Over at Cyborgology: Distance as Authentic

A quick note that Cyborgology published my short essay, Distance as Authentic: Modernist Tropes of an Amish Woman on the Internet.  It is a critique of the narrative framing employed in a recent Atlantic interview with a woman, Emma, who grew up in an Amish community and, at the age of 18, left that community to seek a new life in the modern American setting.  Emma is asked several questions about her adjustment to living in our modern, connected world and what sort of insights she can provide as someone who grew up without online technology being omnipresent in her upbringing.  The following is a quote from the piece:

But the Atlantic interview does more than explore current anxieties related to the Internet; it taps into older conceptions of modern identity even as it subtly alters these conceptions for its own post-modern use. By suggesting that Emma’s perspective allows us to better evaluate our condition in the ‘connected world’, the Atlantic interview reveals its own indebtedness to turn of the century modernist projects that favor ahistorical identities and introduce anxieties tied to the production of modern citizens.

 Read the entire essay over at Cyborgology.

Analysis of Sinai (SPI, 1973)

Finally took some time to sit down and record my ever-brewing thoughts on Sinai, the SPI wargame from 1973 that depicts the various Arab-Israeli conflicts up to that period.  I find Sinai to be a fascinating example to explore as it offers so many facets to analyze.  There is the more formal design genealogy interpretation, in which Sinai can claim to be one of the first commercial hobby wargames to tackle a 'contemporary' topic and even indulge in hypothetical forecasting of potential 'future' conflicts.  There is also the materialist interpretation, in which the rules, game board, and pieces used to play the game are seen as means of constructing a theme or enforcing a specific viewpoint of the conflict via procedural mechanics or design aesthetics.  But for myself, the most interesting interpretation is that related to the role Sinai plays as both a secondary AND primary source of the conflict depicted.

I originally gave this presentation as part of the Weird Shift 'Micro Talks' event held in Portland a few months ago.  Assuming my audience would have no prior knowledge of wargames like Sinai, I spent the first portion of my presentation going over a very brief history of wargames in general before launching into my general analysis.

With this project, along with my previous look at the My Lai card in GMT's Fire in the Lake, I'm beginning to put together enough examples to at least have a half-way decent essay in the works.  Still a back-burner idea, especially since I'm closing in on finishing my dissertation, but I believe there is enough there worthy to discuss and examine.

Understanding 'Sinai': Three Angles

(I wrote this to be transmitted on Twitter, so please forgive the lack of standards like transitions or rhetorical flourishes that are often just so much wordplay. Still, I felt this is substantive enough to be posted here for, perhaps, a different audience. - JA)

Last night on I dropped (on Twitter)  ‘three angles’ being used in my personal project on SPI’s Sinai (1973) but didn’t really explain them. I'm going to try to explain them in more detail now.

Chipping away at my SPI ‘Sinai’ project. Thinking 3 angles: immaterial labor, inward turn of narrative, and mimesis. pic.twitter.com/ORnIwhQ70M
— Jeremy Antley (@jsantley) April 27, 2015

First: specificity. Only looking at modern turn in hex-and-counter wargames, when they focused on contemporary or future-based conflicts. 'Sinai' is among the first (to my knowledge), mass-produced commercial wargames in this trend.

Second: Immaterial labor via Dyer-Witheford/de Peuter's 'Games of Empire'. How are manual wargames same/different from the biomachines comprising virtual games analyzed in 'Games of Empire'? How does Sinai, produced at the beginnings of neoliberal ideological ascendency in the 1970's, reflect these, then, nascent ideals in its production and actual play? What were the latent networks of immaterial labor surrounding both the play and modification of Sinai?

Third: inward turn of narrative. How does Sinai, as a representative of early 1970's wargame design, fit into the centuries trend of inward narrative development most commonly examined in literature? Given the healthy community of players and the wealth of variations/additions created for the game, what does this early example of a 'modern' hex-and-counter wargame have to offer with regards to study of play and narrative?

Fourth: mimesis. Looking at the culture of wargame copies, from acquisition of 'unpunched' copies to worn copies proudly burnished by experienced players. Yet beyond: idea of folkloric transfer of experience through touch and how Sinai, through powerful mimetic properties, reveals both the 'epistemic reservoir' and capacity for 'kaleidoscopic theatre' inherent in 'modern' wargames.

A Memory that is Desire and Gaze

I've been reading Robert Bolano's The Third Reich in off-again, on-again spurts, and recently came across a section (or passage, as my seventh grade English teacher would say) that captured my attention:

I walked the beach when all was Dark, reciting the names of the forgotten, names languishing on dusty shelves, until the sun came out again. But are they forgotten names or only names in waiting? I remembered the player as viewed by Someone from above, just the head, the shoulders, and the backs of the hands, and the board game and counters like a stage set where thousands of beginnings and endings eternally unfold, a kaleidoscopic theater, the only bridge between the player and his memory, a memory that is desire and gaze. How many infantry divisions was it- depleted, untrained- that held the Western front? Which ones halted the advance in Italy, despite treachery? Which armored divisions pierced the French defenses in '40 and the Russian defenses in '41 and '42? And with what key division did Marshal Manstein retake Kharkov and exorcise the disaster? What infantry divisions fought to clear the way for tanks in '44, in the Ardennes? And how many countless combat groups sacrificed themselves to stall the enemy on all fronts? No one can agree. Only the player's memory knows. (Emphasis mine)

Bolano's The Third Reich is a novel about a German tourist, named Udo, who brings two things to his holiday in Spain; his beautiful girlfriend, Ingeborg, and a copy of Avalon Hill's famed strategic war game, 'The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich'. Udo is quite the competitive 'Third Reich' player, having won several tournaments in Germany, and part of his vacation plans involve playing through and refining a new, 'killer' strategy of his own design for the German forces. At the point of the novel from which the above quote is taken, Udo is entering the final stages of long, drawn-out malaise that keeps him from returning to Germany, his only activity centering around a game of 'Third Reich' set-up between himself and a badly burned and disfigured local, whom Udo befriended earlier, known only as El Quemado. What began as a sort of learning game in which Udo believes he cannot lose has, at this point, transformed into a cunning match between two players of equal skill.

Several elements of the quote strike me as worth deeper investigation. To begin, there is the idea put forth of a 'player's memory' that is reflective but also speculative. It eternalizes, memorializes those 'forgotten names' while also recognizing that such ossification is futile, or at best nostalgic, because new fates await such 'forgotten names' with every game. Furthermore this reflective/speculative perspective comes about through the telescoping of play, demonstrated through Bolano's evocation of 'Someone' looking over the player's shoulder, just as the player looks over the figurative shoulders of units and divisions portrayed in cardboard-counter form on the game board. Interestingly the quote also hints that the scene described is that of solitaire play, a mode quite common for aficionados of war games.  There is a sense that the telescoping effect of play allows the solitaire player to become mobile within the endless perspective afforded, their own identity, like the counters below, both forgotten and in waiting.

But what grounds this floating, endless perspective? I believe this answer comes from Bolano's metaphoric descriptor of the war game as 'kaleidoscopic theater'. Kaleidoscopes utilize refraction to generate novel patterns, just as the play of war games generates novel outcomes of battles or, as is the case of 'Third Reich', entire World Wars.  Yet the kaleidoscope works only along a fixed perspective, offering novel configuration within a limited plane of view. War games operate along similar lines, utilizing a fixed perspective to offer novel configurations within the confines of a limited plane of view dictated by rules, materials, and, most importantly, the player's memory which is desire and gaze.  

When Udo questions 'which armored divisions pierced the French defenses' or 'what infantry divisions fought to clear the way for tanks in '44, in the Ardennes', his recompense is to state that while important groups cannot agree on sufficient answers only the player's memory can act as a sort of arbiter of truth, no matter how temporarily or ephemeral such truths turn out to be given the endless churning of play. Access to this truth, to this players memory, is provided by the war game itself which Bolano describes as the 'bridge between the player and his memory.' One cannot access this memory unless they play the game and engage in the act of kaleidoscopic theater. Hence the desire, hence the gaze.

Thinking with History in Wargame Design

(Trigger Warning- discusses the My Lai massacre and contains some graphic imagery.)

One of things that interests me most about board games, and war games in particular, is how online forums become places where designer intent and player expectation meet and often clash over how particular mechanics or design choices are correlative to the actual event or perceived operation of how war works. (A good example being rules for lines of supply, or handling morale checks for units)

Recently I've been very caught up with playing GMT's newest entry into their Counterinsurgency (COIN) series, Fire in the Lake, which is about the Vietnam conflict. As with any game that holds as its central focus a controversial war, there will always be points of friction between popular perceptions of that conflict and the ways in which the designer (or in this case, designers) uses mechanics and rules to highlight themes they believe to be inherent within that conflict. Vietnam is still a relatively recent conflict in American memory, and this proximity in memory allows design abstractions to take on heightened forms. As a counterpoint consider the Second World War, one of the most (if not the most) gamed conflicts in short history of commercial wargaming. Time has dulled the controversy over playing the Axis powers, and while some may cringe at the thought of what moving a SS counter means in the meta-narrative of reflection that occurs outside of gaming, few actively protest the presence or option of commanding these forces. This is even more true for conflicts like the American Civil War, or the famed battles of Napoleon's era.

In a presentation I gave at Connections 2012, a conference that seeks to blend together the worlds of professional and commercial wargaming, I discussed how abstraction in design does a marvelous job of compressing time but that it is a mistake to assume that design also compresses what cultural historian Carl Schorske called 'thinking with history'. The rules for supply or the efficiency rating of a particular unit are loaded with meanings that speak to a lot more than what simply occurs on a game map.

To bring it back to 'Fire in the Lake', here is an event card depicting the infamous My Lai massacre.

All of the COIN games are driven by the play of these event cards. They contain a faction order, represented here by the colored circles at the top of the card, and usually, but not always, a shaded and non-shaded event effect. Depending on what order a particular player's faction holds when it's their turn, they can choose to conduct 'Operations' on the board or opt to have a card's event text take effect. It's entirely possible, and often occurs, that players can choose to never utilize a card's particular event text and, instead, focus on using their 'operations' to improve board position. Yet because COIN games utilize these event cards for both driving the action on the board and injecting a sense of 'periodization' tied to the conflict depicted, they become exemplars of the complicated nexus intersecting abstracted design and 'thinking with history'.

Putting this altogether raises an interesting question: what does it mean to have a My Lai card in a game about Vietnam? This was a question raised in a 'Fire in the Lake' forum post on BoardGameGeek (hereafter BGG) titled, "Card 119: My Lay Downplaying the Truth?" The original poster, Darren Kerr, took offense that the card, and the larger description of that card in the accompanying playbook, was intentionally misleading.

The notes in the play book describe the My Lai massacre as a platoon led by Calley killing 22 civilians. However, this is a grossly misleading description of the actual scale of the massacre that occurred on March 16, 1968 where over 300 civilians were murdered. 

I am not trying to make a political point, because for every one Calley the US Army has many more individuals like Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, but I would be interested in knowing why the designers went with a description that would appear to be deliberately misleading. 

I appreciate that the card relates to Calley's court-martial for which he was found guilty of murdering at least 22 people, however, using that as the justification for apparently downplaying the extent of the My Lai massacre does an injustice to those who were murdered. 

Games are games, but the truth is usually the truth. In this case, the truth is clear and should be told as a salutary lesson for current and future generations.

For clarity's sake, here is the 'My Lai' entry found in the playbook for Fire in the Lake.

Reaction to the forum post on BGG was swift and vociferous. Mark Herman, noted game designer and one of the two minds behind the creation of Fire in the Lake (Volko Ruhnke, who created the COIN series, being the other), asserted that it was never his intention to mislead anyone and that the card text was meant to focus on the historical conviction of Lt. Calley. "We chose to include the event, our choice, to highlight this type of horror." Others contested Herman's response. "This card does not do a sufficient job of highlighting the horror," wrote Jonathan Harrison, concluding that, "[it] rather presents a much diminished and consequently misleading view on [the massacre]."

If we return to Kerr's original qualm, that the My Lai card purports a reality that is disingenuous to the 'truth' of the event, the nexus of design and 'thinking with history' becomes more clear. Kerr believed the abstraction of the card betrayed the gravity of the historical event. In a later response to the forum thread, Herman brought forth a rationale expressed in game terms for why the card accurately reflects the scope and magnitude of the event.

Just to be clear, the Playbook description is as I described it, but the card itself is quite powerful… to quote… 

"Massacre: Set a Province with US Troops to Active Opposition. VC place a Base and a Guerrilla there. AID -6" 

This card could represent an 8 point swing in the game as it allows the insurgents to take a 2 value province with Active Support across the entire spectrum to Active Opposition. In addition the base is worth another point to the VC with a guerrilla defender that can then be rallied into three more for a total of 4. Essentially the play of this event can create appropriately huge issues for the US at least that is what we were going for.

Rhetoric in a wargame, as shown by Herman above, draws not only upon the perceived reality depicted but also how that reality can be abstracted into game mechanics. The event text of the My Lai card becomes a type of shorthand for what actually occurred, although the space between the card, its ludic effect, and intended purpose is such that while these purposes are joined in the card's function they do so in a loose manner that allows interpretation and debate to take place. The card becomes a secondary and primary source on the role My Lai held in popular and scholarly assessments of the Vietnam War. The forum posts sampled above demonstrates this fact. This notion is further reinforced by the appearance of another forum post, "Card 119: My Lai NOT Downplaying the Truth", that formed on BGG not long after the Kerr thread came into existence.

I find this sort of debate, of exploring the space afforded by abstracted design being tied to 'thinking with history', to be a fascinating potential for historians and cultural observers alike. While many games come under scrutiny for how their mechanics are tied to historical occurrences, with the example of Puerto Rico coming to mind, the wargame's long standing link to the idea of truth through play (giving these games a quantifiable value of being an 'epistemic reservoir') gives these debates a much more pointed focus. 

Gated Conversions

Shankly Gates at Anfield, Liverpool via Andy Nugent

I took a break from Twitter recently, partly because several family members shuffled in and out of my house over the last week and partly because I tried to focus my efforts towards completing a long overdue dissertation chapter.  But the allure of the infinite timeline proved difficult to resist and I decided to scan my Twitter lists the other day to see if anything interesting occurred during my absence.

Two words, sandwiched into one, kept appearing: GamerGate.

If you have any interest in video game culture, then you probably already know what I’m talking about.  In case you don’t know, here are some more detailed posts for your perusal:

On 'Gamers' and Identity

A Conversation about Concerns in Videogame Journalism

#gamergate as reaction

If pressed to summarize GamerGate in a sentence or two, here is what I would say: GamerGate is a belief, held by an indeterminate number, that collusion exists between games journalists and games developers and that this nexus is corrupting games, or at least moving them towards a trajectory abhorrent to self-defined ‘gamers’.  Yet to put the GamerGate controversy in such succinct terms suggests the movement possesses cohesion, which it certainly does not.  One has only to survey #GamerGate to see the variety of opinions expressed.  But a couple of developments caught my eye and seemed worthy of further exploration.  The first was the start, and subsequent termination, of an Indiegogo campaign to create a legal fund for exploring the potential abuses between Games journalists and developers.  The second was the posting of a Gamer Manifesto, anonymously written but edited by ‘Gamers’.  What these examples demonstrate is that there is a desire, on behalf of some, to begin formalizing and structuring relationships within so-called Gamer Culture.  It is, as Geertz would call it, an effort at ‘internal conversion’, an attempt to utilize rationalization as a defense against the intrusion of modern and post-modern critiques and ideals.

Last year, spurred by what is now a periodic outbreak of sexism/racism/transphobia from so-called ‘gamers’, Daniel Joseph wrote a post titled “Videogames are the gardens of the bourgeoisie" in which he argued that bourgeois values necessitated the creation of ‘spheres’ of activity separated from ‘real life’.  “Mass produced hobbies, mediated through gatekeepers like trade and enthusiast press is one reason why “games” became a private sphere,” Joseph concludes, later adding that this private nature conjures within individuals the need to protect games from the pressures of capitalism.  Using Joseph’s theme, I explored in my own post, “Games, Truth, and Defense of the Private”, the idea that the rise of bourgeois values correlated with the belief that games could become an arbiter of truth.

But now, a year later and with the rise of GamerGate, I wonder if we are witnessing something new, something that goes beyond the need to wall off games from the public.  Videogames may be the gardens of the bourgeoisie, but what GamerGate reveals is that some feel compelled to venture out of their gardens and establish, in the public sphere, a nascent, rationalized belief in what games should be and how relationships around those games should be structured.

Clifford Geertz

Geertz observed what he termed ‘internal conversion’ in Balinese religious ideals during the 1950’s, that is the process by which the traditional Balinese faith sought to take on elements of the Weberian ‘rationalization’ inherent in the established religions of Christianity or Islam and begin codifying their own belief as a defense against the intrusion of said established religions.  In doing so they introduced a ‘distance’ that demanded greater and more concrete articulation of the sustaining links between belief and practitioner.  Problems of meaning, which before addressed issues in a fragmentary manner, become “conceptualized as universal and inherent qualities of human existence.”  What is good?  What is evil?  Geertz suggests that these broad questions subsume narrower concerns inherent to the pre-rational conversion (such as ‘How do I uncover a witch?) and in doing so bring forth the “radically disquieting suggestions” of the broad questions to the fore.  This, in turn, demands that answers be brought forth in a form equal to the “sweeping, universal, and conclusive manner” the broad questions introduced.

Of course, there are inherent issues for any culture engaging in such an ‘internal conversion’, or ‘rationalization’, of their beliefs.  A brief selection from a larger article on Mari peasants in 19th century Russia highlights these issues:

From "Big Candles and 'Internal Conversion': The Mari Animist Reformation and Its Russian Appropriations" by Paul Werth in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia

What interests me here is the idea that in borrowing the “idiom of religion employed by official Russia” the Mari both utilized a colonizing discourse inherent within that religion and fell victim to its conceptual modes.  In trying to assert their unique belief they ended up assuming viewpoints that integrated them into the colonizing discourse they tried to fight.

GamerGate appears to be following the same path, at least with regards to the two examples, that of the Indiegogo campaign and the Gamers Manifesto, mentioned above.  By utilizing the colonizing discourse inherent in games to provide a Weberian rationalized view of what Gaming culture should be, a culture which is replete with contributions by misogynistic and paternalistic forces, the advocates of GamerGate can’t help but fall into the same conceptual modes that underlie such a discourse.  These modes no longer address fragmentary concerns, like those that prompted Daniel and myself to write blog posts last year, but rather attempt to bring together universal and inherent qualities of Games into focus so that the problems those qualities bring to light can be addressed.

The rallying cry for supporters of GamerGate is that of ‘corruption’ brought about by the perceived collusion between games journalists and developers.  Corruption is a handy conceptual mode to base the rationalization of Gamer culture, at least from the view of GamerGate supporters, because it does away with all the messy fragmentation of previous complaints (Feminism is ruining games!  Transgendered people are ruining games!  Fake Gamer Girls are ruining games!) and, instead, suggests that the larger problem stems from a collected erosion of Gaming ethics.

This is, essentially, what the Indiegogo campaign to establish a ‘Lawyers Against Gaming Corruption’ legal fund for investigatory purposes holds as central to its existence.  By asserting a juridicial solution to the corruption issue, the ‘Lawyers Against Gaming Corruption’ wish to utilize one of the most pervasive patriarchal institutions available to find and perhaps punish the ‘true’ offenders.  In an example that could have been taken straight from Girard, ‘Lawyers Against Gaming Corruption’ offered GamerGate supporters a rationalized process for finding the scapegoat that will absolve them all from the corruptive influence of gaming today and restore the supposed community to its more pristine state.  Instead of having to answer critiques leveled at gaming culture as a whole, the ‘Lawyers Against Gaming Corruption’ offer a way to funnel anxieties prompted by these critiques into the far more defensible position of identifying and fighting corruption.

This logic becomes especially insidious when the corrupting forces are linked to those who raised the critiques in the first place, thus making attacks on female writers, for example, both a natural extension of the corruption ideal and capitulation to the patriarchal conceptional modes built into the colonizing discourse surrounding games.  In trying to defend gamer culture from critiques of patriarchy or misogyny under the larger guise of corruption, the creators and supporters of ‘Lawyers Against Gaming Corruption are utilizing the very same justifications patriarchy and misogyny embody.

This becomes even more noticeable upon examination of the Gamer Manifesto, posted to Pastebin on 2 September 2014.  Even though it purports to extol virtues of harmony and inclusion, the manifesto nonetheless offers up a tiered, almost caste like structuring of Gaming culture:

“There are three parts to this industry that we feel must be addressed for the general health of video games as a whole: the role of the consumer, the developer and the supplier. This trifecta makes up the core of the industry and thus each piece must be improved for games to continue to evolve.”

At the core of this conceptualization, however, is one ‘truth’; that games “should be about the enjoyment of the player.”

The Manifesto states that gamers should add to the future of gaming, not demonize its past.  That Developers, while recognizing that misrepresentation and under-representation of certain populations is a real problem, should not be required to change their own game’s vision and idea.  That Suppliers, which is an unusual term for journalists or critics, should not be pressured by outside influences to “change their opinion to fit an overarching agenda.”  In short, the Gamer Manifesto outlines a structural basis for how gamer culture as a whole should proceed and operate, all while articulating the need to avoid outside pressures that, as the Manifesto explains, are related to the corrupting influences in gaming today:

“It has been said that gamer culture is in the throes of death. This isn’t true. It has merely grown impatient as a wall of both divisiveness and radical ideologies have kept it from progressing further. 

This article, this gamer manifesto has been made with the desire to break down that wall. It is both our branch of peace to those who believe we mean only harm and a battering ram to those who think we will simply comply with how corrupted video game culture has become.”

For the writers and editors of the Gamer Manifesto, seclusion in their walled off, bourgeois gardens no longer provides adequate protection from what were once fragmentary issues now brought together under the aegis of corruption.  Instead they must enter the public sphere and begin the process of 'internal conversion', of providing rationalized interpretations of gamer culture that both promotes distance between gamers and their games while also allowing structural links to surmount the distance, such as the concept of ethics or corruption above, so that the relationship between games and gamers can be harmonious and free from 'divisiveness and radical ideologies."

One important feature for Geertz and his notion of 'internal conversion' is that it is not a totalizing event, nor does it necessarily involve all the members of the cultural group in question.  Therefore we can look at the disparate nature of GamerGate yet still understand some of the larger forces feeding the movement and its expressions.  That the 'Lawyers Against Gaming Corruption' and the Gamer Manifesto are not representative of the whole of gaming culture is obvious.  Yet the fact that these two examples not only put forth a sophisticated response but also attempted to outline and address what is perceived to be the larger illness of gaming is worth noting.  What will happen from here on out is anybody's guess, but it is entirely possible that we are witnessing a decided shift in the evolving articulation of gaming culture.

Fear and Loathing in Kansas

Photo via Dain Nielsen

This past winter, during a three-week long trip to my hometown in Lawrence, Kansas, I carved out some time to meet and have coffee with my advisor.  Only a few weeks previous I passed my qualifying exam to become ABD in History, and she wanted to go over a few of the finer points related to actually writing a dissertation, the task that loomed large with my oral trial by fire now quickly fading.  We spoke on chapter writing, on motivation, on the need to stay focused- and after these topics were exhausted our talk moved on to the more mundane aspects of life; daily chores, grading, and, most importantly, the grind of dealing with a Board of Regents in Kansas that has proved, time and time again, to possess antipathy, if not outright animosity, towards teachers and staff at the various institutions of higher learning under their purview.

I should add this last jab at the Board of Regents are both my words and my interpretation, not hers, and the reason for such a clarification is thus; it is now possible for any employee at an institution governed by the Kansas Board of Regents to be fired if their use of social media is deemed "contrary to the best interests of the university."

Let that sink in for a second- "contrary to the best interests of the university."

It would not be a gross mischaracterization to call this the most draconian social media policy ever adopted by a governing institution of higher education.  Its bureaucratic vagueness is a prime example of the adjectival descriptor 'byzantine', and the simplicity of the statement belies the vast range of interpretations allowed.  What exactly constitutes the best interests of the university?  Who decides what this best interest entails?  Perhaps most importantly, is it possible to reconcile hallowed notions of 'academic freedom' with such an interest?  The Board of Regents would have you believe the two can coexist, but anyone with such a Sword of Damocles hanging over their head would beg to differ.

Bob Dylan famously remarked in his song, 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)', that "if my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in the guillotine."  With the adoption of this policy the Kansas Board of Regents moved one step closer towards actualizing Dylan's eloquently articulated fear.  Their reasoning, I suppose, is that if you can't actually see the thought-dreams of staff and teachers alike then the next best thing is to sharply punish those dreams when they take form in social media.  A public execution would send as subtle a message as this policy, but given that the Board of Regents does not yet possess the power of capital punishment such measures, to them no doubt, seem reasonable and entirely appropriate.

I wonder what else seems reasonable and entirely appropriate?  It seems reasonable and entirely appropriate to assume that anyone with academic talent, even in this harsh employment climate, will think twice about accepting a position at an institution of higher learning in Kansas.  It seems reasonable and entirely appropriate that such a policy flies in the face of pedagogical literature suggesting that professors embrace social media as a way to better connect with their students.  It seems reasonable and entirely appropriate to recognize that this policy is just another step towards nullifying tenure.

It also seems reasonable and entirely appropriate to recognize that this policy makes Kansas the laughingstock of the nation.  Again.  As if this state that was once the focal point of progressivism really needed another reminder that those days are long gone.

All is not lost, however.  Philip Nel, at his blog 'Nine Kinds of Pie', articulates measured responses those working at such institutions can take to fight this policy.  Several other incensed academics across the spectrum of institutions affected are banding together to express their dismay at such a policy.  It is comforting to know that people will stand up and assert what is right, no matter the consequences.

I wish I could be like Antony in Shakespeare's Life and Death of Julius Caesar, able to slyly claim that I come to bury Kansas, not to praise it.  Sadly, there is little to praise and the only thing being buried is any hope that the Board of Regents can meaningfully care for the staff and teachers at the institutions under their charge.

Mimetic Acts Across Cultural Mediums

Palm Tree Reflection via Scott Kinmartin

Because I refuse to let myself get too wrapped up in this subject, I want to briefly talk three things I came across today that have a central theme- mimesis.

Those three things were:

1. The White Album project
2. Daniel Joseph's reaction to Leigh Alexander's post on clones of Threes
3. 1966 New York Times Article on Old Believers

Rutherford Chang collects copies of The White Album; original pressings to be exact, though the condition can be of any quality.  He delights in the variance of the same, seeing within every aged copy a different story or set of circumstances behind its appearance.  His collection, now numbering 944 as of writing, is the embodiment of mimesis and some of the deep delights- but also insecurities-  mimetic objects given form present for modern society.  For Chang, the idea of the White Album collection is to document the collected experience of each individual pressing from 1968, and the variance between the copies, raw differences creating mimetic fuzz around the original form of the copy, complete for him the experience of that mimetic object in total.

Daniel Joseph's piece, reacting to Leigh Alexander's post about Threes and game 'cloning', hint at the insecurity mimesis produces for the cultural medium of games.  Using Marx's concept of the 'general intellect'', Joseph suggests that the ease of cloning casual games, like Threes, is becoming more apparent simply because this form of the larger game medium is no longer resistant to such causal cloning via the traditional safeguards of "sophisticated platforms, rigorous copyright laws, and a high capital investment."  He concludes, "As it happens games belong to everyone while so many still are scrambling for the scraps of this knowledge to survive."

Threes, as a mimetic object on multiple levels (not only as a source of inspiration for clones, but also  considering its digital distribution method via the Apple app store), reveals how the perceived notion of the copy, in this case the games 2048 and 1024, highlights what Plato articulated long ago as the flaw of the mimetic act.  Here I'm quoting Marcus Boon from his work, "In Praise of Copying":

"…Plato's mistrust of mimesis, and of the artist- the mirrored image, and event the craftsman's object, [was because he believed these forms] confuse the ignorant as to what is essential.  At the same time, it is the Platonic belief that the outward appearance of something indicates its essence which continues to generate much of our confusion about what a copy is.  When we say 'an original,' we usually mean something in which the idea and the outward appearance correspond to each other.  There is no distortion in the relation of appearance to essence, to "what a thing is."  Copies, then, for Plato and for us, most of the time are distortions of this relationship.  The mirror produces the sun, yet it is not the sun.  Basicreplica.com produces a Louis Vuitton bag, yet the article is not a real Louis Vuitton bag." (20)

The mimetic potential available to casual games reveals not only the unsettling distortion between idea and outward appearance (found in the example of Threes and its 'clones'), but also that the essence of the casual game, by the very fact that it is *so* open to the mimetic act, allows it to escape arbitrary and imposed restrictions on its form and enter what Joseph calls the 'general intellect.'

With Chang we see the delight mimesis summons; yet with Joseph, and by extension Alexander, we also see the insecurities mimesis brings into cultural forms.  For the final example under consideration, we will see how the emergence of Old Belief into American culture combined both the delight and insecurity of mimesis as exemplified in the question of assimilation.

What strikes me about this two-paneled, front page photograph is that it manages to create a visualized tableau capable of being interpreted though the lens of mimesis.  On the left, we have an Old Believer family set against the backdrop of what appears to be a modest, middle-class house.  The caption juxtaposes the 'traditional beard' of the man with the fact that he currently works in an assumed modern soft-drink factory.  On the right, we have a photo of Old Believers, clad in flannel shirts and mesh-style baseball hats, assembling furniture for the Excelwood Products Company.  Again, their beards mark them as conspicuous even though their boss, unseen but heard in the caption underneath, praises their behavior.  

While the scene would indicate the success of the Old Believers in assimilating into their new American culture, the headline and subsequent sub-title hint at 'distortions' between the assumed original, a bona fide American citizen, and the copy, an Old Believer immigrant from Turkey.  In particular the phrase 'leaning to new ways' suggests that some residual dissonance still exists between the traditional composition of Old Believer lives and the values/mores of the modern as grounded in the space of domestic and factory settings.  There is delight in the copy act itself, as American culture via the house and factory appear to be converting the Old Believers, yet there is also insecurity about what these 'copies' will bring into American culture and whether or not the Old Believers will allow the mimetic act to so completely remake their lives.

Obviously these are loosely connected threads of thought, but it appears to me that viewing the interaction and transformation of a cultural space through the lens of mimesis provides deeper insight into the fundamental nature of said cultural space.

Thirty Pieces of Silver

Quick post today, as I have only a few rambling thoughts regarding Malcolm Harris' recent opinion over at Al Jazeera on "Why Nate Silver Can't Explain It All".

First off, it's a terrific read (let's be honest- I don't usually post about something unless I think it's terrific) so take some time to peruse his prose now.

Second, while I wholeheartedly agree with Harris there are parts of his argument that could definitely be expanded.  I realize opinion pieces can't tackle every subject or point of proof under the sun, but the underlying angst regarding Silver and his new venture, FiveThirtyEight, is really nothing new.  It's part of a much longer history in which rationality claims an objective presence in the face of subjective metaphysics.

Harris calls the work of Silver and his associates 'Actually Journalism', hinting at the larger issues involved; namely, the view that numbers are key to an objective view of reality.  He ties this to the late 20th century epistemological shift against privileged knowledge- but this is a much, much older trend than just the late 20th century.

Numbers being equated to truth, or at least a way to uncover a buried truth, is nothing new.  To use a recent example, look at Vietnam and how McNamara, together with his 'Whiz Kids', used 'objective' data to plot out bombing missions and take measured 'body counts' as proof of progress.  Go back further and look at Sergei Bulgakov's essay in 1905 on 'Basic Problems on the Theory of Progress' in which the Russian intellectual lambasts the, then, current fascination with positivism and a grand 'Theory of Progress'.  Go back even further and you see the debates between followers of Aristotle and Pythagorus on the role of numbers to act as objectifiable observations.

Leaning on the thoughts of Bulgakov, mentioned above, we see direct parallels between Harris' argument and the concerns of the long-dead member of the Russian intelligentsia:

"The theory of progress argues, consequently, for a final identity between casual necessity and rational purposiveness, in which sense it is, as we have already said, a theodicy.  Its goal is thus the discovery of a higher reason that is simultaneously transcendent to and immanent in history, the discovery of the plan of history, its goal, movement towards this goal, and the forms of this movement." (Emphasis is mine)

Calling the 'theory of progress' a theodicy certainly rings true with the work being carried out at FiveThiryEight.  Silver may never calculate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but that doesn't stop him, or his enlisted cadre of number crunching 'Whiz Kids', from acting like the monks who did with their own observations on sports or the minimum wage.

To me, there is no coincidence that Silver's rise is deeply tied to the more recent emergence of 'money ball' and the quantified self.  Baseball became the new proving ground for the classic debate between rationality and metaphysics; managers and scouts preferring to 'go with their gut' or the 'eye test' over cold, objective, and quantifiable numbers.  For many Baseball fans the stadium was a sort of cathedral, so it was all the more shocking to some when believers in the objective heresy of 'Sabermetrics' began posting their expanded theses on clubhouse doors- even more difficult to accept that they might be right or have insight far beyond the accepted, traditional methods.  

However the numbers tossed around weren't definite truths- they were only probable outcomes.  They provided insight, yes, but they were far from the objective pillars of truth that some claimed in their presence.  Yet the idea that a constellation of statistics could reveal a deeper insight into reality proved irresistible, especially for cash-strapped ball clubs, and this most recent affirmation on the power of 'objective' reasoning, in part, allows Silver and his colleagues a 'privileged' position in the realm of journalistic inquiry.

(Case in point: when FiveThirtyEight launched, it did so with a piece on the odds related to March Madness.  The indebtedness Silver owes to sports vis a vis his rise in popularity can be clearly seen.)

The implications of this kerfuffle in Baseball (which is still being played out today) resonate even more now that FiveThiryEight purports to use its 'objective' insight to cover a variety of fields.  Harris is right to call this phenomena 'Actually Journalism', but the only thing we can actually be certain of is that this trend is far from recent and draws upon a much longer tradition.

Hills, Lines, and Wargames

The other day Cameron Kunzelman tweeted about a post by Simon Ferrari titled "Hills and Lines: Final Fantasy XIII" and written in March of 2010.  It really is an excellent post that examines some of the design subtleties in FF XIII that buck the trend (at least, up to that point) for how many JRPG's operate.

Specifically, Ferrari outlines what he calls the 'hills and lines' of FF XIII's design choices.  'Hills' represent the way in which FF XIII slowly ramps up the intensity of battles in order to acclimate players to the complex subsystem of 'paradigms' used in combat.  Here's Ferrari's own words:

"A level will begin, say, with an encounter of two soldiers, then it will add a third soldier. Then the player will face, say, two slimes or a larger enemy such as a behemoth. After these smaller hills have been ascended, the final battle before a checkpoint will combine those enemy types: three soldiers and two slimes, or three slimes and a behemoth, etc. By slowly adding challenges and then combining different types of challenges, the game tests the tipping point where the player has to finally change her dominant strategy and develop a new cycle of paradigm shifts."

Combined with this progressive introduction to the combat system is the fact that FF XIII contains few 'punishments' for those who just barely survive battles or lose them entirely.  Win and everyone in your party is rewarded with full health.  Lose and the game merely restarts you at the moment just before your combat encounter.  This simple design decision means that players are less likely to become obsessed with 'save points' or fear the loss of progress and earned XP just because a battle turned sour.  It creates a smoother experience, as players are not overly punished for failing to succeed.

Ferrari drives home this point by way of an intriguing graphic.  The line to the left is FF XIII, while the line to the right is 2009's Demon Souls.

"Black lines represent progress without death. Red lines indicate time spent on a failed attempt at any segment of the game. Final Fantasy XIII proves that “hard” is not “the new good.” Gentle games have just as much to offer us as brutal games do. Difficulty, like everything else about a game, serves a distinct expressive purpose. Painstakingly clawing one’s way up a mountain isn’t “better” than joyously bounding over a hill. They’re just different."

Ferrari goes on to examine how this very structured path in FF XIII gives way to a more open concept once the player transitions from the 'introductory' world of Cocoon to the more 'free-form' world of Pulse.  Again, I'm only summarizing Ferrari's argument here and I definitely encourage you to read his post in full.

What struck me about Ferrari's argument is how he establishes the link between these hills and lines and how the structure of the two are integral to how a player experiences and learns a particular game's design system.  This got me thinking- what would the hills and lines of a typical board wargame look like?  What lessons can those of us who study board games take away from Ferrari's topographical metaphor?

Here is my own version of Ferrari's line graphic, but this time from a wargamer's perspective:

Wargames represent some of the most complex game systems produced for the textual medium.  (I'm thinking here of examples such as Advanced Squad Leader or The Campaign for North Africa)  Players have to mentally assimilate dozens of rules and even more exceptions to those rules in order to operate the design as the creator intended.  Upon setting up the board and pushing counters around for the first time, many players probably perceive they are making mistakes but that their 'course corrections' mean they will arrive at the end of the game having aligned, generally, their experience with the intent of the design.

My own anecdotal experience with wargames, not to mention those experiences recounted in forum posts at BoardGameGeek or ConsimWorld, suggests that many wargame sessions are more like the graph on the right rather than the one on the left.  You start off correctly then somehow mess up several rules which, surprisingly, still allow you to continue playing.  Along this twisted path you might actually get a few rules right, yet regardless of what you get right/get wrong you still arrive at an ending that may or may not align with the designers original intent.  In both cases you achieve a full experience, but without an omniscient guide to gently correct your play you will, more often than not, mess things up and create an arc that ultimately deviates from the 'correct' experience.

Instead of a smooth arc, or even a spoke-like arc depicted in Ferrari's graphic above, wargames tend to promote an amorphous blob.  There are implications for allowing the player this sort of freedom to create their own arc, and a brief look at what this means for a player's larger game experience illustrates this point.

The guided experience is both an advantage and disadvantage for video game design.  It is an advantage insofar that the player will always track along the experience arc intended by the design.  They may not like it, as is the case for many games, but they ultimately can do little to alter that arc without instituting their own 'house rules' that have zero enforceability within the coded structure of the game.  This consequence leads to the main disadvantage of video game design.  Many players target designers when airing their frustrations with a video game because when placed in a determinist system enforced by code it is easy to see designer error- rather than player error- when following through the experience arc.

Sample page of rules from GMT's 'Roads to Moscow'

Wargames in particular, and boardgames in general, appear to be the inverse of a video game; the player must manually assemble the rule-set, on the fly, when following through the experience arc.  Mistakes are made, some game breaking and some just simple errors of omission, yet the game will never directly tell you the experience you perceive is wrong.  You can fumble and trip but in the end you will eventually have a winner and a complete game experience.  Players are also far more likely to blame themselves, rather than the designer, when they discover their play is riddled with errors.  Foisting assembly of the experience arc, or blob as it were, to the player means that evaluation of play often centers on the player themself and not the designer.  This might mean that a player never really achieves the correct arc as determined by the designer, but is also means the player is more likely to evaluate their own play-experience rather than the systems underlying that play-experience.

In a larger sense this means that video games are exemplars of a positivist ideal.  Systems reinforce your play until you demonstrate correct behavior and are able to 'feel out' the larger experience arc as intended.  Wargames are more like exemplars of a sort of 'faux-positivism' in which the players themselves reinforce their play and must discover if they are demonstrating correct behavior or not.  Video games embrace teleology; wargames, while definitely possessing a sort of 'hidden' teleology, nonetheless leave ultimate assembly of such teleology to the player.  Video game systems embrace a Panglossian attitude towards play.  Wargame systems decidedly reinforce the original designer's Panglossian view, but it's no guarantee that the player will discover this 'best of all possible worlds' through their interpretation of the systems presented.

Now obviously a lot of this changes once a player masters a particular wargame's intricate rule-set.  Mastery allows a player to perceive the intended experience arc, refining the once blob-like interpretation into something more defined.  Having attained this perception the player can then, rightfully, critique the design instead of their interpretation of the design.  Here the video game experience and the wargame experience merge, but it is important to remember that the wargamer can reference the variety of 'blob experiences' encountered before to the actual, uncovered design arc.  Those who play video games have no such recourse, and can only make crude comparisons of systems between separate design arcs (analogous to, say, comparing the different cover mechanics amongst FPS games).

These are only some brief thoughts on the implications of design across two game mediums, but it is my belief that more serious consideration on what constitutes the tabletop vs. digital game experience needs to be discussed.  The idea of 'hills and lines' are just one method of breaching the gap.  We should be cognizant of other methods so that our larger understanding of games across all mediums achieves even deeper meaning.

Post-Modern Secrets

It's been a while since I've posted anything here at Peasant Muse, so why not break the silence by discussing the new kid on the social media block- Secret.

I discovered Secret via Dan Frommer's 'SplatF' and decided that if it was worth his time to mention it, it was worth my time to at least check it out. What's funny is that I tried to download the app myself by searching for 'Secret' on the App Store. That gave me returns like this:

Turns out you have to search for 'Secret - Speak Freely' in order to find the app, making efforts to download this new attempt at freeing yourself from the constraints of traditional social media an ironic proposition from the start- you have to know the secret of how to download Secret.

The premise of Secret is this: you reach into your soul and uncover a hidden truth or pithy pearl of wisdom and reveal it, anonymously, to your other friends who also use Secret. If enough of these other Secret friends (more like Secret Contacts, since that list is what the app asks to consult on your first use) 'love' your shared secret (expressed by tapping a heart icon), then that secret will begin to permeate the screens of your friend's friends (contact's contacts) who also use the app. There is also some sort of 'magic sauce' involved (algorithms stewed in 21 secret herbs and spices) for determining the exposure of any given secret revealed.

I want to share a few thoughts about Secret, and what I think it means in the larger trend that is social media evolution.

- Anonymity, that 'warm blanket' as Max would say, is nothing new for social media, but finding a way to make anonymity stable enough- or, more properly, finding a stable way to channel the latent forces behind anonymity- is something Secret is trying to do. Social media is fast moving out of what I will call its 'Classicist' era, best characterized by static pages broken up into discrete identity fields (my timeline, my photos, my messages). Twitter was an early force that signaled the waining influence of Classicist thinking, despite the borrowings from Classical elements of form and design, and its new conception of asynchronous following and correlating firehose-like delivery of content suggested a new way for social media to grow.

Instagram became the exemplar of what I will call the 'Modern' era of social media that Twitter presaged, a definable shift from the previous period made possible due to mass adoption of smartphone technology. It demonstrated that a narrow focus- in this case, photography- could generate a level of engagement on par with more traditional, 'Classical' social media platforms.

Snapchat, in my opinion, heralded another shift in social media. To keep the metaphor going, I would call the ephemerality Snapchat offers a clear indicator signaling the emergence of a 'Post-Modern' era. We know what a big network (Facebook) looks like and we know what a niche network (Instagram) looks like; the pressing question, at least to me, now lies in exploring the aesthetics of our social media use. Ephemerality is one such aesthetic turn. Anonymity, or at least the sort of channeled anonymity offered by Secret, is another.

(I should mention that my use of the 'classical/modern/post-modern' metaphor is intentional. There is no doubt, in my mind, that the crisis of identity encountered at both the emergence of the modern in Western society, roughly 18th-20th centuries, and the emergence of the post-modern, roughly the late to early 20th-21st centuries, bears a striking resemblance to the crisis of identity associated with social media use in the past decade. These labels might not be appropriate given the short and dynamic timescale involved, but their loose meaning here more than suits my rhetorical need.)

- That being said, the anonymity of the sort pedaled by Secret seems to me to be nothing more than a veil. When you see a secret that originated from someone in your contacts list, you can't help but engage in a modern day version of 'Guess Who?'. Remember the search term I had to use to find 'Secret' in the App Store? 'Secret- Speak Freely'? The directed aesthetics of the app suggest you can 'speak freely' through use of anonymity, yet if the only people who see your 'secrets' are your contacts there are questions of just how warm a blanket Secret's anonymity provides.

Photo via Stian Eikland

Again, it is an issue of the aesthetic design. You could post something truly secret, something no one could possibly know, but unless it is something that can generate 'love' (clicks) that 'secret' is going nowhere. I suppose part of the 'magic sauce' mentioned above helps pluck announced secrets from obscurity and promotes them to the mainstream, but then that brings up essential questions related to the sort of 'secrets' the 'magic sauce' favors.  In fancy terms, knowledge of how the 'magic sauce' works would constitute an evaluation on the epistemic hierarchy Secret uses to categorize a 'secret'. It would be an insight into the aesthetic judgement 'Secret' renders on secrets.

But I digress- my main point here is that there is, to a point, an imbedded game involved with Secret's anonymity. You want to post revealing things, or maybe just something fun, but you want to do so in a manner that clues your immediate readers in on your true identity. It is an identity puzzle you place before others. The fun of solving the puzzle- or trying to solve it- can then be expressed by clicking the 'love' heart. 

You could avoid this game and post something truly cryptic, something no knows about you. Yet, again, the aesthetic design of 'Secret' will render its judgment. If it doesn't generate reaction among your contacts via clicking of hearts, the shared secret goes nowhere and it is almost as if it were never uttered at all. I could definitely see some cathartic use for Secret, but something tells me the designers of the app don't want this to become a *heavy* atmosphere. They want it to be light and fun and the aesthetic expression of anonymity Secret allows reinforces this ideal.

An actual secret from one of my contacts.

Keep in mind what I said above- the real challenge Secret faces is making the anonymous experience engaging and, above all, stable.

- Last observation: since I'm talking about aesthetics, I think it is interesting to contrast Secret's anonymity experience with that provided by Snapchat's ephemerality. Snapchat gives you an image, a moment, and then you have fading, unreliable memories of that image. Secret gives you an ongoing unreliable fragment, a clue, and asks you to reconstruct the image of the original sender. With Snapchat, images lead to words as you try to describe the moment. With Secret, words lead to images as you try to uncover the blanket of anonymity.

Arrival of the Russian Sorcerer

'Arrival of the Sorcerer at a Peasant Wedding' - Vasily Maximov, 1875

For the 19th century Russian peasant family, few elements could portend the future success or failure of a wedding more so than the presence of a local witch or sorcerer.  Vasily Maximov addressed such an event in his 1875 painting, ‘Arrival of the Sorcerer at a Peasant Wedding’, with a mix of astonishment and fear depicted on the various guest’s faces.  The bride, standing with her groom at the left edge of the painting, stares with wide eyes as a confidant- perhaps her mother- whispers in her ear, providing sage advice on how to deal with the unexpected- or perhaps invited- guest.  Other wedding participants give the imposing sorcerer, himself covered in snow and sporting a penetrating gaze, clear berth, while the local village priest (seated to the right of the wedding couple and bathed in an obscured source of light) casts a defiant scowl towards the newly arrived personage.  While the feeling of tension is palpable to the viewer of Maximov’s painting, his subject matter succinctly touches upon many themes associated with the role of the witch/sorcerer in Russian peasant life beyond those of fear or brooding sense of comeuppance.

For starters, the witch/sorcerer is a figure placed on the threshold of the sacred and the profane, their powers a curious mix of both benevolence and malevolence that, surprisingly, helped maintain established norms of communal behavior.  They were primarily fixtures of the locality they inhabited, a fact borne out by the relative diminution of power they experienced the further they traveled from their established residence.  As figures who utilized largely unknown arcane procedures, their presence paradoxically engendered a vast matrix of power and knowledge manifested by peasants who either sought their help or feared their involvement in daily life.  Compared to the mystifying power of Christianity, embodied in the village priest, local witches/sorcerers instead promoted an understanding that reified peasant power in contrast to the relative reduction of power peasants encountered when dealing with anointed church representatives.  Finally, the Russian tradition of witchcraft favored male practitioners over female ones, although both sexes were equally capable of manifesting magical power, a fact that puts the oft repeated wisdom of predominantly female involvement in witchcraft, derived from the Western European experience, in a comparative light.

Of all these characteristics, the ‘threshold’ aspect of witchcraft is perhaps the most important.  Russian folk belief is full of thresholds, whether it is the bathhouse (a place where one gets clean and where divination and other practices involving potentially unclean spirits can occur- it’s also where most traditional births happened), the hearth (a place where bread- a sustaining, transformative substance- is made and where the house spirit, the domovoi, also lives), and even the fence surrounding a church (the inside being the realm, predominantly, of Christianity and the outside the realm of unclean or shamanistic forces).

Witches and sorcerers occupy a similar threshold position.  They partake in both this world and the more mysterious world where spirits and other unknown forces govern.  As such, they act as a sort of regulator or control mechanism for unexplained phenomena that plagued traditional societies.  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in his book Jasmin’s Witch, states that, “Witchcraft…has always existed as an instrument, either benign or maleficent, for the purpose of manipulating the world of the peasantry- or by which that world imagined it was being manipulated.” (5)  The presence of the witch or sorcerer, while sometimes unpleasant, nonetheless offered a way to cope with events that would otherwise have no reasonable explanation.

And because many malevolent issues could be explained by the intervention of witches or sorcerers, their presence in a village facilitated a sort of perverse attitude of mutual respect.  Since anyone could avail themselves of the witches or sorcerers trade, members of a community were more likely to uphold established rules of conduct lest they anger someone and become the target of spells or other unpleasant effects.  This produced a foucauldian effect of disciplinary behavior, yet the means to enforce this discourse was available not to the few but to the many.  Much like the M.A.D. doctrine governing nuclear weapons use throughout most of the 20th century, the local witch or sorcerer maintained order by the very promise of mutual destruction.  Le Roy Ladurie again: “The fear of being bewitched is the beginning of wisdom.” (13)

There is also the issue of how the witch or sorcerer straddles the threshold of being good or evil.  Several terms in Russian exist to designate the various categories of those imbued with supernatural abilities; ved’ma (witch), koldun (sorcerer), vorozheia (fortuneteller), otgadchik (diviner), znakhar’/znakharka (magic healers), just to name a few.  While some labels were clearly skewed towards malevolent practices, such as the ved’ma or koldun, it was not always so cut-and-dry as to what separated the practices of the local witch or the local healer.  Both used the same materials for their craft- either various herbs and grasses, or perhaps tomes of knowledge that covered topics arcane or medicinal.  Charms (zagavori) or amulets (nauzy) could be obtained by both the witch and the healer, and it seems possession of these effects could cast one in a light of maleficence or beneficence depending on the opinion held by the local community.  If both the witch and the healer could make a love potion, who is to say that one is bad and the other is good?

Of course, the real reason why witches or sorcerers could have such a normalizing effect on traditional society and be cast among one of several roles was precisely because they were an integral part of the society in which they lived.  Their power stemmed from the fact that everyone knew they were a witch or sorcerer, their reputation predicated on a devotion to locality.  Think of the Good Witch of the North, or the Wicked Witch of the West as found in the Wizard of Oz.  These are broad geographical regions, but the deliberate choice to center these characters in an approximation of locality clearly aligns with the actual situation many exposed to witchcraft experienced.  Witches or Sorcerers that traveled away from their homes experienced a diminution of their power commensurate with distance.  To put it another way, it’s difficult to be afraid of a distant witch if their powers are not known first hand.

Compare this to a similar Christian counterpart of witchcraft- the hermit or aesthetic.  These personages gain power through their distancing and exclusion from the locale of society.  Even the pilgrimage, one of the more devout acts of piety a believer can undertake, relies on the concept of the distant to convey power and understanding associated with the faith.  This is meant to demonstrate a sense of the far reaching effects of Christianity, the fact that its wide base of power can be viewed in locales far from ones own.  Witchcraft is the inverse of this relationship.  While the witch or sorcerer draws upon a similar wide base of power through access to supernatural means, it can only manifest these powers in an acute fashion by remaining tied to a specific locale.  This, again, ties back to the variety of roles played in Russian society by those marked as being capable of wielding supernatural power; if one person’s witch is another person’s healer, then only reputation and first-hand experience could be the determinant factor in classification.

This unique property of locality meant that the witch or sorcerer embodied the traditional version of branding par excellence.  The interesting thing about brands is that they exist within a matrix of understanding and power.  Brands exude a meaning, but that meaning is mediated through the outside observer who places on that brand their own hopes, desires, and expectations through a bonding process.  Marcus Boon, in his book In Praise of Copying, demonstrates that bonding-via-branding is a form of ‘contagious’ magic that channels mimetic desire.  When we see a celebrity lovingly touch a Louis Vuitton bag (the example Boon uses to describe his concept), the ‘contagious’ power of that celebrity is transferred to that bag and thus enhances our desire to own a copy of that bag.  In the case of witchcraft, the peasant knows the power of the witch or sorcerer and seeks to procure or identify a potion, amulet, or charm that mimetically copies that power for the peasant’s own use or avoidance.

Yet if we prod the underlying reasons why the witch or sorcerer conveys such bonding-via-branding power, then we come to the conclusion that it is the understanding manifested by the peasant- not the witch- that gives the potion, amulet, or charm ‘contagious’ mimetic presence.  The abundance of peasant maxims or folklore regarding detection of witches or the explanations of their magical effects attest to this matrix of understanding and power.  The following examples are drawn from Linda Ivantis’ work, Russian Folk Belief:  Traditional Russian belief held that witches or sorcerers possessed a tail, marking their alleged pact with unclean forces that imbued them with magical power.  In the Penza Province, a sorcerer or witch could be revealed by making a fire using aspen wood on Holy Thursday; once the fire burnt out, the sorcerer or witch would come begging for the ashes.  Sorcerers or witches could also be identified by their clothing, their smell, or use of riddles in speech.

Identification of witchcraft and those who practiced it was a primary concern for many in traditional Russian peasant societies.  Such was the pervasive fear of ‘spoiling’ (a common term that peasants used to describe the effects of witches or sorcerers) brought about through witchcraft that no arena of life was safe from its pervasive influence.  Of paramount concern was the potential ruinous spoiling of a new couple at their wedding.  Jealousy or spite held by a member of the community over the nuptials of a soon to be married couple could easily lead one to enlist the services of the local witch or sorcerer in creating a potion or amulet, often made from something personal with regards to the couple in question (like hair, or clothing), that would cause death, infertility, or any number of ill effects.  As a precaution, the often safest course for potential newlyweds was to simply invite the witch or sorcerer to the wedding as an honored guest.  There were many tales in which a place of honor would be accorded to both the village priest and village witch- Maximov’s painting is a testament to the awkward presence of both.  Failure to do so could either open a couple to the malevolent intent of others, or risk drawing the wrath of the local witch or sorcerer whose invite was spurned.  The latter is most likely the occurrence depicted in Maximov’s painting.  The sorcerer, arriving late to the scene as evidenced by his snow covered boots and shoulders, no doubt is making his presence known so as to affirm his potential to inflict harm.

This leads us to one of the more interesting aspects of Russian witchcraft.  Unlike the experience in Western Europe or America, most documented cases of witchcraft in Russia involved men and not women.  Whereas up to 80% of witchcraft documentation in Western Europe involved women as the primary suspect, this ratio was reversed in Russia.   There is some speculation that this was due to the fact that marginalization of position for females, a factor that led many to embrace  or be forced into the identity of a witch, was less prevalent in Russian traditional society.  Many women, up to the end of the 19th century, lived in extended households that ensured a means of subsistence.  Due to the enforcement of serfdom, and the relative lack of mobility this produced, a women's role in the family and traditional kinship-based networks was more secure than that held by women in the more highly mobile world of Western Europe.  Also, the presence of a codified demonology, which was crucial for those in Western Europe seeking to identify the hallmarks of potential witches, simply did not exist to the same extent in popular Russian thought.

While gender difference was one divergent factor of Russian witchcraft when compared to the Western European experience, many of the other qualities highlighted above- the reliance upon locality, the branding-as-bonding mimetic power, the witch as product of a highly specialized peasant matrix of knowledge- demonstrate that witchcraft shared many similarities across geographic boundaries as well.  One last similarity should be added to this list; the growth of witchcraft trials in both Russia and Western Europe signaled the rise of an increasingly powerful and centralized bureaucratic state.  As authorities sought to bolster their networks of power, the witch became a convenient scapegoat upon which defining aspects of the modern state- surveillance, normativity, and control of population- could be built.  Local, popular knowledge became supplanted by textual decrees and investigations, meaning that articulation and definition of the witch by those removed from the local ultimately displaced both the witch and the locale they inhabited from positions of power.

Of course, Maximov’s painting features no presence of Tsarist officials, only that of the local peasantry.  In seeking to get at the truth of the experience, Maximov has ironically depicted a romanticized version of that experience.  This same romanticizing trend regarding witchcraft continues today, but it is important to realize that all stories about witches harken back to a time when dichotomies between good and evil were more fluid and the witch, far from being a convenient foil for fairy tales, represented a complex and necessary function in traditional society.