Grand Theft
29 April 2008 at 8:10 pm (Wrath) (games, In the News, issues, social theories)
Ah. We come at last to the long-anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto IV.
Well, I wasn’t anticipating it, but its recent appearance in local news pushed it from potential anniversary gift to censorship issue. Basically, the Chicago Transit Authority, cash-strapped and literally falling apart after (at least) a decade of mismanagement, was shamed, by Fox News of all things, into pulling the ads for GTA IV.
Before the CTA succumbed, the game existed in that unfocused mental space reserved for releases that don’t interest me but are preceded by too much hype to fall off the radar. Personally, I’m not a big fan of games that involve human-on-human violence; the only shooter I’m comfortable playing is Halo, because exploding extragalactic tentacled zombies, while messy, is cathartic and totally guilt-free. But now I feel a moral duty to stand up for GTA, or at least to complain about the shrill media frenzy and the ensuing disposal of rare and valuable ad revenue.
Aw, who are we kidding? This isn’t about the money. This is about shrill, uninformed, sensational “news”-induced panics, about censorship and hypocrisy, and about the total abdication of personal responsibility. The people howling about the game and the ad campaign are the same ones who ignore the nice game store clerk’s repeated warnings and purchase it for the 8-year-old offspring whose affections they’d rather buy than earn. (An acquaintance who worked a previous GTA release saw this happen on multiple occasions.) These are the same irresponsible parents who want video game ads stripped from public spaces to save them the trouble of having difficult discussions with their kids.
And do not get me started on the kind of hypocrisy that can ban video games — or even video game advertising — while conveniently overlooking violence saturation in other media. Nobody complains when the CTA runs ads for violent movies, but would you prefer to look at/consider the implications of this or this for 35 minutes? I don’t like casual realistic violence, on TV, in movies, or even in video games. It trivializes our lesser proclivities and desensitizes us to real suffering. GTA is not just gratuitous violence for its own sake; you could play the game that way, but you could play lots of games in ways that deviate from or pervert their primary objectives — say, for example, strip Monopoly.
Lurid fantasies are nothing new. All that has changed is the sophistication of their rendering. Don’t believe me? Check out the original Sweeney Todd, medieval visions of Hell , or just about any ancient mythology. Violent tendencies are a sad fact of human nature; we shouldn’t succumb to them indiscriminately but we won’t get rid of them by censoring a video game.
That said, I’m not a huge fan of the GTA franchise. The carjacking, crazy driving, hooker-hiring, underworld dealings, etc. just aren’t my thing; besides, I lack the attention span to pursue multiple mission-based games. But I will admit that Rockstar designs the franchise with biting social commentary (the talk radio is, like Idiocracy, chilling and riotously funny) and points irreverently and profanely at the darkness and vapidity on which we build “respectable” society. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why the game has been so shrilly denounced. Its very existence upends the fantasy that we live in an orderly, wholesome world populated by people (uncorrupted except for the noxious influence of video games) where manipulation, dirty dealings, theft, and even bloodshed are the exception rather than the rule. In an apt metaphor, the news outlets have offered only sensational and uninformed accounts of a perceived social ill, mistaking a symptom for the sickness. Ironically, Rockstar seems to be the only party interested in thoughtful dialogue about the gruesome consequences when our darker impulses go unchecked.
Grow Old with Me
4 January 2008 at 11:10 pm (Epiphanies, Perspectives, Vanity) (aging, semiotics, social theories)
Thought many thoughts tonight on the way to dinner and had at least two epiphanies fit for paper but only recall one, that plastic surgery is an extension of anorexia, that economists should cite these two practices and their burgeoning as evidence of the inevitability of affluence. Because just as thinness will only be attractive to those who can afford not to eat, for whom eating is such an inevitability that it must be actively avoided, so too youth becomes a luxury commodity when old age is inevitable. No longer prized for its rarity and wisdom, old age has become something to flee, to avoid, to recoil from in terror. It is no longer a golden time to look forward to and look back from but a terminus, an end to the pleasures and dreams of youth, which have become the only pleasures worth having. What of that character early in Plato’s Republic who says old age has done him good because the passions of the flesh have yielded to the passions of the mind? Who among us would embrace that ethos now? Each phase of life once served a purpose. No more. Now we serve only ourselves, our desires, our narcissism and our schizophrenia. On the one hand, the lifting of the phases frees us to pursue anything, at any time. On the other, we have nothing new to pursue. We have slipped simply from being creatures of duty to creatures of desire: once we were told to do, and we did; now we are told to want, and we want.
Even our mythologies have shifted from being to desire. Once there was the story of Eos and her grasshopper; she asked for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. And so in the nature of humans he grew old, he shriveled. Old age as prelude to death. Old age as preparation. Life as preparation for old age.
But it is not all so futile as that. There is so much to do, so much to be, and so much to contemplate too afterwards. If there is a divine being, a wisdom, then it was right to make us as we are, for old age is one inevitability that compensates for our other shortcomings. It forces us to confront our mortality and our fallibility. It enables us to give meaning to our experiences, our choices, to understand consequences. To what end, you ask? Why must there be an end? Why must we be served in any tangible way but to gain wisdom? What is more important or more sublime than truth?
Your life is written on, into, all over, your body. To be marked is to have lived. To live is to be marked. To seek to erase those marks is to deny that you have lived, to affirm that you wasted your life and think getting your wrinkles ironed out will buy you another one or to simply deny your experiences. But you cannot. No amount of collagen or toxins or surgery will change what you have done and who you have become. We make ourselves. The wrinkles are still there underneath the injections and the tightenings and the lifts. Only the superficial is alterable.
If I live that long I want to be engraved by my stories, for better or for worse. Maybe I will regret these words later. Maybe I will live to regret them. Indeed, what irony. I do not seek to tempt fate, but the simple wrinkles of living – old age, scarred hands, laugh lines, these do not frighten me. They are a promise of a full life. But to carry your whole life with you, to be able to look at each line and embrace what it signifies, be it folly or wisdom, sorrow or joy, to be able to embrace what I did and who I became – that to me would be the dream and the gift of old age, should I attain it. That anyone would seek to flee from such wisdom and peace baffles me.
_-_detail_1_(devil).JPG){kind=link}