Monthly Archives: November 2009

Blog

But is it art? Modern Warfare 2, computer games and morality

2 Comments

Modern Warfare 2 - box artSerendipity, yet again… Jonathan’s latest Blasphemous Geometries column on the moral dimension of modern computer game mechanics arrived in my inbox last weekend, and hence (unless he has contacts in the industry of which I am unaware), he’d have had no idea that this week would see a firestorm of controversy over a certain level in the newly released Modern Warfare 2 game. The level in question requires your character to inflitrate a terrorist group and, so as to maintain your cover story, participate in the shooting of innocent civilians; MetaFilter has a good round up of reviews and opinion pieces on the game, and the comment thread is full of interesting responses from both sides of the fence.

The predominant question seems to be whether this sort of gameplay can be considered “right” – yet another iteration of the “do computer games cause/encourage violence” debate, which itself rolled on from a similar public angst around the proliferation of graphic horror movies in the late eighties. There have been numerous surveys and research projects designed to accumulate evidence around this idea, but to the best of my knowledge there’s been nothing truly conclusive either way – though my instinct as a formerly rabid gamer (I don’t have the spare time to play often any more) suggests to me that computer games do no more to encourage violence than Saturday morning kid’s cartoons.

Indeed, it occurs to me that the rightness or wrongness of the “No Russian” level of Modern Warfare 2 – the hand-wringing over whether such a thing should be allowed to go on sale – is a false dilemma; the more pertinent question is that of what it says about the world in which it exists. Plenty of commentators are branding it tasteless, and I have a certain sympathy with that viewpoint – but there’s a lot of things out there that I consider tasteless, and I don’t believe that things should be made to go away just because I don’t approve of them. Censorship should start (and end) with your own finger on the off button, IMHO.

But thinking about the plot of the level (and of Modern Warfare 2 as a whole, from what I’ve been able to glean from reading reviews and opinion pieces about it) from a writer’s (and reader’s) point of view, it actually makes a lot of sense in the context of modern counter-terrorist narratives, with the result that it puts the player into a morally questionable situation that reflects the world beyond the game… though exactly how accurate that reflection may be is open to debate. Perhaps there is a valid argument to say that games like this might put ideas in people’s heads, and end up glorifying what they’re supposed to demonise (if there’s any real difference between those two words beyond one’s personal moral code), but I suspect that the sort of person who’d be encouraged to acts of random violence against innocent civilians by media of any sort is already psychologically predisposed to such an action. And if computer games are a nefarious way of seducing the impressionable with the power-trip of consequence-free violence, what then should we think about the United States Army, which has used the taxpayer-funded computer wargame America’s Army as a recruiting tool since 2002? Is it OK to encourage violence so long as it’s against the right targets?

[Related bonus item -did you see the article at Wired about the Libertarian-penned “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” web-based strategy game? If nothing else, that demonstrates amply that when people encode a political or ideological subtext into a game to the detriment of plausibility, the end results are invariably laughable. And that’s not a partisan statement, either; I’m pretty sure that even were the boot on the other political foot I’d be equally amused by (and disgusted at) the incredible crudity of the sermonising, which reeks of the same childish mudslinging that’s currently packing UK news venues as the incumbent Labour government enters its final earth-bound tailspin and the vultures of opportunism don their bibs.

But then last night I watched an excellent documentary on the history of the Berlin Wall, and found myself laughing at the crudity of the archive propaganda from both sides of the Iron Curtain… before I remembered that, to be effective, propaganda only needs to be slightly more sophisticated than the average media literacy of its target audience.]

Blasphemous Geometries

The Mechanics of Morality: Why Moral Choices in Video Games Are No Longer Fun

15 Comments

Moral ambiguity is an increasingly ubiquitous part of modern computer game character mechanics – so why are the moral elements to gameplay increasingly less enjoyable?

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

###

I remember when having a game take into account the morality of your character was something of an innovation. I remember banging my head against the Eye of the Beholder Dungeons and Dragons games appalled at the fact that something as complex as tabletop role-playing had been reduced to throwing knives at spiders in someone’s basement. The Baldur’s Gate games changed this. Suddenly, if you played an evil character good characters refused to join up with you and if you played a good character then certain solutions to problems were denied you. It was a revelation. Now it all tastes like ashes. Continue reading The Mechanics of Morality: Why Moral Choices in Video Games Are No Longer Fun →

Blog

Under the dome: the Winooski that wasn’t

5 Comments

Score one for internet serendipity, and another for news organisations republishing archive articles. Both SlashDot and architecture/design webzine Inhabitat.com ended up pointing toward the story of Winooski, Vermont, and the flirtation that city had during the last gasp of the seventies with the idea of encasing itself in a giant geodesic dome to protect itself from the snow-bound New England climate. Here’s the 1979 article from Time, when the idea was still freshly under consideration:

Tigan has no inkling yet of such details as whether the dome would be inflatable or rigid, what it would be made of, how air would be circulated, or even roughly how much it might cost. An artist’s rendering commissioned by the town shows a structure about 200 ft. high at its center (enough to clear the town’s tallest building, eleven stories high), covering a square mile of Winooski; it is transparent on its southern side, where there are also solar panels to catch the sun’s rays, and becomes gradually opaque on the northern exposure. The principal entry points are two half-buried tubes that would serve as the major cross streets. Travel inside the dome would be by electric cars or monorail—to avoid lethal accumulations of automobile exhaust.

And here’s a contemporary piece at H+ Magazine that digs up the whole story [and from where the copy of the concept drawing below has been borrowed; please contact for immediate take-down if required]:

Winooski dome concept drawing - John Anderson

Enthusiasts organized an International Dome Symposium, held in March 1980. Buckminster Fuller, then busy assisting in Brasilia, the planned capital city in Brazil that had been hacked out wholesale from the Amazonian jungle, flew in to express his enthusiasm. Fuller (naturally) proposed a structure of multiple geodesic domes, but in any case declared the engineering “not terribly difficult,” and pointed to already existing structures like large airport terminals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Fuller had built the “US Pavilion” at Expo Montreal in 1976 — three-fourths of a sphere consisting of 1900 molded, transparent Plexiglas panels, 200 feet high and 250 feet in diameter, covering 1.1 acres. Winooski’s dome would cover nearly the entire town, 800 times that area. He stressed that the biggest challenge was not keeping the dome up, but holding it down against the force of rising warm air.

It’s easy to look back and laugh at what seems to be a bout of naive and ludicrous old-school futurism… but is it really that crazy an idea? Surely we’ve got the architectural and engineering skills to be able to build such a structure by now, and cities like Winooski – which are likely to become even more harassed by the weather as a result of climate change and rising energy prices – might find there were few other palatable answers to the question of how to remain an economically viable place to live. Is it perhaps time to reconsider Bucky Fuller’s geodesic domes as a last resort in our stand-off with the environment?

Blog

White faces in the day labour queue

2 Comments

I clearly remember my first day travelling in Mexico, walking out from my hostel to check out the zocalo at the centre of El D.F. and catching sight of long rows of men stood by their open toolboxes, with little signs explaining what sort of work they’d do, and for how much money. I’d never seen people queuing for day labour before; I don’t know if it’s ever happened in the UK during my lifetime.

It’s a more common sight in the US, apparently, especially in cities with high densities of immigrants, legal or otherwise. And now in Las Vegas (and elsewhere) the immigrants are being joined by US-born citizens as the economy continues its slow grind through the low times [via GlobalGuerrillas]:

In the latest sign of the Las Vegas Valley’s economic free fall, U.S. citizens are starting to show up in the early mornings outside home improvement stores and plant nurseries across the Las Vegas Valley, jostling with illegal immigrants for a shot at a few hours of work.

Experts say the slow-starting but seemingly inexorable trend is occurring nationwide.

“It’s the equivalent of selling apples in the Great Depression,” said Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

It’s grim news from an economic perspective… but there may be a positive outcome, depending on your attitude. While there’s every chance that competing with illegal immigrants for low-dollar work may exacerbate the resentment and racial tensions that certain talk-show hosts love to exploit, in some cases the reverse may occur – citizens brought low by the financial crisis coming to realise that immigrants are people just like them, in other words.

Bernabe said organizers came across one case where a local sheriff had been sending officers to answer complaints about day laborers and then found one day that the sheriff’s neighbor, a citizen, was among them. Police in that area have been less likely to harass laborers since then, he said. These events will occur more, changing people’s attitudes in the process, he said.

“For a long time, people have looked at day laborers and said, ‘The problem is the immigrants.’ Now the economy is changing. Now people may see it’s a problem of the labor market, of the rights of workers,” Bernabe said.

Buchanan, meanwhile, looks forward to a future that includes a steady job and an apartment. “I’m trying to dig my way out of this,” he said. When he does, however, he sees himself as a changed man.

“Before, I was part of the majority. Now I’m part of the minority … I’m not going to forget this. I’m not going to forget any of this.”

It’d be ironic if the recession helped people to realise that the divide that really matters isn’t the border lines drawn on a map, but the invisible one drawn between the poor and the rich – the one that cuts across nationality and ethnicity in every country on the planet. It’d be ironic, but it’d also be the best thing that the recession achieved. What social changes might we see in a country where the poor refuse to be divided and conquered by the rhetoric of the rich? Would the atmosphere of brotherhood last, or would the first signs of recovery herald a return to the status quo?

Blog

The other sort of hacking: Baltimore’s ghost taxis

4 Comments

Baltimore taxisDovetailing neatly with yesterday’s article about innovative low-budget urban living in Detroit comes a piece on Baltimore’s “hacks”- illegal and unlicensed taxi services provided by anyone with a car to anyone in need of a budget ride across town [via MetaFilter; image by Marcin Wichary].

… a booming economy built around people in Baltimore’s African-American community who prefer to call or flag down drivers like Doug to taking public transportation or licensed taxicabs. There are no statistics on hacking, no academic studies. Yet, as anyone who travels city streets and encounters the finger-wagging hack hail knows, it is a pervasive part of life here.

It is also a somewhat controversial part. Hacking is illegal, a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500 and up to six months in jail. And it has a reputation as a dangerous practice, for both riders and drivers. Although Baltimore Police Department spokesman Officer Troy Harris says that police records “don’t have a category for occupations of homicide victims,” accounts published in The Sun indicate that over the past decade as many as 13 Baltimoreans have been killed while driving hacks. And since hacking itself is illegal, many lesser crimes that might occur in the process–carjackings, robberies, assaults–likely go unreported.

Why has this dangerous and illegal activity become such a part of Baltimore culture? Most reasons given by those contacted for this story can be summed up in three words–convenience, money, and race.

It’s a long article, but worth the read – y’know, the sort of journalism they keep telling us that the internet will kill off. Hacking sounds a lot like the ‘van’ system found in Latin American cities, a grey market that grows around the demand for public transport infrastructure among those living on the margins of society, whether geographically or politically. From the sound of it, hacking in Baltimore is too ubiquitous to be effectively shut down by the authorities without a vast expense of time and money, and its close connection to the African-American demographic means that to do so would probably amplify the problems of discrimination that hacking circumvents. The article points out that the city authorities have too much on their plates with other more serious crimes to spend time on a hacker crack-down (arf!), but one can’t help but wonder if there’s an element of turning the blind eye in that attitude – after all, any street-level economic activity that’s been running for a few decades is evidently driven by genuine need, and producing an official fix for the problem is going to be much harder work than trying quietly to contain it.

What fascinates me about stories like this are the way they tear off the veneer of “respectable”corporate capitalist economics to reveal illicit person-to-person transactions running in much the same way as they must have done since the dawn of commerce itself. I know it’s not fashionable to talk positively about the power of the marketplace right now, but you can’t deny the tenacity with which people will find a way to make a fast buck from the absence of a certain service or product. The question is, how much of the crime associated with hacking would be prevented if the authorities took a more laissez faire attitude and deregulated the business, allowing hacks to compete directly on price and safety with ‘legitimate’ taxis? This strikes me as the sort of small economic ecosystem that could thrive with the introduction of a reputation currency.