mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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8-Bit Video Game Background

In the games of my childhood there was a sense of space: the vacuum of blackness behind the last drawn sprite was the end of the world, an abyss beyond the range of your bouncing character. Some squared hills, a pixelated building and what seemed to be clouds: these delimited the universe. Infinity of depth coupled with extreme finitude of motion: the 8-bit game mirrors our terrestrial world.

In all games there was this loneliness: one’s range of motion stops, one ceases advancing the storyline, and one hurls fireballs at walls that don’t destruct, or jumps endlessly for a platform out of reach, or respawns again and again on a multiplayer map without anyone else. Jump off the edge; sink into the lava; drop down when the screen no longer scrolls: after a while, death is all that is left. Simple games leave us with only extreme options.

A story carries us forward and so long as it does, sketched castles suffice as background. But when the narrative momentum is arrested, when we step off course, the flatness of a videographic topography is the saddest, loneliest thing imaginable: a universe of ultimate inflexibility. Scream into it and nothing happens; mash the buttons into paste and nothing happens. Change weapons, jump up and down, crawl on the ground, pause and unpause: nothing happens. The most modern games retain this quality: there is a place you can go that is the edge of the world; nothing can be experienced beyond it. Isn’t it one of the best places to find? Doesn’t the game lose its depth after one runs into it for a few moments?

No matter how engaging a story is, a game’s paucity of meaningful freedom -particularly experiential freedom- means that one will resort to oblivion above boredom. Violence is integral to video games because only acts in extremis can distract us from the finitude of these virtualized worlds; while enabling limits can draw out creativity, they can only be abided for so long before we experience the urge to destroy.

The screen stops scrolling. When you walk through the door you will arrive at the next level, but you’re not ready. Jump in the air, crawl on the ground, shoot, shoot, shoot.

Tags: 8-bit video game freedom writing
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

J.K. Galbraith, quoted by the excellent Chad and reblogged by many of my absolute favorites, towards whom I mean no disrespect by the following:

I like Galbraith, but this is patently untrue; even if it were the functional outcome of conservative policy, it is no more accurate than saying that “Communists were engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for killing everyone who doesn’t submit to your rule and many more besides.”

That’s what they wrought, but it’s not what they searched for. The transformation of what we all seek -a better world for ourselves and those we care for- into what we create -a world of faction, discord, exploitation, and needless suffering- is the crucial mystery of human life. Why does all we touch turn to dust?

If one does not understand that those whose beliefs one despises believe them just as one believe one’s own, with the same sense of logical clarity, moral decency, and threatened sensitivity, one does not understand humanity, history, conflict, or even, perhaps, the nature of reason.

For Galbraith to perpetuate the idea that whomever we disagree with we ought to fault for evil intentions or selfishness is odd; I am astonished at the statistically-indefensible reductionism of it. Tens of millions of individuals aggregated into a mass and crushed beneath a patronizing quip, the thrust of which is simple: if you don’t agree with me, it’s because you’re a bad person and your arguments are just pretexts.

I remember when conservatives described anti-war protesters as “America-hating radicals in peace-protester disguise; they want us to lose!” And I recall when any activity against their interests was ascribed by Soviet or American cold warriors to “the subterfuge of the enemy.” It is common enough to deny the agency of disagreeable individual actors and suggest that only the gnosis of the party elite can detect the true (devious and dim) motivations of the automata across the ideological divide. It is common and it is wrong, logically and ethically.

Here is the question one must ask: is it possible to imagine someone with a good heart and a sound or even brilliant mind who disagrees with our political beliefs? If no one with a good heart or mind can disagree with us, why should we permit the enfranchisement of those who disagree? If we know what is right, what principle of pluralism could possibly obstruct our implementation of what is right? This is the justification, of course, which all totalitarians use: why let evil or stupid inferior-types restrain our progress?

If we say that we can imagine such a person -or better, that we know such people, as I do-, we’ll see at once how silly Galbraith is here. (I might add that Galbraith is engaged in an old sort of moral philosophy, too: the ad hominem insulting of opponents to avoid the difficulty of empathy, engagement, and persuasion).

I have known both liberals and conservatives vastly smarter and of better character than I am; I suppose I am lucky for that, or I might be inclined to believe that anyone who doesn’t accept my reasoning is just looking for a fancy disguise for their low immorality. As it is, I must accept the basic proposition of democracy: no man can be said with finality to know what is best, or what is in his peers’ hearts.

(Note: My hero Langer has already responded).

Tags: writing politics philosophy history galbraith

Dust

“…it is estimated that the entire outer layer of skin is shed every day or two at a rate of 7 million skin flakes per minute, which corresponds to a mass emission rate of about 20 mg/minute.”

The rain of dust which falls like light snow: so much of it is the skin of you and your loved ones. You breathe this in and out, day after day: in your lifetime pounds of those you care about (and complete strangers and mortal enemies and repairmen and shopwomen) will pass cloud-like into your lungs. We are not substantial enough to cause one another more than a sneeze. We slough off into dust as we live and decompose into dust when we die; but the dust in our house, on our books and our shelves, tells us that we’re dying already, forming a thin layer over everything we own.

When that dust accumulates on the television screen and our family is watching their show, they are watching it through us, through the detritus of our expiring skin. Our children will see everything through us, even after we are gone. But so will many: we will then be the dust in the air and the dirt in the ground, the carbon in the grass and the nitrogen in the sky. It is in dust that you can see where you’ll be, and what it means to precede others through life: it means to fall like ash over the shapes they’ll recognize, the thin, soft layer over the hard contours of their experiences: a sheet over a sleeping body, a fog over a slumbering city.

Tags: dust writing