Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - SJW Experiences Fun, Is Confused

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Dec. 6, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

17:34

SJW Experiences Fun, Is Confused

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	Hello everyone, I've got an article that I would like to go through for a video because it really highlights a point that I really really want to make about video games.
	But before that, I'd just give you a quick announcement.
	So this week's This Week in Stupid on Sunday the 7th of December, I'll be doing something a bit different.
	Goodfella is going to be joining me and we're going to be doing it live.
	See how that goes.
	So we're going to be starting at 9pm GMT and we'll just go until we've run out of stupid things to talk about.
	It's probably going to be sloppy and all over the place, but hopefully it'll be fun because Goodfella is hilarious.
	If you're not familiar with the channel, I've got a link in the description, go check it out.
	And hopefully we will see you there.
	So are you all familiar with The Verge?
	I think you probably are.
	But if you're not, they're the Kratons who began criticising Matt Taylor for his shirts when they should have been congratulating him on his monumental scientific discovery.
	And yes, it was their article that led to him being bullied relentlessly by feminists so he broke down in tears when he apologised.
	So when they write an article about Far Cry 4 titled, We Deserve Better Excuses for Killing People in Video Games, I really had to give it a read.
	I mean, it's like they're talking as if the events of the video game are real.
	Also, this is insanely entitled.
	After the way The Verge has treated Matt Taylor, I actually think what they deserve is to be pushed off a cliff.
	So before I start, I'll just say I've never actually played any of the Far Cry games, but this cover art is fucking genius.
	I've said it before, but I'll say it again.
	There is nothing about this cover art I don't think is fucking magnificent.
	And this screenshot looks fucking amazing.
	So I'm probably going to get this game, because it looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
	So the article begins, first person shooters are notorious for the paper-thin motivations of their heroes.
	Which is entirely unsurprising given that it is the least important aspect of any first-person shooter.
	But continuing, typically muscular bald men who will execute an entire continent if someone puts their country in danger or stuffs their female colleague in a fridge.
	That's a reference to the Women in Refrigerators trope, a trope that has only ever happened once.
	To step around the moral glue trap of a genre that relies on a casual murder, many developers quickly bury their excuse in a compact expository monologue, or they just make the villains Nazis or zombies.
	Or, maybe, what they do is just give a perfunctory excuse because everyone knows the events of the game are fucking fictional.
	In the latest Far Cry, a franchise set in exotic locations where you kill exotic cultures, alright Drama Queen, do you kill the entire culture or do you kill people from it?
	Dozens of hours of thrill killing are justified by a comically grim internal logic.
	You wish to spread your dead mother's ashes, showing respect to her final wish, which is to say you kill hundreds to show respect for one.
	Yes, yes you do.
	Yes, it's a game.
	It's not real.
	What makes Far Cry 4 unique is how the characters in the world seem to understand the real reason you're here.
	The true motivation.
	You want to kill a lot of people for fun.
	Oh my god, it's like the characters in the game aren't real.
	It's like they were programmed by a studio to act in a certain way because they knew and the player knows that none of this is real and that it's all for fun.
	I know that clearly The Verge is staffed by histrionic social justice warriors and the concept of fun is remarkably alien to them but we will get back to that.
	They absolutely show us they have no idea what fun's about.
	Unlike Far Cry 3, the new game doesn't bother with an explanation as to why you're so good at slaughtering humans by the village fool.
	I imagine it's something to do with having loads and loads of rocket launchers and guns.
	But anyway, it simply provides you with the necessary materials and dozens of missions and random moments to be a hero and shoot a man.
	Hey, that sounds awesome.
	This is actually a fantastic advert for Far Cry 4.
	And yet, there's a chance that Far Cry 4 will be the game I recommend as my game of the year because its world is so grand and beautifully crafted, I want to spend days floating through its sky, gliding across its rivers.
	Oh, fuck.
	You are such.
	Just.
	You fucking hipster.
	And yes, shooting countless humans and animals.
	Yes, that is finally the fun bit of the game, thank you.
	Which is just so fucked up whenever I spend more than five minutes thinking about it and I can't stop thinking about it.
	That's because there's something wrong with you.
	It's not that there's anything wrong with the game.
	It's not that there's anything wrong with what you do in the game.
	It's not that there's anything wrong with enjoying what you do in the game, because none of it is real.
	But the author of this article doesn't really seem to be able to delineate between fantasy and reality.
	Honestly, I'm actually genuinely worried that he's the sort of person who might actually murder animals.
	I'm actually worried that he probably like shot a rhino in Far Cry 4 and then like was out just for a walk and saw someone's cat and was like, I did enjoy killing that rhino.
	As an American named AJ Gale, you return to your presumed birthplace of Kirat, a fictional stand-in for the nations of the Himalayas.
	The country, composed mostly of rich forests and mountains, spotted with temples, villages and shrines, has been pulverized by decades of political unrest.
	In the place of an ancient age of posterity, there is now a power vacuum waiting to be filled by one of half a dozen or so morally questionable men and women.
	Sorry, that was actually women and men.
	It's just that men and women rolls off the tongue.
	Far Cry 4's warmest and most morally justified characters.
	Why do I care if the characters in Far Cry 4 are morally justified?
	Why do I care?
	The game is about blowing things up.
	Blowing lots of things up.
	Shooting a lot of things.
	Going quite crazy.
	It's the absurdity of what you do that makes it fun, I am sure.
	I've seen one gameplay video from PewDiePie, which I know, I know, I shouldn't have been watching a PewDiePie video.
	But I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and he really made the game look awesome.
	And no fault of his own, the game just looked cool.
	But anyway, the warmest and most morally justified characters are still violent, selfish, and power-hungry, each of them drawn from the Bioshock school of thought, where all sides of an argument are equally bad and there's no real winning, just losing less.
	Well, that's not very biased, is it?
	I can no wonder that the author of this article didn't enjoy it one bit.
	They're shrewd parodies of philosophical ideals.
	My goodness, that sounds pretty bloody awesome.
	Everyone in this world lives to be judged, and there is the author's problem.
	Because when you are a hipster with no marketable life skills, no particular accomplishments, and your job is to complain about things that other people have built, it's no wonder you will be afraid of judgment.
	But a pseudo-pastor obsessed with guns as if they're divine objects, a philosophical guru who wants to heal the land, but not before showing you a bloody animal sacrifice, the would-be empowered female heroine determined to save her country with an industrialized drug trade.
	No one can be trusted, screams the game, with the caffeinated nihilism of Nietzsche lecturing at the cross games.
	I doubt this person has read any Nietzsche at all.
	Because frankly, it's very difficult.
	I tried to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I got about a third of the way in before I just had to call it off.
	Just after the acrobat had fallen and broken his back and was dying, and the guy came up to him and said, There's no such thing as God or the devil.
	But um, it's a tough read, and I don't think for a second that this dipshit has read any of it.
	AJ, our voice in the game, takes a patronizing tone when he speaks to those people who provide him with the guns, ammo, and reason to kill hundreds of people in an incredibly confusing civil war.
	He doesn't ask for questions or details.
	You ask questions and ask for details, you dumbass.
	Nor does he make the obvious point that none of this has to do with the very simple desire to respect his dead mum.
	Occasionally, he scoffs at their requests some wacky logic.
	These people are crazy, he'll say in so many words.
	Then he'll reload his rocket launcher and shoot a helicopter out of the sky.
	Why are you taking this so seriously, you maniac?
	It's a joke.
	It's meant to be fun.
	The whole game is clearly a fucking parody.
	It's hysterical because despite AJ's scorn and snobbish tone, there's a clear reason they're coming to him.
	He's a psychopath who can kill better than anyone else.
	My god, it's one of those male hero power fantasies that I've heard so much about from social justice warriors.
	And how bad they are.
	I bet this guy feels terrible just playing this.
	As the game progresses, it hints at details about AJ's personal life, but they're mostly buried in bits of text, where the game puts something it doesn't find interesting enough to tell you in its story.
	Actually, that's meant to be a reward for the people who spend more time than your average player in the game world.
	But um, anyway, AJ's family drama takes a backseat to AJ's kicking ass.
	What a surprise!
	It's an action game.
	And taking no names, because taking names would imply a fleck of humanity, of which AJ has none.
	He was built to be boring, to get out of the player's way.
	Yes, that's exactly what AJ was built for.
	He is a vessel for the player to control, for the player to be able to manipulate the world around them, because the player is real, and the game, or the events in the game, are not.
	Do you understand?
	That's why, that's why Indiana Jones doesn't really have much of a discernible personality, but he always wears the same fucking clothes.
	It's for you to project yourself into them.
	If AJ started demonstrating loads of unique and interesting personality traits, you would start to differentiate him from you, because you probably don't share them.
	That really does break the immersion, at least for me, because then I don't think that I'm playing as me in this game world.
	I think that I'm controlling someone else in this game world.
	One character in particular has really stuck with me as a weird inversion of AJ.
	I'm gonna put money on that it's a woman.
	Not that there's anything wrong with women or anything like that, but it's more that these social justice warriors seem to absolutely idolise women.
	I just don't get it.
	I think just women are equals because I'm some sort of egalitarian dinosaur.
	A powerful woman, called it, you learn is running a violent gladiatorial pit in which dozens, if not hundreds, of people and animals have died.
	Oh my god, but how could a woman be bad?
	Her motivation, the dwindling hope that she can save her parents who she believes has been taken captive.
	In an early scene, we see how heavy a burden this bloody job is on her sanity, and she weeps and allows herself to be vulnerable.
	Great, she sounds kind of interesting.
	AJ, ever the pragmatist, chides the woman, but her behaviour, killing in the hope that she'll save the lives of her family, is far more justifiable than killing to scatter the smashes in the right spot.
	Who cares?
	What difference does that make?
	Of all the people in Kirat, you are the quickest to kill in the coldest, most gruesome ways, and you have the flimsiest justification.
	That's why you're in the middle of this.
	It's as if the characters know that you're if you're on their side, they're guaranteed to win.
	The characters are AI, you dip shit.
	They are programmed to do certain things at certain times in certain ways.
	They are not real.
	None of this is real.
	So you can sit here and say, Well, this seems so weird because this is totally morally unjustifiable.
	But it doesn't matter because it doesn't need to be morally justifiable because it's not real.
	I'm beginning to get the sense that some people who make games about shooting people have anxiety about the very experience of playing them.
	Alright.
	And that this anxiety is expressed itself, intentionally or not, in the game's characters and stories.
	Since spec ops the line, we've seen more and more narratives that can be reduced to the only way to win is to not play.
	What are you talking about?
	Are you suggesting that the people who made this game subconsciously were like, you know what, should we make it so that people don't actually want to play our game?
	Or maybe, just maybe, this is not the important bit of this game, and you, as a person, shouldn't be playing it because you can't differentiate between fancy and reality, and you may well go out and murder someone without knowing it.
	You can't be held responsible for your actions because you're a dipshit.
	From Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us to Call of Duty, you can assume one scene where the game forces you to do something particularly grim, tacitly implicating you as an accessory in its bloody enterprise.
	No blood was spilled, no one was killed, and you didn't do anything wrong.
	A, meaning the games are all about killing people anyway, so why are you so bothered about that now?
	But B, you didn't do anything wrong because nothing actually happened.
	This is fantasy, it's a game, it's just for fun, you shouldn't be taking it so fucking seriously.
	You aren't actually making a moral choice because no one is actually suffering as the result of them.
	So we finally get to the bit where the person running this understands that for some reason though, he is still enjoying this, and this is a word called fun that he is obviously deeply unaware of.
	But I want to play.
	I love first-person shooters.
	I don't think you do.
	I really don't think you do.
	But anyway, despite my disgust with their jingoistic themes and their general support of unfettered militarism and the obvious fact that you spend most of their campaigns trying to shoot people in the face so you can conserve enough ammo to shoot more people in the face, I just can't stop playing them.
	And so I've become increasingly fascinated with their bizarre interior logic that seems to hypnotize me into a state of comfort.
	Simply, I want to know what keeps me coming back.
	I don't know me.
	I think you might be a sociopath.
	I think, or maybe a psychopath, maybe full-fledged, maybe you just don't care about human life.
	Because even lacking the ability to distinguish between fancy and reality, you still get your kicks from it.
	If I couldn't tell that Far Cry 4 wasn't actually real and I'd written this article myself and I couldn't, literally couldn't get over how morally unjustifiable almost everything that goes on in the game was, I simply wouldn't play it, no matter how addicting I found it.
	I just wouldn't do it.
	I don't know.
	This is just wrong.
	But for some reason, you sit there twiddling your thumbs, going, God, I wish I could just do something morally unjustifiable again, just once, just one more time.
	So he goes on to say, I've written about the shallow ultra-violence of Bioshock Infinite and the mind-numbing consistency of the Call of Duty franchise.
	Maybe you should just go play something nice.
	What about Hello Kitty Island Adventure?
	You know, I doubt there are very many moral choices in that.
	I haven't played it, so I don't know, but I really doubt it.
	Both have a blunt, almost purposeful stupidity to them, clearly meant to feed a meathead market.
	Far Cry 4 is quite incredible in its gruesomeness, and that it seems both naively at peace with the paper-thin justification it gives the players to kill with such regularity, and yet also utterly exhausted with itself and violent video games.
	It's as if the game was built by two teams on opposite sides of the planet, which to be fair, it was in some degree.
	As the publisher Ubisoft is notorious for spreading development on its big budget titles across the globe, I really don't think that was the problem.
	I don't know this, but I'm going to guess that the problem is that the game was designed to be fun, and you, a person who isn't used to experiencing fun, really finds that a difficult concept to grasp.
	Halfway through the game, a mission required me to kill a man who I later learned was a decoy.
	A voice came over the radio, trying to make me feel bad for killing the wrong man.
	Finally, the game was judging me, but I didn't feel much of anything.
	What option did I have?
	All I could do was follow the script.
	The author of this article has got some severe problems.
	They really do.
	If they cannot distinguish between fancy and reality, I feel bad for them.
	And frankly, I am afraid for them.
	I don't think they should be watching TV.
	I don't think they should be playing video games.
	And I don't think they should be reading books beyond factual informative texts.
	I can't believe that they can't just say, well, it's not real.
	Because everyone else can.
	And that seems to be the very crux of the issue with social justice warriors and gaming.
	And anything, really, but gaming especially.
	None of it happened.
	You didn't kill anyone.
	You don't have to feel bad.
	And what you were feeling was enjoyment.
	It's okay to enjoy something.
	I mean, who has done this to this person?
	And he's not alone.
	They're all like this.
	They don't seem to know how to be able to enjoy themselves.

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