The reviews of new XBox Live Arcade game Toy Soldiers seem less about the game itself and more like a referendum on the Tower Defense genre, of which every reviewer seems to be a little sick. Though it's a genre I happen to enjoy (in spite of the fact that tower defense is not well complemented by console controls), playing the World War One-themed Toy Soldiers did not once make me think "Tower Defense" except in reference to the game's critical reception. It made me think of other war games.
Video games do not capture the subtle quality of ennui well, and the violence they depict is explicitly not arbitrary. For this reason, games have jibed well with the journalistic historical record of World War Two described in the first-person accounts of Pyle and Murrow and even Liebling, but not with the accounts of First World War captured by writers like Robert Graves and Paul Fussell. I chalk this up to the change in journalism's cultural position between the wars.
Journalism during World War One could propagandize with the best of them -- just look at the Spanish Civil War -- but its propaganda was arbitrary. It appealed to anyone who could read, including working people swept up with the educational reforms of the late nineteenth century. The prose of the Hearst and Pulitzer presses came wrapped in exclamation points and was about as authoritative as the cartoons scrawled like graffiti against its ornate walls. This makes them entertaining to read but of little use when trying to tell the history of the war in retrospect, and so they have been forgotten. What we have instead are the accounts of war captured by writers like Robert Graves and Paul Fussell. These tell the story not from the modern reporter's point of view, with all the globetrotting and classlessness and upper-management access that implies, but from the point of view of the soldier. And what the soldier has done in every war for eternity is wait around -- often in terrible conditions, for days and weeks and sometimes even months -- to see whether of not he will die a quick and messy death. World War One was unusual in that it featured many soldiers from many classes. Not only were many of them writers, but many of them were modernists--which is another way of saying they were recovering romantics. They experienced the war first hand and they were expert in depicting the exquisite languors of the soul while bored or incapacitated. Imagine Coleridge composing "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" while in recovery from being injured at the Somme, and you sort of have it.
Except in certain creative, game-breaking circumstances, no death in Chess, Risk, or your average video game is permanent. The same is true of the war video game, whether experienced in the mortal first person, as in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, or in the god-like third person, as in Command and Conquer. Nothing feels more removed from death to me than the gameplay loop of your typical competitive online first-person-shooter, which is like the line that forms in front of a slide at a water park: one splashes into the clorinated, flavorless bath of digital death and then queues up immediately for more. On a scale of optimism, I think this ranks fairly high.
Yet one could not mistake this gamesmanship for Romanticism. The romantic impulse is always aware of the boundaries of frame-- of real death, of the "reality" outside the poem. Tennyson, in his "The Charge of the Light Brigade" -- though it was written contemporaneously with the Crimean War battle from which its title derives -- is always aware of that battle's conclusion ("When can their glory fade?"), and his formal duty to memorialize the dead. Though Tennyson's circus-tent ejaculations--"Forward, the Light Brigade! /Charge for the Guns!"-- are unremarkable today except as cautionary examples against the Romantic impulse, they would not be possible in an atmosphere of endless police action, in which our writers are "embedded" during strong pushes, kept generally entertained, and so feel the need to not show that excitement. To be stimulated and not exclaim is the mark of a professional. If you'll remember, Bush was castigated for his own "Charge of the Light Brigade" on May 1, 2003. He learned afterward to speak in the language of slow accumulation.
I expected the popular music of World War One to be similarly out of touch with the modernism of its soldiers, setting Tennyson's Romantic sentiment to music. Reviewing the music recently, I found the opposite to be true (a great collection of sound files exists here). The music of World War One, about World One, is often witty and sardonic. It details the problems of being there, the trench life and dampness and terrible rations, rather than always the longing for victory or home. Detail is key to the success of any grift, especially the grift we must pass on our selves in order to keep going. This was was of course a discovery I'd made earlier in Paul Fussell's work but forgotten. More intriguingly, the songs were built to be sung and reiterated endlessly. Many of them have source melodies predating the war, and could be recycled wholesale for the purposes of wars to be fought, as George Cohan's "Over There" was exhumed 24 years after it's birth for World War Two era James Cagney vehicle Yankee Doodle Dandy. The songs themselves, considered separately, depend heavily on mnemonic repetition--the repeated choruses are often nearly as long as the verses, and the verses themselves revolve around repeated lyric themes. One imagines soldiers getting drunk on reserve behind the line, singing these songs endlessly, twisting certain words in the chorus to make them last through one long, free night of excess before having to return to the quiet horrors of the front. This may sound odd, but they seem to me to have been used, and received, much like video games are used and received by soldiers today. They are "dumb," ideologically rich, and a great source of catharsis.
World War Two marks a universally acknowledged change in the way journalism was performed and in the way it was perceived. Before World War Two, journalists were sensationalists and ambulance chasers. After World War Two, they were professionals and adventurers. What is not commonly acknowledged is that after World War Two, literature changed, too--at least, in part because of the change in Journalism's status. Modernism ended abruptly in America after the war. Every marquee writer in America after that had some association with the periodical press: Truman Capote with The New Yorker, Norman Mailer with The Village Voice, Hunter Thompson with Rolling Stone. None of them were adventurous writers in the modernist mode. They were literally adventurers. They took their habits from the reporters of World War Two, who sold papers not with modernist exclamation points and invention, but by literally leading the fanciful, exciting life of the classless, postmodern writer and sending back quiet accounts of the truth, expensing trips to Morocco, Tangiers and England back to their papers. (Surprising that no one has yet floated a video game about a World War Two photojournalist.) Put simply, Romanticism and Modernism transform the ordinary stuff of war into something extraordinary. Postmodernism insists that war is extraordinary all the time.
The reason World War One has not been recreated as a first person shooter is because most of the stories we have about that war are incompatible with the loop of that genre's gameplay. For readers, Goodbye To All That, All Quiet On The Western Front and Storm of Steel are still very much in print, and viable cornerstones of literary culture. Difficult to create "fun" from what those men describe. One does not want to wait in a trench for hours or days only to receive the call to go marching into the maw of a mounted machine gun and get torn apart in seconds flat. Every reporter given a chance has avoided it: it's not news.
What I'd call the "style" of the current military sinkhole we're now fighting in Iraq and Afgahanistan is similar, only in as much as it, too, is a war fought in a context shifting notions of nationalism, in which the ground experience seems to consist of long periods of absolute boredom punctuated by fatality-rich moments of batshit horror. The differences of scale between these wars--and this difference is vast-- does nothing to change the fact that young men so armed require not just entertainments but the verse-chorus-verse of endless entertainment. The current lie we tell our selves, that our soldiers tell themselves, comes not in the form of song but in video games. Both the songs of World War One and the video games of the American adventure have their charms. Playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 this week, I found myself in the truly ridiculous-- and ridiculously entertaining-- position of capturing a close-set series of checkpoints only to backtrack over and over again to recapture them in an frenetic game of tag. There is no objective to this capture, no final gain to be made, no liberating duty, and this is refreshing. We are told to do something and we know it will be an endless thing: the checkpoint will never be held. Yet everything looks brilliant, the guns have weight and realistic detail, the dust licks up around my soldier's feet. In this weird collision of lie and truth, we all get to report a fact about a war. I ran behind a wall and then this guy had a rocket launcher and the wall totally collapsed but he missed me and I took his flag.
Now, back to Toy Soldiers, the first compelling World War One game yet created. In this game, one is given a vast, open field, as opposed to the close quarters of a first person shooter. Up close, the field appears real-- it is pocked with trenches, and when mortar fire hits it, clods of dirt fly into the air. Yet, pulling back, one finds toyboxes instead of military barracks, and instead of a sun, there is a desklamp. The effect is jarring and quite unique. One participates in this game much as characters participate in their roles in The Twilight Zone, with a keen sense of the uncanny, of playing a role. To play, one sets up small units: machine guns, mortars, cannons, even units designed to distribute chemical warfare. This is all very much like a real time strategy game, except that one jumps into these units after setting them up, triggering a small orgy of personal violence against the enemy AI. The AI comes by way of the axiomatic World War One timetable, one wave after another. Keeping certain numbers from entering your "toybox" is the object of the game.
The adjectives this game inspires are downright Edwardian: ghastly, horrid. One actively sprays German soldiers and horses in this game with a chemical agent, watches them slow their march, turn green and die. One fires a mounted machine gun into row after row of approaching human torsos. One jumps into biplanes knowing full well that one's final strategy will be a kamikaze dive into a tank. That the enemy AI breaks into pieces and disappear upon being so mistreated only underscores the horror of their expendibility. None make a tactical retreat. All are ordered by an unquestioned game mechanic to press ahead. There are moments in which one, prepared in advance, simply waits for the Enemy AI to send the next wave.
There is a sense in which many reviewers are right about this game. It is a hybrid RTS/Shooter with none of the RTS's complicated strategy nor the shooter's visceral thrill. Yet one may say something similar about World War One itself, or the literature surrounding that war. It is neither here nor there, neither Romantic nor Modern. Its self-conception as a professionally-conducted war was proved a sham. No one ever called it The Good War--such sophistry required a professional class of journalist. Its effects were instead uncanny and went unreported except by artists. This game captures all of this in a way I find it difficult to describe. One never feels agency in the game. No matter the result, its mechanics seem fated rather than willed. In most "God" games, the God in question is the player, a perfect indifferent bureaucrat. In contrast, to this atheist, it seems that God (or at least the game designer) stands to the side of Toy Soldiers, subtly directing fatalities in the guise of the player's flimsy free will. And this is somehow the fun of it. There is a Romantic pleasure in taking up a biplane, knowing you'll never come down again, or to take the reins of a mortar unit you know you'll have to replace again before the battle's over.
In subtle ways, this is a modernist, rather than a postmodernist, take on video-game war. It may even be the first to make that distinction.
Toy Soldiers Saturday, April 24, 2010
Rae Armantrout Saturday, April 17, 2010
Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize! I offer this as news in case you haven't been reading Ron Silliman's blog, which right now looks a little like a wine and liquor factory outlet, if wine and liquor were Rae Armantrout.
Isn't it strange how the Language Poets split into really good and really dumb factions, and all the good ones were women? Is this some concrete legacy of feminism? The demand that the abstractions of law answer to the body?
I won't say. The last time I was around a big group of poets and mentioned my recent successful efforts to fund my entry in an MFA program, one of them--someone who's always been friendly to me, who knows I'm a poet-- asked me in a fakey voice whether or not I was going into fiction. A fair question under normal circumstances, but I took it as a slight for my having recently written stabs in the direction of the elderly avant-garde. No mas, I'm done. I don't have the weight to throw around, I'm spent. I mean from here on out to shower love, pity and affection upon my peers, to cradle their weak, babylike heads in their time of need, to touch sugar water to their parched, anemic lips.
My question is, where are Lyn Heijinian's epaulets? The gauntlet comes down here. Her work from the seventies culminating in My Life is the best work done by anyone in that decade, and I'm including John Ashbery.
Anyway, congrats to Armantrout. Though big-time book prizes, like sausages, do not bear close scrutiny, in this case a good author is getting her due. Start with the book for which she earned the award, Versed, and then work your way back. Veil is currently the only survey of her work, though I suspect there is a Collected Poems on the way for this newly notable presence.
This is Rae Armantrout, from The Boston Review:
The Fit
In a fit of repugnance
each moment
rips itself in half,
producing a twin.
*
In a coming-of-age story
each dream
produces me:
an ignorance
on the point of revelation.
*
I'm at a side table
in a saloon
in Alaska,
my eye on the door
where a flood of strangers
pours in.
*
The door or the window?
It's morning.
Malcolm McLaren Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Malcolm McLaren, dead as of last week, is the test case as to why the principles of Situationism are entirely compatible with, and in fact reliant on, the principles of executive privilege as a creative force. No one believed he could credibly espouse both. Yet both systems believe that ideology is the first principle of creative life, rather than the toxic sludge it leaves behind, so where's the contradiction?
Hiring and "excommunicating" exploited creative workers in a floating cloud of superintellectualization about what people find credibly attractive: this is now the basis of our economy. As go The New York Dolls, so goes Raoul Vaneigem. McLaren deserves our respect, I guess, for illustrating this so clearly. Today, only the boss can change our relation to the economy. Only the boss can be a rockstar.
But, above all, good riddance! And long live John Lydon!
Pragmatism, Torchwood Friday, April 2, 2010
Great moment from the fourth episode in the five-part Torchwood: Children of Earth. Spoilers ahead.
During the credits, the immortal but all-too-human character Captain Jack Harkness used to repeat the very X-Files-y mission statement of the Torchwood organization: it goes something like, "we're joining together to fight the future." I'm apprehensive about the future, sure, but I consider myself on the side of those trying to pry it out with the Jaws of Life, not kick its face while it's stuck in the overturned car. Yet! It's refreshing to hear someone express their anti-modernism so plainly. As Cindy Adams says, only in science fiction, kids. At some point, someone thought that was a little too on-the-nose and cut it, but the sentiment remains crucial to the show.
Torchwood futures are to be fought, for sure--they are sticky and drooling and overpowered and weird-- but they're also terribly seductive. In the first few episodes of Torchwood's run it featured an elixir to control the minds of the opposite sex, a game controller that could talk to ghosts and a lovingly murderous robotic ex-girlfriend. In fact, sex comes up a lot. Alien technology is fun in Torchwood's world, even if it may blow up the world, or the galactic center, or what have you. Normally I dislike the just-for-laffs yardstick most reviewers use to judge SF (the best hilarity is performed with a straight face), but Torchwood seemed to do a great job of mixing seriousness and playfulness in a way that reminded me of Buffy.
Then the third season's Children of Earth came along, and things got grim, grim, grim. No more fun with toys.
Fortunately, things aren't Battlestar Galactica grim. No one is yoinking at their hair and doing actorly jazz hands while crying. The scene I'm thinking of in particular features a group of pressed-shirt government middle managers who've been given an ultimatum by a collection of literally multiheaded intergalactic businessmen whose principle export is children, which children are in turn hooked up to giant plungers and sold as a type of drug. The ultimatum is: give us ten per cent of your children or we'll gas the Earth and everyone on it.
The pressed shirts very calmly weigh their options. Do we fight? We're not sure how. So we give them the children. How do we choose them? By lottery, someone suggests. And so they begin the process of organizing the drawing of straws. Someone pipes up, softly at first, then more assertively: she says, not my children. Every mother and father around the table seconds the notion. Of course, there will be provisions made for our families, of that there can be no doubt, says the round-table leader. There's a clearing of throats, and everyone gets back to the drawing of straws. the woman who was quiet at first speaks up again. She says, let's just say it. Given that we're protecting our own children, how can we not protect those children who are most useful to society? Shouldn't we take from that portion of society that will grow up in unemployment and poverty, that'll tax the state disproportionately? There's more clearing of throats, a few weak protests, but the motion is passed.
Nothing I've read in the Critical Theory section of the bookstore has shaken my faith in pragmatism more than this quiet, tense little performance.
Thanks Thursday, April 1, 2010
Thanks to Joanna Yas and my buddy Bryan Charles for having me read at the KGB Bar last night! It was great to meet Dennis, the owner of the place.
And wow! Ish came bearing all these great books from Canarium Books for me to peruse!
Looking over the Readercon schedule and getting psyched about that, too. Where's Burlington?
Will this be the best summer ever? Will my health hold out?