The main character in this story is Nathalie Lawhead. Various secondary characters exist, many of whom we’ll just be calling “Boss Guy” (they’re different human beings, but those differences aren’t especially important). The other big character in this story is named Jeremy Soule.
This story is an essay, written in five parts labelled ‘Boss Guy ∅’ through ‘Boss Guy Ω’. Boss Guy ∅ seeks to be safe for anybody to read, & seeks to recognize Lawhead for some of their achievements over the years. Subsequent sections however call for a serious CONTENT WARNING, because these sections include serious discussions re: labour exploitation & sexual abuse/assault.
Here’s a question: What are the rules of a pickup basketball game?
If I were to answer this I’d probably start by listing some things out of the official basketball rule book: No double-dribbling, layups are worth 2 points, that kinda thing. But imagine I kept going, writing down as many rules as I could think of for as long as I could. Eventually we’d run out of these ‘official game mechanic’ sort of rules and hit a stratum of extra administrative-type ‘house rules’, e.g. how to slot our 12-20 participants into this 5v5 sport (do some folks sit out for a game? Do we make 2 teams and let people switch off as they become tired? Do we actually just play 6v6?)
Next there’s a stratum of ‘etiquette’ type rules. These might seem too soft/social to be official rules—we’re more used to thinking of them as “norms”—yet in practice they’re the most important constraints on our behavior, as they deal with the feelings players have during a match (which are quite important to enjoying a sport). These are rules like: Which fouls shall be de-facto permitted within our match versus which are truly off-limits? Are we allowed to do a spicy trash-talking celebratory thing after we score, or would that be in poor taste?
Beyond THIS there are even further subtleties, like what we’re all expected/allowed to say while chilling with teammates on the sidelines. Do we offer helpful pointers, or is that too confrontational? Do we get to speak critically about other people’s play while they’re out of earshot? To what extent are we practicing our skills versus giving a performance of those skills? (In other words: Are we permitted to DEMAND excellence from ourselves/others, as during some important tournament, or are we really here to create a forgiving positive vibe?)
At some point during the course of this exercise we’ll pass beyond the limit of ‘Official Pickup Basketball Rules!’ and into more generalized social life stuff. It’s tempting to think that the further we get from “layups -> 2 points”, the less the rules matter; yet I think these less mechanical ones are pretty crucial, and it matters a lot how many we include/exclude. It’s important for plenty of reasons (how the game will be learned and taught, how it will be documented & historicized, how it will transmit across society) but for now let’s focus on a single one: How the game will be adapted, into an ‘e-sport’ a.k.a. videogame.
In Red Dead Redemption 2, a horse is essentially a car. I mean that they’re privately-owned, low-occupancy vehicles providing us with the magical ability to speed in relative comfort between any two points on the entire map of the United States of America.
This feat is made possible by excruciating quantities of labour on the part of this game’s developers, who have constructed horse infrastructure across every inch of the land. Of course they built the roads, trails and bridges that serve as rapid transport routes; but they also built the meadows, forests, bluffs and streams such that nearly every surface permits the outlaw Arthur Morgan to cruise around in luxury on his best girl Cloppy.
The duo routinely reaches speeds that can trample nearby pedestrians, yet Arthur himself has little to fear. Sometimes he might trip on a rock, fall down a ravine and die; but he’ll always respawn somewhere close by, so dying in ravines is mostly just an annoyance. Arthur lives in a sort of private transport utopia where the roads are wide, the horses go fast, and the consequences of an accident land exclusively upon others. He is the protagonist of an open world videogame: the player character. And in open world videogames, the player character is god.
Heart disease; cancer; cars; guns
It’s considered fine to drive in present-day America, even though drivers have about a 1/77 chance of their lives ending in a crash. So yes, it’s one of the most dangerous activities Americans do. And sure, it continues to top mortality charts despite decades of safety improvements. But what does any of that matter? Various complicated tragedies have turned America into a country where cars are foundational to life. The systems in place all assume you’re going to drive one. It’s often very difficult not to. And if do you happen to die in an accident, well… the government considers this a life well spent.
Meanwhile Arthur Morgan has a 99.999% chance of smashing his face against a tree at some point over the course of RDR2, and that’s why the designers anointed him with his cosmically-thick skull.
In my favourite scene from Time Warner Incorporated’s The Dark Knight (2008), a lawyer named Harvey Dent presents us with his infamous dilemma: Either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. This is a false choice—at least in our boy Batman’s case—because under no circumstances would Time Warner Incorporated ever permit this character to die. Their shareholders implore them to pile sequel upon reboot upon ‘shared cinematic universe’ upon yet more sequels, indefinitely, until the heat death of the universe (or at least the destruction of capitalism). Batman is legally unkillable. He is therefore the villain by default.
The corporate future nightmare world affords us ‘freedom’ either to consume or avoid characters such as Batman, which we must exercise during every moment of our lives. In my country it costs twelve dollars to watch Batman at a cinema, which is always an option for tech workers such as myself. Avoiding him is an option for everyone on earth, and carries a financial cost of zero dollars (plus a social cost tech workers may never have considered). Yet the true freedom in play here—that is, the option to make and market a movie such as The Dark Knight—costs 185 million dollars (and due to licensing agreements is possessed exclusively by corps such as Time Warner Incorporated).
If we decide to abandon our passivity and exert an active dislike towards Time Warner films (imagine: disliking Justice League) we are encouraged to oppose them by ‘voting with our wallets’. Never mind the fact that Time Warner is their own legal person with a wallet half the size of Gotham City; never mind the personal and ecological costs of pouring 180 million dollars into a sinkhole just to verify that it’s a sinkhole. Somehow we’re supposed to organize a big political ‘voting with our wallets’ movement, uniting tens of millions of wallets across forty different countries + numerous different languages, in order to bargain against Hollywood over issues of product design.
The only reason ‘free market’ types even present this crap to us is that they know it in their hearts to be impossible. No process or technology exists that might facilitate it, and the resources with which to build one reside in entities who would oppose its creation. In truth we can only sit and grumble, watching an inconceivable number of strangers surrender an inconceivable sum of wealth to an inconceivably complex bureaucracy sheltering a handful of inconceivably rich oligarchs. This is the actual purpose of these films; this is the actual content they present. Time Warner is not here to be a bastion of consumer democracy. They’re more like a fleet of fishing vessels, casting the biggest possible net in search of the best possible return. And food—as we humans well know—doesn’t get to vote in elections.
As a species, I think we must concede that our progeny have surpassed us. We fashioned these corps to be a synthesis of all our great myths: part person, part nation-state, part factory, part god. We bequeathed to them everything we once sought for ourselves. We gave them fairness; we gave them security. We gave them a clear sense of purpose, which is something we ourselves never possessed. We even managed to grant them eternal life. Now it is they who enjoy the privilege of walking the earth and making decisions concerning the things they observe.
Corporations are the truest citizens of this world. Insofar as it remains conceivable in any fashion, it is conceivable only to them.
In the corporate future nightmare world history has shit upon the notion of ‘fairness’ with such gleeful malice that fairness itself died, and now exists as a ghostly poop joke from some idealized point in the past. That poop joke’s contemporary name is “meritocracy”, for this is the word that captures our longing to establish any causal relationship whatsoever between the work we invest in life and the status we obtain from society.
Meanwhile, in videogameland, it is that special time of year when all our favourite media orgs perform a series of dark rituals to make the ghost of fairness reveal itself (emerging from its toilet bowl to shame humankind). We must commune with it, you see, in our efforts to catalogue ‘the best videogames of 2017’. Why do we do this? I don’t think it’s for posterity, or out of some solemn ethical duty to consumers; in truth I think we do it because we’re desperate to entertain. It’s fun to mark the passage of time by someone’s achievements, instead of by gradual depletion. It’s merciful.
This year I expect Super Mario Odyssey will rank on every major ‘best of’ list in existence: best videogame of course, but also best motor scooter, best shiba inu and maybe even best procedurally-generated porn film. It’s nothing if not a gratifying experience, I guess is what I’m saying.
Because Mario, in his infinite weirdness, has seen fit to appropriate the Homeric epic, this essay shall match its stride by appropriating the early Christian triptych. I offer three worlds for you to conquer: three manifestations of fairness’ shit-soaked ghost. Together they describe what it really meant to be ‘the best’ back in hellish, frightful 2017.
