On Dreams

I think that one of the best Martin Luther King day tributes came from Jon Rosenberg, creator of Scenes from a Multiverse. The premise of the comic is that there are an infinite number of universes inhabited by sentient beings, all of whom are pretty much exactly as fucking stupid as we are.

MLK was assassinated during a push for worker's rights, part of a social justice initiative that went beyond the call for de jure equality and made the case for a more equal society. In today's America, Martin Luther King's name is one embraced by people of all backgrounds, creeds, and political persuasions. But if you share his goals, you get beaten in the streets just the same as his followers did at the time.

Many, on air and off, have asked the question: "What would Martin Luther King Jr. say if he saw today's America." Obviously none of us know, but whatever it is, it would without a doubt be painful to hear.

PAX East: A Modest Success

Editor's Note: There is much to say about the disaster in Japan, but as I'm still playing catch-up, I'll wait on that post and give an update on that thing I've been working on

I hope that next time [Team Respect] goes to a con, there are more of us to hit up the panels and hand out swag, because for as much fun as I had at PAX East, I do wish I'd gotten the chance to play some more videogames.

To that note, I did get the chance to demo the new Mortal Kombat, which was more fun than I've had playing a fighting game in a couple of years (and more fun than I've had playing a Mortal Kombat game since the franchise launched).

I also got to demo Twisted Pixel's The Gunstringer, which is truly fucking astounding. Using the Xbox Kinect, you control the story's hero, who just so happens to be a marionette! As you fight your way through the barren landscape, a narration plays that adapts to the action on screen. It is to puppet theater what Rez was to music.



None of this is to suggest that I regret the other purposes for which I attended PAX. As it stands, [TR] is garnering still more followers on Twitter, with a major spike since the con. We distributed pink wristbands with our twitter name and our URL, collected business cards from a fair number of developers. I was also approached by a teacher from my high school, who was interested in organizing an event there about ethics and hate speech and wanted to know if I'd be interested in giving a talk.

Considering that one of the long-term goals we had from the getgo was doing precisely that sort of thing, I'm pretty fucking psyched.

When we started out, we weren't quite sure what we could accomplish at PAX East with such little time to organize and so few resources. The bar we set for ourselves was thus: Make it absolutely fucking clear that at this con, in this city, the people who are interested in helping greatly outnumber the trolls.

The douchetrucks behind @teamrape managed to stage a "flashmob" consisting of between 15 and 18 people outside a nearby UNO's.  They also managed to get us to give them handfulls of bracelets before we knew who they were, and get themselves kicked out of the Gender in Games panel. They've been at this for a couple of months longer than we have, and are followed by 60 people on twitter.

As of this writing, we've distributed around 2000 wristbands, are followed by 192 twitter users-- including the great and powerful @Themiscyra, who on Sunday became the first woman to take the stage for the final round of the Omegathon, and did so proudly displaying a [Team Respect] wristband-- and have made significant content with the press, the industry, and activists in the community. We also met with the brilliant minds at MIT's Gambit Lab, who in addition to their great work in gaming, created the Hate Speech Project as a reaction to the hostility surrounding the dickwolves debacle. It was put on display at the back of their booth at the expo hall.



A full report will follow over at the Team Respect blog, but in short: [TR] is WINNING. This started as a response to a specific mishap in the gaming community, but it won't end there.

As gamers, we're sick of merely saying "games aren't bad for you." Games are GOOD for you. They keep soldiers deployed in combat zones from wanting to kill themselves-- in fact the only behavior more effective in decreasing risk of suicide is 5 hours of daily exercise.  They treat depression.  They improve confidence and self-esteem, and channel positive energy. If you don't overindulge, they make you a more productive, more considerate, more helpful member of society.  But the catch is, none of that shit works if you're an asshole, or are playing in a space that's dominated by assholes.

We can't sanitize the Internet or online gaming as a whole--nor do we want that power-- but from what we've learned at PAX, it's quite clear what our mission from here on out ought to be: To carve out a space where people can expect to be treated respectfully, and to encourage people to take that attitude out to the gaming community as a whole. To encourage others to lead by example and in so doing change the fucking world. The limits of what can be accomplished by our efforts have yet to be fully defined, but what we already know commands us to press forward.

[TR] Update and other thoughts

Six days without a post is the norm for much of my time on this blog, to the extent that I still, STILL have not yet posted my 500th piece on this site. But it's a bit off from my recent posting habits, so let me assure you, I've still been banging my head on the brick wall that is the Internet, but it's been at a different part, and this time I've begun to see deeper cracks appear.  Team Respect has been live for six days now, and as of right now we've racked up 92 twitter followers, an entry on the debacle "Pratfall of Penny Arcade" timeline, 25 forum members (who have collectively posted 93 times) and 37 likes on facebook.

To be fair, we haven't really been trying on facebook, because nobody we know has any finesse with it.  My twitter chops have the likes of Melissa Harris-Perry and Harry Shearer tossing me @replies. My facebook chops have people in my circle of friends telling me "cool story, bro." If anyone were to offer advice or assistance, that would be killer.

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Valentines Day came and went, but the discounted chocolate remains, as does the bottle of gin my Other of Primary Significance got me for what we refer to as "Hetero-normative Teenybopper Bullshit Day," which rates rather above the "teacher valentine" chocolates I got her and leaves me playing catch-up. It's Rogue Spirits Pink Spruce gin, and having sampled a fair number of juniper-wrought liquors, I have to say this is my favorite. The gin has been infused with spruce oil and seasoned in Oregon Pinot Noir barrels, which come in along with various citrus elements to strike the first chord. It middles with cucumber which continues to the tail end, where it's joined by the juniper and grains of paradise, a peppery spice famously employed in Sam Adams Summer Ale.

I've yet to use it in any mixed drinks, as it's delicious on its own or with ice, but I suspect that combining it with Lillet at martini proportions with a twist of lemon would yield agreeable results. I shall report back when I've tested this hypothesis. Enjoying it in any form you choose along with the lyrical stylings of Garfunkel and Oates comes with my unqualified endorsement

May we all be spared of our parties taking a turn for the douche.

Peace

Team Respect: A Grand Announcement

Ever since I was three years old, I've played videogames. It started when I was three years old, and my father's Intellivision allowed for two controllers to control the same character in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. My father maneuvered the crudely pixelated Ranger whilst I shot arrows. We played that Intellivision until it went bust.

Later, I was hospitalized for asthma. I was breathing out of a tube in the wall, and while my parents visited me, I was often alone.  Luckily, they wheeled in a TV with a Nintendo Entertainment System. For sure, I'd rather have been breathing under my own power, but it made my time in the hospital less scary. It's that experience that would later lead me to support Child's Play, a charity that puts toys and games in children's hospitals, so that kids everywhere can feel a little less scared while they're healing.

The charity was the brainchild of Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, best known as the creators of Penny Arcade. Their action helped redeem the gaming community in the eyes of society at large. Gone now are the frothy-mouthed rantings of Jack Thompson. Indeed, the narrative has flipped completely. Prominent researchers are now saying that games are good for you.

Their other great accomplishment is PAX, which is for many of us summed up in a word: home. Last year, it came to the East Coast for the first time, and I was in attendance. It was, in short, awesome. While many other conventions of its sort are commercial enterprises centered on hyping games and getting gamers to part with their money. Not true with PAX.  PAX is a community of gamers who are there to play games with each other. And at that, it's one of the more inclusive spaces in the gaming community.

However, recent events have led many to feel less welcome. Here is a timeline of events. It's not the comic itself that has so many of us upset. It's the boorish response from the creators and their defenders that served to make reasonable critiques invisible. And encouraged some high-grade dickery, taken to the most extreme in those who have vowed to show up to the con wearing shirts that say "Team Rape." As a result, many people-- some of my friends included-- to no longer feel welcome at PAX.  Which sucks, because PAX is truly special and everyone should have the ability to enjoy it.

We're better than this. I know because I've been there.  I've seen people at PAX receive prizes worth hundreds of dollars only to immediately return them and request that they be put up for auction to benefit Child's Play. There is a culture in PAX-- and in gaming at large-- that is conducive to being changed for the better by the existence of good examples.

It is with this in mind that some friends of mine and I have founded Team Respect.

We're not quite sure what our long-term plans are.  As of right now, we're encouraging those in the gaming community who don't like to hear it when their fellow gamers are inconsiderate of others, whether it be defiantly pledging be assholes to abuse survivors, or using "faggot" as a generic insult to stand up and declaim it. To say that we, as gamers-- as human beings-- won't stand for this.

And after that? Who knows? But right now, we're making a hard push to get the word out ahead of the convention on March 11th, and I'd ask everyone who reads this to pass it along to the gamers in their lives. It's time to take our culture back.

Convince one mind at a time to cleave to the spirit of Wheaton's Law, which is to say, "Don't be a dick."

A lighter note.

The great and wonderful Pia Savage has posted her second Psychology Today piece. In it, she describes her first panic attack, which took place during notebook inspection day in the second grade.

As someone to whom notes were superfluous and taking them was like trying to throw with my off hand, I personally appreciate her sharing her own experience.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that if anyone reading this doesn't already know what's going on in Egypt right now, they can damn well find out on their own and I don't need to speak on it with an unearned air of authority.

I will say this. During the day while I was taking a break from rather dusty housework, I was glued to twitter. among the tweets about the clashes between protesters and brownshirts, something hilarious happened.

The National Organization for Marriage linked this cartoon from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal  on their blog.

Naturally, they didn't get the joke. For thinking people, culture shock is a source of humor and/or discomfort. For Defenders of Marriage, it's evidence that something is well and truly wrong with the Universe.

SMBC is authored by Zach Weiner, who in addition to having a surname uncannily appropriate for the brand of humor that he has elevated near to the level of High Art, is about the last person who is going to let you get away with subverting his work to fit your message of hate. The thing about hotlinks is that you only control the name of the file that they display. Usually, that's enough.  However...

For me it was a welcome break from hearing about how Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Richard Engel, Nicholas Kristoff, and all of the other reporters out there whose names I can't immediately bring to mind but who are no less worthy of mention are in real danger. Some have said that the attention they've gotten is a distraction, but I disagree.

I warrant that there's a danger of people from the West focusing their sympathies on the people who look like them who came late to the nightmare rather than the people who have lived their whole lives under the conditions that created this crisis, but that's not the only force at work These are the people we invite into our homes every day to get a better understanding of how the world is working. In the United States, their efforts are routine; expected. In Cairo, during this time of crisis, it gives some cause to threaten their lives. If we think only of the faces we know, then we indeed have missed the point.

I am infinitely grateful both for the reporters who shine a light on the darkest moments of human history, and the smart, funny people who make those dark moments easier to bear. Double points for each if they can manage to stand up for the powerless while doing so.