The View from Nowhere

Playing games is an instinctual urge.  Children are most readily associated with the notion of game playing in part because it is something that humans are pre-wired to do.  Children’s games are pretty abstract.  Playing with imaginary items, people, or animals is not an uncommon aspect of games kids play.  Ideas and concepts are completely at the whimsy of the players where they make entirely new worlds and experiment within the new boundaries created.  Since children are not autonomous, adults are often nearby to witness these activities and the tiny people who play them.  These adults may feel pride at the creative impulses of their own offspring.  “That’s my kid, damn is he/she smart!” the adults may say.  Grown-up observers may also feel nostalgic for the easy-goingness of times past.  “Ah if it were only that simple,” sighs the onlooker.  Of course there may be joy in just feeling superior, “Ah that’s kids stuff!” they might scoff.

As we age the games become more concrete.  Gone are the times where sticks substitute for swords, standing on a table fills in for a high tower, and making sound effects with your mouth is generally frowned upon (unless you are Bobby McFerrin).  Sports are OK to play but are more often just observed.  For the nerdy, video games are acceptable.  Cards, board games, puzzles, Bingo; these are the games allowed for adults.

It seems that games are something that we grow out of.  Or do we?  If games are something that we come out of the womb knowing how to play, how is it possible that we forget how to play them?  The answer is that life becomes the game.  Academics have understood this for a long time.  Freud’s psychoanalytical model of adults simply as larger children touches on this idea.  More recently economic ideas such as game theory make this even more explicit.  The now widely disregarded psychologist Timothy Leary framed it perfectly, adult games are not a sideline to life, games are life.  Think of major life phases; school, family, work, parenthood, friendship.  Each one of these can be conceptualized as a discrete game with its own rules and customs.  Culture can be thought of this way as well.  Break it down and even a conversation between two people can be viewed as a game.  Leary took this to the extreme (is this a surprise?) even referring to himself in the third person as “the Tim Leary game”. Perhaps this extreme viewpoint is unhelpful and even distracting but the take-home is, as it is with any game, what are the rules and who is making them?

Society chugs along best when rules are well known and followed.  Civil order is founded on this concept.  Oddly enough, we now live in a world so regulated that it is now physically impossible to memorize all the laws which govern behavior.  No one can completely know the rules to the game of life. On one hand this may be viewed as incredibly liberating, why bother to worry about all the laws if you know you can never learn them?  On the other hand it could be viewed as horrifically stifling.  I think most people split the difference, exploring the idea that ignorance of the law is bliss while engaging in behavior that they understand either through common sense or common custom, to be “safe”.  As long as they are “safe” they don’t have to worry.  This solves the practical issue of incarceration, but what about the childish expression of playful gaming?  If so many rules have been made that no one can ever know all of them and everyone is playing it safe where is the fun?  Where is the game even?  Are we simply gears in this globalized capital machine?

No, we’re not, even if we are.  Safe, blissful, and ignorant we may make our own games on a human level.  We take control of the situation ourselves.  Subcultures, countercultures, cliques, groups, organizations, even dinner out at a quirky restaurant or drinks at a new bar called Barf where beverages are served in bedpans and the walls are covered in novelty vomit and plastic dog poo provide opportunities to define new rules and thus create new games.  The rules are made by the heads of these establishments.  Dad makes the rules, Mom makes the rules, the boss makes the rules, the bouncer makes the rules, the club president makes the rules.  Spontaneous games created on the fly when people meet on the street for example, can be expected to follow predefined rules of etiquette or can be hijacked by the loudest talker, the most indifferent, the wittiest, the list goes on.  The key to life, like any other game, is to learn the rules (or make them up yourself) and then excel at playing.  Within the hyper-complex, infinitely flexible word of adult life this is nearly impossible.  That doesn’t mean that we should stop trying.  After all, wouldn’t quitting just be childish?

It’s fun saying that Bill Gates is wrong.  It’s fun because 1) it doesn’t matter what I say because the Bill G magic isn’t about being right or wrong its about having 90% of the OS market share so that gives me the freedom to say anything risk-free 2) he’s really, really rich and part of me likes lashing out at that in jealousy.  But Bill is still wrong.

On Feb 21, Bill told students at Carnegie Mellon University that keyboards would be less important in computing’s future.  I agree with this, but Bill went on to say that speech will replace keyboards, and this I think is inaccurate.  What strikes me is how obviously inaccurate this is.  Look at how people work right now.  Many workplaces are tightly packed with cubicles or even rows of seated computer workers.  This works out for the most part, because people can sit and quietly type away without bothering anyone else.  In call centers, the keyboard is used for multi-tasking, allowing agents to talk to one customer while chatting with several others via keyboard.  With cell phones, people can txt people in loud environments when they could not otherwise be heard or in social situations where it would be impolite to have a vocal conversation.  The increasingly personal nature of technology makes it more appealing to make more and more computer use private and unspoken, not the other way.  Can you imagine a crowded bus where everyone is barking orders at their phones?  “Next screen, up, up, up, left, down, close window, place call…”  It is hard enough when people are talking loudly to other people let alone machines.  Bill is right, keyboards are limited and clunky but they are the best thing going right now and speech is not the successor.

Ever since Keanu kung-fu’d his way out of the Matrix, everyone knows that “there is no there there.”  Everything that we understand as real is just a floating, disembodied symbol with no underlying meaning.  Even our own bodies are superfluous to our minds, soon we’ll download into new robot bodies, or maybe even black Trans-Ams, and drive off into the inevitable cyber-future of tomorrow.  I guess this all makes sense if you are into robots and talking cars but is it really accurate?

Sitting in the United States the undisputed bully, ehem, champion of the free-market, globalized, super-democracy it follows that goods and services and their corresponding price would be a good place to analyze the relationship between a symbol (its worth) and the thing itself (the commodity).  If we made 1995-2001 the focal point for our analysis, it seems the above holds pretty true.  Securities traded a zillion times above actual company profits.  Month old dot-coms IPO’d for tens of millions while still in the red and nary a business plan.  Actual value was so 1980’s man!  We’re post-modern!

Now, in the middle of a global credit crunch, the skeletized corpses of past dot-coms lining the shoulders of the information super-highway, and the ghouls of corporate scandal still haunting the media it seems that some of the hype, well, was just hype.  Sadly, market pressures really do seem to care about profits and earnings.  Business plans matter, and if the cost of oil and other natural resources is any indicator, demand for a thing and how much of that thing is available really are important factors in determining monetary value.

Herbert Schiller is one of those guys that people don’t talk about very much.  His ideas aren’t really cool, and so far, Keanu has yet to make a movie based on anything he wrote.  If beer goggles make every person super-hot and sexy, Schiller goggles make everything look like they would after a week long methamphetamine bender.  That is to say, all things appear intertwined, interrelated, and headed for disaster forcing the goggle wearer to become crippled by paranoia and fear.  Schiller stressed that things were not just “things” but instead symbols (and here is the critical part) and these symbols are critically related to labor, value, and exchange.  There is a there there and its everywhere man!

If 1997 is Baudrillard and 2007 is Schiller, it looks like Schiller wins, because in 2007 your house is worth less than it was last year, it costs 100 bucks at the pump, and the Canadian price on books really does seem expensive.  But wait, much like Mick Foley on that legendary day in June 1998, Baudrillard is not going down without a fight.  Even though goods are real, and have real value, the daily work for many Americans is more and more abstract.  TPS reports anyone?  Black clad superheroes and Baudrillard are both right when it comes to information.  Its not there and neither is the work that people do.  Project planning, logistics, databases, middle management; these things are very difficult to quantify.  Measurements such as tonnage, units shipped, gross, capacity, and so on cannot be easily applied to these disciplines.  Woah, so we are in the Matrix?  It sure looks like it.  As workers we are increasingly separated from physical products or even a tangible service.  As telecommuting becomes more common there isn’t even a there, work is just something that is done wherever and whenever it is needed.  Sounds cool on paper, but for my money there is something inherently satisfying in seeing “something” completed.  Even if the something is not  physical, process based activities where satisfaction comes in knowing that during your shift your duties were completed in a way that won’t get you fired are not that fulfilling.

A way out of this conundrum seems to take the abstraction further.  If work is decoupled from the product, why not make an abstract product?  If new measurements are defined that allow for the creation of an abstract thing that lost connection could be recreated.  I’m sure this chills some readers, but I’m not talking about big brother type supervision and relentless goal setting, I’m talking about a new system that taps the psychology of wanting to complete a goal in a way that brings out worker’s talent rather than restricting it.  Peter Drucker talked about management practices that enhanced individual performance, allowing each person’s ability to contribute to the aggregate rather than simply turning one bolt as dictated by a ridged, central plan.  Apart from some divine rescue from a pill-wielding religious fanatic, this is the only way that I can see out of my particular cubicle.

I admit it, I’m an altruist.  I believe that deep down, everybody just wants to do the right thing and get along.  Of course everyone who is not me clearly understands that this is complete bullshit.  This doesn’t stop me from continuing to believe that the inner goody-goody in everybody’s soul is firmly at the helm.

This gets me into trouble alot.  For example, in conversation if someone makes a snide remark I don’t think, “Wow, what a jerk!” I think, “I’m sure they didn’t mean that, they must be just having a bad day.”  Seeing this in print makes me look like some kind of Ned Flanders.  I guess there are worse things than being the Dad that Bart never had.

But I digress.  This entry is not about loving people, it is about running them over with your car.  Seattleites are infamous for grousing about traffic.  It doesn’t help that the world’s largest software maker and 800 pound gorilla of employment is separated from a huge portion of its workforce by a relatively tiny floating bridge.  This fact plus ubiquitous hills, plus several other inconveniently located bodies of water , plus lack of east/west public transit makes for a potent cocktail with a mean rush-hour hangover.  So people spend a lot of time sitting in their cars going nowhere fast.

This will understandably make people cranky, but driving habits are not the best either.  Tailgating is a major issue but so are curiosity slowdowns.  As soon as the sun emerges from Seattle’s famous clouds, people stop to smell the flowers.  Or maybe just stare at the water, or sun, or whatever other shiny thing catches their eye that moment.  Passive aggressive driving is also the norm.  The Washington Driver’s Manual must have a section on how to drive slow until someone tries to pass, then speed up to block them, or how to move assertively into an intersection at a four way stop and then, stop as to let someone else go.

Another thrill is doing things that the cops won’t stop you for.  Running red lights is a favorite Seattle habit.  But so is moving aggressively at pedestrians.  As soon as the peds are in the cross-hairs of the average motorist’s hood, it is time to strike!  What will the ped do?  Stop the car?  Maybe with their face, but no worry to the steel encased driver.  Being the aforementioned sucker, ehem, altruist, I usually enter a crosswalk with the assumption that everyone will behave and I can move along in the benign manner to which I am accustomed.  The irrisistable situation presents itself however, where the motorist can be a tough guy with no worry of any retribution.  If they charge the crosswalk, cheap hoo-has can be had at no risk.  Score!  I don’t get it.  I guess the German word schadenfreuden says it all.  But hey, I’m Ned Flanders, and when you run me over in a crosswalk, you’ll know it’s me from the muffled “Hidely ho!” coming from under the floor.

The men’s room at the seattle public library sucks.  Now, the rest of the library is pretty amazing.  It is over 10 stories tall, made of glass and steel, and oddly shaped.  The floors are made of renewable, recycled materials and there is even a creepy mouth/eye thing that mutters words at you as you ride up the escalator.  I’m no architect but usually these types of things earn major kudos with the building-lover crowd.

The bathrooms however are terrible.  They are bright day-glow green which usually would be a plus, but given the ventilation is poor it is less Kool-Aid acid trip and more vomit at the bottom of a wastebasket.  People are always camped out in the stalls.  When I say camped out, I mean that they are occupying a stall with the intent to be in there awhile, but they also brought appropriate support gear for an extended stay.  Backpacks are the norm, sometimes equipped with sleeping rolls, shopping bags, snacks, portable tv, who knows what else, I’m too afraid to go in there and take inventory.

And that is the point.  It is not a fun place to be, and more so than other men’s rooms, no place to make new friends.  Usually though, as long as you are answering nature’s call from Number One, you can get your business done in an efficient manner and vacate pronto.  Today however, bad got worse.  Today I found that the eco-friendly hot air hand dryer is no longer working, and in line with the eco-friendliness of the rest of the building, there are no paper towels to serve as an axillary hand-wiping implement.  Swell.

Michael Jackson recently released a special 25th anniversary edition of his masterpiece “Thriller”.  The lasting legacy of that album is more than it’s over-the-top title music video where MJ revealed his desire to be more than human.  No, when wolfed-out Jacko cut a rug with zombies he didn’t re-animate human corpses, he was metaphorically bringing the dead sounds of disco back to listeners ears.  “Thriller” built a bridge between rock and dance music and the ghosts of disco have continued to haunt mainstream rock ever since.

It seems unlikely but Radiohead seems to have picked up where “Thriller” left off almost thirty years ago.  Through the crucible of New Wave, underground DJs, and dance clubs disco re-emerged in the eclectic pop beats of Yorke/Greenwood and company.  Other bands such as LCD Soundsystem, Justice, and Hot Chip have contributed their talents to the dance revival.

With Radiohead serving as the vanguard of maintream rock/dance fusion, Seattle venues which were once exclusively host to rock bands have followed suit by becoming home to regular dance events like Broken Disco.  This transition has been made all the more poignant by the gradual closing of the grunge clubs of the 90’s with a strong punctuation made by the shuttering of The Crocodile.  It seems that dance is the new rock.

In an effort to update the now aging icon of Ronald McDonald and appeal to the hip, media savvy Generation Y, McDonalds re-tooled the “Dollar Menuaire” campaign last year.  The refreshed campaign features Paul, a snarky educator of the youth who helps youngsters everywhere to stop worrying and learn to love McDonalds.  I think that McDonalds has really tapped into what young people are into, porn!  Closer examination of Paul shows that he bears an uncanny resemblance to everyone’s favorite horny hedgehog, Ron Jeremy.  See the pics below for a head to head comparison.