If you were a working person in the place where I grew up, you probably spent years of your life riding the Expo Line to & from some job in downtown Vancouver. You probably saw the concrete bricks arranged on the roof of a particular house, located between Edmonds and 22nd Street Skytrain Stations, spelling out some writing in English: “ISLAM READ? QURAN“
Below the Skytrain line is a cycling path dubbed the ‘BC parkway’, and in February it’s quite nice to walk this stretch from Edmonds back to sχʷayməɬ (a.k.a. the part of New West where I live). On a clear afternoon you can track the position of the sun as it slides below the mountains: proof that this river basin is still one of the most beautiful places in the world.
The water level along stal̓əw̓ rises and falls in complicated ways, hiding and revealing this sandbar. It’s a good place for seagulls and crows (sometimes great blue herons!); though if humans tried to walk on this, their legs would sink 3 feet into the mud.
The City of New Westminster built a wooden boardwalk along this northern bank decades ago, & if you take pictures from the edge of that thing you can almost make it look like a screen from some point & click adventure game! (Maybe one where you play as a bird.)
This part of stal̓əw̓ is what people call ‘The North Arm’, and it’s the basis for labelling all the industrial land along this side of the river (I actually live in so marginal a part of town that I fall within the boundaries of a shadow neighborhood called ‘North Arm North’! You won’t really find it on any of the ‘neighborhood maps’.)
My new roommate and I went walking in the city; I’d brought my camera, & she’d brought a folding stool to carry from her old apartment. We used it as a tripod for this long exposure of the infamous barge at Í7iy̓el̓shn (otherwise known as ‘Sunset Beach’).
This thing washed up here during a massive climate change-induced rainstorm, & it’s stayed for months while various authorities scheme on how to remove it (I assume they’re actually squabbling about who should pay for its removal). The park board put up a sign reading “BARGE CHILLING BEACH”, but this was not its proper name; someone came by later and corrected that using the Squamish word + some orange spraypaint.
Lots of people talk about how ‘open world’ games are guilty of a particular bait & switch. As I wrote back in 2015 (in a ‘Slavoj Žižek’ sorta tone):
“They seek to let you do anything, which of course means there is nothing to do! Their attempts to regulate your rise to power flatten them to an exercise in exchanging meaningless junk for the means to accrue more meaningless junk, and their deluge of tiny consequences for all your tiny actions of course renders them consequence-free. Their unique storyworlds—immersion in which is supposed to be the entire point of playing—somehow become completely external to them, since of course every ‘open world’ from Middle Earth to Mad Max manages to be exactly the same. You say you want an open world, but my god, don’t you actually want the opposite!?“
Lately I’ve been reading David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5000 Years”, & it’s given me some exciting thoughts (to me, lol) about why open world games tend to be this way! Like, let’s take an entry from one of my favorite franchises to throw rocks at: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Now, the player character in this game is Kassandra & I like her just fine, but I’ve noticed something weird about her & I can’t get it out of my head. How, exactly, does Kassandra’s drachmae bag work?
Before you say anything, listen: I’m obviously no stranger to unrealistic videogame tropes! I know it’s common for game characters like Link to somehow carry a thousand rupees around in his tiny concealable wallet (or for RPG characters to somehow tromp about with 350,000 golden coins in their inventory). Of course it’s fine for videogames to use abstractions, & to be nonrealistic in whatever way they like…
Still though, these AssCreed games show us quite an extravagant form of it don’t they? The characters in this setting live explicitly on ancient Earth, which was a while before we had forms of global credit; yet all the characters traditionally spend copious amounts of time sorta ‘e-transferring’ coinage at each other in return for various acts of murder & intrigue. Always often & effortlessly, payments received from this country over here (say for killing a guy) can instantaneously become payments made in that country there (say for new leather boots). Kassandra just reaches into her pocket, & e.g.: 100,000 drachmae now exist within her clenched fist. It’s magical, & several steps removed from Zelda’s ‘3000 rupees in a wallet’, & that’s interesting!
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.
