Truth: Red, White & Black is about superheroes.

That isn’t right.

Truth: Red, White & Black is about comic books.

Ugh.

1. Superheroes

Truth: Red, White & Black is the story of the first Captain America. You all know about Cap, even if you don’t know anything other than his recent film and The Avengers. Captain America is a super soldier, given powers not through crazy genetics or aliens or magic, but through good old fashioned World War 2 science.

I have always thought there was something strange about this idea. A German scientist, defecting to America during the second World War, uses his designs and thoughts about human biology to craft a blonde-haired, blue-eyed superman who goes off to punch Nazis. There’s always been a hint of eugenics, of human experimentation, and of science-for-its-own-sake that made me uncomfortable.

Truth renders this discomfort palpable. Robert Morales and Kyle Baker make the history of Captain America’s super soldier serum explicit: it came out of experimentation on African Americans.

I have two simultaneous reactions to this. The first is horror, of course. The use of African Americans as test subjects for terrible things has a long history, and the kind of systemic racism that allowed for it fills me with sadness. There is no way of apologizing for it–there should be eternal shame about it. The second reaction is jaded, but it was “of course.” The history of technological development is one of destruction and genocide. The amount of suffering that goes into the construction of every iPod is unimaginable–why would the super soldier serum be any less?

There are many things that the reader is shown in Truth. We are explicitly made aware that the soldiers who were not admitted to the super soldier program were summarily executed. We are shown a man who explodes, his body literally pressed to physical limits by the muscle-growing serum. We are also shown the cold calculation behind that murder–now the scientists know how much serum is too much.

I could continue to tell you about the pain and suffering that is shown in the book. I could describe, in detail, the double violence of black men being reduced to mere weapons and then robbed of their lives. But that shouldn’t be the focus when I talk about Truth. The focus should be on the fact that these racist, fucked up behaviors are real. They have historical presence.

And they also show us that everyone needs to be aware of these things. White privilege still exists today, just as much as heterosexual, male, and a myriad of other subject position privileges that determine political existence in the world. Identity violences didn’t somehow disappear–they are still here, working their pain. I think it is something to be aware of, and there needs to be a realization on a personal level of the same kind that Captain America has. He realizes that his very act of existing in the world is a way of covering up and implicitly accepting an ordering of the world that eliminates and obfuscates minority positions. The grand signifier that is Captain America can only exist on the backs of crushed black bodies.

It throws the world in perspective.

So I think Truth does good things. It is a song that has to be sung.

2. Comics

This is a secondary bit to the stuff above, but just as important: I think Truth has something to say about labor and who is supposed to get access to the the products of other peoples’ labor. Obviously these things are not equivalent, but there are parallels in the logic of the racist science machine and the Big Two comics companies. I don’t think there is a coincidence that the bodies of the African American test subjects are drawn in a very Kirby-esque way. It is a visual shorthand to make us think about the history of comics production, just like the comic itself forces us to think through the American history of race. Comics were made by people who had no choice–they signed by contracts because they wanted to make comics and that was all they were good at. Kirby was a person who wanted to make the things in his life come to life on a page, just like the men in the comic simply want to serve their country.

Both Kirby and the soldiers were abused for merely existing in the world and attempting to live life how they wanted.

For a better reading of Truth that is probably closer to what I should have written, check here.

Buy Truth if you want to. The name is changed for the paperback/HC.

There is a seriousness in it that can’t be forgotten–a boy is rounding up his entire outlaw family and turning them in. He is a bounty hunter, and whether that job description came as a result of wanting to find his family again or not is something that is left unanswered in the comic.

There is also comedy. It is, after all, a ten-year-old boy hunting around the Old West. He is as much a being of the plains and hardtack, saddles and novelty steel worn on hips too round and weird to be real.

His name is Boyd, and as you will see, that isn’t his horse.

But beyond this weird, spatial talk that I’m throwing around up top, there is something amazing about Cow Boy. It manages to ride the line between seriousness, sadness, and pure comedy in a way that is rare in the comic book form. Comics have a problem when it comes to comedy–it requires timing, and in a 2D world where chronology is absent, it really does require a deft hand to make jokes work. Cosby and Eliopoulos, the writer and artist respectively, have a tight storytelling that genuinely made me laugh out loud and feel a quaint, small sadness at the same time. The comic is a gem in an internet world of shit comics produced for the web. They deserve to be celebrated.

Taking it one step beyond this sort-of review, Boyd is a fascinating character. Sometimes we are shown what he is thinking, but mostly only in moments where it drives the story or the comedic action of plot. There are several moments where Boyd sits on his horse, riding, and we are merely seeing the world as it is. We are presented with the image of Boyd, not the character or thoughts of him, and thus his most private moments are rendered absolutely opaque to us. The following page, my favorite in the comic so far, really shows this:

I know that any half-smart writing about the Western United States automatically draws comparisons to Cormac McCarthy, but come one, this is classic McCarthy stuff. There is a “simple aggression” in Boyd, but it isn’t something that we see in the comic. Instead, we see a calculating boy who constantly overwhelms the expectations of those around him, defeating small-town sheriffs and hooligans alike. The simple aggression is hidden from us, part of the opacity that surrounds Boyd. That final panel, where Boyd looks both sad and thoughtful, is one of the few moments where we see him as an actual child. A kid and a horse, laying down for the night, ready to do it all again tomorrow.

Boyd has a long life ahead of him.

Read the comic. Talk about the comic. Make people read it. It really is amazing, and we need more stuff like this.

The fascinating thing about the interview is that several of the interviewed people spoke more broadly about the topic of modern war-based first person shooters. Modern Warfare 2 is their go-to example of that kind of game, and with good reason–it is probably the weakest game in the series, and it also features the infamous “No Russian” mission.

The article is a little long, but every comment is worth reading, especially because these people actually get to the user-experience heart of a number of issues that game critics are trying to work through all the time. The discussion of vulnerability is especially important–the fact that these video games are used as recruitment tools to bring people into military life when we consider that the soldiers depicted in the Call of Duty games are invincible machines. In the event that the machine dies, a quote pops up that tells you about the honor of sacrifice; then you’re up and ready to sacrifice a life again.

Justin Polaski talks about this:

(Polaski, Army) The previously mentioned games cheapen the impact of the war. Games such as MW2 teach the player that it is heroic to play as a nearly invincible shooting machine mowing down brown-skinned people who spout off culturally stereotypical platitudes and die in droves before the player’s corporately licensed wrath (i.e. the weapons actually having the correct names such as M4A1, Spectre Gunships, and wearing copywritten ACU patterns). Portraying the conflicts in such a manner cheapens the deaths of all those who have died on both sides of the conflicts.

Cheapening of life aside (which I can’t speak to), this certainly speaks to late capitalism’s core ethic: bend everything, eat everything. The war itself becomes a brand name; the Second World War becomes a marketing tool, IP to be exploited and abandoned when it loses its efficacy. What I take from Polaski is a sadness associated with this: the guise of realism paired with unrealistic game mechanics means that the real people who died are seen as failures, or worse, as acceptable casualties. I am afraid of a world where the predominate game-playing demographic cannot understand what it means to lose a military conflict.

I turn to this again and again, but I think this just reinforces the fact that we need more games that make players vulnerable. We need games that show up that humans are weak. We aren’t super. We are all normal, even the most amazing of us. And we need to recognize it.

Check out the article, it is genuinely amazing.

Here’s a track from Washed Out’s new joint. I like it.

Real content tomorrow. For now, music.

On video games and zaniness:

The dynamics of this aesthetic of incessant doing are thus perhaps best studied in the arts of live and recorded performance—dance, happenings, walkabouts, reenactments, game shows, video games. Yet zaniness is by no means exclusive to the performing arts. So much of “serious” postwar American literature is zany, for instance, that one reviewer’s description of Donald Barthelme’s Snow White—“a staccato burst of verbal star shells, pinwheel phrases, [and] cherry bombs of … puns and wordplays”—seems applicable to the bulk of the post-1945 canon, from Ashbery to Flarf; Ishmael Reed to Shelley Jackson.

I’ve got a more specific reading of post-Fordist or contemporary zaniness, which is that it is an aesthetic explicitly about the politically ambiguous convergence of cultural and occupational performance, or playing and laboring, under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the new “connexionist” spirit of capitalism. As perhaps exemplified best by the maniacal frivolity of the characters played by Ball in I Love Lucy, Richard Pryor in The Toy, and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy, the zany more specifically evokes the performance of affective labor—the production of affects and relationships—as it comes to increasingly trouble the very distinction between work and play. This explains why this ludic aesthetic has a noticeably unfun or stressed-out layer to it. Contemporary zaniness is not just an aesthetic about play but about work, and also about precarity, which is why the threat of injury is always hovering about it.

Value judgment and aesthetics (this has particular weight to the “video games: smart?” debates that have been going on):

The act of professing aesthetic pleasure or displeasure, in and of itself, is not interesting to me. What is interesting is the complexity of the ways in which people then defend these judgments (which they feel just as strongly compelled to do). As Simon Frith aptly puts it, “Value judgments only make sense as part of an argument and arguments are always social events.” So in my comment above, I just was thinking in a general way about what John Guillory calls the “constitutive role of conflict for any discourse of value.” That said, the argument of my second book is that the commodity aesthetic of the cute, the performance-oriented aesthetic of the zany, and the informational and discursive aesthetic of the interesting have a unique and even indexical relation to the ways in which the subjects of late capitalism consume, labor, and exchange. Insofar as these socially binding processes are also, inevitably, sites and stakes of social struggle, the aesthetic categories featured in the book reflect these struggles, albeit in a highly indirect and mediated fashion.

Read the bloody thing right now. It is good for you.

Some points:

1. To lay it out there, because I always feel like I have to, the article assumes that cognitive players who are not machines or algorithms must be humans. It isn’t true, lots of animals play games. The essay is anthropocentric, but certainly is more open to nonhuman players because it works through intentionality–anything can have the appearance of intentionality. Next point.

2. The idea that players exist as a specter to games is brilliant. The player is always there, even when the player is specifically excluded from the design of the game. For instance, Progress Quest is designed around the intention of a player to see skills increase, to have adventures, etc., even though the player never does those things. The ghost of the player is still designed around, it is the focal point of the entire experience. If I were feeling smarter (and if all of my books weren’t packed up and a hundred miles away), I would give you the appropriate quote from Derrida to back up this ghost talk (also, “Structure, Sign, and Play”).

3. The last bit of the essay takes a little turn. We are provided with this list of traits that are applied to the entity “player”:

By removing players, we could, perhaps paradoxically, show what was removed. Players turn out have a number of separable traits each highlighted by a specific type of zero-player game.

• Players having continued agency: Setup-only games remove players’ interaction with the game state for (perhaps) the majority of the time that the game plays.
• Players as humans: AI players negate the need for players to be human.
• Players as temporal beings: When a game is solved, or when a game is purely hypothetical, it does not require actual players (human or not) to play it. The player effective becomes an atemporal idea.
• Players as having intentionality: In most cases, and even in the case of AI players, we easily identify a player as an entity with an intention to perform well in a game. That intention does not need to be rooted in a psychological fact, but can simply be the exhibit of a preference for success over failure. The corollary to this is existence of spoilsports; entities that are supposed to be players but who exhibit no intention of wanting to perform as well as possible in a game.
• Player as having aesthetic preferences: We have several times alluded to the fact that players tend to exhibit preferences for different games. Actual, human, players prefer certain game experiences to other experiences, and will compare games, and categorize games into genres. The initially quoted player-centric conceptions of games are thus revealed to be a specific type of zero-player game, that do not reflect the behavior of real players, only a type of hypothetical player devoid of aesthetic preferences.

I disagree with the second trait for obvious reasons. The fourth is weird because it assumes that players always want to win a game. I think that we can probably make assumptions that players have intentionality in that they intend to play the game–they want to navigate the world-space and ludic ecology of the game. Not everyone wants to win. Sometimes you want to be killed. I had a Day Z experience like that today–I wandered around until someone killed me, and I did it on purpose. In any case, that list is unsettling to me for reasons that I can’t put into words right now.

In any case, go read the article. You will be better for having done so, whether you agree or not (I don’t know where I stand right now.)

1. Zach at Hailing From The Edge talks about Prototype 2. I like his affective reflection on the game, and I wish more people talked about how games make them feel. Not what mechanics work or how the story was written, but rather how you feel about you mow down random henchmen or civilians for two hours at a whack. SPOILERS in the quote:

The bad guys are bad because their “tests” are “what happens if we release some monsters onto some caged civilians?” Oh, and a prominent plot point involves torturing an eight-year-old girl. I almost had to stop playing at that point. Between torturing a child and the incessant, overwhelming amount of gore, the game was actually starting to affect me. I had dreams full of the red, gushing organic material that coats the Red Zone. I put down the game for a few days. Picked it up for another hour to finish it off, just to get a sense of closure. Haven’t picked it up again since.

2. Greg Saw posts at Nightmare Mode about the measurement of fun. I take him comments to be more global than how he applies them (it is an indictment with the video game criticism industry as I read it.) I agree with basically everything here. The faster we can understand that games are subjective experiences, the faster that games can grow out of the criticism ghetto it has built for itself. I am so tired of the “yet something is off” articles and op-eds. It is fake criticism, formalist at best, that needs to be replaced with actual analysis.

Clark’s article, I suspect, is meant to be a personal plea to every gamer, but it comes off as a brash sentiment to that overarching and overused theme of “games have so much potential, yet something is off.” They sure do have potential. They’re brimming with the stuff. But the gamer is the one empowered, not whoever Clark imagines sits in the holy throne. Gamers define what’s fun for themselves and they define what’s successful and how strong the interplay between fun and success is.

3. Hayley Campbell interviews Tom Gauld at The Comics Journal. I had never heard of Gauld before this interview, but his art is damn good, and I am buying Goliath as soon as I have enough money to safely buy books without starving to death.

4. Nick Robinson has a bit on Unwinnable: “Winning Sucks: In Defense of Defeat.” There is always a danger in games to see oneself as a hero–part of the destructive logic of games like Call of Duty is that everything the player does (torture, for instance) is implicitly justified because the subjective embodiment of the the player in-game is always “on the side of the angels,” so to speak. So what happens in a multiplayer world? This just gave me a whole new set of ideas about ragequitting that will probably get their own blog post later.

In any competitive game, you’re someone else’s villain. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Stephen felt, as the hero, that he was supposed to win every game of Magic we played. He was owed victory and the cognitive dissonance between how good he thought he was and what was happening on the battlefield seemed to kill him.

5. You should play this game that shows you how goddamn hard it is to be Chairperson of the Federal Reserve. Take the warning that there is a time delay in action versus repercussion VERY SERIOUSLY.

6. The state of New York, in another stupid move that violates free speech rights, is attempting to make anonymous commenting illegal on sites hosted in the state. (A side note: if you don’t read GamePolitics, you should.)]

7. I think this Kill Screen bit by Michael Thomsen is thoughtful in the way that it considers the reversal or reinterpretation of mechanics as a way of “opening up” design. I thought the last segment of Bulletstorm was awesome because it did that.

Most striking the demo footage reveals a sequence with the be-furred space hero trotting along a frozen plane with no weapon while being attacked by a space slug with claws in its mouth. In the first game these dopey little creatures were the weakest in the game but a player’s relationship with an enemy can be completely changed by a simple change in design, in this case taking away the character’s gun.

8. Dominic Pettman is pretty cool. Check out the video trailer for his book Human Error below, and anticipate his newest book, The Technopoetics of Capture, with me right now.

The movement invoked by a reaching-toward must always be uncertain: when I reach toward you, I do not know what I will touch–I do not know yet how your touch will return to me. I know only that I am willing to take the risk inherent in the movement of reaching-toward. This uncertainty is predicated on the double-take of touch. If I pretend to know the outcome of my reaching-toward, I am not really reaching-toward. In other words, when space is preconstructed (when the space between is overdetermined by my certainty about you and your simple location in the world), there is no space to cross, there is no chronotope to create, and ultimately, there is no potential for touch as a reaching toward. (122)

I am particularly concerned with this passage in relation to animals in factory farms and laboratories. I’ll let you do the interpretive work.

A little bit about my history with the Diablo franchise: I played the original game for a couple years after launch. Sometimes I would play multiplayer, but more often I would play alone, clicking on skeletons and whatnot for hours at a time. I have fond memories of doing that, but I was also ten years old. Diablo II came out, but I was deep into the Baldur’s Gate series at this time, as well as Dungeons and Dragons, and the action RPG style just felt too shallow for me. I’m not particularly fond of killing things–my RPG play style has always been based on smooth-talking and dialogue depth. Fighting is too stressful. Talking is easy.

So I haven’t been anticipating Diablo III in any real way. I read the teaser posts over the past couple years. I watched promo videos when they permeated my RSS reader because every website on the internet picked them up to make silly speculations. In the end, the game came out, and some people liked it. Other people didn’t like it so much. It wasn’t the kind of reaction that I was expecting toward the new messiah of video gamery.

There are a couple reasons that I’m not going to play the game. I think there are some real issues with Blizzard creating a game that requires a player to connect to the internet in order to play single player. It essentially means that you can play the game all you want as long as Blizzard tells you that it is okay. To me, it would feel like having a boss. I also don’t like the idea that you can only play in groups that are maxed out at four players. I associate Diablo with massive havoc, and four players can’t do that nearly as well as, say, ten.

If I were to get a little deeper, and I should, I don’t want to play Diablo III because I think the design is shallow. It functions in the same way as World of Warcraft: get the loot, get more powerful, get the loot. Eventually the game is over. I don’t like the Pavlovian reward system, and I honestly don’t understand it. Diablo boils it down to something even more specific–the large coordination through guilds in WoW to access end-game content is absent in Diablo, meaning that the player is reduced to a clicking machine. Click on the enemy. Use a special ability. Click on some more stuff. Click on a big-ass demon. You’ve won the game.

I’m sure there are reasons to love the action RPG genre, but I don’t see them. If I am to be reduced to a clicking machine, I would rather click something more fun.