noisewar internetlainen - games, politics, and sarcasm

This post is going to attempt pulling three disparate subjects I wanted to talk about into one coherent rant... ready?

I'm savagely disappointed in John McCain, my candidate of choicelessness, and was dismayed to hear Michael Hollick's complaints about being underpaid for his voice acting role as the main character of Grand Theft Auto IV. These happened within a week of each other, and got me incensed by how this country is dominated by populist feel-good, and not rational understanding.

McCain, along with the hypocritical bitch whose husband I've already written about, is pushing for a Gas Tax Holiday paid for by money the government doesn't have (until it taxes it out of the people). Like the biodiesel fad that has led to mass starvation in worldwide food shortages, it stokes that unjustified indignation people have who think Big Oil is plundering the common man. Meanwhile, Hollick, telling the NY Times of the "mere" $100,000 he made voicing Nico Bellic, made the presumptuous remark, saying "But it’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it."

I've been reading Atlas Shrugged recently, after a debate with a co-worker where he felt I didn't fully understand Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy and had represented it unfairly in my Bioshock article. After reading it, I've realized that I was more right than I ever knew. She created a complete strawman for her Atlas' and now I know I can't point out any flaw in her logic if I'm in the same room as her fans/cultists. But I did gain an appreciation for how deeply she feels for the great men and women who are assaulted for their wealth and power by the very people who depend on it.

And I have a similar if less fervent feeling for Big Oil. Yes I'm going to defend them. Do you people know that Big Oil has had a declining profit margin since Standard Oil? That Big Oil today has a lower profit margin (7-9%) than most other industries (look up the highest yourself)? And that's without the reinvestment into infrastructure people damn them for! Did you know that the government's gasoline taxes rake in twice as much as Big Oil revenues?

But Big Oil has made so much money! They should give back to the people, cried the looters! Did you know that if you graph Big Oil's "huge" profits to oil consumption, the correlation damns no one but the oil-gobbling people ourselves? Did you know that Big Oil isn't even that big? Exxon (the largest of Big Oil) ranks 14th largest in the world, the biggest being ARAMCO which is 12 times its size! Sure, let's return Big Oil to the mercy of the people, let's just make it state-owned... like the 13 other oil giants in the world that dwarf "Big" Oil.

So when Hollick says it's hard to watch GTA make millions, isn't he right? It's not like he signed a contract agreeing to all these terms, nor had any idea of the popularity of the world's best-selling game beforehand. Clearly he was misled. He should have protested the obvious exploitation by letting another unknown actor take the $100,000 blow that was merely better than average for opportunity starved voice actors whose video game work isn't protected by their own selfless union.

Where Ayn Rand was wrong was her trust in the utilitarian nobility of the elites in capitalism, a trust not so different than the trust in the working man found in her nemesis: socialism. But her dangerously seductive philosophy was birthed from a real and tragic irony. If you run a business, shall I punish you when people can't get enough of your product? When the people force profits upon you, shall I force you to give back charitably? Shall I take your right to pursue profit in the name of National Security, along with wire-tapping and waterboarding?

So then, tell me what right Hollick has to feel anymore pain than the hundreds of other people who worked far more for far less pay and fame, whose efforts in anonymity made Nico Bellic possible? Tell me what right Hollick has to the millions GTA made, when any number of elements in that game could have become the clincher to its appeal? Did anyone buy GTA because Michael Hollick was starring in it?

Then tell me what right we have to demand Big Oil's morality at our feet, when it is us who drank in the prosperity of energy irresponsibility until the mirage began to fade?

No doubt you've heard the news that Henry Paulson wants to tighten standards on banks now that the country is falling apart. Sit back, 'cuz I got a heck of a story for you:

While I am completely sympathetic to how much people hate our current President and his disastrously arrogant administration, it infuriates me to hear people claim Bush brought about this recession. We've been in a recession since Nixon, we just didn't know it yet. The worst is how people believe that Clinton balanced the budget, and that Bush subsequently ruined it. How slick is Willy. I think I need to explain exactly why this is an outright urban legend.

The whole charade depends on the semantics of accounting. We actually have two different debts that add up to become the National Debt. They are Public Debt and Intergovermental Debt. The first is what the people owe, the second is what the government owes itself (that the people will repay). The government owes itself? Right, the government, much like our brains, is actually several semi-independent entities that interact to govern, and therefore can take loans from each other as if they were separate.

What Clinton did was borrow from the government (Intergovernmental Debt) to pay off Public Debt. If you check the U.S. Treasury records, National Debt continued to increase throughout the Clinton administration, albeit slower than the previous presidencies. How in the world can increasing National Debt be considered a budget surplus?

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Why are some folks so good at repackaging the same old shit for our consumption, and have us love them for it? That's how I feel as I'm playing Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass, which is essentially a remix of Wind Waker and all the top-down Zeldas. It's how I feel when I hear Hillary Clinton dredge up the same healthplan that was the biggest failure of the Billary administration, who still has no real way of paying for the darn thing. Oh right it pays for itself, by cutting costs! Just like how I can increase my salary by starving.

I just finished reading Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, and I am still reeling from how disappointing it was. Maybe I'm an action junkie, the stem cells of my attention span tinkered with by the cocktails of impulse that video games provide. I went in expecting to read about Blackwater and how it operated, its tactics, training, its harrowing hidden stories of what evils unregulated private armies commit.

What I got instead was a few pages of the good stuff, and four hundred remaining pages of anti-neo-con, anti-right-wing, anti-religious-right, anti-any-religious-con diatribe. What could have been a sharp tale about a frightening, unregulated cult of ex-special forces types selling their warfaring skills fizzled and drowned itself out. Instead, we got a tale about something bad that every person ever connected to anyone remotely related to Blackwater has ever done. The amount of implicit condemnation isn't just infuriating or unfair, it's just plain boring to read. Skeletons can be dug up in anyone's closet. Scahill had plenty of material for Blackwater alone, but each page just got more and more personal, attacking every politician or figure he's hated, until I closed the book, read the back cover, and discovered, to no surprise, praise form Michael Moore, who pioneered these very techniques.

What techniques? Why, the one where first you imply someone is a bad boy because someone else he knows has done something bad at some point in his life. Then, you simultaneously praise and criticize the same people, using them as you see fit. The favorite Moorian target is the soldier, who is described as a dumb lunk of American arrogance sometimes, and as a sensitive family man at others. It just depends on which heartstring they wanna pull. Scahill is a journalist, and should be above this kind of liberal manipulation. Read it yourself, and see how many scandalous things mentioned have anything to do with Blackwater itself.

Even with his personal agenda splattered on top, which would only bother conservatives like me, the book still lacks a good narrative. There are constant detours that leave me wondering what any of it has to do with Blackwater. There's way too much repetitious foreshadowing, and much of the "facts" could have been left in endnotes. I say "facts" because they are facts, but that doesn't make this an impartial book. If he wanted to say privatization of the army was a disaster, I'd wholeheartedly agree, free-market capitalist that I am. But if he was trying to tell a riveting tale of conspiracy, a soapbox was not the best place to spin an engaging yarn.

There is a tragic flaw in the modern American character. Would it be jingoism, world ignorance, or hypocrisy? No, I find all those to be but charming idiosyncrasy, as innocent as apple pie, and as harmless as a cute .38 snubnose concealed gingerly in an embroidered leather holster. I speak of a greater flaw: the inability to accept due responsibliity, especially when none is due.

My thread from my heart to my tearducts was strained uncomfortably this week, and my agnostic prayers go out to the fine community of Virginia Tech. Who would have known a crazy gunman would wreak havoc on their idyll lives. Actually, I would have guessed... Korean student going for an English Major? I can only imagine how much his asian parents approved of that.

But for all my sympathy, I can not stand the immediate scapegoating that followed. Suddenly, the university was to blame for not alerting 25,000 sleepy college students that they didn't know a crazed gunman was loose since they only started investigating a domestic-dispute homicide. Maybe they were to blame for not knowing the exact location of the gunman on their 2500-acre campus, and making the silly assumption that he had made a run for it the way 99% of criminals do.

Oh but it got worse.

Infamy whore Jack Thompson, a leech, a pox, played the video game card before he (or the rest of the country) had a damn clue about what had transpired. It should have been blatantly obvious to the press that the uber-violent video games that the unknown gunman was not known to have MUST have caused this killing spree. The Washington Post demonstrated remarkable journalistic integrity by reporting the gunman was a hardcore afficiando of Counterstrike. A day later, that statement was removed from their article, surely with only the best intentions. Didn't I just write about this?

Do we have to find someone to blame? Parents, games, guns, police, media, or whatever the hell is near any disaster, why is it we pick one and not all (or none) to blame? It's like a need to put a face or identity to the blame. This kid was just fucked-up, and the gestalt of his recipe for insanity is at once everything and nothing. In fact, because it is everything, it is nothing. We need to focus on healing, acceptance, and have everyone learn pre-emptive empathy. It is nonsense to find sense in senseless violence. Let's learn more about the victims and what they could have been, and not let the 15 minutes of each new accusation rob them of what is really their time. They have been robbed of enough.

If there is one sector I feel comfortable making predictions in, it would be the video game sector, although the majority of it is really just a cluster of a dozen or so companies that publish for a much broader cast behind the curtain. It excites me everytime that this mini-sector is covered by market blogs, and this article is no exception. I like to read about an industry dear to my heart from the perspective of those less intimate with it. What the article says about EA's development difficulties with the PS3 and idealogical difficulties with the Wii, while not surprising in themselves, reminded my of how I've forgotten that companies are companies. Even in the business of creativity and play, the corporate speak is nothing new to investors.

That comforts me.

The game industry, for some betters and many worsers, has grown up. It's leaving its roots in the basement of hackers. It is being held to a multi-national standard, ethically and financially. It has, despite its loss of innocence, become recognized.

And I dearly hope that, like books, radio, comics, television, and film before it, it will endure through its current phase, the scapegoat of political campaigns and modern vices, and enter the annals of pleasant anachronism. Only there is it safe to continue to work its influence as the world whirls around another threat. There, it will build better men.

Right now, the old guard thinks it ruins them. What about the teenage gunman who turns out, contrary to preliminary reports, didn't own a single game? Or what about when the stepmother of a boy recently apprehended for the sport-killing of a homeless man opens herself and her story to Penny Arcade, telling the world that "Video games DID NOT make this kid who he was, and it’s unfortunate that the correlation is there." Her story is haunting, even moreso if unheard.

As the year of the Golden Pig arrives, I hope that the industry will have great fortune, making it (and me) rich. Feng Shui experts proclaim this also a year of Fire on top of Water, a year of great conflict and volatility. With game legislation in furor, and the industry cycle starting anew under the duress of the console war, this will no doubt be one of the deciding years on the fate of games and their status among other media.