"Pure Art"

Something I hate about any creative industry is that many people have an instinctive hate of anyone who is a creator, yet stops "doing it for the art and sells out." Many people seem to have this vision of artists as people who are uncaring about money, who just want to create, who want to shape the world and that's all. In many cases this is absolutely correct, but you see, when you want to shape the world through a particular medium and that's all, it means that you either have to find a way to make money off of it, or become immortal and learn to spontaneously bring about the various materials consumed by your chosen medium.

Now don't get me wrong, there are people out there who stop doing something for the love of doing it and start doing it for the money, as well as people who never loved it and just do it for the money right from the start. Hacks like those shouldn't be tolerated, but at the same time it is hardly fair to begin attacking any artist who stops being "indie" and starts going "commercial". Creators need compensation for what they create, and they need more than just recognition, that recognition needs to translate into hard cash at some point or the person has to devote time to doing other things besides their art.

Take me for example. I make videogames, I'm, for all intensive purposes, an indie developer currently working on the game Mystic Empyrean: Rebuild as president and lead producer of Fancy Hat Studios. I could just release the game for free (actually no, I couldn't, due to contracts and legal licensing stuff I have with Brad Talton, the maker of Mystic Empyrean, but ignore that for the moment), but then I have to ask: "How am I supposed to keep running this game? How do I pay those helping me on it?" Obviously I could not, I need to start making money somewhere, and I need to make it in a steady amount rather than depending on charity (this people, is why the government diverts taxes into various good will projects rather than allowing charity to take over 100% like many libertarians wish to happen).

"Pure Art" is all well and good, but chances are that any one who complains about someone "selling out" is simply pissed off at having to actually start PAYING the guy for his creative works, or is pissed off that he hasn't managed to do the same. Harsh, but true never the less. Most often though, I think of these people as simply too stupid to actually put thought into what they're saying, because I'm a nice guy, and I prefer to think that people are stupid rather than malevolent.

Results to the ME3 Fiasco for the Industry

One of the biggest turning points coming up in the industry today is how Bioware and EA react to the outcry against the ending of ME3. I see a couple of possible ways they could do this, there's more than 3, but these are the basic break downs, so I think I'll just throw them out there in the format of the ending of ME3.

RENEGADE ENDING- EA releases a true ending to the game as a 15 dollar DLC, it's the last level, fighting harbinger, saving the galaxy. 

Result: If this isn't boycotted, then they turn a profit on this sleezy scheme. They do this again and again, and other publishers take it up. The worst possible use of DLC is attained rather than their original purpose of extra side content, bite sized expansion packs, and similar to pay for continued development by the Developer (Remember, developers rarely get royalties, instead they are paid by the milestone and this is why they have to fire so many employees after each project. DLC keeps the developer in cash while they're looking to move to their next project and also pays for any post-launch debugging, which is sometimes essential due to how hard publishers push developers to launch the projects at particular dates.). 

NEUTRAL ENDING- Bioware caves, and releases an entirely new ending for free. Losing both Bioware and EA so much money that Bioware inevitably liquidated and sold off by EA. 

 Result: Publisher Marketing groups have a field day. They get the biggest example for crushing the developer's ability to experiment and expand their game outside of normal player experiences they could have ever hoped for. Can you say Infinity + 1 FPS's for another decade? I can. 

PARAGON ENDING- Bioware sticks to their guns, they release a clarifying and expanding cut scenes and epilogue tracks that are reminiscent of DA1's ending in how they wrap up the lose ends and tell us how the game ends. No new interactive content, battles, or levels are added (they probably cannot afford to release something like that for free) They probably need to set aside the whole "is he indoctrinated or not" question and just outright answer it as "yes".

Result: Bioware still loses a fuck ton of money and user support. EA will still probably liquidate them unless the new baulder's gate is absolutely FANTASTIC and redeeming. But the Developer's right to control the narrative as they see it, to their vision, remains sacrosanct for the time being until something like this is pulled again. Considering Baulder's Gate is being handled by atari and not Bioware, this probably means they're still fucked, though considering they kinda got the credit for NWN2 and KotOR2, then if it does well who knows?

The Rise of Urban Fantasy

An interesting fact of game design is the sudden rise of prominence in
Urban Fantasy games. Not only in video-games, but in other forms of
media too. The Secret World is but one example from the
world of game design, but books such as the Dresden Files, and shows
such as Sanctuary both borrow heavily from the rise of Urban Fantasy.
I find it interesting and wonder how, and why, we are so interested in
such things.


Urban fantasy is the idea of the modern world with magic applied.
Light Urban Fantasy is usually the ground of such books as Tinker, the
world of magic and the modern world are peacefully linked together,
either they have always been so or it is a recent event, but the
creatures of the magical world are no more inclined to evil than
humans are, and just want to get along like fellow sapient beings.
Dark Urban Fantasy takes the other view, that there are hideous
predators stalking the night and seeking our dooms. H.P. Lovecraft
pioneered the earliest form of Dark Urban Fantasy, and Lovecraftian
Horror has long been embraced by the genre. Interestingly, Dark Urban
Fantasy is the primary form of Urban Fantasy, the World of Darkness
from Whitewolf is the most famous example, but The Secret World, the
MMO from Funcom is clocking in at a close second by now. There is
hardly a geek alive who has not heard of the Dresden Files, which fits
into a similar category.


I find it interesting that the rise of games, and the rise in
popularity of Urban Fantasy has risen almost in union. While Urban
Fantasy can find it's roots in Lovecraft's works, which itself grew
out of a reconstruction of gothic horror, it most certainly gained a
new level of popularity with the new millennium, especially with the
explosion of the internet in the early to mid '00s. I believe, on some
level, it is a natural reaction to the sudden availability of
information thrown at people. Previously, the world was a less dark
place, the good stood out because it was so easy to ignore the bad,
and further, humans tend to talk about bad stuff more than good stuff,
as if trying to warn others of our misfortune so they might avoid it.
The world has become a darker place by all appearances, and worse, it
seems as if the average human is losing control over their own lives.
In such circumstances, with an explosion of new views, new thoughts,
new modes of thinking even brought about by the internet and
interactivity revolutions, we have revived the old horrors of our
nightmares and given them form in our modern day world.


Most interestingly, Dark Urban Fantasy has taken this, and combined it
with the conspiracy theories, cabals, and secret organizations that
were once the purview of espionage fiction such as James Bond. Maybe
as a method of rationalization for how magic can stay hidden from the
normal world, and possibly also linking into the ideas that there are
unseen hands controlling our lives. Either way, Dark Urban Fantasy is
a world of secrets, horrors, magic, predators, and a universe that
ultimately does not care whether humanity lives or dies.


Magic and the unknown has always fascinated us, and games especially
have exploited this in their exploration factor, easter eggs and such,
is it little wonder that the mystery of cabals, conspiracies, and
similar things have wormed their way into recent games. Combined with
the fact that Urban Fantasy as a whole is a thoroughly postmodern
genre, a reconstruction of old ideas of fantasy to suit the modern
world, it is little wonder that it connects with us as far more
"realistic" fantasy than traditional Fantasy. Combine this yet again
with the fact that the games industry has played the Tolkien card over
and over again in almost every roleplaying game made for interactive
gaming systems, combine this once more with the fact that almost every
game now contains some rpg elements, and it quickly becomes apparent
why we are steadily seeing an increase in the Urban Fantasy game,
especially the Dark Urban Fantasy. We see these because just as Urban
Fantasy is a reconstruction of traditional Fantasy, the Urban Fantasy
game is a reconstruction of the Fantasy game.


The Secret World is the best example of this. It does away with
classes, now there are only skills. It does away with "faction
specific parties", now you can side with members of the opposite
faction to go adventuring with. It does away with traditional crafting
systems in MMOs, now everyone can craft and it uses a Minecraft-esque
crafting grid rather than a progress bar and materials list. Just as
Urban Fantasy literature deconstructs and reconstructs traditional
Fantasy literature, The Secret World is an Urban Fantasy
deconstruction and reconstruction of traditional Fantasy MMO tropes.

Sex Offender Online Game Ban

Sex Offenders, we can all agree, are fairly vile criminals, they violate one of the most intimate and important parts of human lives, the relationship and trust that is built into sexual intercourse between two people. A new operation put forward by Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has had several game companies with online content shut down the accounts of registered sex offenders. Now, while this is all for the good some might say, I'd like to point out that not everyone who is registered as a sex offender is actually guilty of rape or child molestation, and the registry of sex offenders rarely makes a distinction between out right rape, child molestation, or statutory rape.

To give a seriousness of the allegations here, read this article here. In 2009 this case went to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Fourteen year old boy with a trio of girls, 12 and 11. Even I find the concept distasteful, but the fact of the matter is that the boy would be registered, for life, as a sex offender, in his later years this would hamper his ability to get a job, to go to college, and any number of other things because the registry makes no distinction that the act was consensual between minors. Things like this are why simply putting down a blanket "registered sex offenders should be banned from online games because they could use them to prey on minors as online predators.

Now, even ignoring that people who don't deserve to have their basic liberties stripped from them are having them stripped because of what is, let's face it, a glorified error in the paper work, the idea that the government is nannying us in this manner is frankly, disturbing. Yes, the government should take steps to prevent online predators from being able to do what they do, but that should be through non invasive means, not that they should put the onus of this on the game companies, holding them responsible for removing and banning sex offenders. See, by making it the companies' job to ban these people, rather than by policing such elements themselves, they are effectively making the companies responsible for these people.

If the government wants to police these groups, there are far better and more efficient, and far far more ethical methods than simply stripping them of their rights, especially given the sticky and vague definition of "registered sex offender" that can be applied to perfectly innocent teenagers and strip them of large parts of their futures. If the government, federal or state level, wishes to police known sex offenders, then it can simply be utilized via a program they are required to put into their computers that monitors what they're looking and sends back logs of any key words or specific key stroke combinations that pop up on their machines. Flagging them for companies to keep an eye out for, in case they are accused of sexually inappropriate behavior on the company's website, is also a valid move. Simply blocking them off so that they cannot access content is wrong though.

The Decline of Game Sales, but not of Games

Game sales have been steadily dropping over the past few years, or rather, it should be said that retail sales have been dropping. The social game and app markets are as strong, if not stronger, than they were when they first bloomed a little under half a decade ago now, but they are not directed at the hardcore gamer market. The lionshare of game making has always been the AAA title games, the 'God of War's the 'Grand Theft Auto's, the 'Warcraft's and 'Age of Empires' and 'Mario's of the game industry have always been the goal of all game makers. We want to tell stories and make vast sweeping games that give hours of enjoyment, not piddly little things that people play while on the bus or the toilet.

A rather interesting article came out yesterday from Daily Finance. The author gives some ideas on how one might produce results, and all of his ideas have pros and cons, but I think he's missing a fundamental point: The age of retail in video games has come and gone. It is a mockery, a false choice, an idiot's choice. Why would we ever want to pay for a physical object when the product is actually just bits of data that can be given to use over a line of copper and zinc and rubber. The online game market is where sales are happening now, where it is quick and easy and the purchase can be made right from the system you'll play it on, and a record is kept so that if you ever lose the data you can just download it again. You lose a disk? Your disk is lost, you have to buy a new one. Beyond this fact, he makes some very good points.

The game industry does need to lower it's prices, or more specifically, the retailers and publishers need to do so. So much of game sellers seem to forget that there are more poor people than rich people, and poor people are more likely to spend their money on things that will distract them from how hard life is, after all, their lives are usually harder than those of rich people, they need more distractions. I'm not saying drop the prices enormously, but dropping them to 30 or 40 dollars rather than 60 dollars is probably a good idea, you'll get more sales, and more sales means more investor confidence, and that'll help business all round, not to mention that you get yourself out there.

The next issue he brings up is a better kind of controller, and he might be right there, but at the same time putting in a new controller would alienate older players. I personally cannot stand many of the ways some games use touch screens, but there's no reason that they couldn't work. By using a small touch screen device that communicated with the game, one could alter the specifics of the control for the game.

The last point is the most important. Games need to change. They need to change and transform to be better for casual audiences, without losing their hardercore audiences. Games such as Mass Effect 3 with radically different player modes (narrative, rpg, shooter, plus the normal difficulty level system). Similar tactics will be necessary to keep games nice for both casual and hardcore players.

The point is that games are changing, our audience is changing, our methods of sale need to change. The way we think about and use and make games all need to change, but most of all, to change how we sell and distribute game. If we can handle that change, we will bounce back from this small dip in game sales and profits from retail.

Romney's Latest Comment

For god's sake, just when I think the far right can't get any more racist, Mitt Romney Spits out a comment like this: "In fact, I can relate to black people very well indeed. My ancestors once owned slaves, ..." I mean, it takes a SPECIAL level of stupidity or racism to spit out a comment like this and then think you've done well. In my experience, a lot of what we typically see as racism is actually just classism, I've had personal experiences in that respect where you end up with people being perfectly friendly despite race when they realize the person of the race they thought they hated, were scared of, etc.etc. is actually intelligent, middle or higher class, and isn't a crook. Then there's stuff like this absolute gem.

I'm serious, where the hell can someone get off thinking that saying something like this is a good idea? Is Romney just THAT oblivious? Is he stupid? Does he not think that dredging up wounds that -still- tear into our nation is a good idea? I mean for god's sake, sure, my family once owned slaves, I'm from an old plantation family in southern Louisiana,  but I don't choose that as my basis for being able to relate to African Americans! Note that he doesn't claim to have any African American friends, he doesn't claim to speak for them, he doesn't even claim to be sympathetic or even empathetic towards the general treatment and conditions that most of the Black Community in our nation live in today, no, he somehow convinced himself that the best thing to say was that his family once owned slaves, and that somehow made him able to relate to African Americans.

Am I the only one who is floored that ANYONE would think that is an okay comment to make even off hand? Let alone at a political rally where he almost certainly has had someone going over his speech before hand? That no one caught that? I can't tell whether it's racist that they think "well we're over the whole slavery thing, they should be too right?" or just ignorant to the point of

Social Society

We live in an increasingly social society, even as there are those who defame the internet as decreasing social behavior amongst human beings. The truth is though that we are discovering new ways to be social. In American Society, introversion is treated as if it were some kind of disease, some kind of failing that needs to be stamped out. Introverts now have a method of being social that does not involve physical contact or presence, and the internet is simply how they express that. The internet does not discourage social behavior, it simply gives new options for such behavior for those who prefer different methods of social interaction, ones that are less draining for their personality type.

Internet chat rooms, e-mail, and forums are just one method of this. New games, such as The Way, and Journey, as well as games such as Dark Souls have interesting ways of communicating, often by the complete LACK of normal communication methods. In none of the above games can a person voice chat, or use text to speak with other players directly. In The Way and Journey, both are completely lacking, with only a limited selection of in game gestures and emoticons permitted for the use of the player to communicate. In doing so, we have an entirely new way of socilizing, one that I feel, goes deeper than the normal spoken and written communications. When playing The Way, for example, I was surprised and frustrated by how quickly or slowly different players picked up on my gestures to guide them along invisible obstacle courses that I could see, but they were unable to. We communicated without using words, without using symbols, only gestures our characters could make. "Happy" "Angry" "Confused" pointing in various directions, both arms up, or both arms crossed, with this limited set of communications, we could engage in a meaningful dialogue.

This, to me, goes far beyond "Social Games" like Facebook's Farmville. In those games, you use an existing network of friends, rarely ever communicating with them through the game at -all- you use facebook to communicate, and they occasionally pop into your game to assist with various chores and such. It is beyond comprehension to me that these be called social games because they have no social interaction in any meaningful sense. There is NETWORKING, there is COOPERATION, in a limited sense, but nothing SOCIAL about them really. No, these games are networking games, not social games. Dark Souls has more meaningful social interaction, with the Casandraic warnings left etched into the walls by other players in their own games, and the ghosts of other players invading and helping you in your own world when you call upon them.

Friends in the most unlikely places

I waited to post this until tonight (rather than on Saturday as I usually do) due to some pretty important things. Mostly, it would be my first night in a Hostel, and I'm now staying there for GDC, the Game Developer's Conference. I'm absolutely blown away by the comradery of this place, it's unbelievable. Today after a short conversation with two people, I was invited to the Tonga Room in a nearby hotel, a pacific island themed resteraunt. Had an amazing time, and discussed numerous topics ranging from sexuality, to morality, to how to identify with people, to race politics and culture. I'll probably post on these things at a later date, but it is not the topic I wish to pick up tonight. No, tonight I wish to talk about the natural ability of humans to make friends. Even in completely random situations.

Why is that? Why can we humans make such quick and fast relationships? Especially in places that are, by their very nature, places of transition. Buses, planes, trains, and here in a hostel where people stay only temporarily. It is an amazing experience. I think it has something to do with the break down of ideas and boundaries, in this place with four beds per room, each a cubical without a ceiling to separate it from the other bunk rooms, each in one of the single floor bunk rooms (2nd, 3rd, and Fourth, with the 1st floor being a Chinese restaurant). We have so little in the way of normal boundaries, that to become at ease with these complete strangers, we are, in a way, forced to learn more about them, to become friendly, to establish friends, and to live as best we can given the circumstances.

I wonder if that's not always the case during transitions for humans. Times of transition are periods where strange things happen, where our normal laws and rules are obliterated, and the only constant is change. We find that the conventions we can normally depend on in an artificial area, are no longer applicable, privacy is a luxury, not a right, and we cannot be sure of anything that we own will remain our own without protecting it (both in padlocked lockers, and in forming bonds of friendship with those around us so they will not attempt to steal from us).

We Live Our Lives By Stories

There are few threads that commonly connect human beings, that every human being that we think of as “human” experiences. There are so few things about which we can say “All humans that we consider to be humans, not just beings who are wearing human flesh but are not human in how they think, have experienced with certainty.” Parenting is not one, there are many orphans who have never known their families, their mothers nor their fathers. We can rule out war, because there are tribes of peoples out there who have never known that there were peoples beyond themselves to war with until civilization finally found them. It is not theater, or writing, for those are fairly recent creations of civilization. But there is one definite constant, and that is the tradition of telling stories. All societies tell stories, and all stories follow the same patterns. We live our lives by these stories, and think of our lives in terms of stories, because that is how we have always, and probably always will, explain the world to ourselves, and we can see this because there is real evidence, from the Monomyth, to Jungian Archetypes, to the 2, or 20, or 36 or however many types of narrative you wish to support at any given time, all pointing to common literary experiences that hold universally.


Now, for the single greatest resource of collective archetypes, tropes, and various tools of story telling, you should go look at Tvtropes.org. This website is an enormous wealth of various literary and narrative based syntax by which we can find similar threads in all stories, and each page includes not only a break down of the “trope”, but also go into examples drawn from various types of media, as well as real life examples. I lay this down as the first bit of proof, that if we did not, on some level, define our lives by the stories we tell, how could we attribute narrative tools and mechanisms to real life peoples and events? I challenge you to spend time browsing on this website for any period of time without beginning to think “hey, I know someone like that”, or “yeah, I know a situation like this” about a real life thing or person. In fact, go do it a little right now, then return here and finish reading, it’ll give you some insight into exactly what I mean by “narrative tools”, a term I’ll be using throughout this post and feel needs little explanation at this point (I will go into the term in depth later, for the moment just think of them as types of plots, characters, and events that go on in stories).


Now, the simple fact that we can attribute narrative tools and tropes to real life things, people, and events is not enough to claim that we define our lives by them. I ask you this though? How are we taught our first lessons in life? When we are young and listen to bed time stories from our parents, or they play audiobooks for us on the nights they are too tired to read to us themselves (and in my case, it was always both, first a bed time story, then fall asleep listening to an audiobook). These stories do more for our development than we might think. They instill in us values, world views, thinking patterns, and reasoning abilities based upon what we hear and relate to when we are young. Jonathan Young put it best in this article when he said:

These tales are psychological mirrors and we become more complex as we mature. The storytellers intentionally loaded the adventures with heavy symbolism to reveal more meanings as we develop a deeper awareness of ourselves. Bedtime stories have enormous influence over our identities. People identify with certain characters in the stories they heard in childhood. To some degree, many live out these stories, largely unaware of how much the old tales may be shaping our lives. 

Nothing could be more truth than this statement, and these stories remain true, on some level, inside of us throughout our lives. Little Red Riding Hood tells us about how we should avoid strangers and beware dangers, as well as instilling the sense that authorities can and will save us when all seems lost. The Three Little Pigs tells us how hard work and dedication will protect us from danger and reward us in the end. And is there a person alive today who does not know the story of the prince and the dragon? Told and retold a thousand times until we don’t even think of it as a story anymore. The princess is kidnapped by a dragon and the prince rides out to save her, slaying the dragon and bringing her back to the kingdom to be crowned king and marry her. It is something so integral to how we think of the world that a thousand teenage girls each year wait to meet their “Prince Charming”, their knight in shining armor, and end up horribly disappointed. They have it PROGRAMMED into them on some level to want a boy who is handsome and brave and rescues them from danger. At the same time, the boys are instilled with a need for physical prowess, an idea that there are things a boy does and does not do, that they have to be there to save the girl and fight some imagined or real dragon for the right to deserve her. This is but the simplest example of how stories shape our lives, but it is such a basic one that it has come to have a name all it’s own: The Monomyth.


The Monomyth, as we understand it, is the Heroic Journey, and was has most famously been explained and analyzed within Joseph Campbell’s seminal work: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The story is simple, it tracks the progress of the hero through his journey away from the world he knows, into the depths of hell and adventure, through some transformative experience, to triumph over the evil that drug him away from the world he knew, and back to the real world, his home, transformed and with skills he can apply to make the world he once knew a better place. For an incredibly instructive diagram of these events, I encourage the reader to look here. Read through that list counter-clockwise, and you’ll no doubt think of a thousand different legends, stories, and tales by which you can place it. The most obvious being the Lord of the Rings, but similar examples can be seen in Harry Potter, Eragon, and other modern tales. You can even apply it to real life. We set out from the world we know, we are transformed, we go through hell, we learn something new, gain a powerful skill, and overcome the challenge we face before returning home, our new skill in hand, to make our world better. Then, we once more experience the call to adventure, and once more we seek out a new skill, a new ability, a new experience, to overcome the challenge at hand, and a thousand, thousand times throughout our lives we will live out that cycle until our dying breath.


So we’ve proven that, at least on some level, that we live our lives by plot types. But what about character types? Do we see the world in terms of character archetypes? I would say yes, definitely. And not just in terms of characters, but in terms of events and situations in real life. An archetype is a kind of universal, it represents a thing, a very real thing, a symbol of something simple yet complex all at the same time. An archetype can be a character, or a situation, or a location, or an item, as long as it fits the base definition of that thing. Jung was one of the first to go into the "indefiniteness of the archetype, with its multiple meanings" (Collected Works of CG Jung, 16:497), and you can get a more in depth look into how archetypes function and what they are on the A.R.A.S (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) website. Most powerfully, at the end, it says:

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us (CW8, 342).

Think about that for a moment, think about this, and then think about the tropes and archetypes you browsed through earlier when reading TvTropes (you did browse it right?). Symbols are how we understand this world, and Archetypes are the most primal and basic kind of symbols, a writing mass of work throughout human history all interconnected and indivisible from one another, infinite and expansive and simple all at the same time. Things that are complex and divisible into infinitely smaller units, yet at the same time so simple that we can apply them over and over again to the most basic of human interactions in real life. That is what an Archetype is.


Let’s take a closer look at one of Jung’s Archetypes in particular, Anima and Animus, or the Syzygy. In principle, these are the man who completes the woman, and the woman who completes the man. I’m sure not a single one of my readers can fail to think of a couple who seemed so completely opposite of one another, that they it left the mind boggling as to why they had gotten together. This might give us some insight into that. It’s certainly a common trope within videogames and literary narratives. Look at Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter, opposites, the bungling clumsy boy who seeks to do what’s right even if it means (and sometimes especially if it means) breaking the rules, and the girl who is the opposite side of the same coin. Studious and proper, always sticking to the rules and trying to get things done “the right way.” Is it any wonder the pair end up married in the prologue of the last book? (If this is a spoiler for you, go get a life, please do not clutter up the comments section with complaints. Thank you in advance.) In even simpler terms, almost everyone believes in the idea of a soul-mate, someone who is your perfect match, who in their relationship with you fills in the weaknesses of your own personality. I know I do, I’ve seen it happen, and almost every one of us has experienced it on some level. We meet someone (or sometimes witness it in a pair of other someones), a pair of complete opposites who seem content together and love one another deeply. What can be more basic than this in human life? And yet we define it by a story, by an archetype, we take our cues from things like the Prince and the Dragon and a dozen Disney movies we grew up watching just to figure out how and where and why we should act in particular ways. Can there be any more obvious evidence of our dependence upon story telling?


Okay, so we now have pretty solid evidence that our lives, that is to say, modern lives are defined by our stories. But has this always been the case? I think it must be, because there is an enormous body of work in this direction, dating all the way back to the Renaissance in Italy. The most recent works can be seen in Northrop Frye's Theory of Narratives, in George Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, and in the almost ubiquitous “20 Plot Types” that permeates so many writing classes and guides throughout our society. There are tons of these, ranging from 7 plot types, to a single one, to as many as 69 different plots. Some argue that this means there is no “set number of plots”, and yet he simple fact remains, however, that they EXIST. We can actually put names and formats to them, and while some are simply more broken down forms of others, and some stories are hybrids of various plots, and some stories even include multiple plots running in tandem. This doesn’t change the fact, though, that we have a set of names for these plots and what goes on inside of them. We have defined them, and we define them because we experience them. You cannot define something you have not even conceptually experienced. Stories are powerful for this reason, we relate to them because we see real life situations inside of them, and we see this universally, and always have done so. Every story can in existence, from the oldest to the newest ones can be defined by the narrative tools and tropes and archetypes that they use, even if we cannot, exactly, place a set definition on them when all the building blocks are put together.


We see our lives as stories, and we live our lives by them. We have always done so, and we can see this in how tropes and archetypes permeate our lives and the oldest of stories. The divine pair of Syzyngy, the Anima and Animus in how we see true love and soul-mates, the Monomyth and the heroic journey as how we develop and overcome challenges, and the relationship of real life situations to the plots and stories we tell ourselves. We read stories, and we tell them again and again because they are true. Not in a sense of true that they really happen, but because they tell us, through symbolism and archetypes, how the world functions, and we expect the world, on some level, to function as if it were a story being told to us by reality.

Fate and Freewill (A prelude)

I'm writing this as a prelude to something that I will be posting later on (about Narrativism actually, hopefully that one will give you a good idea of my specific take on the world), but for now I want to talk to you about my thoughts on Free Will, Self Determination, and Fate. Now, Self Determination and Free Will might seem like the same thing, but for the purposes of this post, please think of them in the following ways:

Free Will is actually having choice, that is to say, you are not predestined to do anything.
Self Determination is the actual belief and assumption that you have such, and acting in such a manner, whether or not it is true.

This is a fine line, but an important one give how I spoke of Self Determination and Value previously. Self Determination is not invalidated by a lack of free will, it doesn't matter whether or not it is COSMICALLY or PHYSICALLY possible to make real choices, only that we perceive it as such. If, indeed, we are all predestined and we will make the same choices no matter what, then Self Determination can still exist given the definition above.

I will state here and now that I make my decisions based on Self Determination, I assume Free Will exists, and I try not to allow myself to blame Fate or a similarly nebulous source for my failures or successes. This is not to say I do not accept that predestination and Fate or similar mechanisms might exist on a cosmic level, making Free Will an illusion that we perceive only through our belief in Self Determination, but I do not allow the possibility to be used as a crutch.

Now that that is out of the way, let us look more deeply at how these things function. Fate and Free Will are things that greatly interest us in this day and age, and have been ever since Newton proposed the idea of a clockwork universe (for more on this, see the second paragraph and down of this work), where if one could see the starting positions and velocities of all things in the universe, one could perfectly predict the future with advanced enough mathematics. Now, the ideas of Fate and Free Will have taken a large place in our psychology for much longer, one can look at Descartes for an idea of this as well, his works on proving the existence of -anything- at all has significant implications on Free Will (after all, if we are merely a mind existing in a void, our perceptions controlled by a demon, then our choices are not truly our own by based on stimuli provided by the demon controlling our perceptions). But I choose Newtonian Determinism as a starting point because it was one of the first SCIENTIFIC theories to bring into question the existence of Free Will. After all, if one can predict the future, then one will know what choices are made. If Newton's theory of a clockwork universe is true, then all of our interactions, every firing of every synapse of every mind, is all plotted out and has been since the beginning of time. This theory is the basic outline of the first of several possibilities for the existence of Fate and Free Will. Newtonian Determinism is in the first camp, or the "Fated" camp. "Fated" means our universe runs on a tapestry of Fate, all choice is an illusion, we are predestined to run through our lives in the exact pattern defined at the beginning of time, and will continue to do so until the universe burns out.

Outside of the "Fated" camp, there is also the "Implied Fate" camp, in this set up, there are things that will happen no matter how we struggle against them or try to stop them. We have choice, but ultimately our choices are either to go with the flow of Fate, making it easier on ourselves and working within history to allow what will be to happen, or to struggle against Fate and suffer for it, as what is predetermined will happen no matter what. A webcomic named Erfworld actually runs through this idea fairly succinctly, and it appears to be a major element in the fictional religion of the Qun from the video game Dragon Age from Bioware.

The next possibility is one of "Fateless Ones", that is to say, MANY of us are fated, either by mechanisms of the "Fated" camp, or by the "Implied Fate" camp, but it doesn't matter which one, in any case, there are a select few who, by some means or another (whether they are born that way, they found the celestial cheat code to unbind them from Fate, or they just lucked out at some point in their lives), have true Free Will. Their decisions matter in ways ours do not, and they change the way the world works on a monumental scale. The rest of us only have Free Will, effectively when in reference to how we react to their decisions, as Fate has no hold on them or the way things react to them, only on the after effects, the ripples they leave in the world. This is actually the driving focus of the video game from 38 Studios: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, where you play the Fateless One who is cut loose from Fate after being raised from the dead (making the player character unique in all the world and obviously primary protagonist material).

Finally, there is "True Free Will", and in this camp there is no difference between Self Determination and Free Will, there is no such thing as Fate at all, only probability. Nothing at all is certain or predetermined, only highly unlikely. When I kick a ball, it is only "highly probably" that the ball will go soaring in the opposite direction, rather than, for example, transforming into a pumpkin and splattering across my kicking foot. In such a world, Free Will, our choices, actually matter tremendously, and there is no one to blame but ourselves, and very occasionally more mechanistic forces of nature, when things go horribly wrong.

Of the three, I prefer to act as if our world lies in the "True Free Will" camp, not letting the idea of mechanistic forces of the cosmos forcing my hand into this or that act as an excuse for what I do, or what I fail to do. In actuality, I believe in the "Implied Fate" camp, since that is the one that actually makes the most sense to me. There are things in this world that are predetermined, past actions, or Newtonian Determinism, or Historical Imperative, or Narrative Causality, or some equally nebulous and cosmic force compels history and mankind to follow certain courses of actions, punishing us when we fail to do so, or outright oppose it. I try not to let this belief effect my actions, but it I find it interesting to think about all the same, and hope I've given my readers something to consider as well.

Worth, Value, and Importance

Worth is a loaded word. Worth is one of those words that means so much, and has become something of a taboo word to apply to people. In our world of special little snow flakes, "Everyone is worth something!" I'm not so sure this is true. Worth means value, it means that on some level, you are important, that on some level, the world would be a lesser place for the loss of you or whatever the object of worth was. With this in mind, we can say that to be worth something, you must leave the world a better place than it would have been without you. The world must have been made better by your actions and what you left behind to have been of worth.

I don't think this is unreasonable to say. I think this, by itself, is something we can all admit. The problem is when we have to argue whether or not a person was of worth, whether they, by their decisions and actions, left the world better for their presence. It might be that they make awesome pies, or they painted a wonderful picture, it could be anything, provided the world was a brighter, more fulfilling place for it.  By this definition, those who go about, doing nothing, not creating, simply existing, thugs on the street, lazy children, layabouts and people who just don't do anything, could be seen as worthless. And this would be true. It is cruel to say, but it is true. The teenage thug who does nothing except mug people, smoke on the corner, and assist his gang members in whatever activity they decide to do, could easily be seen as worthless. This, is not to say, they are valueless. Unrefined oil is practically worthless, but it has value, value is not just what you have done or are capable of, but what you have the potential to do. No one on this earth is without value, though there are quite possibly many worthless people, people who are valuable for what they might become should they choose to pursue it.

This is important to recognize. Too many people believe they are "special little snow flakes" that they have their own irreplaceable talent, that they are IMPORTANT. This is not true. Importance is not something any of us here reading will likely ever have. Importance is how much the world as a whole views you in terms of value and worth. Most of the readers of this blog, including it's writer, could die here and now, and relatively few people would know about it or care, where as someone like the president could die this very moment, and it wouldn't be an hour before most of the world had heard about it. No, we must be willing to admit to our children, and to ourselves, that in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of us are not important at all. We have value, and we may have worth, but we are not important. Further, we have to impress on ourselves that we are worthless until the moment we can say "yes, the world would have been a darker, less fulfilling place for my absence, if I had not done this or that, it would not be a better world." At that moment, we can say we have worth. And the more we can say that about ourselves, the more worth we can believe ourselves to have. What we do have to impress on everyone is that they have value, they have potential, they have the capability to do a great deal with their lives, maybe not everything or even anything, but that they are capable of having worth, of making the world a better place, and they can do so without being special, or important, but by just being themselves.

Opinions on Libertarianism and Self Determination

Something has always irked me about the Libertarian view, and that is how incredibly naive it is. Just like Communism, it works perfectly on paper, but it fails to take into account something basic: Corruption. Libertarians believe that the government should have either a minimal or nonexistent role in regulating the economy, and while there are merits to this view, it ignores the simple fact that people with loads and loads of money tend to spend it to secure their place, they spend it to ensure others cannot threaten their power, and usually the best method of doing so is by attacking methods that allow economic mobility. After all? If you're the only one with money, and you see money as power, then you see yourself as the only one in control, you see yourself on top of the world and completely secure. This unfortunate, and all to human habit, of hoarding and sabotaging the efforts of others, is why Libertarianism cannot work in our world today.

The counter argument of course is that big government, governments that get too heavily involved in regulating the economy, tend to squelch entrepreneurial spirit and prevent growth, which can be true if the government is too heavy handed. But the simple fact of the matter is that the purpose of government is to maintain order and allow tomorrow to be very much like today, which was pretty much like yesterday. The purpose of government is to keep horrible things from happening to us, and the economy is far too big and influential a thing to be allowed to run around without some kind of controls on it. One needs to only look at what happened to Wall Street only a few years ago to see that, quite clearly, when the economy starts to plunge, it takes quite a few people with it, even if they had nothing to do with the cause of the plunge. Something so powerful HAS to be controlled, it can't simply be left in the hands of private interests who do not have what is best for the average Joe on the street at heart. The purpose of governments are to maintain things so that disaster does not strike out of no where at those who are not responsible for such disasters, and to help secure the lives and livelihoods of those who are struck by those disasters that cannot be avoided or slip past the government's guard. Now, this means, obviously, that some freedoms have to be given up, but the question becomes: "Are they the IMPORTANT freedoms?"

The most important freedoms we have are those that permit Self Determination. That is to say, the ones that permit us to actually make our way in life, in the way we choose, so long as it doesn't interfere with others choices at the same time. Libertarianism believes it is defending this, but it fails to do so in actuality. To be able to self determine properly there must be choices, and a world without economic regulation almost always will end with monopolies, a lack of choices, only a few options that are not actually options but really just a bunch of people working together to keep prices high and using their funds to ensure that political maneuvering doesn't undermine their goals. There is no real malevolence in this use of money, I highly doubt the rich and powerful of the world wake up every morning and say "I'm going to go stomp on the throats of the poor so they don't get as rich as I do." I just think it's human nature to use all of one's available resources to defend one's place in the world, and as long as those that suffer for those choices are not visible to you, nor being shoved under your nose, you won't think too much about it. What leads to corruption is not some inherent, deep, evil associated with money, but simple survival instinct combined with a lack of perspective. Self Determination is protected for the few, and to them they see nothing wrong with doing such. They fail to recognize that the purpose of government is to protect everyone that is a citizen under that government, no matter how much in taxes they pay, and no matter what their social class. When an economy becomes deregulated, the government stops being able to control it, and then becomes controlled by it, as wealth is constantly accumulated with those who already have money. The purpose of a regulated economy is NOT to redistribute wealth, as so many Libertarians seem to believe, but to keep money MOVING. When money stops moving, economies halt, and the machine of civilization begins to slowly grind to a halt, and then finally fall apart. As the purpose of government is to make sure this great, vast machine never falls apart, it behooves any sensible government to maintain regulations, but not total control of, all aspects of the world that can harm the machine of civilization. Our right to Self Determination stops exactly where it begins to allow the choice to attack the machine that allows us to Self Determine at all.

Henry Jenkins and the Effects of Transmedia Works

We define ourselves by our stories. We have defined ourselves by our stories since the dawn of sapience in our species. Our stories are how we explain the world, and they are how we convince others to change the world, and how we explain ourselves to the world as well as how we explain the world to ourselves. Stories have always been a kind of universal thing, something that everyone does and can comprehend. While nothing else in our collective of societies and cultures could be called universal, the commonality of telling stories is all pervasive. Henry Jenkins, professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, has studied how stories transmute and are used when subjected to multiple forms of media in a continuous whole. The official term for this is transmedia, and one of the most interesting aspects of it is how mutating and transforming as more and more it comes into the hands of normal people rather than specific artisans. One of the Henry Jenkin’s biggest contributions is to the study of transmedia in this manner. He is a public intellectual of the highest degree that has changed how we see the consumption of media and story telling in our new age of interactive and visual media.

Henry Jenkins is a public intellectual who focuses on the study of communications and transmedia objects and trends to explain how and why humans communicate with one another, both through study of stories and of how those stories are told. Henry Jenkins was born on June 4th, 1958, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a journalism and political science undergraduate at Georgia State University. He went on to earn his masters in communication studies at the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. in communication arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later married and went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before finally gaining a job at the University of Southern California, where he continues to teach at the Annenberg School of Communications. His achievements today include a number of books on the subject of transmedia including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. It can be said that few, if any, public intellectuals have done as much as Henry Jenkins has for our understanding of how people communicate with one another through modern media.

Firstly, we must define what a public intellectual is. An intellectual is someone who is an educated, knowledgeable, expert on whatever it is he is talking about. Usually this means an academic though it does not have to. University professors are usually intellectuals on their own subject for example. A public intellectual is one who attempts to take knowledge that is codified in the slang and terminology of his own profession, and decode it for the general masses who do not have the same level of experience or background that the intellectual has, and thus require someone to explain the entire thing in far simpler terms than might normally be done. A public intellectual makes it their goal to explain to as wide an audience as possible their opinions and ideas, as well as educate them on the concepts that underpin those opinions and ideas. A normal intellectual would only write for people who have the basic level of knowledge required to personally understand and decode a profession’s slang and terminology, the public intellectual puts no such restrictions on his own writing.
    Henry Jenkins is most certainly a public intellectual. He has a masters in Communication Studies, and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts, as such, it is almost indisputable that he knows his subject: communicating ideas and such through modern media, since that is the focus of both degrees. One need only reference his autobiographical page on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, which he explains that in one of his books, Textual Poachers, he defines himself as an Aca/Fan(also the name sake of his blog) someone who is both an academic and a fan of various forms of media. He explains on his blog that through that book he was trying to bridge the gap between academics and fans of various types of media so they might better understand one another. This places him quite firmly in the realm of the public, since he was not directly addressing other academics alone, but attempting to explain things in terminology that both academics and laymen could understand so that his point might be delivered. From his credentials and the purposes of his work (and the majority of the works on his website) we can see that he is most definitely a public intellectual.

Now, most interestingly we can see how the world is transforming so that transmedia is becoming less and less an issue of corporations funneling money into new projects for an existing franchise of a particular setting or story to tap new demographics, and is more and more dependent upon consumer interaction and zeal. As Jenkins explains in his article, Transmedia Storytelling 101 (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html), transmedia is a method of media meant to be used in a collective. That is to say, it is designed with the very idea that networking will play an important role in the telling of the story and the aggregation of information about the story and the setting it is in. It lives and breaths on this idea and without a social network of some sort, whether it be Facebook, cell-phones, or even just random forums on the Internet, without a social network, transmedia cannot function in its entirety. This is an enormous prospect for our world as we know it, it is huge, important, critical even to our understanding of human communication. 

This reveals something both terrible and wondrous about the transformation of the art of story telling. With a transmedia work, the individual characters and plots become almost insignificant when compared to the world that is being built. Where in a single book the setting exists merely as scenery and is important for that reason alone, it is not the reason you are reading the book. You are reading the book because the plot grips you and the characters intrigue you on some level. While these reasons might be the reason you are initially introduced to a transmedia work’s world, it is usually not why you continue to explore and look into the rest of the works within the overarching transmedia work. Jenkins uses The Matrix franchise as an excellent example, since while it started as a movie, it now includes several comics, a line of toys and action figures, several video games, an anime, and several books written in the same universe, as he points out in "We Had So Many Stories to Tell": The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html). You do not buy or consume any of the other products because you found them fun, or enjoyable, or intriguing in and of themselves, though they might be all of those things, but that is secondary to the fact that they were related to the initial object of the transmedia work that got you hooked into the world of the transmedia work’s story. You don’t usually buy the action figures made for The Matrix because you saw them and thought they were cool in and of themselves. There are many other action figures with cooler features, more options to play with, and that may even be cheaper that you could just as easily buy if it were an enjoyment of playing with action figures in and of themselves. You buy The Matrix action figures because they are action figures of the characters in The Matrix, because it is related to the central work you enjoy, and suddenly, you are able to continue the stories with your own imagination by acting things out with the toys! And it is this last fact that has transformed our society in ways we could never have believed.

Something relatively new to the world, something that found its roots in one of the first transmedia works ever made: Star Trek, is fan-fiction. Never before in history did someone sit down, and decide to write a story about some other kids who lived in Tom Sawyer’s and Huck Finn’s home town and had interactions with both of Mark Twain’s iconic characters. No, that started when people began to be more interested in a setting than they were in plot of the work they were consuming. Now, it is hardly possible to find a work of any sort of media that has not had some sort of fan fiction written about it. A fan might draw pictures or make a comic, or, as is most common across the Internet, write a story. There are entire websites devoted to allowing people to expand and explain and talk about and write stories within the universe of a single particular setting. Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Star Trek are the works most famous for generating enormous amounts of layman, or fan, created fiction to add to the setting of the central work, but almost everything now has somebody making some form of extra media to add to the whole of a single works franchise in some way, shape, or form.

Suddenly, the art of telling a story has gone critical, it has fractured and fragmented and transformed into something strange and wondrous, and only recently have people even admitted this was a real phenomenon. Before Henry Jenkins’ research, the commonly held belief among academics was that audiences passively consumed media, rather than taking it a part and rebuilding it within the rules in place within the setting of the media. Suddenly, academics have to admit to the fact that there is nothing special in taking an interest in a particular work of media and deconstructing and reconstructing and analyzing it up and down for meaning, because it is something that is constantly done by audiences and fans to remake those works with their own imaginations. Academics cannot claim, as they so often do, a kind of elite status in this analysis of works of art and fiction and literature. (“The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals?”, http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2007/08/public_intellec.html) Normal people are taking charge of processes that we once thought had to be controlled and directed by someone who was an artisan, and while the artisans certainly put out cleaner, critically better works, we cannot say that they are absolutely necessary to the process any more once the ball has gotten rolling.

Without Henry Jenkins, we may never have learned this, or at the very least, it would have taken far longer. Jenkins’ work has transformed how we approach media, it has changed how we advertise, and how we actually make and distribute media. Without his research, would we have noticed that consumers want to participate more in their chosen works? Would we have developed the complex Alternate Reality Games that preceded works like the video game Halo 3, Nine Inch Nail’s album Year Zero, and the film District 9? By codifying and studying how audiences interact with settings that transcend a single form of media, he has set off an explosion of transmedia that, in turn, has unlocked enormous creative potential locked within the consumer populace who was once considered meek and passive.

Morality, and What It Means to Me.

Many people have said many things about morality, what is right, what is wrong, and nothing conclusive has ever been reached. Even so, I feel it is necessary to talk about my own personal views about morality, if only so that readers might understand where I am coming from, what my base line view is. I will speak about this morality quite a bit, though perhaps not with the term moral in future posts, since it's such a loaded word, people don't like to talk about morality really, after all, it's all opinion correct? Maybe, maybe not, but I think that something universal can be said about morality, or at least, personal morality. My personal morals can be described in two sentences:

What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.

What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.

These pair of sentences are my moral axioms. I know that I have done wrong when I have significantly broken one of them, that is to say, I have done something that is not only good for myself, but benefits me at the cost of others. This, I feel, is something people have lost touch with in our world, especially the overwhelming majority of libertarians, social conservatives, and neoconservatives, as well as the vast majority of corporations and the people who pander to them. It was the lack of these axioms that has slowly, but steadily destroyed the tax system and economic regulations that were set up in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, it is the lack of these axioms that causes people to stand aside and watch as laws steadily strip us of our social liberties, of our environment, of everything that makes tomorrow worth living for. It is the lack of these axioms, I feel, that on the whole has caused more ills for humanity than everything else combined in all of human history.

Before I continue, I wish to fully explain what these axioms stand for, how they function for me, and then move onto how a lack of them has caused more evil in human history than any one human has ever committed, and how it is the lack of them that has allowed the most evil things to be done. At the same time, it may be a truer statement that rather than completely lacking these axioms in their personal mental vocabulary, most people simply do not consider them, think on them, or consider the implications, which is every bit as bad as lacking them completely, if not worse. I'm hoping that by this time you have had a little time to mull over the pair of sentences above, and have actually bothered to consider them a little by reaching this point, if you have not, then I ask that before continuing on, read them once more:

What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.

What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.

On the one hand, our first axiom is simple and self explanatory, its meaning should be immediately obvious to everyone. When I do something that benefits myself, there is absolutely nothing that says it helps anyone else, or even that it avoids harming someone else. Let us consider the act of theft for example: I walk into a store, grab some item on sale, and bolt. I've certainly benefited myself here, but I have caused some amount of damage to the owner of the store. I might not even have caused damage to the owner of the store, whoever owns the store, assuming it is a chain store for example, most certainly has more than enough money to cover the loss. The damage done to that person is probably infinitesimally small to the point of practical nonexistence. But what about the store employees? The ones who must answer to the owner for the theft? What about the security guard or the system put in place that did not prevent me from making my theft, surly someone in this interaction between the person who actually bought or produced the merchandise to sell, and myself who stole it, has been harmed by this action. Thus, we can see that simply because something benefits myself, that doesn't mean I have not harmed someone. At the same time, the first axiom does not state, nor even imply that what is good for me, necessarily harms others, this is an important distinction to make, as far too many systems of morality seem to believe that certain pleasurable acts, "victimless crimes" are in fact morally reprehensible. There should be no law preventing me from, for example, singing in the shower provided I'm not harming anyone else by it (and I do hope that my singing is not so incredibly awful that it might actually cause someone who heard it physical, mental, or spiritual harm.). At the same time, there should be no law preventing me from drink alcohol or partaking of drugs that do not cause me harm or do harm to others (for example, marijuana). If there is no victim of a "crime", then how can it legitimately be called a crime?

The second axiom is trickier, and this is the one far, far too many people do not consider, I am especially looking at the libertarian crowd in this case, for they seem to actively ignore evidence of the truth of this statement in many cases. When I do something that is good for everyone, or support something that benefits all, I am part of that all, part of that everyone. When I support a tax that pays for better schools, when I support an additional fee in some process to gain a type of license so that it might pay for better funding to park rangers, I am hurting myself a bit, I am losing something of myself in the immediate, but the benefits are enormously spread out to everyone, myself included. The same can be said of social security, public health care, and in general, a whole lot of things the government should be able to provide yet does not due to a lack of funding and from political lobbyists who out of selfishness seek to destroy such efforts. This is a much more obvious example of something I'm giving up in order to benefit not just myself, but everyone, and in a far less obvious way. When I give money in taxes to public health care, social security, the fire and police departments, and make efforts to defend those things, I know, since I am obviously well off enough to be at least middle class in our society simply by virtue of having the free time to post this blog and pursue a career in game development as well as maintain a multitude of geeky hobbies (and those are all expensive), that I will likely never ever use any of these services. My house is unlikely to be burned down, or robbed, or that I will ever find myself in a situation so economically desperate that I will require social security or public health care. So why do I support it? Sure it's useful for other people who need it but if I'm never likely to use it in my life, then why should I support it? How is the second axiom maintained? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will never use these things, that I will never need them. Bad luck, disaster, or any number of horrors can dash my good fortunes, and I may have need of these things in that time. Simply by knowing there is a safety net there, I am better off than I would be without it, able to take greater risks, strive harder to succeed, worry less about falling into squalor or economic ruin, because I know such things will be there to catch me before total ruination. Not enough people seem to realize this, not knowing that they are shooting themselves in the foot by choosing lower taxes over greater benefits. Similar things apply to internet neutrality, unions, economic regulations, and all of these highly "liberal" and "progressive" things that give power to the government to protect us from what it truly be protecting us from: Random Chance and Human Evil/Stupidity from fellow citizens, not from nebulous, far off "enemies" and "terrorists".

Now that I have fully explained both Axioms, it comes to the idea of why such things have lead to the worst human evils. In the words of Winston Churchill, who was quoting Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And unfortunately it is almost programmed into the human consciousness to do nothing against evil if it does not benefit us directly to do so. Our instincts work against us, they tell us to do only what benefits ourselves and those who are immediately close to ourselves: friends and family and people in our immediate community. Our instincts tell us to fear opposing anything that doesn't immediately effect us, especially when it is being enacted by those we see as powerful, for that is to risk security. This instinctive cowardice is what has allowed such evils as Stalin's reign of terror, the holocaust, genocide, McCarthyism, and heaven knows how many other evils and atrocities across human history, and will no doubt allow for infinitely more. Those who do not consider these pair of axioms, who allow themselves to think only of themselves and their immediate peers, while not evil in their intentions or actions, certainly allow for evil to occur, and will continue to do so until they begin to contemplate, and act, upon the spirit behind these axioms.

Introduction and Thoughts on Interactivity

Hello, and welcome to Blower Boy's Thoughts and Musings, a little blog I've made because occasionally (say, once a week or so) I get it into my head something that just needs to be said, and I might as well get those thoughts out there. Now, rather than talk about myself, my world view, I'm just going to give you a preview of those things by telling you that I'm a young adult, male, born in southern Louisiana, the Acadiana region to be specific, and am a student of interactive media (a fancy way of saying game design) at the University of Southern California. For this reason, as you might imagine, I am quite interested in interactivity, that is to say, two things that interact with one another. This might sound like it is stating the obvious, but considering how much the term "Interactivity" gets bandied about these days, I feel it is appropriate to state the obvious in this case.

For the moment I'd like you to watch the following video:
Gear Ring Video - Youtube

Now, this is an example of interactivity in a way that has not occurred before, at least it has not occurred on a large scale. A ring is not an interactive object, it is not designed to be. You put it on your finger, other people look at it. The ring might have significance in some way, it might designate your marital status, or your high school or college, it might simply be a display of wealth or any number of other things, but it is certainly not meant to be interacted with. You put it on your finger and forget about it, it is decoration. But here, we have something that is new, that is fascinating. It is a ring you can DO something to, and it will visibly have something done to it. Now, obviously this can be done with any ring, you can turn it about your finger, or wear it on different fingers, but they are not constructed with this in mind, they rarely, if ever have been constructed with such things in mind. Yet, here we have a ring that quite obviously is meant to be played with and interacted with. This may not seem all that miraculous to you, but consider that more and more, such objects are appearing in our homes, in our clothing, in our pockets. More and more we are finding our selves in an increasingly interactive world, where things are meant to be touched, to change, to be done to, rather than to sit there and look pretty.

What could have brought about this change though? I think the answer lies in the computer. The computer was a device that not only could, for example, have things done to it, but it could do things back in response to the things done to it. Yes, there have been machines throughout the ages that have functioned like this, but none so effectively or with so wide a basis in technology that we have today. The computer, I feel, as a device than can react in complex and meaningful ways to a variety of stimuli, has transformed, fundamentally, how people today think and feel. The gear ring is an example of this in a fundamental way, since it is a normally non interactive accoutrement that has been made interactive. Don't believe me? Look at the other things that have been made interactive in recent years: Phones (look at your cellphone and tell me it isn't interactive), advertisements (those little game banners on top of your webpage), comics (quite a few interactive webcomic games out there now, but a good example you can find on drowtales.com in the form of Path to Power). I could go on, but my point is made. Take a look around yourself some time, find things that have become interactive that even ten years ago were passive devices.