#we criticize people for only engaging with surface level aesthetics when talking politics

[chewwytwee]

People are getting really mad at leftists for the amount of young racist white guys like it’s their fault fascism has become so popular. It wasn’t even Gen Z pushing the whole ‘we’re gonna save the world’ shit it was everyone else shifting the onus onto the new generation and then the branding stuck.

[passionate-reply]

In 1993, Billy Idol--yes, that Billy Idol--went completely mad and made an electronic album full of futuristic themes, samples, and techno beats. Many consider Cyberpunk one of the worst albums of all time, but on this week’s installment of Great Albums, we provide a somewhat more positive approach. Check out the video, or read the transcript below the break!

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! In this installment, I’ll be taking a look at an artist one might not normally associate with the usual “pantheon” of synthesizer jockeys I usually talk about: Billy Idol. Initially known as the frontman of punk outfit Generation X, Idol found success as a solo artist in the early 1980s, fusing tough-as-nails punk aesthetics with a lavish, almost camp sense of glam, and his visually arresting pop-rock made him an MTV-friendly star of the “Second British Invasion.” While one couldn’t fairly argue that Idol was an “electronic musician,” his early work does contain moments of mild electro-curiosity, perhaps most notably the mercurial ballad, “Eyes Without a Face.”

Music: “Eyes Without a Face”

But despite the minor synth touches of the hit single “Eyes Without a Face,” few in the 1980s could have possibly expected the turn Idol’s career would eventually take by the time of his 5th studio LP: 1993’s Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is, of course, an album with a reputation that precedes it, and that reputation is not a particularly good one. Cyberpunk is a deeply fraught album, which commercially underperformed upon release, and did even worse in the eyes of critics, with the magazine Q dubbing it the 5th worst album of all time. In the nearly 30 years since the album’s release, opinions on it don’t seem to have softened that much, either. But as with everything I choose to talk about, I think Cyberpunk is worth listening to. I think it’s a daring and challenging work of art, and one that stands on its own terms when approached head-on. Whether you’re familiar with this album or not, I encourage you to give it a fresh listen, and a fair shake.

Music: “Wasteland”

Perhaps the most immediately apparent feature of Cyberpunk is its increasingly electronic soundscape, including a prominent sample-based hook on the track “Wasteland.” The album was created in less than a year, and chiefly through use of computers and digital audio software, which Idol evidently found easier to explore and use than earlier forms of music technology. I’m partial to the argument that sees the use of digital software as perfectly compatible with the famed DIY ethos of punk, and hence, not far from Idol’s wheelhouse at all. In the 1990s, computers were still something that far from everyone owned, but in our contemporary world of Soundcloud rappers on seemingly every street, it’s easier to accept the notion of computer music as a grassroots, egalitarian field where even the unskilled are welcome--perhaps even moreso than punk ever was, in the 20th Century. This is one sense in which I think Cyberpunk has aged better than anyone could have possibly imagined. Besides pushing the texture of Idol’s music into new territory, Cyberpunk is also a fairly risky album structurally, opening with a sort of manifesto being read, and peppered with brief interludes between its tracks proper.

Music: “Interlude 3”

It’s only fitting that an album so concerned with the bleeding edge of technology might also try to push the boundaries of the still-fresh CD age. Liberated from the confines of designing chiefly for vinyl, artists like Idol were empowered to create CDs that ostensibly had 20 “tracks,” with no need for empty grooves to separate these brief interludes from the album’s major compositions. This avant-garde touch adds significant amounts of texture to the album, and, dare I say, a sense of world-building. Undoubtedly, one main reason why this album was so poorly received at the time is that it is, quite simply, not what one expects a Billy Idol record to sound like--at least, with the possible exception of its second single, “Shock to the System.”

Music: “Shock to the System”

“Shock to the System” feels like something of an orphan in the tracklisting of Cyberpunk. While tracks like “Wasteland” certainly maintain a rough-edged rock mentality about them, and could never be confused for straightforward techno floor-fillers, “Shock to the System” feels more like it was tacked onto the album just so that it would have something that appealed to those who exclusively prefer Idol’s earlier style--and, given that most of Idol’s greatest hits compilations tend to include “Shock to the System” and nothing else from Cyberpunk, this may have worked. Cyberpunk, as a genre, is often concerned with political themes--its great literary progenitor, William Gibson, once said that “the future is already here, but it’s unevenly distributed,” epitomizing the extent to which the intersection between technology and class is a central issue in cyberpunk media. “Shock to the System” is the most overtly political track on Cyberpunk, inspired by the wave of riots that broke out in Los Angeles following the acquittal of police officers alleged to have used excessive force in the arrest of a Black man, Rodney King. While the role of computers in daily life has changed a great deal since the 1990s, police brutality and anti-Blackness have sadly remained quite similar.

Few have commented on the perhaps uncomfortable implications of Idol’s dramatization of the LA riots from outside, which seems to transmute the scene into one of high-tech fantasy while largely eliding over the racial implications of why people were rioting in the first place--something that seems particularly strange when one learns how upset members of the underground “cyberculture” were about the alleged co-opting and appropriation of their culture. Some have characterized Idol as an honest appreciator of cyberpunk who just wanted to make art that engaged with its ideas, and others more cynically consider him a profiteer who thought he could commercialize a more palatable version of the counter-culture. While the latter hypothesis may well be true, I’m not sure if it can rightfully be said that Idol had “no right” to mine cyberculture for inspiration, particularly since cyberculture has often encouraged amateur participation. Still, as a sometime fan of the literary genre myself, I’m tempted to agree with those who have questioned how deep Idol’s understanding of cyberpunk actually was, particularly when faced with tracks like “Neuromancer.”

Music: “Neuromancer”

In William Gibson’s novel of the same name, Neuromancer is a super-advanced AI with the ability to preserve people’s personalities in virtual reality...though you probably wouldn’t have guessed any of that from this track. Many who interviewed Idol seemed to think he had a weak grasp on the finer points of cyberculture, and even Gibson himself, upon meeting Idol, failed to take him seriously. Still, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to draw a line in the sand, as some have done, and say that Idol was particularly, individually, responsible for the dilution of cyberpunk ideals, as presented by authors like Gibson. While it may be easy to poke fun at the clownish, overwrought figure of Idol, as the embodiment of people who love books they don’t understand, it’s not like that many people owned this album. I think the success of popular films like Blade Runner and The Matrix has done much more to simplify and proliferate ideas cribbed from Gibson.

But however you feel about this, it’s clear that Cyberpunk was an album that ended up appealing to nearly no-one--it alienated Idol’s existing fans with its stylistic diversions, as well as feeling too commercial and inauthentic to cyberpunk enthusiasts. Something else that I haven’t seen mentioned in discussion of this album is the fact that Billy Idol really wasn’t the first to combine the ideas of cyberpunk and music. By the early 1990s, industrial acts like Front 242 and Front Line Assembly had already been making electronic music about cyber brain implants for years, albeit largely underground and often unnoticed by rock-focused critics. I can’t help but think that the prior existence of this stuff was yet another factor that caused Cyberpunk’s failure to thrive. Compared to the electronic body music scene, Cyberpunk comes across as less subtle, less insider, and much more surface-level.

The cover art of Cyberpunk has attracted nearly as much derision as the associated music. The image of Idol’s face bleeds and distorts “into” and “against” a gridlike field, perhaps the greenish terminal of an early computer screen, a representation of the hacker figure entering the virtual world of cyberspace, and identity blurring along those lines. With its wobbly image distortion and queasy complementary colour palette of yellow and purple, it instantly evokes not only cyberpunk aesthetics generally, but more particularly the fusion between cyberpunk and another popular aesthetic of the early 90s: psychedelia, which experienced a substantial resurgence around this time, related to rave culture and its embrace of hallucinogenic party drugs. So-called “cyberdelic” themes abound on the album as well, particularly on the hypnotic “Adam In Chains,” a track that sounds less like 80s New Wave, and more like 90s New Age.

Following the release and subsequent panning of Cyberpunk in the 1990s, Billy Idol went silent for over a decade. While he claimed that his disinterest in making new music was rooted moreso in mismanagement by Chrysalis Records than it was the album’s failure, it’s very tempting to look for a correlation here. Over the years, Idol was often asked if he ever planned to make more electronic music, and consistently claimed that he was chiefly interested in guitar-centric rock, while never completely trashing his vision for Cyberpunk. True to his word, when Idol finally did return to music with 2005’s Devil’s Playground, he delivered on his “classic” sound, and he’s continued to do so ever since.

Music: “Scream”

My favourite track on Cyberpunk is its lead single, the total showstopper “Heroin.” “Heroin” is actually a cover of a song by the seminal Velvet Underground, and it’s everything I think a cover ought to be: exciting, bizarre, and capable of taking something familiar and kicking it into a whole new territory. What’s the point of covering something without changing it and doing something a bit different? “Heroin” is naturally one of the most psychedelic-oriented tracks on the album, being a cover of a drug-themed 1960s classic, as well as one of the tracks with the most influence from dance genres like techno, boasting a very appealing extended outro that makes it feel like a 12” remix. While I think Cyberpunk is a fascinating album, “Heroin” is the one track I think really crosses the bridge from being interesting to being, quite simply, good, and it’s something I’m much more inclined to sit down and listen to recreationally. That’s everything for today--thanks for listening!

Music: “Heroin”

[onett199x]

Yes, video games are art, but are they artistic?

This is another essay I wrote - I don’t do this super often, but I was feeling particularly inspired on this topic tonight, so here it is.

A question I often see asked, usually by someone with an obvious bias or conflict of interest, is this: Are video games art?  These days, the prevailing attitude towards that idea seems to be that they are, although that could easily just seem to be the prevailing attitude from my perspective because most people I  know have a generally favorable attitude towards video games.  At least from where I'm sitting, it seems like a tired, silly question - I imagine a college freshman pointedly answering "VIDEO GAMES!" when his Introduction to Art teacher asks about different mediums of art, and then being slightly disappointed when that professor doesn't try to argue with him about it.  Of course, there are different definitions of what 'art' is and isn't, so I'll start by defining my own terms.  To me, personally, there is no threshold of quality in art.  In other words, anything made by anybody can be art, whether that person has a talented bone in their body or not - macaroni glued to construction paper by kindergartners is art, and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes are art.  By my definition, then, of course video games are art - they have design and controls, they have images designed by visual artists, and they have music composed by musicians.  Any and all video games are art - it didn't just happen when presenters at E3 started trying to target the Self-Important College Freshmen demographic.  So Asteroids is art, Custer's Revenge is art, those battery-operated Game And Watch handhelds are art, and Flappy Bird, Neko Atsume, and Pokemon Go are art.  Some of those are art in the same way that Tijuana Bibles or 'Spot the Difference' games in the funny papers are art, but by my definition, they're still art.  In my mind, at least, that much is simple.

               Where this discussion gets instantly a thousand times more complicated is whether they are artistic.  This is what I think many people mean when they have conversations about whether video games are art - the implied question is not 'Is this something humans made to express themselves', but 'What is the value of this expression?' and, underneath that, 'Can we say it is as valuable as, for example, books, film, or visual art?' And THAT is a hairy, complicated question with a lot of different arguments to unpack and address.  

               I think, to take the previous thought just a little further, many people really want to discuss whether video games can teach us something about the human condition the way that literature or some movies or television can.  This is what makes it a fun debate for people, because when video games were first invented and popularized, that answer was almost universally a resounding 'No'.  At their inception, video games largely served the societal purpose of relieving children and older nerds of their pocket change - Jumpman's plight to rescue Paulina from Donkey Kong had no metaphor, allegory, or social/political commentary.  Everything about its premise, down to Jumpan's mustache and large nose, was the direct result of working within the limitations of primitive hardware.  As video games moved into the home market, they were still primarily targeted towards children (and nerds), with mostly bright, colorful mascots and cartoony aesthetics.  So while they still met my (admittedly generous) standards for the definition of 'art' listed above, they did not pretend to probe the depths of the human soul.  I imagine that changed sometime in the decade that saw the advent of text-heavy role playing games and the transition from two dimensions to three within the game space. In Search Of Lost Time these games were not, however - the closest analogue I could provide would be a Saturday morning cartoon show with action figure marketing tie-ins.  It's only been in the last ten years or so that it seems like some people have really started to push that particular envelope, and, in my eyes, a lot of these efforts are pretentious or heavy-handed.  I'm sure somewhere, someone has written a Thinkpiece on how those games with ~serious moral choices~ (see: Bioshock's decidedly unsubtle 'Will you rescue this innocent child or harvest their organs?') are advancing the artistic merit of the medium, and I hate that thinkpiece.  Attempts to be more subtle with these ideas have certainly surfaced since the whole 'Would you kindly...?' thing, and some of those have, admittedly, presented much more interesting questions for debate.  Much of these more interesting ideas in the 'commentary on the human condition' wheelhouse of video game design comes from indie developers who are setting out specifically to make us ask those questions. Just to name a few, Papers, Please puts us in the role of a government official in a bureaucratic dystopia and encodes its morality-based commentary in the actual gameplay;  Undertale takes Bioshock's simple 'this or that' morality and flips it 180 degrees to be about how we consume video games.  In fact, many of these games ask us what we can learn about ourselves based on the choices we make when we play video games, which makes for fun conversations but, in my mind, they lose a lot of their academic merit as soon as you try to apply those lessons to just about any other scenario.  As much as I loved and bought into Undertale's unique take on video game morality, it has almost no real-world application.  Outside of these examples, the bigger, more mainstream games have certainly become more cinematic, or, to perhaps narrow it down a bit, more like blockbuster films.  Naughty Dog's Uncharted series has all of the genre hallmarks, snarky witticisms, and epic symphonic soundtracks of Marvel's Cinematic Universe, while their critically-acclaimed The Last Of Us puts us in approximately the same head space as AMC's The Walking Dead television adaptation.  It's work that engages us mentally, in other words - we don't simply sit and absorb it, because it isn't so much statements as questions.  Something that engages us, though, isn’t necessarily high art just for that fact.  The works that are the most discussed and revered among narrative-driven mediums frequently have stories that affect many people on a deep, personal level, perhaps even altering their world view.  To contextualize it, I’d put the artistic merit of most video game storylines/premises/scenarios somewhere in the middle of the scale that ranges from Antonio Banderas's performance as the Nasonex bee to Brian Cranston's performance as Walter White on the scale of 'what does this teach me about myself' - they're fun to think about and talk about, but I'm not expecting many academic texts on the intricate socio-political subtexts of Mass Effect 2.  

                That's my admittedly complicated answer to the question of whether video game storylines/scenarios can pose powerful existential questions - you might unsatisfyingly condense it down to 'sometimes, I guess'.  I think even the most artistic video games have a hard time truly transcending the threshold of 'high art' because, at some point in almost any game with a serious message to it, that message is encoded in the game's very gameplay, even if it's not as obvious as 'X to save, Y to harvest'.  It is a message that you cannot complete the game without at least hearing, even if you aren't thinking about it as hard as perhaps those game developers wanted you to.

               This is my caveat to all of this, though - I don't think all art has to ask us deep, probing questions about humanity, society, politics, or history.  Even high art does not need to ask us that.  When people frame the debate of The Artistic Merit of Video Games, they often use literature, film, or television as a reference point, all of which are art forms that almost universally present a narrative, the presentation of which provides a message of some kind.  It seems, on a surface level, that these mediums are the most relevant comparisons to video games, because a very sizeable chunk of video games also present a narrative, and maybe even a message.  To imply that something must have a narrative to it in order to qualify as art, though, is to discount work like J. S. Bach's keyboard music or the paintings of Piet Mondrian from a discussion of what is and isn't art.  Obviously, then, that definition is not a functioning definition of art.  Even film and books are not solely artistic because of their narrative or because of their underlying message.  Many of cinemas great auteurs are considered great not solely because of the stories they told, but because of their innovation with finding new ways to tell those stories through the use of cameras, lenses, lights, sets, props, and actors.  Alfred Hitchcock told compelling thriller stories, but he also once presented an entire movie in what appeared to be a single unbroken shot.  William Faulkner presented the history of a troubled Louisiana family by telling it through the eyes of a mentally-handicapped character with no concept of the passage of time.  These are not just compelling stories, but compelling stories that could not have been told to us any other way.  In the 'uniqueness of presentation' discussion, video games certainly have a strong horse.  I am surely not the first, second, or hundredth person to point out that video games are special because we must actively participate in them.  More so than a stage drama with audience participation or a music performance where the crowd claps and sings along, video games cannot and will not engage us without our input.  They even prevent us from experiencing them if we aren't skilled enough, a subject that has come more into debate in recent years with the rise in popularity of extremely challenging games like Dark Souls.  In that (admittedly somewhat extreme) circumstance, we must learn the language, dynamics, and flow of the game in order to experience it.  Any person can listen to Liszt or Chopin and enjoy themselves without understanding the complex music theory that went into the composition of their music, and anyone can watch Mulholland Drive without grasping its experiments with narrative structure, but to play a video game requires a base level of comprehension.  Where the bar of that comprehension is set and the ways the video game works to impress that comprehension upon us is an artistic choice on the part of its creator.  I've heard it said that people learn best by teaching themselves, and that great teachers excel because they identify well the methods their students learn by, and are better equipped by that to provide the students with the tools they need to teach themselves.  Video games are a potent example of this principle - there are some excellent YouTube videos of people breaking down the ways in which video games allow us to teach ourselves how to interact with them.  It's through careful attention to this instruction that even punishingly difficult games like Dark Souls can be enjoyed by a large community of fans - I would contrast it with games whose difficulty is based purely in muscle memory or in trial and error.  

               To delve into this a little further, a commonly discussed element of game design that is hard to put exactly into words is called the feel.  My best definition I can give is how well the game gives the player the impression that they are in direct control of their avatar on the screen - a game with good feel can be as effortless to play as it is to move one's own body, and a game with bad feel can completely ruin the immersion, like bad acting or an out-of-tune musician.  To me, game feel is another of the more important facets by which a game's artistic value can be judged.  Video games are, like I said, unique for their symbiotic relationship with their audience/consumer, and the games that do the best job of immersing their audience do it by feeling the most natural.  I think perhaps the ur-example of this connection is with that omnipresent man, Super Mario (who I mentioned above in his previous identity as Jumpman).  As his original moniker implies, Mario is a guy who jumps, and he jumps in many different ways (exponentially more since his transition to 3D).  This concept is so simple it can be reduced to two words. It works so powerfully and connects to so many people, though, for two reasons: first, that it feels very natural and responsive to do, and second, that it can be done however the individual consumer wants to do it.  Mario can jump everywhere all the time, or only as often as he needs to.  He can do a regular jump, or a long jump, or a backflip, or kick off of walls.  Game Maker's Toolkit's Mark Brown describes this as 'player expression' - I don't know whether he came up with that term or if it was someone else, but it perfectly illustrates that element of video gaming.  The ability to bring such a versatile array of experiences from so simple an action demonstrates the technique of video game design that is there just as surely as there is film technique, writing technique, or music technique.  Regardless of the message of what is on the screen, we can tell a well-shot film from a poorly-shot one, even if we don't necessarily know the terminology to explain to someone else what the difference is between the two.  We can also instantly tell the difference between trying to control Mario and trying to control Superman in Superman 64.  While it might seem strange out of context to say that, in this sense, Mario games are an example of an exceedingly technical, artistic accomplishment in video games, that is absolutely a point I will stand by, much the same as Dark Souls or Half-Life 2.  

               There are other common points of comparison between video games and other mediums in the debate about artistic merit, but I think what my general argument is boils down simply to the fact that video games can do the most for us artistically when they do for us what nothing else can. I think using interactivity in an artistic medium to push the boundaries of narrative is one powerful way that artists can do that, but the very most basic idea of what a video game is - a world you can interact with - presents the widest possibility for artistic expression, narrative be damned.  Almost all of the truest artists in video games - whether they are Shigeru Miyamoto creating games that any preschooler or retiree can pick up and play, or whether they're Hideo Kojima crafting an experience that demands a comprehensive understanding of a detailed game world - exceed at what they do not because they ask themselves how they can tell a great story.   They exceed at it because they ask themselves what can be done in a video game, and the artistic merit of the medium grows and expands best with the exploration of new ideas.  Like blockbuster film franchises and copycat musicians, there's certainly money to be made and entertainment to be had from presenting another angle on something familiar and comfortable, and like those mediums, innovation isn't always world-changing or popular.  Any form of art succeeds by connecting in some way with its audience, and it's so exciting to think about the ways we still haven't yet discovered to connect with art - when a good book or film truly engages us, it's nothing short of a revelation, and to me, the surest sign of artistic merit in video games is that I can feel that revelation from them, too.

[fabulizemag]

Navigating my complicated relationships with Beyonce and Michelle Obama

New Post has been published on https://fabulizemag.com/navigating-my-complicated-relationships-with-beyonce-and-michelle-obama/

Navigating my complicated relationships with Beyonce and Michelle Obama

Even my Superheroes have weaknesses…

I remember the first time I saw Destiny’s Child on TV. I’m an 80s baby so girl groups weren’t new to me but there was something different about Destiny’s Child. They embodied the soulful voices of girl groups of yesteryear while appealing to mainstream media as En Vogue had done—plus they were young. They weren’t a niche girl group that was attached to a specific music trend, they were setting the trends.

Destiny’s Child unapologetically became part of American’s English lexicon with words like bugaboo and bootylicious. Even with the changing of the group members and their internal drama, Beyoncé handled herself like a true professional and that’s nothing short than admirable.

But isn’t that typical of Black women? When we are put under pressure we make diamonds? You can rightfully argue it’s a hurtful cliché used negatively against us that sets us up for seemingly unattainable goals that nobody else has to abide by. But that ruthless, passionate work ethic is what I and many others love about Beyoncé. She consistently beats the odds as a Black woman and she’s that chick.

That’s why my relationship with her is so complicated and it’s not just with her, it’s the former First Lady Michelle Obama, too. Two international renowned Black women who undoubtedly will go down in history for their achievements and both who have been criticized unfairly by whiteness and racist pundits are not without their flaws.

But I don’t like talking about my heroes’ flaws under a white gaze because their flaws aren’t up for them to analyze because their criticism can’t be racially unbiased. For me, my criticisms( at least, I think) seem to be layered. It’s hard for me not to want to mention them when I discuss their husbands’ actions because, in my heart, I don’t feel they are unaware of their husbands’ plans. I refuse to believe these smart and successful businesswomen aren’t protecting their families’ interests when their men make these questionable and in some instances, regressive declarations.

But Patriarchy?

Yeah, patriarchy. Patriarchy is trash. I’ve toyed with the concept that for Beyoncé, patriarchy is a major hindrance to her personally and professionally. For the sake of argument, let’s say Jay-Z did initially engage with Beyoncé when she was 18-years-old, he was already about 30 and no matter how successful she was at the time it’s never a good combination for older men to date younger women. Their intentions are usually rooted in grooming young women; molding them and having the ability to manipulate them emotionally and mentally (which to some extent he did when he admitted he cheated on her) paired with the fact she’s witnessed her own mother sacrifice and tolerates similar behaviors from her father. I’ve taken all this into consideration when it comes to analyzing Beyonce from a Black womanist lens but none of that can really explain her branding aesthetic of social justice.

If she didn’t use social justice in her work, yall would call her a coon!

Not necessarily. During the Civil Rights Era, a lot of artists used news and politics as a motivator and backdrop for their art. You can listen to many Black artists between the 60s and 70s and find numerous records that became the soundtrack for what we know identify as the soulful sound of liberation. Not every artist was an activist and that’s ok and my point. You can make music for the people if you wish but it’s a different ballgame when you believe you are the voice of said people.

I don’t hate Beyonce because she’s a multi-millionaire. I believe she’s worked extremely hard to be where she is in her life and I hope she’s happy. However, as a millionaire, it’s impossible for her as a brand to fundamentally be “for the people”. Wealthy people are never for the (poor or working-class) people and have no real interest in liberation because liberation, especially Black liberation involves eating the rich. As the poor, marginalized and working-class culture shifts, so does the identity of what is socially responsible and what is not. The wealthy need the poor to exist for them to remain wealthy. Without the poor and working-class, who would attend Beyonce’s concerts? Who would buy her merchandise? When was the last time you seen wealthy influencers rocking Ivy Park? That’s no shade at all but it is the truth.

I wish for Beyonce to use her position and power and flip shit upside-down. Now that’s she’s secured her seat at the table I want her to flip that muthafucka over and open the doors for everyone else and not just a select few. When powerful women marry and are involved with powerful men who have questionable actions as they relate to marginalized people, you have to ask yourself, are these women complicit or are they putting the batteries in their men’s back?

I love what Beyoncé represents for Black girls in media. I love how she embraces hood aesthetics, social media conversations and creates art in a visual and musical form we can amp ourselves up with. My biggest (and honestly, probably my only complaint) is Beyonce’s tendency to use social media activism as a branding tool. Yes, I’m aware the Carters have donated money ( as they should) to Black Lives Matter and other families who’ve been victims to state sanction violence. I’m aware they’ve donated more money than I’ve ever made in a year ( and again, they should) but the idea that Beyoncé is a spokesperson for the poor or working-class Black woman or can relate to everyday struggles is, in my opinion, far-fetched and disingenuous. As long as the Black wealthy push the pull-up-your-own-bootstraps and coddle whiteness, they can never truly represent me.

However, the difference between Beyoncé and the former First Lady and even Oprah is that Beyonce is more likely to evolve— maybe. I always say that Black people are fundamentally conservative. White supremacy is ingrained into our DNA generations deep. Like many of you, I was proud to vote for Obama, twice! In his eight years in office, I saw the Obamas get treated with disrespect, endure racism domestically and nationally and be judged by standards they wouldn’t give the current joker in the office now if their lives depended on it. Michelle Obama was easily my favorite of the couple; she’s smarter than her husband, tall, beautiful and confident. I watched politicians, pundits and white feminists try to break her spirit and all she did was flip her perfect-coiffed hair at them. Who could have asked for a better first lady?

But as racial tensions steadily rose and the opportunity to stand for the working class and marginalized presented itself, Obama didn’t always take it. In all fairness, he had constant pushback from republicans in congress and they threatened him with impeachment every day. For a while, I reasoned with their lack of actions on certain issues. Let’s face it, you can’t be a left-leaning president and you definitely can’t be a left-leaning Black president, so he picked and chose his battles. But I started to feel the excuses I was making for the Obamas were biting me in the ass when Obama would get on TV and say certain things using certain lingo and speech patterns to essentially talk-down to poor Black people. When Obama told Black folks to call their cousin Pookie to go out and vote, he basically reiterated what white liberals do to Black voters; put the results of voting on the marginalized population in the country.

Ok, but what does this have to do with Michelle? When Michelle released her now New York Times Bestselling memoir, everybody and their mama went to buy the book and if they were lucky enough, they were able to see her in-person on her book tour. Some of the passages from her memoir come straight from Black respectability playbook of middle-class Blacks who feel they work harder than poor Blacks without acknowledging their access to resources. Michelle stated that racism and racial inequality are psychological and we have to help others overcome. That’s bullshit.

It’s bullshit because Black people didn’t invent racism; just like women didn’t invent sexism. It’s not up to the marginalized party to help the oppressor overcome their bigotry. In the United States, Black people have been writing about racial equality since they could write and the path to ending racism lies within white people. However, when Black people achieve certain access to privileges, they assume all Black people can do the same. For all transparency reasons, I grew up in a middle class household. Both are my parents are college-educated and my father had access to generational wealth. My experiences growing up looks different from others who did not have the resources I had. It took me being financially vulnerable as an adult to understand how the system treats poor people even when you are trying to help yourself. When you grow up in middle-class Black America you are reminded daily that you aren’t like other Blacks and anti-Black rhetoric is a foundation of distinguishing yourself from others.

If you are still here reading, thank you because I went in on a rant, but if you are still here reading I want to make it clear that I can appreciate these women for what they mean to Black people as far as representation goes. But we can’t be satisfied with the surface-level representation. We have to do more than root for everyone who is Black. We have to encourage and bring wealthy Black people to task beyond the aesthetic of Black liberation. Wearing berets and quoting our historical leaders in a bop isn’t enough. We are facing dark and dangerous times and if our Black wealthy won’t condemn all forms of white supremacy, they might as well take a picture with them. You know, like Mrs. Obama does with former President Bush.

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Why it's Time For Video Games to Address Climate Change

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/why-its-time-for-video-games-to-address-climate-change/

Why it's Time For Video Games to Address Climate Change

Climate change is often seen as a distant problem, a burden for future generations to bear. This comes as no surprise; the sheer scale of destruction that human activity has brought upon the planet since the middle of last century is overwhelming. Earth has heated dramatically. Islands and coastlines have begun to sink into the rising seas. Extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods, have drastically increased in frequency, displacing and taking the lives of thousands of people each year. Ecosystems have begun to collapse. Extinction has become a daily event. And all these problems are accelerating. Right now. The climate future is already upon us.

The solution to our climate crisis will require immense social and political transformations. Rebellion and civil disobedience – what we demand as non-negotiable to governments – will also be key in shaping the future of our planet. We are already seeing promising early signs of this in vital protest movements like Extinction Rebellion and YouthStrike4Climate. But there is another piece to the puzzle.

The 15 Hardest Contemporary Games

I am not about to suggest that a single piece of art will save us, but rather that cultural shifts in how we talk about our climate emergency are vital to confronting our planetary present and future. Art and society inform one another. You can glean a great deal about a period of history in a society from its art alone, particularly via culturally dominant storytelling forms such as the novel or film, and historically also the popular theatre. But art can also, in special cases, direct society towards change. We might look specifically here to: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which was seminal in emboldening anti-slavery sentiments, prior to the civil war; or the Jonathan Demme movie, Philadelphia (1993), which, though not groundbreaking by today’s standards, is widely credited as playing a crucial part in de-stigmatsing HIV in mainstream America; or Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the renewed relevance of which, alongside its timely adaptation to television, is disturbingly clear today.

With their oft-cited two billion users and emergence as a new storytelling medium, a claim to such cultural relevance should theoretically extend now to video games (https://www.statista.com/statistics/293304/number-video-gamers/). And yet, video games – particularly the big ones, the kind we drool over during E3 announcements – have not engaged with human-made climate change on a serious level, at least not to the same degree as other storytelling media, such as the blooming literary genre of ‘cli-fi’ (climate fiction), which has spawned hundreds of novels about climate change in recent decades.

I am left to wonder: when are video games going to begin to say something about the defining crisis of our time?

Squint, and you might just make out the initial traces of climate change discussion in simulation and strategy games of the early 90s. SimEarth (1990) and Civilisation (1991) incorporated pollution and global warming into their game design, with the former going so far as to include melting ice caps and rising sea levels, rising temperatures, extreme weather events and ecosystem collapse. But the intervening decades did not witness an increase in the development of games that reflected intensifying public concern around climate change. It would seem, then, that as climate politics grew ever more complex and heated in the real world, video games, willingly or not, drifted into more tepid waters.

It’s not like nobody is trying. Strange Loop Games’ Eco, an ambitious society simulator that encourages players to work together toward collective sustainability, exemplifies such endeavor. Certainly, more climate-focused games are coming out nowadays, particularly in the educational and fast-paced indie spaces. Educational games, often targeted at younger audiences, are great in principle. They have a place. However, as researchers Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne observe, games like NASA’s Climate Kids ‘lack both the artistry and mainstream engagement sufficient to make contributions to the public understanding of the issues wrapped up in our current climate challenge in the way that cli-fi does.’

Indie games, on the other hand, have undoubtedly offered artful visions of climate-changed environments in recent years. But these backdrops rarely connect explicitly to human-made climate change. A clear example of this tendency is Earth Atlantis, a 2D side-scrolling shooter, the opening titles of which read:

“The ‘Great Climate Shift’ struck at the end of the 21st century. Ninety-six percent of the earth’s surface is underwater.

Human civilization has fallen. Machines have adopted the shape and form of marine animals. The ocean is full of creature-machine hybrid monsters.

You are a ‘Hunter’ and the new journey begins!!”

While games like these might encourage us to explore and play in changed environments, it would be a stretch to describe them as having any kind of commentary on climate change processes or the plight of our planet.

As a doctoral researcher, focussing primarily on how climate change is communicated within fiction, I am often asked: ‘What are some good climate change video games to play?’ It’s a thorny one; I am still asking myself that exact same question.

To be blunt, considering how many video games feature post-apocalyptic settings, there aren’t many. As we race uncontrollably towards countless irreversible ends, when one million species teeter on the edge of extinction, when Earth’s great marvels – the polar ice, the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon – are vanishing, when the planet is increasingly being deprived of all it needs to support life, video games are still throwing us into zombie apocalypses, pestilent plagues or nuclear holocausts.

There is so much creative potential here to envision a better world and how we might problem-solve our way there, or a powerful warning of what is to come if we do not act now. Video games’ capacity for setting rich and detailed stories in extensive open-worlds (potentially modeled in deeper, geological timescales) are well suited to the demands of carrying a topic as complex as climate change.

Video games have long explored climate aesthetics, but not climate politics. Floods, fires and all manner of catastrophes and wasteland visions abound, but they are rarely linked to our current emergency. I don’t think this is due to a failure of imagination, or because developers don’t care. It is telling, however, that Dennis Shirk, the lead producer on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, whose expansion pack Gathering Storm affords players the chance to work with climate change modeling and scenarios, has stated that: ‘No, I don’t think that’s about making a political statement … We just like to have our gameplay reflect current science.’ While it’s possible that big publishers might currently view a climate change game as too niche and too politically risky an investment, we can only hope that, sooner rather than later, we will begin to see climate change feature more seriously in major video games. Who knows? Perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 will do precisely this.

I have been careful not to state categorically that there are no climate change games in the triple-A echelon, only to highlight that they are disappointingly scarce. There is one major exception: Horizon

Zero Dawn.

On the surface, it is easy to dismiss HZD (because … well … it has really cool robot dinosaurs) but it would be wrong to do so. Without going into spoilerific detail, Guerilla Games’ exquisite RPG is ultimately unequivocal that we – the ‘Old Ones’ in our time of rampant techno-capitalism – are complicit in the climate apocalypse. Perhaps this is HZD’s greatest trick: its relatable backstory of climate breakdown is revealed slowly and in pieces, not all at once. We are emotionally invested in young protagonist Aloy well before we can fully comprehend her bleak world and what led to it. But the game also does so much more. It has a utopian pulse and deep moral core, a belief that radical transformations are still possible and that there is something worth fighting for today.

HZD marks a critical step towards bringing climate change to the fore of the global gaming community and carving a space out for more overtly climate-focused games to thrive. To date, HZD has sold over ten million copies worldwide and is one of the most successful new intellectual properties on PlayStation 4. It comes as no surprise that a sequel is in development. There is clearly a huge demand for this type of blockbuster.

Maybe it’s just that I see my three-year-old daughter in Aloy, but something about HZD moved me deeply. It is a damn good story, filled with nuance and poignant detail, whose shimmering world invokes sublime feeling. It reminds us of what we should truly value. It’s somewhat abstract, but by whatever narrative alchemy, HZD makes me want to make the world a better place, to leave it better than I came into it. It is a rare and precious artifact, and perhaps, one way or another, a sign of things to come. We need more games like it.

JR Burgmann is an Australian writer and editor. He is completing his PhD at Monash University, where he teaches and is a member of the Climate Change Communication Research Hub. He is writing a novel. You can follow him on Twitter @JBurgmannMilner

Source : IGN