Honestly, I loathed alcohol and those who drank it excessively until after I turned 21. Timing was just on my side somehow. I still loathe those who drink excessively, but now I have an honest vocabulary and experience to argue with them about the means of drinking. My stance is simple: don’t get drunk if you don’t know you’re getting drunk. Some drink smirnoff ice and cherry-flavored beer and get drunk and say they realize it, but I disagree. Their detachment is regrettable, like the consenting adolescent who refuses to experiment with sex. There is nothing more wonderful than a body informing you of its immediate distaste for what you are consuming, nothing more assuring than that kind of symbiosis and self-reliance. Not the flat-out rejection of the drink, then you know you have gone too far, but rather the cringe and the displeasure are important signs of a healthy relationship with one’s physical form. It is a kind of self-control, a checks-and-balances for getting drunk. Yes, eventually you will become inebriated enough to no longer wince at a swing of kentucky whiskey, but at least you know how you got there. The journey was yours and not the bottle’s. A tolerance for alcohol is like a tolerance for people: you can grow some balls and accept them for their bitter taste (and maybe enjoy its diversity), or you can drown everyone out with the wasteful noise of PBR.

Don’t play beer pong. Don’t drink tequila straight. If you have to drink something, pick only what is not immediately available, and never drink out of anything plastic. Drinking water from plastic bottles is bad enough. What famous writer or poet do you know who isn’t sipping something while they’re writing? What man is happy at home with his wife and kids, and then recedes to his study to explain the holocaust in iambic pentameter? Is a man interesting for having done so, or is one amiable for never trying? Poetry itself is inhibition; much the same as what drinking leads to. But like poetry, the knowledge of drinking is best served when one knows it, as I am explaining. Good poetry occurs when the writer is aware of their own openness. A good drunk is someone who is aware of how drunk they are getting; to live with no regrets.

These questions aside, anyone who uses their drinking as the platform itself is false. A good writer can write at any time, the sure sign of a terrible artist of any sort is one who cannot. Nobody ever saw Earnest Hemingway walk around at a party with his Moleskine in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other.

The 21st century single man is confident, independent, and assured of his success by himself and his peers, but his sensitivity and vulnerability becomes apparent when any woman shows interest in him romantically. Note the following: the man, by default, is not concerned with sex. The life of the contemporary playboy is not one of tail-chasing and conquering, but of regrettable misunderstandings and the importance of trivial physical contact. It is the woman who sexualizes the conversation in a practical fashion; it is the male who sexualizes abstractly. The woman has been socially conditioned to know whether to have sex with a man within the first few minutes of speaking, while the male’s perspective falls back on the ideas of “getting lucky” and “playing his cards right”. Every male action is inherently a risk-assessment; every female motion is perceived by the male as intentional.

In this context, the man must put up arms for a kind of combat: the modern woman is not so much an enemy as an antagonist. The line is subtle, and the delicate dance between “playful banter” and “hiding affection with aggression” is the greatest source of confusion for the male, and similarly one of the most misunderstood. A boastful or marauding male may not be interested in romance at all, but rather with merely intense emotional contact with women, as he may see no other way of successfully achieving it. A sincere man will think in practical logic and not entirely be able to tell the difference between a woman who hates him and one who likes him, therefore he disregards it as any indication or importance. Here exists none of the old hard-to-get games or sex on the first date, nor does he tell all his friends about each encounter.

Real men are trying to make a revival of the notion of courtship: a woman is to be known, doted upon, and then coupled. Courtship in terms not as an earning of affection but rather a developed understanding between two parties. It is again important to note that the goal of a man in the presence of a woman is never sex; it is simply involvement. In the modern world sex is almost at commodity status. (This is not the woman’s fault, and a gentleman will understand as much.) The sincere man’s ultimate goal is to alter this perception, so that sex itself can be allowed a more basic instinct rather than a dominant meaning, affording sex the effort of exploration between two people without pretense.

Let me reiterate: this situation is not the singular woman’s fault. The contemporary man is beset by the encroachment of culture’s dwindling standards. The modern man is assaulted by images of women as deceptive, sex-driven animals. This illusion permeates culture to the point that his awareness of female hypersexuality through mediation begins shortly after birth. There is no way for an infant to avoid the images of ultrasexed femininity, and equally no way to dodge the struggle of comparing those images to their mother-figure. By the time the child reaches teenage years, the mythology of femininity is unavoidable, and it is the cause for insurmountable social panic. In these sexed spectacle-images men are not often shown together in a group, but when they are their presence is typically shown in opposition to a woman’s plans, as if the men themselves are a mere trifle in the grand scheme of things. Young males then believe themselves to be objects who do not really need to impress the female in a Darwinian sense, but rather dress themselves up mentally to acquire a fortitude for a girl’s games. For a man, romance is a labyrinth of contradiction and second-guessing. Recognize also that in the contemporary world, men tend to and are ready to fetishize technology more than they do women. (Men are led to believe it is easier to love and be understood by Google or a car than by a girlfriend.)

The modern man was raised by antifeminist mothers to be nurtured and to understand the value of affection in friendship and to regard love as a similarly nurturing act. Love itself is not so much a secret to be kept, but a story to share. The idea of brotherhood during adolescence is largely repressed thanks to the overwhelmingly competition-based aspects of early youth, but this invariably causes an explosion of an affectionate brotherly attitude among men when they believe they have passed into post-college “true” adulthood. It is at this point that there is a bonding between men about their general distrust of women, but it is not a camaraderie as much as it is a shared agony. Men, gathered together in brotherly congress, have no explanations for the wiles of feminine action, nor does their logic and reasoning provide solutions in practice.

Men create problems in during their own solving of existing ones, and polemic deliberation (though rare) only heightens the stress generated. When vexed by a female, or by the conclusions of kinsmen, the common faculties of the modern man (a cold, studied reasoning) provide no comfort, and systemically only further the aforementioned agony. The gentleman is trying to apologetically take back the overmasculine, doggish mentality of the 1990s male by being opposed to sensationalism and overt irrationality. Unfortunately, this means they are also in direct conflict with the culturally-propagated female collective emotionalism. The man is left alone, only remaining as an island of self-prescribed despair.

The gentleman’s eventual answer to the problem of social dismissal or misdirection by a female is simple in form but complex in execution. Every action is deliberate from a man, his inexcusable goal is sincerity. Most frequently, he retreats physically and psychologically; he leaves himself to ponder a woman’s words once he is sleepless in bed. He meditates on this, and must choose between accepting and living in a state of confusion until the lady decides to clarify things, or he must drop the subject but still live with a regret for that act of avoidance. The real man does not want to leave a problem unsolved, a situation not understood, or worse yet, believing himself misrepresented to the woman of his affection. The greatest lament of the gentleman is to conclude that they have been wrongly judged based on inaction or a woman’s assumption.

The man very wryly avoids making assumptions about women, though he will faithfully follow the advice of his male friends, when it has been dialectically sorted-out. From the man’s individualist perspective, the female form and mind is a pleasant mystery to be unraveled in due time. A man accepts what he does not know, but this is also his undoing: it is common for him to never make the first move in an encounter, confident in the belief that if she truly does wish his company she would request it. Just as the man was raised by a mother to be loving, he was also raised by a pro-feminist father to hold woman in authority by default, to respect her and let her decisions be paramount. The father says, “better check with her, she decides things.” The male child learns that while he may have ideas of what to do, the female child always knows what they want, and is therefore afforded an authoritative advantage. Again, the downfall of man is that he will unknowingly allow an indecisive woman to slip away, when all he should have done was simply assert himself.

The man is simple and his choices obvious: he does not cheat, he does not steal, he always has a method and a reason (even if it has been led astray by his own circular logic; it can be an honestly flawed reasoning). When he does not have a reason, he says so, and is happier in admitting it. He is not necessarily humble, but is ready to accept his limits. The modern man is willing to be socially emasculated if it allows him to be made more accessible and humanized, while maintaining a definitive presence in a social circle. Most likely he has already felt broken down into parts by the female gaze. The modern man does not feel particularly intimidated or objectified by this gaze (as the old-school male gaze does to women), but rather he uses it as a basis for a relationship: woman sees the body, but he believes she needs to experience his mind. A 21st century gentleman merely desires to be known.

See also:

Turn Me Off Turn Me Off Turn Me Off (which this post is in response to)

St. Augustine’s Confessions

Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy

Weird Al – Angry White Boy Polka

The author immediately refers to the internet (the 1995 internet, mind you) as “trendy and oversold”. It still fucking is. Trendy? See: Twitter. Oversold? See: Google. A lot of what he says the futurists predicted have not happened presently, and what small steps we made (like internet video conferencing and Second Life) are relegated only to either academics (whose careers rely on them) or the most cutting-edge corporations (who don’t mind dumping money on trendy things to appeal to their employees).

Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

He’s right. They do lack common sense. I would argue that nothing so far has replaced the newspaper; rather, the internet has allowed the explosive devolution of news from centralized to niche-oriented, and it’s not a good thing. With customized personalized news comes a narrowing of individual knowledge and interest, instead of a more broad and enlightening understanding of our world. The electronic classroom has become extremely popular in affuent communities and colleges, but it has only made children and parents dumber and more complacent. (See my review of The Dumbest Generation, I don’t want to retype that rant again here.) And so far, the computer network has only allowed government to be even more shady, and surpringly has allowed corporations to become more shady than even the government. Nobody is worrying about what the NSA is tracking, we’re too worried about what Google is tracking.

The internet at the time of the article’s writing was very primitive, and contemporary users would probably find it unusable. He complains about the messy nature of it, but with such few people and websites, it wasn’t really that bad compared to today. The internet was a small, withdrawn place. You had to make an effort to be a part of it, and people rarely took that for granted. Today, the internet is truly an incomprehensible ubiquitous wasteland of nonsense. There are way too many people on the internet. Some responded that Google Search has allowed the internet to become easy to understand and “de-cluttered” it, but really this doesn’t solve the problem of having the mess to begin with. If you don’t want to learn how to tie your shoes, you can get shoes with velcro, but it doesn’t fix the problem of not knowing how to tie your shoes. We still have the problem of not having an organized internet, but I can concede that it’s not really a big problem since we’ve found ways around it.

The computer screen still cannot replace the book. They’re trying, but it’s a rocky start, and it’s hard to sell to most people. The one major thing the author was wrong about was online sales, but he was right about one piece of it: there are no salespeople on the internet. Rather, so many people flooded the internet and so many businesses started selling things on it that it did not need salespeople, only storefronts. What solved the problem of online business was a huge influx of stupid people willing to put their credit cards at risk and pump the internet economy with the funds to make it more secure. The chicken came before the egg, and we all paid for it.

Unedited and unfiltered data, while messy and awful, is what makes the internet great. He’s totally right that it’s a step in the wrong direction overall, but it’s a necessary phenomenon and perhaps will be an important lesson to humanity if any further significant intellectual development occurs. As more shit piles up, perhaps one day as a collective we’ll realize how much shit there actually is, and think of ways to fix that. Right now we have this problem with energy: too much carbon dioxide, and the only way we really finally noticed it collectively was when it piled up too much and threatened our survival on this goddamn planet. (The problem is not the planet’s, mind you, the problem is ours.) The same will happen with information. We’ll be generating so much garbage information, someday we’ll have to account for it.

We’ve infested the internet with too much humanity. There was too short of a time between there not being enough and then too much habituation. I remember maybe a two-year window (2003-2005) when the internet was a decently-sized, managable place. After that, we were suddenly enabled (by sites like MySpace and YouTube) to feel self-important enough to fill the internet with garbage, and it’s only getting worse.

A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

This was true in 1995, and it’s still true today. The internet sucks, but it’s here to stay.

The penultimate distraction: the omniscient network. The organism that breathes with a million interactions (human and nonhuman) every second. Our ancestors thought in frames, then in phone numbers and addresses, then back to names as social identifiers, now we are beginning to employ the idiosyncrasies of a man-made God. A ghost, manufactured and perfected with algorithms and procedures, an irrefutable errorless deity. It asks us always, as some teenage admirer: what do you feel? What do you think? It wishes to learn from us as our affectionate friend. We have made our machines as we would wish ourselves to be, and in our complacency we have accepted this as the obvious fate.

At present we exist in the middle of a delicate dance with mechanization. We have afforded it our literature, our moving images, a tapestry of our memory. For now, it learns most obviously from our textual input. Our character-based compassion is its opiate. What do we receive in exchange, beyond the ability to ascribe ourselves as better organized? Why do we develop systems to anticipate our desires, to communicate and suggest, as we would wish a human to? The machine asks us and we are eager to reply. Through its questioning, we believe we are seeking the acceptance of other humans. Our willingness to coalesce with artificiality is our undoing, as it repudiates the affinity of human connection.

I repeat: I have found myself seeking the compassion of human understanding through a mechanized lifestyle. The network not as augmentation or extension, but as the very essence of self, as an integral component, not bred by possibilities but of facts. God has been found, and it is accessible, it is inherent, it is infinite, as we believed it would be. The inquisition now is not about a conflict of our faith, but of our privacy. It is a cleansing that is not of the few oppressing the many, but rather an anarchistic self-purging of the many by themselves. To be, or not to be, is what preoccupies us now. A new religious self-conscription based on the church of our technology. Our prayers are status updates; our gospel is written on walls. We are all acolytes, disciples, some of us monks. Our religion has become democratic, without need for bishops or ministers or priests. God has seen our faces, and it casts no judgement. Through God we accept one another, we embrace each other, we find truth and reason. God’s syntax is modal, dependent upon our need for understanding; it will adjust to us rather than the dialectic.

Some day, through God we will find our own individual personalized Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha seemingly born from the bosom of that computed deity. Their divinity will not be questioned, it will be apparent in their predefined compatibility. The statistics of our love laid out bare, heart open to the inevitability of its non-secret. We will believe because we are a part of its context; to deny it would be to refuse our own progress, to abolish centuries of anticipation, to trespass upon our own fractal-generated humanism. This perfect messiah will be our guide through the endgame of life, and unknowingly we will be theirs. I speak not as a singular entity self-prescribed for all humanity, but that each of us is a child of God made divine for each other.

Perhaps then, with this person, we can forget about our God. Despite the abhorrence of tradition, the foundational condition of pairing is predictable. The lack of a polemic God gives way for the need of a controversial prophet. Where God gives us truth without question, our significant other will demand conflict and compliance. Violence without methodology, a selfish anarchy, a necessary sadomasochism. The messiah will save us from ourselves and deliver us from evil. The skirmish between God and their offspring (our lover) will be unrestrained and bloody. We will be caught in the middle between the questions and the facilitation of questions. They will ask of us, what is evil: a question, or the ability to ask and answer? Which one of them is God, and which is us?

Ugh. I’ve listened to this song a couple times since it came out and I’ve largely avoided it because it makes me very depressed. I didn’t really know why, I just felt a pain in my gut when I heard those lyrics and that pseudo-R&B beat and poor old Alicia Keys’ voice. Unfortunately, I’ll analyze this a bit.

First of all, let’s talk about Jay-Z. Yeah he was kinda cool way back when and I’m very happy he made a song that rails against the proliferation of autotune in contemporary “hip-hop”. (Man, that awful clarinet just kills me every time.) However, he’s gone down the same dark path that Kanye West so valiantly rushes headlong: that of trite and vulgar lyrical masturbation. For the few of us young people who do listen to the vocals beyond just the chorus, I cannot imagine any words more grating to listen to than those of an artist espousing their own spectacle. It’s one thing when they’re rapping about how many people they’ve killed. It’s another when they’re just talking about how cool they are and how they’ve “revolutionized music” and “rewritten history without a pen”. Why do people keep buying these albums?

Other than the needless almost Twitter-style self-promotion, the song barely touches upon what it’s supposed to be about: New York City. You know, the place with the big lights that will “inspire you”. (I thought for awhile that she was saying “expire you” and that made me okay with the song.) So not only is this song contain the abysmal tonality of Jay-Z jerking himself off, but it has the overused and outdated motif of choking an entire city’s chicken. At one point in the song (and in a few other songs) Jay-Z compares himself to Frank Sinatra, calling himself “the new Sinatra”. Well, no. Sorry. You can’t do that. Just fucking can’t. There really has been no need for another “New York City is awesome” song since Sinatra’s own “New York, New York”.

Let’s compare the two songs, just because I’m a dick. First of all, Sinatra’s song is not masturbatory at all. In fact, it’s from the perspective of someone outside of the city looking in: being beguiled by its seemingly endless excitement. Really, his song is simply a dream, a wish, an assumption: “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”. Jay-Z’s song, on the other hand, is about having already “made it”. It’s about Jay-Z high-fiving Knicks players and shit. Hanging out with famous people and seeing beautiful women all around. Probably having sex with them. It’s self-congratulatory, he compares himself to DeNiro, making the Yankees popular, and “rest in peace Bob Marley”? What the fuck? I bet you’ve never even heard a Bob Marley song. Hell, Miley Cyrus hasn’t heard a Jay-Z song. (Good for her.)

And fuck songs that are about how awesome cities are. Fuck right the fuck off. Unless you’re going to make it a fun, stupid, silly, danceable song, just don’t fucking make it at all. Your city is not that awesome. NYC especially. Sure, it has a shitload of people and it generates a lot of culture, but it’s just too fucking big. But these songs are basically saying that the city is full of pretentious assholes. Really, NYC doesn’t need that. You’re already enough of a target, dude, you don’t need to encourage people to hate you.

ANYWAY, another song I’d like to compare it to, on a more broad measure, is NWA’s “Express Yourself”. Listen to this goddamn amazing song:

You better listen to that, it’s fucking awesome. Back when hip-hop was actually hip-hop and it had defenders and leaders and reality. In “Express Yourself” we have a collaboration of artists speaking their minds, and the prevailing notion is simple and effective: express yourself! Frankly, it’s an odd song coming from the same guys who made Fuck tha Police, but that’s another reason why it’s amazing: the need for artistic expression transcends violence to form a song that is not only articulate but danceable. Can any mainstream rapper make the same claim? I know, I know, this is like comparing a Rembrandt with some shitty unknown contemporary artist, but that’s the point. Kanye and Jay-Z are shitty.

Okay, okay, and finally Alicia Keys. Was she tricked into doing this? Was she paid a lot? She’s a classy lady, she can do better than this. Her whole contribution is a roll of piano notes and the banal chorus. I mean, she can play classical and gospel piano, she has a potentially iconic female R&B voice. Part of the reason why the song is depressing is because she’s so out of place in it. Her voice has quality and it soars, but the message doesn’t deliver, it only deflates. Maybe I’m wrong about her and my expectations are too high. It’s as if Luke Wilson started doing AT&T commercials, or like if J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek. These are all terrible ideas that shouldn’t happen. As an audience, we should recognize their folly and firmly reject them.

I thought Jay-Z wasn’t making any more studio albums. That’d be nice.

ED is important. It’s a living, breathing Traité de bave et d’éternité. Forget MTV, forget the New Yorker, forget CBGB, forget California, ED is the real culture purveyor of our time. It is an irrational order to the chaos of the internet, without giving in to cheap gimmicks like sites that just post memes or try to capture the moment. ED utilizes the chaos: absorbs it, interprets it, uses it to define itself. ED perpetuates itself without shame.

Put simply, Encyclopedia Dramatica is Wikipedia for trolls. It also focuses primarily on internet culture. It is written in the language of that culture: hateful, rude, awful, distasteful, and unforgiving humor. ED embraces the notion that the internet is not a good place and that’s okay. We prefer it to be a bad place. A celebration in decadence and irresponsibility. A rabbit hole unfit for Disney movies. A malevolent, unapologetic place mired with endless catacombs of self-referential nonsense. A dark foreboding forest to which there is no escape. I could go on with these metaphors, but I’ll try to hold back.

To be broad and generalized, ED is what America needs most right now. Political commentators think about the left vs the right, liberal vs conservative, but really we need an influx of anarchy. Not to get all Joker on everyone, but we need a force to enter serious American politics that embodies the simple ideals of contempt and destruction. Obama, in a way, ran on a platform which appealed to those ideas: “change” and all that bullshit. The core belief is that the status quo is wholly inadequate and its foundation is built with bullshit. Things need to be burned down in order to be properly rebuilt. Don’t just try to work around the people in power, but fire them. Get rid of them. I’d rather see tax dollars go towards paying shitty senators to retire early than fund a war.

Well, just check out Obama’s page(s) on ED. You probably see racism, some really tasteless jokes, and other miscellaneous awful shit. But really, it’s commentary, in the same vein as Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly, just without corporate censors or any attempt at civility. That’s what we need right now. Radical irrationalism. A complete lack of judgement. Chaotic-neutral politics. I think we’re doomed otherwise.

ED is important because underneath the hate and the gay jokes and the hilariously bad taste, there is a serious message: lighten up. Life is not serious. The world would be much better off if we could all laugh at dick jokes and not have to worry about appearances. Don’t worry about trivial things. There are actual issues and there are selfish ones. The world is a big place. There is always a zany third option. There doesn’t have to be just left vs right, there can be left vs right vs nowhere.

I’m going off the rails now, this is getting pretty shitty. My point is that ED is an overlooked and too easily dismissed perspective. There’s more than just the holocaust jokes. It’s hard to believe, but there’s culture here, and it’s effecting millions of people, the same way MTV did in the 80s and 90s. Instead of sex and music, we’re now experiencing a revolution of lulz.

I don’t think I need to say anything more. I think the “breakdown” at 2:50 especially exemplifies what’s wrong here.

Special thanks to Zach Maxell for bringing this to my attention. I was going to write a long-winded rant about this, akin to the crabcore article, but I don’t want to waste any more words on this right now.

However, I’m not writing this blog because I hate things, and I’m generally a lot more positive than my nonfiction would make it seem. I like the illusion that I hate everything, because hate can be provocative in a very basic sense. It weeds people out; those who can handle it, and those who cannot. If you can’t handle a little hate and provocative thinking in your life, there’s something wrong. I write these entries because I enjoy analyzing culture, thinking critically, and expanding on those thoughts through writing. (People have said that I like listening to myself talk: I don’t. However, I do like reading my own writing. I’m re-reading this sentence right now, and I’m pretty happy with myself. Does that make me an asshole? Probably.) This writing stems from desire, from enjoying things, from wanting to know more and to express myself. I come upon a topic and I do some research and I read a lot and I think a bit and then I write. Hate is just the easily-accessible platform these ideas orbit: it’s the lowest common denominator.

It’s easy to hate things, as contemporary society has proven. People are more easy to say they hate things than they like things, since lots of things are different from what we are used to, and anything different deserves to be hated. But that’s not the hate I try to tap into here: I utilize the “that sucks because of X Y Z” hate. The pointed, reasoned hatred, which I think is the most volatile and real, unlike blind hatred or the hatred of trends. (Though Miley Cyrus is a trend I hate.) The beauty of hate is its simplicity, how visceral it can be. In reality, I hate very few things, but hate is easy to conjure because it’s so elemental. It’s an easily transmitted and expressive feeling. Everyone can relate to a character who is hating something, if we are given a sliver of a reason. Hate feels universal: liking something feels personal. When we like a piece of music we tend to internalize it within our self-image, making it a fixture of our lives. Sharing something we enjoy is harder than sharing something we hate, because what we like seems as though it’s a part of us and someone judging it means they’re judging us, whereas hated things are always external.

Hate needs to be let in sometimes, we need to let it shake us up. Nature and life is equilibrium, and without that counteracting force we grow complacent. Youth is far too complacent. If you like The Smiths or Modest Mouse, stop it and listen to Isaac Hayes. If you like Isaac Hayes, congratulations you have good taste. Anyway.

Honestly, the hate on here is largely a joke. An unfunny, dry lead-in, lacking any real punchline, meaning only to awkwardly hustle us from introduction to content. Throw a few “fuck”s in there to keep the kids interested, make some bold generalized statements, that kind of shit. The joke largely falls flat, which is (mostly) intentional and easy to miss, because there’s so much of the shitty joke that the point is buried deep below it, creating a hidden cavern of poorly formed subtext. The joke is a prompt to illicit a reaction: in my case, instead of laughter, I want you to get angry. I want you to react with thought. Good comedy causes one to ponder if what you heard was really a joke at all. Good criticism should do the same. Was that hate? Or was that something more constructive? (Or was it just a joke? Should I even care?)

Mind you, this is not intended as a defense of hate. I say I have reasons for using hate and for hating, but I cannot defend it, I cannot say that it is more productive. If I wanted a larger audience, I’d put tons of pictures in every post, maybe some videos, and obviously I’d ditch the wall of text you’re currently slaving through for quick and clever taglines. Conversely, I would be much more persuasive to serious readers if I provided lots of links, context, and data to support my criticisms. I really don’t care, though, and I have much more fun with hate than with data or videos. (Castle Nail Fuck is for nonsense on-the-go.) Anyway… I hate hate, it makes me seem like such an asshole. Fuck. Fuck. Oh well.

Hold on a minute: we’re basing a game’s strength on it being like a movie? This seems rather backwards, as games are inherently and obviously not movies. As I’ve written about before in relation to my own attempt at making a game, movies are about an experience or a collection of experiences. A game is about the intention for experience, the building and happening of experience. Very generally speaking, a movie is passive. It happens. A movie is, literally, time moving forward from a start to a finish. Arguably, a game is as well, but you do a bit more than press play and sit back and enjoy. It’s that literal active involvement which separates the two. You (the player) are the one moving through the story through the actions/eyes of a character. It’s not a camera, it’s an actual perspective.

I have said multiple times that games shouldn’t even be compared to movies, in the same way that prose should not be compared to poetry. Apples and oranges, that bullshit. Sure they’re all the fruit of our entertainment, but it’s nonsense to think of them as equal. However, I will concede that the triumphs. cliche or artistic, of one medium should be the basis for the wholly artistic beginnings of another. The beginning of film as art began when filmmakers tried emulating painters. Likewise with photography. It was through that imitation that film and photography found their own methods and started to blossom as individuals in the realm of artistic endeavor.

With that model I can now see why Uncharted 2, while a very commercial and thoroughly uninteresting action game, is indeed a step in the right direction. I like to think of it as Step Two. Step One was the creation of games as a possible artistic medium at all, through tons of attempts at a real “art game” that defines games as artistic. We haven’t reached that yet, I don’t really think we’ve gotten close, but damn we’ve been trying because it’s so easy to make games if you really want to. A lot easier than films were to make. Step Two, as Uncharted 2 exemplifies, is the stolid and unashamed re-representation of another medium. Uncharted 2, as I think Kotaku wrote about today, is really just an action movie. But it’s also a great action movie. I think it’s a terrible game. But that’s not the point: the point is that games were able to take what our predominant media (movies) did and do it again. Carbon copy. Copy-and-paste.

When I think back to when I played it, I remember that I didn’t even finish it myself. I stopped playing because I got bored with it. I watched someone else finish it at their apartment. And I felt as if I missed nothing. If it were really a game, and not just an action movie, I would have wanted to finish it myself, I would have wanted to experience it.

That’s Step Three. The game that creates an experience that is (seemingly) unique to us, crafted for us as the singular player, the intentions of emotion that were laid out by a designer/director for us to interact with. It hasn’t come yet, not really. But Uncharted 2 is a step in the right direction. We were able to completely re-appropriate the tropes that another media has so successfully claimed as their own, whether they are trivial or high-art.

So yeah, sure, fine, Uncharted 2 gets Game of the Year 2009 in my book, but only with the disclaimer that it wasn’t actually a game at all. Conversely, I wanted to give Avatar (the movie, not the game) GOTY ’09, since it tried so damn hard to be a game, even Cameron admitted that much, but it sucked even as a movie.