Uncreative Questions About Something Featuring a Persuasion Meter

A couple months ago I had the displeasure to read Tom Bissell's Extra Lives, which ticked me off in a dozen ways but most especially regarding a certain 2006 fantasy video game, Oblivion. TB's feeling about this game were pretty much the same as his for Fallout 3, GTA4, and Metal Gear Solid in that it's fun and bizarrely liberating/enslaving, but the content of the game was really about as pursuant to his thesis (how video games are similar to cocaine or something) as the brand of sofa he was sitting on. I want to expound this game, which was released at the exact peak of my adolescent dissipation and so is forever unsolvably torn between nostalgia and shame in my own head. But, more relevantly, I'd like to submit that Oblivion also highlights a very interesting time for the fantasy genre and my generation's use of (/by) entertainment.

Art, I've heard, exists for two reasons: to escape from ourselves and/or to reflect upon ourselves; the meteorically popular and successful fantasy video games of recent years are widely considered the former. So what are such a booming demographic so eager to escape? The obvious answers are loneliness, impotence, and, most powerfully I'd say, boredom. This is a genre where the most profitable works, World of Warcraft and EverQuest, are centered on the concept of a dynamic world with regularly updated content so that, unfortunately, the adventure never ends. The final subjugation of ennui. But Oblivion holds a special place in this dominion because it turns out to be extremely dull.

There's something almost fascinating about how boring Oblivion is. Its prequel, Morrowind, was set in a very strange place with mushroom trees, giant invertebrates, and a uniquely awesome culture sort of like colonial China. But Oblivion takes place in the blandest fantasy world you could come up with. There's bad goblins, bad demons, elven ruins, a shining but threatened kingdom, quaint pseudo-medieval architecture, harp music, predictable skills and attributes, cookie-cutter polytheism, and areas named "The Imperial City" and "The Great Forest". And unlike almost every other game before or since (notwithstanding an extreme and unrelated experiment in Daggerfall earlier in the series, which featured a truly vast area of playable space even by today's standards, but where the point was a gimmick for advertising, not immersion for players), Oblivion's terrain was procedurally generated rather than being built by level designers, supposedly in pursuit of realism. But it only amplifies the surreal ordinariness.

So what's the deal? Is 2006 the point where gamers got so comfortable with their escape that they no longer wanted to see it as an escape- just another everyday sword & stroll? Did Oblivion's devs realize or conclude that they could sell more copies by watering down the setting and appealing to as many casual gamer dipshits as possible? Or was it a reasonable next step in roleplaying games, in that it offered a fairly naked, plain setting for players and modders to project themselves onto with greater freedom?

It seems like the popular reaction to Oblivion's setting was fairly negative, and both its expansion and Skyrim were a response to that. Having put in thirty hours of grinding achievements in Atom Zombie Smasher, I've yet to try either. To be continued...

Miss America TwitterRage is Exceptionally American

It seems to me from the contemporary lit I've been hitting that the French of the 18th & 19th centuries, whose culture was (& is?) about as globally exulted as America's is today, had very different feelings about what to define as, nationally, their own.  Anything noble, brave, elegant, or clever was readily appropriated and defined by a Frenchman as "French".  Which makes sense if you think about it- not only does the aspirational Catherinian courtier get a Gallic distinction, but the term "French" itself gets reinforced as meaning excellent or beautiful or whatever.

So why do we Americans have such a issues with spreading our own nomen during our golden hour?  I don't think anyone disagrees that that new Miss USA chick is hot or Latino MLB players aren't athletic wunderkinds.  And not just now- for centuries it's been the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the blacks, the Cubans, etc etc.

It's because we know who the real Americans are.  It's not us.  It's the innocent brown people we disrupted and decimated in Chapter 2 of our history books.  We're stingy and nervous and spiteful about who to call American because we're afraid that, really, we ourselves aren't it.  Until we somehow make peace with the way our country was founded, we'll always be pissy and defensive over who gets to identify as its citizen.

6 Reasons Why Computer Gamers Should Join Peace Corps

Okay, I'll start. I'm Jessie and for most of my adolescence and sparingly, reluctantly, still now in "adulthood" was and am hooked on games, specifically MMOs. But until I scored a rooftop solar panel recently, for the first nine (definitely not incubative, I might add) months of my Peace Corps service I had access to a crappy computer maybe an hour a week. So why....???

1. At least half of the challenge of early PC service is finding stuff. I don't know about all these post-WoW hand-holding MMOs developed with what's always seemed to me to be the psychological equivalent of some really anal engineering field, like a nineteen y/o's impetus for life progress as timing mechanism instead of a spark-plug. But back in my day you had to work to find what towns had quests, where the exactly linguistically modified monster type you needed was, and where the hell you were in the world. So okay really this point only applies to people who have ever made a /location macro. A vast amount of any early PCVolunteer's time is spent seeking around some horribly designed areas that all look the same, following inept directions, and calculating the benefits from your time since doing anything takes twelve times as long as it would in America. If you can get to cap level in an MMO that has only four building models you can find where to buy yogurt in a third world country.
2. You're kickass at jumping into a new world. Another big part of PC's early challenge is maintaining enthusiasm and flexibility in the face of some drastic cultural shifts. Going to a country where noone's heard of the Superbowl isn't so psychically different from projecting yourself into a world where the Superbowl doesn't exist. You're also obviously fine with taking on a new name, meeting new people, and having basic things in the world done differently.
3. Your health is fairly pristine. If you've spent a large portion of your life indoors, sitting, doing non-strenuous activity, I'd wager you're probably more fit for PC service than the average blue collar. Living in a developing country takes moderate strength but vast endurance. Having an unscarred duodenum and a weirdly youthful gait is more important than being able to lift XX (I don't even know) pounds.
   And as far as mental health, I'm having a hard time thinking of a better training regimen for the physical solitude and ennui of rural poverty than game binging.
4. You probably hate your life right now anyway. For various reasons that I've decided to inappropriately expand on here, MMO binging is arguably more painful and despair-inducing than what I conceive to be the reality of plain old drink/drug addiction. First, it's uncool. Definitely uncooler than drinks/drugs. Your skin is awful. You can't get laid. You can't connect with most people, even when you really want to, while hiding such a enormous, embarrassing side of your life. You (probably) have friends who MMO as hard as you do, who you can gleefully chat up all day, but you constantly, inescapably realize how immature and lazy and selfish they are, as you are. Second, binging drugs for 95% of a human being's waking life, for years on end, simply isn't possible. But it is with MMO. Sure, you're free from the dopamine crashes and collapsed veins, but there is nothing, nothing, nothing in your life but this stupid adolescent compulsion that morphs from a childhood flower dream to a yawning skull day in, day out. And third, while it seems to me that a lot of traditionally enslaved junkies do their thing to get a groove, to unlock potential, to loosen up, MMO (especially latter-day hand-holders) just takes, takes, takes. Your creativity, standards, aspirations, passions all get squashed to perpetuate exactly one purpose.
   So but PC service is a magic pill for most of that. It's cool as hell, it'll force you to diversify your life when your battery goes dead after an hour, and it will open opportunities for you to remake yourself when you pop over onto the other side of the planet.
5. You might be sick of capitalism right now. One of the nice things about MMO is the equality it lays out for people, and the contrast that that offers to current America. Post-WoW pay-to-win scourges aside, everyone starts at level 1 and is given the same opportunities. Countries that invite PC often technically have (sometimes enormously) steeper inequality than America, but you'll never see it. Everyone in your village will be exactly as dirt poor as everyone else. And if you think combat-role-based teamwork is cool, impoverished collectivism is calling...
   I mean if you're choosing to log out of America for most of your waking life then there's probably a lot more you can fill in here for yourself.
6. You have ascetic tendencies anyway. Staying hooked on MMO is very difficult in some senses; not all its entailed sacrifices are easy or involuntary. A lot of MMOers I know have a big idealist streak that would prove a boon in PC, getting back to the endurance thing. Proclivity to self-sacrifice is actually probably the only facet of idealism that I'd recommend taking into PC service in any case.