Sunday, September 4, 2011

In Defense of JCPenney: Social Media Justice and Mob Rule

That half a dozen of my Facebook friends (all of them women) separately denounced the recent clothing miscarriage showed just how vehement and wide-spread this outcry really was. I can see the point: JCPenney made an obviously-sexist T-shirt available for sale that seems to promote looks over brains. Before too long, another T-shirt came under fire for listing ‘boys’ and ‘shopping’ among a list of a girl’s ‘best subjects.’ The outrage spread like wild fire, and the same day it started, JCPenney pulled it and issued an apology.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and defend JCPeney: they shouldn’t have pulled the shirt. I mean, you can’t fight a mob, so pulling it was certainly the smartest business move, but don’t think for a second that JCPenney actually gives a damn what was on that shirt.

First of all, this is not a controversy at all, and it should be. Half of the more than three hundred headlines that come up in a Google search for this story read “sexist T-shirt sparks controversy.” I’m sorry, but controversy implies there is an argument going on, but I see no debate. There is no one providing another perspective. So I guess that’s my job.

It is such a wild phenomenon to witness the mob mentality at work on social media. No one engages in discussion at all. It’s just, “Oh my God, this! This is happening!” And you pass it along just like that, and pretty soon everyone feels like they are a part of bringing down the Berlin Wall or something, but they always end up looking like Johnny-come-latelys who do their deed and walk away having no clue what they've just done. I’m not saying this is true for everyone, of course. Some people do have strong beliefs, but to jump on a band wagon and pass it along without a conversation is a little disingenuous.

The only article I found – the ONLY one – that actually gives another view is from this mother of two. Her personal opinion is this:
And I wouldn’t pity a girl in this shirt because I don’t know that girl or how she sees herself. I agree it advertises something, but that something is exactly what’s up for debate. Is it…

I’m pretty, I can’t be smart.
I’m pretty and I’m so smart I conned my brother into doing my homework.
I hate homework, I wish being pretty got me out of homework.
or even
This shirt’s slogan is silly, I’m just wearing it for fun

Who knows?

She also points out, correctly, that it is her job, and NOT JCPenney’s job, to be the role model and educator of sexual and social values. She has her opinion about the shirt like everyone else, but ultimately it’s her decision to buy the shirt for her daughter or not.

But it’s not just the controversy, it is the apparent amnesia that social media justice seems to have when executing its sentence. Remember Don Imus? The racist who talked about the black WNBA athletes as a bunch of “nappy-headed hoes”? Sickening, right? You should have heard his show years ago! He wasn’t racist enough to get fired before, so why now? Because of social media. But this is a double-edged sword. Imus’ audience didn’t go away, just him. You can dance with joy that you've brought down an awful bigot, but isn’t it his audience we should be concerned with? I would have though bigotry would be bad for business in this day and age, but he was holding steady right up to the end.

And do you really think that JCPenney is the first to put out a T-shirt that promotes looks over brains? Certainly not. There’s a whole market of sexist T-shirts for sale online! If she can’t get it from JCPenney, she’ll get it from someone else. JCPenney is not the culprit, here.

But let’s assume they are, and get to the bottom line (no pun intended): Demanding that options be taken off the table does not fix the problem in a free market, it just removes options. The only thing that will fix the problem is for consumers to not buy the product. It’s that simple.

Vote with your dollar, not your voice. Here’s why…

When the next shirt comes along, how is the marketing manager going to know if there will be another public outcry? Suppose you go to Walmart and say, “I was told that Tapioca will give you cancer. How dare you make Tapioca available! I’m telling!” And then you go tell your friends and they tell their friends, and pretty soon there’s an angry mob outside demanding the removal of Tapioca from the shelves. They remove the Tapioca as anyone with any business sense would, and the mob goes away feeling like they’ve done their job. But later on, a new rice pudding comes out. The market manager might reject it because it bears too close a resemblance to Tapioca, and whether it is or not, it would be too much of a risk to carry it. And others will no doubt follow. And this is all to say nothing of the fact that Tapioca MIGHT NOT ACTUALLY BE BAD FOR YOU.

Nevertheless, for these reasons, it is not just the “I’m too pretty” shirts that will be pulled and refused to be sold. There are several shirts which will never see the light of day, and not because people won’t buy them, and not because they are bad. As this girl points out, while she’s glad they pulled the Homework shirt, she doesn’t have a problem with the other shirt that quickly made the rounds on social media. But JCPenney won’t consider the difference.

And also, if anything was done here today, it has probably resulted in making teen girls MORE interested in things like this. If you make a forbidden fruit out of it, they will flock to it. No doubt some of the girls saw this come up on their Facebooks and thought, “now I want that shirt!” And they will try and get it or one like it, not because it’s how they feel but because they don’t want to feel stupid anymore. At least the T-shirt will give any parent a golden opportunity to teach their kid a lesson about self-worth, which is not a lesson every girl needs to learn. Just the ones who vote with their dollar.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

I'm Not Sorry I Waited For Games To Get Good Again

I’ve been grilled repeatedly in the past for my reluctance to consider video games as being a superior medium of art and entertainment, which will eventually replace movies. So many of my gamer friends don’t watch movies much, yet they are convinced they have the golden goose. Though I remain thoroughly convinced that cinema as an art and entertainment medium isn’t going anywhere, there are some things that my gamer friends would be surprised to hear me say, and that is partly what this blog is about.

The first thing is that I love video games.

It’s true. I give video games a bad rap because I hate most of the ones they make these days. Like every gamer, I like to spend my time – including the time I want to waste – doing something that matters to me. Something fun or useful or educational. Even if it’s shooting spaceships with a laser or stacking puzzle blocks, I want to feel like I’m benefiting from the experience in a number of ways. Trying a new game shouldn’t feel like trying a new kind of tofu, it should be a powerful experience that pulls you in like a dynamo.

Unlike most gamers, however, I’m willing to admit that this is subjective. If I don’t like a game, I don’t expect some douchebag to tell me, “oh, you’re just not fun-ing right,” or “you call yourself a gamer?” Few are as elitist and condescending as online gamers (though Metal fans and pretty much the whole of modern art comes to mind as well). You can have an opinion, so long as it’s not a bad one.

For me, the whole emergence of interactive media is analogous to the start of a really awesome party. Officially, the party started at 7pm, but you don’t show up at 7:05. You never want to be the first one to show up at a party when there’s not much going on. You show up at 11:30 when a good number of the women are already sauced, but not so late that all of the best ones are taken. For video games, I’d say we’re at around 8:15. We still have a long way to go before shit gets interesting.*

But in all seriousness, I want to make several points. I'm going to argue that video game users have less psychological control over their input of media than movie-goers, video games will not replace movies but may compliment them, and that some of the best games of the future (IMO) will be of a type called "interactive cinema." Although I could be way more vicious in my attacks of gamer behavior, I've kept them to a minimum. The gamer lifestyle is not what I'm after here.

*

I learned rather quickly growing up that, outside your typical Tetris-style puzzle games, they would have to change quite a bit before I’ll place them alongside cinema in my life. I love non-story-based games but story-based ones have a lot of growing up to do.

First of all, there are many fundamentally different interactive experiences that are possible, which all tend to get lumped under the banner: Video Game. It is disingenuous to compare cinema to interactive media without making this distinction.

Puzzle games like Tetris are not interested in telling a story at all, and are worlds apart from a game like LA Noire, which is story-based. There may never be a college professor who does his dissertation on the dramatic motivation of one tiny green frog who just wanted to cross the damn street, and just as well. Furthermore, some non-story games involve competition between players, both in the room and online. You would not call these story-based any more than you would a soccer match.

But of the games that we would reasonably call story-based, there are those who would contend that the self-written story is an argument for the viability of video games as its own art form. They contend that the user’s desire to control the outcome of the story is not afforded by film and therefore will be the reason for film’s obsolescence. But they would be WRONG.

Let’s be clear about one thing: cinema is a passive medium and interactive media is, by definition, an active one. They share two things in common: they both involve the illusory rendering of photographic images, and they have an educational function. They have a beginning, middle and end, motivated by the educational function which is chiefly responsible for showing us how the new universe works and which choices will help us reach our goal. Time, space and control are the main differences between these two mediums.

If we are limiting the discussion to story-based video games, let’s start with role playing games (i.e. self-written stories). These are no more self-written than choose-your-own-adventure books are. No matter what ending you choose, the author of your world saw it coming! They must have, in order to design your world. Everything, down to the last coin you found which finally gave you enough to buy the elixir you’re gonna need to fight the big boss guy down the road – God’s got it covered.

And there is nothing fundamentally different between playing Grand Theft Auto to beat on some whores and watching someone else do the same in Hostel. If you play GTA so that you can torture someone, you’re not making a choice that is any different than choosing to see Hostel, in which much torture takes place. The big difference, however, is in the fact that a largely architected statement is being made upon the completion of the story in Hostel.

Games don’t have to make statements, but in a sense they do nonetheless: come to my sandbox and do what you can’t or won’t do in your real life. They’ll set up the torture chamber for you, get you all the tools you need to do what you want to do, all so that you have a choice? Get real. If you actually went to a hostel and got a room of your own and a victim of your own, and they give you a chainsaw, an ax and a dull knife, would you really just say, “nah, let her go”? And if that is your argument – that you COULD choose to let her go – then I’m right anyway: there is no more choice in a video game than there is the choice to see a movie.

However, suppose you do play Grand Theft Auto and you don’t want to do bad things; suppose you want to play it straight. You would still only be making choices that the game designer is allowing you to make. So, even if you have more choices, they are false choices. In a movie, you’re with it or you’re not. But that is a good thing, not a bad thing. Good stories need a good storyteller. Could you imagine driving across a bridge and going, “you know? I think the bridge should go THIS WAY!” and to find out, to your dismay, that the bridge does not, nor should not, go that way; hence, you sink and you fail.

A story-based video game that lets you do whatever suits your fancy (in terms of story) isn’t really a story-based game at all. The game designer knows the ending to all story-based games – even the games in which your choices change the outcome (as I will discuss later). Again, the designer MUST know.

The previous comparison does also present an ethical quandary, which speaks to the spurious notion of control in video games. We think interactive media gives us more control, but this is mostly false. It is one thing to see such heinous acts in a movie, but it’s quite another to become complicit in them.

If you see torture in a movie, you are detached and passive, and can become desensitized to seeing it. If, however, you participate in the act yourself, you are psychologically guilty yourself. The argument that “it’s just a few bits of code in a machine” is actually quite a disturbing validation for something you would never even dream of doing in real life. It's the same as using the line, "It's OK, we're just fooling around," as a cure-all to justify bad behavior.

I’ll stay on this point, because this is a huge point of contention between some of my friends and I. If you say to yourself, “I’m going to climb Mt. Everest,” psychologically speaking, you have. Studies have shown that simply saying something like this actually produces the same psychologically-satisfying effect as actually doing it. That is why whenever you announce your plans in this manner, whether you are aware or not, you will be more likely to fail than by not saying it. You can THINK it all you want, mind you, but when you actually say it out loud – especially to a friend – in your mind, it’s just like you did it.

This is why those who play aggressive video games tend to become more aggressive in nature. It is why the military is able to use Doom to dehumanize killing and thereby raise casualty levels. Yes, I’m using the Doom argument. That gamers scoff at this argument to me indicates a greater sickness, because they would rather discard it as anomalous than face the fact that they might not have as much control over their minds as they thought. They don’t want to acknowledge that doing something in Make Believe Land actually has consequences psychologically. Sure, you’re not going to believe you’re Spiderman in real life, but every time something goes awry, it becomes mighty easy to say subconsciously, “Wait! You mean the world isn’t right? I thought I saved this shit already!”

With movies, on the other hand, you are forced to be not a participant but an active observer, attentively taking in each detail. I agree that not everyone is as attentive as others, which is why a lot of the arguments I’ve just made about video games and psychological complicity apply to film as well. They are both visual mediums. If you are not paying attention to what is going on around you, you WILL be vulnerable to subliminal persuasion (as opposed to voluntary persuasion, of course, where you are agreeing to the terms of the story). In video games, it is by definition impossible to be an observer. Multi-tasking only works so well and young people have a disproportionately high perspective of their ability to multi-task. When you have a thousand things on your screen all vying for attention, how do you sift through them?

With film, it is the job of the filmmaker to tell you what you need to know and when you need to know it. Some filmmakers, like Wes Anderson, like to “cloud the frame” by giving you plenty of stuff to look at, but it’s more an aesthetic choice that doesn’t (or rather shouldn’t) affect your ability to follow the story.

For all of these reasons I think it’s safe to say that genuinely telling your own story is not, to my knowledge, happening in today’s games, nor is it really possible in an interactive way. The fact that it is interactive means you are simply a character in someone else’s world, especially if you are playing a role of any kind in that world. You are telling his story more than the other way around. You can sit in the front of the roller coaster or the back – both are choices you could make that would alter how you enjoy your experience. You can spend five minutes in the House of Mirrors or an hour. Wear the brown robe instead of the black if you want, but you’re not “controlling” anything. If you don’t believe me, stop and thank Mr. Conductor before leaving the roller coaster. Thank him for letting you “tell your own story.”

In my view, you are not telling your own story until the day in which you are creating the world yourself. No, Sims doesn’t count. There, you are still using someone else’s toolbox and, therefore, someone else’s predispositions and set of embedded values. You might not, for example, be able to construct an eco-friendly home or community, and must instead settle for what's already in the toolbox here. As a side note, however, interactive media could play a vital role in modelling political and economic systems in the way civilization-building games work, and this would be an interesting place to start with the self-told story.

What I would love to see is someone creating a simple system whereby a user COULD create his own tools, write his own story, and use this custom-taylored toolbox to continue writing and telling personal stories. I realize that it would cease to be interactive, but it would fit the definition of a self-told story.

*

NOW, if any of my gamer friends are still reading this (and haven’t already begun plotting my assassination, or at least preparing their rebuttal), let me get back to the part where I love video games.

I have no doubt that video games give a user more control over the manner in which the media is taken in or in some cases how the story turns out, at the expense of psychological control. But wouldn’t it be a match made in heaven to have the best of these two worlds? That is where the last form of gaming comes in: the truly interactive story.

Resident Evil was an interactive story, but it was more interactive than story, like most games. But what if you could actually have a game that was more story than game? Would anyone play it? I FUCKING WOULD.

Gamers, despite their elitist posturing, would greatly benefit from such a form of video game. It would bring in a whole new slew of gamer, just like the Wii did. And the Wii is pretty goddamn fun to play, let me tell you. The Wii re-introduces the notion that you can have fun playing a game with OTHER PEOPLE IN THE ROOM. Such a foreign concept nowadays!

I’m surprised developers have not yet caught on to the fact that there is an obvious buck to be made by bringing a mostly cinematic audience into the fold. Film and television are still way more popular than video games, and I don’t see any indication that that’s going to change.

If you are a gamer, I already know you disagree, but I have news for you: YOU’RE WRONG. If you want to look simply at the “film industry,” then you would see that it is quickly changing, but is far from dying. Where are most of these rumors of a struggling movie industry coming from? The MPAA, of course. But even though the MPAA lies. Numbers don’t lie.

People watch movies now way more than they ever have, because of the increasing accessibility and diversity of them. People thought that television would kill movies, but once the industry adapted and stopped hating TV like the plague, it ended up helping the movie industry. The Internet is doing the same thing. The more people CAN watch movies, the more they DO. The only thing that is going to change for movies is where they are viewed and how many there are (and there will be MANY more).

Additionally, and perhaps most important economically, the old model of getting pop culture product – where something becomes huge like the Beatles or Star Wars – will become increasingly irrelevant. There will still be exceptions, like millions of people tuning in to see the Moon landing, which will connect us once again through experience.

But this doesn’t mean death to movies, because it’s true for all media. It is what those in the media trade call The Long Tail, and it basically stipulates that all content will become individually less popular because there is more media appealing to niche markets. For video games, this means that interactive media has come at the end of pop culture, rendering the argument for its future supremacy moot. This means that even if movies do fall out of favor socially, they will merely exist along side video games in a landscape of “media clutter.” By today’s standards, this will look even more like anarchy than media already is.

*

Here's what I would love to see...

I had a dream which operated in the manner of interactive cinema described above. It was night time, and I was on the mound of a baseball stadium facing the outfield. Thousands of spectators filled the stadium, and there was a large movie screen in center field. A scene between Deep Space 9’s Benjamin Sisko and Cassidy Yates played out, in which he was stupidly falling for her plot. I pitched the ball to myself and swung the bat, and the ball hit Sisko right smack on the head. He immediately turned to her, shot her a look of absolute disgust and said: “You are a witch, woman, and you will not usurp my presidency!!”

I would be most happy if I could do this in a video game. And as it turns out, I can. One of my favorite games is Heavy Rain, which does this very well. It’s very rough around the edges, but it’s got something very innovative and powerful going on: a truly cinematic gaming experience. The emotional journey is just as much a part of game play as the physical one. You can be a deadbeat dad who whose negligence and tendency for self-destruction brings about an early end (as was the case for my roommate), or you can be the strong-willed, loving father who perseveres (which I’m doing).

This kind of experience, in a lot of ways, would be much harder to design than a film or a typical video game. To have the rest of the game’s story be affected by a character’s emotional and moral choices, and hence their dealings with other characters, would be quite difficult to do, especially when such a small thing as hugging your wife says oodles about the kind of guy your character wants to be.***

I think this interactive cinema will and should become huge, and it is where film and games finally meet. Cut-scenes do not a cinematic experience make, nor does throwing toast at a midnight screening of Rocky Horror make an interactive experience. But, I believe these two will not just flirt with each other, but because they were made for each other, they will create a form of art and entertainment all their own. But right along side of this beautiful creation, film and video games will continue to do their thing.

I will still play my Galaga, and I will make room again for others. I am hereby announcing my desire to try some new games. My interest in games has already been rekindled by some games like Braid, Heavy Rain and Portal. If you think I’m not being fair, prove me wrong. Point me to what you consider to be the best, and I will check it out.

If what you think is the best is terrible, I do, however, reserve the right to crap on you for showing it to me.


*I admit, this analogy only works if your goal is to get laid. If your goal is to quietly judge the competition and sip your Grasshopper while sparring with a colleague you dragged to the party with you over the latest stock picks or pseudo-indie rock bands, then NO this analogy does not work for you. You win, I guess, but you kind of also lose.

**To fully make the point that cinema is here to stay, I would have to write a whole new post. If you remain unconvinced, email me and I’ll consider writing one.

***Even though making story-based games more cinematic would be pretty sweet, my arguments for why movies allow for more psychological control are still true for them as well.