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myfriendpokey · 5 years

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Morality Play

What does it mean to have a videogame tell you you're a good person? It doesn't know me, can't see me. I don't know if you can be *immoral* in a single player game outside of some very inventive custom controls. Why should I care what a game says? Any inner moral life that a videogame or a painting might possess would be more alien to me than that of a bug or a starfish. Of course videogames and paintings are made by humans, and shaped by the moral opinion of humans.. but we might make a distinction between what the human says and the object says, we might still feel the latter is more important, somehow.

The moral authority of an artwork or object comes from the fact that it's not quite human, that it comes to us from outside humanity to an extent, is distinguished from the unreliable back and forth of human consciousness in motion. But this distance is exactly why you might expect those moral verdicts to be unintelligible to us, or at the very best, to be untrustworthy, an imitation. So what's the appeal – that of having a human voice which speaks with the gravitas of an immortal object? The pleasant conceit that the general shape of our minds is universal, like all those Star Trek aliens that are just regular guys with slightly weirder ears or foreheads? The void speaks, and turns out to sound like a computer engineer.

But maybe not necessarily, maybe in fact it's sometimes not universal authority and moral support that we seek from the object: maybe a certain jankiness of verdict around the way these things communicate in human terms is itself part of the appeal. I think of paper fortune tellers, magic eight-balls, "love tester" machines that return a romantic prognosis based on palm temperature. The entrancing bathos of the chance-driven or mechanistic judgement that still speaks with a human voice: I’m sorry, I cannot answer right now. Please shake me, so I may try again. How different is that to the widely beloved and magnificently broken romance system in Dragon's Dogma, where, spoilers: your "soulmate" is not a matter of direct moral choice, but of variables being tracked over the course of the game including who you talked to and what sidequests you completed - which means it could arbitrarily turn out to be the weapons merchant, or a grandpa npc you found a potion for. Which is goofy, but only in a slightly more blatant way than "accidentally unlocking the romantic option in a dialogue tree from just clicking around" or "having your morality score drop 5 points because you pressed the wrong button and accidentally hurled a rock at someone's head while trying to equip shoes".

I think something I appreciate about videogames is the kind of insectlike moral life that they tend to portray, the sense of value systems which are in some way recognisable but which have mutated in conversion to something alien and horrifying. Lara Croft shooting a wild eagle is unfortunate, Lara Croft shooting a thousand wild eagles is bizarre – but really those thousand eagles are just the one eagle, the one self-contained pulp encounter fantasy, which has been extended, extrapolated, systemised as result of being placed in this machine. The latter may be more egregious but it’s still composed of repeated incidents of the original encounter - and part of the strangeness in these games is just the uncomprehending machine effort to systemise the half-formed gunk substance of our terrible fantasy lives, which only bear a vague and halfhearted relation to any notion of ethics in any case.. We can contemplate with envy and excitement the possibilities of running more realistic, recognisable emotional and moral situations through the meatgrinderof the format in this way. How about a solemn middlebrow videogame about divorcing 50 different wives, each one larger and more powerful than the last (excluding sprite recolours)?

All this is not to say that the casual political and moral stupidity already in videogames should simply be excused or exist outside of critique. But in addition to the body of discourse around "moral commodities" - commodities invested with moral or political meaning independent of any brutal labour practices they might entail or monopolistic accumulation of private wealth they might support – I think it's also worth considering the purpose of the "moral object" itself. The alienation intrinsic to the object form can be a way to think, and also a way to avoid thinking. To project moral beliefs away from the specific context of a creaturely human existence can be a way of expanding that existence, but also of denying it. The paltriness of the human can itself be problematic next to the splendour of the object, and the reflected moral superiority of those with the means of producing such objects.

*****

There's a famous line in the Spiderman comics that with great power comes great responsibility. But it's also kind of a weird line because, while obviously applicable to Spiderman, the person it's actually delivered to is Peter Parker - who is, for all his uncle knows, still a physically awkward and friendless nerd with no immediately visible "great power" to speak of. He does like nuclear physics, though - maybe the advice was intended as a friendly intervention to keep him from turning into the next Edward Teller? Or possibly it's just a kind of unconscious, pulp-writer-trance-appropriation of the muscular liberal rhetoric of the then-current Kennedy administration. Or maybe, and stretching a bit, it's a line that relates more to the conditions of pulp culture manufacturing itself, to the awareness that the stuff you make will be printed thousands of times and sold to kids around the country, poured raw into the national subconsicous. With great sales figures comes great responsiblity.

I mention it because I think it connects to an issue with the kind of cultural criticism that emerged, like it or not, from the specific context of an age of mass media. With great power comes great responsibility - but conversely, to execute your great responsibility you also need great power. And what are you meant to do if you don't have it? Does no power mean having no responsibility? It's possible, but i feel like most people would be dubious about this as a moral lesson - and the inescapability of heavily-financed blockbusters in the culture means that an assumption of already "having great power" sometimes becomes a critical starting point. If you don't have power you should get it, so that you can then have great responsibility and contribute to the discourse. The effect can sometimes be like climbing a mountain of corpses to get a better platform for your speech about world peace.

A good essay on jrpgsaredead.fyi points out the way that certain industry conversations on "accessibility" revolve specifically around access to whatever mainstream AAA action games are currently dominating the news cycle. And the related effect where both problems and proposed solutions are particular to these games, the audience they have, and the resources they can bring bear: More consultants! More characters! More romance options! Better character creators! If you're speaking to an (essentially captive, given the marketing monies involved) audience of five million people you'd better be sure your ideas are, at least, not actively harmful, and in fact should ideally be improving - - fine. How about an audience of 50 people? Or an audience of 0? Does that mean this work is less moral than what speaks to a larger crowd - in effect, that it's worse? And what about the relationship to audience that this kind of teaching implies? i can think of several occasions where people from different subcultures or minority groups were reprimanded because something in their own experience might read differently, or problematically, when presented to a presumably white/cis/affluent etc audience - which is of course the audience that matters, because what's the value of presenting work from an alternative perspective to an audience already familiar with that perspective, to whom it has no automatic moral significance (might, in fact, merely be 'aesthetic')? Compare the complexity of a specific local audience which can think for itself to the easy win of the alternative: a phantasm audience of moral blanks to whom rote lessons in hypothetical empathy can be tastefully and profitably imparted over and over, forever.

****

If the ethical act is that which we'd be willing to posit as universal law, perhaps we could say: the ethical artwork is that which we'd be willing to mass produce. Small or hobbyist developers are encouraged to work from the perspective of a mass-productive capacity they do not in fact possess; their successes and inevitable failures are hoovered up alike by the industry proper for later deployment in the form of cute dating sim or inspirational narrative with similar but sanitized tone or aesthetic. In essence a kind of moral QA testing, with all the job security and recompense that this implies.

The hobbyist is, by definition, not universal: they are enclosed within the local and the material. What time do you get off work? What materials do you have to hand? Are those materials always legal? The entire western RPG Maker community exists as result of widespread bootlegging; the entirety of videogame history and preservation essentially depends on stolen copies; we find out about it through ROMs, videos and screenshots which mostly depend for their continued existence on copyright holders either not finding out or choosing not to pursue these debateable violations. It's a complicated discussion whether this stuff can be justified on a general, universal level - but also I'm not sure we can do without it. When Fortnite uses dances from TV and music videos of living memory they're considered to be in the public domain; but Fortnite itself is not in the public domain, even though it's so inescapable that even I have a pretty good idea of what it looks and plays like despite having made a pretty determined effort to not find out anything about it. It's "public culture" in that sense, and it includes public culture within it, but both game and imagery are privately owned and aggressively policed (suing teenage hackers, etc). What does it mean for art to emerge from an ever more privatized sense of public life?

In 2007 the RPG Maker game Super Columbine Massacre RPG was added to, then removed from, the Slamdance festival following complaints; it was a minor cause celebre at the time following concerns about censorship and the lack of protections for expression in the videogame format specifically following the Jack Thompson media crusade in the United States. In 2019 the same festival retrospectively changed their reasoning: now the game had no longer been removed on the basis of questionable taste, but on the basis of questionable compliance with copyright law, since it included music from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins without paying for licensing fees (and also because the author generally "hadn’t created several of its elements" - asset flips!!!). There's some humour in the fact that a benign-sounding concern with "artist's rights" could just be swapped in as a more respectable-sounding surrogate for general prudery with exactly the same result. But also, in this instance, what does it mean about the game? As facile as SCMR is, the bootleg use of graphics and music was its most interesting element: the game was a bricolage of American pop culture at a specific point in time, as were the killers, as are we. The nearness and recognisability of that culture, the sense of not being able to get enough distance from it to properly fictionalise or think about what happened, is what stands out. An "ethical" version of the same game which used original music - Nirvanalikes, some tastefully copyright-adjacent Marilyn Manson clones - would not just be diminished, it would be actively insulting in the false distance it implied.

I don't mean this at all as a request for more edgelord-ism. But it's worth remembering that videogames themselves are not ethical; are, in fact, colonized materials assembled with exploitative labour and dumped aimlessly into public life by electronics corporations looking to make a buck. The bizarre and haphazard ways this long dump of poor decisions has manifested, warped, been adjusted into culture is part of what's worth attending to about the format – I think it's worth looking closer into all these pools of murkiness, before ethical landlords can come drape a tarp over them as part of the process of divvying up the property.

(image credits: youkai douchuuki, quiz nanairo dreams, trauma center: under the knife, espial)

#gamechat #games criticism #moral

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deadcactuswalking · 5 years

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 28th April 2019 (Jonas Blue, Lil Dicky, Rita Ora)

Top 10

We have a couple new arrivals this week, but the biggest story is still how this song clings on to the top spot, as “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus still at number-one for a second week, and both the meme and constant discussion surrounding the song continue to spread to the point where it’s a cultural phenomenon.

The rest of the top 10 is incredibly less interesting. “Piece of Your Heart” by MEDUZA and Goodboys is up two spaces to number-two. It could make a play for the top.

Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved” is also down a spot to number-three.

Down one position from last week is Billie Eilish’s “bad guy” at number-four.

Tom Walker’s “Just You and I” isn’t moving at number-five.

Avicii’s posthumous hit “SOS” featuring vocals from Aloe Blacc has boosted up six spaces to number-six, becoming Avicii’s first ever posthumous Top 10, as well as his tenth Top 10 in general, and Aloe Blacc’s third.

Up a spot from last week is the Jonas Brothers with “Sucker” at number-seven.

Russ (Splash) and Tion Wayne’s “Keisha & Becky” stabilises its spot at number-eight, down a spot from last week.

Elevating a single space from recent controversy is “Here with Me” by Marshmello and CHVRCHES at number-nine.

At #10, to round off our top 10, is “Talk” by Khalid, up a space and returning to the top 10.

Climbers

Wiley’s “Boasty” featuring verses from Stefflon Don, Sean Paul and Idris freakin’ Elba is up five spaces to #12, whilst “All Day and Night” by EUROPA featuring Madison Beer enters the top 20 at #14, up eight spaces from last week, becoming the first top 20 hit for EUROPA as a group, as well as Jax Jones’ seventh, Martin Solveig’s third as well as Beer’s first ever (Congratulations). Other than that, “Pretty Shining People” by George Ezra is up nine spots to #25, and his other song “Shotgun” is up seven to #30, so there must have been some sort of boost to the album sales, but generally, that’s all we have.

Fallers

We have a few more of these, or at least it seems these songs are more notable. “Giant” by Calvin Harris and Rag ‘n’ Bone Man finally gets its streaming cuts due to dumb UK chart rules and is down 10 positions to #16, whilst “Boy with Luv” by BTS featuring Halsey collapses 16 spaces down to #29 as K-pop always does, “Disaster” by Dave featuring J Hus is down six spaces to #33, whilst “wish you were gay” by Billie Eilish as well as “MONOPOLY” by Ariana Grande and Victoria Monet seem prepared for a premature exit, down 11 and 10 spots respectively to #37 and #40.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

I’m going to assume YNW Melly has had his streaming cut as “Murder on My Mind” is completely out of the Top 75 after dropping out from #38. Speaking of, “Options” by NSG and Tion Wayne has very unfortunately dropped out from #23 due to this dumb chart rule, which directly affects certain genres, i.e. urban music like hip hop and R&B (as well as EDM, for that matter) that is boosted prominently from streaming, from never having any longevity and not becoming as big as hits on the year-end than they deserve. “Options” would have been locked if it weren’t for this rule, as I think it would have lasted many more weeks. The other drop-out is from Ariana Grande and it’s “break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored” from #39.

NEW ARRIVALS

#39 – “Carry On” – Kygo and Rita Ora

Produced by Kygo and Afsheen – Peaked at #8 in Norway

Yes! I finally get to talk about Pokémon! I know what you’re thinking, what? Why? It’s just Rita Ora collaborating with some massive EDM producer like she always does, and while you’re right, it’s for the Detective Pikachu film, which isn’t currently out but I am going to see it at some point. I’m excited to hear this soundtrack as well, although I’m not exactly expecting Kygo and Rita Ora to deliver anything particularly good, or interesting, or Pokémon-related for that matter. Pokémon songs for the anime films have never directly related to the film plots, though, and usually were kind of boring, motivational songs with very vague lyrics, which is understandable as they had to be rushed out every single year. Anyway, this is Kygo’s seventh Top 40 hit and Rita Ora’s 21st, which is impressive, and is it any good? No. Of course it isn’t, and I’m mostly indifferent on this tasteless drivel that EDM producers put out in general with female pop singers where it sounds like the singers have been artificially sped-up, with mixing that’s overly-drowned in reverb and an instrumental as dry as clay years after it is first moulded. The piano melody here isn’t bad, but it isn’t unique and doesn’t carry Rita Ora’s incredibly weak hook, and in general her performance here sucks, like that random “Woo!” she adds in that pauses the song entirely just to halt his momentum, to add nothing at all! There’s barely a real drop here, so it just feels like a constant onslaught of nothingness and high-pitched vocal samples, which I somewhat like for its effort not to make a club banger but rather a tropical house ballad straight out of the dregs of 2016, and it’s not the last new arrival we have that does that here, but this is the only one I’ll talk about in this episode, more on that later. Anyways, this isn’t worth much analysis. It’s dreadfully boring but it’s not exactly long and doesn’t overstay its presence for THAT long, I suppose, it’s just disappointing for a soundtrack that is supposed to provide the music for what is looking out to be a film full of personality with actors oozing charisma. I’m looking out for the Sonic the Hedgehog film’s soundtrack a bit more now, albeit just for the novelty of a Dr. Robotnik cover of “Gangsta’s Paradise”. Next.

#27 – “No Diet” – Digga D

Produced by Ghosty

Digga D is a UK drill artist, as most of the rappers we see on the charts are in 2019. I’ve only vaguely heard of him before, so I think it’s safe to assume that the extreme marketing for the song involving a lot of different companies and individuals, including Mixtape Madness, is what landed this on the charts as Digga D’s first top 40 hit, as well as the video which is about trafficking crack cocaine in Coca-Cola cans... sure. Anyway, is the song itself any good? Well... the beat is incredibly minimalistic like most UK drill, with just an ominous piano line as the backing for a skittering hi-hat and bass-heavy trap beat – those 808s, by the way, are pretty insane. Digga D isn’t really saying anything of interest or anything different than the other guys, but the beat is good enough to carry him a lot of the time, and I love his weird sounds he uses for the ad-libs. It reminds me of a British Migos, where instead of repeating the line, he just makes unintelligible nonsense words and stutters. The singing on the second verse is pretty janky in relative to when it appears in the verse, and while Genius says this and the supposedly playful lyrics are what sets it apart, I don’t see the juxtaposition here, I just think it’s kind of surreal in how bipolar this song feels. There’s an ominous, eerie and menacing beat, violent and braggadocious lyrics from Digga, and then a bunch of silly, humorous ad-libs over it. This song has an identity crisis first and foremost, and while we’re at it...

#24 – “Earth” – Lil Dicky

Produced by benny blanco and Cas—

Nope. No, sorry, not touching this one. I appreciate what it’s doing for charity but I have a LOT to say about this song and trust me, it is not overwhelmingly positive, so, no, I’m not covering this one, at least not like this, and not right now. I might do a full-length review at some point but I think it’s much more likely that I talk about this at the end of the year, if you get the gist. For now, to replace an actual review, let me just list the guest stars, because technically, this is a song by Lil Dicky featuring Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Halsey, Zac Brown of his eponymous band, Brendan Urie of Panic! at the Disco, common fungus Hailee Steinfeld, Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart as Kanye West, Adam Levine of Maroon 5, Shawn Mendes, Charlie Puth, Sia, Miley Cyrus, Lil Jon, Rita Ora, Miguel, Katy Perry, Lil Yachty as an STD, Ed Sheeran, Meghan Trainor, mother-father gentleman PSY, professional basketball player Joel Embiid, Tory Lanez, John Legend, Bad Bunny, Kris Wu, Leonardo DiCaprio and the entirety of the Backstreet Boys. Does that count as a review for Lil Dicky’s second UK Top 40 single? I don’t care, I’ll talk about in length when I want to. Trust me, I’m planning ahead.

#23 – “What I Like About You” – Jonas Blue and Theresa Rex

Produced by Jonas Blue – Peaked at #1 in Belgium

Oh, yeah, this, okay, well, Jonas Blue exists, I guess, and I’m supposed to review everything he puts out because everything this dude makes charts... and sucks. I don’t really have a problem with the dude, but nothing he makes is all that interesting, and he’s the epitome of carelessly generic EDM and dance-pop. This particular track features vocals from Theresa Rex, Danish pop singer who you won’t know by name and she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, but you will know the voice of from “Solo Dance” years back, which she had uncredited vocals on (I’m glad they stopped not crediting the vocalists on EDM tracks, especially since, you know, they do all the heavy lifting in terms of singing). The production here is pretty tropical, I guess, with some handclaps and a weak synth drop that has a few orchestral stabs to replace any unique instrumentation. None of the vocal melodies catch on yet and I’d much prefer “Solo Dance” to this. What else am I supposed to say? I know I’ve taken the easy way out with these two songs, but honestly we’re at a standstill in the charts right now where it should really be more interesting than it is.

Conclusion

Even if I didn’t review it, I don’t care, Lil Dicky and friends still get Worst of the Week for “Earth”, with Dishonourable Mention going to Jonas Blue and Theresa Rex for “That’s What I Like About You”, or something to that effect. In fact, there’s no Best of the Week or Honourable Mention, the Dishonourable Mention is tied as Kygo and Rita Ora’s “Carry On” exemplifies the exact same problem. God, what a crappy week. Follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank for more pop music ramblings and Top 20 rankings, and I’ll see you next week!

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