#But they also weren’t interested in that art form enough in particular the political contexts of it

[rotzaprachim]

As a staunch lover of that style of music I found Daisy jones and the six in both book and show form sooooo disappointing

[jamsque]

Bitterness in the Age of Fighting

I was excited when the first episode of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness appeared in my youtube feed last Monday, I’m willing to watch anything Jon Bois puts his name on right now. Most of his content is centered around American football and basketball and baseball, which is great, those are all sports I have watched at least semi-regularly at some point in my life, but for the past few years I’ve followed Mixed Martial Arts more closely than any of them. Felix Biederman, the writer and narrator of the show, was a new name to me: I know Chapo Trap House by reputation but the most I have ever heard of it is a few clips out of context.

That first episode did some strong establishing work to set the tone and context for the series, and then got to work telling the fascinating story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Gracie family. It’s a story I know decently well, I think Felix did a good job of picking out the interesting characters and especially the moments of class struggle, and of course his words are backed up by the datawave audiovisual stylings of Jon Bois that we have come to know and love. The political ideas were more familiar and less interesting to me than the bits about fighting but I was curious to see how the show was going to try to draw connections and parallels between the rise of MMA as a spectator sport and the socio-political environment in which that rise took place.

I was engaged and I watched each episode as it came out through the week and by the end of episode four on Thursday I was starting to turn a little on the series. In this era of Youtubers with healthy Patreon support and good microphones I’ve gotten used to clear, smoothly edited, well recorded voice work and for me Felix’s narration falls short there, especially for a project with a major media company behind it. More than that, though, I was no longer on board with where the show seemed to be going, and I was worried that it would end on a sour note. I found myself agreeing with Felix’s political commentary but disagreeing more and more with his thoughts on MMA and the way he was choosing to frame the history of the sport.

The final installment disappointed me more than I had feared it might, enough to motivate me to make some kind of response to or critical reading of the whole series. Re-watching it with that in mind I (unsurprisingly) found more things I disliked. Fighting in the Age of Loneliness does an excellent job of telling the story of the ancestry, birth, rise, fall, second rise and anticipated second fall of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but along the way it makes some pretty big missteps and takes some positions that I strongly disagree with. I’m not going to break down each episode individually but I do want to lay out the issues I have with the series and in particular dig in to the problems with the last episode. Towards the end I think I might even call Felix Biederman a fascist.

First, I want to provide some context for my own thoughts about MMA, and make some inferences and assumptions about Felix’s history with the sport that I think go some way to explaining why we see it quite so differently.

*

I am absolutely not a long-time hardcore Mixed Martial Arts fan, until relatively recently I didn’t have any interest in combat sports at all. Growing up in the UK around the turn of the millenium I was aware of boxing but only from a distance, it was already well on its way to fading from the forefront of the popular sporting consciousness, and my pacifist socialist middle-class parents certainly weren’t watching Mike Tyson fights. The first contact I had with what I would later know as MMA was a grainy video I remember watching on some pre-YouTube video sharing site as a teenager: a highlight montage of a man wearing black, red and white shorts kicking various different people in the head in various different boxing rings, with the same concussive effect each time.

I became more aware of the modern sport of MMA when I started noticing the UFC in mainstream sports media headlines around 2014. Three names kept appearing in those headlines: Jon Jones, for running into things with cars, Conor McGregor, for running his mouth, but most of all Ronda Rousey, for running through every challenger the UFC put in front of her. I suspect that there are a lot of newer MMA fans who, like me, were swept up in the hype surrounding Rousey and McGregor during that time, and stuck with the sport after they finally broke their respective winning streaks and came back down to earth.

Three years later even though I watch MMA most weekends and even though I have become almost as fascinated as Felix Biederman seems to be with the history of the UFC, the people who have fought in it, and the things that they have done to each other, I still consider myself a ‘casual’ fan. This is at least partly because when I think of ‘real’ or ‘hardcore’ MMA fans, I think of people like Felix, who have been around the sport for a lot longer and are, at best, skeptical about the results of its most recent jump in popularity.

Felix doesn’t explicitly talk about the genesis of his interest in the sport but there are hints in the text. The general tone of the piece goes from being detached and historical in the first episode to personal and emotional in the last, which I think is both a deliberate choice on Felix’s part and a reflection of his own experience. The third episode, when his narrative reaches the mid-2000s, is when I think it transitions from learned history to memory, and it’s around here that Felix starts making frequent references to goings on in MMA fan culture. If I’m correct then Felix Biederman has been following MMA for at least a decade longer than I have really known what it was. He has had the time to become emotionally invested in fighters and even the UFC as an organisation in ways that I am not, and of course his initial views on the sport were formed a relatively long time ago. MMA fights in 2018 don’t look all that different than they did in 2005 but the UFC has certainly changed a lot in that time, as have public awareness of and attitudes towards a new generation of combat sports stars.

*

That decade and a half of change in the UFC is the real focus of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, but it presents itself as something much broader. The first episode is titled ‘The Invention of Fighting for Money’ and in it Felix makes a lot of sweeping statements about the past that don’t hold water. He very much tells the winner’s version of history, the narrative favoured by the UFC and the Gracie family, who would have you believe that they invented not only the modern sport of MMA but somehow the very idea of fighting itself. Felix remarks on the marketing and promotional skills of Rorion Gracie in the second episode without seeming to realise quite the degree to which he has himself fallen prey to them, and he also comes across as having the slightly fetishistic attitude towards East Asian martial arts that has become common in the USA over the past half century or so.

As he transitions out of the prologue, Felix says “the true catalyst for MMA as a sport, business and spectacle go back to Japan”, and when he goes on to describe the spread of Jujutsu from Japan to Brazil he says “after hundreds of years, Martial Arts had finally broken containment.” At the end of the series he proclaims that the “fourth era of fighting itself” is currently beginning and that the previous two ���eras’ only lasted a handful of years each.

These generalisations don’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. The history of Martial Arts or combat sports or fighting or whatever term you care to use goes back much farther than feudal Japan, and some of the other things Felix says imply that he is at least partially aware of this. As he is giving his starry-eyed take on the life of Judo’s inventor he says “As long as there are people, they will at some point want the ability to keep someone from kicking their ass, no matter how unlikely it is that they will ever get into a fight.” It strikes me as particularly American that his argument in favor of combat sports being inherent to human society is based on the concept of self-defence. I prefer a line of reasoning that is similar but based on competition: As long as there are people, they will at some point want to test their wits and skill and strength against each other.

Indeed, the story as we know it of unarmed combat sports is as old as recorded history: there are images of wrestling in four thousand year old Egyptian tombs, and the classical Greek Olympics included an event called Pankration, which could be roughly translated as ‘fighting with all of your power’, that had an almost identical ruleset to early Ultimate Fighting Championship events.

Felix oversimplifies the history of fighting as a whole, but even if we just look at what he says about Mixed Martial Arts he gets it wrong. In episode one he says “The entire sport of Mixed Martial Arts owes its existence to Mitsuyo Maeda” and then in episode two he alleges that “A world where proto-MMA existed outside of gymnasiums in Brazil seemed pretty unlikely in 1976.” A corollary of my earlier statement might be that as long as there are people testing their wits and skill and strength against each other, there will be other people who think they can do it better. People have been pitting different schools of fighting against each other and amalgamating them long before the Gracie clan existed.

A decade before the date when Felix claims that mixed martial arts were confined to Brazil, Bruce Lee was blending Wing Chun with other styles to formulate Jeet Kune Do. A decade before that a Japanese Karateka was devising a ruleset which would eventually become Kickboxing to facilitate competitions between karate and Muay Thai. In the 40s the Kajukenbo school was founded in Hawaii with the goal of rigorously testing multiple fighting styles against each other to determine which elements of each were the most effective. In the 30s a Czechoslovakian Jew was refining the boxing and wrestling he had been taught in gyms into Krav Maga in brawls against anti-semitic thugs.

In Victorian London the Bartitsu school taught gentlemen a blend of five different fighting styles from around the world, while in the music halls exhibition matches pitted boxing against Savate. Savate was itself developed over the preceding century by efforts to find a middle ground between the heavy-booted street fighting style spreading from French ports and the Queensbury rules boxing that was popular in England.

Even the legend of the birth of Muay Thai, a fighting style which has had arguably as much influence on the modern sport of MMA as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, is a story about mixed martial arts: when the Konbaung Dynasty of Burma captured a famous fighter during their battles with Siam in 1767, they offered him the chance to win his freedom if he could demonstrate the superiority of his Siamese boxing style against the Burmese school, which he promptly did by knocking out ten Burmese opponents.

Felix contradicts himself on this topic in the first episode when he describes Jigoro Kano studying western wrestling and sumo to augment his Jujutsu training and develop Judo. In the second episode when he says “In 1993 no one knew anything, and most people still thought that if you did karate the right way you could blow up somebody’s heart” he is obviously being facetious but he is also projecting his own ignorance outwards. There has always been fighting, all over the world, and there have always been evolving schools of thought about the best ways to fight and the best rules for fighting as a sport. The story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Ultimate Fighting Championship is captivating but it is not, as Felix presents it, the only story about fighting. In this regard, as with others, he seems to have internalized the some of mystique that the UFC has cultivated around itself and its history.

*

Once the history lesson is over I think Fighting in the Age of Loneliness hits its stride and Felix’s passion for the Pride FC and UFC fights and fighters that drew him into the sport shines through in the writing and the narration. His criticisms of the ways that the UFC continues to underpay and otherwise mistreat its fighters are spot on and if anything he could have gone into its anti-union policies in more depth. Before I get to the final episode, there are a few smaller criticisms I want to get out of the way.

Firstly, I would like to have seen more about modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts in the show. I largely chalk this up to the difference in perspective on the sport between Felix and myself: a female fighter was what drew me to watch the UFC in the first place so my image of the sport is one that has always included women, whereas Felix got his start watching Pride, which had no female fighters, and an all-male era of the UFC. There were women competing in MMA at that time and a few exclusively female promotions but if Felix ever watched any of them he doesn’t mention it. In the end, Ronda Rousey gets a minute and a half, Joanna Jędrzejczyk gets about 30 seconds and Cristiane Justino gets a name check.

Rousey is the only female fighter to be mentioned outside of the quarantined WMMA portion of the show, and she comes up during a rather odd accusation of nepotism that Felix levels at Dana White, one which I have heard from other longer-standing UFC fans. I am no supporter of Dana’s and I’m not seeking to defend his character, but it seems far more likely to me that the reason the UFC put so many promotional resources behind Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor is not, as Felix supposes, simply because Dana White personally liked those two fighters, but rather because he saw the opportunity to make a lot of money off of them, which he did. Dana is a fight promoter, he is notoriously fickle in his affections and the warmness he displays towards any given fighter is directly correlated to their ability to drive pay-per-view buys for his promotion.

I also think that there are some more straightforward explanations for the UFC’s success than the poetic ones that Felix understandably focuses on. The ideas of the UFC as a refuge for outcasts and the alienated, both as fighters and as fans, and the honesty of single combat in an age of uncertainty are clearly very thematically important to Fighting in the Age of Loneliness as a project. For me the series places too much importance on the role those things played in the current popularity of the sport and doesn’t put enough emphasis on, or even mention at all, some more mundane but more significant contributing factors.

The vacuum at the top of combat sports that was created when boxing all but collapsed under the accumulated weight of decades of corruption and promotional malpractice, and the brief but significant success that the WWE had with a grittier presentation of professional wrestling in the late 90s both set the stage for the rise of modern MMA in the USA. That rise was helped along by things like the value of the walk-off head kick knockout and the fourteen second armbar victory in the age of the highlight clip and the animated GIF, and the mix of astuteness and good fortune that led the UFC to put out a reality TV show featuring actual physical conflict at a time when programming was being dominated by reality shows based on exaggerating and continually re-hashing interpersonal squabbles.

*

At the end of episode four, titled “As the world fell apart, the only magic was in the cage”, Felix’s rhetoric about the things that happen during UFC fights reaches its most florid, mythological heights. Against a montage of post-fight embrace photographs he says “The magic that we wish we saw everywhere else was in the cage [...] At least there was one place where unthinkable things actually happened, at least if you put two weird people with incredible abilities in front of each other their combined experiences and opposing martial abilities would create a beautiful, maddening story.” I am not criticising Felix for being more captivated by the emotion and passion of fighting than I am but the praise and reverence which he lavishes upon his favourite period of the sport’s recent history at the end of the fourth episode clashes brutally with the way he starts the fifth.

“No-one is ever content to just like something, especially not nowadays”, he says. “We’re not just fans of things any more. We declare our media consumption habits to determine the types of people we are [...] now if someone doesn’t like something we like they hate us” These lines and the visuals that accompany them are presented as a barb aimed at the legions of TV personality and pop star fans bitterly defending their territory on social media. Although there is a hint of self-deprecation about this segment I don’t read much self-awareness here, mostly just old fashioned middle-class punching down at the popular culture of the working class.

In the way he frames what he views as the best period of the UFC’s history, Felix is himself engaging in, as he puts it, “battles that our millionaire entertainers will probably never give a shit about or even find out about”. He has taken to the field of the culture war to defend his memory of a past version of a massive, sinister entertainment company against the changes that he perceives to be ruining it.

Here is where the bitterness begins to creep in, and build. Felix starts talking about the insecurity of modern MMA fans and the sport’s image problem, but then he abruptly dispenses with those concerns and starts arguing that MMA should remain insular and niche. A this point he also waves a huge screaming red flag by describing Jon Jones as a “weird person” who is “actually pretty fascinating once you get to know him” and who has “more depth than most would know”, but we’ll get to that later.

“Who gives a shit if we don’t have hundreds of millions of people watching with us every time, and why do we care if people think we’re fucked up or weird for watching it. We know what our sport is, and we know who we are [...] It’s our stupid violent insane spectacle sport for freaks and assholes that’s as legitimate or illegitimate as any other sport in the world. Well, at least it was ours at some point.”

I recognised this argument the moment I heard it. It sounds almost word for word like an insecure gamer defending video games as an art form and as a hobby that is just for real nerds and not the masses. I know that argument very well because I have been that insecure gamer in the past. In complaining that MMA is not “ours” anymore he has jumped from “if someone doesn’t likes something we like they hate us” to “if someone likes something we like for the wrong reasons they hate us”.

This is the tone that Felix adopts for the entire final episode, and he proceeds to decry three recent changes he thinks the UFC has made in an effort to bring the sport into the mainstream, changes that he declares as already being “to the detriment of the viewers, the fighters, and ultimately, [the UFC] themselves”.

The first is the Fox TV deal, of which his criticism is that it has led to too many fights and therefore too many fighters, but he doesn’t present any reasons why more fights has been a bad thing. He talks about how poorly the UFC compensates its rank-and-file fighters, which is a great argument for better fighter pay, but is not an argument for fewer paid fighters or fewer fight cards.

The second is the UFC’s apparel deal with Reebok, which he accurately assesses as a disaster for their fighters.

The third is drug testing, and for me this is where Fighting in the Age of Loneliness goes completely off the rails. The first thing he says in this segment is probably the only part of it I agree with: “the vast majority of your favourite athletes use steroids.”

*

Felix is right that the UFC asked the US Anti-Doping Agency to start testing its fighters more to provide an image of legitimacy than because they actually care about fair competition, but his main problem with the policy is that performance enhancing drugs are in fact cool and good. Earlier in the series he celebrates the way that Pride FC’s “loose medical oversight” and “pro-steroid policy” allowed its fighters to “consistently break laws of god and man,” now he gleefully exclaims that “Steroids are actually kind of amazing.”

“The human body is absolutely not designed to fight for 15 to 25 minutes, but steroids help make it work”. Felix provides no justification whatsoever for this claim, and it’s a ridiculous one that springs from the same myopic view of the history of combat sports that he expresses in the early episodes. To present just one counterexample, fighters in classical Greece did not have the benefit of modern nutritional science and training methods, let alone anabolic steroids, but the only time limit on Pankration bouts was sunset. Fights that last more than 25 minutes might not be the most fun to watch but they’ve certainly been happening since long before the steroid era.

Felix doubles down on this position. While he acknowledges that steroids “have their side effects” he asserts that “it is impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without some chemical help.” This is another absurd claim, he does try to back this one up but in doing so he immediately undermines it: “Talk to any retired fighter, and they’ll give a number anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of their former training partners juicing.” Rather than proving his point, this statement suggests that it is not at all impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without chemical help because at the very least ten percent of fighters are doing it. This scaled-back version of his original pronouncement does make the prospects of success seem pretty bleak for clean fighters, but Felix doesn’t care. He is happy to accept that if most fighters are doping then fighters need to dope to compete and therefore it is OK for fighters to dope.

USADA testing in the UFC has, in Felix’s opinion, fucked things up. There are a lot of very valid criticisms that he could make about the inconsistent way that the policy has been applied to different fighters or the odd ways it has conflicted and overlapped with state athletic commission testing policies or the lack of fighter engagement in the process of rolling out the program leading to confusion and uncertainty about the rules, but he doesn’t. Instead of talking about the massive unregulated supplement industry in the USA and the habit that some supplement brands have of ‘accidentally’ slipping a bit of the good stuff in their products to make sure that their customers get the gains they crave, he complains that fighters are being punished for “by-products of over the counter substances”. By-products and contaminants are not the same thing, I’m not sure if Felix just misspoke here or if he genuinely doesn’t understand the problem he is talking about.

He goes on to moan that the punishments for breaking the rules of the sport are longer under this new program. He doesn’t say why the longer bans are bad, just that the UFC has been ‘capricious’, and it seems obvious to me that the reason he disagrees with the longer bans is that he thinks PED usage is a good thing. Let’s address that idea.

There are two main reasons why I think performance enhancing drugs should be banned in almost all sports. The first is that PED use is bad for the long term health of athletes. We know that there are permanent negative effects associated with the use of anabolic steroids, and there are scores of other widely used PEDs that simply haven’t been around for long enough for the consequences of their use to be properly understood. It is possible to argue from this position for the regulation and standardisation of PED use in sports, and although I disagree with that line of reasoning I do think it has some merit, but there is no hint of this argument in Fighting in the Age of Loneliness.

I think the most practical way to prevent athletes from being incentivised to gamble with their future health for short-term gain, especially in a sport like MMA which already carries so much physical risk, is to ban the use of PEDs and enforce that ban with testing. Felix talks about steroids helping fighters to recover quickly from serious injuries, but I don’t think that is a worthwhile tradeoff to ask them to make, and I don’t think it would be a bad thing for the health of fighters if less prevalent PED usage meant that fewer of them had to endure the accumulated physical toll of fighting four or five times a year.

The second reason is a purely sporting one. The rules of all sports are arbitrary, but they usually constitute an attempt to delineate a competition that tests one particular set of skills and abilities in its competitors and excludes others. Chess is not designed to be a test of split-second reflexive reactions, 100 meter sprinting is not supposed to challenge your ability to predict the strategy your opponent is going to employ and prepare a counter-strategy, and as far as I am aware there is no sport that seeks to test its competitors ability to improve their bodies through medical intervention. I want the sports I watch to be fair competitions that are about what they are about, and Felix does too: he repeatedly praises the “truth” and “honesty” and “earnestness” of “what goes on in the cage,” but he fails to see how this contradicts with the idea of allowing the outcomes of fights to be heavily influenced months ahead of time by means of one fighter having access to less scrupulous, less restrained doctors than the other.

There is some nuance here around where you draw the lines between sports nutrition, necessary medical assistance and doping, but again Felix does not adopt a position so sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated in almost every popular sport that athletes with the help of an organised and scientific doping program have a significant advantage over clean rivals with similar levels of experience and training, and that’s not a contest I was ever interested in watching. Fighters shouldn’t use steroids any more than match sailors should use outboard motors, it is contrary to the very concept of the sport.

*

Felix isn’t just mad about USADA testing because he thinks steroids are nifty, though. He’s also mad that they took away one of his favourites. “At the absolute highest level of the sport, no-one was derailed by this as much as Jon Jones” This is another part of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness that emphasises the gulf between Felix Biederman’s perspective on the UFC and my own. He watched Jon Jones’ rise through the ranks and his multi-year reign as the consensus best fighter in the world, and was apparently completely captivated by it. In describing him Felix returns to the hagiographic tone of the third and fourth episodes, describing him as “a giant, freak athlete who did moves that he learned off of youtube to humiliate fighters we grew up with”, comparing him to Napoleon, calling him “a genius who can destroy world champions with stuff he saw in a movie, the equivalent to those savant kids who can hear a song once and instantly play it on a piano perfectly”

By the time I was starting to watch the UFC, Jon Jones had already sabotaged his career fairly comprehensively. I don’t know Jon Jones as a legend or a genius or the greatest fighter in the world because I’ve never seen the fights that earned him that reputation. Here are the things that I do know about Jon Jones, things that have happened or that I have learned about since I started following the sport:

Jon Jones is a homophobe. In 2012 Jon Jones crashed his car, plead guilty to driving under the influence, and received a slap on the wrist. In January 2015 Jon Jones tested positive for cocaine in an out-of-competition test and was issued a token fine. In April 2015 Jon Jones ran a red light and caused an accident involving two other cars that left a pregnant woman with a fractured arm, then ran away only to turn himself in after an arrest warrant was issued and eventually plead guilty to fleeing the scene of an accident, receiving 18 months of probation. In 2017 Jon Jones was given a one year suspension after testing positive for banned hormone and metabolic modulators, which turned out to be contaminants in an erectile dysfunction pill he had been given by a training partner. In 2018 Jon Jones tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was suspended again for 15 months.

On the front steps of courthouses Jon Jones is humble and apologetic, and in the immediate aftermath of being caught doing something he shouldn’t have he often talks about how hard the experience has been for him and how much he has learned from it and grown as a person. At all other times he acts as though the bad things that happen to him or around him are never his fault, that he has no responsibility to ever change or even reflect upon his own behaviour, as though in all these struggles he has been the victim of cruel circumstance and conspiracy.

The Jon Jones that Felix describes is not someone I recognise, and the way he describes him is concerning. “As we got to know Jon more, we saw his personal foibles, like his DUI arrest and rivalry with Rashad Evans” I don’t think that having a heated rivalry with a competitor is comparable with drunk driving at all, and in framing the incident this way Felix trivializes it. He does this again with Jones’ hit-and-run conviction, mentioning it in passing but quickly moving on to quip about how awesome Jones got at powerlifting in his year off. He calls Jones “a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, got pissed off and said incredibly cutting things to his opponents”, reinforcing the impression that Jones’ main character flaw is simply being too fierce a competitor, instead of calling him, say, a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, took drugs he shouldn’t and crashed cars.

Felix is constantly making excuses for Jon Jones in this part of the episode. When he gets to the second failed drug test, he says Jones “got popped by USADA”, a turn of phrase that subtly reinforces Jones’ own narrative of victimhood, especially since Felix has already established USADA as the bad guys who are fucking up the UFC. He wraps up the Jones segment with a ‘boys will be boys’ defence couched in another appeal to the glory of days gone by: “It used to matter less if you acted like an idiot. Everyone was a bit of an idiot in one manner or the other in life, but god forbid you now embarrass the sport”.

*

From here, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness whines to a messy conclusion. The segments get more disjointed, it’s at this stage that modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts gets all of two minutes of consideration, and then there is a rather reluctant summary of the UFC career of Conor McGregor, who Felix seems not to like. He certainly doesn’t describe him with close to the same kind of exaltation that he deploys earlier for fighters who had similar trajectories like Mauricio Rua, Anderson Silva and Jon Jones.

After that, Felix goes back to behaving like a fan of an indie band that has started making top 40 hits. He doesn’t like that the one of the UFC’s new part-owners is an asset stripping firm, even though in his golden age one of the UFC’s part-owners was an Emirati war criminal. Back in the first segment of the first episode he references “this modern era of fighting, where all of the things that used to make the sport unusual are mostly gone,” and now he returns to that idea and calls the supposed new “fourth era” of fighting “sanitized and oversaturated,” contrasting it with the “honesty of a fist-fight” and the “cultural haven for strange people” that the UFC offered ten years ago. He complains that there aren’t enough knockouts any more. When he brings up the recent long-anticipated fight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov he says “sometimes the dam of normalcy breaks and we get momentary bursts of how things once were,” which strikes me as a rather ‘what have you done for me lately’ attitude to take about something that happened the month before this video series came out.

Things drag closer to an end and Felix keeps returning to his golden age. “What was once a weird refuge for those who needed it is now eroding into just another thing that’s as formless and indistinct as everything else. Fighting has rid itself of so much of its magic. It does not transcend the world any more.” The way that he constantly makes references to a bygone era when everything was simple and pure and good and as it ought to be, and wishes dearly that we could return to that era instead of continuing to face the injustices of this current moment in time, reminds me a lot of an ideology that has has a big resurgence in the USA recently.

The episode wraps up with one final spasm of bitterness. “This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched, and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn’t just our problem in our idiotic bloodsport. You’re fucked too.” He’s not wrong about the commoditization of entertainment and sports-as-entertainment but he sounds once again like a whiny gamer stereotype or a disillusioned popstar fanboy of the kind he mocks at the start of the episode.

And then the episode doesn’t actually end. The sort-of epilogue about Donald Cerrone fighting Nate Diaz seven years ago is a good little segment, but it doesn’t do anything here. It doesn’t serve to illustrate or emphasise any of the things Felix has been talking about in the minutes leading up to it, it doesn’t follow from them in any kind of narrative. It feels like a piece that some combination of Felix Biederman and Jon Bois just liked too much to cut, even though they couldn’t find a place to put it, so they stuck it here at the end. Maybe it is intended to provide some sense of denouement after Felix’s angry ranting. Regardless, it comes at the end of such an unpleasant half hour that its attempt at poignance failed utterly on me.

*

Felix Biederman likes different fighters than I do, he has a perspective on the sport of Mixed Martial Arts that often seems parochial and outdated to me, and I am puzzled by his obsession with the idea that combat sports athletes are all strange, broken people, but none of these things would bother me if Fighting in the Age of Loneliness did not present itself as an authoritative, comprehensive history of fighting, instead of what it is, which is the story of Felix Biederman falling into and out of love with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Together with Jon Bois he certainly tells that story well, their collage of tales of societal fracture and political indifference with images of single combat is a powerful one, but in pursuing its thematic goals the series fails over and over to justify or interrogate the positions it puts forward.

If the UFC disappeared tomorrow, or if it had never been created in the first place, fighting would still exist, Mixed Martial Arts would still exist, the “one two path of a punch to a guy snoring on the ground” that Felix claims to adore will still exist. Fighting is exactly as magical and exactly as mundane today as it it always has been and always will be, even if Felix Biederman doesn’t enjoy watching it as much as he used to.

[benjaminjamestaylor]

My Top 10 Albums of 2018

If you know me well, you know I do this every year. It’s not in the hope that people will read it; more a sort of time capsule that I can look back on in the future and fondly remember the music that soundtracked my year. Some years, there’s a clear and obvious number one (Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, for example). Others – such as this one – are more of a close-run thing, with the top spots changing sometimes as late as the writing process.

Before I get to my top ten, I would be remiss not to mention a few albums that missed out but have nonetheless been regulars in my rotation this year. Firstly, I should tip my cap to the experimentation shown by Beach House, Ben Howard, and Low, all of whom showed a refreshing intent to break from their norm and make some greatly interesting music. I’m also acutely aware of the lack of representation for R&B and hip-hop in my top ten – I didn’t ignore these genres, it just so happened that they weren’t among my ten favourites. Kids See Ghosts and Earl Sweatshirt in particular came close, and Janelle Monáe was another that I enjoyed greatly. Here’s my honourable mentions list in full:

Beach House – 7; Ben Howard – Noonday Dream; Low – Double Negative; Janelle Monáe – Dirty Computer; Brockhampton – Iridescence; Anderson .Paak – Oxnard; Villagers – The Art of Pretending to Swim; Jeff Tweedy – WARM; Matt Maltese – Bad Contestant; Kids See Ghosts – Kids See Ghosts; Pusha T – Daytona; Earl Sweatshirt – Some Rap Songs; Parquet Courts – Wide Awake; Kurt Vile – Bottle It In; The Beths – Future Me Hates Me; Jungle – For Ever; Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You Really Feel; Mitski – Be The Cowboy; Hop Along – Bark Your Head Off Dog; Lucy Dacus – Historian.

Also, here’s a Spotify playlist of all my favourite tracks from the year.

Now on to the top ten…

10. Blood Orange – Negro Swan

I’ve got a soft spot for a true album – one that’s greater than the sum of its parts, and should be listened to as a whole. There are actually very few tracks on Negro Swan that hit home outside the context of the album. But there’s so much to like here: the way tracks flow into each other, punctuated by regular snippets of dialogue from the likes of transgender activist Janet Mock. The word that defines this album is ‘introspection’ – there are regular references to the desire to be loved and the fear of allowing oneself to be loved completely. At times the tracks feel frustratingly unfinished, and that’s all that keeps this at the back end of my top ten.

Highlights: ‘Saint’, ‘Charcoal Baby’, ‘Nappy Wonder’

9. Snail Mail – Lush

It’s been a hell of a year for young, female indie rockers (more on that later…), and Lindsey Jordan (A.K.A. Snail Mail) is perhaps the most prodigious of them all. The teenager’s debut, Lush, is a highly impressive record that showcases her signature sound: subtle, twinkly guitar melodies and foot-tapping drum beats. It tails off a little towards the back end of the album, as the novelty of her style begins to wear off. You wonder if this was a record she rushed into making, to capitalise on the considerable hype around her. If that’s the case, it’s a shame as a few more songs to the standard of ‘Pristine’ and ‘Heat Wave’ may have pushed this album up into my top five.

Highlights: ‘Pristine’, ‘Heat Wave’, ‘Stick’

8. The 1975 – A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

This album is getting a lot of love, and I’ll admit that on first listen I didn’t get the hype. The 1975 are a somewhat controversial band – they face lavish praise and upturned noses in seemingly equal measure. There were moments of their absurdly-titled previous record that I liked, but their overly synthetic sound and Matty Healy’s unique vocal style are occasionally grating. ABIIOR has its flaws, but there’s also much to admire. They’ve incorporated a variety of styles, from stripped-back acoustic to arena pop and even jazz. The obvious themes of life and love in a digital age are well-explored and the production is, at times, gorgeous. Stick with it – it might just grow on you.

Highlights: ‘Love It If We Made It’, ‘Inside Your Mind’, ‘I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)’

7. U.S. Girls – In A Poem Unlimited

In many ways, this record is a better executed version of the 1975’s. Meg Remy looks at similar themes of our problematic modern world, though in her case she explores them through a lens of feminine anger. Songs like ‘Rage of Plastics’ and ‘M.A.H.’ are direct, furious tirades towards American politics in the Obama era. The instrumentation and production is staggeringly brilliant throughout, with each track demonstrating a different string from Remy’s bow. On ‘Rosebud’, she channels her inner Madonna to produce one of the finest, most listenable indie pop tunes of the year.

Highlights: ‘M.A.H.’, ‘Rosebud’, ‘L-Over’

6. Maribou State – Kingdoms In Colour

My favourite electronic album of the year, Kingdoms In Colour improves on Maribou State’s encouraging debut, 2015’s Portraits. The improvements lie in their balance between the dance-pop hits, where they utilise long-time collaborator Holly Walker on vocals, and the more experimental, sample-based pieces that make up the rest of the album. It’s the latter that leave the most lasting impression, no better than on ‘Vale’, with the sample of Melanie de Baliso’s ‘I Feel You’ dovetailing beautifully with the group’s accompanying melody. If you’re looking for an album to put on as a backing track at your next party, look no further.

Highlights: ‘Beginner’s Luck’, ‘Nervous Tics’, ‘Vale’

5. Big Red Machine – Big Red Machine

A collaboration between Bon Iver and the National was never going to be bad, was it? Big Red Machine doesn’t quite hit the heights you might expect from such a high-profile meeting of minds, but there are enough moments of genius here to make it an album worth revisiting repeatedly. For the most part, Justin Vernon leaves his trademark complex song structures at the door in favour of simpler, more lineal compositions. This leads to some tracks feeling repetitive at times, although even these feature a central hook strong enough to keep you interested. And on 'Lyla', with its polyrhythms and meandering structure, there are hints of the exciting fruits this partnership could eventually produce.

Highlights: ‘Lyla’, ‘Hymnostic’, ‘I Won’t Run From It’

4. Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Perhaps Arctic Monkeys’ most divisive album since Humbug, TBHAC is also their bravest and most ambitious. It’s essentially a concept album – tales of a futuristic hotel on the moon brought to life by Alex Turner’s controversial switch from guitar to piano. It’s no surprise that the album has alienated some of the band’s more fundamentalist fans, as there’s a blatant lack of Turner’s usual indie dancefloor hits as well as a side-lining of outstanding drummer Matt Helders. Instead, we’re treated to songs without clear structures and, aside from ‘Four Out Of Five’, catchy choruses. Turner occasionally strays too far towards self-indulgence (‘Batphone’ is a difficult listen), but he’s still a remarkable lyricist and he’s produced an album that cements their status as the band of their era.

Highlights: ‘Star Treatment’, ‘American Sports’, ‘Four Out Of Five’

3. boygenius – boygenius EP

I may be cheating a tad here by including an EP, but given that there’s as much to enjoy here as on many fine albums released this year, you’ll excuse me. boygenius are a supergroup of sorts, featuring female up-and-comers Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus. Individually, all three are well worth a listen. But their collaborative EP propels them to new heights. Each has their own songwriting moments (two each from the six-track EP), and these intertwine through stunning vocal harmonies to form a completely cohesive collection of songs. The finest moments are Bridgers’, with her soft vocal timbre particularly captivating on ‘Me And My Dog’. We can only hope the success of this experiment results in a full-length album in 2019.

Highlights: ‘Me And My Dog’, ‘Souvenir’, ‘Ketchum, ID’

2. Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour

No album surprised me more in 2018 than this one. After a slew of out-of-this-world reviews, I decided I had to give Golden Hour at least one listen – if only to be able to confirm it as what almost all country pop albums are: ‘not for me’. The thing is, this record transcends genre, and even those who like neither country nor pop will appreciate its beauty and the quality of its songs. Everything on Golden Hour is well-executed: Musgraves sings beautifully; the instrumentation feels minimal yet rounded; the production is absolutely on-point; and the melodies are to die for. There are even psychedelic elements throughout – nods to Musgraves’ use of acid during the album’s production. Give this album a chance, leave your prejudices at the door, and you’ll be treated to a simply perfect collection of pop songs.

Highlights: ‘Slow Burn’, ‘Wonder Woman’, ‘High Horse’

1. Soccer Mommy – Clean

As I mentioned, this wasn’t a runaway number one. But the more I re-listened to my shortlist, the more it became clear that Clean was the strongest candidate for top spot. Snail Mail and boygenius have already taken spots in my top ten, demonstrating what a strong year it has been for female indie vocalists. But Soccer Mommy’s (Sophie Allison’s) album just feels like the finished product that both Snail Mail and boygenius are aiming to eventually produce.

Clean doesn’t just contain great songs with deliciously spiky lyrics (the opening line of ‘Your Dog’ is a belter), it also feels so well balanced. Laid-back, melancholy tunes like ‘Still Clean’ and ‘Blossom’ are countered by catchy indie numbers like ‘Cool’ and ‘Skin’. Allison’s voice seems refined too – perfectly able to handle those two ends of the spectrum. Considering the album centres on a feeling of teenage angst, the sound feels remarkably mature. It’s a worthy album of the year.

Highlights: ‘Cool’, ‘Skin’, ‘Blossom (Wasting All My Time)’

[musicrunsthroughmysoul]

I don’t speak in class and yet here I am saying this anyway (sorry for the really overt reference...bye)

I didn’t mean to do this, but, since I’ve been sick and laying in bed a lot because I haven’t really had the energy to do anything, I started reading interviews with and articles about Pearl Jam. A couple of them I remembered I’d already read, but I kept reading, anyway, because I forgot some of the things they mentioned and how they said them. So, somehow, after I finished reading all the interviews/articles I felt like reading, I decided to watch the “Jeremy” video again. And, afterward, I started having some serious, analytical thoughts about it, so I opened up OneNote on my phone and started taking notes. Only, these notes weren’t just notes. And then they weren’t just about “Jeremy.” So that’s why I’m writing this now, even though in my head I already wrote this post and I wrote it completely differently than the way I’m writing it now. Bummer. Thoughts are only good once, I guess.

So, the reason I’m writing this, after the context above, is because, after writing down some of my critique ideas about “Jeremy,” I ended up going off on a tangent and critiquing Pearl Jam, instead. And the thing is, awhile back I talked about wanting to write a gender critique of Pearl Jam, right? I did. I said so a couple times at least. But I haven’t really touched the article since I first had the idea for it, and maybe one other time, very briefly. I definitely did not intend to come back to that article now, and I have no idea where these thoughts came from precisely. But I wrote them down, nonetheless, and now…well, now I have anxiety. So I needed to write, of course.

I just find it interesting how I planned to write the critique of Pearl Jam, and, in my head, it was going to be mostly positive. It really was. And maybe that’s because the topic is fairly narrowed down – gender – but I really had it in my head that it would be a positive critique. Well…I guess I didn’t account for getting sick and having all this seemingly-extra time on my hands and these thoughts that are most likely not influenced by my illness but I suppose it’s possible they are. But hey, I’ve thought them so far, so there’s some validity in that, at least.

Anyway, long story short, this critique I suddenly started writing ideas down for that ended up not being related to “Jeremy” at all became a critique of the band. Gender was definitely a topic I centered most of my ideas around, as well as philanthropy and social issues (now that was directly related to my piece about “Jeremy”), and so, to explain further, I think I came to this topic when I started writing about subverting expectations. And basically I concluded in a fairly short space with only a few ideas to support this idea, that Pearl Jam do not and have not inherently subverted any expectations. So…it became a negative critique. In other words.

And honestly, hence the anxiety, I guess I’m struggling with that right now. Since I became such a big fan a few months ago, I recognize now that I was participating in the very thing I’ve been so annoyed about: ultimate, blind fandom. Of course, a lot of the fandom I’ve been annoyed about involves sexualizing the musicians which I have not been doing, but blind fandom – I mean, they’re in a similar space, I think. So now that I feel like I’ve regained my sight, I also feel disappointed in my own actions, let alone theirs. (And, anyway, their actions have nothing to do with me. I’ve simply critiqued theirs to the point where I feel less good about all the respect I previously amassed upon them.)

Now, before anyone gets up in arms over this, I’m not sharing any of my critique here tonight or probably for a long time in the future. I just needed to write about this to document my struggle with it. And it is a struggle, which maybe you don’t believe. But I typically don’t start liking something or someone, become obsessed with it, critique it, realize the error of my affections, and then immediately get over it. That’s definitely not what happens, and that’s not what is going to happen here. To start with, I didn’t become obsessed with Pearl Jam when I started listening to them. In fact, I listened to their first three albums for an entire year before I started watching live performances and became interested in them as a group/as people. So, basically, I think it’s fair to say I was wary. I was wary for the same, low-key reasons I mentioned just a few months ago, for example, when I tried identifying their personality types – I judged them based on my own bias. But the thing about that is, and not to alienate anybody (or myself?) but my first impressions tend to be pretty dead-on. Whatever I feel based on the way someone comes off a lot of the time ends up ringing true in the end. Which is to say, I feel whatever I do about someone, I warm up to them and think I was stupid not to have given them a chance earlier, and then we come full circle and whatever it was I didn’t like about them from the beginning ends up ending my connection to them. And I’m not saying that to be like, ‘Haha, look at me, I can identify people and their true nature really well from the very start and it sucks for all of you people who can’t…’ because, like…well, no, because if that were true, I wouldn’t end up giving them a chance. But sometimes I do, and look where it’s gotten me! So I don’t actually always learn my lesson with that.

So here’s me not learning my lesson…again.

However, I do think it’s important to say that, no matter how my critique ends up turning out (be it positive or more on the negative side of things), I still respect the music. While I may not learn my lesson about trusting my gut instinct about someone or something from the very start and ending up down a rabbit hole of ‘everything depends on my respect for this person/group’ in particular, probably, I still have this blessed ability to respect the art and be able to put all of my admiration and energy into respecting that. As an artist, myself, I absolutely believe that art is sacred. Not everything art has to say is sacred, but the act of creating and sharing that art is THE MOST sacred thing. Not to get all preachy, but I really do feel that’s true.

Even though, sometimes, I will admit I have moments where I’m listening to their music and I think ‘Hm, um…you know what? This…this actually…really isn’t that good…’ And I never know if I think that because of my mood – because I’m feeling particularly antagonistic/critical (about the music or, perhaps, more specifically about/because of the band) – or because there is some little justifiable reason for the thought, but other times I obviously rock tf out and I feel the music very deeply and appreciate its existence. Still, whatever I feel about it, I still respect it. But the fact of the matter is that my respect for the music and my respect for the people who make it is not intertwined. I know it is for a lot of people, and hey, maybe it is for me right now (hence the struggle), but that’s not how it is for me all the time, and I absolutely appreciate that. When the artists let me down, the great thing is that the art is always there for me. I can always depend on the art. And I always want that, because, a lot of the time, that’s how I fucking stay alive. That’s how I decide to keep living. So yeah, I fucking respect the art. But I don’t inherently owe my respect to the people who make it. That’s just a lucky bonus that sometimes happens.

The thing is, back to my “please don’t kill me, fellow Pearl Jam fans,” I don’t not respect them. I respect their philanthropy efforts a WHOLE HELL of a lot. For one thing, when I became a fan, I did NOT expect to respect that so much, but that’s really something that they’ve been about since their inception, so there’s no reason in relation to that for me to say, ‘Nah, fuck these guys, they’re not doing enough’ or ‘They’re not doing anything that’s actually making a difference.’ Not that I think anyone – fan or not – would actually say or think that, but I’M JUST SAYING…I'm not saying that. At least not exactly. I recognize that, as a band who already does a great service by sharing their music with the world, they’re not, by any means, obligated to support other/outside and often political issues. Like, especially me, I believe wholeheartedly that art is political. And it may be a lot more obvious with a band like Pearl Jam, but still, I think that should say even more that they’re not required to be political otherwise. And yet, they are! And they’ve done AMAZING, INCREDIBLE things for people and their community (which I happen to sort of be part of) and issues that are really important to them. So I’m not discounting or discrediting that at all, for a second. All I’ll say about my critique is that, from just some of the ideas I ended up writing down, I realized that I’m disappointed there is not more to admire. And yeah, I did just say in this same paragraph and then disprove that “they’re not doing enough,” but well…in some ways – just some ways! – that is true. In issues unrelated to the things I’ve already mentioned/that most PJ fans already know about, and things I’m specifically educated in/about, I’m thinking there is veracity in that. And that’s all I will say until I post my actual critique, which I do plan on doing, but possibly not until the far future because I want to be as thoughtful and resourceful in my critique as I possibly can be. This…this is really just me writing about my reaction to the realization. But this isn’t at all the realization, itself. At least not fully formed and eloquently stated with sources and evidence to support my idea. :) I definitely admit that.

[myfriendpokey]

futures market

(ed. note: stephen died while writing this, may his sinful heart now rest in peace)

I think that every work implies an audience, i think that projected audience will be perpetually dreamlike and strange since it's drawn not from human consciousness but from a form of same which has been distorted through embodiment in alien material. Refracted by some "medium" and then existing as a transferable, reproducible object and living an object life separable from the human circumstances by which it was produced. And I think that when we evaluate a work part of what we evaluate is this audience and the prospect of belonging to it, the possibility of a community with those assumptions and those values. The saying "give people what they want" always confuses me in this context because surely part of what they want is the possibility of wanting something else, of being a person who wants something else. Advertisements famously sell not just a product but also the prospect of being the kind of person who likes that product. Even the most conservative works pull a bait and switch in this regards in that part of what they suggest is the prospect of being a person who already knows what they want, of having character and qualities that persist in time rather than being a shapeless blob of experiences.

Avant-garde work could be said to be that which prioritises the formation of new audiences, or the possibility of forming new audiences, above any actual qualities which those audiences would have. It draws on the utopian aspect of creating new social structures, new communities, where whatever form they ultimately end up taking the fact that they can be made at all is in some way a celebration of agency and the possibility of new futures. But the other side of things is that even as the appeal of these imaginary communities comes partly from their distance from our real ones, they're also evaluated on the basis of their feasibility - their power comes not just from a list of bloodless alternities but from possessing a transformative quality, the real possibility of enactment which is used to make demands on the contemporary. Not just a future but one already germinating in the present. And though I like and respect a lot of these works it's also hard, for this reason, not to feel a little uneasy about them - because the imagery of an imminent, transfigurative break from the present has been so co-opted as a way to conceal the fundamental limitations and eerie inertia of capitalism that I think it's hard for anything drawing on that tradition to escape lending credibility to it, even when its interests are directly opposed. 20+ years of an increasingly threadbare neoliberal consensus  in the face of problems which grow more and more obvious mean the notion of an unexpected, miraculous shift in the causal order grows more and more central, from the vague sense that someone will invent, like, a moss or something which will stop global warming in the nick of time to the idea that the same clumsy, stupid videogames we've been bonking against invisible walls in for decades now will any minute now transmogrify into the effortless freefloating virtual lucid dreams of legend. And in fact videogames provide a constant running example of just how profitably this perception can be managed - - from a medium which from inception built upon a certain futuristic quality coming both from the historically new level of consumer access to computer technology and from decades of science-fiction representations of same, and which leveraged that into a perennial suggestion that the bright new day was always just around the corner - that by playing videogames now you were securing a kind of early-investor bragging rights to the media singularity to come. If there's anything historically new about videogames it's the extent to which the very suggestion of potential developments to be had later on was finally recognised as more profitable than any intrinsic qualities of the form itself.

And I think all this raises some problems when we think about avant-garde and experimental videogames, not just because in replicating some of the assumptions of the industry they risk being assimilated by it - you can't game-design your way out of late capitalism, there are no final aesthetic solutions to economic problems etc - but because by repeating those assumptions they risk being judged by the standard of contribution to this same monolithic vidcon future, and then discarded accordingly when "the future" changes according to stockholder diktats. I mean that when you see these works as yet more expressions of "the medium" it's harder for them to survive when that status is taken away again, and that at this point it's difficult to conceive of a future of videogames that doesn't in some way just flow back into the orthodox one still being sold.

Why does this matter. I think the videogame market will crash again because that's what markets do, and when it does I believe it'll be blamed on small engines, on unity and rpgmaker, on asset-flipping and joke simulators and walking games and political games rather than e.g. the incessant boom-bust cycles of capitalism or the fact that the particular interactive media singularity that videogames have invested so much image, money and energy into identifying themselves with looks more and more dated and less likely to happen. I think there'll be more gamergate bullshit from people who invested in the stupid, stupid videogame dream and got told by youtube millionaires that it was being undermined from within by sjw fifth columnists making pug dating games. I think that just as places like YouTube have shown a willingness to quietly cut down on who's able to make money through their service places like Steam will do the same thing, particularly after already raising the prospect of exponentially increasing the cost of using the store for small developers already. I think middlebrow columnists at the Atlantic will cash checks saying well, a lot of those games weren't pushing the medium forward anyway, and that the whole thing will end up being recast as a morality tale about an overcrowded, overdiverse market, and that a lot of valuable work people are doing now will be just wiped from the record in the same way as a lot of pre-2007 indie games were, or flash games, or interactive CD-ROMs, or whatever the fuck.

I think that when this happens experimental games or avant garde games or alternative games will be seen less as possible alternatives to the mainstream tradition than as offshoots of it which got pruned, and I'm not sure how much help they will really be to anyone trying to figure out ways to make these things without getting pulled into the endless churning blood rotor of existing videogame culture.

I've written before that the game scenes which interest and excite me most are things like FNAF fangames, Undertale fangames, Unity horror games, RPG Maker games, hyperspecific utility pieces like the Prosperity Path orbs, less for any particular aesthetic or design qualities than for them being videogames which manage to escape some of the awful binary of Producer/Consumer and the ideas of "importance" which evolve later to help justify that perverse dynamic. Like what does it mean to experience a game if it's just part of a big stack of almost interchangeable things and anyway you're only absently going through it when searching for more stuff to steal for your own interchangeable thing. Which is healthier and more interesting than "art". But I think part of it too is the sense of having a specific audience to bounce against, even if it's just of people looking to take your Secret Of Mana midis, and the way that the concreteness of that audience helps defuse the kind of creeping tendency towards cultural speculation that comes with the belief in a big medium-wide payout somewhere down the line that'd justify the time and energies of everyone involved. I don't think it's enough to say people should make an effort to criticise games for what they are as opposed to what they might be, or whatever, insofar as that's even possible. I think being able to appreciate what they are is dependent on recognizing that they have an audience which is similarly settled, similarly "just there". And I think working towards constructing that kind of space would mean, yes, a sort of concession of "the future" to the stockholders of industry, renouncing the right to eventually reap that dread crop. But in the process being able to better engage with the present and all the disparite forces and strands within it who have similarly been lopped off that grand narrative, or were never part of it to begin with, and navigate all the ambiguities and potentials of that space. I think the future of videogames is the same kind of desperate, self-willed dream as those years worth of Twitter shares, for a company which has never actually been profitable, or the horrible locked-down image of infinity that sees new Rocket Racoon movies coming out every year til 2099, I think those dreams are ones that emerge and grow stronger as the actual basis for them either materially or affectively grows ever more decrepit, I think however overwhelming they get they can only really be strangled in the present.

As they say... no futur-what! what are you doing in my house! no-aieee!! (manuscript abruptly cuts off)

[ciathyzareposts]

Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space (and Space-Program Games in General)

“Demography is destiny,” wrote the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. That truism has been taken to heart by many in the time since — not least by our political classes. Yet it applies equally in the world of the arts and entertainment. For in any free market, the nature of production is dictated as much by the consumers as by the producers.

Certainly this is true of computer games. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they were largely the province of a rather specific demographic indeed: single white males between the ages of ten and thirty from relatively privileged socioeconomic circumstances, with a bent toward intellectual rather than active pursuits — i.e., the stereotypical “nerds” of pop culture. Computer games reflected the tastes of these boys and young men in other kinds of entertainment and leisure-time hobbies: Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, jet fighters, World War II, action movies, heavy-metal music, fast cars, and, when they could get a glimpse of them, fast women. Although I too have liked all of these things to a greater or lesser degree at some point in my life — I did, after all, grow up as a member of exactly the demographic in question — their extreme prevalence in the cultural ghetto about which I write has often left me searching, sometimes in vain, for games with a different set of values and antecedents.

But this article is not about one or more of those interesting cultural outliers. It’s rather about an interestingly scanty subgenre of games which seems like it ought to have been perfect for the demographic I’ve just described, but that for some reason just never quite took off. Specifically, I speak of games based on the realities of space exploration in a contemporary context, as opposed to the outer-space fantasias of Star Wars and the like. After all, just about every nerdy teenage boy goes through a race-for-the-Moon phase at some point. (And why not? Has humanity ever embarked on a grander collective adventure?) Further, games on this subject would seemingly have fit in well with the broader craze for realistic simulation, as manifested by everything from F-15 Strike Eagle to SimCity, which had taken a firm grip on the industry by the end of the 1980s.

And yet there just weren’t many simulations of this particular type, and even fewer of them that did very well. It strikes me that it’s worth asking why this is so. Was there something about this subject that just didn’t work as a game, or are we dealing with a mere historical accident here? Let’s begin with a brief survey of the field of earlier games that did venture out into this territory before we turn to the one that will be our main focus for today. To help in doing so, we’ll further divide the field into two categories: vehicular simulations of spaceflight and games of space-program management.

The earliest game of the former type actually predates the personal computer. Created on a big DEC PDP-8 by a Massachusetts high-school student named Jim Storer, inspired by the real Neil Armstrong’s nerve-wracking manual landing on the Moon in 1969, the very year it was first programmed, Lunar demanded that you set your own landing craft down gently before your fuel ran out. Implemented entirely in text — you simply entered the number of fuel units you wished to burn each turn in response to a changing textual status display — it inspired dozens of clones and variants, most going under the more accurately descriptive name of Lunar Lander. By the dawn of the personal-computing age in 1978, David Ahl was able to write in his landmark book BASIC Computer Games that Lunar Lander in all its incarnations was “far and away the most popular computer game” of them all. It was even converted into a graphical standup-arcade game by Atari in 1979, in which form its quiet, cerebral tension made it an incongruous outlier indeed in an arcade full of shoot-em-ups.

Other programmers got inevitably more expansive in their ambitions for spaceflight simulation after Lunar Lander. By 1986, with the release of Spectrum HoloByte’s Orbiter, they had graduated to offering up a complete Space Shuttle flight simulator, covering all the stages of a mission from liftoff to landing. (Sadly, it arrived just in time for the Challenger disaster…) In 1992, Virgin Software published an even more complex and complete iteration on the concept, entitled simply Shuttle.

Yet neither of these later simulations came close to matching their simplistic predecessor in popularity. Their subject matter, it seemed, just didn’t quite work as a hardcore simulation. A simulation of a jet fighter flying into a war zone — such as the popular and long-lived Falcon series which Spectrum HoloByte produced after Orbiter — offered an intriguing range of tactical possibilities which a simulation of a Space Shuttle did not. A fighter pilot flying into combat is lord of his domain, in complete control of his airplane; the outcomes of his battles are entirely up to him. An astronaut flying into space, on the other hand, is merely the tip of a long spear of cooperative hierarchy; situations like those last few minutes before the Eagle landed, when Neil Armstrong was making all of the decisions and executing them all alone, have been vanishingly rare in the history of space flight. If, as Sid Meier likes to say, a good game is “a series of interesting decisions,” this fact makes spaceflight as it has existed so far in our historical reality problematic as the subject of a compelling simulation. Too often, Orbiter and Shuttle felt like exercises in rote button-mashing — button-mashing which you were expected to do exactly when and how ground control told you. Perhaps you weren’t quite the spam in a can the test-pilot peers of the earliest astronauts had so mocked them for being, but it sure felt that way at times. “As strange as it may seem,” wrote Computer Gaming World magazine of Orbiter, “a lot of flying the Shuttle is boring — a lot of pushing buttons, running computer programs, and the like — and it shows.”

In light of this, it’s telling that arguably the most entertaining of these spaceflight simulators opted for a less hardcore, more impressionistic approach. Apollo 18, developed by the Canadian studio Artech and published by Accolade in 1987, posited an alternative history where at least one of NASA’s final trio of cancelled Moon missions actually did take place. In keeping with Artech designer and theoretician-in-chief Michael Bate’s concept of “aesthetic simulation,” Apollo 18 portrayed a mission to the Moon not as a holistic vehicular simulation but as a series of mini-games, jumping from the perspective of ground control to that of the astronauts in space whenever it felt the need. This more free-wheeling, almost cinematic approach, combined perhaps with the fact that going to the Moon is inherently more exciting than releasing yet another whatsit from the Shuttle’s cargo bay in low Earth orbit, made the game a more riveting experience than its Shuttle-centric peers. Still, even it ran out of legs fairly quickly; once you’d worked through the steps of getting to the Moon and back once or twice, there just wasn’t much motivation to do so again.

So much for simulation. In the category of strategic space-program managers, we have an equally mixed bag.

Just as with the venerable Lunar Lander, one of the very first attempts to portray the contemporary conquest of space in this way was also the most successful of its era, in both financial and artistic terms. I wrote at some length long ago about 1984’s Project: Space Station, an earnest effort, masterminded by a fellow named Laurence Holland who would go on to become LucasArts’s flight-simulator guru, to portray the construction and operation of a commercial space station in Earth orbit. Both space stations and private enterprise in space were much in vogue at the time, thanks respectively to President Ronald Reagan’s announcement of plans to build a station called Freedom in his 1984 State of the Union address and the realities of a terminally underfunded NASA whose priorities shifted with the political winds — realities which would insure that Freedom itself never got off the drawing board, although it would gradually morph into the joint project known as the International Space Station. As I wrote in that older article, Project: Space Station, which blended an overarching strategy game with light vehicular simulation, came heartbreakingly close to greatness. But in the end, it was somewhat undone by a lack of feedback mechanisms and poor command and control — weaknesses which, it should be said, feel more like a result of the limited 8-bit hardware on which it ran than a failure of design in the abstract. But whatever its failings, it was by all indications reasonably successful in its day, enough so that, when its original publisher HESware went bankrupt within a year of its release, it was picked up at auction by Accolade and re-released by them in the same year they published Apollo 18.

Alas, Project: Space Station‘s immediate successors would prove markedly less rewarding as games to play or products to sell. Space MAX, created and self-published by a former Jet Propulsion Laboratories engineer named Tom Keller in 1986, poured on the detail at the expense of playability, until it came to resemble one of NASA’s long-range planning tools more than a computer game. And Karl Buiter’s Earth Orbit Stations of 1987 buried a very appealing premise, focusing more on the mechanical details of building a modular space station than had either of the earlier games of its type, under an atrocious presentation layer which Computer Gaming World described as “a textbook case of how not to design a [GUI] interface.” And after those two less-than-compelling efforts, the strategic space-program-management subgenre pretty much dried up.

This, then, was the underwhelming state of contemporary-spaceflight games in general in 1993, when Interplay published a new take on the subject matter bearing the name of one of the most famous astronauts of all — in fact, the one who had actually been sitting there beside Neil Armstrong when he was making that hair-raising landing on the Moon. Like Apollo 18, Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space chose to turn back the clock to those glory days of the Moon race rather than focusing on present-day space stations engaged in the comparatively plebeian labor of developing new industrial-chemical compounds and new medical treatments, important though such things undoubtedly are. The managerial perspective it adopted, however, had more to do with Project: Space Station than Apollo 18. A noble effort in its way, as indeed were all those games I’ve just written about, its own points of failure have perhaps even more to tell us about game design than theirs do.

Fritz Bronner

The driving force behind Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space wasn’t its astronaut mascot — no surprise there, right? — but rather one Fritz Bronner, a less famous American whose name would have fit perfectly to one of the German rocket scientists who helped Werner von Braun build the Saturn V rocket that sent men to the Moon. In the early 1980s, as a young man with dreams of becoming an actor, Bronner spent many an evening playing a variety of tabletop wargames and RPGs with his buddies in his home state of Florida. On one of those evenings, he had just finished an RPG session when he turned on the television to see a rocket launch on the news — an event he always watched with interest, being a self-described “space fanatic.” The thought process he went through then, with his mind still addled by game systems and dice rolls, will waken immediate recognition in anyone who has ever played Race into Space. For the most fundamental mechanic in that game has its origin right here:

The game player in me suddenly wondered what the odds were for a successful launch. The next thought I had was the chance of failure. I formulated in my mind a guess on the total number of [successful] launches versus failures. I quickly concluded that out of ten previous launches, nine of them were successful. Just before liftoff, I rolled the percentile dice and rolled below the range, which indicated to me that the launch would be successful. A few minutes later, another satellite reached orbit. I was elated that I had come up with a pseudo-model for launch success.

Immediately I wondered how a manned launch would work. I started to play with some rough mathematical figures. I selected a one-stage rocket and a two-stage rocket and then realized that I would have to devise a safety factor for a capsule. I think I came up with around 85 percent for the capsule. Then I plunged into what mission steps would occur in spaceflight. I rolled the dice on a three-step suborbital flight and to my excitement it worked! Suddenly each step of the mission was monumentally important. I became tense as I rolled the dice. It reminded me of the flavor of the early spaceflights.

I called [my friend] Steve [Stipp] over and told him of my successful suborbital flight. After his own successful flight, we both gleefully started scribbling notes on possible payload weights and additional mission steps. Soon we had scraps of paper filled with my horribly drawn stick figures of capsules that were lofting astronauts into space.

At this point, it was success or total failure on a mission step. We both realized that it was too crude and unrealistic for a rocket to always blow up on the pad. There were cancelled launches and aborts that should be considered. We laughed and played and scribbled more notes and sketched drawings for several hours, and then folded it up and forgot about it for several years.

In 1985, Bronner’s acting dream took him from Florida to New York City. His wife was working as a long-haul flight attendant, leaving him with plenty of solitude for contemplation in between auditions there in the big city. A television documentary called Spaceflight refreshed his memories of playing that improvised dice-throwing game of space launches. Just as importantly, it shifted his thinking toward an historical perspective. What if he made a game about the space race of the 1950s and 1960s, with one player in the role of the Americans and the other of the Soviets, each trying to be the first to reach the Moon? Each player would have to research the technology necessary for each stage of the endeavor, then test it with a live launch. The tension that would make for interesting choices was clear: that between researching everything exhaustively to achieve the best possible safety rating and pushing the timetable to beat out your opponent. At bottom, then, it would be a “press your luck” game — an evergreen in tabletop game design, but implemented here in the service of a thoroughly unique theme. For the next couple of years, Bronner continued to develop and refine the concept, even sending samples to many board-game publishers, albeit without managing to stir up much interest.

In 1987, Bronner’s acting dream took him from New York City to Hollywood. While he would never become the movie star he might have imagined back in Florida, he would carve out a solid career for himself as one of the film industry’s unglamorous but indispensable utility players; he would take bit parts in dozens of movies and television shows alongside starring roles in hundreds of commercials, and eventually also take on small-time writing, directing, and producing gigs. A year after arriving in Hollywood, he wrangled a meeting with the Los Angeles-based Task Force Games, best known for their Star Fleet Battles tactical space-combat games which took place in the Star Trek universe. He finally got a positive response from this publisher, and soon signed a contract with them to publish the board game Liftoff!.

Liftoff! made its public bow in the summer of 1989 at the Origins International Game Expo, one of the tabletop hobby’s two biggest American events, which happened to be held that year right there in Los Angeles. The reaction to Bronner’s game at Origins was cautiously favorable, but it never translated into much in the way of sales in the months that followed. Task Force Games had been bought by the computer-game publisher New World Computing the year before they signed the contract with Bronner; it was for this reason that they were in the Los Angeles area at all, having been moved there from Amarillo, Texas, to join their new parent. Yet the relationship wasn’t living up to either partner’s expectations. Profits, which tended to be scant at the best of times in the tabletop industry, had become nonexistent, as the expected synergies between the computer and the tabletop business failed to materialize. In 1990, Task Force’s founder John Olsen scraped together enough funding to buy his company back out from under New World and moved with it back to Amarillo. Necessity forced the downsized entity to focus its resources on Star Fleet Battles, its most well-known and marketable franchise. Liftoff! died on the vine.

But Fritz Bronner wasn’t willing to let his game go so gently into that good night. Although he had never owned a computer in the past, his arrival in Hollywood had coincided with the beginnings of a buzz from the more forward-thinking members of the media elite about the future of interactive video and multimedia computing. It certainly hadn’t been lost on Bronner when signing the contract with Task Force Games that the company’s parent was a publisher of computer games. In fact, he had tried to interest New World in a digital version of Liftoff! repeatedly, but could never really get their attention. Fortunately, his attorney had assured that the contract he signed with Task Force/New World gave them just one year to develop a computerized version, if they wished to do so; afterward, those rights reverted to Bronner himself. He soon bought his first computer, a used Commodore Amiga 500, to consider the possibilities. In the summer of 1990, he started talking with a young programmer named Michael K. McCarty. At year’s end, the two of them formed a company which they named Strategic Visions, and began working on a demo to show to publishers.

It perhaps says something about the zeitgeist of gaming on the cusp of the multimedia age that Bronner and McCarty elected to make their demo a non-interactive video rather than an interactive game. From the start, Bronner’s vision for the project had been to move the mechanics of the board game onto the computer essentially intact, then spice them up with lots of video footage from the archives of NASA and the Soviet space program. His timing in this respect was perfect: the fall of the Iron Curtain helped immensely in getting access to the latter’s videos. Meanwhile the fact that all of the footage was the product of government agencies, and thus released into the public domain, helped in another way. Less positively, this overweening focus on the multimedia aspects of the project, which would continue throughout its duration, would rather distract from some worrisome flaws in the foundation of the actual rules set — an issue we’ll return to a bit later.

In the short term, though, the non-interactive demo served its purpose. In contrast to the relative lack of interest the tabletop design had garnered, the proposed digital version attracted lots of publishers when Bronner and McCarty brought their demo to the Summer Consumer Electronics Show for private screenings in June of 1991. The videos Bronner showed of rockets soaring and exploding were well-nigh irresistible to an industry all abuzz with talk of interactive movies incorporating just this type of real-world footage. Over thirty potential partners viewed the demo reel in the course of the show, and several of them came forward with serious offers.

Bronner settled on Interplay Productions for several reasons: they were also Los Angeles-based, always a nice advantage; he got on well with Interplay’s head Brian Fargo; and Fargo had immediately run with an idea Bronner had mentioned in passing, that of signing up Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin — by far the most gregarious and ambitious of the Apollo 11 astronauts in terms of media and marketing — to lend his endorsement to the game. Indeed, Fargo already had Aldrin on board when the contract was signed in August of 1991. Thus did Liftoff! become Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space.

Aldrin’s direct participation encompassed nothing more than marketing — he regaled a long string of trade-show attendees and magazine editors with his well-worn tales of landing on the Moon, while saying next to nothing about the game itself — but it did lead to the computer game’s most significant substantive addition to the board game. Bronner added a roster of astronauts to be recruited and trained, who manifested differing strengths and weaknesses and even differing personalities which could cause them to be more or less effective when combined into crews. The idea and approach are so similar to the astronaut management found in Project: Space Station that one suspects they must have been inspired by that earlier game. That said, I have no proof that this was so.

Otherwise, though, Race into Space is a fairly straightforward re-implementation of Liftoff! rather than a major expansion upon it. In fact, some parts of the board game are actually trimmed away, such as the ability to play as the head of a fictional European or Asian space agency, which Bronner had included in order to allow up to four players to gather around the tabletop. Race into Space, on the other hand, is limited to two players, each of them controlled either by a human or the computer.

Pitched to Interplay with an absurdly optimistic six-month development timeline, Race into Space ran over that estimate by a factor of three. Indeed, it became the first game in history to get two feature-length previews in Computer Gaming World, one in January of 1992 and one in December of the same year. An early decision to switch development from the fading Amiga to MS-DOS didn’t help matters; nor did Strategic Visions’s need to rely on Interplay’s art team for most of the non-digitized graphics, work that got done only as time allowed betwixt and between other in-house projects. Most of all, though, the project began just a little bit too early, before the typical consumer computer was quite able to live up to Bronner’s multimedia ambitions. Even the version of the game that finally did ship on floppy disk in March of 1993 was heavily compromised by the limitations of its storage medium, with digitized still photographs standing in for most of the videos the original demo had promised. Players would have to wait for the CD-ROM version, which didn’t arrive until fourteen months later, to truly see the game as its designer had imagined it.

Race into Space is played in turns lasting six months each, beginning in 1957 and stretching until either 1977 arrives or someone manages to land on the Moon. Economics will play a big role in your success or lack thereof; you’re provided with a semiannual budget which increases only gradually, with the completion of major milestones according it a more substantial boost — especially if you manage them before your opponent — and catastrophic failures having the opposite effect. This approach is rather ahistorical on the face of it — in a classic example of throwing money at a problem until it bears fruit, the budget of NASA in particular was dictated more by the achievements of the Soviets than by the agency’s own accomplishments — but is probably necessary for Race into Space to work as a game.

As the game goes on, you build up your program’s facilities — adding things like additional launch pads to let you carry out more launches per turn.

Still, the core of the experience remains what it was when a young Fritz Bronner first started experimenting with the idea of a space-program-management game in the early 1980s: watching with bated breath from mission control as your rockets go up, hoping each successive step will go off without a hitch to get you your next mission milestone. Said milestones encompass everything from launching the first unmanned satellite — the game begins in the year of Sputnik — to the Moon landing itself. Yet, beyond the first few milestones at any rate, they don’t break down into a mere linear progression of steps to be mindlessly walked through. You can combine milestones into one mission; for example, you might make your first flight of eight days or more duration the same one where your astronauts first execute a space walk. And you can also skip some of them entirely, if you’re pressed for time and are willing to forgo the budget boosts with which they tempt you; the aforementioned space walk, for example, isn’t even strictly necessary for a Moon landing.

Most importantly, Race into Space lets you implement not only the historical method of getting to the Moon — that of employing a space capsule which orbits the Moon and a separate landing craft to take part of the crew down to the surface — but also a number of other approaches that were discussed at the time, such as an all-in-one-spacecraft approach (this requires developing a monster rocket that makes a Saturn V look like a kid’s toy) or even a reusable space shuttle (this requires both an enormous investment of time and money and a really slow opponent). The variety of alternate histories the game allows is not infinite — more on that momentarily — but is enough to provide for at least a few interesting and even educational playthroughs. If nothing else, you’ll walk away from your failed attempts to rewrite history with a better understanding of why NASA chose the approach they did.

Achieving firsts is extremely important because it increases your program’s prestige — which in turn leads to an increase in its budget. If things go too disastrously wrong, you can even be fired from your post as program director.

But alas, Race into Space soon begins to show those cracks in its foundation which I alluded to earlier, which are partly born from the lack of a clear sense of its own goals as a game. One can imagine at least three abstract approaches fitting into the general framework of “a managerial game about the race to the Moon.” One would be a heavily experiential game, in the spirit of Michael Bate’s aesthetic simulations, de-emphasizing the competitive aspects in favor of taking the player on a journey through those heady early days of the space age. Another would be a replayable game of hardcore strategy, in which the fiction of the Moon race functions as a mere thematic skin for the mechanical underpinnings which quickly become the player’s real focus. And still another would be an open-ended sandbox, a learning tool that lets the player experiment with many different approaches to landing on the Moon and to spaceflight in general.

Race into Space never firmly commits to any one of these approaches, but rather feints toward all of them in various places. The end result is a confusing mishmash of elements that are constantly cutting against one another. The heavy reliance on photographs, video, and sound clips from the period in question seem to push it into the experiential camp, but its board-game-derived mechanics and relatively short play time — a full game usually takes no more than two or three hours to play — pull it in the second direction I outlined. And so the cognitive dissonances start to add up. The video clips lose their appeal when you’re forced to click through the same ones over and over, every time you play, even as it remains debatable whether the mechanics are really compelling enough to make it a game you want to return to again and again under any circumstances; there are really only one or two best paths to follow to get to the Moon, and once you’ve found them there’s little reason to keep playing. Meanwhile the game’s educational sandbox potential, while by no means nonexistent, is also sharply limited. True to its board-game roots, Race into Space doesn’t simulate spaceflight at all beyond rolling dice against an arbitrary set of success-or-failure percentiles. In terms of spaceflight hardware, it lets you mix and match a set of pieces it provides for you, and pour money into each piece’s research to push its reliability percentage up, but it’s nowhere near sophisticated enough to let you develop your own components from scratch. Here too, then, it feints in a promising direction without going far enough to truly satisfy over the long term.

Yet this sense of confusion about what Race into Space actually wants to be constitutes only its second biggest problem. Its biggest problem of all doesn’t require as much design philosophy to explain: the darn thing is just too darn hard. Something is badly off with the math behind this game — something you sense more than you can know. Playing it quickly begins to feel like that memorable montage of exploding and misguided rockets from the film The Right Stuff. You can recover in fairly short order from failed launches in the early phases, when you’re mostly launching unmanned craft, but they turn devastating when they start chewing through your astronaut corps like a wolf in a chicken coop. Failed missions not only destroy the morale of your surviving astronauts, causing them to perform worse, but knock the reliability of the failed component almost all the way back to zero, forcing you to research it up again from scratch. This of course makes no sense in strictly logical terms; in the absence of any new inputs, a defective component should be defective to exactly the same extent on the next flight. Rather than conveying the rounds of investigation and soul-searching that always accompanied a real loss of life in the space program, as it was doubtless intended to do, this mechanic just furthers the impression that the game is out to get you at any cost. The fact that the computer player mysteriously seems to be able to cut more corners than you without killing astronauts by the dozens contributes strongly to the same impression.

Screens like this one appear distressingly frequently, almost regardless of how thoroughly you research and develop your components. Either the real NASA was incredibly lucky, or something is off inside this game’s numbers. Perhaps a bit of both?

Unkind though it may sound to say, I can’t help but suspect that Race into Space‘s issues in this area reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics on the part of a younger Fritz Bronner — a misunderstanding that somehow never got corrected through all his years of working on his game. A mission does not, as one might initially imagine, have a chance of success equal to the reliability percentage of its dodgiest hardware component. On the contrary: the various components actually undergo reliability checks at various times — often at multiple times — during a mission. Therefore even a stack of components which have all been researched up to a reliability of 95 percent still has a substantial chance of failing in some more or less disastrous way on a more complex mission. And yet you simply don’t have time to laboriously research every component up to its maximum reliability, which for many of them is substantially below 95 percent anyway. You’re in a Moon race, after all. You have to roll the dice. Small wonder that so many players over the years have advocated save-scumming — that dastardly practice of saving and reloading until the dice roll your way — as the only practical way to play. That, or play a two-human-player game, but just click through your “opponent’s” turns without doing anything. Playing that way, you might just be able to get to the Moon before 1977.

So, despite the historical verisimilitude it works so hard to inculcate via its video clips and all the other period-specific touches, Race into Space‘s mechanics lead to a simple game of luck at bottom, and one where the odds are stacked against you at that. There is no opportunity to jump in and make decisions when a mission starts to go wrong — no chance, in other words, to improvise your way through a drama like the Apollo 13 mission. You’re a mere helpless bystander from the moment a mission begins until it ends.

The game’s delight in making its players’ rockets go boom provoked such howls of protests from early purchasers of the original floppy-based release that Interplay soon released a patch to tweak the numbers somewhat — although still nowhere near enough in the opinion of most. The very fact that Bronner felt able to manipulate the numbers in this way, of course, demolished any remaining belief players might have harbored that the numbers had any real historical basis at all. Clearly they were strictly arbitrary. Bronner never did achieve a balance that felt both playable and true to history. And that failure makes it difficult to consider Race into Space as a whole as anything but another interestingly failed attempt at making a game out of real-world space exploration.

Race into Space sold in reasonable numbers for Interplay, but never huge ones, especially after word of just how frustrating it could be got around on the street. Thus none of Bronner’s plans for sequels, which he had publicly discussed at some length in the run-up to release, ever got off the metaphorical launching pad. Strategic Visions soon folded up shop, and Bronner continued his career in Hollywood. He’s never designed another game.

Ironically, the sequels Bronner discussed may actually have made for better games than this one. One idea, for example, would have focused on a manned mission to Mars. Removed from the context of real history, not being surrounded by all those grainy old video clips reminding players of what once was, such a game would have been able to exist entirely on its own terms, and may have wound up feeling more satisfying because of it even if its mechanics had been left largely unchanged.

As it is, though, Race into Space displays that most telling sign of an ingenious game idea with questionable execution: players lining up with ways to fix it. Their efforts were confined to the realms of speculation and hex editors until 2005, when, the rights having reverted to Fritz Bronner, he generously released the game and all of its source code under the General Public License. In the time since, a small community of enthusiasts has continued to port and refine the game on a sporadic basis, but it’s never managed to garner a critical mass of developers or players. Ditto an attempt at a full-fledged commercial revival of the concept by the wargame publisher Slitherine, which arrived complete with the original game’s astronaut mascot in 2014 under the name Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager.

While Race into Space‘s most specific, practical design mistakes aren’t too hard to identify, the more generalized failings of it and its peers in the scanty tradition of contemporary-space-program games do rather prompt one to ask another question: is there something about the subject matter itself that causes it not to work as a satisfying game? I believe I’ve actually done a reasonable job of answering that question already for the case of spaceborne vehicular simulations: as I noted near the beginning of this article, an astronaut in space just doesn’t have enough independent agency in most situations to make for a reasonably realistic simulation that’s also engaging as a game. But what of the other broad category of games I’ve addressed today, the one to which Race into Space belongs: that of space-program managerial games?

For a long, long time after Race into Space, one might have been forgiven for assuming that space-program managers as well were indeed nonstarters as satisfying games. But then, in 2015, a game called Kerbal Space Program came along to prove such naysayers wrong. I don’t usually write about modern games here, but I will briefly outline the premise of this one.

The titular Kerbals are a species of furry green aliens who run a space program of their own on their planet of Kerbin. Despite their cartoony cuteness, said space program itself is simulated with meticulous attention to detail, including all of the particulars of physics and aeronautics which Race into Space so conspicuously lacks. Players with an interest in rocketry or aeronautical engineering can and do lose years of leisure time to it. It may or may not be a game for you, but it is, by any objective definition, an impressive piece of work, far more intrinsically fascinating than any other that I’ve written about today.

And how does it accomplish this feat? One obvious answer is that it knows what it wants to be first and foremost: a sandbox for exploring the practical possibilities and limitations of space travel using the technology of our own recent past, present, and near future. A dedicated modding community has helped the designers to graft on additional layers of competitive strategy and economics for those who want them. Nevertheless, the game’s central delight remains that of creation and discovery. Kerbal Space Program is, in other words, one of the preeminent sandbox games of our time. And it’s completely comfortable with itself in that role, being free of the cognitive dissonances of Race into Space.

This stronger sense of itself is certainly one of the secrets to Kerbal Space Program‘s success. And here’s another: having noted earlier that the proposed non-historical sequels to Race into Space may have led to more compelling games, I’ll now submit Kerbal Space Program as Exhibit One in evidence for that argument. Freed from the weight of all that real human history, existing as it does in a world of cartoon aliens, it can just be a game.

Games can be great tools for exploring other lives and other times, but sometimes you just want to play. History, after all, doesn’t occur for our ludic amusement. Every wargamer knows that the number of unaltered historical battles that lead to good games is very small indeed; most real battles have their outcomes foreordained before they even begin. Perhaps the Apollo program and the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station and all the rest just don’t have the right stuff to make a worthy game. But that’s okay — because it means that, instead of recreating the storied past, we can imagine an exciting future. That goal is at least equally worthy — and, as Kerbal Space Program so thoroughly illustrates, it’s something that a game about space exploration can most definitely do, and do well at that.

When you play Race into Space as the Americans, each turn begins with a newscast from “Carter Walcrite” — a nod to Walter Cronkite, the television anchorman whose dulcet tones were the voice of the space race for many Americans, whom a number of surveys revealed to be the most trusted person in the United States during the turbulent 1960s. (I’ll leave the comparisons with contemporary attitudes toward journalism as an exercise for the reader…) Although the inclusion of all this loving period detail is wonderful on one level, on another it can be oddly stultifying to your attempts to write your own history.

(Sources: the books The Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space Companion by Fritz Bronner, Designers & Dragons, Volume 2 by Shannon Appelcline, and BASIC Computer Games by David Ahl; Computer Gaming World of August 1986, March 1987, October 1987, February 1988, January 1992, May 1992, December 1992, and August 1993; Strategy & Tactics 212. Online sources include Leon Baradat’s comprehensive Race into Space site, the article “The Buzz is Gone” at The Escapist, and Steve Stipp’s homepage.

You can download the current open-source edition of Race into Space for free, or purchase its spiritual successor Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/buzz-aldrins-race-into-space-and-space-program-games-in-general/