Fat Princess - my side of the war

Titan's new game for Sony, Fat Princess, is taking some flak from intelligent people. I found Holly's critique interesting (and with the great line "I used to think fat people were inherently hilarious too — when I was 15 years old. Then I grew the fuck up and realized it made me an asshole.")

The price of being critical. Once again I'm surprised at the reactionary hate inspired by (what I consider to be moderate) feminist critique. Melissa McEwan writes about the fallout from her letter to Sony. She has received a lot of hate comments. No one can really defend this game from a critical attack that points out it's coming from a male-dominated (patriarchal) perspective that considers obese women as humorous. That's a fact.

What these "debates" often descend into is a war of insecurities. People who want to enjoy the game attack critics for not being able to stop thinking and have fun. They see the attacks as an issue of insecurity from being rejected by mainstream culture. Similarly, critics see the defenders of Fat Princess as insecure children who try to raise their own self-esteem by pushing others down. Thus the debate moves away from observing the game and into the angry world of hurtful comments known as trolling.

Indeed, I am insecure. I fear there is a cultural war going on and the unthinking are winning. I was first aware of the polarizing, side-choosing, warlike nature of these battles when reading about the absurd dispute over feminist Jessica Valenti's sweater.

I have a tendency to put the blinders on. I try to avoid choosing sides in conflict because I know from playing Apples to Apples how quickly my own righteousnesses makes everyone else's opinion into nonsense.

Yet, in this instance I must choose a side. I side with the criticism of Fat Princess and denounce the game. Boycotted. If you can't see the harmful patriarchal perspective boiling up in this game then you are choosing not to think and have earned my ridicule, asshat.

My own perspective on Fat Princess:

I like the game dynamics. It's a massive (32 player?) multiplayer game where two armies try to capture the other's princess. You can feed your princess in order to make it difficult for the opposing team to lift her for rescue. It's neat because it requires a lot of teamwork, the graphics are my cel-shaded preference, and it looks like there's a lot of nice touches in this preview.

You would have to have your head quite far up your ass not to notice the following things:
1 .The premise is the classic male (warrior, active) saves the female (princess, passive).
2. The image of a fat woman is an intentional source of humour in the game.
3. All of the active characters (rescuers) are male.
4. The sole female character is passive. All of her movement requires others to lift her or to feed her.

FAQ. Crushing your counterattack.
1. Hey, what's wrong with the classic formula: male hero saves female victim?
Nothing. The only thing wrong is its dominance in our entertainment industry. We should throw off the psychological restraint of 'playing the victim' and provide women with a greater variety of female roles to identify with. Notice I did not say discard this formula, merely add some variety.
2. We should laugh at the fat princess since it's an unhealthy lifestyle, right?
Interesting. Did ridicule help you become a 'better' person or is it more likely to lock you into a cycle of self-hate? Additionally, notice that we're dealing with a princess and excluding princes. Our culture is notorious for waging war on the minds of young women by surrounding them with images of minority bodytypes. Finally, stop fucking around. You're not laughing at the "unhealthy lifestyle" so stop playing the bullshit social crusader. You don't laugh at smokers or carbon monoxide emissions. You're laughing because you've been trained, in our culture, to consider certain bodytypes as unacceptable, thus, humorous. The same thing happens in our culture that encourages to think of heterosexuality as normal and homosexuality as unacceptable, thus, humourous. Consider the rise of the terms 'gay' and currently 'no homo'. These things cease to be funny as you grow up and began to think for yourself.

3. Of course all the rescuers are male, aren't playable female characters usually shitty?
Agreed. Their increased speed never compensates for their weak hit power. Honesty, you have to headstomp someone 50,000 times with Chun-li. Video game designers take note. Stop making shitty female playable characters. Make them just as strong and as slow as their male counterparts. Better yet, have users choose their characters on stats alone and then have a male or female skin randomly generate on the mod.
4. Isn't the game pro-women since the object is to protect them?
Great point but I'm not sure I quite understand your complex argument. Let me put my head up your ass so we can see the world together. Shit, now I see how deep it is. Seriously, only ask questions that you can't bury by thinking for yourself for thirty seconds. What is this, baby's-first-debate?

I believe that criticism alone is useless and that the real useful (and difficult) work comes in thinking of solutions:

The following things would improve the game:
1. The 'princess' should be randomly generated as a male or female.
2. The princess or prince should be an active participant in the plan to make themselves fatter and more difficult to carry (as opposed to a passive object that requires stuffing). This shifts the humour from 'images of fat women are funny' to 'the absurd concept of rapidly gaining weight to prevent your own kidnapping is funny'.
3. The playable characters (rescuers) should be male and female.

4. The playable characters should have a variety of body types (not simply 'bearded angry men' and 'overtly sexualized women'). The NES game Ice Hockey had three body types.

The fact that these ideas do not occur to video game designers proves that the industry is patriarchal. Notice, I did not say 'run by men'. The patriarchy can be propagated by men, women, children, parents, even people calling themselves feminist.

A note to those who plan on enjoying playing Fat Princess.
It looks like a lot of fun. Fat Princess is not responsible for all of the crimes of our culture. It is a small patch in a larger quilt of oppression. You can defend the patch but not the quilt. Know that you have to turn your critical mind off to enjoy the game.

Final Fantasy II (94%) the Review

FF2 for the Super Nintendo was my introduction to Role Playing Games (RPGs) and, while FF3 is a reputable challenger, it remains the ultimate boss of RPGs.

There is nothing to compare the satisfaction of finding a hidden treasure chest, gaining a level of experience, or inflicting the fabled 9999 damage.

Timing and Circumstances
As the eldest of three brothers I held the controller and encouraged my brothers to compete for the role of "chief adviser". It was a tyrannical system for a one player game. But RPGs don't require fast reflexes. There's no carefully timed jumps or dodging bullets. It's a lot of walking around, talking to people, selecting battle orders from a list, and watching the story play out. I thoroughly enjoyed watching this game with my brothers. It was like a thirty hour movie. We were in a frenzy when we finally reached Golbez -we were even allowed to put the game on pause for the entire duration of dinner (that had never happened before).

I found the story captivating, I couldn't wait to defeat the next boss and watch the plot develop. Later, I would speak with someone who had a similar experience with Final Fantasy X -a game that I thought was terrible. Perhaps my appreciation was in my age. My understanding of cliches was also young. Everything in the game seemed so new and daring.

Music
I've always had respect for composers of video game soundtracks. The prolific Nobuo Uematsu is the only rival to Capcom's Megaman series for creating consistently captivating music. An impressive feat considering game tunes are made with po tentially irritating bleeps and bloops and are played on relentless loop. It was the music of the underground world that made me hold a tape player to the television to record the sound. Of course, the music may mean nothing to someone who has never been there.

Graphics
I was forever enamo ured with pixel art since admiring the quality of Tellah and Yang's sprite walking on the world map, a simple two frame animation. As video game systems began to strive for photo realism, I never lost my attachment to 16bit images. Like a Chuck Close portrait, a magnified look reveals abstract patterns that transform into breathtaking order as you step away.

Story
There is a twist of betrayal in the game that had my brothers and I announce our shock and disappointment. This was the first game where the central char acter showed any sign of emotional growth. This was also the first video game that I played where characters sacrificed their lives. I'll always remember the twins, Palom and Parom, redeeming their lackluster characters by turning themselves to stone in order to save us. There was a certain dignity in their deaths that made it hard for us to continue ridiculing their outfits and lack of useful spells.

FF2 has a special place in my heart. I hate poetry. But I am impressed at how some classical poets demonstrate their mastery of language by making the strict form of iambic pentameter seem organic. The designers of FF2 responded to the restrictions of the SNES by crafting a work of art within the 16bit walls. It provided me with hours of entertainment and remains one of the few games that I consider emotionally resonant.

As a sidenote, Final Fantasy IV in Japan was released as Final Fantasy II in North America.

The Future of Academia

*I couldn't be happier with the style of my last post (thanks to this bit of code). Hypertext is well suited to the dual pursuits of academic writing: clarity and proof . We should train students to write essays in this format.

The form was inspired by this online version of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The content was inspired by teaching high school students how to approach a text as if they were a Marxist, Feminist, Postcolonial, or Psychoanalytical scholar. We presented these perspectives in a straightforward and simple manner. The students rose to the challenge and the results were very encouraging.

A Marxist Reading - A 'How To' Guide

1. A Simple Guide to Marxist Analysis

When looking at your reading material, here are three questions that are central to Marxist thought:

1.1 How does the material portray the relationship between the bourgeoisie the proletariat?

Simply put: what's the relationship between the owners and the workers? Does the author want us to sympathize with the rich or the poor characters?

1.2 Does the material encourage class consciousness?

Simply put: is the reader encouraged to become aware that they're part of an exploitive system that needs change?

1.3 Does the material support the proletariat revolution?

Simply put: is In the coming class war (where the workers overthrow the owners to create a classless society), what side is the author on? Remember, if they don't take a side then they're supporting the bourgeoisie by encouraging things to remain the same.

2. What is Marxism?

Marxism is a perspective that originated with Karl Marx in the mid-1800s. It was the age of industrialization in Europe (factory production, invention, and the growth of cities) and Marx emerged with a long-lasting critic of capitalism.

2.1 How did Marx understand the world?

Marx studied how humans make things. He divided human history into four different stages characterized by our changing ways of making stuff:
prehistoric societies hunted and gathered, ancient civilizations used slaves, feudal societies had serfs and Lords and modern society used capitalism.
Basically, if we're simply considering the power to make stuff, capitalism kicks ass. Consider shoes. A modern shoe factory can produce more shoes in a single day than any slave or cobbler could have made in their lifetime. Marx was impressed by the power of capitalism but he was also concerned with how the controlling class of people exploits the working class of people.

2.2 What is capitalism?

'Capital' is the resources someone has to invest (consider it 'extra money'). People with 'extra money' can risk it by building factories to make more profit. It's easy to see that there is a division between the people with 'extra money' (owners or as Marx labeled them "the bourgeoisie") and workers ("the proletariat"). In a capitalist society you are born into a world where all of the property is owned by someone else. You have to inherit a share of it or use your labour to buy your own piece.

Although capitalism is amazing at making stuff it is also incredibly exploitive. Child labour, dangerous working conditions, and long hours of repetitive labour were common in Europe during Marx's time (and can still be seen today). Marx saw that factory production would be able to satisfy basic human needs and predicted that the workers, upon realizing this, would rise up and overthrow the owners. This revolution would be violent since the bourgeoisie were unlikely to surrender their privilege peacefully. Marx foresaw that the final stage of human production would be a classless society. He believed that this was a scientific fact. Thus, Marxists believe that the workers' revolution is not an ideal fantasy but an inevitable historical fact.

2.3 Futhermore

Marx's prediction of a classless community is the basis for the political ideology known as communism. Communist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba have had revolutions but not in the manner that Marx predicted. For instance, the peasantry played a decisive role in these revolutions despite Marx's theory that revolution would only happened once peasants had moved into cities to become the proletariat ad gain class consciousness. Thus, there are many strands of Marxist thought (Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, etc.).

Additionally, Marx thought that the revolution was going to happen in his lifetime (well before the rise of consumerism and the invention of the iPod). It didn't happen. Marxist scholars struggled to explain why. Vladimir Lenin argued that industrialized countries had spread their factories around the world and slowed the process of class consciousness.

Communist countries believe in solidarity with other countries struggling with their own revolution. The Cold War was a period in history where the Soviet Union and the United States sponsored many civil wars in order to support communism and capitalism respectively.

3. A Marxist analysis of Pokemon

Here are our three questions of Marxist analysis applied to Pokemon. It may seem silly (I certainly laughed while doing it) but the results are surprisingly indicative of the pervasive triumph of the capitalist mentality (class, competition, hierarchy).

3.1 How does the material portray the relationship between owners (the bourgeoisie) and workers (the proletariat)?

We can consider the children in the show to be the bourgeoisie. They carry little creatures, Pokemon, with them and use them to increase their own status. The Pokemon work for their masters by fighting each other. The Pokemon respond to the bourgeois commands and are rewarded by returning to their cramped living space or 'Pokeball' in order to be carried around for another fight. The proletariat, in this case the Pokemon, feel intense guilt for failing their masters and incredible joy for providing them with victory. We are meant to like the Pokemon, such as Pikachu, who are subservient and duty-bound to serve their master in spite of severe physical pain.

3.2 Does the material encourage class consciousness?

Although humans and Pokemon are clearly part of two separate classes there is no attention drawn to this division. In fact, it is presented as natural and necessary. The audience is encouraged to adopt the bourgeois perspective that the goal is to "catch'em all". The story follows the competitive bourgeois struggle to become ranked number one. Furthermore, the Pokemon are organized into their own class system where creatures of a higher class are superior in strength to Pokemon of lesser status. The audience is encouraged to accept competition and hierarchy as natural features of the world. The Pokemon show no desire to rebel against their masters. No one suggests that this stratification exists let alone questions the inherit injustice.

3.3 Does the material support the proletariat revolution?

There is no sign that the Pokemon should rebel against this oppressive system nor is there any encouragement for the audience to desire a revolution. One has the feeling that if the Pokemon did revolt against their overlords then we would be encouraged to cheer for the humans to restore order.

Underwhelmed by London

I enjoyed King Lear at the Globe theater. We had tickets as "groundlings" -no seats but allowed to stand. Many people, including myself, held ourselves up by placing our arms on the stage.

I feel like a Spook with my "Tube" pass. We bought these incredibly expensive subway passes that give us unlimited rides while we're here. Single rides on London's tube are hilariously expensive.

I finished the Graham Greene book The Human Factor. Do not recommend.
7word review: Family relationships plus double agents equals boring.

When the students are late we punish them by making them wake up early and jog with me. One of the greatest moments happened today. One of the students was left behind by three others who were running frantically to make it on time. The student left behind arrived late and was punished. However, the other three students (who made it on time) felt so badly about abandoning them that all three of them offered to run in her place. Naturally, I accepted this proposition since it was legendary.

I'm very tired. I yawn wildly as I wait as these photos from Paris are uploaded.

I saw a performance of Shaw's Pygmalion tonight. I was not moved emotionally but found some enjoyment giving the play a feminist reading. In the end, Ms. Dolittle was empowered but only after the insistence of the annoying male.

I don't think I've met anyone from London. all of the servers here are foreigners trying to make it in London. The Londoners must be hiding in suits on top floors. In Paris, I felt bad because of the language gap when I was ordering food. Here, the language gap is the other way. My english is "fine" but the servers speak with accents and don't always understand what we mean.

I met a girl named Rachel at the Globe theater. She was cool. In the crowd of standing groundlings behind us a grown man collapsed. He passed out, falling onto his face. Rachel sprung into action and placed him in semi-prone where he woke up and was whisked away on a wheelchair by Globe staff.

Brokeback Mountain in Paris

I finally went into that new museum, musée du quai Branly (2006), to see the "Non-European" art (especially since I enjoyed that hidden basement of the Louvre so much). It was a fantastic choice. I was loving the masks from Cameroon and Mali and, since I forgot the camera, I was forced to sketch shitty likenesses.

Deeper into the museum I heard the gunshots and horse whinnies of an old Western movie. It was quite loud. Who the hell was watching a Hollywood Western in a Non-European art museum? Was it my imagination? No, those are gunshots. I had to investigate.

Upstairs was the "melange" section -where cultures collide. 16th Century Mayan art with clear Spanish influences, a model galleon some foreign street artist had made out of discarded coca cola cans, and a little theater with six screens that was comparing Asian cinema to American cinema.

I sat down to watch. It was quite a nice set up. There were three pairs of screens. The first pair was paused. It was some anime movie and, beside it, some space sci fi movie. In the second pair both of the movies were playing but they were only running the audio for one. The sound would switch back and forth so you could get the gist of both films. The movie on the right was Brokeback Mountain. The movie on the left --

WTF?

Was that Tony Leung? Am I watching a Wong Kar-Wai film in Paris? Yes I am. That was a surprising-

WTF?

Look at the third pair. I know those faces. I don't know the name of the American movie but that's Ernest Borgnine! Wait... the movie there comparing it to is... that Vietnamese Western/Melodrama that we didn't finish watching!!!

One nice and surprising thing that I have noticed about the students is that no one carries an iPod. No one is plugged in and they all walk and talk together.

Today we did the best poetry lesson that has been done in the last, oh... 150 years.
Morning: we taught all of the standard poetry terms -particularly iambic pentameter, and had them scan a classic and modern poem. Afterward they had to take a side on two questions:
1. Are classic or modern poets more talented?
2. Does close study of a poem ruin it or increase your appreciation?

Evening: Went into the Rodin museum for inspiration. They all wrote 20 line poems. Then we sat on the grass boulevard south of Napoleon's Tomb and made them condense the poem to 10 lines. Naturally, this was agonizing for them. Their reward for their hard work was to condense it into 2 lines.

Then we had them reconstruct those two lines as imabic pentameter.

A learning experience that has been informative, fun, and produced creative work.

Paris - Day 3?

I didn't think I'd ever be here again.
Landed in Paris with 43 students and 4 staff.

We've been to the Louvre twice,
The Latin Quarter for a lunch and group dinners,
Picked the statue of Charlemagne at Notre Dame as a meeting spot,
My fave building, the Pantheon,
We've done group discussions on Great Expectations,
Lunched on Rue Mouffetard,
Had lectures about and form, content, context, and great writers,
Monmartre, with a group photo at Sacre Couer and then crepes,
They've written in their journals about their own great expectations,
The Pompidou museum featuring the most traumatic art I have seen there yet: photos of Austrian genital mutilation, a video of a naked woman razoring the star of david onto her belly, a hauntingly life-like mannequin of Hitler with real hair (I had to look away because I thought I saw it move. Seriously, this thing had pores. Also it was alone in a room. Creepy. Kneeling, facing the wall so you had to walk around to see the face...)
I've fiddled with about thirty laptops to bring our digital coursepack to life (including a tiny ASUS that's running linux!)
We've had a one-on-one talk with each student about the English course, what they feel about their writing, and they just handed in an assignment designed for that specific individual to develop a particular skill.
I spotted some nice graffiti. Quality stencils of the Dalai Lama and Gandhi.

I was happy to see that they had spectacular poster sized photos from around the world placed on the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens: lava, ladybugs, airplane crashes, soldiers, farmers -there's even a picture from Canada, it's off two polar bears dancing.

We've been here two and a half days.
I take pride in overhearing students say how it feels as if we've been here for a week.