Gamers as peaceniks

Ok, so the pac-man quote was one of those arguments that disproves itself (is there some Latinate rhetorical term for this? I'd love to know it). But I just ran across another bit that unselfconsciously seems to mitigate a games-are-ruining-society panic (at least from my perspective).

I don't play first-person shooters for several reasons:
1. they're a bit after my time (I think Doom came out the year after I graduated college, so it's not in my golden-age set like Crystal Castle would be. Or Centipede).
2. I tend toward the addictive and have heard of far too many people who can't get offline once the killing starts
3. they scare me: the realism smudges any line that might otherwise be there between entertainment and training.
4. I don't have a gaming-oriented computer or fast internet connection.

So I confess being susceptible to a kind of left-conservatism (or at least pacifist-) about violent gaming. I can see how people expect it to produce nihilists, desensitized to the real effects of violence.

But after reading a fascinating student paper about Quake 2 gaming clans (which, by the way, come across in the paper as a stark example of Foucault's notion of disciplines), I checked out the Online Gaming League website (ogl.org). Here's a little nugget of a poll that got me thinking:

Should we go to war in Iraq?
No: 41%
Yes: 38%
Don't give a crap: 21%
105 responses

Interesting.... Wonder when it was taken.

it had to happen

Zizek is a movie! That's hilarious. I wonder how it is.

Ok, so two things made me laugh out loud

this weekend. The other one (besides the pac-man quote) was the Post's word play column, Style Invitational. Scroll down to week 602. I think my favorites were Bong Mot and Bananab.

best thing I heard this weekend

a bit of weblore that is probably old hat to those in the know, but I only saw it for the first time the other day:

Apparently a Nintendo representative once said something like this:

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

Confirm or deny, anyone? Or maybe just buy the T-shirt. DJ ghost is the bomb.

Scholar Activists

Like Bourdieu said, time for an intellectual international.

Public anthropology

What they're reading in the white house/state dept.

What they should be reading.

Especially the bit taking down Thomas Friedman.

My favorite bit (not from the book, but the page I linked to Tommy's name):

In his New York Times article, Thomas Friedman challenges the critics of "globalization" to name "a single country that has upgraded its living or worker standards, without free trade and integration." As the above list suggests, every single one of today's developed countries did exactly that. You can file that under "facts you won't hear" from the mainstream media.

You know those motivational posters in airplane magazines?

They should look like this.



Obvious reminder of the Simpsons, remember when it went something like this?

Homer: Boy, if something's too hard, just quit. It gives you more time to watch TV.
Bart: Thanks, Dad. What's on?
Homer (voice and soundtrack swelling with emotion): it doesn't matter.

But that's too easy. Real life provides better self-parody. This from Steve Striffler's ethnographic article on working in a poultry plant in Arkansas:

At 3 p.m. sharp, Javier, my orientation leader, gathers up the new recruits and escorts us into a small classroom that contains a prominently displayed sign. "Democracies depend on the political participation of its citizens, but not in the workplace." Written in both English and Spanish, the message is clear in any language.