The Long Goodbye

OK, it's not as long as its author envisaged, but I am going away – first to a conference and then for a holiday on the ould sod. The conference is Naaswch - the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History. It moves between Wales and the US or Canada each year. I didn't manage anything for the Harvard gig last time, but I have the pleasure of going back to Bangor this time, the institution that took a chance on an unknown kid during the Clearing process and gave me two of my degrees.

My last Welsh-related paper looked at the signifying role of food in a selection of literary texts (which I must write up and publish). This one draws on the long history of colonial and postcolonial literary theory and applies it to something new in the field: the ways in which the Welsh, Scots and Irish have been represented in video games. The TL;DR version is that there's basically a mashed up version of all 'Celts' (the concept is a 19th-century confection) dragged out when modern, technologically advanced societies feel the need for a bit of spiritually-informed violence. Arthur, tartan and blue face-paint feature a lot. There's quite a bit of smiting, plenty of castles, grottoes and caves, and some impractical and frankly a-historical ladies' clothing. Not the kind of thing that will keep the midges off as you plod across the bog. For a little light relief, there's also Welsh-as-comic-sidekick, as seen in some Japanese games.

Brennos - a Celtic Barbarian. All you have to do is wipe out his villages

Castles (1992): you play the oppressive Saxon invader

A typical Arthurian MMORPG

Dún Darach (1985)

A still from Grand Theft Auto V

Korean MMORPG Mabinogi. Not a scene I recognise from the Four Branches

Basically, the Celts are usually The Past: too wild or effeminate to cope with modernity, with the possible exception of DJ Dai (who plays sheep noises and has a terminal illness. I'm suggesting that the Romantic and Victorian struggles over how to define Celtic identities have been carried over wholesale into video art.

Here are a few of the games I'll talk about.

Comic relief: Ni-no-kuni: Wrath of the White Witch



Hot Warrior Maiden (though she does speak a formal approximation of modern Welsh): Civilization V:



Celtic spirituality as close to mental ill-health and self-help: Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice





and finally an interesting comparison: the Shropshire-set Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, which looks forward rather than to the mythical past while addressing key questions about life, consciousness, progress, science and the future in a way that even the best Celtic-based games just won't do.



So that's my paper. After that it's over to Ireland for (hopefully) some rain, reading and relaxation before returning to find out how many and which of my excellent colleagues have been fired in pursuit – according to my VC in the local paper – a 'Renaissance' of artistic activity in the area. No, really. He actually said that closing courses (he didn't have the space to mention the redundancies) and diverting the cash to STEM and nursing courses would magically stimulate the arts. Mind you, I'm doodling some pretty graphic images of him right now while a friend has sent me a bespoke tie which beautifully encapsulates my feelings towards management, so perhaps he's right.

Try not to miss me too much.

Grab yourself a whore and settle in

I'm getting increasingly bored by the glut of super-hero films: the studios are now run by men in their late 40s trying to recreate the witty glee of 1978s Superman and its ilk, unhampered by reflection on the fact that their feelings about such films is coloured by seeing them when they were boys. The nostalgia is accompanied by cold hard commercial concerns: they conceive of the audience as a later generation of teen boys and find it nigh on impossible to make films for adults, women, teenage girls (other than vilely patronising rom-coms).

The latest bit of boy-man rubbish is that some extra, once caught, will be fined $5 million (affect a Dr Evil tone for that bit) for leaking the top-secret hush-hush news that the new Batman movie will have a FEMALE Robin.

O.M.F.G.

I just think it's embarrassing that in this day and age, it's considered a major transgressive, progressive move to make a familiar and relatively unimportant character female. It suggests that the studio chiefs, directors, producers and scriptwriters still think of women as The Other, and assume that their audience does the same. Of course it's possible that the female Robin has been cast so that homophobes behind the camera and in the stalls can't giggle about the homosocial bond between these two men. Far better that Batman has a female junior: 'normal' gender roles return!

She-Robin will become a symbol rather than a character: every time we point out that female superheroes are always sexualised in ways the men aren't, their defenders will whine that they 'let' us have a female Robin (and hope that we don't notice the inevitable marginalisation and gendered nature of said representation). Commissioning 'erotic artist' Milo Minara for Spider-woman is just the latest example of a tawdry, sleazy tradition:

The obvious rejoinder to this is to say that it's better than nothing. As a Doctor Who fan, I was disappointed by the latest selection of yet another white male Doctor, however excellent I think Capaldi is. It's about time such roles were taken by women without any fuss being made about it whatsoever. I'd like the next director to say 'we auditioned x number of people and she was the best fit', rather than – as the Batman people evidently have in mind – using the moment as a big shock.

A friend tells me that Robin's been female in the comics for some time – I wonder whether the same arguments popped up when that happened. Films are different, of course: the history of comic book adaptations is of massively widened audiences consuming watered-down versions of characters held dear by 'real' fans: The Kick-Ass films, for instance, skipped the gang-rape of KA's girlfriend, thankfully.

We seem to be at a particularly low point in gender representation. The whole Gamergate thing reminded me of a particularly good undergraduate dissertation one of my former students wrote. A keen gamer, she simply recorded and analysed the comments, conversations and behaviours of fellow players when she played as a supposed male and as a female. So the vile poison of Gamergate was no surprise: I've read all the rape threats and torture propositions before – my student was a tough cookie but I still worried about the cumulative effect of this stuff. Gamergate, in case you have a life, started off as a nasty personal spat between games developer Zoe Quinn and her ex-partner, who posted some petty and apparently untrue accusations on his blog relating to her professionalism and morality. Before long, certain corners of the internet spawned regiments of male gamers pouring out misogynistic bile and claiming that the real problem is journalists' failure to 'understand' the ethos of online gaming, which they feel should be a space removed from 'real life' politics and social movements. To them, games are goal-oriented quests with pretty basic requirements: killing, and scantily-clad women to provide sexual services or be killed. And perhaps some magic rings thrown in. This, they feel is 'normal'. Anything else is 'political' or (perhaps even worse) 'art'. Ugh. To recap: games which privilege white males slaughtering Vietnamese/Native Americans/Orcs/aliens etc., and reducing women to sidekicks, prostitutes or slaves isn't political, while mentioning this is political, and engaged in by SJWs, or 'social justice warriors'. No wonder Charlie Brooker is driven to despair:

Never, ever choose “woman” on your first playthrough of The Internet, because you’ll face an immediate difficulty spike. Suddenly it’s a stealth game with nowhere to hide, one with hundreds of respawning enemies waiting to attack you the moment you make a noise or stand out in any way whatsoever.
OPEN MAILBOX.
I SAID DIE U FUCKN WHORE says the game, accompanied by an animated gif of your head on a porn star’s body.
You decide to see what you’re carrying, by typing INVENTORY.
YOU HAVE: A LAMP, A ROPE, A FAT ASS AND SAGGY TITS, chuckles the game.
You try something else. You type GO NORTH.
The game thinks for a while, then distributes your home address and phone number and threatens to murder you and your entire family.

They particularly hate independent games authors who don't provide said slaughter'n'slags action. Some of them are even WOMEN. Which just proves to them that women aren't gamers and have no sense of humour. Apparently.

Take this well-spoken chap who has recorded a 20 minute walk-through of Dragon Age in which he matter-of-factly goes looking through the brothel, in which he meets a woman who describes her time as a prostitute as 'fun times' (around 3.45).



This is also the game Anita Sarkeesian points out contains the injunction to



Having made that point, Sarkeesian has had to cancel several lectures because she's received death threats, and left her home. Quinn wrote a game about suffering from depression: this is apparently 'too dark' for gaming (despite the multiple games in which you can play an SS officer for instance), and like Sarkeesian these critics have made their points through the medium – again – of death threats. As she explains,

"the Internet spent the last month spreading my personal information around, sending me threats, hacking anyone suspected of being friends with me, calling my dad and telling him I'm a whore, sending nude photos of me to colleagues, and basically giving me the 'burn the witch' treatment"

Amusingly, said threats come from people who say that online content and other media activity have 'no effect on real life'. I don't like this false distinction, and it seems that someone who'll simultaneously say 'it's just a game' while sending assassination threats doesn't really believe it either.

Does it matter, given that these keyboard warriors are a small band of men? It does, because they're vocal, they drown out debate far beyond their numbers. They've hijacked the terms of the discussion and they've moved from issues to identity. To them, it's not enough to disagree with other people's opinions - they issue personal threats or stay silent when others do the same. They've achieved the silencing of women and their male allies, and even ended careers. Depressingly, there's the inevitable hashtag for these anti-political warriors: #NotYourShield, which claims that accusation of misogyny are used as a weapon to evade the 'real' core of the argument: journalistic ethics when writing about games. The bigots even funded a supposedly feminist group to design a fantasy character called Vivian James – the result is an embarrassing tamed girl-woman whom the loons are now depicting as an innocent victim of these ball-breaking commie man-haters:

It reminds me of break time at school, when the girls mooched around the edges of the playground while the boys took up the space to play football, and this was accepted as natural.

BY this point, you're probably as bored and depressed as I am. The difference is, I'm going to have to teach this stuff, in media ethics classes, to male and female gamers. I'll say one thing for cultural studies: there's never any shortage of new material for discussion. I think I'll stop now – I'm pretty certain the #NotYourShield people will have enough death threats lying around to spare one for little ol' me.

PS. I'm such a politically-correct pinko liberal that I stopped playing games when I realised Civilisation II was rigged so that you couldn't win by running a peaceful, socialist economy.

Here we go again…

Every so often, a hysterical rightwing newspaper or attention-seeking corrupt discredited member of Parliament calls for a crackdown on violent video games because they corrupt innocent little minds.

This time it's Keith Vaz, an embarrassment to humanity, let alone the Labour Party and democracy (career highlights: suspended from Parliament for unfounded accusation against a policewoman, leading a demonstration calling for The Satanic Verses to be burned; expenses fraud and blocking an investigation into further fraud; dubious financial links with some very dodgy billionaire businessmen; being 'for hire' ideologically and betraying his supposed principles in the hope of currying favour; frequently interfering with government business on behalf of dodgy friends; 'flipping' his homes to con the expenses rules and over claiming on various items; obsessively supporting homeopathy).

So a rather slippery, unintelligent and untrustworthy chap. But he's grabbed some headlines by saying that Breivik's claimed use of a video game to 'train' for his massacre.

Sigh. Here we go again with a debate we stage for first-year media students every year before moving on to more intelligent ideas.

We start by asking how many of them have played violent video games. Most have. Then we ask them to calculate how many people they've killed in the games, and how many deaths they've witnessed in games, on TV, at the cinema and so on. The total is usually some astounding number.

Then we ask them to confess to the number of actual real-life killings they've committed. The total is usually quite low, though I suppose we should control the statistics for the possibility that some students might not reply honestly to this question.

It becomes clear that these young people tend, on the whole, not to transfer their garrotting, shooting and bombing skills from the screen to the street. We then consider whether it's possible that killers who do possess violent games might choose them because they have pre-existing violent tendencies. It's even possible that people use fictional violence as a safety valve, letting off steam without doing any harm. I had a housemate who ended up attacking several of us with a knife before being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His shelves were full of martial arts and UFC DVDs. I didn't assume that they caused his mental illness - I  think he liked them so much because he was mentally ill. It might even be that watching them delayed the day he lost control.

From where I'm sitting, there's a clear line between Vaz's Nazi-style book-burning and his belief in homeopathy to his argument to his assault on video games (which I don't play, by the way). Clearly he believes in the power of fiction to an extent greater than the rest of us. He operates by anecdote unless - and I know this is cynical - he just wants the attention.

But why stop with video games? I read an awful lot of disgustingly violent books. Last week I read a play in which a man dabbles in the occult, then murders his way to the top of the tree. It's called MacBeth. And yet I haven't stabbed by line managers at all. Similarly, Titus Andronicus involves cutting out a girl's tongue, cutting off her hands, then two boys being baked in a pie and served up to the family. Yet my chopping board is dusted with nothing more than flour even after exposure to this sick filth. I've read Portnoy's Complaint without wrapping a raw liver around my gentleman's parts and pleasuring myself (yes, American Pie viewers, literature got there well before you). I've not followed any dilatory rabbits down holes nor followed any instructions to 'Drink Me'. I have not set out in any beautiful pea-green boats, nor knocked myself out on the entrance to Platform 9 and 3 quarters. I've eaten no Lotoses or attempted to enter Xanadu. I have not eaten of the tree of knowledge. Some of those poets are sick bastards. Get them off the shelves. Have you read any Swinburne or Dowson?

The truth is that however distasteful a particular artefact might be, it will form only a tiny proportion of anyone's life. Balanced against the desensitised slaughter of pixels are parents, siblings, friends, colleagues, fellow students and various institutions all encouraging you not to go on killing sprees. Viewers and gamers are complex and morally-sophisticated people - drawing a straight line between playing a game and committing a massacre.

I wonder which games Keith played to teach him him how to burn books, defraud the taxpayer, and corruptly cosy up to billionaires… or did he acquire all these skills by himself?

The funny thing about these self-appointed censors is that it's always other people they're protecting. Keith's too clever to be affected by these horrible games. But the oiks are stupid and suggestive and he needs to protect them from themselves.

I've a few simple rules to get me through life. One of them is as followers: 'anyone who burns books is usually on the wrong side of the argument'.