A Few Thoughts Just Short of 31

Yes, I still have a tag for "introspection." Some angsty, mid-20s parts of you die harder than others, I guess.

So I've been trying to write this blog post for a few weeks. "Trying," I guess, more in the sense of "needing to find thirty spare minutes to actually sit and type" than "this subject matter is so wrenching I can't see to type through the flood of my tears," but having said that, I also like to think that I'm always doing something more...umm...meaningful in addition to performing the mechanical act of writing just to stay in practice, and maybe I've been trying a little harder to do that "something more" than is really necessary. So, here goes.

At first, this post was going to be about everything that's happened in the last few months: I became Dr. Bunting officially, I finished my dissertation, I gave an amazingly fun colloquium in front of a significant percentage of my department's faculty and graduate students, I climbed some really gorgeous mountains, lived in Portland with my college roommate for a week, ran eight miles in one go, learned to ride a road bike and then pedaled 26 miles, chopped my own firewood, learned HTML and a little CSS, got another essay accepted for publication, won a postdoctoral fellowship...and those are only the things that I can think of offhand that have happened since my last real blog entry back in April. I have something like six hundred pictures up on Facebook and Google right now from the last few months, and honestly lately I've been taking them as much to "capture the moment" as to make sure I actually remember what I did day-by-day in the maelstrom of things-doing that this summer has become when I look back on it in a few months or years. It's been intense, but also great, and I've been really happy to be able to direct some of the near-boundless energy I've learned to summon while semi-functioning as an overworked grad student for the last few years toward other interests and pursuits for once, at least for a little while.

But as you might have guessed at this point, it's a bit ridiculous to try to go back and sum everything up, no matter how much blog-writing might insist upon itself as a form of minutiae-laden self-documentation. I've been away too long, and summary would just bore both of us, writer and reader, at this point. 'Tis the price of a (rather wonderful) way of a life lived a little bit further away from the internet than usual, I suppose. Suffice it to say this: whatever the ultimate physical and existential results of my two months of scholarly and literal wanderlust have been, they're likely a significant part of my DNA now, and describing my hand to you would be a bit impossible for me. It's been one of those brief but intense episodes of time that occasionally happen in life, usually as the result of a tragedy and not a graduation, that end with you suddenly realizing one day that you're not sure if you'd recognize yourself from two months ago if he was standing in front of you. I can't really say how I've changed because it was so sudden and fundamental, but I definitely have, and I think it's been good. I suppose time will tell.

Melodramatic much? Yes, I guess I've still got a bit of 2005 left in me yet.

...AND I WILL DRINK THE COLORS OF THE WORLD!

While trying to find the true summit of Moscow Mountain on Wednesday, I sort-of stumbled upon a grove of old growth cedars, and it was amazing. So that is the thing that I will write about.

According to the internets and some people in Moscow who should probably know (or at least know more than anyone else around), these trees are in the neighborhood of 1,000 years old, and, walking into the grove, you can feel it. I can't explain how, but the feeling is there, an ancient-ness only slightly offset by the picnic table that sits in the middle of the grove. The oldest cedars in the grove don't even really look like cedars anymore: they're enormously wide at the base, strikingly tall, and warped with age, the typical striped-bark pattern of a younger cedar tree twisted by a thousand years of incremental growth.

I walked around in the grove for about a half-hour, unconsciously in a hushed silence. I took some pictures, but they fail to really convey much of anything useful. I've posted them on Facebook, but I won't repost them here because it's sort of pointless. At some point I realized that I was, again unconsciously, standing at a respectful distance from each tree, while flies and other short-lived bugs climbed up and down the bark just as their bug-ancestors had for the last however many bug-generations. I realized I was being a bit silly at that point, and leaned into one of the larger trees and was struck at just how rooted (no pun intended) it felt. I've touched very few things in my life that date back to around the time that Beowulf was first written down, and even fewer of those very few things have been alive. As I stood there under the sun that was arcing above the cedars for something close to the half-millionth time, I felt one emotion overwhelming all others: humility. Coupled with this emotion was the thought that if I'd ever had a church, so to speak, this was probably it.

Interesting.

I don't mean to turn this into a post/argument about religion, but religion/worship was the thing on my mind while I hiked back out of the grove and to my car, and I want to get those thoughts down in a slightly clearer fashion, hopefully without offending anyone.

Now, worshipping a tree might seem like a silly idea (unless you're a druid, I guess), but the thought is built upon a lot of things that I've thought about religion for a long time (even while I was a Christian and, later, a Buddhist, before giving up on those labels entirely). First, religion is about transcending death. Death is the one (ultimately final) experience that our minds simply cannot compass. Nobody comes back from death to tell you what it's like (except Jesus, but I digress), and most likely it's just your body ceasing to work and your thoughts disappearing from the world. That's a pretty scary, nihilistic end to an individual human life likely peppered with moments of transcendence and vibrant, pulsing relevance. One moment, you're eighty or forty or twenty or ten years' worth of experiences, contributions, connections, and emotions, the next moment you're a sack of flesh dead on the ground, likely having pooped yourself. It's all rather inglorious, and the fact that death can happen, theoretically speaking, at any time, is frankly pretty horrifying. So we've created stories in which there is something else, in which there is an overall point (and sometimes even a reward) to a well-lived life. Or stories where we just keep living, but somewhere else.

Death is inexplicable. Religion seeks to explain it. What's more, religion more generally seeks to provide a definition to the otherwise rather indeterminate human project. You live, you die, you impact some people, some people impact you, but it's all rather messy because the only judgment you have to base the quality of those impacts on is subjective human judgment (yours and others). So, God or whoever provides this judgment for you at the end. Great work, what you did was the right thing. Good dog, here's a treat. Don't suck at this or you go to hell. Suddenly, there's an obvious answer to this indeterminacy...the problem is that it's provided by a mysterious, immortal deity, not the other humans that we have to live with on earth, the only life that clearly, obviously, agreeably exists for every single one of us.

Here's where humility comes in. I've no problem with constructing a system of belief or values that's based in staving off death. Death is scary. I don't ever want to die, and when I do, I'm sure it will be horrifying. I'm all about dealing with that fear instead of being mastered by it. But I think one does this best by acknowledging one's place in the scope of life, and the cycle of birth and death, rather than tossing that aside for a human-centric afterlife fantasyland that carries the very real possibility of encouraging us to ignore the importance and scope of what we do here, and now, on this earth.

Which is, of course, in the great scheme of things, not that much.

For me, the humility implicit in this view is the heart of whatever religion I have. It's what makes a thousand year old cedar numinous instead of just a plank of wood. It makes me feel small, insignificant, and rather than a cause for nihilism, I see this as a cause to be grateful. Grateful to have the opportunity to live a brief time within a system that is a hell of a lot larger, more complex, and older than my brain could ever possibly understand, let alone surmount.

I wonder, then, how can it possibly matter who or what made that system, or why? Why is it so hard for us to accept awe over mastery? Maybe if there still more 1,000 year old reminders around, we'd find it easier to see ourselves as small?

It's long seemed to me that gods are, generally speaking, representations of the people who worship them. Religion comes from within, not from without, and throughout history it seems like it's been the gods that take most after humans that have caused the most trouble. There are worse lessons to learn from death than humility.

TWO-PART PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

MAKING OUT WITH SOMEONE OF THE SAME SEX DOESN'T MAKE SENSE TO ME ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, BUT IF OTHER PEOPLE ENJOY IT AND IT'S NOT HURTING ME DIRECTLY, THEN GOOD FOR THEM. ISN'T NOT HATING SOMETHING JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND IT ONE OF THOSE SKILLS YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO LEARN WHEN YOU BECOME A RESPONSIBLE ADULT? I THOUGHT SO.

ALSO, WELCOME BACK, BLOG, IT'S BEEN AWHILE.

Thoughts on Record Store Day from Someone Who Lives in the Desert

Apparently this is my first post in quite awhile. Huh. I suppose I've had a lot going on, what with finishing my dissertation and gaining super-secret doctor-powers and all.* But still. I hate to neglect ye olde blogge. I've actually been writing quite a bit in my new pitiful-for-normal-people-but-enormous-for-overworked-grad-students amount of free time: bits of songs, bits of poems, a new short-story-type-thing and a few nonfiction narratives...and that's not even counting the two essays I'm revising for (hopefully) publication. So yeah...lest the lack of blog-activity lead you to believe that I haven't been following through on my promise to write more: I'm writing a lot. But I'm also playing outside a lot, and cooking huge meals a lot. And those three things combined bring me as close to my ideal zen-puppy-like existence as I can rightly get.

So typing that into GIS made me aware that this is apparently a thing.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, though, all that blather has fuck-all to do with what I want to write about right this second, which is my ambivalence re: Record Store Day. If you don't know what Record Store Day is, you probably just closed this tab and went across the room and threw on your favorite Third Eye Blind CD, or A-Ha cassette, or Kanye West iMusic thing-a-ma-jigger, or Native American ululation wax cylinder, or whatever the hell you listen to music on instead of vinyl. If you're still here, I'm writing specifically in response to this article, which I think pretty evenhandedly explains why I found it hard to get excited about Record Store Day this year.

In fact, now that I've linked to that article, I realize that all I really want to do is rearticulate the same points less articulately. Which is sort of pointless...but then again, isn't a blog, by definition, pretty pointless? Here we GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I don't have to explain myself to you.

So, Record Store Day. A day in which lots of brick-and-mortar, independent, and often financially embattled music stores attempt to attract new (and presumably repeating) customers once a year by getting in extremely limited selections of already rare and obscure vinyl and CD albums, singles, and EPs, and charging well over what "regular" vinyl albums, singles, and EPs would cost to the lucky few who actually get in line early enough in the morning to snag the rarest stuff while sending everyone else home dejected. Make absolutely no sense yet? Moving on.

Next, those who do get their hands on the rare stuff sell it on eBay for an inflated price, and many such albums pass from owner to owner this way for months or years, never leaving the packaging because to actually take the music out and, you know, listen to it would ruin the item's collector's value.

Better still, there appears to be no logical reason that this hipster-consumerist (hipsumerist?) holiday couldn't easily be executed in such a way that would actually entice more people to buy vinyl and frequent their local stores.

Instead, we have a situation in which:

1. Much of the music purchased on Record Store Day never even gets listened to in the first place.

2. Much of the profits made off of those rare pieces of vinyl and CDs never actually go to artists, or to record stores but instead to private eBay sellers.

3. Many, many people want to buy something, and yet there is a purposely limited supply for some reason, meant to enhance the specialness of record collecting, I guess.

4. Many customers are turned off from going back to small, local stores after having to wait in line for hours during their first-ever visit since the staff can't handle the demand RSD generates one day a year because they aren't set up for the indie rock equivalent of Black Friday.

5. Ultimately, the whole experience ends up replicating the stereotypes of small, independent record stores as nerd havens where people who aren't in the know get treated like ignorant Philistines and vinyl purchasing as a hobby only for people who are interested in paying fifty dollars per album and competing with other buyers to score the limitedest limited edition of everything.

"Fuck you for not being me!"

Tell me again why this was a good idea?

I'm all for getting people out to independent record stores. Moscow has a great indie store, Deadbeat Records, staffed by a bunch of great people, and they've thrown pretty excellent RSD shindigs the last two years. I went last year and poked around the "used" bin for fun, bought a few cheap singles, and then went home. I didn't even try for any of the limited stuff because, despite having called the store months early and had them order copies of four different albums for me. They simply didn't get them in, they said, explaining that you can ask the RSD mothership for whatever you want for your store, but the odds that you'll actually get it in stock (especially in Moscow, Idaho) are pretty low.

What's infuriating is that just at the one store I stopped in at, there were five or six of us customers ready to throw down around a hundred bucks or so each on new records, but because of RSD's manufactured limited-edition nonsense, that was five hundred bucks that our local store didn't get because they weren't able to stock any of the things that any of us big spenders had hoped to buy. I ended up spending my money on used climbing gear and like to think that my life was the better for it, but the whole episode just drove home how mixed a message RSD gives to the consumers that it's supposed to be romancing.

This year there was only one thing I wanted: Phish's first-ever vinyl release of their first album, Junta. I knew for an absolute fact that there wasn't going to be a copy at Deadbeat, so I just fished (hah) around online for a few days, then by the morning of RSD, when copies started popping up on eBay for $300, I gave up and went and did other things, resigned to the fact that there was no way to get a new piece of vinyl by my favorite band because of Record Store Day.

Which leads me to my primary suggestion for making RSD more consumer-friendly (and thus more record-store-friendly): cut out this limited edition bullshit and cater to people who just want to own and listen to music. Isn't that what buying music is about, listening to it? And isn't that supposed to be the draw of vinyl, that it sounds better? Do record stores want to encourage "record collection" or do they want to stay in business while disseminating awesome music to people who want to pay to enjoy it?

Why not just have a Record Store Day where lots of your normal inventory is on sale? People can still get albums by their favorite artists, and there's still an incentive to come to the store on a particular day, but it's just a price thing.

Or, better yet, why not have a Record Store Day where lots of new vinyl albums are released, but are released on a non-limited-edition basis? This is what has, ultimately, come to gall me the most about RSD. People will stand in line for hours and gouge each other's eyes out for, say, a new M. Ward 7 inch, and yet much of M. Ward's catalog of normal, non-special-release albums are more or less unavailable on vinyl unless you're willing to pay exorbitant prices for old pressings on eBay. It's frustrating to me that labels are willing to go through the effort of making goofy limited edition pressings of things like Feistodon while entire discographies of their best artists are begging for a normally-priced, normally-alloted vinyl release.

Take Phish's Junta for example. The pressing of the album that came out on Saturday was limited to 5000. Knowing both the Phish and audiophile communities as I do, I can more or less guarantee that a press four times or more this size would have sold out just as well. In addition, the band regularly releases "special" 7 inches like Mike Gordon's Moss Remixes and the Two Soundchecks single when most of its studio albums have never been released on vinyl, and the few that have are well out of print and can only be heard by people willing to pay upwards of $500 for one record. Why not participate in the next ten Record Store Days by releasing one studio album per year at a price that most of your fans can afford and in a quantity that won't result in pile-ups at the cash register and absurd eBay auctions? Such an approach would make stores a ton of money, get music into the hands of the fans that want to hear it, and get rid of all the manufactured drama that so many people assume is inherent in vinyl "collecting."

How does this not make sense? WHY ARE WE LIVING IN HELL

* The power that I gained was actually just a +1 to my Number Of Cheeses Combinable On A Grilled Cheese skill, which was already at 3 due to previous leveling up.

This Is What the Male Equivalent of a Feminist Looks Like

Unfortunately.

So I wanted to write up a response to this article, which I posted on Facebook the other day. Mostly because when I read it the first time, a lot of what it said struck me as really important, and yet, because it's Cracked, the valuable points have to be tangled up with overly broad generalizations and dick jokes, which means that the general response seems to be to just laugh it off as a joke piece, or to take umbrage at what are obviously intentionally inflammatory statements that are meant to come across as "offensive" for comic effect. But I wanted to take a few long paragraphs to further explain why I think that the perspective the article offers is fairly unique within popular discourse about gender and why it's maybe worth looking past the dick jokes. My reaction was based pretty heavily on my own personal experience (when isn't it, really?) and so I'm just going to run down the original article's points and respond to each briefly. And then likely get a whole bunch of comments about how I just don't understand, because I'm a man! Whooooo!

First, the introduction. Really, all I have to say about this is that it resonates completely with my experience. Lots of men not only believe that women deserve to make less money and have less opportunities/rights than they do, but many of those men also believe that women have "earned" those disadvantages by being overly-emotional, untrustworthy whores. And many of those men actually flat-out hate women. As in, if it wasn't totally illegal, they might just keep a "wife" chained up in a cage in their basement, using her for sex and baby-production and nothing else...and hell, even though it's illegal, they might just do it anyway. I have met a lot of these "men", mostly through the manual-labor-type jobs that I've worked, but also in office complexes and academia. It's not strictly a blue-collar phenomenon, as evidenced by much of the right's recent woman-bashing. And what I've observed from working with these people (aside from the constant, instinctual urge to strangle them to death) is that their anger is actually rooted in fear. If they were completely at ease with who they were and with their place in society, they wouldn't need to hate women...but instead, the specter of WOMAN is the one big thing in their tiny, tiny world that they can't a) understand on a fundamental level and b) control directly. So, they are afraid. And, as almost always, that fear eventually mutates into hatred. Which moves us right along into the rest of the article, which I think does an excellent job of explaining how this hatred comes to be...

5. This. This is the root of it all. We men are told by our society that an attractive/compatible woman is our reward. The idea that we conceive of our own lives, necessarily, as narratives in which we are the protagonist (Wong uses the word "hero", but I don't see myself as a hero, and neither do a lot of people I know, so let's go with "protagonist" instead) makes a lot of sense to me. Considering our situation vis-a-vis our body and our eyes, and our memories, and all that fun stuff, how else could we see life? We are the main character, and though that main character never really "wins" completely (hint: you die at the end), everyone has goals, high-water marks, etc. that stand out as achievements, things that make your life seem worthwhile, whether they're pedestrian things like just being a nice guy and helping an old lady cross the street or getting that $200,000 a year job. And I think that it's fair to say that for almost all of us, men and women alike, one of these goals is to find a partner (or partners, or whatever your preference might be with regard to relationships/sex). So, if you're a heterosexual male, one of the high points of your narrative is almost always going to be the point where you "get the girl", and thus it's no big surprise that this is the center of a great many stories told via TV, movies, books, video games, etc.

During most of college and the beginnings of grad school, there was a long time where I thought that this was a really cynical way to view relationships, and that I, personally, was above the idea of "winning" a girl, or "being owed" anything. Me and my friends had, in fact, spent hours upon hours in our dorm rooms, and later at home and at the bar, bemoaning how all the "good" girls seemed to get snapped up by douchebags who wore flat-brimmed hats with stickers on them and who cared about things like Nickelback and professional wrestling. Just like in the movies, we all had attractive, intelligent female friends who continually got together with men who treated them like garbage and we were the guys who sat and listened to them complain about how crappy their relationships were because we were the "nice guys". However, unlike the movies, these girls never realized their "mistake" and came running to make out with us in the middle of the street during a rainstorm as the credits rolled. For years, this was frustrating to me: we would treat these women the way that they seemed to want to be treated, yet we were single while they dated guys that we could tell at a glance were not "nice guys". Eventually, though, I came to realize the irony here, which you've probably realized already. Our very attitude toward women, our considerate, "nice guy" perspectives, were just as tainted with this idea of entitlement as Bruno "Can You Spot Me, Brah?" McLargeHuge was. We were sure that because we didn't act like we deserved a girl, we deserved a girl. And we were pissed that we weren't getting her. And ultimately in our minds that we didn't get a girl was the girl's fault. She didn't understand the difference between the jocks and the "nice guys", man! Actually, yeah, I'm sure she did. She just didn't want us, because in a very fundamental way, we weren't as unique as we thought, but were instead just like every other guy out there. Eventually, I managed to overcome having this attitude, but it took a lot of work and almost thirty years...and I like to think of myself as a particularly self-analytical person. It's no surprise to me that lots of men go through their entire lives being mad at "women" as a general concept because they feel like they didn't get what they were "owed".

4. This one I won't say much about. It's just plain fucked up. I find a wide range of women attractive (I hope you get what I mean here, there's really no way to say it that doesn't sound creepy), and those that I don't, I still think of as human beings. If you're so zeroed in on a woman's ability to satisfy you sexually that you can't see women that you find unattractive as human beings, then your problems are well beyond the scope of what I'm able to comprehend as an empathetic being.

3. This one's pretty key. Again, Wong goes a bit off the deep end by making his point through talking about public masturbation, but the basic point is no less important for that. Men are more sex-centered than women (as a general rule). It's a biology thing: we're meant to make babies. Women are meant to have them and then take care of them. This doesn't mean women can't like sex too. But it does mean that by default, on a biological level, all women a man finds marginally attractive are potential sexual partners, even if it's just for a split second before culture/societal norms reassert themselves and you realize that we've decided that just banging every woman you lay eyes on is inappropriate. This is the way men function. I have talked with well over a reasonable sample size of men over the last fifteen years about this. And it is true. We choose to overcome this urge (most of us), but that does not destroy it. This urge interferes with our ability to think of women as anything but sexual objects, and so if you want to be a human being (see 4 above), you learn to make it secondary (or tertiary, or whatever). But it is there. We are programmed to have sex with all of the women, and the fact that we don't make us normal, well-adjusted, acculturated adult men...but that doesn't make that part of our brain turn off. I don't like the fact that this is the case, and it's made me feel dirty and gross and perverse for fifteen years and for every day of those fifteen years I've been working to overcome it...but it doesn't completely go away, because it can't. This is fundamental because, as I said, this is something women can read about, but can never understand in an embodied way, the same way that we can't understand what carrying a baby for nine months is like. Despite the fact that being a man is "the norm" and being a woman is unique and different and deviant (as per our cultural narrative), there are things about being a man that women can't understand, but have to make allowances to deal with if they want to be in a heterosexual relationship. More on this later, though.

2. This is pretty much an extension of 3, as I see it. That is, the biological penis-power I just talked about also manifests in the form of our desire to smash shit, to play tackle football in the mud, and to watch things explode. I laughed my ass off at the 300 reference in the original article, because it's so true: there's some part of a man's brain that wants the world to be like that. We generally realize that it's unreasonable and stupid and thus the world doesn't actually end up being that way, but the fact that we still express that world through our movies and video games and what-have-you says something, to me. I don't really buy the claim that this feeds into man-hate for women because "women took it all away", though. But this urge needs to manifest occasionally, whether it be through a game of football or whatever. That's not my way of providing an excuse for men to act like neanderthals all the time, but rather a request: if men can accept stereotypically "girly" things from time to time without a sarcastic eye roll, then the opposite should be true, as well.

1. Finally...this is the section that resonated most with me, and yet, at the same time, it's the section most prone to ridiculous overexaggeration. Wong essentially states that men's drive to impress women (whom we see, biologically, as sexual objects and, culturally, as rewards that are owed) has created the entirety of human civilization. That might be taking things a bit too far. However, I think the central point here is an important one. A lot of the stupid shit that men do, they do for women. Even those dumbass, chain-up-your-wife men I mentioned earlier. Many, many women don't seem to get this, and they can't, because they've never been a man. They don't know what it's like to navigate the concerns I discussed in 3 and 5 every single day, because they can't. And that's fine, as there are a great many things about being a woman that a man certainly can't understand. It's not a problem of intention: men don't suck at relationships (generally) because they don't give a shit. When they suck at relationships, it's because they care too much, but much of that caring is in a dirty, biological (and for many people, sinful) way that requires them to navigate a lot of internal bullshit often just to be able to say hello to a pretty girl.

I hear these stories about how men rule the world, and how women are subjugated in terms of the economy, in terms of basic human rights, in terms of having a cultural voice, etc. And I'm sure these things are true, because they are backed up by statistics, and math has no biological urges. But since I turned 12 (or whenever I started growing facial hair), women have ruled the world that I live in. Because amidst the few things that I want out of life, like time to pursue meaningful hobbies, enough money to stay fed and keep a roof over my head, a dog, a few friends that are like-minded and want to share various adventures with me, and a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with a member of the opposite sex, there is only one of those things that can unilaterally be denied me by forces completely beyond my control. I'll let you guess which one it is. While men trying to impress and "get" women might not have created civilization as we know it, it's certainly shaped my life to a degree that few other things have, and thus while I know that, in some ways, this and many other cultures are patriarchal and man-centric, from my own experience, I see a lot of that patriarchy just being constructed to control what it is I (and lots of other men fear): that, given a choice, women won't want to have anything to do with us. Is that a reasonable response to a completely neutral, biological problem? Of course not. But I think that in a lot of feminist discourse the motivation behind that response gets overlooked, because, again, women don't know what it's like to be a man.


Near the end of the original article, Wong writes "This is really the heart of it, right here. This is why no amount of male domination will ever be enough, why no level of control or privilege or female submission will ever satisfy us. We can put you under a burqa, we can force you out of the workplace -- it won't matter. You're still all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it." It's not really a problem that can be solved: there's an unbridgeable gap there, on both sides...but I feel like both sides could be addressed a little better, and a little more honestly, and that maybe as a result, both sides can understand each other a little better, rather than it just being the stupid, horny, powerful male against the petite, incapable, helpless female.

Any thoughts/personal experiences/etc.?

Baldur's Gate > Mass Effect > The Ending of Mass Effect > Your Mom

So I have a ton of video game blogs/news sites on my RSS feed. And the vast majority of them have been inundated with articles and editorials about the so-called Mass Effect 3 "controversy" lately. Now, I haven't played any of the Mass Effects on account of having old, slow computers and no disposable income. But I have been a Bioware fan since the 90s and have recently gone back to Baldur's Gate for my first playthrough in over a decade. In the process, I've run across some things that have caused me to have a rather strong opinion on the whole Mass Effect ending thing. Granted, as I said, I haven't seen that ending, so maybe that invalidates my opinion completely. But then again, we are on the internet, where opinions are even more like assholes than usual. Or something.

Oh, 2005.

So let's start here, because this is an especially good place to start. That article gives a good summary of the controversy so I don't have to, and it does so without coming down strongly on one side or the other.

Now, here's the deal. Games do not tell stories. At least, not in the traditional sense of what we understand a story to be. To paraphrase Tadhg Kelly's blog post that I'm currently too lazy to quote directly, traditional stories operate on dramatic tension (generally speaking: there can be comedic drama, "serious" drama, etc.). This tension is generated by the audience's lack of agency: sitting back and waiting for the dumb cheerleader to get butchered by the insane, zombie scarecrow while you scream "TURN AROUND, OH GOD, TURN AROUND!" is dramatic. If you were able to enter the movie and make the cheerleader leave the room, get in her car, hotwire it when the key refused to turn in the ignition, and then drive to the police station, the movie would cease to be dramatic. Being in direct control of the cheerleader's escape might be exciting in its own right, but it would not be dramatic, even if that's sort of what it would feel like. Drama requires a lack of agency, and that lack of agency is what makes a story worth hearing, or seeing.

So you see how video games break this system, right?

Hint: it's with this.

What videogames do instead is make you an active part of the story. Mario is you, to a degree. Commander Shepard is you, arguably to an even greater degree. The choices you make in the playing of a game make that playing -- your story -- unique to you. Even though many players play the same game, which is always ordered by the same code, their experiences are all going to be, to a degree, unique. Even if you and I are just playing Tetris, the "story" of each of our play sessions is going to be a bit different. If both of us play Mass Effect, the differences are more pronounced, and most likely more emotionally and personally significant. The way we each play the game is what creates that difference.

"Back in 1991, your grandpa turned the L-shaped block twice, and then he stacked the box block on top of that, and then he dropped the long block next to that...it was awesome."

But that's not all that's going on. There's also the code. The code makes the world. It defines the limits of the player's avatar's abilities to interact with that world. It defines how quickly the Tetris blocks fall. It ultimately decides when the game ends. The player (as opposed to the audience) gets to take part in telling the story of a video game, but the game's rules -- as designed and coded by the developers -- play an equal part. It is within the tension between the player's desires and the limits the devs have put on the player's expression of those desires that the fun, pleasure, excitement, angst, hatred, malice, screaming, etc. of playing a video game comes into being. It's what makes games games.

Well that, and a healthy dose of online racism, misogyny, and other assorted bigotries.

But both sides -- player and devs/rules -- are necessary. And that's what's seemed to go over the heads of the Mass Effect fanboy/girl nation. Mass Effect is not "your" game. Shepard is not "your" Shepard. The results of all of the choices you make were always preprogrammed into the games by the devs, and your personal journey through the Mass Effect universe was always, technically, reducible to a particular arrangement of assigned variables and series of conversation trees. To pretend, then, that there is no difference between choosing from a series of previously dictated options and getting to write your own ending to Mass Effect's universe is just silly. It's like picking up a Choose Your Own Adventure book, working your way to the very end, and then being angry that it's not just a blank page that allows you to scribble your own ending. If you want to write a story that goes exactly the way you want it to go, it's easy: I do it every day, and all it costs is the price of a pen and a pad of paper. But that's not what a video game is. A video game is a conversation between the player and the rules/devs/code, and you don't get to just deny the outcome of that conversation when it isn't to your liking. That breaks the entire tacit agreement that makes games fun in the first place. Of course, as I understand it, Mass Effect hasn't ever been particularly about player choice anyway; rather, it's been more about creating a huge, dramatic space opera and letting the player choose -- again, just like CYOA -- which direction the story might go next at predetermined intervals. In this way, I'd actually argue that Bioware's game-stories are less about player choice now than they once were.

I've really been enjoying Baldur's Gate lately, and a lot of it has to do with how little things are scripted, as compared to most contemporary RPGs and RPG-type games. In the post that I linked to above, I shared an incident that happened in-game recently, wherein I lost two of my party members simply because they couldn't stomach the thought of me defending a drow priestess, a member of what they perceived as an inferior race. Well, a few nights back, after some 20-odd hours of adventuring in my party, the same drow priestess suddenly left, with no real explanation other than insults about my intelligence, disappearing into the woods, never to be seen again.

Ungrateful trollop.

Similarly, I found myself in a position last night wherein I couldn't escape a claustrophobic mine tunnel choked at both ends with hobgoblins while keeping my entire party alive. The result? A headlong charge to freedom that resulted in an elf ranger that I had had in my party since nearly the beginning of the game -- some 30 hours before -- being killed in the middle of a random, nondescript battle, one of hundreds that I'd engaged in throughout the game thus far. These episodes, as I said, weren't scripted. Of course, I know that they weren't random and actually came about through some calculation within the internal logic of BG's main program (that's how software works, after all)...but there was something very powerful about the illusion of randomness that the lack of obvious scripting provided. I had no warning that the drow was going to leave. When she did, there was no fanfare, no big cutscene. I wasn't forced to swallow prerendered sentiment. She just left, leaving me to wonder what I had said, done, or not done in the last 20 hours of play time to make her do so, when I wanted to keep her in the party. Similarly, the elf's death was no grand, heroic spectacle. He died like most soldiers do: anonymously, unheroically, and that realism was all the more affective for its randomness. As I said, on some level this was still me making choices that led to a scripted, programmed result, but unlike in Mass Effect and many more recent games, that scripting was unobvious, and in that BG, for me, is the more interesting and engaging game type. I don't always know what the results of my choices will be. I often don't even know when I'm making choices. There is never any illusion of control, and thus I never expect to control my destiny. I can only hope that when I reach the end of the game, the conclusion will feel like a fair result of all of my choices, and if it doesn't, well, the game itself has taught me over and over again that we don't always get what we want, in no uncertain terms.

It makes me wonder how Mass Effect has (apparently) slowly indoctrinated masses of players into thinking the complete opposite. If frustration abounds because of the game's ending, maybe that's a sign that it's supposedly "realistic" and "dark" conclusion was not presaged by 100 hours of similar realism, at least in terms of how player choice was treated. If that's the case, then I guess I can understand a little cognitive dissonance on the part of the player when the end comes...but still, guys and girls, just chill out. You're only part of the game-playing process. If you got to make all of the decisions, it wouldn't be a game...it would just be you pretending with no consequences, and it would be boring. And then you'd probably complain about that, too.

If you want a game with a lot of player choice, a game where you can just be you, and the world that the devs have created just exists to empower your own possibly demented, possibly angelic fantasies, play Minecraft. Seriously. In a game like Minecraft, the story is almost entirely yours to write. But more on that later. I'm tired of typing.

Seriously.