civilization and ludic eurocentrism

Sid Meier's Civilization is a eurocentric game.

Now, I know what you're going to say to me. You're going to say to me "No way, Jake! You're full of crap! Look at the balance of western vs. non-western leaders and civilizations portrayed in the game. Look at the fact that those leaders speak their accurate native languages (or close approximations thereof), and that the units you control do also! Raargh, I'm angry that you're wrong!"

Well, hopefully you won't say that last part. But you're right! Civilization as a series does have a very good track record of representing traditionally marginalized societies and groups. It uses as a measure of who should be included not only expansionist success and historical fame, but also internal political achievement and successful defense against colonialism, as well as making an effort to include nations that might have been great had they not been outright exterminated.

But centrism is about more than that. It's not merely the erasure of certain peoples' contributions to history, which Civilization laudably doesn't do. It's instead a totalizing system of values that emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes others. It tells us--in the case of Civilization, through gameplay--what is important and what is not important. Civilization is Eurocentric not because it whitewashes history or under-represents certain groups, but because of what it is about: expansion, conquest, and technology.

As I see it, these have been the things that seem to have been viewed as important to western powers, at least in our understanding of them. What do we study in Western Civ 101? The expansion and conquest of the Roman Empire. The wars of the middle ages. Colonialism. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. The Napoleonic wars. The world wars. The cold war. Granted, we do hit religion, industrialization, the rising middle class, and the change in theories of government, but I feel that the balance lies on the side of foreign policy and the Idea of Progress over the social.

For any historians who take issue with this, I am willing to concede that this might be a historiographical problem on my part. But if it is, it is a history that the designers have also bought into and that informs their decision making. Expanding your territory and researching new technologies are the two things that are absolutely critical to success in the games. Later entries have allowed a more peaceful and less expansionist approach, but even these are either dependent on earlier expansion (economic, cultural) or also easily facilitate the militaristic path (diplomatic, scientific).

This type of centrism is necessary, and we shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in it. In fact, that's such an important point that I'm going to repeat it. We shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in eurocentrism to the degree that they have. Because of game mechanical concerns (what some scholars have taken to calling Ludic elements), you could not have a non-centric game, or at least not a successful one. A game that attempted to give equal weight to all of the things that nations, states and societies have viewed as most important and have focused on would be terrible. It would be a nightmare for the player to micromanage and contain so many interconnected systems that it would collapse under it's own weight. Because Civilization is a game series and not a historical analysis, it must necessarily emphasize some things at the expense of others.

But...what would a different Civilization game look like? What if we made a conscious effort to emphasize the traditional concerns of East Asian civilization, for example? I am not a historian or an East Asian studies major, so my understanding is limited, but I'll speculate.

Given collectivist tendencies, a sinocentric game might focus a great deal more on internal rather than external strife. Your empire could have a "harmony" value that represents your overall social cohesion. Let it fall too low and face the risk that groups of your cities could attempt to break away into independent empires, or that pretender armies might try to seize power. You could be forced to balance the competing demands of accumulating technologies from foreign trade and preventing foreign cultural influence. If ahead in tech, you could play the cultural colonialist role and sell your advances for influence or exotic resources. Expansion and warfare would still be a big part of your strategy, as these are things that every state has struggled with, but they might have an impact on your harmony stat or your foreign cultural influence. It's a matter of what's emphasized.

This is obviously a cursory speculation, and if anyone with more knowledge about both East Asian culture/history and strategy games wants to fill out my ideas, or call me out on where I'm wrong, I'd look forward to hearing from you.

waking nightmare on west st. germain

Hypersomnia, a gallery show by Anna Ault, just opened at The Gallery Vault, and it's a terrifying beauty to behold. Although the physical gallery space itself remains the faux cheerfulness of the white gallery cube, but nothing beyond that has even the slightest inkling of cheer, simplicity or even sanity. Rather than visiting a gallery show, the experience of Hypersomnia is more akin to falling into a version of Alice's Wonderland written by Wes Craven with the Mad Hatter played by Heath Ledger's Joker.

Anna's work is a chaotic mess, but that's a credit to it on even the worst of days. When it's great, like in Hypersomnia, you end up with either a visual or conceptual call to madness, a controlled chaos that evokes Hitchcock's Birds and Lévi's Baphomet in equal measure. This makes sense considering both the title and the artist's own struggles with the specter of death at an early age. In these contexts, the works take on a somnolent quality that brings to mind the twisted worlds of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and the feeling of being trapped in a world of imagination, longing for a return to real life. Chaos reigns here.

The formal quality of the work is predominantly linear, but is balanced by these well known animal images, which draw you out of the visual as soon as it begins to become overwhelming. Birds and goat-demons are simultaneously a threat and a friend for Anna, like an alternatively abusive and loving relationship that one cannot escape from. Fish and snakes are more humorous and playful, to the degree that anything can be in Anna's warped world. Once you have a moment to ponder the meaning of a bizarre image like that of a purple rat in a full hazmat suit devouring the neck of a human man, the tangle of lines and overlapping shapes draw you back in.

This Matisse-like push and pull of image and concept continues as you pass each of the exactingly worked 204 pieces in the show. By the end you're dizzy and profoundly disturbed, and in my case, profoundly affected with a desire for more. Perhaps hearkening just a touch back to the cacophony and speed of the Italian futurists (though without their juvenile love of war and the machine), lines and shapes and collide with printed and drawn matter in a way I'd hesitate to call controlled chaos. A better metaphor, if I'm not overloading you with enough comparisons already, would be to the kaleidoscopic nature of David Lynch's films had he worked with H. R. Giger. One thing leads to another that it shouldn't naturally lead to, but the connections seem to be implied nonetheless.

Anna's work pushes against the Duchampian trend toward minimalism and high concept that characterized the art of the second half of the twentieth century. But it also proves that a formalism of exacting detail need not neglect a gut-punching emotional character. Anna's going places. I'd recommend you get to the show and grab onto her coattails (or, rather, tail feathers).

Hypersomnia is open 12 pm to 3 pm October 16th, 17th and 18th, and The Gallery Vault is located at 708 West St. Germain Street in St. Cloud.

Most of the works in the show are for sale, and the artist can be contacted for price and availability at annaault@yahoo.com

the happy dog problem

I originally posted this to Facebook, and I hesitated to post it here because it's not strictly related to the topics of this blog and I'm worried about having to great a diversity of topics. I decided to go ahead anyway. If you have no interest in philosophy, go ahead and skip down to the next post.

You are sitting in a dog park when you notice a dog in the distance. This is a happy therapy dog that lives in the park and whose job is to cheer people up by playing with them. The dog is very good at this job. People always seem very happy after interacting with him, and more than one person has remarked that playing with the dog turned a bad day into a good one.

You’re about to go play with the dog when he dashes away toward another person, barking and wagging his tail. This other person is clearly extremely sad. You’ve never met this person but he or she has clearly suffered a devastating tragedy of some sort, and is on the verge of tears. The dog is currently running toward the sad person at full speed.

Closer to you than the sad person is a group of five people who also look extremely sad. You’re not sure if they know each other or not, but you’re guessing that they probably don’t since they’re not interacting. In an astonishing coincidence, they each seem just as sad as the individual sad person.

You know this dog well. You’ve interacted with him before and have built a rapport. You can reasonably expect that if you call him, he will come. Furthermore, you’re close enough to the group of five sad people that you could easily use your calls to steer the dog toward them.

However, the sad individual looks as if he or she is about to leave the park. If you call the dog now, the sad person will leave the park before you have time to get to them and cheer them up yourself.

Two questions:

First, do you call the dog over to cheer up the five sad people instead of the one?

Second, if you are familiar with the question known as “the trolley problem”, do you believe that your answer to the happy dog problem is fundamentally or essentially different from your answer to the trolley problem? Why or why not?

at the crossroads of GIFT and teamwork

So, I'm reading Playable Pedagogy, specifically Alex's comment on being a noob in Dota 2.

I hesitate to play any real matches against real opponents because my teammates warned me that if I play with others, I will be verbally torn apart if I can’t play decently. This is the main reason I stay away from collaborative gaming.

As a friendly gamer who regularly joins pick-up groups in MMOs, this is incredibly disheartening to hear. I know what she means; Gaming in multiplayer for nearly twenty years has given me my fair share of interactions with the slime and human detritus that lie waiting in the gutter of the gaming community. What I mean is that it's incredibly disheartening to hear that yet another person has been turned off from gaming with strangers because of this. I hear it all the time and, unless it subsides or we can change the conversation, it's going to continue to damage the reputation of the hobby and turn away the more thoughtful people who might help make great games and great multiplayer experiences.

Maybe I'm different in not being as bothered by these things. I grew up in Quake II, where trash talking was simply one of the rules of the road. You didn't have to instigate—I never did—but you at least had to tolerate it. There was also respect there if you could bite back sharply and cleverly after you were bitten—but only once; making a big deal out of it was seen as getting emotional and thus embarrassing. I'd liken it to the way stand-up comics are expected to deal with hecklers by making a joke at their expense and then moving on.

But trash-talking is probably the least disquieting form of internet abuse in most cases, especially because you expect it coming from the other team and because it has a long history in competitive activity outside gaming. It's another thing entirely to hear your own teammates rip you open and tear out your entrails.

This is a phenomenon that's fairly unique to internet competition. For example, can you imagine what the reaction would be if, during a post-game interview, an NFL quarterback blamed his offensive line for folding up and his receivers for dropping clean throws and also refused to address what he could have done differently? He'd be canned before they could get him off the air. There's no place for this in athletic competition, so I don't buy the often stated argument that people playing Dota or other MOBA games are more aggressive because they're more competitive.

One of the things at work here is clearly GIFT. In 2004, Mike Krahulik, who draws and sometimes writes for Penny Arcade, articulated in a simple formula what internet veterans had unconsciously known on some level for years: why people are jerks on the internet.

Fig 1. John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

This is, of course, comedy, but it's important because it articulates in an extremely accessible way a foundation for further understanding. Personally, I think it's an oversimplification that is essentially true nonetheless. On the academic side, psychologist John Suler was writing contemporary to Krahulik and published a well-cited paper on what he termed the Online Disinhibition Effect, citing six primary factors for the change. Whatever the specific reasons, it is well documented that online interactions do cause people who otherwise might be reasonably helpful, or at least neutral, to become hostile.

So how does this influence Alex's concerns about being a noob and the particular brand of hostility directed at new players? She has a point there:

I think what experienced gamers get out of noob-shaming is more self-serving than that. I think experienced gamers reinforce their experienced-gamer-culture in part through noob-shaming.

Maaaaaaybe. I'd need to know in more detail what she means by "experienced-gamer-culture," but I'm skeptical. I know many experienced gamers across many different games and in many different communities and only very rarely is a part of that culture an exclusion of outsiders. A preference for insiders and a respect for knowledge and expertise, possibly, but not a closing of the culture.

What makes more sense to me is to explain it as a form of blaming the thing. There's a video of a chimpanzee eating a lemon, clearly disliking the sour taste, and then attempting to smash the lemon in apparent punishment for the foul flavor. You can see this in humans too sometimes; people who stub their toes very hard on an object will sometimes kick the object out of a reflexive anger that comes from a wholly irrational place. By shifting blame onto others, we can avoid the shame of our own failure.

I mentioned that I wasn't as bothered by these things; I game with strangers in spite of their occasional hostility to me. For a long time I felt like getting used to this was a process that everyone had to and would go through, a forging-in-fire that resulted in stronger people and the ability to shrug off trolls. But if the number of friends who have vocally expressed their aversion to gaming collaboratively is any indication, I'm clearly wrong on this.

We need more thinking and scholarship on the issue as it relates to gaming if we want to create a more welcoming environment for people who aren't willing to go through that fire. Playable Pedagogy, "tag you're it."