Seriously dude. You’re basing your political reasoning on demonstrating an old wive’s tale that most of us in Kentucky know is bunk.

Can we put this douchebag and Michael Moore in the same padded cell, please? This is the perfect example of what I was talking about here.

(HT to Andrew Sullivan)

After only checking a few stories on the three major news networks’ websites this evening, I’m glad I managed to miss most mentions of today’s protests. As my good friend, Travis Prinzi, says, “Everyone is lying” about healthcare to one degree or another. I quit being bothered by the debate a while ago, because it really isn’t a debate. As Obama’s address to Congress showed, it has only become a matter of one side unable to put forth a clear message while the other side thinks “clear” means screaming at the top of its lungs. I couldn’t figure why I was seeing all the signs that would, in the same sentence, equate Obama with a fascist, a socialist, and a Communist. None of those things can co-exist with the other. But then I realized that for anyone throwing those terms out there (whatever their political affiliation), the words are no more than synonymous with “not free.”

Instead, I find myself rather worried at the moment.

In the largest city in Kentucky, Louisville, a couple of goomers apparently decided to show up to today’s protests wearing camouflage. Now, camouflage is a time-honored tradition in Kentucky, one in which I occasionally partake, myself. I find my digital ACU’s and MARPAT knockoffs to be comfortable, roomy, and immensely useful. And, yes, like many-a-Kentuckian, I do wear them in public, and not solely to work around my house. However, I don’t go around in public carrying signs that recruit for right-wing militias, urging people to carry AK47′s instead of pitchforks. I’ll let you put 2 and 2 together to figure out what their message is for. Now, in no way do I consider these guys and their ilk as representative of conservatives in general. But, they are representative of a very loud voice in the conservative movement. They don’t strike me as actually angry with much that Obama is doing, but more so angry that a Democrat is president.

I am as turned off by this as I was in 2003 when anti-war protesters decided their best course of action was to lay down in the streets and stop traffic. Yeah. Like that’s going to help anyone understand the message. I will remark on one significant difference, though. Anti-war protesters didn’t show up in public strapped with loaded weapons as a “message” for the president, or talk openly of the possibility of an armed revolt headed by a “Bubba Effect” (thanks, Glenn Beck). I find Michael Moore to be as depressingly vapid and simple-minded as many conservatives do. But I’ve never seen the guy insinuate that anyone should die or face an armed revolution because they disagree with him. These guys lost their minds at suggestions that Bush should have been impeached. Can you imagine their response if liberal activists like Moore showed up in public with weapons, suggesting the possibility of civil war after 9/11?

This is my problem with some of the more vocal responses on the Right to Obama. It’s not a disagreement. They’ve become openly threatening, and mainstream republicans have done comparatively little to distance themselves from such statements.

I’ll be even more bothered if this tactic works because it would signal the total breakdown of civic discourse in the United States. Instead of anything even masquerading as civil discussion, the political process will give way to barely contained threats of violence. There are legitimate issues to have with this plan (as I’ll discuss in a minute), but Obama’s healthcare plan is not a threat to freedom in the US. Socializing medicine has never been considered an indicator of oncoming political tyranny. And sorry, but “Obamacare” is not Action T4, as I’ve heard suggested in recent days. The plan does not work toward euthanizing gays and lesbians, the mentally or physically handicapped, or religious minorities in the name of a Final Solution.

I’ve decided in recent weeks that I have no philosophical problem with federally subsidized healthcare. I respect Travis immensely in his support of the Libertarian response to Obama’s healthcare plan:

We recognize the freedom of individuals to determine the level of health insurance they want, the level of health care they want, the care providers they want, the medicines and treatments they will use and all other aspects of their medical care, including end-of-life decisions.

Ideally, I agree. Let people determine what they want. It’s a simple principle. And I’m certainly glad libertarians are pointing out that federally subsidized healthcare isn’t a purely democratic or liberal soapbox. But I think this is too naive in the face of the problems that exist at the moment. Current insurance programs often mitigate against “the level of health insurance” that many Americans want or need. I am denied individually purchased health insurance because of a “pre-existing condition” that I haven’t suffered from in more than ten years. When I’ve applied for effective plans that we can afford, I have been denied. Instead, we purchase coverage for me through my wife’s job at a ridiculous rate. Since I’m stringing together multiple adjunct positions (not what I want) in order to make a decent payday, my part-time status at all schools for which I teach means they extend no benefits at all to me. A public option would be of tremendous benefit to us, at least in the short term. And on an added note, I would bet my wife would disagree! But, we manage to live in love and harmony!

As a Kentuckian, a husband, and a man, every bone in my body pushes me to avoid help and assistance in every way I can. I have been taught to be self-reliant to such a degree that I balk at even accepting financial help from family members. I would give it without question to nearly anyone who asks. It’s something I’ve learned to value in the idealized notion of independence bred into me in the Appalachian Foothills, and in my reverence for the vision of America put forward by people like Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This means that while I might have severe problems accepting help, I have no problem whatsoever seeing a little extra pulled from paycheck if it means some kid suffering from leukemia can get treatment without forcing his parents into bankruptcy to do it.

However, I recognize there is a level of naivete at work in this formulation, as well. While I have no philosophical problem with national healthcare, I do have practical worries. My one major criticism of the healthcare bill up to this point is cost. Even if you don’t balk at the numbers that have been thrown around, it’s a safe bet that the actual costs will be far more than current estimates suggest. It’s a government program. Costs are always higher than initially estimated.

In addition, while such healthcare works wonderfully well in nearly every other industrialized, democratic nation on Earth, none of them have a population well over 300 million people. Even if you’re only talking about a fraction of that number coming under the umbrella of a public option, it would still be an undertaking whose proportions could be staggeringly complicated and impractical. My skepticism, then, doesn’t grow from some abstract fear that freedom will be lost, or the “moral fiber” of America will be left tattered. Instead, I’m simply skeptical such a plan could actually “work” on that large a scale.

It’s this set of concerns that forced me to ignore the Facebook statement circulated by many of my friends the other day about the public option. It’s a noble sentiment to want to ensure that people do not suffer needlessly. But it’s as narrowly construed as the libertarian argument above. It ignores real-world constraints.

So, the thinking head finds itself where it usually does — unsure of an answer. Independents for Homer J. Simpson in 2012…

(Given how I’ve tagged this post, how long will it take before someone blows up my site and accuses me of being a pinko commie or a right-wing fascist? Jay, I know you’ll respond with your unmatched eloquence!)

Anyone have suggestions about what to do?  Think I should just move everything over?  Or do you have suggestions for things to talk about here?

And the crappy thing is that I finally found a theme that I really like here…  Oooohhh, the irony!

Over time, much of my gaming and media thoughts will move to the new site.  I haven’t decided if I’ll try to export the stuff already here over.

I won’t recap the film’s genesis.  Doing a little Google searching will fill you in on the details concerning Peter Jackson, a Halo movie, and some controversy over Blomkamp as the chosen director.  For our purposes here, only one thing from that saga need concern us: this is Blomkamp’s first feature film.  He’s made a name in small formats.  But, Jackson is the first to hand a full-length feature over to Blomkamp.  The man can do quite a bit with a comparatively small budget. If last year saw the comic book superhero film elevated to far more than the sum of its parts, this year will be remembered because District 9 made great leaps towards recovering the sci-fi film from Michael Bay and George Lucas (oh George, what have you wrought…?).  But while good, District 9 doesn’t quite transcend its genre conventions.

The movie combines the visceral punch of David Cronenberg’s visuals with the action and intensity of a film like Black Hawk Down with a plot right out of Insomniac Games’s Resistance. Sci-fi conventions, war-movie action, and the fragility of the human body are married into an apartheid allegory that also conjures images of modern inequality, violence, and disaffected societies.

Shot in an ad hoc mixture of traditional filmic techniques and a faux documentary style, the audience watches a story in which the perspective is never settled.  Blomkamp bounces his viewers back and forth from interviews, to security camera footage, to shaky-cam a la Saving Private Ryan, to the standard movie perspective.  I felt the whole exercise to be making me a little nervous, leaving me unsure of my impressions of the story versus those of the characters (presented as real people).  The audience finds themselves in the position of learning something that on-screen characters don’t — and the privilege matters.  Our position shows us a level of humanity and conflict within the characters (human and not), while on-screen characters seem both willfully oblivious and unknowingly duped.  Yet, I never felt quite sure of some characters’ motivations or feelings towards others or their promises.  Even the most sympathetic characters show signs of duplicity.

We watch a South African man named Wikus van der Merwe (played very well by newcomer Sharlto Copley) take on a new job for Multi-National United (MNU) and it’s attached private military contractor.  His task is to “evict” refugee aliens from their horrifying slum (namesake for the film) and relocate them to “better” (i.e. more controllable) quarters — all 1.8 million of them.  Wikus is a bit of a milquetoast, and the task doesn’t exactly go smoothly.  As soon as the operation starts, gunfire erupts and brutality becomes the main weapon of choice.  The aliens in question, dubbed “prawns,” come to Johannesburg as refugees — starving, emaciated, and near-dead.  Rescue efforts quickly devolve as alien and human behaviors come into conflict.  Instead of being rescued, human impatience leads to the prawns’ segregation and forced internment within District 9.

The prawns not only appear animal-like (both “prawn” and “creature” come off as derogatory terms designating them as not-human) but seemingly behave like it, as well.  They have a craving for raw meat and cat food.  The site of them digging through garbage becomes ironic.  They seem not only to be scavenging animals, but as their intelligence and caring emerge, these behaviors conjure images of humans doing the same on the nightly news.  We are shifted away from seeing them as animals to seeing them as other beings bordering on social meltdown because of problems beyond their control.  One young alien child becomes a central character (son of a prawn named Christopher Johnson — that’s not a typo), and I found myself watching in terror, afraid the little boy would be killed or executed.  There is certainly precedent for it in the movie.  The attentive audience can’t help but both marvel at the little boy’s desire to see his people’s home world, as well as wonder about the psychological damage he’s suffered during all the terror he’s seen.

District 9 never rubs the audience’s face in gore like Saw or Hostel, but it doesn’t shy away from it in key moments, either.  We are witness to a lab full of medical and weapons experiments on prawns that would make Josef Mengele proud.  We see carnage on the battlefields in District 9′s slums.  And Wikus’s body undergoes some horrifying changes.  But this isn’t bathed in buckets of blood like most modern horror films.  It’s designed to make the audience cringe at behavior and emotion, not recoil in terror at gore.

As the movie goes forward, though, it’s narrative style evolves not just as an ad hoc mixture, but as an ever-changing recipe for that mixture.  The documentary-style interviews fade in frequency as the movie progresses.  The viewer becomes more embedded in Wikus’s journey, and the perspective reinforces the idea until key moments.  In those key moments Blomkamp wants to juxtapose the audience’s perspective against that of the folks in the movie to demonstrate that we don’t need to be as dismissive as they are.  It’s an interesting device that had me both thinking and feeling through the whole experience.

One real flaw I found in the movie, though, was its pace.  For all it’s trying to marry together, the wedding feels a little too shotgun for me.  Interesting ideas, emotions, and characters are established, but they’re never allowed to fully breathe because of the need to push the sci-fi action.  The climactic battle scene is exquisitely shot, reminiscent of Black Hawk Down (right down to the soundtrack, actually).  But Blomkamp seems to get a little too caught up in staging a frenetic firefight rather than telling his story.  It’s thrilling, but I didn’t want the thrillride in this case.  I wanted to maintain the aliens-as-refugee others allegory.  The battle is actually between differing economic and cultural attitudes competing for control of District 9.  The PMC doesn’t fight the prawns, but a local group of armed thugs who sell contraband to the prawns.  Yet, these decisions never really “humanize” the prawns enough.  They aren’t shown dodging the fight, or fighting back.  Instead of seeing them as victimized others seeking empowerment, Christopher Johnson’s brilliance and ambition comes across as an aberration in a prawn society full of “worker drones.”  I know he’s not, given all the alien technology scattered around.  But, the film never pays much more than lip-service to this.  His fellow beings are never fully present in the movie.

Which leads me to the other major flaw I found in this: just like some of the best action films, the characters seem to recede behind the action a bit too much.  The PMC commander for MNU is a little too stock as the film’s symbol of human violence and evil.  He is Darth Vader in a combat vest.  Scratch that — Vader changes over time.  Think more the bad guy in every 80s Arnold Swarzenegger flick.  He’s too easy to despise.  I have no problem with his downfall.  Thus, the film’s portrayal of humans starts too look a little too much like the dehumanizing portrayals of the prawns the film wants to critique.  That’s bad for a film in which the themes involve character and perception.  I kept looking for a reason to sympathize him.  But I don’t get it.

The movie is good, even very good.  But it’s kept from true greatness.  The effects are spectacular, especially given the film’s budget.  Choice of angle, perspective, and cinematography do a lot to mask some limitations, but I never felt like I was watching CGI.  It manages to create empathy for a character and a species as far removed from human as they could be.  And that’s no small task.  But, it unfortunately does more to make me want revenge against the human bad guys than it does to make me root for the prawns seeking their rights.  I don’t so much empathize with their oppression, fright, and desparation as much as a sympathize with their desire for revenge.

See that?  It’s an anthology kids, one dedicated to Harry Potter.  And your’s truly has an essay in it.  I’m psyched because the essay was a culmination of a lot of work, and this anthology has been in the pipeline for a while from Zossima Press.

It’s edited by my good friend at The Hog’s Head, Travis Prinzi — who has his own well received HP related book available, as well.

Several other authors of fine talent and scholarship have work in the anthology as well.  It is well worth the read.

Click the image to go to Amazon and buy it when it becomes available!

Thanks go out to both Travis and Bob Trexler, Zossima’s managing editor, for their hard work on the book.  Their help definitely made my work far better than it was.

I picked this instead of the movie poster for obvious reasons.

Since Pierce Brosnan exited the James Bond movies, leaving the reigns of the UK’s greatest gadget-lovin’ superspy to Daniel Craig, Bond has become a leaner, meaner machine who relies more on his hands and his body’s ability to take punishment.  Have you wondered what happened to all the high tech gizmos Q has surely been developing while Bond batters the baddies with his fists?  Apparently, GI Joe hired him, sent him to Egypt, and gave him a budget that probably caused the world economic crisis while he sucked up R&D dollars like you wouldn’t believe. The only way the plot in this movie makes sense is if the gadgetry exists.  I mean, Ripcord does manage to fly from Moscow to Washington DC in about ten minutes. 

The simple way to review this film is to say that if you liked Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, then you’ll probably like GI Joe: Rise of Cobra.  And you can count me in that group.  It’s mindless popcorn fluff (Jamie and I ate almost 3/4′s of a large bucket — extra butter), so take it for what it’s worth.  No meditations on the human condition.  Most of the key character development here is undercut by some really bad acting. And it’s clear that some of the film suffers from a comparatively underwhelming effects budget.  Oh, it has plenty of special effects.  But, by today’s big budget standards, some of them aren’t nearly as sharp as they should be.  But, again, the movie was fun.  And I’ll freely admit that part of that fun for me was just the heroin-like overdose of nostalgia I felt the whole time.  But, because the flaws are there…

Channing Tatum is never remotely convincing as Duke, and it’s not like the character is Hamlet or anything.  Duke is a cartoon stereotype of a John Wayne caricature.  Look tough.  Sound stern.  That’s the stage direction.  The one line I remember from Duke as a child was this:  “I’m gonna kick the mustard out of that hotdog!”  I dare say Channing Tatum would say this with a straight face and completely eff it up.  In the first fifteen minutes of the film when Duke is “rallying” his troops, I couldn’t help but laugh — out loud.  A paragon of leadership and stability he is not.  Marlon Wayans kept trying to riff with him with a little comedy.  At some point, I’m pretty sure that Wayans just decided to make fun of Tatum to see if he could figure it out.

Truth is that most of the characters aren’t given enough screentime to really develop anything more than which side they’re on and why.  If you’re pissed, you fight for Cobra.  If you ever smile in the film, you probably fight for GI Joe.  Pretty simple way to tell the black hats from the white hats.  One exception might be Sienna Miller as The Baronness.  She won’t win any awards for anything here, but there is a playfulness in the character that Miller clearly enjoys on-screen.  She, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Rex/Cobra Commander), and Dennis Quaid (General Hawk) seem to be the ones that understand the full absurdity of the film, and so they play their parts to the hilt.  I know, at some point, Dennis Quaid had to look around at his surroundings and ask himself, “How the hell did I get here?”

Ray Park, again mute and unrecognizable and badass, actually manages to emote more effectively than pretty much anyone else in the film.  And he never speaks a single line while hidden behind his mask.  The Snake Eyes/Stormshadow backstory actually occupies a significant portion of the film’s exposition, scattered throughout as flashbacks.  Their encounters are appropriately spectacular, especially in one scene.  It is one of the weirdest scenes I’ve ever witnessed in a film. The two ninjas beat the living crap out of each other — smashed scenery, meat cleavers embedded in wooden pillars, blood flying — and they are not more than ten years old.  Seriously.  And the martial arts expertise in the scene is downright astonishing.  And, of course, disturbing.  The scene is as violent as any in the film.  My inner ten year old looked at the ten year olds in front of me and totally empathized with their gleaming eyes.  Then I wondered which one of them would end up with a broken nose by the end of the night.  I think the two mothers chaperoning the boys had the same question, given the looks they were exchanging with each other.

Once the action starts, you never have time to stop for anything.  Planes, gizmos, VTOL things with no real designation, superarmed Hummers, underwater vehicles, energy weapons, guns, explosions.  These things are a constant here.  The final climactic battle is essentially the Death Star reset under the North Pole.  More than a few scenes in this last 30 minutes are cribbed shot-for-shot from the Star Wars universe.

But, as a GI Joe movie, it all works.  The corniness, absurdity, and action strike a chord with pretty much any boy who was 10 to 12 years old in the mid ’80s.  The general tone is the original cartoon brought to live action life.  If you’re like me and you desparately wanted the USS Flagg as a kid, or learned a little about life from a GI Joe PSA, you’ll have fun.  Seeing (the adult) Snake Eyes and Stormshadow kick ass is worth the eight bucks.  Just know what to expect when you go in…it’ll be half the battle in enjoying the movie!  (sorry…  couldn’t resist)

(HT to Brain Rage)

[HT to James Webb]

In my paper I’m trying to pass through SIGDOC‘s review process, I’ve managed to sharpen some thoughts on experience as a conceptual term that can be applied to culture studies.  A 2003 article by Torben Grodal in The Video Game Theory Reader has led me to see narrative in a fashion that is a bit different from what literary studies has made of it.  Grodal posits storytelling as essentially a cognitive process composed of four elements: perception, emotion, cognition, and action.  Below is a passage from my paper in which I lay the foundation for an analytical model I’ve been working on in some fashion for about six months:

Torben Grodal’s cognitive model of narrative asserts “the experience of stories is based on central embodied mechanisms” [6]. He argues for an understanding of narrativity as an experiential set of processes, and not a structural formation bound to the particulars of the medium of transmission: “Our experience of stories exist as representation of exterior worlds and they may be described as such, but at the same time they are body-brain-internal processes that need to follow the innate specification of that platform” [6]. The audience proceeds through a four-stage cognitive process. Very briefly, an audience
member notices something (perception), suffers some kind of affective response (emotion), makes a decision about how to react (cognition), and then performs whatever strategy she decides upon
(action) [6]. In effect, any artifact has narrative potential depending upon a person’s affective response to the stimuli. Yet, the difficult-to-predict emotional responses become the cognitive hinge that can greatly determine the running narrative an audience member constructs in relation to specific experiences. Do the tools utilized within the artifact allow the audience to effectively engage with that artifact in the way it asks? Or, does the artifact ultimately commit some subterfuge against itself?

Though narrative theory has a wide array of branches now, its modern roots are in Seymour Chatman and Gerard Genette and their different structural theories of narrative.  Chatman’s 1978 Story and Discourse had tremendous influence in early games studies discussions, as narratologists and ludologists went back and forth about a dichotomy in time that he saw as a requisite in all narratives.  The structure of the medium defined its narrative capacity by creating a “story” time and a “discourse” time.  “Story” referred to the time/setting of the events within the story.  “Discourse” referred to the time in which the story is told.  In effect, Chatman theorized that the two could never happen simultaneously.  A story could not “happen” and be told at the same time.  No matter how quickly a story is formed from events, even in our 24 hour news cycle, story and discourse are always asynchronous.

Many prominent games studies scholars initially argued that such a thing is not true in games because events unfolded in response to player input.  Thus, there was no true temporal difference.

What struck me hard in my first reading of Grodal’s theory was that he deposited story formation in the reader and her interpretations of what she perceives.  The structure of the medium didn’t hold some kind of primacy.  Instead, narrative emerges within the interchange of the text and the reader as something at least partially contingent upon the reader.  It’s very close to Reader Response Criticism, particularly the phenomenological or post-structural views described in the link.

What is starting to emerge from this the more I think about it is that our experiences with media can be described this way.  Looking at Grodal’s theory in one sense, his different components seem almost elemental or instinctual within the human condition.  Emotional responses to our perceptions are not necessarily conscious choices, but are reactions that are felt in some way within the body and mind.  They are “embodied”.

Thus, “experience” with media is a word that attempts to understand that embodied response.  When we speak of media as an experience, what we’re really saying is that our perception and understanding of it move into realms that are difficult to analyze, or are perhaps impossible to really analyze. Thus, what that experience “means” to audience members is immensely difficult to grasp.  <i>Transformers 2</i> is a good example.  There isn’t a proper “story” in that movie to really piece together.  But, does that mean it doesn’t affect its audience in profound ways.  Weaving together nostalgia, spectacle, epic summer bombast, and archetypes, I witnessed an audience very much affected by the film.

For games, the analytical model I’ve come up with is this:

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows Grodal’s theory developed as a cognitive matrix through which the player filters her engagement with the gamespace’s rules and fiction (an idea from Jesper Juul’s Half-Real).  The concentric circles are resonances, or consequences of player response, as they radiate outward.  In theory, every element within the central core of Figure 1 can resonate, perhaps even simultaneously.  Meaning emerges from negotiated relationships among these elements as their resonances ripple across each other.

In effect, I’m beginning to wonder if “meaning” is a term too strictly conceived in analytical terms — something that can and needs to be analyzed, taxonomied, categorized, etc.  Instead, meaning can engage at a more emotional or affective level.  Or even a ritual one.

In terms of communication design, the idea points designers toward the need to account for these embodied experiences in user interfaces and usability.  Knowing how the representation (or fiction) of a medium bonds with its rules/tools through the player’s affective elements can help game designers particularly develop game spaces that more affectively develop experiences and meaning.

I think…