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doshmanziari · 4 years ago

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Musical Offerings for the New Year || What is “Radical Music” in 2021?

Near the end of 2020, a bunch of musicians populating a chatroom, including myself, each submitted ten minutes’ worth of our work to another musician, Chimeratio, who generously compiled it all into a set totaling nearly ten hours.¹ The work didn’t need to be new; just what we thought might best represent our abilities/style(s) and/or perhaps what we were especially pleased with. The set premiered in late January. Since I have some tentative plans for reorienting Brick By Brick this year, while not overriding its emphases, I wanted to share that music with anyone who’s interested.

I compiled the four videos into a playlist, although you can also access them individually: here (1), here (2), here (3), and here (4). If you care to, and are on a computer, you can also view the accompanying chatlog and read people’s responses from when they were listening to the live broadcast.

The compulsion for this project was sparked by excited discussions over and usage of the term “digital fusion”, most helpfully propagated by Aivi Tran, designating a computer-based body of work that for years lacked the rooftop of a commonly agreed upon genre-name. While describing my music has never been a big concern, even if it’s usually felt impossible (what, for example, is this? or this? I dunno!), I’ve appreciated how the spread and application of this term has brought together people who may have felt isolated.²

As “digital fusion” gained designative traction, I witnessed the activity in the aforementioned chatroom explode over the course of a few days. Before, a day’s discussion might’ve been a few dozen messages; now, there were dozens of messages every half-minute. This had positive and negative ramifications, the negative being that conversations often proceeded at a pace of rapidity which precluded concentrated thought. Eventually, I bowed out because the rapidity exceeded my threshold for meaningful interaction; but I was glad that significant invigoration was going on.

I wanted to share this music also because it intersects with thoughts and talks I’ve been having stemming from the question, “What is ‘radical music’ in 2021?” This was stimulated by a 2014 talk given by the writer Mark Fisher, wherein he contends that, were we to play prominent “cutting edge” music from now to people twenty years ago, very nearly none of it would be aesthetically shocking, bizarre, or revelatory (think of playing house music to an audience in the early 1960s!). Fisher also observes a trend of returning to music which once was seen as the future -- as if, deprived of a shared prograde vision, imaginations turn hazily retrograde; ergo, genres such as synthwave or albums like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

It isn’t my goal here to argue about the “end of history.” Fisher’s time-travel hypothetical, however, rings loud and true to me. Visible musical radicalism has, for at least a decade, been strictly extra-musical, in the sense of songs like “This is America” or “WAP”, where one’s response is primarily to the spectacle of the music video, the performer’s identistic markers, and/or the manner in which the lyrics intersect with (mostly US-centric) ideological hotspots. Musically, there is really nothing radical here. Any vociferous condemnations or defenses of a song like “WAP” deal in moralizing reactions to semantics or imagery: how progressive or regressive is the political aspect? how propelled or repelled are we by the word “pussy”?

It would be a mistake, and simply wrong, to assert that the only music one can enjoy escapes the parameters outlined above; and my inability to coherently categorize some of my own music hardly raises that portion to the status of radicality. But the question here pertains to what is being made, and I think that if we’re going to seriously consider the nature of truly radical music today, we do need to question if such a quality can prominently exist when our hyper-fast consumerist cycle seems to forbid not just sustained, lifelong relationships to artwork but also the local, unhurried nourishment of creative gestation. Now, in my opinion, there are good, even great, examples of radical music still being made in deep Internet-burrows, and for evidence of that I would offer some of the material contained in the linked playlists. Moreover, I’d say that this quality can exist in part because these little artistic communities are so buried.

Let me share a quote that another person shared with me recently:

For culture to shift, you need pockets of isolated humanity. Since all pockets of humanity (outside of the perpetually isolated indigenous people in remote wilderness) are connected in instantaneous fashion, independent ideas aren’t allowed to ferment on their own. When you cook a meal, you have to bring ingredients together that have had time to grow, ferment, or decompose separately. A cucumber starts out as a seed, then you mix it with the soil, water and sunlight. You can’t bring the seed, soil, water and sunlight to the kitchen from the get-go. When you throw those things in to the mixture without letting them mature, the flavor cannot stand out on its own. Same thing with art and fashion. A kid in Russia can come up with a new way to dance, gets filmed on a phone, it goes viral quickly but gets lost in the morass of all of the other multitudinous forms of dance. Sure it spread far and wide, but it gets forgotten in a week. In the past, his new art form would have been confined locally, nurtured, honed, then spread geographically, creating a distinct new cultural idiosyncrasy with a strong support base. By the time it was big enough to be presented globally, it was already a cultural phenomenon locally. This isn’t possible anymore. We’re consuming too many unripened fruits.

The main impression I have here is that radical music today will, and must be, folk music. Our common idea of folkiness might be the scrappy singer strumming a guitar, but my interpretive reference rather has to do with the idea of a music being written, first of all, for one’s self, and then shared with a small-scale community, which in turn helps the artist grow at their own pace. This transcends a dependence upon image, the primacy of acoustic instrumentation, or the signaling of sincerity versus insincerity. It is a return to the valuation of outsider art, so rare nowadays. As someone who I was recently in dialogue with wrote, “Where can you find new genuine folk music? Pretty much just with your friends, imo. Even then, the global world is so influential and seeps into any crack it can find. I think vaporwave was radical and folk for a while. Grant Forbes made that music way before the world knew about it.”

Sometimes, a lot of fuss is made over what’s seen as “gatekeeping” within certain communities. It can be, depending on the context, justifiable to question and critique this behavior. At other times, the effort of maintaining a level of exclusivity, of retaining an idiosyncratic shapeliness to the communal organism, can be a legitimate attempt to protect the personal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects from the flattening effect of monoculture. Hypothetically, I welcome the Castlevania TV series and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate having introduced new and younger demographics to Castlevania. In actuality, stuff like “wholesome sad gay himbo Alucard”, image macros, and neurotic “stan” fanfiction being what’s now first associated with the series makes me want to put as much distance as possible between my interests and those latecoming impositions.

The group-terminology David Chapman uses in his essay “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” is kinda cringey, but some of the cultural/behavioral patterns he lays out are relevant to the topic. Give it a look. If we cross his belief that “[subcultures] are no longer the primary drivers of cultural development” with our contemporary consume-and-dispose customs, we’re left with the predicament of it’s even worth attempting to bring radical/outsider art beyond its rhizomatic habitat. This is troubling, because it would mean that artistic radicality no longer might not only refuse to but cannot encompass cultural upheaval. It would be like if dance music were invented and -- instead of progressively permeating nightlife, stimulating countercultural trends, and ultimately being adapted as the basis for pop music globally -- only were listened to via headphones by a few thousand people on their own, stimulated a group meeting once a year or two, and never affected music beyond a niche-within-a-niche. That’s a very sad picture to me.

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¹ Chimeratio has also maintained an excellent blog on here dedicated to looking at videogame music written in irregular time signatures, far preceding higher-profile examinations like 8-bit Music Theory’s video on the same topic.

² For myself, creative isolation has had its uses, because it has led me down routes that are highly personalized. The isolation can be dispiriting too. Although a lot of my music is videogame-music-adjacent, almost none of it uses “authentic” technology, such as PSG synthesizers or FM synthesis; and the identification of those sounds is fairly important for recognition.

#music analysis #radicalism #digital fusion

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witch-of-tempests · 5 years ago

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Tiny rant Bc I fucking hate her

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Why do people love Feyre Archeon so much? I’ll tell you why. Because she’s the perfect person to live vicariously through. She doesn’t do SHIT through her story that has a lasting impact. She isn’t really even that kind or humble like the book and how she wants us to believe. She has to literally tell us that she’s a ‘badass’ over and over again and doesn’t even do shit to prove it that once again, has a lasting impression. The literal final battle she just sort of watches as shit happens and doesn’t really do anything. I know nothing about her personality or could give you a example off the top of my head that stuck with me. I still however, love her sisters. They have actual flavor to them, and I like how their stories went. Everyone calls Feyre a badass, or they feel so sorry for her for her mental struggles and shit. They excuse her behavior because she was traumatized and what have you, but when Tamlin lashes out and can’t handle his own emotions for the same reason, he’s labeled as total chode. Abuse is not ok in any form, and if the fandom jumped on Tamlins ass for what he did (mind you the unspeakable crime he did was lock her in the house when she’s clearly unstable and be sort of a closed off jerk for a bit. He also destroyed some furniture but I don’t remember Feyre being particularly upset about that.) they should jump on Rhysand for the same thing. He literally took a doped up Feyre around and paraded her though the mountain, THEN sort of forced her into a yearly contract because she had no other choice. Which don’t get me wrong, I love Rhysand I think he’s the best part of the series. But his flaws are his love for bland ass Feyre. While we’re here, let’s address how Feyre literally does not exist without a love interest. She has no motivations beyond one base need in the first book before her love interest is introduced. So let’s look at a few other YA protagonists that are in the same boat.

America singer, the selection:

America is by far the second worst in terms of story. She suffers from YA love. Meaning she usually doesn’t have motivations beyond her love interest. But the key difference here is that she does SOMETHING. Her entire story is super self indulgent and you have to turn off your brain for a bit with some of the politics, but still it’s enjoyable because America feels somewhat grounded in reality. I haven’t re-read the selection in a while but here’s what I remember of her personality. America is sort of a ditz, she says things that she doesn’t mean to say but it ends up working out for her thankfully. But she’s also very kind, and though the story does linger on her biggest gesture of kindness, she sort of backs up that action by doing other small things. (Playful banter with her maids always gets me smiling). She’s also just as emotionally charged as any teenager, and though her moods seem irrational when she gets them, she keeps a level head about it. She exists both to compliment, and outside of her love interests. Infact I don’t remember a lot of time she gets with her eventual fiancé, because she’s busy sort of making a name for herself.

Jude Duarte , The folk of the air series.

Now Jude has a lot more in common with Feyre, they both are humans thrown into the Fey’s courts, and have to navigate their own feelings about a ‘bad fae boy’ while fighting for a place there. The key difference? Jude. Actually. Does. Something. Cardan is a jackass and absolutely everything Rhysand would’ve been had he not been destined to be with vanilla ass Feyre. Jude doesn’t hesitate to call Cardan out, kick his ass, or question his motivations. Infact her childhood upbringing and Cardans actions to her blind her from romance for the most part. Judes character development and it in its entirety exists outside of her romance. Jude is a headstrong, willful person, and I don’t need her telling me that to know.

Linh Cinder, The lunar chronicles.

Cinder herself is a lot in the same retelling vein as Feyre. Cinder being Cinderella obvs. But her romance is not the be all end all of the story. She’s willing to sacrifice what chance she does have with her prince to ensure the safety of a ENTIRE PLANET. Cinder herself is a excellent YA character, she’s thoughtful and actually kind of calculating. She also is able to learn from her mistakes (that she makes frequently) and wastes no time in taking advantage of a opprontunity when she sees it. She also is recklessly selfless, IE going into a quarantine on a hunch just to bring comfort to someone else. But her romance sort of takes a backseat to the main plot, and she never lets what she truely wants get in the way of her wanting the best for the majority.

Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games

Do I need to go on? Ok. Katniss is the PINACLE of the YA ‘chosen one’ girl trope thing. But her romance? It’s like on the back row of a tour bus for her. It’s played up in the movie and mass media consumption, but she’s just trying to survive. She’s a hilariously sarcastic and realistic heroine, even though she describes herself as hard to like and such, she’s still a LOVELY character who I absolutely adore. She isn’t in the games for fame or glory, she’s here for a objectively selfish reason. To save her sister. Anyways I could go on for pages about how much I love Katniss but the point here too is that she struggles with PTSD as well, like Feyre. But she’s again, realistic. And sort of sucks it up and bottles it away so she can like, survive. Where Feyre, and I say this as someone who struggles with PTSD myself, mopes about it. There are days when the flashbacks and terrors make you want to curl up and die, and those days are more often than not. But, you have to suck it up sometime and deal with it later. Katniss does that shit, Feyre does not.

TLDR: Feyre archeon is a shit character

Ps: Theres better smut on the internet.

#feyre archeron #sort of a rant #YA protagonist #Katniss everdeen #Linh cinder #America Singer #Jude Duarte

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attract-mode-collective · 7 years ago

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Review: Fabricated City

I’ve been living in New York City for over two decades now, and each passing year (more like each passing month, or week, or hour, or minute) I ask myself why in hell do I bother sticking around? But then comes summer time, aka the best time, cuz it’s Asian movie time. Otherwise known as the New York Asian Film Festival!

Seriously, if there’s one thing that the Big Apple can continue to lay claim towards, and proudly, it’s how there’s absolutely no better place on earth to be if you’re a cinephile, with the NYAFF as the undisputed number 1 reason for 16 years now. Though why am I mentioning all this, on a video game blog? Well, that’s because…

This year features a film that’s video game related! Obviously. It’s been a while, ever since the 2012 edition brought us the live-action adaptation of Ace Attorney, and before that, there were the live-action adaptations of both The Onechanbara and Yakuza in 2008. Though this year’s Fabricated City has much more in common with something I saw all way back in 2003, Resurrection of the Little Match Girl.

Because Fabricated City is not based on a game but an original story (if you can call it that) and also hails from South Korea. It’s by director Park Kwang-hyun, his first film since 2005’s Welcome to Dongmakgol, which long-time goers of the NYAFF still fondly remember (like myself). Going in, expectations were high, especially after reading one reviewer describe it as: “an updated version of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy set in the world of online video games.”

Well, ummm…

Fabricated City stars Kwon Yu (portrayed by Ji Chang-wook), who is the captain of a squad of online gamers (hence his nickname, Captain). They all play a first person shooter that strongly resembles Call of Duty, so much so that the film opens up with the team in the middle of a fracas that basically mirrors that Super Bowl ad for Modern Warfare 3 from years back. The rest of the team is quite capable, with each member specializing in a skill of some kind, be it sharpshooting or demolitions. Except for Mr. Hairy, who is considerably less than equipped and in fact is perpetually frightened of all the gunfire.

So two minutes in and I’m already confused. I’m assuming anyone else would be too, unless he or she was completely unaware of the visual cues that what we’re watching is a realistic depiction of a scene in a video game (or is completely unaware of the film’s plot beforehand). Cuz why would someone be acting all scared like this? It’s not like whomever is playing a scary video game. True, often you have to forget about what you know about a movie beforehand while watching, to go with flow, but in this instance... it’s just confusing.

After a scoring a victory, despite the fact that the Captain was killed in the line of fire, due to saving Mr. Hairy’s hairy ass, we cut to reality… Inside an internet cafe is where the real Kwon Yu spends all his time, playing video games and not looking for a job. Which drives his single mother up the wall. We also find out that the Captain is a mystery to his teammates and he subsequently has never met them in IRL.

A phone rings next to his booth and Kwon Yu answers; it’s the owner, who left it behind, and she asks him to return it back to her. At first he doesn’t want to bother, but the hefty reward is too much to pass on. So he drops it off at the woman’s apartment, with zero fuss or muss. But when she ends up raped and murdered, guess who’s the suspect? The Captain becomes public enemy number oneand is sentenced to life in jail without parole (thanks in part to the seemingly gutless public defender’s halfhearted defense).

Not surprisingly, the Captain immediately becomes the target of the big dog of the yard and his posse, who savagely beats our hero into submission, or so that’s his plan. But Kwon Yu fights back, despite being outnumbered, largely due to the fact that he knows how to handle himself (as a former taekwondo star before being kicked off the team for aggressive tendencies). Though the primary source of his resolve is mom, who tells her son that she’s trying her best to get him outta there. But when she unexpected commits suicide, all hope seems lost. Until Kwon Yu is befriended by the single person that no one messes with in jail; a cannibal serial killer who takes a liking to the young man that has guts enough to stand up the big bully.

Alas, their friendship only lasts long enough for Kwon Yu to make his escape. As a fugitive, the Captain discovers that he truly is enemy number one, though there’s one lone voice out there, trying to prove to the world that the evidence simply doesn’t add up: it’s Mr. Hairy! Captain eventually meets up with his teammate, who turns out to be a super cute girl. Gee, what a surprise. As well as a super shy girl; Hairy can only communicate with Captain on the phone… even if they’re in the same room.

It’s worth mentioning how, at this point, I was more than a little disappointed in Fabricated City; there was hardly any video game to this video game movie, which itself was pretty bland and predictable. I honestly would have shut it off, if not for the acting chops the star, Ji Chang-wook, who does his best to add in as much heart and soul into such a one dimensional character that the film will allow. Though things started to pick up (or so I thought) when the rest of the team shows up. Again, as expected, their real world selves betray their video avatars: one’s a sorta young dude, another is kind of middle aged, and the third is practically a grandpa. No one seems like the typical gamer-type, which is neat I guess.

There’s actually seven squad members, but the other two are porn stars who are simply too busy to show up. Anyhow, the remaining five go on a mission to clear the Captain’s name, and along the way they discover the existence of an organization that covers up heinous behavior of the rich and powerful, by framing innocent individuals (like, you know, Kwon Yu). Naturally the inept public defender is the evil architect of it all, whose super fancy desk is basically the 21st century version of the one Dillinger uses to communicate with the MCP in Tron. And is there an attempt to haxxor said desk? You bet there is!

Easily my biggest issue with the film is its overuse of movie magic. Two minutes into the proceedings, one gets the feeling that the director is perhaps unfamiliar with video games, which is already an issue. Yet the logic flaw that I described above, at the very least, helped to establish character, and the dichotomy between the Mr Hairy we see at the very beginning and the real person that is revealed is at least somewhat entertaining. Whereas when the good guys create drones to spy on the bad guys, which are conveniently able to listen to conversations through walls, cuz they can all do that you see… it would appear that Park Kwang-hyun also has a less than firm grasp of technology. The example given is just one of several transparent attempts at covering up plot holes, which gets super dumb, super fast.

Towards the end, the Captain exhibits all sorts of extraordinary abilities. Being able handle himself in a fight makes sense, it’s established that he knows how to punch and kick. But his death defying driving skills? While it would have been super cliched to connect it to time spent with driving video games, at least that would have been some other connection to video games that I was craving for. So, as a video game movie, Fabricated City is a disappointment and certainly not the new Resurrection of the Little Match Girl I’ve been craving. While hardly perfect, it at least had plenty of attempts at connecting video games with the real world, as goofy as they were. Like how God was a French guy who runs an arcade in heaven. Fabricated City is just not nearly as interesting.

Though simply taken for what it aims to be, an action crime drama, it fails in that too. Largely due to the aforementioned overuse of technology to get the Captain and his team out of hot water, time and time and again. It’s perhaps unfair or flat out foolish to state the following, since there’s only one previous film to his credit, but Fabricated City feels like a movie by a director trying to do something totally different. And the result is either a refreshing take on a genre or a total mess, cuz the director doesn’t realize that he’s actually doing what has been done before, yet not as well. Still, Ji Chang-wook’s performance is fairly engaging, so if you want to tell people that you saw one of his earlier work when he inevitably becomes the talk of Hollywood, you’ll have that chance on July 15, at 3:00PM.

In the end, Fabricated City is legit the rare dud in an otherwise phenomenal line-up for this year’s NYAFF. May I suggest instead a Filipino take on American teen romance flicks, with a heavy dose of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? To learn more about that one, simply head on over to my personal blog, which used to be mostly about video games but is now mostly about Asian movies as a whole. Though I’m not done talking about video game movies. In fact, I’ve got another review in the wings, either next week or the next…

Don’t forget: Attract Mode is now on Medium! There you can subscribe to keep up to date, as well as enjoy some “best of” content you might have missed the first time around, plus be spared of the technical issues that’s starting to overtake Tumblr.

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nicholerestrada · 6 years ago

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How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Mortimer Goth settles in to one of the 15 wicker chairs that have suddenly appeared by his lit fireplace. He feels strangely compelled to sit and remain seated, as if guided by an unseen hand, even as the room he’s in grows curiously hotter and hotter. Before he knows it, the chairs around him burst into pixelated flames. He’s on fire! He calls for help, but his wife, Bella, can’t hear him. She’s swimming in circles in their backyard pool, searching fruitlessly for a ladder that doesn’t exist.

For the uninitiated fiddling around their family desktop, the original version of “The Sims” was mostly about nurturing humanlike characters through life’s minutiae. For everyone else, “The Sims” was and is a game about death, about wacky, inconsequential death, about fiery death and watery death, death by starvation and death by electric shock and death by skydiving malfunction ― Mortimer and Bella’s worst recurring nightmare. And as the game evolved over the years, a kind of meta-game has formed around it: a subtle relationship between creative, death-obsessed “Sims” players and the game’s ever-adapting designers, keen on raising the stakes of the simulated lives we so easily ended.

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

In the scenario above, the deaths of Mortimer Goth and his wife were no accident. They were the result of a human player deciding to set in motion a series of events that would lead to the inevitable demise of digital beings brought to life in a simulation game. That human player could have ushered Mortimer and his wife into a room and removed the door, watching as the Sims starved inside. The player could have prompted the characters to start making a feast with their cooking skill at Level 1, tempting a shoddy oven to burst aflame and engulf them. The player could have even neglected the couple’s guinea pig, only to have Mortimer pick it up and allow the rodent to administer one fatal bite.

But that player chose to cluster highly flammable chairs near the fireplace and hope they caught like tinder, and remove the ladder in the swimming pool once Bella, ignorant of the option of simply lifting herself out, dived in.

Back in the heyday of the game’s first iteration, everyone killed their Sims. I feel confident in stating this even without hard data to back it up: Killing Sims wasn’t exceptional behavior, it was the norm. Just look at the Reddit threads relaying depraved “Sims” activity with comments spooling into the thousands, or this Polygon article, where it is written, “It is a proven fact people love killing off Sims.”

“That was the only enjoyable way to play ‘The Sims’!” Maddy Myrick, 31, told me. She’d responded to my callout on Twitter, asking first-generation “Sims” players to explain the morbid habit of killing a thing you were ostensibly tasked with keeping alive. “Sometimes I would start a new family, convinced that I would let them live. But, inevitably, I quickly became bored with designing their house (which I was never able to finish).”

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“My favorite thing to do was lure my Sims into a seemingly normal space and then take away its exit,” my colleague Sara Boboltz confessed in a direct message. “So, I’d make a tiny house and take away the door. I’d make a pool and take away the ladder. Make a two-story house, take the stairs. You get it. Sometimes my Sims would be teachers I didn’t like.”

“I made a guy who was a compulsive neatfreak,” Reddit user vsanna wrote in a comment that rose to the top of its thread. “Put him in a really surreal little house with a wedding buffet and a hamster or something, deleted the door. Eventually he went insane from lack of cleanliness and depression over his little rodent friend dying, and starved to death once the banquet rotted. I put the resulting urn in the room. I then repeated an identical scenario several times, always keeping the urns in the room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.”

Our penchant for serial killing has not gone unnoticed at “Sims” headquarters. According to “The Sims 4” senior producer Grant Rodiek, who’s been with the company since 2005, the latest version of the game registers around 28,000 Sim deaths per day.

“I think [killing Sims is] a way players can express ultimate control over a thing. It’s funny, mischievous, dark, without being grotesque,” Rodiek said. “It’s a kinder, gentler method of using a magnifying glass to burn insects.”

Between life and death in “Sims 4,” there’s still no single path to playing. The vastly open-ended game nudges you toward certain goals — meeting your Sims’ physical needs; securing them a means of making money — but no task or accomplishment is necessarily required.

Rodiek and his colleagues have had a lot of time to analyze the preferences and behaviors of “Sims” players. He’s whittled users down to a handful of types: There are the “aspiring Frank Lloyd Wrights” who love tinkering in the game’s Build mode; the Create-a-Sim artists who painstakingly remodel favorite characters or celebrities in digital form, or the narrative writers who play out classic storylines (think: mysterious new kid, star-crossed lovers, etc.) in Live mode.

“And then you have the sort of people … we call them deviant players,” Rodiek said. “People who like to mess with their Sims, people who like to poke at the system, people who like to have fun and break the game and do weird stuff.” (These categories, I’d add, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

In the early years, these players, in an effort to discover all the ways they could ruin their Sims’ lives, might’ve swapped stories with friends about building murder houses and endlessly uppingtheir budgets for DIY torture devices using the “rosebud” money cheat.

As the internet’s capacity to bring people together has evolved since the early 2000s, so have user-created parameters to keep gameplay interesting. Forums hold lists of restrictive challenges, which can involve everything from having one Sim birth 100 babies to re-creating consecutive historical eras with each generation of a family. On YouTube, players show themselves re-enacting “The Hunger Games” or building lengthy mazes meant only to make simulated life harder for their tiny humans.(One Simmer who orchestrated 12 seasons of Sim “Hunger Games” — complete with training days and sporadic gifts of food like apples — was recently hired on by Electronic Arts as an associate producer.)

Over the years, the current base game — there are four total now — is supplemented with expansion packs to provide new ways to play the game — and kill your Sims. Rodiek said it’s the first thing developers plan out with each new expansion, along with new places for your digital hedonists to hook up.

Much-beloved YouTuber “Call Me Kevin” has a series showcasing his comically deadly restaurant in “Sims 4,” where unskilled chefs serve up the sometimes-fatal pufferfish nigiri introduced in the “City Living” expansion pack. It’s the only thing on the menu. Watching him play, you see Sims dining casually together, only to be interrupted when one diner clutches at their throat and falls head-first into their food. He’s amassed quite the graveyard behind the restaurant, complete with a coffin that you can WooHoo in — Sim-speak for sex.

Part of the widespread appeal of killing Sims might be that the actual moments of their demise aren’t particularly disturbing. Generally, dying Sims just drop or crumple to the floor in distress, disappearing altogether in some versions of the game. Coming across a hungry cowplant provides the bizarre and delightful visual of a giant flower consuming a Sim, but there’s no blood or errant limbs left behind. In a fire, Sims might become visibly odorous as their Hygiene levels plummet, but that’s about it — no gore or horror-movie theatrics.

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

“We don’t let toddlers burn to death,” Rodiek said. “That’s just gross. That’s not funny, there’s nothing humorous there. We don’t let dogs burn to death because like, again, that’s gross.”

Eventually, the grim reaper, who can talk to but sadly not have children with Sims, comes to collect your character’s soul, leaving an urn or gravestone in the Sim’s place. The reaper himself has a cellphone or a tablet, ostensibly to process the Sim’s soul, or something. It’s all a little goofy.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

Philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, who has written extensively about the philosophy of games, likened the act of killing Sims to the innocent phenomenon of “speedrunning,” where players try to complete a given game as fast as possible.

“One of my favorites is a speed run of ‘[Super] Mario [Bros.]’ where you try to get zero points … even though the traditional goal of ‘Mario’ is to max out your points. Trying to get to the end as fast as possible with zero points is actually much harder and much weirder,” he said. “You’re playing the game in an unintended way, which, for some people, I think it makes them feel more creative.”

“The system seems to tell you, ‘Look, the point of this game is to take care of the Sims,’ and all the tools that are given to you are given to you to take care of your Sims,” he said. “So if you want to kill your Sims, you have to do kind of creative and unexpected things and kind of remix the game.”

However, Nguyen said it was also possible that, for the players who like “The Sims” for its narrative possibilities and engage with “the fiction of the game,” explorations of death could have deeper personal significance.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said.

Whatever the explanation, the game’s creators have come to understand that we use “The Sims” not just to simulate life, but to play God. And it’s impacted the way the game has shifted, from “Sims 1” to “Sims 4.”

The first two versions of “The Sims” ― which Rodiek described as “disastrously hard” ― made it easier for the Goths to expire outside of a player’s purview. Direct Sim-on-Sim homicide isn’t possible, so accidents were more often fatal: a grilled cheese that burns down the house, a malfunctioning skydiving simulator, or a fatal shock delivered to a character standing in a puddle during an electric repair. In “The Sims 2,” simply being in the front yard at the exact time a satellite falls to Earth could be the end of a Sim’s brief journey.

But nowadays, compared to “Sims 1” and “Sims 2,” it’s a lot harder to deliberately kill off dear Mortimer and Bella. Anyone coming to “The Sims 4,” the game’s latest version, might notice their characters can now easily hop out of a pool, ladder or not. It’s a change that came with “The Sims 3,” effectively eliminating one of the preferred manners of Sims murder.

“I love how funny and surprising it is to say, ‘Hey, we as a team recognize what you’re doing and, ha-ha, we flipped the switch,’” Rodiek said. The decision was born out of developers’ desire to further up Sims’ intelligence and self-sufficiency with each new version. Players, he said, “got pissed at this.”

“Basically, our thought was if Sims are smarter, and if Sims are less likely to just frickin’ die all the time, well, maybe they’re smart enough to pull their asses out of the pool,” he said, noting that you can still kill them from exhaustion if you build walls around the pool. “They’ll still fart at the wrong time and they’ll still just pass out in a pool of vomit if they’re tired enough and the timing is wrong, but that, at least, is a win for them.”

Now, if you leave them unattended, “your Sims will basically default to neutral,” Rodiek said. Players can worry less about making sure everyone has had a bathroom break or a meal. If you don’t direct your Sim to do it, they’ll likely figure it out themselves.

“Our tagline was, ‘We want to move past peeing,’” he said of shifting Sims’ needs beyond basic survival. “However, for them to really succeed, you have to nurture them. And nurturing your Sims comes from more emotional, higher-level fulfillment.”

Now, Sims have aspirations generally based on interests or specific actions: One Sim might want to become a tech genius, while another wants to become the neighborhood enemy. Fulfilling these wishes results in rewards that make the Sim better.

I’m usually a gentle “Sims” player, nurturing my families into fulfilling home lives and careers, watching as they level up in activities like baking and guitar playing, occasionally tossing in a love affair here and there. For the purposes of this article, though, I set out to kill as many Sims in “Sims 4” as I could.

Not wanting to delete doors and watch my Sims starve, I fell back on faithful killing strategies, like the classic fire scenarios. There were newer tactics I could try, too: In “Sims 4,” even Sims’ emotions, taken to the extreme, can be fatal; their hearts can explode from sheer rage or cease beating from hysterics.

In “Seasons,” the most recent expansion pack, Sims who are skilled in flower arranging can whip up a mysterious plant, the scent of which ages or kills its recipient. A video from website Sims VIP illustrating this particular death demonstrates the cruelty: At first, an elder Sim is pleased to be receiving a gift. But upon realizing his bad luck, he becomes angry, shouting out “Narb!” He wipes his brow, swoons to his knees, and even checks his pulse one last time before the grim reaper arrives.

“Seasons” also allows the possibility of death by freezing or overheating, or getting struck by lightning. New kinds of warnings tip you off to these sorts of ends: The game indicates via a Sim’s “moodlet” that your electronic buddy might die if he doesn’t get out of the blizzard, or change out of his snowsuit during a heat wave, or run in from the thunderstorm.

One of the suggested ways to murder your Sims is through overexhaustion, though once a Sim becomes “uncomfortable,” many actions, like jogging, become unavailable to a player. In “Sims 4,” more Sims simply die of old age than tragically before their time: Age accounts for 30.5 percent of deaths in the game, compared to the 11 percent who die of hunger; the 10.7 percent who drown; or the 10.6 percent who die in a fire, according to statistics provided by Rodiek.

Maybe I’m unpracticed, but I couldn’t murder my Sims. I made one Sim flirt with her husband’s dad in front of her husband, enraging the husband until the spouses became enemies, then nemeses. I had them all fight — illustrated by a cloud of dust and occasional flashes of limb — but it only made them a little dazed. I had them all pee themselves, then installed a shower and had them all walk in on each other, but no one reached the deadly “mortified” level of embarrassment. I made the dad swim in the pool in wintertime, but he kept getting out once he started freezing. Without resorting to the walls-around-the-pool method Rodiek mentioned, I couldn’t play God quite like I used to.

Defeated, I had the enraged husband and wife divorce before closing my game. It seemed only fair. When I opened up “Sims 2,” however, I found that one installation of the “shoddy fireplace” did the trick in no time. My Sims freaked out and wailed, too frantic to obey my requests for them to stand directly in the flames — but the blaze got them in the end.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“It is really great when people have a Sim that they really care about, and they care about how they orchestrated their life, and they see them raise children, and maybe get a divorce, and then their children grow up and then they die. They go, ‘Oh, man, I could just re-create them, but it will never be that Sim.’”

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.

In a perpetual quest, developers hope to keep inching “The Sims” toward a better reflection of real life and death, to keep raising the stakes and allowing customization in ways that matter to players.

In 2016, “Sims” released an update that expanded the possibilities of gender expression among characters, no longer restricting certain hair, makeup or clothing items to one gender or another and allowing players to select whether a Sim could impregnate others or get pregnant, regardless of outward appearance. Similarly, Rodiek said, creators are discussing the possibility of incorporating Sims who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind, or use a wheelchair. To help develop these, the team has been talking to players who have similar experiences.

“In actually talking to these players, talking about how it affects their lives, we’ve been thinking, how can we reflect this in a way that works in our game?” he said. “That’s the stuff we’re actually looking into that we really want to figure out, because it’s scary to get it wrong, but I think it’s so important if we can get it right.”

In terms of death, Rodiek said he could envision developing a kind of long-term, terminal disease within the game from which Sims can’t recover (but, seriously, don’t ask him about it on Twitter, because they’re not making this right now).

“I could see us approaching that in sort of a generic way that we’re not saying that it’s this specific cancer. But we’re basically saying that your Sim has something that can’t be cured and they will die before their time as a result of that,” he said. Maybe, he added, it’d be an option players could toggle on or off.

“I think it’s a reality of life … in a way that is like, yes, it’s real, and yes, it’s sad. But maybe for someone who wants it, it’s cathartic or its interesting and it helps you tell a story,” Rodiek said. “Those are some of the things we’re trying to grapple with and talk to our players about how to get right. And it’s terrifying, but it’s really cool if we could do it.”

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

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michaeljtraylor · 6 years ago

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How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.”

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

Download

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/killing-sims-death-murder-ea_us_5adf94dbe4b07be4d4c58fd4

from RSSUnify feed https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/ from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.tumblr.com/post/179530072194

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queermediastudies · 6 years ago

Text

Analyze Queer Media in China: Taking Audiences’ Re-Creation as Examples

Group7: Zhuoqun Zhang, Zhenxuan Liang

Unlike the tendency that queer message is becoming acceptable in US, the Chinese government still showed great opposing to everything related to queer media, and they do not want them to appear in the public view. Due to the government’s complete control of the media, queer culture has encountered a cold winter in the Chinese media. The General Administration of Radio and Television, which is the government department in charge of media supervision in the country, classifies homosexuality and sexual incest, sexual perversion, sexual assault as the obscene, unethical behavior, in the fifth rule and sixth points of the “General Rules for the Production of TV Drama” and prohibits it (China Film Make Association Secretariat,2015). Here is the document of the policy.

(“General Rules for the Production of TV.”, 2015)

These policies lead to the fall behind of queer media in China directly. The series of policies thwart the development of queer media, enforce it to reform to fit in that environment. There are only two choice for the queer media in order to avoid being banned: either delete all queer contents or some “suspected queer content”, or reduce the “level” of the queer content. Therefore, many queer media deleted sexual behavior, such as kissing, too-directly language, to pretend that there is no queer message. Inevitably, this phenomenon has led to various of lacks and deficiencies of queer content in the Chinese media.

However, the strict policy of queer message is resulting in more requirement of queer media. It is an undeniable fact that the lack of media queer content does not mean that the audience does not have the need for queer content. In fact, this fundamental imbalance in supply and demand has led to the audience, especially those who are identified as queers, or who has a strong tendency to consume queer content, generate dissatisfaction. To a certain extent, it even increases the audience’s desire for queer content (Li, 2004). Directly rebelling against the government is totally not a wise behavior when the media under the strict supervision of the government. Therefore, the Chinese audience tends to solve the status of the scarcity of queer content through internal way rather external, and the re-creation by the audience is one of the important means.

(Tsuji, 2004, p. 156)

The Chinese people do have great requirement of the queer media. The photo behind is an example of this phenomena. This a scream shot for the Japanese anime Yu-Gi-Oh! GX episode 156 from a Chinese video website Bilibili. The colorful subtitle is a special function in this website, named bullet subtitle. Everyone can send bullet subtitle at every moment when watching the video, these messages will appear at other people’s screams when they are watching the same video at the same moments. The bullet subtitle can easily present the direct feeling of the audience when watching at that moment. The bullet subtitle in this scream shot means “These two boys will fall in love forever!”. However, there is not any plot showing that they love each other. They are just good friends. It shows that Chinese people do need these messages. More importantly, it also shows a tendency that the Chinese people would re-create some message to change the original media into a queer media.

The re-creation by audience means that the audience re-creates new content that belongs to the audience itself, based on the original content, subject or worldview and other original content under the premise of the audience already consumed existing original media. The re-creation of queer content by Chinese audiences generally present as two forms. First, they create new queer content based on the original media that does not contain queer content, for example, the audiences set up romantic relationships for two or more characters who do not show a romantic relationship in origin media message. Second, strengthen the existing queer content, which means increasing sexual behavior, or directly defining the behavior as the expression of queer. At the same time, the Chinese audiences are also willing to spread their re-creation contents. Those contents mainly presented through the internet in three types that fictions, paintings, and videos. There are three major platform for these three kinds of media. The fictions are mostly posted on Tieba, the paintings are mainly come from Weibo, the videos are more common on Bilibili. Here is the logos of these three platform.

(We made it by ourselves)

Within this situation in China, the audience have no access to the queer media, but the public do need some queer messages, not only for the queer people, but also for the other people. To solve the problem of the lacking of these kinds of media, the audience can just create these media by themselves. Due to the public media is controlled by the government, the audience can just post these re-creation media through some private social media, in which government have less power in this area. As a result, re-creation media about the queer message is super popular in China, now.

All of these three platforms are opening to everyone, and the messages from them are treated as private messages. Thus, the government have less power on these areas. At the same time, the audience have more liberty on these platform, which is very suitable for the re-creations.

The Re-Creation Fictions

The text is one of the most direct way that audience may think about when they want to re-create. It’s no need for strict professional skill, and can seem as zero-cost. Text is equal to the direct expression of queer audience perception, which is similar to the comment in the rating system. But most text created by the audience cannot be considered as the re-creation. They either lack the elements from the original media: for example, just to describe their feelings after saw a film; or they lack their new creation part: for example, just a re-narration of the original message. But fiction is an ideal audience text re-creation is because is usually performed as a totally new story based on same character, worldview, background from origin media.

Fictions do not have further influence that other two types of recreation because of two reasons. First, in the media age, not everyone wants to spend their time reading. Secondly, lower professional skill requirements also lead to generally lower quality of text re-creation. This disparity quality tends to have a greater impact on text content than other forms. Finally, the audience’s re-creation has not been well disseminated. There is no doubt that the most suitable form of text transmission is books, and also includes e-books. But the queer fiction can’t be spread in China through legal way. It can only occur in Tieba, which is a social media in China focusing more on the textual information.

(A scream shoot from Tieba)

Here is an example of re-created fictions. It is a fiction created by an audience after he watched the animation “Fate stay night”. It was uploaded to Tieba. In the fiction, he changed the relationship between the two hostile male characters. The writer created a romantic atmosphere for the two guys. But it still follows the traditional binary oppositional gender perspective through add “feminine” characteristics on one character in order to match another character who is the masculine character.

The Re-Creation Paitings

In addition to the fictions, there are more people eager to the paintings with queer message re-created from some medias. Compared to the fictions, the paintings can present more vivid and more visualized information, even though the painting required more skillful people to do the design job. But the paintings cost the audience less time to capture the information. Thus, the paintings are more influential in this decade, when the audiences are searching for more convenient and fast-reading media (Liu, 2015, p.700-712).

With the re-creation paintings of queer content becoming more and more popular, it is now a very important aspect of Weibo. Many people who are not interested in queer media also post these paintings to appeal the queer fans. On the other side, some people who are interested in the queer media is also searching and support these painters. Now, Weibo is becoming a place for Chinese people to do communicate with each other about queer information. Queer people can also find out groups through Weibo.

Thus, the re-creating paintings become a very popular category of queer media. In the Chinese searching engine, the citizens can very easily find out these paintings. This phenomenon is quite common in a Chinese famous social media app Weibo. Weibo is quite similar to Instagram. Weibo means mini blog in Chinese. In Weibo, people can send post, which is up to 140 word, and up to 9 pictures. The setting of Weibo making it is suitable to the demand of audiences in this decade and it is also suitable for the painters to present their artworks. At the same time, most of the post from Weibo is recognized as private content, and government have less power in this area. Therefore, people have more liberty of post queer information in Weibo. Then, there are more people post re-creation paintings of queer content in Weibo.

(Ye, 2012,p.1)

This is a painting made by a Chinese painter to present the love between these two boys. In fact, this is just a painting from her album on Weibo, which consists of the pictures presenting the similar information. The two boys comes from Yo-Gi-Oh GX. They are just the example I mentioned before. They just good friends, and do not have any emotion beyond the friendship. Chinese people are creating something to change it into queer media.

The Re-Creation Videos

Unlike fictions and paintings, it is hard to create a whole video by an individual in a short time. It is also hard for an audience to gather a group of people to create videos and there are a few people that are willing to spend a very long time to create a video. Thus, the Chinese people seldom re-create the whole videos (Noldus, 2000, p.197-206). Instead, Chinese people make some videos consisted of a short clip from the original media and add some voice over about their own comments about the original media. This kind of video is very common in one of the most popular video platforms, which went by the name of Bilibili. Similar to Weibo a Tieba, Bilibili also open to everyone and make an environment that has more liberty and the government have less power in this area.

There is a popular type that the voice over comments are guide other people to find out the “hidden” queer information in the original medias. The editor may analyze some detail from the original medias to prove that there is some queer information, even thought there is not the queer media in the original medias at all.

Similar to the category of the re-creation in behind, the queer message is a useful tool to gain more fans. However, due to these video do not create new image or story, it will also appeal more people to focus on the original medias.

(Zhangmao, 2018)

Here is a video from Bilibili, made by Zhangmao. It is analyzing a famous Chinese TV serious, named Zhenhun. Zhangmao made a clip of the Zhenhun in order to show the audience the plot of the TV serious. However clip is following a story line of the love of this tow actor. In fact, the relationship between the two actors in Zhenhun is just coworkers. Zhangmao re-created the romantic relationship of the two actors. This video is becoming on of the most famous video of Zhangmao.

Overall the examples, they all presented the situation of queer media in China. It is in a very unique style. In China there is no official queer medias. Even all the queer medias are re-created by the audience.

According to Stuart Hall, the motivation for the audience to re-create can be explained as because the audience is in a negotiating position, and the ideology of the audience and domination is always in a state of contradictory negotiation (Hall, S., Morley, D., & Chen, K. H. 1996). On the one hand, the audience can accept the content provided by the media, and on the other hand, the content provided by the media cannot fully meet their needs or not completely fit their opinions. It is this state of being in the middle that constitutes the direct motivation and reason for re-creation. Conversely, the audience completely agrees or disagree with the media, it does not constitute a reason for re-creation: the audience who completely agree has been satisfied in the process of consumption, and the completely opposed audience cannot have interest with it. Specifically, look at the Chinese audience: they may like the content of the media they consume, such as the characters and plots inside; but on the other hand, they will not be satisfied with the lacking and missing of queer content.

On the other hand, Stuart Hall’s point of view can also be used to explain the Chinese audience’s strong spreading intentions for re-creation. Also because the audience is in the middle position, this means that the audience needs to establish a dual identity compared other people. In other words, the audiences in a negotiating position need others to agree with the part of the media they agree, and they also need others to disagree to the part of the media that they disagree with. Take the “Game of Thrones” as an example. The other only need to know that someone who likes or dislikes to watch “Game of Thrones” is enough. And this is easy, through daily communication or the rating network. But in the audience in a negotiating position, he may also like the Game of Thrones, but he may think that Jon Snow should fill in love with Tyrion Lannister instead of Daenerys Targaryen, and this will be more difficult to find others have the same idea. In a sense, re-creation is a process of expressing an opinion by the audience in a negotiating position and actively seeking identity.

It can be said that the re-creation of the audience has alleviated the demand for the content of the queer to a certain extent. In this way, we can research on how the public make meaning in interactions with texts or called audience analysis. There is a surprising finding that the audience has played such a significant role in the creation of the queer culture, even more than the media itself. More specifically, re-creating simultaneously provides an important site of resistance and identification for viewers, which can be identified as “queer space”, is recognize the possibility that various and fluctuating queer position might be occupied whenever anyone produces or responds to culture (Doty, 1997,p.3). The role of re-creation itself is a resistance to the Chinese government’s banning on queer media. In addition, the recreation is interacting closely in queer identity recognition. The process of identification involving in the process of both creation and consumption. One of the purposes of the audience’s re-creation is to gain others feedback through the others consumption of content that they create. And gaining the feedback means the identification. Consumption also chasing for identification in this case, because the information conveyed from re-creation is sort of that the queer individuals are not lonely. It telling the public that there are groups of people have the similar requirement and the similar thought. In a word, the audience consumption of re-creation which containing queer content is the recognition of its own queer identity. And the “queer space” also meant to the regressive work of mass media (Doty, 1997,p.4).

The re-creation by audience is similar to the Stonewall, which both is case that under the government’s suppression, people first to tent to use internal way rather than external way to fit their desire–the re-creation can be seem as gay bar. But as we all know what was happened on Stonewall event, the re-creation, or other internal way are not the consistence way to duel with the imbalance in supply and demand of queer content. When the government’s suppression continues to strengthen or the fragile imbalance is broken, no one can sure that the “Stonewall event” will not occur in China. Maybe Chinese government need to think about to change itself.

References:

General Rules for the Production of TV. (n.d.). Retrieved October 5, 2018, from http://www.ctpia.com.cn/exchange/zcxx/2015-12-31/1451534140473.shtml

Hall, S., Morley, D., & Chen, K. H. (1996). Stuart hall : critical dialogues in cultural studies. (82).

Tsuji, H. (2004, October 6). Yu-Gi-Oh! GX . Retrieved October 5, 2018, from https://www.bilibili.com/bangumi/play/ss157#3563

Ye. (2012, March 20). 4810. Retrieved October 5, 2018, from http://photo.weibo.com/2673467341/albums/detail/album_id/3425657242413195#!/mode/1/page/1

Li, Yinhe. (2004). The Judgment of the Law of Sex in China . Nanjing Normal University: Social science (1), 21-31.

Doty, A. (1997). Making things perfectly queer: Interpreting mass culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Park. (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2018, from https://tieba.baidu.com/p/3839348002

Noldus, L. P., Trienes, R. J., Hendriksen, A. H., Jansen, H., & Jansen, R. G. (2000). The Observer Video-Pro: new software for the collection, management, and presentation of time-structured data from videotapes and digital media files. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 32(1), 197-206.

Liu, Z. (2005). Reading behavior in the digital environment: Changes in reading behavior over the past ten years. Journal of documentation, 61(6), 700-712.

#queer media #photoessay #LGBTG #china #re-creation

0 notes

vernonliang-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Analyze Queer Media in China: Taking Audiences’ Re-Creation as Examples

Group7: Zhuoqun Zhang, Zhenxuan Liang

Unlike the tendency that queer message is becoming acceptable in US, the Chinese government still showed great opposing to everything related to queer media, and they do not want them to appear in the public view. Due to the government's complete control of the media, queer culture has encountered a cold winter in the Chinese media. The General Administration of Radio and Television, which is the government department in charge of media supervision in the country, classifies homosexuality and sexual incest, sexual perversion, sexual assault as the obscene, unethical behavior, in the fifth rule and sixth points of the "General Rules for the Production of TV Drama" and prohibits it (China Film Make Association Secretariat,2015). Here is the document of the policy.

("General Rules for the Production of TV.", 2015)

These policies lead to the fall behind of queer media in China directly. The series of policies thwart the development of queer media, enforce it to reform to fit in that environment. There are only two choice for the queer media in order to avoid being banned: either delete all queer contents or some "suspected queer content", or reduce the "level" of the queer content. Therefore, many queer media deleted sexual behavior, such as kissing, too-directly language, to pretend that there is no queer message. Inevitably, this phenomenon has led to various of lacks and deficiencies of queer content in the Chinese media.

However, the strict policy of queer message is resulting in more requirement of queer media. It is an undeniable fact that the lack of media queer content does not mean that the audience does not have the need for queer content. In fact, this fundamental imbalance in supply and demand has led to the audience, especially those who are identified as queers, or who has a strong tendency to consume queer content, generate dissatisfaction. To a certain extent, it even increases the audience's desire for queer content (Li, 2004). Directly rebelling against the government is totally not a wise behavior when the media under the strict supervision of the government. Therefore, the Chinese audience tends to solve the status of the scarcity of queer content through internal way rather external, and the re-creation by the audience is one of the important means.

(Tsuji, 2004, p. 156)

(We made it by ourselves)

The Re-Creation Fictions

Fictions do not have further influence that other two types of recreation because of two reasons. First, in the media age, not everyone wants to spend their time reading. Secondly, lower professional skill requirements also lead to generally lower quality of text re-creation. This disparity quality tends to have a greater impact on text content than other forms. Finally, the audience's re-creation has not been well disseminated. There is no doubt that the most suitable form of text transmission is books, and also includes e-books. But the queer fiction can't be spread in China through legal way. It can only occur in Tieba, which is a social media in China focusing more on the textual information.

(A scream shoot from Tieba)

Here is an example of re-created fictions. It is a fiction created by an audience after he watched the animation "Fate stay night". It was uploaded to Tieba. In the fiction, he changed the relationship between the two hostile male characters. The writer created a romantic atmosphere for the two guys. But it still follows the traditional binary oppositional gender perspective through add “feminine” characteristics on one character in order to match another character who is the masculine character.

The Re-Creation Paitings

(Ye, 2012,p.1)

The Re-Creation Videos

(Zhangmao, 2018)

On the other hand, Stuart Hall's point of view can also be used to explain the Chinese audience's strong spreading intentions for re-creation. Also because the audience is in the middle position, this means that the audience needs to establish a dual identity compared other people. In other words, the audiences in a negotiating position need others to agree with the part of the media they agree, and they also need others to disagree to the part of the media that they disagree with. Take the "Game of Thrones" as an example. The other only need to know that someone who likes or dislikes to watch "Game of Thrones" is enough. And this is easy, through daily communication or the rating network. But in the audience in a negotiating position, he may also like the Game of Thrones, but he may think that Jon Snow should fill in love with Tyrion Lannister instead of Daenerys Targaryen, and this will be more difficult to find others have the same idea. In a sense, re-creation is a process of expressing an opinion by the audience in a negotiating position and actively seeking identity.

It can be said that the re-creation of the audience has alleviated the demand for the content of the queer to a certain extent. In this way, we can research on how the public make meaning in interactions with texts or called audience analysis. There is a surprising finding that the audience has played such a significant role in the creation of the queer culture, even more than the media itself. More specifically, re-creating simultaneously provides an important site of resistance and identification for viewers, which can be identified as “queer space”, is recognize the possibility that various and fluctuating queer position might be occupied whenever anyone produces or responds to culture (Doty, 1997,p.3). The role of re-creation itself is a resistance to the Chinese government's banning on queer media. In addition, the recreation is interacting closely in queer identity recognition. The process of identification involving in the process of both creation and consumption. One of the purposes of the audience's re-creation is to gain others feedback through the others consumption of content that they create. And gaining the feedback means the identification. Consumption also chasing for identification in this case, because the information conveyed from re-creation is sort of that the queer individuals are not lonely. It telling the public that there are groups of people have the similar requirement and the similar thought. In a word, the audience consumption of re-creation which containing queer content is the recognition of its own queer identity. And the “queer space” also meant to the regressive work of mass media (Doty, 1997,p.4).

The re-creation by audience is similar to the Stonewall, which both is case that under the government’s suppression, people first to tent to use internal way rather than external way to fit their desire--the re-creation can be seem as gay bar. But as we all know what was happened on Stonewall event, the re-creation, or other internal way are not the consistence way to duel with the imbalance in supply and demand of queer content. When the government's suppression continues to strengthen or the fragile imbalance is broken, no one can sure that the "Stonewall event" will not occur in China. Maybe Chinese government need to think about to change itself.