fuck — fuck advocacy

Posts Tagged ‘fuck’

arcade fire, or, the fetishization of music as a depopularizing force

2/16/11 by Cyle Gage

So that Arcade Fire won a grammy, right? For album of the year, no less. And I suppose that’s a worthy benediction for the once-artful romance of music. I mean, what else was there to give an award to? Lady Gaga? Katy Perry? Does anybody really take this stuff seriously anymore?

Since the onslaught of emo music in the early 2000s, while I was in high school, I’ve been watching the steady devolution of pop from a rigid, monolithic structure to a screaming quorum of hedge-bets and has-beens. With rapidly decreasing traditional record sales, the transition from music as populist rejoinder to a cataclysmic divider has been thorough and remains unfinished. Perhaps, as I am afraid to believe, it will never be finished, like fashion (goddamn social network). This shattering of “music” as we know it in America has come largely thanks to the networking and layering/defining of social life, strictly upon our faith in the omniscient god-machine, life-sustainer and social differential engine.

The parallel is simple to see, but why would anybody want to see it. “Indie music” has come at a time when we are all worried about our social lives more than we’re worried about war or recession (do you remember we’re still in two wars and a recession?). The varied styles of indie music cater to those who would benefit most from their promise of distance; very different from how emo music assured that all of us have our hearts on our sleeves and we’re really all emotionally stunted and clueless, all of us together yearning to be understood. Rather terrifically, and terribly, emo music was firmly supplanted by that it is opposed to; instead of us wanting to be one and together sharing the same depression, now we all want to be islands with our own musical fortresses. I knew Eminem’s story arc before his second album came out, and I’m still surprised he hasn’t shot himself like Kobain did.

Tags: doomed, fuck, music

On Hate

1/25/10 by Cyle Gage

Recently I’ve been getting questions/comments like “why do you hate everything?” and “nobody likes you because you hate everything”. It’s easy for people to ask this and it’s also hard to disagree with their reasoning: I write a blog about hating things. It makes sense, superficially, to assume that I hate everything. I tear things down much faster than I praise them. I don’t usually like to write about things just because they’re awesome (unless they’re awesome because they bring the hate). It’s fairly logical to assume that, in general, I hate things, and that I’m a fairly negative person because of it.

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.

Tags: bullshit, fuck, haters gonna hate

Uncharted 2 as Step Two

1/18/10 by Cyle Gage

So yeah this is late to the game, haha, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to write down because I haven’t seen it definitively written by anyone yet. Over the last three weeks Uncharted 2 has been coveted as Game of the Year 2009 by various blargs and maga-zines, and at first I staunchly rejected that notion. Uncharted 2 was pretty, its characters funny, its plot well worked out but nothing terrific (in fact, wait a minute…). The reason so many reviewers have been elevating it to GAME OF THE YEAR has overwhelmingly been the idea that it’s “the most cinematic game ever”, moreso than even Metal Gear Solid 4 or Modern Warfare 2.

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.

Tags: art, fuck, video games

Multiplayer Sucks

12/31/09 by Cyle Gage

Let’s forget for a moment that games are supposed to be fun. Fuck that. I’m going to argue on the basis that contemporary games are striving for one thing: respect as a medium, like film or poetry. Modern video games should want to be experiences, they should want to be more than just button-mashing. Hell, most contemporary games cost three times as much as a movie, contain ten times more content, and cost more people and more time to make. I’d be willing to contend that there is an even bigger independent side of video games than there is to the film industry, since making games is easier and more accessible now than making independent movies. Anybody can get ahold of a copy of Flash or Processing and make a game in a few days if they want to. A lot of people do (and there are a lot of shitty flash games because of it).

But there’s something killing games more than all the shitty flash games combined, and that’s multiplayer. Not multiplayer as a general concept, no, but rather the way multiplayer is driving the creation and marketing of games. Today, the best-selling and most far-reaching games are multiplayer-focused. Modern Warfare 2. The Halo trilogy. World of Warcraft. This is what’s killing the future of games, and it’s the same mistake movies made so long ago, an error that I hoped video games would learn from. But greedy people are everywhere, and video games turned big and corporate very quickly. The formula is simple, and we can painfully see it all the time at the box office: make a movie that has a highly marketable and simple plot and then make sequels. Video games are falling into the same formula.

People have praised games like Modern Warfare 2 and movies like The Dark Knight because while they were big-budget highly-marketable titles which made lots of money, they took risks or were generally unconventional. Immediately what springs to mind are the whole ideas of a superhero movie being successful and the now-infamous terrorist mission. Critics love this shit. They say these films and games deserve to make all the money, because they’re close to art. I fail to see what makes the MW2 civilian slaughter mission anything close to art. I read a similar critical review on Destructoid or something, but I’ll reiterate the point again, and with a broader focus: the whole point of video games and what sets it apart is the interactivity of it. I, as a player, have the power of choice. I control a character. But nowhere in the process of killing civilians in an airport can I choose to do anything else. There is no interactive narrative, just a linear sequence of events. However, most people ignore this and just go online to play the multiplayer.

Tags: art, bullshit, fuck, video games