We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day In general, escapism of any sort interferes with cultish indoctrination. Once people start imagining things, they might start imagining alternatives to your totalitarian utopia. Or they might start asking ‘counterfactual’ questions and discover the sheer incoherence of the worldview they had previously accepted by default. There are many features of modern culture (even apparently secular ones) every bit as poisonous as the most all-consuming cults.
Fun is also a reliable indicator that something is deeply wrong: The peasants must have some bit of spare time and energy to themselves which hasn’t been dedicated slavishly to the one true cause.
– Commenter Madrocketsci
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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An interesting point, except that games have become so sophisticated and “immersive” that they are ideal tools of progressive tyranny. A Daily Beast article reprinted at NewGeography.com makes the point that in the “city of the future” that Google wants to build, “Everyone else will enjoy leisurely prosperity—playing with their phones, video games, and virtual reality in what Google calls “immersive computing.”.
I contrasted this with Marxian utopia circa 1840: while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind.
Today, the idea of emancipated individuals hunting, fishing, raising cattle and criticizing is anathema to progressives, and such activities are now either banned or severely restricted and closely watched (try criticizing Islam in the UK today). Progressive tyranny prefers instead to channel all human aspiration into “escapism” and computer games are the perfect instrument.
But isn’t cultish indoctrination typically built on escapism? Cultish indoctrination depends on building an alternate reality, misdirecting the mind towards alternate explanations and accounts of where we are and where we’re going and why.
So perhaps it’s more accurate to say that those who would push one alternate reality disapprove of other, competing alternate realities that might take away attention and emphasis from their own.
Er… no. People have to want to play them, which makes the medium a real bitch for the Left, given that quality of gameplay is just a tedious detail to be addressed when the actual objective is the ideological payload.
If you want to understand the honest Marxist view of the arts, your first port of call should be Trotsky. The idea of art-for-art-sake (games-of-games-sake) is anathema, and in reality that was one of the drivers behind Gamergate (‘journalistic’ criticism of games on an ideological basis rather than “is this game any fucking good?”). Things like Depression Quest is what ‘left wing games’ look like.
Attempts to graft left wing ideology into AAA games have been steadily less and less successful as they become more and more blatant (grating in games like Dragon Age: Inquisition, but catastrophic (critically and sales-wise) in Mass Effect: Andromeda (indeed the latter may well have killed one of the best SciFi game franchises. BioWare is probably a write-off, not just for the ideological shit (good looking characters are an ablist no-no) but also the fact they seem to have forgotten how to actually make high production value games))
I don’t agree. The specific content of the game is not as important as its, for want of a better word, immersiveness (which is a function of the “quality of gameplay” you mention). People who are immersed in gaming are unavailable to interfere in politics. The tools behind Gamergate may well politicize the content of games, but Google just needs people in its city of the future to occupy all of their time in “playing with their phones, video games and virtual reality.” I am using “game” to cover all of that and not just games proper. And yes, I am (probably) exaggerating the effect, but even if only 5% of the population so immerses itself, that is, in a nation of 340 million, 17 million fewer people to interfere with your building of the city of the future or other utopia.
“In general, escapism of any sort interferes with cultish indoctrination.”
I wonder if that’s the reason most of my teachers in high school and college were so against escapist entertainment.
I found this quote a welcome perspective. I have viewed gaming (for adults) as irresponsible* escapism to the extent that it was as if people were acknowledging the menace of the Left and hoping to deal with it by pretending that they didn’t exist rather than taking any steps to oppose or counter them. From the Left’s POV, any failure to acknowledge and bow to them is to invite retribution, and to the extent that gaming involves ignoring or evading them it is a crime.
* To me, it is up to you if you wish to be irresponsible, but do not complain when you are shot, tortured or starved to death by a menace you ignored.
Bilwick (March 14, 2018 at 8:00 pm), Tolkien and Lewis were routinely accused of writing ‘escapist’ books by the literary establishment of their time. As Tolkien remarked to Lewis:
(Quoted from memory.) The Diana Wynne Jones quote that heads my most recent post features much the same point.
How immersive a game is, is in no small part a function of gameplay, but it is also a function of how relatable the game is, which is a non-trivial obstacle to embedding a political message in a game: and that does indeed cut to the specific content in some genres.
I know lots of people who played Dragon Age: Inquisition, and there are forum guides out there which tell you how not to get trapped in a dreary California leftist discussion with various oh-so-noble homosexual toons, whilst finding ways to ‘game’ the game for the best content without enduring the shit. Gamers want to rock, they don’t want to be preached to, its a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium to think otherwise.
That is also true for reading books, watching TV, working for a living, driving a car and mowing the lawn. But guess what… want to know a sure fire way to getting gamers involved in political action? Fuck with their games or tell them their games are racist (or whatever). And multiplayer games create communities, and annoyed communities with an affinity are particular quick to become political when they are fucked with.
I kept saying, years ago about Second Life, that serious libertarians should design games where the player is a libertarian. Perhaps Britain has become more libertarian, or the player could be trying to live ‘off the grid’ in a red-tape version of Britain now. Same ideas now, guys!
Nicholas, I’ll buy it!
Oh, if only I were 45 years younger…. 😎
Lots of games – and lots of fiction in general – are about things that are “wicked cool.” They’re about doing evil things in worlds that would be horrible to live in, but that are also aesthetically pleasing and outright fun when you don’t have to face the real-world consequences. There are, for example, quite a number of fun games where the player gets to be a socialist dictator.
Julie, in some games, you can set your character age to whatever you like!
I’m a roleplayer old enough to remember Patricia Pulling and Tipper Gore, this is just a re-hash, it is nothing to do with video games specifically.
The Google future needs someone to program it, and thus the little nerd who plays D&D completes the circular logic.
Not only therefore has the game spawned the opposite of its intent, a community discussing how to avoid PC preaching, but readers can imagine how unpersuasive (as well as boring) PC ideology is when reduced from the narrow minds of its believers into the yet more limited state of a computer program.
It also of course has an excellent opportunity to create gamesmanship loopholes – in no small part because play-testers may be scared to point them out. I was never interested enough to see if the 2012 (IIRC) Elder Scrolls development of “You will be able to persuade any NPG of either gender to marry you’ (Wow, ‘either gender’ – it is so hard for the woke to stay relevant 🙂 ) opened the way to winning over a trail of slaughtered useful-idiot persuadable NPGs as it seemed to do. But here too, the thoughts raised (not only in me) were not always what the PC intended.
It is one of our core beliefs that humans, not least PC ones, are poor at foreseeing the consequences of their actions, so that it is wise not to let the intent hide the actual outcome. We should expect games to teach the same lesson – to those who can bear it.
I can only imagine what the SJW scolds think of one of my favorites, the non-human, genderless Q*Bert.
I’ve seen those guides too 😆 which is a perverse compliment to the last playable game Bioware ever made. There’s enough good gameplay in DA:I to make it worth the fuckin’ hassle of going to the effort of not stepping in the SJW shitpiles. By the time Bioware reached Andromeda, there was nothing but shitpiles in their buggy piece of shit excuse for a badly written game. There’s no forum guides where to extract the good stuff because there isn’t any. This your brain. This your brain on SJW. This is your brain when you don’t hire real devs to make a AAA game.
Andromeda was the first game I ever bought that I uninstalled & deleted before I finished it. Waste.of.fucking.money. Waste.of.fucking.time. Fuck Bioware, fuck EA. At this stage, buying from these turds ever again is aiding & abetting. I shoulda figured that out three games ago. I’m sticking to Rockstar (awesome lunatics) , Bethesda (proving fucked up bugfests can still be fun) & CDPR (Vodka fuelled Gods in a world of grunting pygmies).
I see you played the Fallout series too! I had a macro that saved the game every 60 seconds.
Quoted for truth 😎
Yeah, you should’ve but better late than never. Bioware is cancer.
The left want to either control fantasy (including fantasy games) or destroy it. But then the left want to control everything – or destroy it. They are totalitarians – “total”, nothing (to them) should be outside their control.
And the post makes the point well – “counter factual history” is just saying “what if…..?” And that is unacceptable then we are in the Hegelian nightmare of history being destiny – “historical forces” leading to a predetermined result.
Actually the study British history is dominated by Hegelian thinking – “Social Reform” (the expansion of the state) is considered automatically good – “liberals” are trying to create the same view in the United States, with the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society being considered automatically good, just as (in Britain) the “reforms” of Disraeli or David Lloyd-George being considered automatically good.
No debate, no dissent allowed.
Paul Marks is correct again. I rather enjoy reading his posts, but I suspect he not mine. I’m an atheist curmudgeon which is neither here nor there until somebody gets the Bible wrong, and then I turn into Ben Shapiro, correct, annoying and a jerk. LOL.
Oh, I agree (exempting your last clause slightly 🙂 ) – and suggest we agree to disagree over who that somebody is. 🙂
My discussions with Paul whenever Sir Douglas Haig works his way into the conversation usually end (and might perhaps, after so much comment space has been consumed, now as usefully begin) with a similar agreement. 🙂
Join me in a toast to free speech – a virtue not only celebrated but also demonstrated on this blog!!
Thailover and Niall – thank you very much.
And I would much rather talk to an “atheist curmudgeon” than to a “modern Christian” – i.e. someone who has no clear beliefs at all.
As for Douglas Haig – I draw a distinction between a bad general and a bad man.
General Pakenham at the battle of New Orleans (1815) was a bad general – he sent his men in on a frontal attack against prepared positions. But he was not a bad man – when the first attack failed he personally led the second attack and died doing it. A good man covers their military mistakes with their own blood.
General Douglas Haig would never have done that – he would have always found a “scientific” excuse (very scientific – from a man who failed his maths exam, and almost every other piece of academic work he was forced to produce himself, rather than have James Edmonds do for him) NOT to lead the attack himself.
Douglas Haig was not just a bad general – he was also a bad mam, the technical and “scientific” term is that he was a SHIT.
People remarked on how soldierly and correct the language (only a few manly words from Douglas) and bearing of Douglas Haig was (almost like an actor playing the role of an aristocratic British army officer – far more formal and “aristocratic” than the Earl of Cavan, commander of the Guards, who as he actually was an aristocrat did not have to play the role of one), whereas General Henry Wilson was most un soldierly – always making jokes and playing about. They also remarked that Douglas Haig was a handsome man (indeed he had a Harry Flashman like handsome appearance), whereas Henry Wilson was “grotesque” (as Denis Winter puts it – with his standard unkindness).
It never seems to occur to historians that Henry Wilson was not born ugly – he was SHOT IN THE FACE. Perhaps they should ask themselves why Douglas Haig never seemed to get wounded – over a whole lifetime in the army. Even the famous occasion in 1914 when Douglas Haig drew his pistol and waved it about shouting “we will sell our lives dearly” there were NO GERMANS ANYWHERE NEAR. Douglas was threatening Germans who WERE NOT THERE (and he knew they were not there). He might as well have been on a stage in a theatre.