Wojit

Comic for April 8th, 2014.

The United Kingdom’s (UK) capital, London, is a city of stark contrasts, where wealthy expatriates and a few home grown billionaires, rub shoulders with the numerous poor, who flock from across the country to make their fortune in the metropolis. However, despite the riots that regularly tear across this sprawling city, there is little sign of ethnic unrest, deep in the heartlands of the English peoples.

The same cannot be said hundreds of miles to the north, where a growing political movement is demanding independence for the Scottish tribe. This would be the first time that borders have changed in Western Europe for half a century, and would represent a severe blow to the southern tribes, who depend on the mineral wealth of the Scottish homeland.

Read the rest of the article at Think Africa.

Tokyo is clean, my opinion may have been informed by my leaving the dank smoggy world of Shanghai but seriously the place is immaculate, the escalators especially at Narita airport were polished to this high reflective sheen and they have this nice pseudo holographic lady standing there and waving welcome when you first come in.

And everyone is so nice, no one clears their throat so that the loud noise of mucus penetrates the air as is so common in Shangahai. People bow, they queue, when you exit trains people wait until you exit which is seriously a big deal because we dragged our suitcases in the metro. Seriously in the Shanghainese metro you need to charge and shove your way out otherwise you just get forced back in. Japanese money is strange, I cannot believe they have one yen coins, that’s like having pennies, from an Australian perspective, that’s silly and weird. (A: I AM SO GLAD TO GET OUT OF CHINA)

Already I’m having interesting experiences, in the NEX which we took to get from Narita airport to Tokyo there was a nice lady selling snacks on the train. Her hand was disfigured and she had this limp but she was so sweet and nice and it was clear that she puts so much effort into making her dress neat and her make up was very presentable and she was pretty. I don’t know, for a second I just had this empathy attack that such a nice lady must have had a difficult life and it made me sad.

The biggest problem so far is the usual all-Asian face but no Japanese language skills. Usually all the Japanese people I talk who know I can’t speak Japanese are super nice to me. But in normal interactions outside of tourist places I can tell that people assume I’m Japanese and then follows the obvious surprise and confusion on their faces as I smile and nod uncomprehendingly when they speak to me. I don’t like making people uncomfortable and confused, it’ll take me a little time to get used to that.

OMG let me tell you about Japanese toilets. Of course the first thing I did when I got to the hotel was to investigate this spray business and words cannot describe the feelings I encountered when I had my first spray. For those of you unaccustomed to what I’m referring to, toilets in Japan have this spray functionality where a stream of water is directed at the user’s arse. Yes, that is right a stream of water directed at someone’s arse, there are many highly skilled engineers and designers out there who dedicated hours of their working day making sure that the aim of the spray is suitable for the anuses of the varied sizes of people who may need to use those toilets. Let me tell you I was not prepared for the experience, firstly the spray occurs with a non nominal amount of force and then the water would change temperature so that the stream becomes warm, all the while the whirr of heavy machinery forms the musical accompaniment to this unique experience. Kudos to the engineer, the aim of the toilet was excellent. How would I describe this experience? With practice and more understanding I would buy one for myself in Australia. Also apparently some models you have to press the stop button for the spray to stop, I only was aware of this after sitting there for a minute or two as I waited for the stream to stop. So yes spray toilets, would recommend.

I had my first ramen experience tonight, I went to this random ramen place and I can tell you I was not disappointed. The soup was not overly salty or heavy or oily, the meat was tasty and not overly salty as it generally is in Australia, the whole ramen felt light and wonderful. Food is cheap and high quality in Japan, 10/10 would recommend.

I would’ve written about my experiences in Shanghai but somebody decided it was a great idea to have this thing called the Great Firewall of China and make it super hard to access things like Gmail, Facebook and WordPress. Anyway it was all boring family reunions, but I did meet my long lost cousin which was pretty awesome but I’m not sure I want to go into detail because he’s probably reading my blog right now. (HI DELMAR)

Anyway my wonderful girlfriend is telling me to shower and sleep cause it’s almost midnight but I want to talk about my first walk around Tokyo and my first Tokyo rice ball but she’s right cause I stink so I guess that’s for tomorrow. (YOU DO TOTALLY STINK)

…

Ugh I was going to call it a night but I just want to say, certain Japanese showers were not designed with not short people in mind, there was a protrusion over the shower that meant that everyone over the height of 170 cm would hit their head any number of times on it. For me it was three, hence I have already had my first Lost in Translation moment.

(Idk babe, I think you simply complain all the time and don’t know when to quit arguing when you’re definitely losing HEHE. You also just broke the luggage strap and one of the wheels is falling off. Anyway I had some great gyoza for dinner and plane food was pretty decent too. Goodnight! We have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow) xx

 

You guys remember Batty, he's been in two comics before, this one and this one. He's a real guy and everything. When we play "Whose Countrymen Are More Annoying" I usually win the patriotism round and he usually wins the sports round. Apparently, getting drunk on public transportation at nine thirty in the morning is perfectly normal on game days in Germany.

Comic for September 4th, 2013.

As I gear up to release Museum of Mistakes: The Fart Party Omnibus in September of this year, I’m going to be reposting some samples from the Fart Party Vol 1 & Vol 2 over the next month or so. I’ll also continue to post new sketchbook comics when I can.

But first, this: I’ve hinted before at a book I made/shelved about my struggles with substance abuse over the years, and yesterday I posted a long half essay, half comics piece, The Fart Party’s Over, on Narrative.ly. (If you saw it with the original title before the change, my apologies, that was not my title. Woof.) It pretty much clears up the basics of what happened to me over the last few years, and how it’s effected my work. It explains why I took a break from comics and (re)started urban exploring. It’s…hm…how do I say this…it’s some Serious Shit I guess. Here are a few preview comics and paragraphs:

via Narrative.ly: “If you ask someone who works in comedy what is the most difficult part of being professionally funny, many, if not most of them, will tell you it’s the depression. I’m not saying all funny people are depressed, but having spent a lot of time with cartoonists, comedians and comedy writers over the past decade, I can assure you that the percentage of those struggling with depression is higher than average. My theory is that since the best comedy often springs from tragedy, cynicism, sarcasm and misanthropy, those who excel in comedy usually come from a background comprised of those events and character defects.”

The way I presented myself in comics was in a cartoony style, with short black hair and bug eyes. It was a style I’d settled on years ago, based on a hairstyle I had once, for about two weeks. I chose the style quickly, without much thought, but perhaps I subconsciously did it to separate my real self from my cartoon self. My cartoon self made my problems seem funny, but when I drew my real self in secret diary comics, the tone and style was completely different and much more reflective of the truth during that year.

 

Sometime during 2010 and 2011, I secretly completed 230 pages of a graphic novel about my alcoholism that I never showed anyone, and ultimately shelved.

 

And then something changed. It wasn’t planned; it didn’t directly have anything to do with comics or drinking, although it had everything to do with both. Right after I sent in the final pages in for The Infinite Wait, I put away all my drawing supplies and I went outside. Well, more accurately, I went outside and straight into an abandoned insane asylum in New Jersey. And I haven’t drawn comics since.

So the question that probably didn’t cross your mind until I put it there is, if I’m happy and healthy, does it have a negative effect on my comedic work? And the answer is that I don’t know. And I don’t particularly care. If being a good comedy writer means I have to be depressed, then fuck it, I quit. The world doesn’t need any more fart jokes anyways.

To read the entire story and see more comics, please go to Narrative.ly.

 

This comic was inspired by a recent stew. I like it a lot, but because today's a holiday no one will see it.

Inspired by the excellent rubyetc on Tumblr.

The Sci-Fi blog io9 posted yesterday about a fantasy writer who could well have become as famous and influential as Tolkien – had she been a man. Naomi Mitchison, author of The Corn King, The Spring Queen and Travel Light, was a friend of Tolkien’s, and one of the proof readers for  The Lord of the Rings. But her own books have been neglected and forgotten.

Amal El-Mohtar reviews Travel Light, the story of a little orphan girl who is brought up by bears, then dragons, and abandons her dragon lifestyle of hoarding to hit the road, says she fell from a great height when she discovered the book, as an adult, and realised that she could have been reading it alongside her childhood favourite, The Hobbit.

That Mitchison’s life and works should have been so unfairly relegated to secret history drove home my feeling of books as points of divergence to alternate timelines; that having read The Hobbit rather than Travel Light at that fragile, formative moment of being a child in Lebanon standing at a crossroads of languages, religions and literary traditions nudged me into a different life. Who might I have been if I had met Halla Bearsbairn before Bilbo Baggins? How different might my attitude toward dragons have been if I’d met Uggi before Smaug? How different would the spiritual landscapes of fantasy and science fiction be if they had accepted as antecedents works that showed a corrupt Byzantine Christianity and sympathy toward Islam?

But, most crucially for me, I wonder: Where might I have gone if, instead of a middle-aged Hobbit enamored of his pantry, I had embraced a girl who lost three homes before choosing the open road?

After a cursory inquiry on Facebook, it turns out that a handful of feminist fantasy and scifi geeks I know have heard of the author, but none have read her books.

Her Wikipedia entry says that as well as being a prolific writer, Mitchison was an active socialist and feminist fighting for the rights to birth control and abortion.

Travel Light is available on the US Amazon site, and some of the other novels, a memoir, and a biography are available on the UK site.

 

This article is crossposted from my latest feature for the Border House; that version can be seen here.

What is staggering about much that passes under the banner of “fantasy” is how decidedly narrow its escapist vision tends to be. In both fantasy and sci-fi, far from transcending the fetters of real world limitations, we see our own world with its myriad failings reinscribed in uncritical verbatim form with only a smattering of chrome, Medieval grit, or magic to poorly disguise the copy. Dungeons & Dragons, long the towering mainstay of fantasy roleplay whose name is synonymous with its genre,  has at times been either a magnificent carnival of fantasy or a pitiless mire of the same tired clichés about gender, race, and sexuality that bedevil so much of nerd culture. This schismatic approach to its material is, I believe, a psychic scar left by the culture wars of the 1980s when D&D was accused of various and sundry evils; all ranging from reefer madness with dice to charges of blood drinking Satanism. The game remains gunshy about introducing content that might be deemed something less than family-friendly. Even its excellent Book of Exalted Deeds compendium—a supplement geared towards elaborating the concepts of virtue and divinity in D&D—came with a “Mature Content” warning sticker. The offending content was, well, a boob, along with a frank discussion of torture (and why it was morally unjustifiable).

This flinching instinct on the part of D&D’s inheritors, Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, has kept LGBT characters far away from public acknowledgement in the game’s content. “Family friendly,” that delightful euphemism for wilful ignorance of and prejudice against sexual minorities, has become the catchphrase of the granddaddy of RPGs.

While my love for D&D was immense and filled with innumerable fond memories, many immortalised on a shelf groaning under the weight of 2e and 3.5e books, I lamented the fact that such a fantastic genre should be hamstrung by senseless timidity. It was not just the issue of LGBT inclusion, of course; the writing had ossified, the taken for granted dimensions of the setting had become set in stone, routinized and underdeveloped. Flashes of brilliant creativity were smothered in the gloom of playing it safe as the controversial Fourth Edition went to press.

Enter Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder. For years I’d ignored it blithely, thinking it was a low rent, grittier D&D that had nothing new to offer, save a nostalgic continuation of the 3.5e ruleset. How wrong I was. The long, in-depth second look it deserved from me was occasioned by a friend’s breathless Facebook post about a trans woman character being introduced in the game’s latest adventure module.  A lesbian trans woman, married to a half-Orc Paladin of a Lawful Good goddess. My attention was well and truly piqued.

From Representation to Creative Flourishing

It is a common complaint amongst those determined to preserve a patriarchal status quo that characters ought not deviate from a white/male/hetero/cis norm unless there are “good narrative reasons” for doing so, whatever those might be. Curiously, nothing ever seems to fit the bill for such people; any deviation from that norm immediately occasions passionate metaphors about shoving things down throats and other vaguely sexual musings. But for those of us who, in good faith, worry about tokenisation occasioned by well-intentioned efforts at inclusion, there is a legitimate concern about ensuring that, say, LGBT characters are drawn to be people first and queer second, lest they be defined entirely by one facet of their identity.

Paizo gets this balance just right, in my view.

The 73rd issue of their Adventure Path modules—self-contained cycles of adventures that provide detailed information about settings and campaigns a DM can use to start a plot for her players—The Worldwound Incursion by Amber E. Scott might well serve as both illustration of inclusion done well and an example of what that inclusion can look like in the specific medium of a pen-and-paper roleplaying game. (Cover at left; art by Wayne Reynolds).

The eponymous Worldwound is a scar in the world of Golarion, spewing forth demons and other hellish beasts who break like a tide against the increasingly beleaguered defenders in the nation of Mendev. Divine wardstones help keep the fiends at bay, but when one of them is sabotaged, one of the great citadels of the nation—the crusader city of Kenabres—falls to the horde. It is into this maelstrom that your adventuring party is thrust. Spared from the invasion by a virtuous dragon’s last minute intervention, your party and a few NPC citizens of Kenabres awake in an underground cavern—you must find your way back to the surface and do what you can to ease the fate of the fallen city.

One of these NPCs broke her leg in the divinely cushioned fall from the surface, Anevia Tirabade, a forthright rogue of a woman who served the city as a scout and archer. The story from here on out is very well treated by Ms. Scott; Tirabade is one of three NPCs of varying strengths and personalities with whom your party must work, negotiate, and assist. The mechanics of this, and the story possibilities that emerge, are a delight to read; one’s imagination really takes flight with the help of the complicated entanglements Scott writes for each character— the other two are Aravashinal, a blind wizard whose membership in a secret society drives a subplot, and Horgus, an arrogant noble whose gossipmongering about the other two could bring about the downfall of the group.

The genius of this module, I believe, lies in its strong emphasis on relationships and the deep elaboration that Scott gives to the myriad ways they impact the story, even as Kenabres crumbles. Rare is the writer who captures the fundamental humanity of apocalypse (beyond clichés about survivalism, at least), and Scott certainly rises to that challenge. The depth of these relationships, the conspiracies, triumphs, and tragedies they all entail, emerge as rewards for good investigative roleplay—and it is only here that Anevia’s story emerges.

One discovers that Anevia Tirabade is a trans woman who is married to a Half-Orc Crusader named Irabeth. Irabeth Tirabade is, in this campaign, helping to organise the resistance against the demonic horde. There is a beautiful and romantic story behind Anevia’s transition that is inextricably bound up with the love shared between the rogue and paladin, there for the taking if one wishes to learn it. But it is neither the focus of the story nor Anevia’s raison d’etre for being in it. Like Amanda Downum’s Savedra Severos, Anevia is a trans woman who is many years post-transition and whose role in the present story is akin to that of her cisgender counterparts—being a person of some power and influence in Kenabres pitching in after its destruction.

Anevia’s story is presented neither as a joke, nor as the driving motivation of her character. Like all trans people, her transition was merely instrumental in helping Anevia live a liveable life; her true adventure lay in the work she did for her adopted hometown, and the labours she would come to share with her wife. She is now part of the resistance and thrust into the epicentre of a renewed crusade against the forces of Hell, all of which are entirely orthogonal to the fact that she happens to be a lesbian trans woman. This is inclusion done well; Scott’s backstory for Anevia does not render her invisible as a trans person, but it also does not centralise that aspect of her as being the only worthwhile or interesting thing about her. Instead, it threads through her life in a seamlessly realistic way.

She grew up as part of her mother’s criminal gang, dysphoria leading to asociality on her part, even as she both learned to pick pockets and escape into art about strong women heroines. When at last the forces of law broke up the gang, Anevia’s mother sent her away to a temple of Desna, where a priestess would raise Anevia as her daughter—initially as a disguise, albeit one rather eagerly donned by the young Anevia. Her foster mother let her set off on an adulthood of adventuring, like the women from the stories Anevia so loved, with her blessing for this new life. On that long series of adventures in which she lent her services to other temples of Desna, she would meet Irabeth and fall head over heels.

I shan’t indulge in telling the whole story but it’s very sweetly written (aside from pronoun mangling when discussing the pre-transition Anevia, but it’s a forgivable lapse considering the audience; it’s still a dramatic and graceful step in the right direction).

The one artistic suggestion I might make is as follows. After falling for Irabeth, Anevia, according to the text,

“had revealed herself to actually be a man… but this didn’t matter to the paladin, who had learned to value a companion’s personality over her appearance. In fact, Irabeth had spent a fair amount of her personal wealth (including selling her father’s sword) to fund the purchase of an elixir for Anevia, one that would shift her physical gender to match the rest of her.”

(Okay, so maybe I will recount a bit more of their adorable love story). But the point is that it is rather unfortunate to recycle the “actually be a man” language which, although well intentioned in its use here, probably engenders more confusion than not amongst those unfamiliar with trans people. Generally speaking, any talk of ‘actually’ being one’s birth sex tends to be the spearpoint of a lot of transphobic arguments, and it’s best not to legitimise that.

When I have written trans people into my sci-fi and fantasy settings, I’ve always made sure to give them a unique name (“transgender” and “transsexual” being too deeply ground in our own world’s political and medical rhetoric to be truly distancing). One Pathfinder playing friend, writer Katie Berger Tremaine, suggests calling trans people “Arsheans” after one of the empyreal angels devoted to, amongst other things, diversity of gender expression. (That angel, Arshea, is another of Ms. Scott’s inspired creations and merits their own article).

The Fundaments of the Inclusive Adventure

One of the more darkly hilarious criticisms levelled at Irabeth and Anevia was that they were improbable due to being “too many identities at once.” This bizarre charge, being the inverted version of the vituperatively bigoted joke that says one must be a “disabled black lesbian Muslim” to get ahead in the world, is merely another irksome spasm of privilege and the myopia it inculcates— but it merits special comment nevertheless.

Behind the slur lies the idea that such people do not exist—that one might be a lesbian, or trans, or biracial, but surely not all at once; that is merely a fantasy of leftist diversity maniacs, after all. Yet, we actually do exist. As I joked more than once on Paizo’s forums to people making such prejudicial criticisms, Anevia and Irabeth’s story is actually all the more affecting because it maps onto the contours of my own life. After all, I’m a lesbian trans woman in an interracial relationship, myself. And given Irabeth’s biracial heritage as a half-Orc who struggled against racial prejudice and aspired to fit into human dominated institutions—she is also someone in whom I saw a rather lot of myself. It’s the kind of story not often enough told, and Ms. Scott captured it with aplomb.

It is here we return to the question of creativity in writing and the benefits of artistically-crafted diversity (as opposed to hamhanded tokenism): it makes stories better, more original, and more interesting. While transphobes were attacking Anevia simply for being in the story, and Irabeth for simply being a lesbian—occasioning all manner of scrutiny not given to Worldwound Incursion’s several straight cis male characters—they ignored how much lore and roleplay grist each woman added to the tale. The Worldwound Incursion is remarkable for its emphasis on the many social relationships—be they interpersonal or at the level of organisational conspiracy—that make up a city, even one smouldering in ruin amidst a truly hellish war. Unlike many adventure modules, Pathfinders’ as a whole place a good deal of emphasis on fleshing out the NPCs who are a setting’s truest ambassadors, imparting the living and breathing soul of a fantasy realm.

In this light, Anevia and Irabeth are, in their ways, part of Kenabres’ essence; each woman and her history says something about the hopes and failures of their adopted homeland, and their love is a perfect symbol of the virtues they tirelessly defend from the Worldwound’s spew.

What the critics of these two characters miss is how elegantly Amber Scott drew their fundamental humanity (with apologies to Irabeth’s Orc-ness, of course). Diversity does not just exist as a discrete property of a person fully coterminous with one aspect of their identity. There must also be diversity within a character. Anevia is not just a transsexual woman; she’s the crafty child of the streets who speaks forthrightly to all, regardless of rank, and who fights back the memories of her scarred past, trying to live in the here and now. She’s the Worldwound scout who found love on the edge of the abyss and who, at the present point in this campaign, limps her way through a cave with several strangers on her way into a strange, new adventure that has turned that world upside down.

Well done, Ms. Scott.

Concluding Thoughts: To Tell The Untold Story

The adventure module itself is also a testament to everything Pathfinder is doing right as a roleplaying game; rich in lore, technical rules that intrigue but don’t bog one down in math, an epic story that drops level 1 players into the midst of an incredible tale, a lavish gazetteer for the city of Kenabres, a short story, and some unique monsters thrown into the fray—there’s a lot to keep you busy. My personal favourite detail has to be Scott’s exalted magical sword, Radiance, (which inspired this article’s title); it was the sword of an outspoken crusader, a woman named Yaniel, who witheringly condemened her superiors’ negligence and took the fight to the demons. The weapon, in the hands of a virtuous paladin, can ‘level up’ with you. From Amber Scott’s fast paced and captivating plot, to Jerome Virnich’s evilly cute Sin Seeker monster, the module presents a peerless toolbox for adventure. If Pathfinder excels at anything it’s finding ways to tell stories that fantasy RPGs haven’t before.

I’m going to have to resist the overwhelming impulse to make a cheesy pun on the RPG’s name by saying something like “there’s a new path being found in roleplaying games!” and instead simply say that Pathfinder’s latest books merit a closer look. Paizo’s Creative Director, James Jacobs, has gone on record to say that LGBT characters exist in the world of Golarion and that all freelance writers are advised of this canonical fact. The iconic Cleric, Kyra, has been officially revealed to be a lesbian woman, and we can—apparently—expect more ‘out’ NPCs in the near future. It is no less worth mentioning that Pathfinder has overtaken D&D as the world’s bestselling PnP RPG: it’s yet another nail in the coffin of the dreadful cliché that “diversity doesn’t sell.” Wizards of the Coast might do well to take note.

*The banner image and Worldwound Incursion cover art are by Wayne Reynolds; the art of Anevia is uncredited in the book but I will add a name as soon as I can find one.

It’s Game of the Year season again, and Bioshock: Infinite looks primed to come away with a number of awards. This is, of course, a horrifying statement about race and the videogames community at large. The cultural influence of Infinite has yet to produce anything positive, and instead empowered racists in their agendas.

As one of the few people who has actually bothered to critically look at racism in Bioshock: Infinite, and continued to cover the issues and bigotry surrounding and following it, it’s horrifying to me that we now live in an age where unironic outwardly racist groups are using promo art from Bioshock: Infinite as propaganda postings online.

EDIT: I am mistaken in the above paragraph. In my fervor I forgot a good amount of pieces critically looking at race in Bioshock: Infinite, and am including some links provided to me by Elizabeth Simins. They’re all must-reads, of course.

God Only Knows: A Conversation About Bioshock: Infinite

Booker DeWitt and the Case of the Young White Lady Feels

Bioshock Infinite Through the Eyes of an Angry Black Man

Which isn’t as “ironic” as it sounds considering Bioshock: Infinite is just as racist as the National Liberty Foundation, they just, well, know how to hide it better. They know how to wrap it in fancy art and pseudo-intellectual sci-fi bullshit, the assumed authority as a “creator” declaring that revolutionaries resisting their oppressors are simply Nat Turners waiting to happen, and that “the truth is in the middle” somehow. To quote Robert Moore:

The truth is in the middle, whispers Kevin Levine as he pens this script. After watching such situations of racism and oppression, he pulls back the sheet as he’s done in other games on the big, halfway twist. I’ve played all of Levine’s games, I’ve seen it. I expected the leader of this revolution, this Fitzroy woman, to be wicked and corrupt, our SHODAN or Fountaine. But he continues and makes a more sweeping reveal - the people of columbia feared all these individuals to be savages and monsters and lo’ and behold, they are.

…

Was there anybody non-white on staff to shake their head at this? They really couldn’t find someone on the street to say "whoa dude, this is getting kinda racist?"

Emphasis mine.

If a person of color wants to be respected and liberated, they have to go down the whitewashed history of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., not the “savages” like Malcom X who dared to take arms and defend his community. Even then, that’s not true if you actually listen to PoC activists like Suey Park recount the bullshit they have had to put up with over the years from supposed “white allies” who only seek to prove their own goodness in the world.

In modern society, racism to white people is simply dressing up in white hoods and lynching black folk in public. It’s a costume, a hilarious caricature of evil to us that we feel ever so distant to, that we would never possibly make that mistake again, right? As long as I’m not *that,* I can’t possibly be racist! Of course, thousands upon thousands of pages written by people who have actually suffered under racism and numerous personal accounts as well as statistics and endless studies have proven that America is still a very racist, and a very un-free country for a great number of people. Even with all that, many if not most white people will deny they even benefit from modern racism, which is a factually based reality people of color have to deal with on a daily basis.

So of course, having an entirely white led creative team, Bioshock: Infinite was a racist piece of trash that will most likely go on to win numerous Game of the Year awards and go down in the history books as “true art” by the games scholars of the Western world. It’s not like other spheres of the art world have a long history of white supremacy, games are no different. Simply more embarrassing with the endless mountains of actually anti-racist material written and produced nowadays, especially at an entry level format.

Upon my discovering of the National Liberty Foundation’s appropriation of the supposedly “satirical” artwork of Ken Levine’s brainchild, I proceeded to ask him if he was proud of himself for giving ammo to such horrific people.

"Village idiot," he calls me. Not caring about the victims of racism, not attacking the racists using his material to forward their views… it’s me, daring to criticize him, the supposedly "enlightened" creative genius. I’m the idiot, too many hours reading bell hooks and Malcolm X to be able to possibly think for myself. How dare I, little well-read blogger man, speak against a captain of industry like himself?

You see, the “it takes a village” comment is what tickles my funny bone. Ken Levine’s been in the industry a rather long time, dating back to System Shock 2. Of course, it’s indisputable fact the games industry is primarily staffed with straight white males, if not according to the IGDA (http://archives.igda.org/diversity/IGDA_DeveloperDemographics_Oct05.pdf) then the endless hate speech from “gamers” using slurs “ironically.” If white people with awful views surround themselves with other white folk who share those views, it’s an endless pinball machine of back and forth bullshit where one’s racism is simply reinforced and grows bolder.

Of course, with a smash hit like Bioshock in 2008 and a games criticism community too infantile and centered around the simple storylines and mechanics of AAA, Levine was hailed as an intellectual and creative genius, creating a (heavily-scripted) world of (not that intellectual at all) wonder.

Not too long ago, intellectual giant and rap artist Kanye West asks us in the 2010 masterpiece My Dark Twisted Fantasy, “you got the power to let power go?”

Levine didn’t. He let it go right to his head, and decided his magnum opus would tackle the harsh issues of racism and time travel. Actually, he decided to make it about being a strong white angry dad man-shooter, protecting a precious innocent white girl (who brutally murders a Nat Turner inspired caricature of a black resistance leader) with time travel and racism being window dressing. Time travel’s one thing, but a entirely white head creative team using anti-black racism as a backdrop for a pile of bodies a strong angry white man stands atop of?

This is the problem with Irrational Games and Ken Levine’s attempt at “anti-racist satire,” if you’re just generating and presenting “ironically” racist content that is indistinguishable from actually racist content, and you end up equating historically accurate violent oppression to completely imagined and irrelevant violent resistance so the player can brutally slaughter hundreds of black people for your finale, you’re not being satirical at all.

Levine’s insult towards me is pretty telling - it was retweeted and favorited dozens of times, and I got plenty of hate mentions sent my way. But you know what’s funny?

Nearly

All

(note: Jonathan Ore is not white, and has asked me to let you know he mostly agrees with what I’m saying. Which is totally a-okay! My bad for including him in this, and I apologize.)

Of

Them

Are

White

As

Hell

Just how could that be? How could that possibly be?! I thought Levine had made “true art,” a real intellectual masterpiece! One that would cross racial boundaries and unite us all in wonder and racial harmony! Yet, all I see are a bunch of white pasty nerds flooding my mentions with everything from accusing me of “logical fallacies” to trying to compare the Vox Populi to the Jews during the Holocaust and the atrocities of Israel’s government following it, in hilariously inept leaps of logic.

Consider how fucking white the games industry is and how fucking long Ken Levine has been in it, dating back to System Shock 2 in 1997, it makes one wonder if he’s ever even talked to a black person. Does he even have one black friend? You know, the one that proves we’re not racist, when LBJ passed the My Black Friend law after MLK was assassinated. All us white people have to have at least one black friend to prove racism is over, if you didn’t know.

You see, white people like Ken Levine and Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic, that’s satire; not your half assed attempts spouting “ironically” racist bullshit. Satire is actually tearing down a bad thing - not just showing it at face value and going “ha ha ain’t it great we’re not literally shooting blacks in the street anymore, right guys? That Kanye West so crazy thinking Bush don’t care about black people!”

Except, uh, wait.

Black men are killed by police, security guards, and vigilantes once every 36 hours in America. Instead of shutting the fuck up and listening to what Dave Chappelle was actually saying, especially about the difference between outspoken and cloaked racism, white people were sitting around shitting themselves laughing “fuck your couch n*****” around the office water cooler back in ‘04. Ashamed, Dave abandoned fame and the comedy world lost a great man. He attempted to return, and when the white members of the audience heckled him to repeat Chappelle’s Show skits, he stormed off once again, rightly so.

At the end of the day, we white folk learned that outspoken racism wasn’t acceptable anymore, but instead we can get away with subtle racism in public, as long as it’s cloaked appropriately. We can get away with “forgetting” all the horrible shit done to get people of color out of Oregon after the civil war and laugh at goofy Portlandia segments. Shows like “Friends” or “Girls” can take place in New York City, one of the most supposedly intermixed melting pots of America, yet feature entirely white people as the main characters. Infinite demands it sets the terms for black liberation, without an ounce of input from them.

At the end of Bioshock: Infinite, the player character has a bodycount in the hundreds at his feet, initially the white racists of Columbia soon followed by the black and Irish bodies of the resistance, based not on actual black resistance to white oppression during 1912, but completely unrelated Russian and French Revolutions, with a little Nat Turner thrown in. Levine imagines himself a thought leader, bravely declaring South Park level bullshit that the truth is somewhere in the middle. To quote Tumblr user starburp:

do you know why you did this? because the black people in this storyline aren’t fucking people. they’re props. literally. they are props. and that’s what i find so fucking offensive about bioshock infinite, is that it makes black people props in a storyline in which white people get to revise white history through all kinds of fanciful sci fi wizardry in order to make themselves feel better while STILL excluding and marginalizing black people, and we’re supposed to be happy about it. okay. thank you. thank you so much for being so concerned about faithfully depicting black life in 1912 in a floating white supremacist city in the clouds in which people can travel between space and time that you forgot to depict any other aspect of historical reality or even to give the black people in the game fucking brains

no, actually what you did is create a whole fantasy 1912 in which you relegated blacks to symbolically representing the demon of overt historical white racism because that is the only demon white people are willing to fight (because it’s already obsolete, so there’s no real challenge there), forget how you just fucking perpetuated racism with your stupid fucking game

white people present this reality to the exclusion and marginalization of all other realities, and then they give themselves a pat on the back for kind of thinking about racism for like a couple of days, and then they turn viciously defensive when poc confront their stupid inane inaccurate version of reality, even though the fact that poc feel excluded and marginalized by it should be the only fucking evidence white people need to understand that they fucked up

 Emphasis again mine.

Yet with all this supposed intellectualism, a white ubermensch of slaughter reigns supreme at the end of Bioshock: Infinite, and that in the end says more about Levine’s internalized racism and the state of race in videogames in 2013 than any witty Twitter comeback. You know, I bet it drives Levine nuts, the popularity Kanye West has. The fact that a man who proclaims “put that pussy in a sarcophagus” has far more to say about the world than Levine ever will.

Instead Ken stands atop his money and fame profiteering off of exploiting black history, amongst a village of white, racist idiots, he being the biggest of them all with nothing of worth to say.

It certainly takes a village, Ken. You just happened to immerse yourself in one of the absolute worst. When your village consists of almost entirely white people, you’re probably in no place to speak about the histories of people of color, and Bioshock: Infinite’s lasting testament is tantamount proof of this fact. That is your legacy, Ken - one of continuing the long legacy of white supremacy in games, and nothing more. 

I think Barbie Dreamhouse Party might be the most sarcastic, darkly satirical game I’ve ever played. And I’m not even sure if I’m joking at this point. When a game with a name like that pops up on Steam, of course any red-blooded human games journalist is going to take a look, right? I was expecting a garish pink mess of dress-up minigames and saccharine terror, obviously, but Dreamhouse Party seems to take this into a whole other realm of creepy weirdness. This is a game in which a sentient closet-based AI locks four girls in a room (with giant metal barriers) because one of them smudged her make-up, and forces them to repeatedly apply lipstick and eyeliner to freakishly giant doll heads until he is satisfied. That’s not my arch interpretation of events. That’s what actually happens.

(more…)

Missed Lauryn Hill's special Thanksgiving shows in New York City? Not to worry. The reclusive artist just dropped the video for her latest track "Consumerism" -- and it's about as trippy as you would expect.

(h/t Afropunk)

Yellow thing and orange thing is my favorite bistro brunch.

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November 26th, 2013: A poem! It snowed yesterday But then stopped; the haiku form I can now co-opt One year ago today: "i'm addressing myself while i'm dressing myself in a dress for myself" – Ryan

This woman is taking a selfie. IS THIS FEMINIST? 

Awww, doggie! Look at the little doggie. Look at his FACE! He’s such a good doggie, yes he is, he’s just a little cuddle-monster. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that right? Yes he is, he’s going to get his picture taken like a good boy, he’s a SMART doggie, yes you are! Yes you are! He’s just the smartest doggie with his cute little eyes and nose and face. He just loves to cuddle! He wants to be a famous doggie on the Internet, yes he does, yes he does! Doggie doggie doggie. GOOD boy. GOOD boy. 

Oh, wait, shit, there’s a person in this? PROBLEMATIC. 

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This post doesn’t have any spoilers that I am aware of.

I.

I’ve played something like ten hours of Grand Theft Auto V and while I don’t feel like I have a good read on the structure of the game, where it is going, etc., I do have another feel: boredom. I have mostly been bored.

There have been some great moments–switching between characters on a mission, the heists, riding an ATV, playing tennis. Mostly, though, it has been a great morass of driving around and doing very predictable, dare I say GTA-style, missions. Most have lacked excitement. “Go here,” the game says, “and kill this guy.” Or even worse: “Go here and do a fine-grained and intensive yet utterly unexciting task like towing or dockworking.” This isn’t how I want to be spending my stimulation simulation time.

II.

This past summer I played some Grand Theft Auto III. It holds up as well as you would expect. The control scheme, like most of the control schemes from the early PS2 era, is fumbling at best, and I’m honestly surprised that I was able to beat that game as many times as I did when I was a #teen. And I did beat that game, over and over again, playing through every mission and collecting every secret package and tracking down every weird internet rumor that I could about the game. If you can fly the Dodo all the way to the first island, or you can purposefully glitch into Blue Hell, then anything could be possible.

“Anything could be possible” is probably the best summation of my memories of GTAIII. I didn’t understand how games were designed and built then, being a #teen, and so I had a wild-eyed acceptance of everything I was experiencing. I also thought it was amazing for all the things you could do, including running down pedestrians, murdering rival gangs, and doing sick jumps. While today that game feels painfully limited (you can’t even swim!), at the time it was amazing, and I have fond memories of the experience.

When I fell in love with the idea that “anything is possible,” I also became deeply attached to the object that gave me that “anything”. I didn’t want to give up the world, the possibilities. More importantly, I didn’t want to give up the chance that we could get more but better in the future (which Vice City eventually did give us). These feelings on my part were partially politically oriented. To my young mind, it seemed like what I enjoyed doing with my free time was under attack–Jack Thompson and the various legislators who had, and have, made it their pet project to “protect” children from “excessive” media were spinning up on the topic of video games (yet again) just as I was really settling into “my” world [Jacked is a good book on this. I had my problems with it, but the sections on Thompson are great.]

So I went to ground. I doubled down, as young men do, on rhetoric about free speech and censorship and media effects. I learned about the history of the arguments around the topic. I read up on polemics written during the birth of the novel, film, radio, and television. I became a small-scale “expert” on the topic so when teachers would try to pin me down on questions about violent representation I would be able to speak up.

At the same time, I spent every weekend with friends where we talked about how cool the characters of Grand Theft Auto III were. We fake-planned drug deals, talked about freedom, talked about how to get rid of bodies. These are all things that teen boys talk about, I think–we would have had these odd fantasies of fictional power whether we had video games or young men’s novels or just some sticks in the woods–but GTA gave us a particular frame to discuss it. The game was, after all, modeled on the real world. Then some of us went on to try for that absolute freedom, the dealer’s life, excessive violence in the face of our social situations and I really do wonder about pattern recognition.

III.

I told that long story to give a sense of my investment in GTAIII back in the PS2 era. As I said before, I recently returned to the game.

It isn’t funny. It isn’t engaging. It is boring and a chore to play. More importantly, it always was.

The Grand Theft Auto series is only successful because of investment. It is the old Thomas Hobbes trick–you give someone an entire world and it is up to that person to make something of it. In the case of GTAV, the world that is given to the player is (intended to be) the largest possible world. Not only is this apparent in the physical location, as shown very clearly in the map size fetish around the game, but also ideologically. The game very clearly intends to allow as many people as possible to be part of the experience, and nothing gets at this better than the “humor” of the game; it is designed to be above all politics, the kind of “we make fun of everyone” that gives even the most virulent racist or sexist a way of escaping criticism. The radio is full of jokes–about conservatives admitting to being assholes during their campaign commercials, about liberals who claim that having a tv show makes you a liberal, about consumerism and Weasel News and everything in between. The sundry cast of characters the player meets in the game works similarly: the paparazzo who has to get the scoop and casts his blatant awfulness in the language of a public good, the FBI agent who demands a torture for the sake of torture rather than to get information, the yogi who preaches selflessness and concentration while demanding that a customer push her butt into his crotch. By making fun of “everything,” GTAV is trying to convince us that it is above any real commitment to an ideology.

I said a few words ago that the game “very clearly intends to allow as many people as possible to be part of the experience,” and I want to follow it up with “the game clearly fails at doing so.” The very attempt to speak from the position of the God’s eye view, somewhere away from ideology, is a guarantee that you are enmired in it. The game is so deep in casual and explicit sexism and racism that it can’t see it, let alone be critical or above it; oppressive politics is the air that Grand Theft Auto V breathes.

IV.

So why is Grand Theft Auto V so conservative? I don’t mean that in the sense of the political party, although they’ve taken that moniker on for a reason, but rather why is its politics so regressive, racist, and sexist? Why has “doggy style” sex been a visual joke twice in ten hours? Why are two of the primary narratives “black man trying to struggle out of the hood” and “white successful criminal,” both of which have been rehearsed over and over again in media?

I think part of it is a time issue. The political moves of Grand Theft Auto V make a lot of sense in the context of the ever-more-sanitized late 1990s. In a decade where the body, the fetish, and violence were increasingly seen as the only aesthetic ways from breaking out of the “end of history,” Grand Theft Auto makes a lot of sense. Lampooning Democrats and Republicans on in-game radio hit so hard in 2001, but in a world where pundits and politicians are already sounding like parodies of themselves, these jokes don’t really land. When the world you’re creating as a parody is hardly distinguishable from the real world, the parody might as well not exist.

Another part, related to time, is that that core tenets of GTAV are no different than those of GTAIII: making a point by shocking people. When GTAIII came out, there was still power in that–MTV, independent cinema, and Marilyn Manson had all demonstrated that purposefully alienating parents was a powerful way to draw an audience. It worked–for many people I knew, GTAIII was just as exciting for its function as a “fuck you dad” as it was as a game. But in retrospect, the “shocks” of GTAIII weren’t shocking at all. They were the dominant culture repackaged in ethnic stereotypes, in homophobic jokes, and in misogynistic writing.

The Grand Theft Auto series has always been about selling our own shitty culture back to us and then explaining that we’re transgressive because we buy it.

What’s shocking after reality tv? What’s shocking after sex tape culture? What’s shocking when grisly and graphic murder is some of the most popular entertainment? This isn’t an appeal to something far away, to a long lost past, but a real question: what is Grand Theft Auto even doing anymore? To make its regressive politics seem progressive it has to project us into a past, or worse, create a strange fake version of the world where being a generally crap human being is seen as heroic. When we’re playing GTAV, we’re not experiencing a fiction of the present; we’re playing historical fiction, ideological fiction, where terrible and boring people can be thought of as progressive and interesting.

 

Filed under: Video Games Tagged: grand theft auto III, grand theft auto V, politics, video games

If you found this comic funny: cool! Next one will be Tuesday! Here’s that Franny Glass cosplay thing I said you wouldn’t get on Tuesday because it’s Christmas for everyone: (Mona is being Boo Boo) If you did not find this comic funny, it’s probably because PRIVILEGE IS NOT FUNNY. I thought a lot about […]

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I will be at SPX this weekend! You should come say hi!

I like the George R. R. Martin books too. What do YOU think has happened to Jon Snow, gentle readers? There are three more strips in this little storyline (this one posted September 10, 2013), and then another storyline featuring INEZ, some other comics, and then a big Grand Finale to the Year One stuff, at which point all the …