Kid Oakland, now a frontpage diarist on the Kos, has a bit that references GTA (as well as Biggie and Tupac) to make a point about prison. The usual flamewar about the virtue (or lack thereof) of the GTA franchise ensues.

This is something I'm interested in tracking, not only because I'm interested in politics and the next round of the culture wars, but because I'm fascinated by the continued emergence of videogames as a cultural product, a medium for narrative and for representing myths, values, etc.

I think the reflexive reaction to violence in games is just that: reflexive. People inevitably fixate on the fact that in all three modern installments of Grand Theft Auto you can pick up a prostitute, watch your car rock back and forth, loose some money, then kill the girl when she gets out of your car and take your money back. I remember being blown away by this when I first heard/saw it a few years ago, not because it was so depraved, but because it was so logical. The great advance that Rockstar Games (makers of GTA) have made is to build an unprecidented level of logical consistency into a world founded on comic-book/action-movie violence, which ultimately creates a much more engaging experience for human beings on the playing end.

So while it's just breaking into the mainstream that this game creates a fantasy world wher really awfully brutal things are possible -- and this is bringing around the real possibility that there will be a push for some kind of regulation soon -- I believe the step up in gameplay and engagement will make it a powerful medium for narrative development, leading to Videogaming as a source of positive social values. It's already happening, as per this comment:

Having played "GTA: San Andreas", I can tell you, the one time I sprayed everyone in a pizza shop with bullets for money, I was guilt ridden for the rest of my time in the game. Even in the video gaming world, I felt this kind of behavior was "cheating". I didn't earn my money as I should have...and innocents died because of it. I think these games are very interesting and open up parts of your brain which wouldn't be touched otherwise...

I'd point out that San Andreas is decidedly anti-crack, and points out the geopolitical relationship between the soviet union's collapse and the massive rise in street crime in the early 90s. That's a long way to come from Space Invaders and Pong.

From the seester:

lohanfreestyle.com

make sure your sound is up

Just do like the lady says.

The human world thrives on personality, mythology, narrative and story. This doesn't mean that only people with ingratiating personalities are successful, only that someone with an authentic personality will often win over someone lacking or with an inauthentic one. It means that someone with a myth, a tale, a legend will have more social gravitas than someone without.

We often forget these things in our highly marketized world. The realm of commodities and products is often inhuman, powerful as it is, and that makes it weak. Don't forget that.

Just occurred to me as I was making some coffee at noon -- I got up at noon this Monday, and why not? -- that not so long ago sugar was a major part of the commercial engine driving Western expansion into the rest of the world. Now it's so common you can buy five pounds of white sugar (once the most prized variety) for the same price as a loaf of moderately-expensive bread, and we have a national epidemic of childhood obesity because high-calorie sweeteners are added to so many things that remain so cheap, many of which are sold in our schools.

In the heyday of colonialism, people were enslaved to plant, harvest, process sugar. Now we have a different kind of economically-driven domination. People ruin their physical lives in order to consume.

This is part of a general trend in the post-industrial era, the transition from production to service and consumption. We really don't need 6 billion people making things with the most advanced machinery possible. It would be thousands of times more than the world needs. I mean, the industry of fashion had to be invented from whole cloth to keep the textile industry alive. Fashion is an information industry, mostly design and marketing, which informs the masses that old clothing (the last style, the last year, the last season) should be thrown out and new attire purchased on a semi-regular basis.

I'm not opposed to fashion as a concept, but it's interesting how it's been put to work by the profit cartel to harness the Westernized human being's desire for identity in the service of consumption. The supreme irony is that because this consumption is meant to justify the output of our mighty engines of mass production, people's hunger for identity-bolstering products, things one would think would set the individual apart from the mass, tends to be sated in a rather uniform manner.

This has been generally true across the cultural board for some time -- "I'm going to be alternative, just like everyone else" -- and there are fascinating questions to be investigated about the nature of identity vis-a-vis individualism. It's coming to many people's attention that there is no such thing as an individual; neither man nor woman can exist as an island. So you need a tribe, people you belong to, etc. But still, the way in which the corporate market has been able to co-opt the notion of rebellion against the corporate market is really quite something.

This phenomena feels prescient to me because I went through adolesence at the onset of Grunge (soon followed by Punk) as a marketed culture. I can recall watching "Smells Like Teen Spirit" debut on MTV at the age of 12 and being vaguely afraid of what I was seeing, similarly to how I felt when my friend Ramen made me a tape-copy of Ice Cube's seminal Predator. Now I recognize it as the tipping point where a cultural style went from being an indigenous set of rituals and products to the primary product of a massive marketing engine.

No matter how personal that feels to me as someone who had it wrapped up in their early adolesence, it's not a new phenomena. The story of Alternative/Grunge and Hip Hop are just semi-recent examples of a cultural cycle that's gone round several times in the late 20th Century. It's the story of Rock and Roll, a fact which not even Elvis or The Beatles or either of their cunning management teams fully understood at the time. It's the story of the "Hippies", a cultural term which started as semi-derogatory, not something the denizens of 1960s counter-culture created or owned.

Today I think something new is emerging. Due to the democratization of information, the ability of centralized and established power centers to influence the development of culture is decreasing. There's a growing amount of factionalization within the cultural sphere. One need only look at the array of musical genres which are bandied about seriously (at least by their practitioners) to see the movement. Everywhere that culture has slipped out from under the corporate thumb, an explosion of innovation has occurred.

The critical change is that the democratization of information allows for a much different kind of power relationship between cultural producers and audiences, and in fact eliminates the need for people to be permanently tied to one class or another. One night I may be a producer or a performer, the next night I may be an appreciative member of an audeince or even just another mindless consumer. You can play a bunch of roles in life; it's the cosmopolitan way, and it's more fun than being a starving artists or a couch potato.

More and more and more of this to come.