Japanese Nationalism

So the people at Microsoft have made themselves a bit of an enemy of Japan. It turns out that when you register for Xbox live on the 360 and try to register as being from Takashima, it doesn't recognize it as a part of Japan. (Which is impossible now anyway because as far as I know, there isn't much in the ways of Internet on the islet. Currently only a old couple from Korea stay there seasonally, the Kotaku article is a bit off on their facts.)

This is really interesting news being that I've also be recently accepted as a presenter at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting to talk about the islet dispute between Korea and Japan. One of the things that I wanted to talk about is how it's quite surprising how the younger generation are engaging in this controversy. For the most part, the Japanese avoid conflicts and debate to a irritating degree. Hardly anyone ever talks about politics or even keeps themselves tuned in on what's going on. (I remember one time the Vice Principle of the junior highschool I was working for was quite impressed on how much I knew about Japanese/US currency exchange rates. He thought only economist would worry about such things.) But from the flame wars on various message boards and such, it seems that people are quite fired up about this. This isn't something that the Neo-conservatives are pushing either, these are young 20 somethings in Japan that are usually apathetic to being a part of anything in their world. One of the things I'm interested about is why would this incite the Japanese so much? The news story report makes it seem as if it's some attack on the Japanese as a nation to make such a mistake.

Technology and Art

This is a well done documentary about blogging in Japan. I read only a few Japanese blogs, mostly of my previous students and friends. I would have to agree that there is definitely something distinctly Japanese about the way they blog. This is an example of the subtle differences between cultures can change they way technology is used. Technology and Culture are two parts that constantly influence the other, and for some reason often are pushed apart. As if there are moments in which Technology transcends Culture, or that Culture is an attack on faceless Technology. However, really what we see is that both have always been interrelated.

Take for example, the technology for making potable water. As more and more people lived closer together, there was a higher amount of cross contamination in diseases between different people. So every society had to have a means of having drinkable water. Most European based societies solved this problem by fermentation, producing wines and beers that were free of the major bacterial concerns. From that, an entire set of food productions, holidays, and customs were created around the use of wine and beer. In Asia, water was cleaned through boiling and adding tea. Likewise, entire philosophies, ceremonies, and rituals were based on the idea of tea making.

On the other side, music has greatly influenced the technology produced in which to enhance or expand the range of music ability. Beethoven's playing style broke many of the pianos of this day, and newer means of building pianos were created which influence the modern piano. Changes in how music is recorded follow changes in concept of art elitism, to mass art consumption. Music changed from something the leisure class enjoyed, to something for all to enjoy. So technology was created to aid in this ideal.

Violent video games and violence

You kind have to know about Firefly, specifically to the revelations about reavers in the movie Serenity to get the picture.

Recently, Fox Business had a story on the link between adulthood violence and violent video games. I usually scoff at anything Fox has to say, but further reading into the research shows more validity than I usually give such thoughts. But after reading a bit more on Dr. Bushman's website, I'm reconsidering my thoughts.



The research is quite sound. Most of it is comprised of 300 different studies, some by himself, some by others to create a long range study of video game activities and adult violence. In one study in particular was quite brilliant. Basically he took several school age children and had them play two types of video games coded as violent and non-violent. After 20 minutes of this, the child is then given a simple competitive task against a fictional child. The winner is then asked to punish the other child by giving them a blast of sound through a set of headphones. The sound is ranked from 1 through 10, and the child is told that anything above 8 would cause hearing damage. It turns out that the group that played violent video games were more likely to use a punishment above 8. A study like this is very costly and difficult, so I have a great deal of respect for it.

One of the major things that Dr. Bushman is concerned about is a generalized concept of why people behave violently. Many of this research studies break the traditional myths of violent behavior. One in particular that interests me is his theory on how violent people are not people with low self-esteem.

Narcissists, says Bushman, believe that they are entitled to admiration and respect and, when they don’t get it, they become aggressive. Bushman blames the self-esteem movement of the past 20 years for producing a generation of people who think the world has been turned upside down when they are not singled out for their “special-ness.”

“Because of the self-esteem movement, you have sports teams where everybody gets a trophy regardless of skill,” says Bushman. “There’s a school in Alabama where they had a mirror with a banner above it that said, ‘You are now looking at the most special person in the world.’ Children in elementary school fill out forms that begin, ‘I am special because …’ and they have ‘All about me’ weeks where they celebrate themselves. The problem is not low self-esteem.”

I find this interesting. (Mostly because it flips modern educational theory on it's head.) One of the things that I try to advocate on the video games controversy is to exert that video games is a medium. Like books, movies, music, theater, dance, and comic, they have no moral value or intellectual importance in it of itself. As the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray said, "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or poorly written. That is all." There are well created games like Final Fantasy VI, Dance Dance Revolution, and PacMan. These games challenged the mind to understand and practice routines outside of their normal world. There are also poorly constructed soulless million dollar corporate projects made merely to produce profit at the expense of the public. (I'd care not to name names here.) Consider this, when you see how things are marketed, are these attempts to communicate human interaction, or are they a selling you the promise of solving all the ills in your life?

Women love the Wii

Honestly, I didn't even need to add the text here. I'm not saying that girls don't play games. I'm saying is that this depiction of women playing games plays into the same thing as babes in beer commercials. There is nothing progressive going on here in terms of race or gender.

Ubisoft may sue me over this....

Once again something has gotten the internets in a stir, and Something Awful is in the middle of it. To bring you up to speed, Ubisoft has long been promoting Assassin's Creed with the clever use of Jade Raymond to draw the male gaze to their game. Frankly, you couldn't see anything about Assassin's Creed with out her out in front. It's rather unfair, because the game itself is quite a draw on it's own and they didn't really need to have her tarted around. Also Jade seems to be quite a decent person and doesn't deserve to be treated like eye candy to promote the game. The idea of female role models in the game developer world is good and all, but that wasn't the intention of Ubisoft. It was blatant pandering of a person's looks under the guise of women empowerment.

So on the Something Awful boards, a vulgar comic was made in parody of the way that Ubisoft have been using Jade's looks to sell the game. It was vulgar and insulting, but it's the internet, this sort of thing happens. So Ubisoft decides the best thing to do is to bring legal action against Ubisoft.

My question is who is at blame here? Is Something Awful to blame for being the host site? Is the comic artist to blame for making a comic? Or is Ubisoft to blame for treating their own employee like a piece of meat to sell their game. Sierra never treated Roberta Williams this way, makers of gender conscience games like Leisure Suit Larry.

This "gamer girl" phenomenon is strange. When Morgan Webb was the G4 "gamer girl" people automatically called her a fake. The very concept that women would like games challenged the hegemonic idea of the "true gamer". Surely, girls can't possibly like games, if they do, they only like tetris, or they're doing it only to impress their boyfriend. Somehow it was more believable for girls to like other girls than for them to play through Chrono Trigger or circle-strife. Once the public finally got used to the idea the there are girls that genuinely like playing games, they became a national treasure. If someone "found" a girl that liked playing games, it was like finding buried treasure. The industry was no different, soon things like the "pimping" women out to promote games was on the main stage and not just as a part of "booth babes" at seedy gaming conventions. Women were front and center and filled out the "stereotypical" male fantasies of that perfect gamer girl they want to meet. There is nothing "empowering" about having women paraded like this. It is in fact detracting from the long history involvement that women have always had in the gaming world. This is merely treating women like objects to be desired in a new and underhanded way.