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.

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.

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.

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.

Ladders, Builders, and the AHA

'Ladder to Somewhere' by Corey Templeton

If you've ever watched Chappelle Show, then you probably know the series of skits titled, 'When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong'. If you're an academic historian, or a graduate student in history, then you've probably read the recent AHA recommendation to have institutions embargo completed dissertations from digital release for up to six years. There's been a lot of responses, both pro and con, about the issue, but for me all I can think is that the AHA might be the most recent candidate for another episode of 'When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong'.

Why do I feel this way? A few reasons below:

1. I have no doubt that the AHA, in its own mind, has the best interest of junior scholars in focus when they grapple with and think about policies to pursue in protecting nascent scholar's interests. Junior scholars represent the future of the profession, and it makes absolute sense for the AHA to deal with professional issues in a way that makes life for junior scholars better, not worse.
2. That being said, I also have no doubt that the committee behind the 'Embargo' policy tried to 'Keep it Real' by framing their appeal as a means to protect future junior scholars' access to monograph publishing. But in many ways, trying to equate protection of junior scholars through tacit support of a notion that accessibility is detrimental to their career is where 'Keeping it Real Goes Wrong'. 
3. One word never mentioned in either the AHA proposal, or William Cronon's recent support of this proposal, is prestige- and if you are talking about monograph publishing being related to tenure or advancement in the profession without also acknowledging the linkage this process has to prestige, then you're missing a very crucial part of the entire process. 

I've seen the responses, on Twitter and in the comments field for both the AHA announcement and Cronon's support piece, and they essentially fall into two camps. The first camp, what I would term the 'Ladder' group, may feel that the entire publishing system is misguided or essentially enforcing a protectionist scheme on academic work, but they are on the ladder of either a tenure track job or current book deal. (Or they are of a group that hopes to one day be on the ladder) A lot of them sympathize with issues in the system, but for them to get ahead they have to follow the current system's rules- they have to climb the ladder. Why? Because in order to get promotion at a Division I school or seek recognition by their older, tenured peers who often sit on Tenure and Promotion Committees, they feel they have to publish a book.

The second camp, what I would term the 'Builder' group, feel that new digital paradigms are providing increased opportunities for scholars to share their works with wider audiences and this means that several cherished notions of 'scholarly work' need to be rebuilt, or remodeled, in order to accommodate the profession to changing standards. Some of the 'builders' have tenure, while others do not. Some of them are in the academy, others are not. Many of them have personal academic blogs, or perform work that is very public in its outreach and scope. Why? Because for them, the idea that one's work should be hidden behind paywalls, or made to be consumed by only a small subset of the academy, is anathema to their desire to build new structures. For the builders, publishing a book is okay- but so is sharing your work online. They see OA ideals as a blueprint for what their building should look like, what the future of a digital profession could look like.

But- and this alters what I said above- there is also an amorphous third camp, those who are feeling out whether they should be on the ladder or helping the builders. Some of them want to be in the academy, and that means they need to start climbing the ladder. Some of them want to build a new academy, and that means eschewing the ladder not because it is bad but because it takes energy away from building. There's even a fourth camp, those with tenure- but they are largely immune to the direct implications of this debate, even though their voices carry weight for how those implications play out.

What every camp is concerned about, except for those who already have it, is prestige. The ladder folks want to climb towards it. The builder folks want to build new conceptions of it. The rest of us are wondering if we can ever have it at all.

My sympathies lie with the builder group, because I come from a niche area of history that the ladder does not often reach. I study Russian history, and my dissertation focuses on Old Believers. In my department, many, many students enter to study American history. A smaller subset come to study Western European history. An even smaller subset, far smaller than the other groups, come to study East Europe/Russian/African/Asian history. Although I have not made efforts to shop it, I'm under no illusions that publishers are clamoring to take my dissertation manuscript and shepherd it through to monograph form. I'm not Robert Crummey, or Roy Robson. I'm just Jeremy Antley, a guy who is tackling a small portion of the work those two, comparative giants also discuss. (If you don't know who I'm talking about, then I've sort of made my point already) What publisher wants to invest 20k or more in a book that, literally, a few dozen will find serious interest, with the added possibility that a few hundred more might have casual interest, in reading?

I don't have a track record. I don't have enough prestige to get noticed by large publishers right off the bat. I'm not attending Yale, or Columbia, or Harvard, or Princeton. I'm a product of a less prestigious state school, which I think is a fine institutions with good quality professors in a variety of fields. While I have no doubt that I can climb the tenure ladder of academia if given the chance, I also know that those kind of opportunities, especially in my chosen field of Russian history, are few and far between- especially if I'm competing against other candidates from top flight institutions. If I don't have sufficient personal prestige when applying for jobs, those jobs will default to looking at the prestige of my institution or the prestige of those under which I've studied. There's a little joke I tell folks who ask me what I study- I tell them it's 'Russia+', as in 'Russia + American History' or 'Russia + Women's Studies' or 'Russia + Insert Field Here'. For me to have a realistic chance of getting a tenure track job, I can't just be a Russia guy. I have to build a broader base. As Kurtis Blow once said, 'these are the breaks.'

Here's another rub; I also tackle the subject of games in an academic way. While some have given me praise for the work I do, I've also had some measure of scorn applied as well. Trust me, I would love to write a paper concerned with the intersection of history and games like Twilight Struggle, 1989, and Andean Abyss. But the momentum isn't there yet- the ladder just does not extend that far.

So, for me, any policy that endorses a view of hiding my work just so it will be more attractive to publishers feels a bit absurd. If I had a firm grasp on the ladder, perhaps I would feel differently. But I don't, and I don't see many willing to extend that ladder for someone they don't know who researches in fields not widely accessible or even considered legitimate at all. That's why I sympathize with the builders, because I've achieved a modicum of success in following their path. My two published articles, one on History embracing games and the other on Textual Dualism in Russian history, both came about because I was willing to publish early versions of my thoughts in blog form. I received feedback from these public outings that, in turn, helped shape my larger, revised arguments that were peer reviewed and published in journals embracing an open access ethic. I've been able to attend conferences outside the strict purview of History because others read my publicly shared work and thought it worth supporting. I've been given the opportunity to write for Play the Past and have essays published on The New Inquiry website because my work was open and accessible.

I built my reputation in public view, because to do so in private would have given me none of the opportunities above. I'm a builder because that's the only way someone like me can gain an audience and, subsequently, gain prestige.

I could have hidden my work, could have silently chipped away at it until it was fully baked and ready to be consumed. I could have done all of this in the hopes that the final unveiling would grant me the prestige I rightfully believe should be awarded. I could have outstretched my hands in the hopes that when I opened my eyes the ladder would be there for the climbing. Maybe that's the best way to keep it real. But my gut tells me that if I did those things, my keeping it real would go wrong.

As a final note, in what has been an already rambling post, I want to say that just because I'm for the builders doesn't mean I'm against those who climb the ladder. I don't want to force my ideas on anybody. To be fair, this is an extremely tough time for academics and it's hard to tell someone to suffer for principles I believe in that may cost them a job, especially if that person has a family or other obligations they need to support. Everything I've said above is, in the words of Royal Tenenbaum, 'just one man's opinion'.

I think Dan Cohen is right in that what people are reacting to is the fact that the AHA made their policy with little discussion involved. Now we are discussing it, and that's definitely when keeping it real can't go wrong.

Board Stiff with Formalism

Photo via Henrik Berger Jørgensen

There's nothing like being fashionably late to a party, or a debate about formalism and games.  Oh, wait- I mean, a debate about formalism and digital games.  Because if you've read all the posts and back-and-forth's, you probably noticed one thing; it almost entirely centers on the medium of digital games.  Which is not a bad thing, really.  It just happens to be a shame, because the topic is larger than the digital and should, rightfully, include the medium of board games.

First off, I want to be clear that I'm not going to discuss the grand old question 'are games art?'  Personally, I find that question to be inane and a complete waste of energy.  Others agree.  I'm totally certain that others disagree vehemently, but that's my stance and you won't convince me otherwise.

What I want to investigate here is an altogether deeper issue.  Why, in all this debate on the question of formalism, have board games been mostly ignored?  Because it seems to me that the board-based brethren get short shrift when it comes to the debates circulating around the larger topic of 'games'.  Raph Koster, who let loose a salvo in the formalist fracas with his 'A Letter to Leigh', does mention board games, but he also cloaks their presence, and by extension the absence of other 'non-games', under larger issues of player agency and 'gameness'.  While I don't agree with Koster's overall assessment, which I detail below, I do want to make clear that by bringing board games into the conversation Koster has done the debate a huge service.

Zack Morris time out: Pop quiz- what makes a game a game?  Would you be amazed to know I'm playing a game right now?  It's called, 'Write a Blog Post' and I'm currently kicking the ass out of it.  I'm winning in every way, despite having no defined objectives (if I finish, did I really complete the game?  If I quit writing my blog post, have I not achieved some sort of win state?  Does it go on, ad infinitum?), and the only person playing is myself.  I just earned bonus points for writing this.  End Zack Morris time out.

Specifically, let me address one particular board game Koster brings up in his post- Brenda Romero's Train.  Koster categorizes this 'game' as one that "uses the fact of engaging with it at all to accomplish its effect," before asking if this type of 'game' is really just embracing 'narrative moves' over "game-like moves."  He questions the aesthetic, implying that it is "something that should probably only be done once, marveled at, and then moved past."  By suggesting that Train is a game where "the only moral move is not to play," Koster questions, at a very fundamental level, if the aesthetic of play in this type of game is not merely a twist, a sort of trick of narrative, thus making it not a game at all.

But is the only moral move not to play?  To me, this is very indicative of a 'formalist' critique.  This is something board games have to constantly deal with, probably more so than digital games, because many players categorize the board games they play according to very formalist schemas.  Caylus is a worker placement game, Twilight Struggle is an area control game, Agricola is part of the larger family of Euro games, and so forth.  It's easy to think of board games this way.  But that's not the whole story.  If you take a look at many reviews of games, they focus on more than mechanics- they ask deeper questions of story, of theme, of how the game actually plays.  These reviews, without explicitly stating it, ask, "How does this game give me a narrative to interact with?" - which, in my mind, is something deeper than a formalist critique.  It's a humanist critique.  How does this game make me react as a human?  Formalism is a product of the rational.  Humanism is a product of the metaphysical.

Returning to the question, "Is the only moral move (of Train) not to play?", my answer is: no.  It's not just no, it's a hell no.  Why?  Train is about providing the player a sense, terrible as it is, of the sort of grotesque, normalizing effects that focusing on transporting Jews to concentration camps presents to those attempting to maximize and make efficient such transportation.  Playing Train isn't supposed to be pretty, or even fun.  It's meant to be torturous, it's meant to make you ask and question the source of your own humanity. 

Did you take glee, ignorantly, of moving the most amount of people to the end of the line?  Probably.  And when you discovered the true purpose of the game- moving representative figures to their representative death- did you recoil and become sick at the idea?  The ethical answer is yes.  But would you have encountered this full range of quandary, of questioning your own humanity, if you simply refused to play the game out of moral concerns?  To be honest, the moral question brought up by Koster assumes you know what the game is about before you play it.  But that posits perfect knowledge, which *any* game must assume you don't possess at the first go-around.  So my answer is that if you want to know what this game is about, you absolutely have to play it.  And in doing so, in playing the game of Train as it was meant to be played, perhaps you can affirm a part of your soul and it's place among the larger population of humanity.  Does this deny player agency?  Does Train embody the qualities of gameness?  Is this just a trick of narrative?

Asking these sort of questions, to me, is sort of like the old adage: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.  If you have to ask do these qualities make Train a game, you probably shouldn't play it.  I say this in no affront to Koster, but I do think asking these sort of questions is indicative of the formalist trap of evaluation.  Which is, to say, I think this falls along the same issues as asking if 'games are art'.  Should you only play Train once?  Perhaps.  Does that mean you can't watch others play it, see their reactions, and take that experience in conjunction with your own?  Brenda Romero designed the game, has seen it played many times- and I'm pretty sure her answer would be 'no'.  Because, in a metaphysical sense, watching others play Train can be just as powerful as playing it yourself, even if that game lessens its 'gameplay' effect after one session.

Now I'm fully aware that opening your argument with a game like Train is a bit like dropping a hydrogen bomb to solve an ant problem in your house.  It's a bit of overkill.  But I make this example as a way to demonstrate that similar metaphysical games, like so many Twine examples, can easily be sunk in this same formalist quicksand without considering, truly, their full effect on the player, or even those not playing but merely observing a Twine game being played.  If your evaluative criteria is that "You can't do better at Train", then you have blatantly favored the rational over the metaphysical.  Which is fine, to a point.  But it certainly isn't applicable to the nebulous category that we call 'games'.  Games are, by their very nature, a blending of the rational and the metaphysical.  Board games tend to draw this blending out in a way that video games do not, so easily, reveal.  Because with board games, you have to address the form they present at a basic level. But you absolutely have to go past that for any real critique.  You have to go past mechanics to consider the humanist perspective.

Koster says 'art games' and AAA are about control, that "they are…more about the author than the player."  But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss player agency the way Koster is comfortable doing, especially with regard to deeply personal games- like Dys4ia.  As a player of these of games, am I not affirming my place in the broader perspective of humanity when I play a deeply personal game?  Why is the narrative effect a hindrance in Twine games, but for other games- like Andean Abyss or Twilight Struggle- the narrative effect adds to their luster and allure?  When you step out of the strictly rational bounds of critique, when you go beyond the form of the game, you enter into a territory much less defined by exclusives or schematizations.  You enter into the being of the player themselves, their ability to take what is presented and draw their own lessons from the act of play.  I can think of no greater surrendering of control than to let someone bring his or her own interpretation to the fore.

Koster calls this process out "as rhetoric and not…dialectic," with the consequence being that Twine games (or really any deeply personal games) "move against the fundamental current of gameness."  But I think this makes the mistake of placing the game on a central pillar and reducing the role, the agency, of the player who approaches this pillar.  Koster says, "the unique power of games, to me, lies in the conversation between player and designer."  But I disagree- the unique power of games lies in the conversation between the player and themselves while interacting with a designers interpretation.  If we place the game on the pillar, as is the tendency of the formalist critique, then we are accepting the supremacy of the rational over the metaphysical.  If we place the player on the pillar, then we reaffirm the humanity in the game and accept the presence of the metaphysical in conjunction with the rational.  In the end, the pillar disappears under this ideal and we no longer are bound by rhetoric.  We become the dialectical.

Play is not something that begins when the game starts and ends when it is put away.  Play is the process of using a rhetorical device to engage in a dialectic with ourselves.  That's why I can't agree with Koster when he says, "games have had nothing to say for so long."  They have so much to say that it's easy to just link this outpouring strictly to mechanics and then reject what the game has to say by rejecting the mechanics linked to its outpouring.  When you imply that Twine games impose a narrative rather than have the player construct a narrative, that critique is easy to accept or recognize because the mechanics of Twine are rather straightforward.  But to look only at mechanics and not ask the deeper, metaphysical questions of what play in this medium produces as far as conversation between the player and themselves is to miss a very large part of why games exist at all.

Or, to put it another way, to frame a game experience as between a player and designer is to favor, exclusively, the mechanical over anything else.  But if we frame a game experience as between a player and themselves, we can elude the trap of formalism and go straight to the dialectical process play intrinsically produces.

But I've digressed far too much from my main question- why have board games been largely left out of this formalist debate?  Why are digital games entering this phase now?  I think, in part, digital games are coming to terms with the *way* in which they are played.  When people begin to critique the effectiveness of Bioshock as a first person shooter, what they are really critiquing is the necessity of using a standard game controller to interact with the digital medium.  Digital games have long been experiences mediated through various controllers, and this recent 'piercing of the veil' with regards to Bioshock should be seen as a turn away from the formalist obsession with mechanics, and the controllers that facilitate them, towards a bigger question of how does this formalist 'roadblock' hinder or not hinder the conversation the player is having with themselves while playing the game.

That's why board games can, and should, provide the digital game critiques with an exemplar of how to negotiate around various formalist roadblocks.  So many players of board games ask these sort of questions every time they play.  While many do, admittedly, frame this inquiry around a mechanical theme- does the card driven mechanic of Twilight Struggle enhance the gameplay experience?- the larger questions asked go to the heart of what it means to interpret the game experience as a player.  The various 'controllers' utilized in board games are hardly fixed in place, and the numerous mods or house rules scrawled on box tops are a testament to the wide degree of flexibility board games enjoy over their more rigid digital cousins.  Now I would be the first to admit the board game/digital game relationship is not a 1:1 experience, and there is only so far comparative analyses can go in these sort of endeavors.  But the links are there, waiting to be explored.

So while I find myself almost totally at odds with what Koster presented in his 'Open Letter', I nevertheless admire his insistence on bringing the question of board games back into this larger debate.