Jason Rohrer’s New Gamist Manifesto

Published February 8, 2010 Uncategorized 6 Comments
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At the just-concluded Art History of Games symposium in Atlanta, Jason Rohrer presented a new game “Sleep is Death” as a response to the deluded quest for AI-based storytelling in games. As part of his presentation of the game, he distributed a manifesto of game design principles to symposium attendees. This is the manifesto:

“New Gamist Manifesto

February 3, 2010

1. Games do not have spoilers.

2. Games cannot be finished.

3. Games do not have characters, except for the characters who play them.

4. Games do not have stories except for the stories that players tell through them.

5. Playing a new game is less like reading a new story, hearing a new song, or seeing a new film.

6. Playing a game is more like learning a new language.

7. Games are interfaces, not between minds and content, but between minds.”

The Indigestible Truth: Of Love, Airline Security, and Cows

Published January 17, 2010 Uncategorized 5 Comments
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“Shut your talking hole,” she told me. We were sitting in Tompkins Square Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon and I was knee deep in trying to explain how humans can’t absorb nutrients from cow’s milk because the molecular bonds aren’t made to be broken down by our digestive enzymes. I’ve had this thought for years; it’s absurd to drink the milk of another species. It’s not made for us.

I had just moved across the country for her and used a big chunk of luggage space to bring her a couple of pints of ice cream from Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco. A few weeks before I moved she had wondered aloud in a Gchat about the things I might bring for her from San Francisco. She mentioned a burrito first, but the thought of refried beans and sour cream packed next to my underpants didn’t seem realistic.

Ice cream came up next, and my brain closed around the idea like a bear trap. Ice cream was innocent and sweet; a luxury from the optimistic summertime. I saw an image of two teenagers sharing an ice cream cone walking through the urinal sidewalks of the Mission District wholly content to be in one another’s company. I immediately decided that I would bend physics and ram my head through any bureaucratic wall to bring her as much ice cream as I could fit in my bags.

I would need dry ice, a cooler, and it would probably be wise to make sure the airline would let me board the plane with a controlled substance.

I quickly learned that most airlines don’t like to advertise their stance on dry ice as luggage. Every search I did returned a jigsaw of dubious forum postings and a FAQ from a Mexican airline of which I had never before heard. Instead I crossed my fingers and dialed the 800 number at the bottom of my itinerary. I learned I could bring 2 pounds of dry ice in a carry-on and 3 pounds in a checked piece of luggage.

Now all I needed was a cooler. I didn’t work hours that made it easy to shop at the kinds of establishments that might keep coolers in stock. I scoured the Walgreens and all the late night liquor stores in my neighborhood, but the only thing I could find was a floppy insulated lunch sack. I spent an entire Saturday wandering around the suburban hinterlands at the end of a BART line looking for a Target that never appeared.

And so I decided to just order a cooler on Amazon. It arrived a week later and was disappointingly small. 18 inches seemed so much bigger in writing than it did in mottled blue plastic. It would have to do. I only had a week left.

I realized I had no idea what flavor of ice cream to get. The idea that I would really bring something with me from San Francisco had been an idle joke as much as a serious request. But I didn’t want to make it happen with the wrong flavors. So I sent a circuitous email, asking about what flavors of local grown exotica she would be most interested. Silence.

The last weekend before I left my Dad came down in the maroon mini-van he had bought to move my wheelchair-bound grandmother around in the months before she died. I mailed thirteen bankers boxes to my friend’s address in New York for $270. Everything else would either fit into my checked luggage or left behind.

We went from the post office to an old industrial nook in Hunter’s Point and picked up the dry ice. I got ten pounds for $10, the minimum they would sell. I asked the nice ice man to cut the rectangular block in half so it would fit in the cooler.

The last stop was Bi-Rite. The sun was setting and I had been running on adrenaline and black coffee all day. I would have to wake up at four the next morning to make my flight. I was getting scared and numb at the same time. I had used up all the go-chemicals in my brain moving boxes and worrying about weight-limits for checked luggage.

I bought a quart and two pints of ice cream. This cost $37 dollars; honey lavender, brown sugar with ginger caramel swirl, and orange cardamom. I tried to fit all three containers into the cooler with the dry ice. It was an inch too tall, the lid wouldn’t close.

A kindly stranger saw me wrestling with the geometry of it all and offered to help. “I’m great at stuff like this,” he said. I stood back and let him have a look. He turned all the containers upside down and tried to close the lid. He got the same result except he also managed to put a big divet in the side of the softening containers, causing some brownish goo to squeeze out from under the lid of the honey lavender.

I wanted to punch him in the face. I had expected some professorial application of higher logic, but he had only succeeded in butting into my mess to make things worse. And now the frozen love offering to a woman for whom I was moving across the country had a giant dent and some sticky brown stains running down the once pristine containers. Only in San Francisco could such well-meaning charity come hand-in-hand with total incompetence.

I covered the lid as much as I could, still leaving the vexing inch open to the air and drove back with my dad. There wouldn’t be enough space for all three containers of ice cream. I’d have to cut it down to two, but which two? I spent the rest of the night packing and repacking my bags, cutting everything down to a bare minimum and throwing out everything else.

I squeezed the cooler into my heavy black duffel bag and to lean with all my weight to close the zipper. I took one last look at the pint of ice cream that wouldn’t make the trip. Orange cardamom, you didn’t make the cut. She told me she hated artificial citrus flavor once, buying Vitamin Water after a night of drinking. That decided it. Better to be boring than wrong.

The next day I hauled my four bags onto BART at five in the morning. Everything together weighed 180 pounds; a backpack, two big duffel bags on either shoulder, and a giant Chinatown roller bag dragging on broken wheels behind me. It was like carrying another person. I could feel the cold of the dry ice radiating out from the cooler as it rubbed against my ribs.

Eight hours and lots of introspective airplane time later I was in a Super Shuttle heading into Manhattan. The orange sky disappeared behind the gray skyline of the city. I kept imagining the cooler in my bag like a ticking bomb in a Hitchcock movie. Had it melted on the flight? Did some feckless baggage handler steal it? I wanted to check, but I was afraid of letting any of the cold air out before I could transplant it into a freezer.

When we saw each other the next night, I told her I had brought her a present. “What did you bring me?” she asked.

“You know,” I told her. Silence. A month later, in Tompkins Square Park the ice cream was still sitting in my friend’s freezer, growing a frosty little beard. Then one day, I ate both containers of ice cream for lunch and dinner, respectively.

There’s a doctor at UC San Francisco whose research shows that animal proteins, like those found in milk, metabolize into sulfuric acid in humans and leads to bone loss. Other studies have suggested that humans can’t actually absorb much of the calcium in dairy without a magnesium supplement to help break down the bovine bonds.

Halfway through the first pint I started to feel a twinge of nausea. I didn’t stop to think about it. You can’t think about a feeling. The salt lingered on my tongue after the sugar and creaminess melted away. I kept pushing spoonfuls into my mouth to quell the cold flush it left on my tongue.

I’ve never met anyone who moved for someone else and made it work. It’s a Chinese finger trap. The closer you get the more you want to pull away, touching suddenly becomes claustrophobic. Idle talk is mistaken for fact that builds into something absurd when taken literally, like milk causing bone disease, or traveling 3000 miles with a couple containers of ice cream for somebody who didn’t want to take them in the end.

So I ate it all by myself. I don’t even like ice cream, but I ate it all and I couldn’t stop myself. All it did was make me think of her.

And I never saw her again.

Avatar and Evolution, or Isn’t It Ugly to Think So?

Published January 16, 2010 Uncategorized 13 Comments
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I was four the first time I saw a movie. My dad had a job teaching a summer session at UT Austin and in the evenings there was a program showing movies on the side of a building on campus. We sat in folding chairs on a lawn between two rows of manicured trees and watched the movies on a screen of mottled cement. We saw Fiddler on the Roof, Superman 2, and Star Wars. I have a few scattered memories of my early childhood, but that summer is, for me, the starting point from which I can draw a continuous line of memory to where I am today, writing this.

I fell asleep during Fiddler on the Roof, but I remember still the last wintry image of the man pulling his cart while the fiddler follows behind him. I could barely put together sentences and had no way to relate to the stories or places in the movie, but the starkness of the ending was like an immediate and sharp waking, and I can still remember it today. It’s a kind of sport to tell children lies: Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, religious fables, super hero stories, euphemisms about a stork to ameliorate the horror of describing the inner animal hibernating inside our loins.

Seeing that terrible and lonely march through an unforgiving part of the world during the cruelest season was a shock. It was like waking suddenly and finding myself underwater. There was an irreconcilable conflict between that image and the self-centered whimsy that had defined most of my young life. It was sobering, all of the idle daydreaming about playtime and candy had to immediately be put aside to reckon with something urgent and all encompassing.

James Cameron’s Avatar is about consciousness. It begins with medically administered waking from a six-year sleep, and ends with a metaphysical eye opening onto a purer kind of life among blue humanoids. From the outset, humans are shaded with moral compromises. Jake Sully is a paraplegic because military insurance coverage in the future refuses to treat those conditions even though the technology exists. Jake’s selection to replace his dead brother is, likewise, ruthlessly utilitarian.

He doesn’t have any social, linguistic, or cultural understanding of the species he is about to merge with, only his genes make him an ideal candidate. The human home world is described as dead. Humans now have to rummage through the galaxy in search of raw materials to keep their civilization on life support. The miners and mercenaries that protect them speak of the Na’vi in derogatory lingo, savages that can be moved from one tree to the other or else bulldozed. Which is to say there’s not much of a case being made for humankind.

The Na’vi are treated with reverence. Cameron hits all the nativist tropes that have been marveled over for centuries. They are naturally more athletic than the bumbling humans. They can link consciousness with any other living creature in their world through a dangling dreadlock cum sex toy. The can tame wild animals by virtue of this glowing French tickler. They sleep in hammocks, wear loin cloths, have shaved Mohawk hair, and live in one big tribal commune in the roots of a giant tree that sheds midichlorians.

It doesn’t come as a surprise when Jake eventually becomes alienated from the heartless greed of his own species and instigates a terrible battle to save the cherished locals. After vanquishing the guilty humans, he wins the great prize of being able to transform completely into a Na’vi. As the end credits scroll, the last image of Pandora is Jake riding on the back of a space pterodactyl heading directly into the glowing red sun, which I assume is setting because all of the imagery that preceded it was set in the daytime.

There’s something terrible in that image. A human who renounces his species and all of the achievements that have brought him to where he is in favor of the primal thrill of native life; the palpitating exhilarations of riding on the back of a big lizard bird, living naked, and eating in a squat. It claims as a spiritual victory what seems to me a tragic dismissal of all the advancements of a civilization that can travel through space, heal dead limbs, survive in alien atmospheres, make use of natural resources for the collective good, bond DNA, and create empathetic links between two creatures through computer code and electric pulses (presumably).

Avatar is a movie in opposition to evolution, which is simply stupid given how entirely reliant on technology is the entire experience. This is the inner heart of the most deluded bullshit, a romantic infatuation with the eradication of human growth, evolution, and achievement.

The humans greatest sin is greed and corrupt exploitation of nature for their own purposes. When the Na’vi kill a space panther for dinner, it’s necessity. When humans marshal vast amounts of technology to find materials to sustain themselves, it’s corruption. When humans enter the environment of other creatures they become amoral militants. When the Na’vi break into the habitat of those space pterodactyls, wrestle one to the ground, force it into submission, then mind rape it so that it will always identify with its master, Cameron finds some kind of rugged natural poetry.

Avatar is a parable about how to slough off consciousness. It’s an apologetic for all of the awful and unanswerable moral dilemmas that conscious beings face in the world. It’s a romantic leap backwards into a time of unknowing with only amusement park athletics to compensate.

The great leap backwards is inevitable, the foreknowledge of that looming precipice of our own dissolution is what defines us. The struggle to justify one’s life in the face of that unavoidable reunion with the lower molecules of the galaxy is the edge beyond which we might discover who, and why, we are. I’d rather have that struggle than the animal existence Cameron’s imagined for us in the future. Avatar’s idea of waking is to turn away from those defining struggles with loneliness and purpose for the sake of an orientalist dream. In other words, to go back to sleep. Would that Cameron thought more of what it is he’ll have to leave behind once he goes.

Confessional Journalism, Mammals Speaking, and Piss on the Bed

Published January 6, 2010 Uncategorized 5 Comments
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I remember being terrified the first time a reader said I should be fired in the comments of an article I’d written for IGN. I was still the new hire in an office of internet quasi-celebrities and everything struck me as overwhelming. I used to feel a nauseous vertigo when I guided my mouse cursor over the publish button in the backend tool. I was worried that my clattering thoughts were going to send advertisers out the door and destroy the ten years of branding that everyone in the company had built up before I got there. When an angry reader gave voice to those worst fears I remember looking over my shoulder at my boss, secretly hoping that he didn’t read article comments.

I also remember having been a reader looking in through the window at IGN. So much of what appeared was a blank and impersonal wall. But there were small windows through which could be seen the artifacts of human activity. There were signs of life, though it was hard to reconcile with the monolithic frame through which all of those little scraps of personal creation were sent. And through that window, the most urgent impulse was always to throw a rock and shatter it.

When I started writing for Nerve I found myself indulging my narcissistic imagination a few hours of whimsical backward looking every night. Feedback was often similarly aggressive.

I prefer disagreement to agreement. I don’t expect a chorus of approval from the crowd when I share a thought or an experience. As I wrote last month in Gamasutra, I don’t think of what I do as a didactic espousal of objective truth. When I write I think of it as a framework for interaction. In the same way that a game designer chooses the inputs and actions to allow in their world, my personal filter chooses ideas, experiences, and feelings to send out into the world to see what weight they might have there.

I don’t approach anything I’ve ever written as a document of truth. I write confessional journalism. Everything I put forward is impeachable. I’m less interested in consensus than I am discovering the reasons someone has for disagreeing with me. In that exchange, that confrontation of ideas I learn something. I become better. I gain something I didn’t have before, in the same way I hope that someone reading something I’ve written can walk away with some new thought or momentum that wasn’t there before.

Christopher Hitchens once implored his readers to think of all experts as if they are mammals. It seems, on first glance, to suggest a kind of Glenn Beck-ish derision for the “idiots” that surround us on all sides. But it’s more a reminder that we are all idiots. There is nothing that cannot be legitimately argued against. Our truths are not objective, nor are they final. They’re the resting place of the last best effort of someone wrestling at the edges of their own ignorance.

I recently helped Clive Thompson research an article about Duke Nukem Forever for Wired. The day the article was published he posited an idea, borrowed from a friend, that the great problem with journalism was the posture of “knowing.” We have all become experts, impossible to educate and unwilling to allow for hypocrisy or legitimate contradiction.

What this says about the audience alarms me the most. Grappling with my limits, articulating my own shortcomings, is one of the true joys I’ve found in life. Feeling the weight of my own existence, flung over my shoulder, packed in a duffel bag, flown around the globe, collected into a few indemnable paragraphs and sent out before the anonymous audience with its teeth permanently gnashed in a sneer. Expecting incompetence at every turn, while yearning for absolute truth in every word.

Being called names blows, as does having one’s livelihood publically urinated on. But it’s not intolerable. A lot of things blow, and I’ve publically urinated on lots of things, both literally and metaphorically. Like for instance one night in Bangkok when I pissed on my friend P’s bed while he was out shopping because I was spectacularly drunk and thought it would be hilarious.

In the old days confessions were anonymous, and they were guaranteed to lead to absolution. Now confessions can be broadcast for a massive audience and prostration is inevitable. Not even the New York Times can escape the sneering derision, the knowing cluck of the tongue that suggests we know so much better. All the sins of our fellow humans we have surpassed, and we look down on them when they make their best guesses and begrudging their attempt at moving forward the boundaries of their own ignorance.

If our writers are mammals, can anything different be said of their audience? Let it stand, then, that in the now mature medium of interaction we must both push forward their limits of our mutual ignorance and hypocrisy. And the first step must necessarily be a confession. Not to declare victory or trumpet some great discovery, but to share in a common experience and follow the particular affects of its branching path back down the vine to the irretrievable seed from which it sprang.

Operating in Darkness: The Struggle to Document Political Violence in Zimbabwe

Published December 23, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments
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This is an article I wrote a year and a half ago about the election fallout in Zimbabwe. It was originally written for the the Financial Times Magazine in the late summer of 2008. They never ran the piece and I lost of track of it in the preceding months. I recently had a hard drive crash and rediscovered it in some old doc’s beavered away in a dusty folder. I first met Ambassador McGee in Madagascar when I was in Peace Corps there. I spoke to him via email for the article, which follows:

——-

“I knew I was moving to a country in a political crisis, but had no idea exactly how bad things were,” said James McGee, the current United States Ambassador to Zimbabwe. In March, Robert Mugabe, the country’s president and one-time liberator, was upset in the first round election by Morgan Tsvangirai, a candidate from the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change. It initially appeared that Tsvangirai had won a majority of the vote, negating a need for a second round of elections.

Official results from the election were not released until a month later when, following a secretive recount overseen by Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. The final tally gave Tsvangirai 47.8% of the vote while Mugabe took 43.2%. In the follow-up election in June, Tsvangirai dropped out of the race after months of violence, assassination attempts, and a scourge of voter intimidation. Mugabe collected 85.5% percent of the vote to Tsvangirai’s 9.3%.

To orchestrate this unbelievable electoral turnaround, Mugabe and the ZANU-PF arranged a far-reaching campaign of violence and intimidation meant to break the spirit of Tsvangirai and his MDC supporters. According to McGee, more than two hundred people were killed and somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand Zimbabweans were displaced. After the first round of elections the ZANU-PF instituted a new program, internally referred to as Operation Vhoterapapi (“Whom Did You Vote For”), in which armed ZANU-PF supporters corralled MDC members for re-education. Support for Tsvangirai in the second round elections would be punishable by death.

Stories of rape, beatings, murder, and destruction of property appeared at regular intervals in the Western press. The day before the June 29 elections The New York Times ran a picture of a Zimbabwean baby with two broken arms on its front page, a casualty of the ZANU-PF-sanctioned violence. After several assassination attempts and failing to convince mediators that he had won the first round elections by an outright majority, something that would have eliminated the need for a run-off election, Tsvangirai officially withdrew himself from the race less than a week before the vote.

“More than 20,000 homes have been destroyed and over 10,000 people have been injured and maimed in this orgy of violence,” said Tsvangirai. “We believe an election that reflects the will of the people is impossible.”

With most Western journalists expelled from the country, getting accurate reports from the ongoing crisis was difficult. Many who tried to remain faced official detention, intimidation, or worse. Freelance cameraman Edward Chikomba was abducted and killed after allegedly supplying Western media outlets with footage of head injuries given to Tsvangirai during police detention just prior to the first round of elections.

In this time of uncertainty, filled with anecdotal reporting and few hard facts, McGee sensed an opportunity. A former pilot who earned the Distinguished Flying Cross three times during a six years of service in Vietnam, McGee became a career foreign service officer with tenures as Ambassador in Swaziland (2002-2004) and Madagascar (2004-2007).

McGee’s initial objectives when he arrived in Zimbabwe in October of 2007 were to help involve more citizens in the electoral process and to open a line of communication with opposition parties. “This worked well and we were able to surprise the ruling party with the turnout and level of personal commitment displayed in the March 29 elections,” said McGee.

Two weeks after the first round of elections the US Embassy began receiving reports of people being “brutalized by the government” for their support of the MDC. McGee arranged a visit to Avenues Clinic in Harare, a hospital being overrun with victims of beatings and torture. “We still have firm reports of people being hospitalized with broken limbs, people hospitalized with burns, and these are all people who have been abducted or forced to go to torture camps,” said McGee in a radio interview with SW Radio Africa.

Under McGee’s guidance, the US Embassy began assembling packets of information to document the systematic violence and the extent to which ZANU-PF was involved with it. “We have literally hundreds of reports, affidavits, pictures, people coming in and telling us their stories, us going to hospitals where victims are literally 99.9% MDC,” McGee told SW Radio Africa. Information was sent to the United Nations and the Southern African Development Community countries in an effort to raise international awareness and supplement that scattered media reports.

McGee arranged another trip to a reported torture site in the small town of Mvurwi, bringing along several staff members and fellow diplomats from Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, and Tanzania. They discovered a cache of torture journals, describing the names of detainees and torturers, the reasons for detention, and the methods of abuse. While attempting to leave, McGee and his entourage were surrounded by ZANU-PF soldiers who locked the gates of the compound and surrounded their vehicles to prevent them from moving. After a tense standoff McGee opened the gates himself while the ZANU-PF soldiers kept their guns trained on him. He waved his group through, daring the soldiers to shoot him.

The UN has been a vocal critic of Mugabe and the ZANU-PF. “The campaign of threat and intimidation we have seen in Zimbabwe goes against the very spirit of democracy,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. “Instead of openness, free competition and transparency, we have witnessed fear, hostility, and blatant attacks against Zimbabwean citizens.” The UN Security Council proposed additional sanctions be applied to Zimbabwe (the US has an on-going embargo dating back to 2001 intended as punishment for Zimbabwe’s involvement in the Second Congo War), but these were vetoed by China and Russia.

While the West has been vociferous in its criticism other African leaders have been have been reluctant to speak out against the ZANU-PF. “With a couple of notable exceptions, the African diplomatic corps has been missing in action in trying to do anything to assist the people of Zimbabwe,” said McGee. “In some cases, African diplomats have actively aided – mainly through manipulation of the media –- the efforts of the government of Zimbabwe to oppress their people.”

Chief among these figures is Thabo Mbeki, former President of South Africa who led the SADC envoy to advocate for peace. Mbeki initially played an important role in securing several key rights for opposition parties in the run-up to the March 29 elections, including the public posting of votes at polling places to help ensure fairness and transparency. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga has been outspoken, calling for Mugabe to be suspended from the African Union until he allows a free and fair election.

Most other members of the AU have been unwilling to take critical positions against Mugabe. Zambia’s president, Omar Bongo said the Mugabe should be recognized as Zimbabwe’s new president after the second-round elections. Mbeki’s approach of “quiet” diplomacy urged for a power-sharing plan between the ZANU-PF and MDC, which would allow Mugabe to retain his position as president while Tsvangirai would become Prime Minister. Cabinet positions would be split between the two parties.

Talks of forming a coalition government have been continually stymied. The MDC proposed a split of authority, giving ZANU-PF control of the Defense Ministry while putting an MDC official in charge of the Home Affairs Ministry, which is responsible for the country’s police force. A deal appeared to have been completed in September, but the ZANU-PF has been unwilling to enact to any significant changes allowing the MDC into positions of authority.

They have instead tried to give the MDC charge of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the handling of waste disposal, while retaining control of the Finance Ministry, the army, and the police. An SADC summit was called in Swaziland in late October in part to help mediate the seeming impasse, but Tsvangirai was unable to attend because to the ZANU-PF refused to renew his passport making it impossible for him to leave the country. “If Mugabe wants an agreement he must do everything to respect the MDC,” Tsvangirai told the Zimbabwe Independent, a local newspaper. “If you cannot give me a passport, how will you entrust me with the keys of the government?”

As the impasse over a power-sharing deal continues, divisions in the MDC have surfaced. Some members are willing to compromise on the larger political stakes in order to begin addressing the urgent health woes and economic crises that have ravaged the country over the last several years. In a country once considered the “breadbasket” or Southern Africa, Zimbabwe has been ravaged over the last two decades.

Life expectancy in Zimbabwe has plummeted. In 1990 the average male lived until 60, today it is 36 for men and 34 for women. According to a 2008 survey by the US State Department, HIV/AIDS prevalence among Zimbabweans age 15-49 is over 15%. After a program to reoccupy huge swatches of farmland previously owned by whites, much of Zimbabwe’s economy has collapsed. Foreign investment in Zimbabwean industry and agriculture has dried up, ownership of farmland has been determined by party loyalty, and jobs have evaporated under the comparative inexperience of the new owners. A recent study by the Cato institute pegged inflation at an incomprehensible 516 quintillion percent. More than 80% of the country is unemployed. After a crippling drought, 2.5 million Zimbabweans rely on the World Food Program’s aid programs to survive.

The result has been a steady exodus of Zimbabweans fleeing into neighboring countries to seek political and economic refuge. “Four million Zimbabweans reportedly live in South Africa,” noted McGee. “Another 500,000 in Botswana, that’s twenty-five percent of the total population of that country.”

The arrival of Zimbabwean immigrants has provoked resentment in many neighboring countries. “We have already seen outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa and the economic drag these refugees are causing in Botswana,” said McGee. “Direct foreign investment is nonexistent in Zimbabwe and investors are reluctant to look at surrounding countries with the problems Zimbabwe cause on their doorsteps.” Recently the German company that supplied the ZANU-PF with the paper to continue printing new money revoked their account due to a combination of political pressure and outstanding debt. No longer able to print new money, the government has resorted to repurposing old bills instead.

While resentment remains dangerously high between the ZANU-PF and MDC, some locals have risked their lives to cross political boundaries to help out their countrymen. “A major figure in the ZANU-PF has been, and continues to, work with the International humanitarian community to provide assistance for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPS),” said McGee. “During the violence and government intimidation between the two elections, he provided housing and food for over 200 people who had been displaced from their homes by government operatives. If his actions had been discovered by the ZANU-PF he would have been expelled from the party and his life could have been at risk.”

Reporting from Zimbabwe continues to be difficult and dangerous. The few remaining foreign reporters must travel in disguise and put their guides and translators at risk. The local press is largely beholden to the ZANU-PF. It is illegal to practice as a journalist without annual accreditation from Media and Information Commission. Practicing as a journalist without this accreditation is punishable by up to two years imprisonment. The country’s largest newspaper, The Herald, is largely sympathetic to the ZANU-PF and has called McGee an “Uncle Tom” and “a house negro.”

With so many difficulties surrounding the efforts to report on events continuing to unfold in Zimbabwe, McGee remains committed to using his position to document the country’s struggles.  “I will personally maintain a high profile, where necessary, to keep the international light on events in Zimbabwe,” said McGee.

“The world needs to express its outrage and not allow this regime to operate in darkness. Nothing would make it happier than to be ignored by the world.”

——

A year and a half later, the government is still haggling over a power sharing deal, but some foreign add has been allowed back into the country and the government has opened media channels with CNN and the BBC. Meanwhile unheard-of inflation, poverty, HIV infection, and starvation persist.

Here’s a Flickr stream with periodically updated images from the country, including documentation of the continuing violence, against dissidents and government workers alike.

Instant Coffee, Prague, and Strippers Who Kill

Published December 4, 2009 Uncategorized 4 Comments
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I knew at a young age that I wanted to drink coffee. I remember watching cartoons and feeling dazzled by the perpetually full coffee cup and the turkey leg that stayed the same size bite after bite. It was a wonderful way to look at the world, a satisfying beverage, more exotic than water, consumed in perpetuity by a smiling oaf. Growing up my family drank coffee on ceremonious occasions, during the presentation of a birthday cake or to welcome the arrival of an unexpected guest. But it was almost never around in the mornings. It was a social ritual to be shared.

I started drinking coffee in high school. My senior year I took a couple music classes at City College so I got to leave campus for three hours every day. My city college classes were only twice a week so on the other days I’d go to the newly erected Barnes and Noble. I’d read and drink refillable black coffee back in the naïve days before Starbucks realized they could charge people for a second cup. I never noticed any of the effects of the caffeine. I didn’t get the wave of mania nor the acid-stomach crash. I drank it like a cartoon character, expecting the cup would always be two-thirds full and do no more than a cup of water, albeit exotic, black, and oily.

When I was twenty-three I moved to Prague for a couple of months and had to give up drip-brewed American coffee for the bitter Nescafe equivalent. I remember arriving that first night at one in the morning, all the buses from the airport had stopped running. I was traveling with a twenty-five pound typewriter in my bag and was secretly terrified.

I had no reason to be in Prague. I didn’t know anyone there and had never thought about it until my friend P sent me an email mentioning that it was cheap and pretty. And so I moved (a pattern, perhaps, a willingness to jump). I booked a monthly rental in a hostel in Holsevice, a grumpy suburb north of the Vltava. It was the end of October and the night was cold and black. I stood in the taxi line, staring at the dingy old Skoda sedans, expecting to be mugged or kidnapped.

The cabbie was pale and hairy, dark stubble stood out against his oily jawline in the shadows. I felt ashamed when I had to speak to him in English. He nodded and pulled off without saying anything. We drove through the shadowy suburbs. The windows were dark and the sidewalks were empty. It didn’t look anything like the Gothic postcard I had imagined in my head. It was a musty European suburb.

When we pulled up in front of the hostel my heart sank a little. Holsevice is a good distance from Prague center. I felt like I’d arrived in the Toledo of Central Europe. I handed the cabbie a few carefully separated bills whose weight I still didn’t understand.

The building was a four-story cement chunk with dirty linoleum floors. My room was on the top floor. There were three twin beds with heavy comforters, a metal radiator, a sink with a mirror, and a small table with a plastic chair. There was a slanted window over the middle bed that looked out onto the neighboring building, a real estate office with the company name spelled out in big red letters.

I put my typewriter on the table and took the bed closest to the radiator. The first two weeks were horrible. It was cold and grey and the Czechs I encountered were brusque. I thought I saw a slight sneer beginning whenever I caught someone’s gaze. I was also far away from the city proper. I lived around families and tottering old people making daily pilgrimages to the park or grocery store. The trees had lost their leaves already and the buildings were drab rectangles with yellowing curtains in the windows.

After two weeks of wandering, hiding in internet cafes, drinking in local bars with throaty construction workers in blue coveralls half-undone and tied around their wastes, I decided I needed a better regimen. I had read a story about a stripper in Las Vegas who murdered Ted Binion with a secret dose of heroin so she and her truck driver boyfriend could make away with his millions. I thought this should be a movie, a glitterball of self-delusion. I decided that I wouldn’t leave my room every day until I had written 5 pages.

There was no television or radio, and I hadn’t brought anything that could play music. I would sit there with a ream of paper I had stolen from my last job, my dad’s old typewriter from his college years, and a ripped out scrap of newspaper with the yellowing picture of a stripper on it.

I struggle and suffer when I write. A friend once said my Nerve posts read like a breezy conversation. I found this wonderfully flattering because the process of creating them feels something like being transformed into a paraplegic mule and being asked to assemble an Ikea dresser with only a Korean set of instructions to go by. Which is to say, it’s ugly when I write.

One of the first things I had to acknowledge as a writer was shame. It felt like an act of great arrogance to record my own mealy thoughts and hold them out as if they might have value for anyone other than my doting grandparents. This feeling was amplified in screenwriting, where ideas had to come indirectly, in ornamented plotlines and symbology. In doing it, I was asking for two hours of someone’s time and money, and expecting a lot of money to be spent on a physical production, employing dozens if not hundreds of talented people in the erection of my little play-mobile drama. I felt like I would have been a fraud to take up a lane on that track without having something real and serious to say.

I’d reread every line, almost immediately, to test its mettle. Is this really worth saying? I squirmed and paced, getting up from the table as if I had been holding my breath under water. There was a big Nescafe machine in the lobby and every morning before I started I’d walk down the four flights of heavy cement stairs, slide a thick 10 Koruna into the machine. It would start to whir and a small plastic cup would drop down onto the metal platform and after a few seconds a glurp of pre-fabricated espresso would fall into the cup.

I’d walk back up the stairs again, the burning sensation of the coffee in my hand distracting from the empty white room at the top of the stairs and what I would have to do with it.

Heresy: The Beatles, Milli Vanilli, and the Smell of Bullshit

Published November 25, 2009 Uncategorized 4 Comments
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I’ve never liked The Beatles. Even as a kid there was something condescending in their melodies and lyrics. I felt like a dog watching a ball bounce, my head forcibly nodding against the staccato handclapping and harmonized shouts of cheer. I didn’t have a fully formed world view, but I knew by instinct it was piffle to say “Nothing you can know that isn’t known/ Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.” There’s a folksy egotism in their cheerfulness; as if the universe exists simply because we’re here to witness it, and that fact should be sung out loud.

When I heard “Nobody Told Me” for the first time I started to get an inclination of what I felt was missing. I really like John Lennon’s solo records, but The Beatles make my teeth clinch. You’ve heard before about all the attendant dishonesty and hucksterism that built up The Beatles, in every bit the same way as have been New Kids on the Block, The Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, and the Jonas Brothers.

They began a bunch of woefully ambitious teenagers with Little Richard in their eyes. After playing local coffee shops and eeking out a meager tour in Germany, they hire Bruce Epstein, whom Paul McCartney would later call the real “fifth Beatle.” With Epstein’s help, the milky and red-lipped runts started wearing suits, won a record contract, and kept playing regular gigs with Epstein covering expenses. And then the kindling of dimples, eternal love, and an E Major caught fire and turned them into something like a sneeze, but even better.

In the first album review I ever wrote, I wondered what a fifteen year-old really has to share with the world. I asked it of Miley Cyrus, but I think the question deserves to be asked of The Beatles. They formed as miscreant teenagers, hung on long enough to find a similarly hungry manager, and won themselves a podium in front of the world before they’d even really had a chance to live. I don’t mind being sung to by teenagers, but I’d prefer they do it in a voice that’s their own. The Beatles sound chillingly impersonal to me. They sound like a bunch of sophomores with big lungs and an ear for form, unconvicted smiles and headbobs to accompany songs about loving someone forever.

Their music sounds cold and alien to me, the pious augmented chords from the hymnal conflated with the sing-along major chords of Gilbert and Sullivan. Even when there was nothing else like it, The Beatles still bore the stiff structures of their deathly boring antecedents in proper British culture.

It’s bizarre to see how many people still like The Beatles, and seem to do so without having much thought about why. In most company it goes almost without having to ask, it’s simply assumed that you’ll like them. We all do.

I’ve been called a bullshit artist by a lot of people. My friend S, upon first meeting me, used to peer at me suspiciously when we talked because she was always trying to figure out if I was being serious or not. It’s an easy trick to look someone in the eye and tell them something of which you have no serious understanding.

It’s a pretty idea to imagine we’re rational creatures who communicate through intellect, experience, and exchange. But people are just as prone to believe something based on the way it sounds, or how pretty is the box in which it comes. Go read a newspaper, watch a news show and listen to how much unfounded assertion there is in the daily life. And listen to your friends, co-workers, and family members parrot these assertions which they’ve internalized, not because they’re true, but because they arrived with some startling force and conviction.

I often wonder if I could get away with writing articles whose factuating hyperlinks point to nonsense. I could make a claim about the civil war in Sri Lanka and link to a clip of Looney Tunes just as easily as I could a news story from the AP. Alternately, I could write something filled with daggers and venom about some political conspiracy whose supporting texts were dense thickets, 10,000 word think tank reports which needed to be fished through to discover the one relevant passage which, I’d inevitably be mischaracterizing.

But if things sounds true, based on some subliminal animal response to tone of voice, diction, body language, and insinuation, then they becomes true.  Perception is reality. I wish I could have created a compilation of the reactions I’ve gotten in telling people that I don’t really like The Beatles. The blank disbelieving eyes, the head turned to the side in mistrust. I told my friend C that The Beatles were church music with a backbeat and he’s made it into a refrain whenever I see him.

When I was twelve I was in love with Milli Vanilli. For a year or two, their first album became the candy coating on my pre-teen ennui. I doped myself with their music, feeding hopeless crushes that stretched towards infinity, and daydreams about another summer vacation. I didn’t know anything. My conscious life had unfolded in a quiet suburb measured in bicycle routes. The only scandals I knew were about neighbors divorcing or kids throwing parties when their parents were out of town. It was a simpler time, one that placated my sense for bullshit. It lasted for a while, but as soon as I started listening to another generation’s bullshit, I realized I was already covered in it.

Video Game Reviews: Wong Kar-Wai, Emotional Algebra, and Boredom

Published November 5, 2009 Uncategorized 3 Comments
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My first video game review for G4 went up earlier this week. I wrote about Band Hero for Nintendo DS. You can read my professional summation of that experience here. It’s been several years since I had to approach video games as a reviewer. While I was toiling away in the lightless rooms of QA testing after returning from Peace Corps, I started writing for a website called Nintendo World Report.

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I initially found it a very easy thing to do. Video game reviews write themselves in many ways. The scale on which games are evaluated has been so formulaic, so heavily skewing towards a small set of technical and creative prejudices, that it was an act of simple algebra applying a 7.0 to a children’s platformer or a 3.5 to an arcade revival about shooting syphilitic aliens.

The more I did it, the more I wondered about the lasting value of it. The same ten or twenty adjectives could be swapped out irrespective of genre or concept. Games with technically advanced graphics could never rank below a certain level of commendation. And the audience played along in a kind of call-and-response way, anticipating the formula and arguing vehemently when it turned out to be inconsistent in any small way.

In the short time that I spent reviewing records for IGN, I found this constraint to be non-existent. The scoring system was the same (1-10) but the medium was explicitly subjective. When I attached a 6.5 to Merriweather Post Pavilion, a record which I like quite a lot, I didn’t feel any trepidation. It was my experience with the record, and it was as honest and thorough as it could be after ten listens. The challenge of coming up with a numeric score in music reviewing was more about interrogating my own experience, not predicting what the average consumer’s experience would be (though, to my discredit, I made mention of this mythic creature on more than one occasion).

There is pressure to always have an opinion in our culture; to choose a side, wear a team color, to have an answer coming out of the movie theater when someone asks you what you thought. Over the weekend I watched Days of Being Wild, one of Wong Kar Wai’s first movies, about a man stringing along two women then going on a trip to find his long-lost birth mother.

I watched it late at night and, like a lot of Kar-Wai’s movies, it bored me. He makes movies I like rewatching, movies that I like thinking about in hindsight. But the process of taking in everything on a first-run is an exercise in extreme patience, a bored supplication. Is that a good experience? Is it bad? Is entertainment the first front on which creative works establish their enduring value? If so, is it really a reviewer’s job to evaluate whether or not the work entertains effectively?

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I think reviews are, by definition, worthless. You can review a car or a brand of super glue, because they have specific functions that can be broken down and ranked in efficacy and convenience. Art has no corollary function, its only defining characteristic is abstraction. Sometimes that takes the form of a brain-baiting plot, and sometimes it takes the form of totemic deliberation. When I read criticism, I don’t want to hear about whether or not the thing worked, I want to know what it meant to you, the reviewer, the human being watching, playing, reading, hopefully, feeling.

I found that almost impossible to do in trying to account for my experiences with Band Hero. So instead I just wrote about whether or not it works.

The Modern Mosaic: Penny Flame, Afghanistan, and A Home Away From Home

Published November 3, 2009 Uncategorized 12 Comments
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As the news of Abdullah Abdullah’s withdrawal from the run-off election in Afghanistan broke, I was watching Penny Flame talk about her intimacy issues on Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew. I was surprised to see Flame on the show. I immediately recognized her, but didn’t realize internet porn had made her famous enough to land on a cable series. I realize this is the haven of Vern Troyer, CC DeVille, and Bronson Pinchot, but I confess, without much pride, that my estimation of porn actors was even less than that.

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I knew Flame ‘s work mostly from a series she did on BangBros in which three or four women would target random men in malls and auto repair shops then have sex with them. It was like Vaudeville, celebrating total randomness and the simplest mechanisms of physiology. I especially like the scattershot selection of men in the videos, many of whom were doughy convenience store clerks with small-ish penises and the occasional bought of impotence. There is something both heartless and completely satisfying in watching a chubby man with a small nub of penis berated by four naked porn stars. Call me a masochist.

Flame was always the most aggressive of the bunch. Her voice sounded raw from cigarette smoke and her eyes would bulge out in giant white spheres to punctuate some bragging-point about how much dick she was hoping to get. I felt something violent and confrontational when I watched her, as if sex with her was an act of scorn for the pathetically single-minded man and his even more single-minded penis.

Seeing her on Sex Rehab, with all its attendant staging and self-promotion, I felt a sort of relief to see that there was a normal human being underneath the hormonal sex-Nosferatu in her videos. A plodding and ego-centric Jennifer Ketchum operating the oiled joints and sliding gears of Penny Flame. Both are media constructs, but one points away from a real person and the other points back towards her.

In reading about Afghanistan, I am reminded of that scornful writhing on top of one extreme or the other. The eye-bulging bravura of either side, arguing about what should be done with US troops and whom they should be targeting (as if so many people could even pick a Taliban from a taxi driver—I could not). There is an undertone of failure in every argument surrounding Afghanistan, and the debate is typically binary and militaristic. Do we stay and fight the Taliban, or do we concede that the fight with the Taliban wasn’t ours in the first place and shouldn’t have been taken up.

There’s a dire narrative in this framing of what’s happening in Afghanistan, and I think any argument about foreign policy that hangs on drama, or even makes sense as a story, deserves mistrust. Narratives tend to require villains, and villains necessitate fighting, and that has come to dominate much of the popular understanding of the US presence in Afghanistan. We’re there to fight, and after 8 years, it appears fighting has not produced any profoundly positive results, so it’s time to leave.

A few weeks ago, Peter Galbraith, the aide to the UN’s Special Representative in Afghanistan, wrote about how he was fired for pushing to postpone the election in Afghanistan as evidence mounted throughout the spring and summer of the Independent Election Committee fraudulence. Rather than face the serious corruption of the championed administration of a barely coherent national unity movement, the UN chose to ignore Galbraith’s reports and, instead, fired him to preserve the “best interest of the mission.”

Democratic elections make better stories than do false starts and willful corruption of an administration upon which American interests have desperately hung their hopes of success. We want to race towards the third act of this story, and so the means of getting there become expedient to the ends, an Afghanistan that we can leave in the same obscurity in which we found it in 2001. We want a narrative, tragic or heroic, that justifies the forgetting of that place. We gave you democracy, and democracy gave you another despot. None of our business, you take it from here.

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The granular stories of trying to build roads that connect the capital to the desolate mountain regions to the North, a precondition for any functional economy, are not important. It doesn’t matter that polling stations were put on record without anyone to work them so long as a winner could be declared in the end. It doesn’t matter that the president of the country, whose authority is said by many to reside only in Kabul, has now ensured himself another term as head of a local fiefdom, in a country made up of scattered fiefdoms.

According to this view, we are then de facto army fighting against the regional leaders that oppose the one the US has sanctioned in his tiny bubble of influence. On these terms, to ask the question of whether or not US forces should be lessened is to answer one’s own question: of course. Ironically, Obama has said he won’t  significantly reduce troop levels in Afghanistan, even if he chooses to ignore General McChrystal’s request for an increase.

Which leaves another series of questions in between the “yes” and “no” of withdrawal: what needs to be done beyond military strategy to make Afghanistan a more stable and prosperous place? There are the terrible and mundane arguments that are much less scintillating to think about. Where should the next road be built? Who should pay for it? How to transition Afghani farmers away from poppy? Is there an emerging political class among the Taliban that can be tolerated in a participatory democracy?

News of Mr. Abdullah’s withdrawal also coincided with an asterisk of a news story from Radio Free Asia about six Uyghur men who had just been released from Guantanamo after seven years of detainment. The men were refugees from China, where Uyghurs have had a long and contentious history with the Han. They had fled into Afghanistan and were picked up for possible terrorists. Now they’re sitting in Palau without a country to return to. Like two other Uyghurs released earlier this year, they may wind up settling this new and unexpected tropical home on which they find themselves, far away from the frigid dust and hardscrabble rocks of their home territories.

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It’s easy to forget that in the midst of all the high-level talk of strategy and realpolitik, individual human beings are affected by all this, on both sides. Whatever solutions await, they deserve to be left better off that when we started.

I don’t know how Sex Rehab will wind up for Jennifer Ketchum, but I suspect the struggle to manage her compulsions will be a lifelong journey. I hope it’s an ascendant one.

The Right Thing Last; Afghanistan, Poppies, and Opinions Before Facts

Published October 31, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments
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I was living in China during the build-up to the US invasion of Iraq.  Separating fact from hunch, and political distortion from opinions of reasoned conviction was hard in any location. In China, it was especially tough because of the tightly controlled media (my phone was tapped and emails with particularly divisive verbiage had a way of not making it through to my inbox), and my comparatively child-like ability to understand the language in which they were delivering news in the first place.

In addition to my regular course load of teaching college freshman basic English, I taught an advanced class for a group of engineers from a giant steel corporation that basically ran the city I lived in. For many of these classes, I’d choose a conversation topic instead of lesson planning. In the process of informal debate, I’d write new vocabulary words on the chalkboard and explain a few new colloquialisms, and call it curriculum.

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As the heat over the looming invasion intensified, my students couldn’t resist the chance of bringing up the arrogance of American foreign policy. They asserted the familiar argument: no war for oil; the US cannot act unilaterally to violate other country’s sovereignty on circumstantial evidence.

I didn’t know how to join their conversation either for or against. I could have held an opinion on general principle but I would have been entirely ignorant on how that principle might have applied to the confrontation with Iraq and the myriad grounds on which it was being forwarded at that point.

I remember wandering through a K-Mart with my mother during the Iran Contra hearings. I remember the dark green of Oliver North’s uniform as he testified, and the dingy color of the walls in the background. I remember coming home from school one day in Fresno and turning on the television to watch cartoons only to find a live stream of missiles landing in Baghdad during the first Gulf war. I remember Clinton’s address to the nation in 1998 explaining why he was bombing Iraq again “without delay, diplomacy, or warning.”

Those were vague scraps of memories dwarfed by fixations on music, women, and the mythology of my own adolescence. Iraq had nothing to do with the shape of my life in suburban California, but suddenly I was in another country realizing I had no honest way to answer claims about what my government was doing.

I was immediately skeptical of the opposition, though, because they had come to a hard and fast opinion about the issue before the case had been fully formed by the administration. And they didn’t seem to have any more comprehensive an understanding of the past than I did in my childish myopia. We’re encouraged to have convictions before facts.

You can see this in our popular discourse. The debate over healthcare reform reached its peak before a bill even existed, and it was argued along lines that were largely incoherent. The arguments against Iraq were, likewise, fervently asserted and minimally supported. Neo-colonialism was alleged. US support through weapon sales in the 80’s was a counter-balance to the genocide in Kurdistan (as if the fact that American weapons were used should somehow dull the horror of the crime in the first place). There was no nuclear program (you really sure about that?).

Winston Churchill said Americans always do the right thing, but only after they’ve tried everything else first. In how many debates over Iraq, or now more pressingly Afghanistan, have you heard someone say, “You know what, I have no idea. I actually don’t know anything about Afghanistan.”

To look at the news, you’d think we’re all foreign experts with years spent traveling around the middle east conducting business and carrying on correspondence with some of the brightest minds in the myriad cultures there. On what other grounds would we have to assert that the invasion of Iraq was actually a war for oil? Or that withdrawal from Afghanistan is a cut and run policy that goes against the sage advice of the general du jour?

The absurdity of the public debate is that we argue with ourselves and neither side knows what it’s talking about. We bend faintly understood facts to support the principled conclusions we’ve been holding up our sleeves the whole time.

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One thing I’ve come to believe about Afghanistan is the idea that we should buy their poppy crops from Afghani farmers, which are currently being sold for conversion to heroin which finances, in significant part, the Taliban. Before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan had a self-sufficient agricultural economy and was one of the world’s best-known grape producers. Much of their land was destroyed during the fight against the USSR and, according to the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Schoolers, 30 percent of the economy shifted to poppy farming after the Soviet departure.

Poppy crops bear fruit in one planting season. Grapes take years to bear fruit. After the American invasion in 2001, a huge part of the remaining agricultural economy in Afghanistan was destroyed. The Taliban, which had once outlawed poppy, now encouraged it as a convenient way to raise money for the fight against the American military. For the average farmer the choice between earning a living farming versus throwing in with the Americans for some k-rations and bribe money is an easy one to make.

I can’t forward many opinions about the war in Afghanistan. I’m not generally educated enough on the region, nor the beliefs of the people there, to be able to do much more than parrot facts I’ve heard elsewhere. But I have lived in poor places where people’s survival is dependent on the food they grow with their own hands. Where the houses people live in are the ones they build with mud brick and collected scraps of wood.

Offering these people a stable environment that encourages them to participate in a legitimate economy (a decriminalized and medically useful drug trade instead of a gangsterist one), and which offers subsidies for the gradual return to regular agricultural crops that help form the fundaments of a national economy in a resource starved country; this is as much a moral imperative as is the decision of what to do with our troops.

But I’ve never even been to Afghanistan. So I may be totally wrong.

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