I can't avoid Hilary Clinton. There she is, in every bookstore, leering unsettlingly out at me from the special displays where Thomas Piketty's book used to sit. As much as I don't want to think about it - and good god, I'm not going to read the fucking thing - I have some thoughts on her book.
Specifically, the title.
Hard Choices. Oh my.
It has already long-since occurred to many of us who notice such things that the rhetoric of hard choices, tough decisions, or some variation on words or theme, serves only the purpose of lowering expectations, and, generally, of signalling a rightwards orientation. It was a favourite rhetorical trick of Tony Blair's, and it has now become a standard of David Cameron's. The point of the hard choice is to signal to the public that, while there are many things the speaker wishes to do - really, honestly, earnestly - in a better world, that unfortunately, things being what they are, with the need to engage with the grim realities of the world, so on and such forth, those priorities will simply have to change. It's not what we wanted. It was a hard choice.
Observers may well notice that so many of these things which are described as hard choices actually bear a strong resemblance to the long-held convictions and ambitions of the speaker or writer. Cuts in the UK are routinely described as difficult decisions; the Opposition are constantly invited to demonstrate that they are ready and willing to make those hard choices, ie. to throw their ostensible constituency under the bus in the name of the market. All our parties - as they are in the US - are broadly aligned around the same program, with only distinctions in tone and emphasis to be made. We can make the point - and many do - that there aren't very many choices, and they never seem especially hard. The point is the signalling. Politicians are on your side! They wish they could help! But, you know, the world, bad things, terrible threats.
This is useful because it suppresses debate and reinforces the idea that we live in a post-ideological age. There are no arguments to be had, no competing ideologies, no politics; only hard choices. You can believe what you like, but the world works in this one way, and you have to compromise, to accept that reality, to get power (this is compromise not in the sense of reaching an agreement with another side, so much as the sense that a wall with a hole in it is "compromised"). Once you've got that power, you can't use it, except in narrowly prescribed lines. The hard choice is the rallying call of a technocratic political elite that is almost farcically insular and homogenous; it ensures that the few radicals who do somehow get into the system are shunted to the sidelines as unrepresentative mavericks; dangerous intrusions of the dread ideology into a politics-free politics.
Anyway. What's interesting to me, then, is that Hilary Clinton is leading the charge for hard choices by slapping it on the front of her book. Obviously this is a reaction to Barack Obama. The Audacity of Hope turned out to be a millstone around his neck as he turned out to offer neither hope nor audacity; "hope and change" turned out to be the most empty of slogans as Obama turned out to be an aimless, pointless mediocrity rather than an inspirational figure of charisma and unity. The Democrats have governed on a platform of doing the bare-minimum to maintain party discipline and loyalty among their voting base, not by offering much of concrete worth to their constituents so much as stoking up the threat of the Republicans. Meanwhile the real ideological battle is not being fought; as witness endless "liberal" Facebook memes trumpeting Obama's competence in terms dictated by the enemies of most Democrat voters: in terms of managing the structural deficit, bailing out industry, and killing military targets. Clinton's book, then, surely signals nothing more than a realignment of Democrat party messaging with their intentions.
Obama offered the world and delivered next-to-nothing; Clinton is also offering next-to-nothing, but she at least is making sure you know it from the off.
Showing posts with label Overuse of Italics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Overuse of Italics. Show all posts
Thursday, 10 July 2014
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
Feature, Not a Bug
(Source: http://www.videogamer.com/pc/assassins_creed_unity/news/no_female_leads_in_assassins_creed_unity_unfortunate_but_a_reality_of_game_development_ubi.html)
So, the first thing to note on l'affaire Ubisoft is that it came about because a journalist actually bothered to ask a games developer just why they hell they still aren't putting a playable female protagonist into their multimillion-selling flagship series. That alone is fairly staggering; you're a games journalist, man, you're not supposed to ever ask difficult questions, let alone call someone on their obvious bullshit! The piece is, of course, currently rocketing its way across the channels and byways of the internet, giving lie to the oft-repeated claim that these questions aren't asked because people aren't interested in this sort of thing. We are, of course. Especially when it's a question-and-answer which cuts to the heart of the problems with representation in the games industry.
A female character was, we are told, on a "features list" for a long time, but simply had to be cancelled owing to the unfortunate exigencies of developing games to tight budgets and schedules. They'd have had to do different animations. Costumes. This would have doubled the dev time on those things, so unfortunately, the lady got canned. Sorry! And besides, they're doing history, and women were all in cupboards or something back then...?
All of this is nonsense, and it's hardly worth spending time on debunking. Ubisoft are a big company; the Assassins' Creed franchise sells millions of copies every year; the biggest expense as far as I'm aware wouldn't have been costumes or animations at all (there's female characters in the multiplayer mode) but rather in voice-acting, and so it's possibly telling they don't mention it.
No, the core of the problem here is that a woman was not conceived of as a credible focus for the story Ubisoft was trying to tell from the get-go. Despite their protestations to the contrary, it's clear that they started off with a male character to tell a man's story. The female counterpart was never a core part of the experience but a feature to be jettisoned. The woman is peripheral from the start: she is not integral to the experience except as an ancilliary character in the orbit of a man, deployed to chide, harden or propel the male character's adventure. Men get to be free-running sexy assassins; women get to be rescued.
It's not like Ubisoft are exactly alone here, although the Assassins' Creed, Watch_Dogs and Far Cry releases are all prominent offenders in perpetuating the utterly ubiquitous bestubbled-meaninglessly-angry-loner-male protagonist known and reviled as Doomguy. It is, as I said at the top, a problem the games industry has: because it's still male-run, male-driven, and creating for a notional audience of awkward teen boys (despite the large and ever-increasing numbers of women who play games), it is an industry utterly accustomed to putting a man at the centre of things and viewing women as a peripheral, an added extra: a feature.
When you're relegating half the world's population and a good section of your own audience to the level of a gun -with-some-flames-on-it DLC, something's badly wrong.
The maddening thing is that there are examples out there - good, successful ones - of how to do this sort of thing, and have been for years. I'll glance briefly at two here - Mass Effect and Dark Souls.
Mass Effect, as well as offering a broad palette of character customisation in terms of name, appearance and background, was constructed around a character-driven narrative that could be altered (within limits) at the player's discretion. If the character was male or female, the world subtly shifted around them, as it did with many of the choices the player could make. This kind of agency reached its zenith in the third instalment, where the character could choose to pursue a relationship with basically any of the main supporting cast. Want a chaste, do-gooder male space marine with stubble? Go ahead, you boring fuck! Want a remorseless black lesbian space-racist? Knock yourself out! Whatever you choose, you get to be the hero or heroine of your own story - and the gender choice, from the perspective of running around blasting fuck out of galactic bastards, is entirely arbitrary. It is still a masculine story and structure (ultraviolence in space; the loner against those who doubt him) - it's just that the game developers cared enough to give the player some level of control over it.
Dark Souls offers the character customisation but does something quite different with the narrative: which is to say, Dark Souls doesn't actually have much of a narrative as such, and as a result the player is given remarkably free reign to put his or her interpretation on it and, indeed, to construct their own character's story as they traverse the world. The silent protagonist is a perfect cypher for whatever the player wants them to be (with the stricture that the player has to want them to be a mouldering undead who batters monsters with a club).
There are plenty of other examples out there, of course, which just makes it all doubly maddening. Nintendo's ever-more-androgynous Link and the prospect of a Zelda game where you get to play as Zelda (!) are tantalising glimpses of progress, even if the company will have to do more than that to atone for its shameful handling of the Tomodachi Life fiasco. People who self-identify as "gamers" are constantly anxious that people aren't taking the medium seriously enough. There's something of a point there. But I expect that the Ubisoft news story will be met with the usual calls from the gamer grognards that attempting to have this discussion is somehow "injecting politics" into something that's meant to be fun, oblivious as ever to the fact that this sort of thing means games aren't fun for a lot of people. Until game-players, developers, producers, journalists - in short, the industry - get a grip on its problems with women, minorities, and all the wondrous variety that is human expression and experience, then games don't deserve to be taken seriously.
So, the first thing to note on l'affaire Ubisoft is that it came about because a journalist actually bothered to ask a games developer just why they hell they still aren't putting a playable female protagonist into their multimillion-selling flagship series. That alone is fairly staggering; you're a games journalist, man, you're not supposed to ever ask difficult questions, let alone call someone on their obvious bullshit! The piece is, of course, currently rocketing its way across the channels and byways of the internet, giving lie to the oft-repeated claim that these questions aren't asked because people aren't interested in this sort of thing. We are, of course. Especially when it's a question-and-answer which cuts to the heart of the problems with representation in the games industry.
A female character was, we are told, on a "features list" for a long time, but simply had to be cancelled owing to the unfortunate exigencies of developing games to tight budgets and schedules. They'd have had to do different animations. Costumes. This would have doubled the dev time on those things, so unfortunately, the lady got canned. Sorry! And besides, they're doing history, and women were all in cupboards or something back then...?
All of this is nonsense, and it's hardly worth spending time on debunking. Ubisoft are a big company; the Assassins' Creed franchise sells millions of copies every year; the biggest expense as far as I'm aware wouldn't have been costumes or animations at all (there's female characters in the multiplayer mode) but rather in voice-acting, and so it's possibly telling they don't mention it.
No, the core of the problem here is that a woman was not conceived of as a credible focus for the story Ubisoft was trying to tell from the get-go. Despite their protestations to the contrary, it's clear that they started off with a male character to tell a man's story. The female counterpart was never a core part of the experience but a feature to be jettisoned. The woman is peripheral from the start: she is not integral to the experience except as an ancilliary character in the orbit of a man, deployed to chide, harden or propel the male character's adventure. Men get to be free-running sexy assassins; women get to be rescued.
It's not like Ubisoft are exactly alone here, although the Assassins' Creed, Watch_Dogs and Far Cry releases are all prominent offenders in perpetuating the utterly ubiquitous bestubbled-meaninglessly-angry-loner-male protagonist known and reviled as Doomguy. It is, as I said at the top, a problem the games industry has: because it's still male-run, male-driven, and creating for a notional audience of awkward teen boys (despite the large and ever-increasing numbers of women who play games), it is an industry utterly accustomed to putting a man at the centre of things and viewing women as a peripheral, an added extra: a feature.
When you're relegating half the world's population and a good section of your own audience to the level of a gun -with-some-flames-on-it DLC, something's badly wrong.
The maddening thing is that there are examples out there - good, successful ones - of how to do this sort of thing, and have been for years. I'll glance briefly at two here - Mass Effect and Dark Souls.
Mass Effect, as well as offering a broad palette of character customisation in terms of name, appearance and background, was constructed around a character-driven narrative that could be altered (within limits) at the player's discretion. If the character was male or female, the world subtly shifted around them, as it did with many of the choices the player could make. This kind of agency reached its zenith in the third instalment, where the character could choose to pursue a relationship with basically any of the main supporting cast. Want a chaste, do-gooder male space marine with stubble? Go ahead, you boring fuck! Want a remorseless black lesbian space-racist? Knock yourself out! Whatever you choose, you get to be the hero or heroine of your own story - and the gender choice, from the perspective of running around blasting fuck out of galactic bastards, is entirely arbitrary. It is still a masculine story and structure (ultraviolence in space; the loner against those who doubt him) - it's just that the game developers cared enough to give the player some level of control over it.
Dark Souls offers the character customisation but does something quite different with the narrative: which is to say, Dark Souls doesn't actually have much of a narrative as such, and as a result the player is given remarkably free reign to put his or her interpretation on it and, indeed, to construct their own character's story as they traverse the world. The silent protagonist is a perfect cypher for whatever the player wants them to be (with the stricture that the player has to want them to be a mouldering undead who batters monsters with a club).
There are plenty of other examples out there, of course, which just makes it all doubly maddening. Nintendo's ever-more-androgynous Link and the prospect of a Zelda game where you get to play as Zelda (!) are tantalising glimpses of progress, even if the company will have to do more than that to atone for its shameful handling of the Tomodachi Life fiasco. People who self-identify as "gamers" are constantly anxious that people aren't taking the medium seriously enough. There's something of a point there. But I expect that the Ubisoft news story will be met with the usual calls from the gamer grognards that attempting to have this discussion is somehow "injecting politics" into something that's meant to be fun, oblivious as ever to the fact that this sort of thing means games aren't fun for a lot of people. Until game-players, developers, producers, journalists - in short, the industry - get a grip on its problems with women, minorities, and all the wondrous variety that is human expression and experience, then games don't deserve to be taken seriously.
Thursday, 22 May 2014
Your Radical Voting Guide, 2014
Politically radical but unsure how to mark your ballot in this, the most stupendously amazing and important European Elections ever? Well, have no fear! I, your good pal, have taken it upon myself to prepare this, the Radical's Guide to Voting Radically, 2014 Edition. Read on, fair reader, and know just how, when, and wherefore to strike your Blow For Democracy!
Your exciting options include:
-Write-in vote for Full Communism! Do we even have write-in votes here? Isn't this just a longwinded and naïve form of spoiling your ballot? Might you not have bothered to vote at all for all the good it does? Suppress these, the voices of False Consciousness, comrade! All power to the Soviets!
-Dissatisfied with the major parties? Summon powers more fell than they can comprehend! Clad in your finest black robes, carrying only the most perfectly scented dribbly candles, conduct your very own black mass in the safety and security of the voting booth! Teach Westminster to fear your most secret of ballots! Rejoice in the knowledge that to die first in the hateful embrace of The Dread Powers From Below is an election promise that won't be reneged on - not like those Lib Dems!
-Suck it up and vote Green! I mean, they're not going to get within spitting distance of power, and there's still a few too many people who go on creepily about industrial society and our ancestors and the pure bloodlines of the ancient races, but they're good for a laugh, Caroline Lucas is a fine person, and helping them beat the Lib Dems would be slightly funny for almost a whole day!
-Don't vote! Maybe you've been hanging around with anarchists for a bit and you've cobbled together a justification in your own head; maybe you honestly can't be arsed - stick it to the man by not bothering to show up at all! I mean, it's only the European fucking Elections, and who gives a shit? You're not going to vote for a fascist, so why are you to blame? Why is everyone giving you crap for the failures of a broken, unrepresentative, and hopelessly corrupted political system? All you've done is eat Weetabix in your pants! You didn't campaign for the Reich! Bonus points for causing Liberals nationwide to froth at the mouth and inveigh tiresomely about civic duties and the martyrs of the suffrage movements of yesteryear, who would punch them in the face for doing so!
-Vote for one of three flavours of neoliberal tyranny or some actual fascists! In which case, I don't know why you're even here. Leave me alone.
So there you have it folks! I hope that makes your options clear. Now go out there, and get some democracy right up you!
Your exciting options include:
-Write-in vote for Full Communism! Do we even have write-in votes here? Isn't this just a longwinded and naïve form of spoiling your ballot? Might you not have bothered to vote at all for all the good it does? Suppress these, the voices of False Consciousness, comrade! All power to the Soviets!
-Dissatisfied with the major parties? Summon powers more fell than they can comprehend! Clad in your finest black robes, carrying only the most perfectly scented dribbly candles, conduct your very own black mass in the safety and security of the voting booth! Teach Westminster to fear your most secret of ballots! Rejoice in the knowledge that to die first in the hateful embrace of The Dread Powers From Below is an election promise that won't be reneged on - not like those Lib Dems!
-Suck it up and vote Green! I mean, they're not going to get within spitting distance of power, and there's still a few too many people who go on creepily about industrial society and our ancestors and the pure bloodlines of the ancient races, but they're good for a laugh, Caroline Lucas is a fine person, and helping them beat the Lib Dems would be slightly funny for almost a whole day!
-Don't vote! Maybe you've been hanging around with anarchists for a bit and you've cobbled together a justification in your own head; maybe you honestly can't be arsed - stick it to the man by not bothering to show up at all! I mean, it's only the European fucking Elections, and who gives a shit? You're not going to vote for a fascist, so why are you to blame? Why is everyone giving you crap for the failures of a broken, unrepresentative, and hopelessly corrupted political system? All you've done is eat Weetabix in your pants! You didn't campaign for the Reich! Bonus points for causing Liberals nationwide to froth at the mouth and inveigh tiresomely about civic duties and the martyrs of the suffrage movements of yesteryear, who would punch them in the face for doing so!
-Vote for one of three flavours of neoliberal tyranny or some actual fascists! In which case, I don't know why you're even here. Leave me alone.
So there you have it folks! I hope that makes your options clear. Now go out there, and get some democracy right up you!
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