. “Like, even if you were all alone, in your house the whole day, with no chance whatsoever of coming into contact with another human being?” he asks (or something to that effect). And Nixon says “I would still wear a suit and tie.”

Nixon was raised in a time when everyone was expected look their role, however. Like the Pope, he probably figured there was never a moment in his life in which he was not embodying the office of president/ex-president, so it was his duty to constantly dress the part. But he was also raised in the aftermath of the Depression, a period when everyone obsessively tried to look as comfortably middle-class as possible, which is to say a sort of watered-down, affordable version of what they imagined higher class people looked like. Read the rest of this entry »

12 years later, what can we learn from Penny Arcade?

Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik

A review of The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade (2009)

I spoke with Tycho from Penny Arcade a few times. This was back in 2000, when his site was only two years old, my site was non-existent, and ICQ was the popular medium of online communication. I remember asking if he, as an American, preferred Gore over Bush, or vice-versa. He told me that he favored Nader, which I thought was kind of an odd thing to say, even in those days when I had considerably fewer political opinions than I do now.

It seems weird to remember that there was a time when you could just instant message the Penny Arcade guys and casually discuss politics. The comic, or rather the brand, is now a multi-million dollar media empire, with DVDs, video games, resolutions of praise from the state legislature, and so on. It seems superfluous to even summarize. The very fact that you’re on an online comic site presumes you likely have some knowledge of what PA is, even if it doesn’t go far beyond “that one webcomic.”

There were no such things as “webcomics” a decade ago, at least in the sense of the career-making industrial-complex that exists today, so merely getting to be “that one” is an accomplishment unto itself. The Penny Arcade guys, Tycho and Gabe, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, inspired an industry, and deserve to be recognized as pioneers of the internet age as much as Mark Zuckerberg, Arianna Huffington, or Craig Newmark. It’s what makes their 11.5-year retrospective, The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade, such a necessary work, and a vital read for anyone interested in what their success represents. Read the rest of this entry »

The first ideological era of government?

I recently bought a book at the local flea market entitled The Encyclopaedia of World Politics, copyright 1950.

When you look up “Republican Party,” it says:

[The Republicans are] regarded as the more right-wing party. Yet, strictly speaking, the two great American parties cannot be exactly classified under the left-and-right pattern, and there are conservative as well as progressive republicans, as there are conservatives and progressive democrats. Both parties include sections of all classes of the population.

The same thing is repeated when you look up “Democratic Party.”

This is obviously not an accurate description of modern American politics, where both parties are now hugely ideologically limited in agenda and appeal, and getting moreso with each passing year. It reads as very quaint and dated, but keep in mind the 1950s were not that long ago. Indeed, almost all of the recent political establishment grew up in that era, the era in which one’s party label was still fairly vague and unideological designation. Until pretty much the last two decades, in fact, the party you joined was primarily an expression of familial solidarity, a narrow ethnic or religious identity, or a desire to participate in an existing regional power structure. A consistent ideology or philosophy was tacked on later, if at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Living in Japan will make you hate it

A lot of my friends have been forwarding me this article, published yesterday on the Kotaku gaming blog. “I totally heard your voice while reading it,” one guy said.

It’s a long, very critical article about life in modern Japan, written from the perspective of a foreigner who has been living there for about five years and is falling steadily out of love with the place. I lived in Japan for only a single year, and fell out of love almost immediately. Hence the familiar tone.

It’s a really well-written piece, insightful and targeted and savage in all the right places. Aside from some of the author’s more insular rants near the beginning (born from his unique frustrations as a non-smoking vegetarian), the article projects, very coherently, a frustration with Japan that I believe inevitably consumes any reasonably intelligent western ex-pat after sufficient time has passed.

It’s insightful to the point of being somewhat esoteric, in fact. I question just how accessible the article would be to someone who has never experienced a prolonged period of Japanese societal immersion. Japanese culture, and the flaws and frustrations contained therein, is a topic surprisingly hard to articulate. It’s a nation defined by behavioral subtitles and lots of strange, unquestioned assumptions, that although seemingly minor in scope, achieve totalitarian magnitude in practice. Read the rest of this entry »

Enough with welcoming the world, let’s talk about ME.

I don’t want to come off as someone who is excessively bashing Canada in my country’s moment of triumph, but… well, someone has to.

The main conclusion to be drawn in the aftermath of the 2010 games is that they were remarkably self-indulgent. The cloyingly insecure opening and closing ceremonies, which I have previously deconstructed, were one particularly overt manifestation, but the larger theme could be felt everywhere else in Vancouver too. Maybe that was a good thing for Canada, and a good thing for Canadian morale, and a good thing for our athletes, but it was still the reality. If we got a glimpse of some sort of “new Canada” over the last two weeks, it was a country that is first and foremost interested in gazing lovingly in the mirror. Read the rest of this entry »

My review of the 2010 closing ceremonies

They were worse than the opening ceremonies, which is saying something.

Basically, the same fundamental problems that plagued the opening show were even more apparent during this one. Beyond that, there’s not a lot to say. Read the rest of this entry »