entertainment

Social Networking as Entertainment

March 15, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

Sturgeon’s Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of music is crap, ninety percent of food is crap (unless you’re starving, in which case it’s life-sustaining crap), ninety percent of television is crap, ninety percent of literature is crap, and so on.

Sturgeon’s Law is correct. Ninety percent of everything is crap, which means ninety percent of the social networking being done in the name of democratization and personal empowerment is also crap.

What’s interesting about social networking crap is that it breaks down into two symbiotic categories which are opposite sides of the same entertainment coin. On one side we have ridicule, which makes us laugh, and on the other side we have righteous indignation, which makes us cry.

Comedy. Drama.

It’s as if social networking is actually a medium of entertainment, and only incidentally concerned with socializing or networking.

Adding to the appeal of social networking as entertainment is the fact that ridicule tends to generate righteous indignation and righteous indignation tends to beget ridicule, meaning there’s no stopping them once they get started.

Looking for laughs? Log onto any social networking site and you’ll find someone making fun of someone, which you can then like or retweet or comment on. If anyone has the temerity to accuse you of ridicule you can respond with righteous indignation.

Looking for justice? Log onto any social networking site and you’ll find someone standing up to someone, which you can then like or retweet or comment on. If anyone has the effrontery to accuse you of righteous indignation you can respond with ridicule.

(If you were in third grade you might be accused of bullying or playing victim, but because you’re an adult using expensive information-age technology you don’t have to worry about that.)

Like every other medium of entertainment, the ninety percent of social networking that is crap would be harmless fun if it wasn’t also inherently dehumanizing. Unlike every other medium of entertainment, participating in the generation of all that crap diminishes our ability to appreciate the remaining ten percent.

— Mark Barrett

Real-World Violence and Means

February 1, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

Unable to prevent mass murder by focusing on opportunity or motive, you are now reduced to considering how to limit the means of such monstrous acts. From the outset you know this is not a particularly promising approach to protecting innocent lives because almost any object, including the human body itself, can be used to kill. Other than wrapping everyone in a straight jacket it will be impossible to prevent human beings from injuring each other, but with judicious limits it might be possible to decrease the total amount of carnage that berserkers commit in a given calendar year. You won’t ever know who you saved, and you won’t ever be able to keep people from going berserk, and some people will still die, but you might be able to limit some of the fatalities that would otherwise take place when individuals do become homicidal.

Although you rightly abandoned your plan to incarcerate people by the millions based merely on broad suspicion about their potential motives for going berserk, because doing so would still fail to prevent mass murders among the remaining free citizens, your realize that the same was not true for those individuals who were incarcerated. Even allowing for the fact that they might be more likely to go berserk compared with their free counterparts, perhaps as a result of being unjustly imprisoned, by virtue of being locked up the potential for any individual to commit mass murder would plummet. While supervision and isolation would certainly prevent some violent acts from taking place, even in the general population where the opportunity exists to murder people en mass, the means of doing so would simply not exist. Even if prisoners went berserk with regularity, the total amount of damage they could do would be limited — at most — to whatever carnage they could cause with a shank or other weapon before others intervened en mass.

Leaving aside full-blown riots, the likelihood of a single individual going berserk and taking out twenty or ten or even three people in a prison yard is severely limited by the fact that they will rapidly find themselves outnumbered. If they had the right weapons the plan would have a better chance of success, but among all the institutions known to man prisons in particular are notoriously loathe to permit the possession of exactly those weapons that make killing human beings easier. For example, while many prisons allow prisoners to express themselves with paints or drawing materials, including tools that could be repurposed to violence, few prisons allow personal expression through use of chemical agents or explosive devices. Even if you are the baddest of the bad in Cell Block C, the fact that you can’t get your hands on the tools that would allow you to kill many people quickly means you’re limited in the damage you can do.

Unfortunately, when trying to limit carnage outside prison walls such prohibitions do not apply. Not only are people allowed to own a wide variety of products that can be used to kill many people in a short amount of time, as long as those products are legal they can stockpile them for that exact purpose and nobody can tell them you’re not allowed to do so. Only after they’ve gone berserk and killed a bunch of human beings — thus proving that they are criminals if not also mentally ill — can citizens, by law, be deprived of many of the means of mass murder. [ Read more ]

Narrative Context and Motive

December 19, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

In considering the degree to which interactive entertainment may trigger individuals to commit mass murder we have unwittingly fallen into a logical abyss from which we cannot escape. Hand in hand with any brain training that occurs while playing computer games is the narrative context in which interactivity takes place. Because it’s assumed, with some plausible justification, that brain training makes interactive works potentially more dangerous, the narrative aspects of interactive titles tend to be viewed differently when compared with similar narrative elements in passive mediums such as film or television. For example, a movie which depicts the slaughter of tens or hundreds or thousands is presumed to be less potentially harmful than an interactive work which requires the slaughter of tens or hundreds or thousands.

As you’ve come to realize, however, from the point of view of motive this distinction produces no practical or actionable difference. Were we to exclude all interactive works from the marketplace by dialing the clock back thirty years to see if doing so prevented acts of violence from taking place, the answer would clearly be no. Prior to the invention of computer games only a few decades ago there was no shortage of mass murder, serial murder, massacres, atrocities, crimes against humanity and attempts at genocide — meaning whatever it is that motivates such acts on an individual or group basis, the impetus seems to be inherent in human beings, not inherent in mediums of entertainment.

With regard to computer games, however, the question of interactivity and brain-training cuts both ways. If what you’re practicing in a virtual setting is violent, it may also increase your chance of survival if the world actually is overrun by alien invaders, Nazis, terrorists or zombies — all of which currently serve, at least in the United States, as acceptable narrative foils for entertaining and ruthless acts of patriotic or godly barbarism across all mediums. Swap out such socially acceptable antagonists for farm animals, school children or the handicapped and almost anyone would be revolted by the ensuing carnage, let alone by actively participating in such fictional crimes, yet at root the brain-training play mechanics would remain exactly the same. Meaning it’s not the interactivity per se that’s the potential problem, but the context in which that interactivity takes place.

If you’re mowing down horde after horde of evil incarnate — or whatever social, ethnic, political or extraterrestrial group you see as evil — by definition that cannot be bad, at least in a narrative context. On the other hand, mowing down innocents, even using the exact same mechanics, would be not only reprehensible, but dangerous in terms of a specific kind of brain-training we call desensitization — which in itself is also not inherently negative. For example, if you’re afraid of spiders a prescribed round of clinical desensitization may cure you of that problem. On the other hand, if you normally empathize and sympathize with your fellow man, but find that spending a few days or months or years fiddling with a murder simulator erodes your reluctance to go on a real-world killing spree, that would obviously not be a good thing. [ Read more ]

Interactive Entertainment and Motive

November 17, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

While children aren’t more hostile or violent than adults, and on the whole seem to do a lot less damage, on average they do seem a bit more cognitively pliable. This is partly explained by the fact that their brains have not fully developed, and partly because they haven’t had time to learn what’s right and wrong in many cultural contexts. If a child is angry it may seem, from the point of view of the child, like a perfectly reasonable response to pick up a toy and start bashing someone. If the child is fortunate, that decision then leads to a reasoned teaching moment about social norms from a nearby adult. Precisely because children need to learn what society expects and how to control their emotions, however, it does seem prudent to watch out for influences that could teach behaviors which are the opposite of what society desires.

In that context the first thing we can say about attempts to blame any medium of entertainment for acts of real-world violence committed by anyone of any age is that we are justified in making a distinction between groups that are and are not likely to be influenced. Our concern, as it was with the mentally ill, is that children may have a harder time distinguishing fantasy from reality, meaning the more a given medium replicates reality the more likely it might be that children could possibly become confused or led astray. For example, while we don’t believe that watching a violent movie over and over will make the average adult more likely to commit acts of violence, we do think — again, with some plausible justification — that doing so might affect a child, or perhaps even a group of young people if such experiences are communal. In response to such concerns, movies have long been given content ratings so busy adults do not have to preview each title in order to know if it’s appropriate for younger viewers.

As to which mediums of entertainment we should be most concerned about, that’s a more complicated question because blaming mediums of entertainment for acts of violence is not a rational pursuit. Not only can any medium of entertainment be used to demonstrate, depict or dramatize acts of violence, violence is routinely used in all mediums for the express purpose of entertaining an audience. When it comes to scapegoating or assigning blame to mediums for acts of carnage, however, there is almost always a perceptible bias toward some mediums and away from others. While usually self-serving, such scapegoating has appeal because it provides an apparently plausible rationale for tragic events that would otherwise remain uncertain as to cause. Even better, having done our civic duty and singled out one medium for blame, we can then go back to lustily enjoying bloodbaths and unspeakable acts of cruelty in the presumably innocent mediums of entertainment we prefer.

The idea that any medium of entertainment is incapable of triggering or contributing to a berserk act is of course nonsense, if only because — as we’ve maddeningly discovered — we can never know for certain what motivates such behavior. If a medium of entertainment can be experienced by human beings, and if we can never predict what will trigger someone to go berserk, then either all mediums of entertainment have the capacity to trigger berserk behavior or none of them do. Since we generally seem to agree — at least for children and the mentally ill, if not sane adults — that mediums of entertainment can influence behavior, then we have to allow for such influence across all mediums. [ Read more ]

The Free Press and Motive

September 14, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

Still reeling from the realization that the motive for murder (or any other act) can never be reduced to a predictive certainty, you decide that getting the word out about your discovery is critical to finding solutions that will prevent violence. Because you are well connected you place calls to several prominent reporters and news outlets, all of which express universal disinterest in what you have to say. The reaction is so consistent that at first you think you must not have explained yourself clearly, but after several more not-for-attribution conversations and a good deal of cogitation it becomes abundantly clear that you’re not the problem.

Leveraging Responsibility
When it comes to exploiting the blood of innocent victims you have learned there are two ways to profit from the question of motive. You can plausibly ascribe motives to others because those motives can never be proven false, and, you can plausibly deny motives ascribed to you because those motives can never be proven true. While most parties opt for one strategy or the other given the rhetorical nature of charges and counter-charges, there is one stakeholder perfectly positioned to turn the usual back-and-forth about motive into a salable product itself. In fact, in the United States the right to do so is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Not only does the First Amendment preclude the government from telling you what you can and cannot say as a citizen, if you are a member of the press it gives you the right to tell the citizenry anything, even when the government would prefer you kept quiet. Whether a noble journalist concerned with truth or tabloid trash trying to make all the money you can by broadcasting insane ideas or outright lies, the First Amendment allows you to claim that you are being responsible and fair and objective and balanced without any fear of contradiction. Even if you are intentionally fomenting righteous indignation, fear and anger in your audience with the intent of converting those emotions into cash through advertising agencies, you have the right to do so. (Such arms-length transactions also allow you to claim that your mercenary editorial practices are entirely separate from your mercenary business practices, as if such a distinction was meaningful.)

Imagining yourself in the role of a money-hungry reporter eager to pervert the protections of the First Amendment, you realize your first objective would be identifying a real-world event that would draw interest — like, say, a mass killing. Assuming you were fortunate enough that such a crime took place, you could then attempt to fuel the story by providing what is euphemistically called coverage. From an entrepreneurial point of view this aggressive reporting would be aimed not at informing the public but at trying to give the story legs so it did not become just another moment in history. While ostensibly the result of consumer demand, such lucrative continuing interest would in fact be largely dependent on your reportorial ability to turn the tragedy into a marketing opportunity for you, your employer, and for the story itself.

If the story did develop legs you could then freely engage in what’s euphemistically called analysis, which is in fact little more than water-cooler-grade speculation if not outright editorial propaganda. If you were fortunate, cunning or both, you could use analysis to tie the real-world tragedy you’re milking for money to a long-running real-world debate that will never be resolved, thereby opening the door to profits in perpetuity. For example, if someone goes berserk and murders a dozen people, while you’re ceaselessly reporting what few facts you know during wall-to-wall, twenty-four-hour, live, multimedia coverage, you can also use the killings as a springboard to raise questions about, say, the easy availability of weapons, the inadequate state of mental health screening and treatment, or any other causal factor you believe to be good for your bottom line. Because you are under no legal obligation to be informative or accurate, you are constitutionally free to shape your analysis in whatever way proves most entertaining, engaging, infuriating or traumatizing to your audience, and most profitable to you. [ Read more ]

Real-World Violence and Motive

September 1, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

The Killer’s Motive
Fortuitously, not only do we happen to know that the mass murderer we have in custody is guilty beyond any possible doubt, but because the killer is still alive, has waived counsel, has been deemed lucid by a battery of experts representing every conceivable psychological and psychiatric discipline, and is articulate and willing to answer any of our questions — which they will always respond to honestly due to an incurable compulsion for telling the truth — we will not, as we must when a murderer is dead, insane, or less than truthful, have to guess as to motive. Indeed, after a protracted interrogation we have extracted all the information we possibly can from the murderer, and at first blush it does seem as if we understand what the killer was thinking. As heartless and unconscionable as their behavior was, we can see a certain internal logic to their decision making. Even better, not only do we find no loose ends or inconsistencies in their statements, but when we look at similar crimes perpetrated by other murderers we see some factors that seem to correlate with such violent acts. Included are various forms of entertainment which demonstrate or dramatize violence eerily similar to the violence our killer unleashed, further tightening the apparent correlation between motive and murder.

In the end we are convinced that we understand why a dozen people were killed, and we are hopeful that this information might aid us in preventing such tragedies in the future. Unfortunately, the night before we are to turn in our findings we find ourselves in a dingy bar having drinks with a couple of strangers, and as the conversation wends its way toward dawn we discover to our horror that one of the people we are talking with shares not only the same perceptions of the world as our incarcerated killer, but they play the same violent computer games and watch the same violent movies and listen to the same enraged music. The overlap is so complete — so eerily exact — that in a moment of foggy panic we have the bar patron arrested on a trumped-up charge because we are convinced they must also have killed a dozen people.

As it turns out, however, the patron not only has no criminal history, they have an airtight alibi across the entirety of their life, leaving no possibility that they committed any crimes, let alone homicides. By every available metric they are indistinguishable from our killer, yet they have not killed anyone. While we can’t shake the feeling that the bar patron may at any minute go berserk, that unease pales in comparison to the devastating realization that some critical information is obviously missing from the motive both we and the killer ascribed to the killer’s actions. Where we thought we knew why a dozen people were dead, it turns out there is at least one other person in the world for whom all the relevant factors hold true who has not committed a crime, meaning we do not actually know what caused the killer to kill.

As an anecdotal test we run our analysis of the killer’s motive by a hundred people, explaining it step by step, and to a person they all agree we must be right. Yet we know we are not right because that same combination of environmental and personal factors applies to the bar patron as well. The motives we’re attributing to the killer sound plausible and reasonable and compelling to everyone, yet we know there is another person in the world — who has not killed anyone — for whom all of our purported causal attributions apply. Which leaves us with a choice to make, and because we have a conscience it’s a choice that makes us extremely uncomfortable. [ Read more ]

Entertainment and Real-World Violence

August 25, 2014 By Mark 8 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world.

A few weeks back I ran across yet another article purporting to shed light on the decades-old question of whether video games beget real-world violence. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, the article was merely another grinding of the ever-glistening axe which both sides in that debate are all too eager to wield in service of their own disingenuous agendas.

Here is the opening paragraph from the article, which took journalism to task for suggesting that violent video games and real-world murder might somehow be related:

In the wake of the killing of the schoolteacher Ann Maguire last week, the question has again been raised of whether playing violent video games could lead someone to commit murder. It’s a common link that we see suggested in the media whenever tragedies of this sort occur, but the scientific evidence simply doesn’t support these claims.

As we’ll soon see, implying that a lack of scientific proof voids any possible causal complicity is a gambit exploited by every industry that has ever been accused of fomenting real-world violence. Such arguments are at best legal and at worst deceitful, and in no case scientific. The inability to prove cause and effect by scientific means does not mean there is no cause-and-effect relationship, merely that it can’t be proven — and the first people who would tell you that are actual scientists. As we’ll also see, the last people who will ever admit that’s the case are members of the press because they have a vested interest in leveling such charges whenever it profits them to do so.

In attempting to understand cause and effect we’re taught — rightly — to put our bedrock faith in facts. Because science is very good at unearthing facts it may seem that a lack of scientific evidence is somehow important to the question at hand, but it isn’t. We need know nothing about science in order to determine whether violent video games or video games in general or entertainment of any kind can cause an individual to act in a particular way at a particular time. Abandoning science may seem to leave us bewildered about how to prevent acts of violence in the future, but in fact the opposite is true. By stripping away improper appeals to science and eliminating false hopes arising from such appeals we end up in a very certain and logical place that allows us to keep as many people as possible from being murdered. Or would, if all parties were in agreement with that laudable objective, which unfortunately also turns out not to be the case. [ Read more ]

Driving Interactive Interest

August 23, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Over the past thirty years or so, as computer and video games have become more mainstream, basic assumptions about the design of interactive entertainment have changed. In the early days, when the majority of the market was hardcore, designers aimed for more hours of play per title because longer games were in demand. (They often did so by rigging games with impossible battles and repetitive chores, but the demand for long games was real.)

Fifteen years ago or so the demands of the market began to change. Consumer research showed players in the aggregate preferring shorter and easier games. While hardcore gamers still existed, they now made up a much smaller percentage of a market that included casual gamers and people new to computer-driven entertainment. Presenting these customers with 100+ hours of hardcore (if not also tedious and unfair) gameplay made no sense, and ran the risk of alienating them from the industry.

Like mountaineers determined to cross another peak off their list, hardcore gamers tend to finish games no matter how grueling the experience. It’s a badge of honor and a way to differentiate themselves from the masses. Casual gamers, on the other hand, tend to explore interactive works like tourists, following their whims and interests for a few hours before heading back to the hotel for a nap. And according to a recent article on CNN’s Tech page, this sight-seeing approach is fast becoming the dominant response to interactive entertainment across all demographics:

“Just 10 years ago, I recall some standard that only 20% of gamers ever finish a game,” says John Lee, VP of marketing at Raptr and former executive at Capcom, THQ and Sega.

And it’s not just dull games that go unfinished. Critically acclaimed ones do, too. Take last year’s “Red Dead Redemption.” You might think Rockstar’s gritty Western would be played more than others, given the praise it enjoyed, but you’d be wrong.

Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions.

Let that sink in for a minute: Of every 10 people who started playing the consensus “Game of the Year,” only one of them finished it.

Computer and video games are not cheap to produce, and the best of breed — often called triple-A or ‘AAA’ titles — can be more expensive than big-budget films. Sinking previous development resources into a product most consumers will never fully experience might make sense if the expense was recouped through additional sales, but that’s a huge gamble in even the best scenario. Making the odds worse is the ugly fact that consumers are simply hard-pressed to find time to play and enjoy longer works.

[ Read more ]

Theme, Literature and Money

October 27, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

Nathan Bransford put up a post today titled Themes Schmemes. Here’s the gist of it:

I think the drive to write Literature/art sometimes leads some very talented writers, especially young ones, to write books that as an agent I can’t sell because there’s too much attention paid to the themes and the subtext and the meaning and other English-class-type concerns, rather than the narrative and the plot and the craft and other sausage-making-type concerns.

In talking about theme over the course of this past week, I tried to stay focused on the difference between theme as a useful literary technique and theme as a toxic analytical tool. I tried to stay away from the relative merit of theme as a technique or personal literary objective because I consider that an artistic choice. Saying that theme is bad when used by a particular author to create a given story would be like saying that reference photographs are bad for any artist’s painting. It’s not for me to decide.

Bransford’s post, however, changes the axis of analysis. Instead of the utility or merit of theme, he is focused — rightly, for an agent — on sales. And from that point of view I have no doubt that he’s right: theme and other literary tools are often completely unnecessary when crafting marketable fiction. The problem, of course, is that this is a slippery slope, and once you shove off you can’t stop the slide without exposing yourself to your own market-driven arguments.

I’m confident Bransford believes there’s a minimal level of storytelling skill necessary to write a bestseller. Still, if you found a trendy, charismatic writer who could riff on pornographic sex, gruesome, sadistic violence and pop-culture references, and you hyped the resulting title with a cutting-edge social-media marketing tour, you might end up with a bestseller on your hands. At which point that writer’s agent would point out that Bransford’s concerns about plotting and character and story are totally overrated, and the only thing that matters is whether you really can increase sales by taking a bus load of orphans hostage and refusing to free them until every American buys five copies of Risotto: A Love Story.

Which is why I tend not to make market-driven arguments about craft-driven processes. If what sells is what matters, then nothing else matters.

— Mark Barrett