Archive for September, 2008
POW Bros: the medium is the message
First of all, I absolutely cannot believe I missed this. For anyone else who missed it: last week, games journalist (and, full disclosure, friend) Jared Rea made a video poking fun at John McCain’s “Prisoner of War” campaign angle.
I love that this is the web 2.0 equivalent of a political cartoon, tailored to suit the tastes of video game enthusiasts.
Obviously, the video went viral—so viral, in fact, that it was actually picked up by the Crooks and Liars blog. “Probably the most juvenile thing I’ve ever seen on this site,” snipes the very first commenter. I cackled aloud when I read this remark.
But let’s say that, instead of a video about video games, Crooks and Liars had posted a political comic strip, and in that strip, McCain is playing Poker or Go Fish or Uno with his political opponents. And say that McCain, in this game, keeps playing a ‘POW’ card. Let’s say that happened. Would that commentary be considered “juvenile”?
But then, and for me this is maybe the most interesting part, Jared found himself defending his work on his home turf, right there in his blog’s own comments. Now, to be fair, plenty of folks were impressed with the video’s astute, if spectacularly silly, shorthand analogy. But a lot of people are uncomfortable when video game iconography is used as a metaphor for current events, it would seem (as we saw earlier this month).
One man expressed his distaste, going so far as to lambast Jared, in the comments section, for “making a political message thinly veiled with a video game shell, when you are first and foremost an entertainment writer. What does any of this [have] to do with video games?”
Is Jared, as “an entertainment writer,” obligated to conceal his political bias?
More to the point, though, I’ve seen this particular complaint pop up at several mainstream video game sites, and especially at those sites where editors are permitted to post to blogs. Hey! You review video games! What gives you the right to talk about politics, current events, war, or culture? Or, and I’ve seen this argument around, Hey! I come here to talk about fun stuff! Knock that off!
I wonder with what frequency critics of other media—movie critics, for instance, or music reviewers, or book critics—are accused of doing the same. I do think it’s somewhat strange, and a little disheartening, that even fellow gamers are suspicious of politics-and-gaming’s overlap.
Is the consensus, even within our own gaming culture, that the medium of games is too lowbrow for the projection of potentially engaging metaphors?
Can’t tear my eyes away from Mazemod streaming radio station
With the hopefully-temporary dissolution of my beloved Muxtape, I’ve found myself relying on other streaming music sites and services.
But I was completely unprepared for Mazemod.
More like AMAZE mod! Apart from the fact that I had no idea how completely rad Amiga chip music is, look at this website! Let’s face it: this is what William Gibson thought the internet would look like.
