Western Masculinity and Anti-masculine Cant

I'm really struggling to find scholarly discussions of masculinity that don't deteriorate into some kind of boilerplate about the "need to dismantle patriarchy in all its forms" (Schut 103). As you can well imagine, that particular field of feminist criticism - overlapping with the discussion of the "liberated man" - is particularly vibrant for a range of (often crassly political) reasons and sifting through it to find something in any way reflective of masculinity as it is lived instead of a cartoon masculinity used as a political prop is tough work. Either the scholarship is explicitly anti-masculine polemic, or it is a kind of Gorillas in the Mist exploration of these wondrous, mysterious creatures called "men".

Some of the scholarship can just be filtered for this gender bias and appropriated for my own uses, which sometimes yields really useful sources (like Kevin Schut's "Desktop Conquistadors" in Gaming as Culture). And very rarely I'm delighted to find a constructive discussion of masculinity like Thomas Newkirk's Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture that at least attempt to understand the internal coherence and value systems in masculine discourse without the pejorative political imperative projecting external values and language onto a system that doesn't work in those terms.

Otherwise, though, the scholarship is pretty insufferable. Not because of its explicit arguments it makes about masculinity, but because of the false premises it takes for granted and the false consensus it evidences in doing so. A few shibboleths from Derek Burrill's Die Tryin': Videogames, Masculinity, Culture illustrate my point.

In a brilliant and sweeping fashion, Haraway fuses the discourse of science to a particular masculinity - a "modest" masculinity - that defies the typically visible macho and hyperviolent masculinity in Western history and culture. (19)

In what sense is Western masculinity "hyperviolent"? Hyper implies "in excess" or "above", but in relation to what? Which cultural masculinity is the invisible (and presumably "acceptably violent" or "nonviolent") denominator in this binary? One could scale back the statement to one of "violent masculinity in Western history", but the problem would remain of the word "violent" implying a non-violent corollary to define it as violent.

All these kinds of questions are rhetorical of course. This bit of semiotic laziness boils down to a lazy deployment of cant and a reliance on a false consensus of "what we all believe" that isn't in evidence. It derives I believe - as most such bits of anti-masculine canon seem to - from a reliance on feminists to define how men see themselves (which is particularly galling considering the radical imperative of being able to be called by a name you choose for yourself). Such a stance relies on outside observation to discuss an identity that must be lived to be understood (another fact that shockingly eludes those relying on feminism to discuss the internal machinations of masculinity. Would we rely on men - or more pointedly, self-described patriarchs - to theorize for us about what it's like to be women?). It fails completely to appreciate the use value of strength and force in masculinity or to postulate theories of the utility of performative "violence" beyond the facile correlation of "violence" with "bad" and ruminations about Western patriarchy (hint: there's a reason why the increase in violent computer games correlates with a decrease in actual violence).

Take this bit for example:

Marx posed the issue starkly: does social being determine consciousness, or does consciousness determine social being? Male violence must either be seen as a question of original sin ... or as a social construction required by patriarchal society. (23)

Notice the wildly false dichotomy. Either male "violence" - that is, as described elsewhere in his book, a lionization of strength and any physical competition - is an original sin, or is a social construction of the sinister patriarchy. Men are either sinners, or they're puppets. No room is made for a positive, productive use value for masculine discourses of power. "Violence" is a moral evil from the start in this formulation, and the only question is how culpable the men are in their wickedness. This is the blindness I am seeing in a lot of the scholarship on masculinity as I prepare for this conference paper: the erasure of a basic question that I would assume academics were always asking themselves when discussing anything: what makes that value statement valid? Why is masculinity and its promotion of strength de facto a moral hazard? What makes "violence" less valuable than "nonviolence" (especially across contexts)?

Furthermore, why treat masculinity as a problem to be solved instead of trying to approach it on its own terms?

Final Fantasy XIII

... has sucked up a huge chunk of time recently, and it really shouldn't have. That time is completely wasted and I should have realized by now - after having played every Final Fantasy from 7 through 12 - that I would just have to start over and play it through once I got the Prima strategy guide. I know: I'm cheap. But I realize that's the kind of player I am and I want to get all the goodies along the way and not miss anything.

Plus, the sometimes intrusive Final Fantasy tutorial system neglected to mention that I shouldn't be crapping through all my Aegisol and Fortisol fighting random trash monsters because - surprise! - you won't be able to get any more of these incredibly valuable items later in the game... They were dropping like rain in the first couple chapters so I used them up assuming my time of plenty would never end. O, what a fool I.

Generally, Finaly Fantasy XIII is a mixed bag for me. I like the game enough to play it through again (the combat system is innovative and yet the game is familiar enough to let me play it as Final Fantasy). I can definitely say, though, that I'm not invested in most of the characters the way I was in XII, X, or VII, or even as much as in the comparatively weak characters in VIII (FFIX was a disaster so I don't really count that). Apart from Lightning and perhaps Vanille, the characters could all die in a train crash and I wouldn't miss them or care where their boring stories were going. I routinely skip any cutscene with Sazh, Fang, or Snow because Sazh and Snow are boring stock characters while Fang's personality fades into the background noise as "random ornery woman".

I generally expect there to be a character or two that is just garbage: I think there's a rule somewhere in Japan where you have to have a trash character in your anime-looking RPG, no matter what. It was true for FFVII (Cait Sith), Breath of Fire III (Momo), FFX (Waka), FFXII (Penelo)... For some reason there's always a character that is neither badass nor central nor useful in battle nor otherwise interesting. Yet the game forces you to use this character for a couple hours of time-sink for reasons beyond my ability to divine (I can only imagine that these trash characters have some other value in Japan that I don't grasp). XIII's problem lies in the fact that at least half of the cast is the "worthless trash character".

Finally, is there a rule at Square Enix that all your proper nouns have to be drawn from an internet word generator? For fully a third of the game I had no idea what was being referred to when someone said Pulse, l'cie, fal'cie, ci'eth, cocoon, and so forth. These are pretty important elements and the story lost my interest several times because there was zero explanation of how to decode the game's nomenclature. It didn't help that once I realized what these words meant I recognized how stupid the names were and they could have just as easily been replaced with something recognizable (for the record, the words above can roughly be translated Earth, demigod, god, demon, and space station).

...

Hmm, I guess I didn't like FFXIII as much as I imagined; at least not the story itself. It's a testament to how well the game is designed as a game, though, that I'm still planning on playing it through again, only skipping all the tedious cutscenes.

Dissertation Ideas and Other Esoterica

Is it ever too early to start thinking about my dissertation? I started my PhD last year immediately after finishing my MA, so it may be on the early side. But, then again, one can never bee too prepared I don't think as long as the path isn't set in stone at such an early date.

My main project - in all my scholarship, including my future dissertation - is to open up new media to serious literary investigation: specifically video games, but also some other marginal pieces of cultural production. I, quite frankly, reject the continued exaltation of the "book" as a class of special objects in the 21st century. For many centuries, the book has been incredibly important to the West as a vessel for knowledge, power, and culture, but even while I don't imagine the book is dead (as some maudlin Cassandras insist with every new internet site), I really don't see it having the impact in the next 100 years that it did in the last. Literature - especially the capital "L" literature that academics like to study - simply isn't the location of cultural power any longer.

But I digress...

* My first and probably favorite idea is one I'm calling "Mapping the Multiverse: Warhammer 40K and the Reading of Game Fiction". This possible project would involve an investigation of Warhammer 40,000 as a multi-modal project and how people interact with a single intellectual property in a range of media and modes including books, magazines, websites, comics, conventions, tabletop games, card games, RTS video games, online MMOs, virtual communities, fan groups and so forth. Specifically I think I'd focus heavily on Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War and Blood Ravens: The Dawn of War Omnibus because I think the crossover between book and video game really helps erase the barriers between literary text and video game as cultural product (Basically, Blood Ravens is a 3 part novel covering the events that happen in Dawn of War). After a chapter of work erasing I'd go into the cultural significances I see in Dawn of War, why I think the multi-modal consumption by the audience is important, and finally how to read Dawn of War as a video game fiction (as opposed to just stretching the book-critique rubric over the face of a video game). This would ultimately lead to a "going forward" discussion about reading video games, and especially ones involved in a multi-model intellectual property, as important innovations in how culture is produced as well as a possible source of solutions to problems (especially Postmodern ones) posed by print culture.

* I'm considering doing something similar with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning since the Warhammer property has as many modes of interaction as Warhammer 40K, but if one appreciates the differences between W:AR and Dawn of War - not just as stories, but as games and interactive spaces - then one understands that the approach would be very different. The main difference lies in how the community interacts with the text. Dawn of War is an RTS game and a novel, but W:AR is an MMO. The dynamics for how an audience interacts with a Massively Multiplayer Online game are unique and touch on a range of other audience-studies issues. So if I did Warhammer, I'd still do the multi-modal inter-textual reading, but it would also necessarily focus more on audience receptions, interpretations, and interactions with the text and the meta-text (like forums, websites, conventions and so forth). It's definitely possible and probably valuable to tackle issues of audience in the MMO and how that relates to Convergence Culture, but it's just a much different project I think than dealing with Convergence itself and trying to read video games from that.

In fact, the MMO experience is different enough that I wonder if perhaps the MMO is somehow different in kind from other games because of the "massively multiplayer" aspect. The MMO facet practically forces one to discuss issues of audience and mass culture even if I really just want to do a close reading and search for internal meanings. I'm wary of any topic that tyrannically compels me to discuss something, which makes me wary of tackling WAR even though I enjoy it and making connections across the modes deployed by Warhammer.

* Finally there is the option of just doing a critically-informed reading of something like Warcraft III (or Dawn of War or anything really). This may seem like a trite fallback but a serious critical reading would do a lot of the things I need it to. First, it would afford me the opportunity to make the case for video games as serious cultural production that ought to be considered critically (even apart from the politically tedious meta-concerns like "is GTA making people violent" or whatever). Second, the fact that a game is being critiqued at all is a novelty that is worthy of exploration. As far as I know - and I've done a lot of searching, but I may be mistaken - there is nothing out there that critiques video games in a scholarly way except as generic media artifacts in larger discussions of culture. No one discusses Warcraft as a Postcolonial and Ecocritical critique of Western hegemony or Warhammer 40K as a post-scientific realist dystopia. There's a tiny bit of soft pop-philosophy about Final Fantasy, but nothing scholarly. Finally, it would still afford me the opportunity to discuss how to read a video game and the ways in which that is distinct from critiquing other kinds of culture (plus, of course, how that distinction is meaningful for whatever close reading I do).

As generic as it sounds, I think a basic close reading would still be innovative and meritorious just because of its novelty here.

More ideas to come I'm sure...

Warcraft III and Victorian Technology?

Just kinda thinking out loud while I prepare to scramble through this first paper next week.

*My class? Victorian Telecommunications. (ZZZzzzz, right? I'm intrigued by the idea of revisioning Victorian technology as precursors to mass culture, but after 7 weeks covering the steam train and the telegraph I'm ready to claw my eyes out.)
*My task? To write a seminar paper for this CFP: A conference on Victorian networks, Connections, and technologies. My angle would be drawing some parallel between some 19th century tech and modern tech.
*My challenge then? To come up with some way of relating Victorian material production concerns and their epiphenomena with similar material production concerns in, say, Warcraft III or something similar (I'm open to other titles, but since I'm reading WC3 for my freshmen it seemed easiest).
*My main concern? That while I can do the mental acrobatics required to make this comparison, I'm having trouble imagining how to make the answers to my questions here - whatever either of those things ends up being - relevant. More to the point, my idea is probably specious (aren't they all!) and there may be some furious spin to get this contraption committed to paper.

My primary idea is to compare serialization in some Dickens novel (probably Great Expectations since I've actually read it) with story-telling in Warcraft III. My premise is that the epiphenomena of Dickens' serial publication - the harsh segmentation of the story, the flattening of characters, the episodic nature of the narrative, the complex legion of characters interwoven through each other, and the effect of the audience as a "floating spectator" that moves from character to character - are each reproduced in Warcraft III. The game is played through chapter-missions and for the most part each mission functions in the same episodic way that a serialized chunk of a Dickens novel does: by giving a small and cohesive story arc that nevertheless emanates from a grander metanarrative. This effect, along with the story switching back and forth between RTS combat and narrative cut-scenes, causes fragmentation of the story. The characters are also largely flattened in the same way a Dickens character is flattened: because the story is more plot-driven in Warcraft III, character development is not as rich as it might be and many characters are easily identified as stock character types and monodimensional plot devices. The game also "floats" from character to character the way a Dickens novel does. There are main characters, and the story in WC3 is ultimately about Arthas, but we as players drift from Arthas fairly frequently, moving to follow Jaina, Kel'Thuzad, Thrall, Tyrande, Malfurion, Illidan, Maiev, Anub'arak, Kael'thas... the list is pretty long. Not to mention the legion of minor characters woven in like Muradin, Mal'Ganis, Medivh, Varimathras, Uther, and so forth. The story of Warcraft III, though, begins and ends with Arthas.

The problem with this line of attack lies in the fact that I'm not sure I can sustain it for very long. The effects are similar and interesting to tease out, but the causes are very different. Dickensian novels are blocky and flat because they're being transmitted in chunks over a huge span of time in a monthly magazine. WC3 is delivered all at once, and its blocky flatness is derived from its primary purpose as a RTS game... Though perhaps this is where the two ideas really meet: in the realm of material production.

At the very basic level, both stories as narrative are controlled in no small part by how they are made: Great Expectations because it has to fit into monthly installments, and Warcraft III because it has to conform to the RTS game format that demands linear objectives. The stories are shaped by the way they exist as material objects then... And if I make that my thesis, my task would be to dip into close readings of each to discuss just how the story is being shaped by its material existence.

Still, the main problem is relevance. To what end am I making the comparison? What is the larger impact of this coincidence? Perhaps my thesis and my "relevance" are tied into one. Making the comparison allows me to broaden the horizon of literary consideration by taking non-literary texts like video games and comparing them to books (that is, after all, my primary goal in academia). More than that though, it forces a consideration of any text as a material object and troubles the idea that texts can be works of singular artistic genius divorced from the material concerns that give that art shape.

Warhammer Online

So I made the switch from World of Warcraft (which I felt compelled to joylessly write about and "play") to Warhammer Online, and I immediately embrace the change. Sure, my reasoning from a scholarly perspective wasn't entirely sincere, but I strongly suspect that I'm not alone in the Ivory Tower for taking the real taste-based reasons for enjoying a piece and pulling them like taffey until they sound like legitimate scholarly arguments. Is the reasoning specious? Perhaps. On the other hand, I think serious scholarly discussion flows much more freely from a product one enjoys (hence why we teach ENC1145 as "Writing About Whatever").

Plus, for all the influence of WoW, I find Warhammer easier to talk about from my perspective as a person trained in discussing literature because - lucky me! - the game fiction overlaps with other kinds of fiction: tabletop games, comic books, and novels. And not in the "cash in on the phenomenon" kind of way that WoW books and epiphenomena appear. Warhammer had books and such before becoming an online RPG. As such it allows one to discuss intertextuality between the novels and the game fictions, how audiences read and respond to each, and to draw conclusions about the power of games vs. print as cultural productions.

The drawback of discussing an MMO is, however, the incredible timesink that it represents. I haven't joined a raiding guild or anything, but even just splashing around in the virtual world to get my sea legs back I've spent an embarassingly long time this past weekend. It's not as time-devouring as in high school when my little brother and I played EverQuest in shifts so that our necromancer was online for like 56 hours (grinding Sister Island in the Ocean of Tears for experience and money), but I acquired only 2 levels (from 33 to 35) and 5 renown ranks (from 28 to 33) in Warhammer in the last week* and it'll only slow down from here on out because my bonus experience for returning to the game will have run out.

This practicle question of reading MMOs raises a criticism question for me that sort of overlaps an issue I've been discussing with my students who are playing through Diablo II for their papers. How important is it to be good within the game to "read" it? I told my students that I really only valued the plot of Diablo II for their own work and so they could cheat all the way through if they wanted so long as they gossipped with all the characters. The reality though is that a reading for someone who has no gaming skill is going to be very different from that of a power gamer. My reading of Warhammer from the early 30's and goofing off in battlegrounds is going to be very different from the lvl 40/80 guy with full raid gear who dominates the server rankings. The question is somewhat difficult to resolve inasmuch as both readings are legitimate but it's the 40/80 power gamer that guides the metanarrative about the game: that is, the community experience of the game is usually read through the prism of how those at the top are experiencing it.

Of course, perhaps this dynamic in itself is something that's begging for critique. Why does a gaming community see a game through the lense of the most powerful player?

*To put it in perspective, there are 40 possible levels and 80 possible renown ranks

Building A Critical Rationale for Avoiding WoW

I've been struggling recently with the idea that I should be playing an MMO - and I should, if I plan to write about it. Who can write about something they're not reading? (answer: me, but it's sort of dishonest, come to find out)

At the same time, though, I've struggled with the idea that I should not only be playing an MMO, but that it should be World of Warcraft. Millions play it, it's clearly dominating the platform and clearly influential, so it becomes the obvious choice for criticism, right? And yet, I don't really like World of Warcraft. (There; I said it. I know I've blasphemed against gaming culture, but I don't care.) And besides, my internal argument that I ought to be playing WoW because it's so popular rings pretty hollow compared to the pursuits of my academic peers. No one's building a scholarly CV on the writings of Virginia Woolf because Woolf is just so damn unavoidably popular. Quite the contrary; people make a name for themselves these days for reading obscurity more than popularity. There may be problems with that approach when dealing with popular culture - and thus gaming culture - but I can deal with those as they arise.

So if I ought to be playing an MMO to talk about MMOs, but I don't want to play World of Warcraft, it becomes incumbent upon me to generate a rationale for playing something else (and for that something else being contributive to a critical knowledge of the MMO and gaming culture).

* Firstly, WoW is waaaaay overdetermined. The discursive gravity of WoW is so great that any discussion of MMOs in general is drawn towards WoW. Blizzard sucks the oxygen out of the room, leaving everything else at the periphery even though WoW is not the only game in town.
* Secondly, it's difficult to discuss why WoW is successful or popular because Blizzard's hegemony renders those questions invisible. WoW's just popular. A way to find those questions, though, may lie in examining subordinated titles and finding out why they get less market penetration and what kinds of subcultures they are appealing to. Why EverQuest, for example, isn't WoW is probably a more insightful question than why WoW is WoW.
* Thirdly, conspicuously avoiding WoW allows me to indulge in the currently fashionable academic disdain for canonicity. If there is a game canon, Blizzard might as well be William Shakespeare. Apart from engaging in academic tribalism, though, discussing other more obscure titles would build a framework for visualizing games as being more than WoW the way we try to envision books as being more than Dickens and plays being more than Shakespeare.
* Finally, engaging games at the periphery may allow some critical distance to discuss commodification. WoW makes no resistance to commodity, and it might be illuminating to discuss how other games maintain without prostituting themselves to the Blizzard model.

That rationale having been created, I'm right now installing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. At 300,000 subscribers it's somewhere at the periphery definitely, though not as much as EverQuest at 150,000. I think Warhammer is helpful for other intertextual and cross-media reasons as well. The title exists not just as an MMO, but also as an RTS game, a tabletop game, a literary universe, and a range of other contexts. Reading Warhammer across contexts as a popular culture device could be enlightening.

Girlie Vampires Don't Suck - Part 2

If the characterization and popularity of the Stephanie Meyer vampire is to be trusted, then women really, really like the "monster with a heart of gold" as their vampire (and have liked it since the Gothic Romance of the 19th century and before). This vampire is "dangerous" in a few ways - from being a murderous predator, to being physically powerful, to representing the mysterious possibilities of supernatural sexual encounters - and yet is also sensitive and caring and not really "threatening" even though he's "dangerous". The good boy and the bad boy rolled into one, it seems.

(As a side note, I'll say that my inclination is to try to avoid stereotyping and essentializing the tastes of women... though the reason for that inclination is more to do with my education in the liberalized West than with any objective Truth (or lack thereof) about women. We're sort of trained in the Humanities to avoid totalizing the ideas of certain groups to avoid perpetuating stereotypes about them. And yet, would it really be shocking to discover that women - as a class of persons - liked similar things? Especially in representations of men as objects of possible romantic/sexual interest? It's almost as if the entire project of the Humanities and gender scholarship has been to dismantle - or at least deny - what everyone kinda knows as common sense.)

This presentation of the vampire bears striking resemblances to dangerous anti-heroes through the history of the romance genre. The heroine in such romances, particularly Gothic romances, is both attracted and repulsed by a sexy villain whom she has the opportunity to tame with her womanly wiles.

This brings up two important questions, though, about the Stephanie Meyers vampire. 1) Why is the most powerful vampire image a romance instead of a horror? and 2) Is the vampire today really just an incidental palimpsest to the archetypical romance? The answer to number 1 for the paper I'm writing lies in the gendering of audiences that I highlight as the major difference between film/book vampires and game/comic vampires. Women as consumers have more control over film and literature, so those media will tend to cater to the collective (or at least most common) desires of women.

The answer to number 2 could very well be "yes", but I'm going to make an effort to argue otherwise. The vampire is a powerful image at the moment and I'd be disappointed to discover that its just coincidental to renewed Gothic romance fascination (though there is that as well). So since I want to avoid a "yes" here, some questions I'll have to ask myself are:

* How is the vampire materially different from a generic romance anti-hero?
* Could vampirism be extracted from the story without changing it?
* If the vampires were, say, zombies instead, would the story change?
* How is the story about vampires instead of about romance?

If it turns out that vampires are just a convenient kludge for spinning a tame bit of erotica, then I'm going to be pissed off haha.

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Next up: The Video Game Vampire and audience perspective