Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Relevant Retropost: Distracted From Distraction By Distraction

...that's a line from TS Eliot. He was a well-educated creative genius and a grotesque anti-Semite, back in the days when that combination was still possible. It no longer is--so we'll have to listen to someone else if we want any insight into the job creative people have in times like these. Here's Toni Morrison, talking at Portland State University. She has just finished reading off some racist quotes from eminent Americans:
Nobody really thought that Black people were inferior. Not Benjamin Franklin, not Mr. Byrd, and not Theodore Roosevelt. They only hoped that they would behave that way. They only hoped that Black people would hear coon songs, disparaging things, and would weep or kill or resign, or become one. They never thought Black people were lazy—ever. Not only because they did all the work. But they certainly hoped that they would never try to fulfill their ambitions. 
And they never, ever thought we were inhuman. You don’t give your children over to the care of people whom you believe to be inhuman, for your children are all the immortality you can expect. Your children are the reason that you work or plot or steal, and racists were never afraid of sexual power or switchblades. They were only and simply and now interested in acquisition of wealth and the status quo of the poor. Everybody knows that if the price is high enough, the racist will give you anything you want.  
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. 
None of that is necessary. 
There will always be one more thing. The strategy is no different than bombing Cambodia to keep the Northern Vietnamese from making their big push. And since not history, not anthropology, not social sciences seem capable in a strong and consistent way to grapple with that problem, it may very well be left to the artists to do it.
For art focuses on the single grain of rice, the tree-shaped scar, and the names of people, not only the number that arrived. And to the artist one can only say, not to be confused, [sigh] not to be confused. You don’t waste your energy fighting the fever; you must only fight the disease. And the disease is not racism. It is greed and the struggle for power. [Audience member murmurs in agreement]
I think of this a lot: "...the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work." I am going to go ahead and make the leap that this applies to a wide variety of prejudices.



The Braindead Megaphone

Another novelist, George Saunders, describes a similar situation in his essay The Braindead Megaphone:
Imagine a party. The guests, from all walks of life, are not negligible. They’ve been around: they’ve lived, suffered, own businesses, have real areas of expertise. They’re talking about things that interest them, giving and taking subtle correction. Certain submerged concerns are coming to the surface and — surprise, pleasant surprise — being confirmed and seconded and assuaged by other people who’ve been feeling the same way. 
Then a guy walks in with a megaphone. He’s not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. 
But he’s got that megaphone. 
Say he starts talking about how much he loves early mornings in spring. What happens? Well, people turn to listen. It would be hard not to. It’s only polite. And soon, in their small groups, the guests may find themselves talking about early spring mornings. Or, more correctly, about the validity of Megaphone Guy’s ideas about early spring mornings. Some are agreeing with him, some disagreeing — but because he’s so loud, their conversations will begin to react to what he’s saying. As he changes topics, so do they. 
....In time, Megaphone Guy will ruin the party. The guests will stop believing in their value as guests, and come to see their main role as reactors-to-the-Guy. They’ll stop doing what guests are supposed to do: keep the conversation going per their own interests and concerns.
Both the villain and the victims are more broadly defined but again the point of the weapon is the same--distraction: "The guests will stop believing in their value as guests, and come to see their main role as reactors-to-the-Guy." The Megaphone--like Morrison's racist--keeps you responding to the distractor's concerns, rather than building things that respond to your own.

Extremely Important and Massively Uncomplicated

When considering the social issues outside our gameworlds in 2017 we see a series of problems that frustratingly combine the following two qualities: they are extremely important and massively uncomplicated. Should black people be shot by police? No. Should trans people be able to go to the bathroom? Yes. Are illegal immigrants a major threat to our country? No. Should gay people be allowed to marry? Yes.

The only reason the country's discussing these things is the Megaphone. There are adults who think that, like, Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization but they're not intelligent or reachable via games or anything else predictable. These are open-and-shut-cases.

Important but not complicated. Artists and critics--especially in the sphere of games--are not used to thinking with this category. We are used to thinking that the artist who tackles the Real World Issue is doing something deep and difficult. But in reality, the designer or GM who goes "Ok, stop trying to figure out how to beat Tomb of Horrors and consider this: what if orcs are just like you and me and like colonialism is bad?" is lowering the tone of the conversation. They are asking us to stop a complex problem-solving exercise that might actually be helping us sprout neurons we could use later for some practical purpose and instead think about something intelligent people in 2017 cannot possibly disagree on: colonial genocide is bad and orcs are fictional things with no moral reality and if you're a grown ass human who acts racist because they played a game (or drank a beer or lost a bet) the problem isn't games it's you being so impressionable.

What makes social problems thorny for the kind of people that are actually going to read your blog or play your game isn't that they don't know racism or sexism or any other -ism is bad--it's that, as Morrison says above, greed and the struggle for power make people compromise their principles--or refuse to formulate them well enough to know they're violating them. I know several indie gamers who have admitted privately that they are scared to speak out against the abusers in their community for purely financial reasons--or because they know the price of speaking out is the abusers will turn on them. It's the worst version of professionalism.

Saunders continues:
We’ve said Megaphone Guy isn’t the smartest, or most articulate, or most experienced person at the party — but what if the situation is even worse than this? 
Let’s say he hasn’t carefully considered the things he’s saying. He’s basically just blurting things out. And even with the megaphone, he has to shout a little to be heard, which limits the complexity of what he can say. Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic, favoring the conceptual-general (“We’re eating more cheese cubes — and loving it!”), the anxiety-or controversy-provoking (“Wine running out due to shadowy conspiracy?”), the gossipy (“Quickie rumored in south bathroom!”), and the trivial (“Which quadrant of the party room do YOU prefer?”). 
We consider speech to be the result of thought (we have a thought, then select a sentence with which to express it), but thought also results from speech (as we grope, in words, toward meaning, we discover what we think). This yammering guy has, by forcibly putting his restricted language into the heads of the guests, affected the quality and coloration of the thoughts going on in there. 
He has, in effect, put an intelligence-ceiling on the party
We've seen this everyone-must-talk-about-something-stupid dynamic several times coming from inside games: GNS, chainmail bikini prudery, edition-warring, etc. but now there's a new dynamic at work--the mainstream press is noticing D&D.

And--as any freelancer is going to tell you--the articles about RPGs are not going to be well-paid or with long enough deadlines to produce new research. And they are going to be occupied with that thin slice of the Venn diagram where the game-relevant overlaps with general public interest--and the writers will be under tremendous pressure to be...entertaining, conceptual-general, anxiety or controversy-provoking, gossipy, trivial.

Saunders sums up: There is, in other words, a cost to dopey communication, even if that dopey communication is innocently intended.


Educating the Conqueror is Not Our Business

After her speech, Toni Morrison got questions--and they illuminate how having to deal with The Megaphone impacts art and artists:

I love Latin American literature and Russian literature. It never occurred to me that Dostoyevsky was supposed to explain something to me. [Audience chuckles] He’s talking to other Russians about very specific things. But it says something very important to me, and was an enormous education for me. 

When Black writers write, they should write for me. There is very little literature that’s really like that, Black literature. I don’t mean that it wasn’t necessary to have the other kind. Richard Wright is not talking to me. Or even you. He’s talking to some White people. He’s explaining something to them. LeRoy Jones in the Dutchman is not talking to me. He’s talking to some White people. He’s explaining something to them. It may have been very necessary. It certainly was well done. But it wasn’t about me and it wasn’t to me. And I know when they’re talking just past my ear, when they’re explaining something, justifying something, just defining something. [Glass thunks.]

But when that’s no longer necessary, and you write for all those people in the book who don’t even pick up the book—those are the people who make it authentic, those are the people who justify it, those are the people you have to please, all those non-readers, all those people in Sula who (a) don’t exist and (b) if they did wouldn’t buy it anyway. But they are the ones to whom one speaks. Not to the New York Times; not to the editors; not to any distant media; not to anything. It is a very private thing. They are the ones who say “Yeah, uh huh, that’s right.” 

And when that happens, very strangely, or rather, very naturally, what also happens is that you speak to everybody. And even though it begins as inward and private, and gets its own juices from itself, the end result is it’s communication with the world at large....

[Another question]

So the question is “What do you do…?” Well, educating the conqueror is not our business. Really. But if it is, if it were, if it was important to do that, the best thing to do is not to explain anything to him, but to make ourselves strong, to keep ourselves strong.


Sad Unicorns


In times when the worst ideas are popular, when, as Yeats said...The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are full of passionate intensity there is a pressure on creative people to use their platforms to point out the worst-ness of these ideas. To make their art this:
...but what Sad Unicorn games and the sloganeering that they encourage do is simply allow a degraded culture outside the conversation you're trying to have create a degraded culture inside the work.

You can't do that because (among other things) it doesn't work. When the world is dumb, you don't dumb-down, you smarten up.

You do not go "Well we have to put off the nuanced conversation til later". You do not go "Well this may be valuable but this isn't the time or context for that work". You do not surrender to the Megaphone.

You create a more sophisticated thing--you create an internal conversation that is meaningful to you and to good people, and the internal energy of that will pay off when it's needed, "even though it begins as inward and private, and gets its own juices from itself, the end result is it’s communication with the world at large" because you will have made yourselves and your people strong.
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4 comments:

Matrox Lusch said...

Thank you. As to complex problem-solving exercises that might actually be helping us sprout neurons we could use later for some practical purpose and internal conversations that are meaningful, a couple things that happened in my home group's last gaming session.

One, I have run games on grids since 3rd ed. However, I am editing a bunch of gaming video from our early nineties heyday that show we rarely used miniatures at all (maybe marching order). Last game I forgot maps and my monster minis (had the PC minis though) and we ran essentially on top of our books and stuff. Worked perfectly and seemed to be much more evocative. Players were much quicker to explain to other players where everything was and such rather than wait for me to show how things fit spatially on a drawn map.

Two, ha, I once opined that word descriptions were much more evocative than art for gaming purposes. I had players with a variety of sight during twilight: a couple with 320' infravision, one with 90' darkvision, and two halve-elves with 60' colorized darkvision. Result that when the party encountered some Abstructs from “Lusus Naturae” I explained some various features wordily (“Yak-like faces coming toward you,” “Seem to be floating,” etc.), but once I showed a drawing to the two folks who could see most clearly, my friend Jessica was like, “Kill them, shoot, shoot, shoot now!”

The event had all the makings of a bust: spending 3+ hours converting characters to the new edition, not even beginning to game until midnight, PCs levels ranging from 3rd to 14th, and actually only having a single combat encounter. Weirdly that in actuality everyone was invested, the high-level characters even got popped several times, the party worked together as a whole and in discrete sub-unit partners.

In terms of game as conversation: What does playing on a grid speak to, but adherence to rules. And perhaps someone inhibited from “acting” or motion because perhaps misplacing their character's position on a grid would reveal ignorance of “rules” or maybe break the scene.

Playing on an unlined coffee table using books and other accouterments as landmarks freed up players, new & experienced, to explore characters actions creatively rather than in the context of the specific, exact rules (which are essentially arbitrary anyway, like medium humanoids moving exactly 30' walking for 6 seconds).

And also the effect of opportunistic art (see the Abstruct, not the cover bit, the drawing inside the book) to provide a more immediate visceral response that provokes action to an encounter, rather than mere words that can be evaluated as revealed (yak-face/ok not scary, floating/weird, 10 spidery legs growing from the creature's bottom extending upward/maybe time to ready missile weapons vs. appropriately-timed representative art = “Shoot!”)

While I grok from your post relevance beyond the context of an RPG, your post resonated with my recent gaming event, which was very fun, social, interactive, suspenseful, and rewarding (5,000 xp each!). I suppose also there is some difference in an event being “live” as your audience is your audience, I mean everyone's right there – no question. Writing is a more complicated matter. I upped Chandler's stats for Abstructs and the party encountered 7 of them which I don't know Chandler would find appropriate or not. Plus I had the Abstructs make resin-temple parts out of everyone, not just children, because I needed an excuse to make off with the 3rd level druid rather than just waste him with their telekinesis.

RPGs exist at this intersection of writing and performance. A hybrid maybe reflected in Toni Morrison's interactions with her audience, who she told the purpose of writing to power being "to keep ourselves strong." I have always played D&D like it was for college-aged people or older, not a kids game. Har, even when I was 13. Not to demonstrate I was precocious or anything like that. It was so we could have monsters like Blood Sucking Freaks. Hmmm...

Tedankhamen said...

I'm teaching media studies this fall - you've given me lots of material. Thank you.

The funny thing about racist or fascist gamers (disclaimer - I know nothing of the scandal du jour, just Trump riffing) is that they'll play through a storyline about rescuing a princess, but grab the pussy of the gamer girl at the table; they'll move heaven and earth to rescue the stolen children of the elves, but laugh at refugees in cages.

It is funny that you can do an empathic, supposedly cognitive developing exercise and still be a moron.

josh said...

I magine that two cavemen probably created distraction to survive against bigger stronger animals but somewhere beyond language we began tell stories for entertainment (distraction). so there were two forms, the strategic or tactical and the therepeutic or artistic.
The scary thing is that greedy fuckers and guys with megaphones combine the forms and weaponize that.

Golgfag1 said...

Just found you from a friend's blog, and started reading interesting stuff, unfortunately don't have enough time to respond at the moment apart from this brief message.