(Rocksteady / Warner, 2009)

Arkham Asylum, a four-year old superhero game, takes place in what is nominally an open world but actually an excuse to constantly backtrack through the same environments in linear missions. There’s lots of items to collect, upgrades to buy, challenges in single- and multi-player flavours and character biographies to read to get you up to speed with Batman continuity. You’ll have to forgive me for stifling a yawn, I’m just so incredibly worldly and jaded. I don’t really want to be playing a perfectly serviceable big-budget videogame from 2009, I’d rather be crossing the Kalahari desert on a sailboat with wheels, accompanied by Zooey Deschanel on piano and Prince on the banjo. I’m just too cool and interesting for this game.

The part I’m especially too cool for is not the stealth bit, in which you must incapacitate armed guards one at a time without being seen. Neither is it the side-scrolling platform segments set in Bruce Wayne’s subconscious. I am not He Who Is Too Cool To Play A Side-Scrolling Platform Game, that person is to come after me and I am not fit to wash the socks in his sandals. No, the troublesome ingredient is the unsophisticated, Golden Axe-esque button mashing beat-em-up part. The sprite of a burly white plutocrat so rich he has a spare Batcave pirouettes about the screen, smashing his fist into the skulls of undereducated, economically disadvantaged mentally ill people who are disproportionately likely to be members of ethnic minorities. The animation is lavish, at the cost of the game practically playing itself during these sequences, giving you plenty of time to wonder at the horrible irony that is the popularity of Batman as a character. This guy spends a fortune on Kevlar bodysuits, souped up cars and all the rest of the paraphernalia necessary for the fulfilment of his juvenile fantasy of beating people up, while his home city sinks further into the spiral of poverty, crime, drug abuse and incarceration. Look at him, standing on a building trying to look cool as his trademark is projected onto the sky.

cock

Batman is not like other super heroes. His position in Western culture is so assured he doesn’t even need an origin story. Spiderman was bitten by a radioactive spider; Superman comes from another planet and the Hulk got the way he is from standing too close to an atom bomb when it went off. Batman draws his super powers from the class system. In every incarnation in every medium, Batman beats seven shades of shit out of the poor because it is what we expect him to do. Because it is what we would do.

The Batman that we used to know and love was a figure of light entertainment, rescuing local councillers from muggers on the streets of Peckham with his sidekick Rodney. Nowadays, of course, he’s all poorly lit and growly. I reflexively find the concept of a dark, gritty Batman too offputting to have ever bothered reading any of the relevant comics, but it is my understanding that the more influential ones were written by alleged racist misogynist homophobic wizard-bothering gun-nut Frank Miller, who remains desperately popular with the same comic fans who have latterly been organising a letter-writing campaign against the comparatively moderate and personable Orson Scott Card. (I come here not to praise Card, also a homophobe, but merely to point out that there are no reports of him losing a PA over a faeces-smearing incident.)

The other interesting thing about a character who’s basically Patrick Bateman in a pair of comedy ears is – and this is by no means an original observation – just how extraordinarily gay he is. (Batman, not Miller). Here we have a man who lives alone with only his butler for company, except when he’s house-sharing with a young “ward”. He prowls the streets under a false identity at night looking for his natural arch-enemy, the very incarnation of open deviance.

The Joker is Batman’s dark mirror, the person he could be, if only he gave in to his innermost desires. Here, as played by Mark Hamill, he’s pitched perfectly. The macabre delight with which he taunts his own thugs as Batman takes them out one by one in the Human Revolution-esque stealth sequences is a gift that keeps on giving. Regrettably, his inevitable bulking up for the finale strikes a bum note.

Did I bring up the Human Revolution comparison already? This game, which predates it, refuses to be eclipsed in the crappiness of its boss fights. One day I’m going to write a blog post about why boss fights are and always have been a grotesque blight on game design, with examples including, but not limited to, R-Type, Rainbow Islands (which might not be the first game many would pick as an example of horrible bosses; those people wouldn’t have had hours of work undone on multiple occasions by the appearance of a vampire who spits out other, smaller, vampires), Joseph Campbell and Shadow Of The Sodding Colossus. That blog post will go viral and have Comment Is Free, the New Statesman and the Huffington Post banging on my door. Today is not that day, but suffice it to say that the ones in Arkham Asylum are about the usual standard. There’s Bane, who is apparently some sort of Mexican wrestler guy. There’s Poison Ivy, the plant-related villianess who carries out plant-related crimes and sits, with crushing inevitability, in a big killer plant. There are a number of other big lads, each of whom insists on halting the narrative until you beat the crap out of them. None are remotely interesting.

One day, Count Fangs, I will return. And I will kill you.

Would it be quite fair to describe Arkham Asylum as a distillation of everything that’s wrong with this dying console generation? Well, no, because I’ve been playing the PC version, and there’s a splendid fourth-wall breaking moment about two thirds of the way through that wouldn’t have worked as well on console, assuming it remains unchanged. It relates to Scarecrow, a super-villian of the insane genius persuasion, who demonstrates the fact that he’s more concerned about being evil than he is about being able to scratch his nose by having syringes strapped to each of his fingers. His schtick is to inject our hero with psychoactive drugs that are actually capable of breaking the fourth wall, by making you think your graphics card is overheating and the game has crashed. But it’s OK. Batman fixes your computer, then you help repair Batman’s fragile psyche. Making Batman apparently the first person to be able to resist Scarecrow’s drugs. “What are you?” asks Scarecrow, in horror. He suspects, you see, that Batman’s indestructability comes from the fact he’s a character in a game.

He’s wrong. Batman is more than that. He’s already left the pages of the comics and become part of our everyday lives. The reason he doesn’t need an origin story is because he’s already emblematic of the contemporary relationship between criminal and victim, plutocrat and plebeian. That’s why he’s open to such varying degrees of light and shade in his portrayals, and so tormented. He’s the hero we deserve, and the one we absolutely don’t need right now.

(Terry Cavanagh, 2012, iPhone)

People, by which I mean influential people, with blogs and readers and Steam friends (as opposed to the boring, everyday, standard sort of people that you might see on a bus, who might own a touchscreen smartphone but statistically are more likely to use it for sending each other photos of their sexual organs than for playing hexagon-themed arcade games) have described Super Hexagon as “Zen”. That’s a word with multiple meanings, all of them useless in Scrabble due to its pesky capitalisation, and yet it is undeniably a bit like an interactive version of one of those carefully raked Japanese rock gardens, if you’ve ever stumbled through a rock garden drunk while the rocks spin around you, your clumsy swerving in effort to avoid a fatal collision being further hindered by the way your vision zooms in and out in time to the techno that pumps through your recommended headphones. Perhaps “wabi-sabi” would be a more appropriate description.

What I’m trying to say is, is, you’re only really going to finish Super Hexagon on its hardest difficulty setting (like I did yesterday) if you have the supreme mental detachment required to achieve absolute buddahood for at least sixty seconds, which when you’re at One with the universe, turns out to be an infinite amount of time. It might get even more interesting after that, but the realisation that you’ve actually beaten the damn thing after five months of struggle has the effect of painfully returning your spirit to the earthly plane, resulting in a feeling of disorientation and anticlimax that’s significantly removed from the normal sense of accomplishment one gets from conquering a tricky challenge.

This sense is not helped by the high score table, which once you go and check it turns out to have been conquered by either hackers or pan-galactic beings who exist outside time and have thus managed to keep playing for 4.8 billion years on the easiest difficulty level (blowing creator Terry Cavanagh’s early advantage out of the water in the process.)

Anyway, the game works because it’s about the mastery of a simple and entirely fair system. If you mess up, and you will mess up on such a frequent basis that you will begin to doubt your own motor control, there is literally nobody else to blame. You just didn’t press the right direction in time. Given sufficient manual dexterity, best attained with several months of practice, any possible combination of shapes can be navigated through. In that respect, it’s fairer than Tetris, Asteroids or any other pure arcade game I can think of off the top of my head, although those all take more than sixty seconds to finish.

And that’s all I have to say about Super Hexagon.

[With apologies to finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com.]

Lizardarchy: one of the most misunderstood critical-theory concepts ever, often wilfully misunderstood. Lizardarchy is one form of social stratification via a power/dominance hierarchy – an ancient and ongoing social system based on traditions of elitism (a ranking of inferiorities) and its privileges. Societies can be (and usually are) lizardarchal, oligarchal and plutocratic all at the same time, complicated by current and/or legacy features of sectarianism, imperialism and colonialism, so the species hierarchy is only one source of social disparity. Because of the limited capacity of the word “lizardarchy” to describe the full operation of intersecting oppressions, some now prefer to use the word “kyriarchy” (“a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression”) instead, but it is not yet in common use.

A complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.

Historically, lizardarchy operates through the disproportionate (sometimes exclusive) conferring of leadership status (and formal titles indicating that status) on lizards, a tradition characterised by casting all humans as naturally unsuited to lead lizards, no matter what talents and expertise they might possess.

Some societies are more lizardarchal than others, but lizardarchal social traditions are universal in human/lizard societies, taking the physical strength disparity between the species as signs of a general human inferiority, a “natural order” that indicates humans are meant to be subordinate.

Not all lizards are Lizardarchs. A Lizardarch is a lizard who has special power and influence over not just his/her family but also in society, due to privileges gathered through intersections of age, wealth, achievement, lineage, patronage and the exploitation of others as these attributes add to his/her place in the elite social hierarchy.

Non-elite lizards do not generally actively conspire with Lizardarchs (although they may aspire to become one): the lizardarchal pattern however means that subordinate lizards are ranked above subordinate humans in the traditional socioeconomic hierarchy from which Lizardarchs skim the cream, meaning that lizards (as a group) benefit more from the injustices of Lizardarchy than humans do (as a group).

Even in modern-rule-of-law countries with full legal species equality, there are still many lizardarchal remnants in the way that lizards (as a group) seek to discourage humans (as a group) from social independence and independent financial security. These remnant lizardarchal traditions do more harm to humans, on balance, than good.

The continuing subjugation and abuse of humans in more traditional societies, along with the continued inequity even in rule-of-law societies, is why mammalism seeks to dismantle lizardarchy. Which is why some of those who are privileged under Lizardarchy are so antagonistic towards mammalism:

“Mammalism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages humans to leave their lizards, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
Pat Robertson, multi-millionaire televangelist, lizard and former presidential candidate, 1992

“It seems to many of us that the people you mention are actually anti-mammalists in mammalist clothing. essentially they say they care about equality in the workplace, and that we’ve already gotten there; and that all the other stuff is not important because the species-differences there are meant to be. Frequently they dismiss mammalist concerns about taxonomic harassment, about humans being forced out of their careers and back into the home, or about date-rape by lizards, saying that these things are not about equality and are oppressive to LIZARDS.”

If you shut up truth, and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
Émile Zola

“I thought I saw something… A guy in a coat.”
NSF Terrorist

New York City, Battery Park

It’s the kind of conflict that both sides deserve to lose. The racist, anti-semitic US militias of the NSF have stolen a cannister of the rare Ambrosia vaccine that the evil, repressive One World Government was planning to distribute to VIPs and their families. UNATCO agents JC Denton and Anna Navarre have been dispatched to get it back. The militias are holed up in the Castle Clinton fortification in Battery Park, the former tourist destination repurposed in the world of Deus Ex as the site of a shanty town. As with Fort Wood / the Statue of Liberty, the NSF are consciously appropriating sites associated with the defence of the United States from foreign invaders, and with the War of 1812 in particular.

Deus Ex’s version of Battery Park is a miniature open area, a taster for the broader urban regions that will become the norm later in the game. It contains two missions, to be played in sequence.

There are two ways into Castle Clinton. Anna Navarre has an army of blue helmets ready to storm the front door of the building, and you could join them. It’ll give you a nice easy route to the Ambrosia cannister, paved with bodies. Alternatively, a small child on the dock will show you the location of the back entrance if bribed with food. I go in the back way. I always go in the back way. It’s a tense stealth mission through a small but well-defended location that’s bristling with security cameras and turrets. Some of the guards are armed with flamethrowers, always the sensible choice when defending a confined space with metal flooring.

I slip through like an invisible badass. The cannister is retrieved, to the amusing discomfort of Anna who is forced to postpone her full-frontal assault. Next, I’m tasked with rescuing some hostages from a heavily barricaded subway station.

In one of the game’s more bizarre moments, the shanty town that has grown up around the subway entrance is occupied by unarmed NSF militiamen. If you draw attention to yourself they run panicking out of their huts and are promptly chased and murdered by knifewielding UNATCO troops. If you’re not disturbed by this scene, imagine if it happened in Far Cry 2.

“Got everything you need for this assault on a compound of armed extremists, Johnson?”

There’s actually a very strict time limit operating throughout this level. The soldiers are waiting behind concrete barricades at the front entrances to Castle Clinton and the shanty town, and will only attack if you keep them waiting too long.

My initial bright idea of hiding in the ventilation ducts and shooting a box of TNT as a terrorist walked past it resulted in the single-shot massacre of every living thing on the platform. A lesser game would force you to replay the mission. Here, your handler Alex Jacobson expresses his moral outrage at your murderous behaviour and the game plays on. Still, I know I can do better than that. Let’s reload and try again.

This section is more limited than the two scenarios we’ve encountered in the game so far, since the disposition of the forces in the underground station simply does not permit the classic Bruce Willis stealth technique of knocking the men out one at a time and hiding their bodies in ventilation ducts. It is possible to ghost through and simply catch the tube train without being seen (it’s never explained why the hostages don’t simply get on the train) although when JC arrives at the next station he gets told off for leaving the siege for Anna to turn into a bloodbath. An open assault is possible, but hardly in the spirit of Deus Ex. I preferred the option of going down through the ventilation ducts and sniping at the NSF with tranquillizer darts, with the always-hilarious result that they run around angry and confused for a few seconds before falling over.

Weirdly, some of the guys have flamethrowers again. Filling an underground train station with volatile explosives and then letting off flamethrowers is precisely the sort of behaviour that makes people think the average terrorist is a blithering idiot.

Still, the NSF have been wholly incapable of even the most basic resistance against the state so far. Their Castle Clinton base is woefully ill-equiped to stand up to an assault from three men and a Cyberwoman, and even when they see the troops massing outside the door they prefer to patrol pre-set routes around their headquarters rather than, say, guarding the entrances. They appear to be unaware of the psychological deterrent to invasion provided by the presence of an armed man whose job is to watch for intruders with the intention of shooting them in the head.

To their credit, their colleagues at the subway station have prepared themselves for just such a possibility and have made sure the entrance is properly guarded (we must be charitable and assume that the station’s man-size ventilation ducts are merely an artistic representation of something only a hyper-perceptive superagent powered by nanotechnology would think of trying to squeeze into). But they’re holding hostages on the platform of an open subway station. There’s literally nothing to stop the hostages deciding to get on a train and leave, or to stop a trainload of UNATCO troops from Hell’s Kitchen arriving on the platform and starting a gunfight.

Clearly the NSF are desperate. Presumably the Ambrosia cannister has just arrived at the Castle Clinton base via the harbour, and they can’t remove it the same way because of patrolling police boats. (UNATCO don’t appear to have any boats of their own, which for an organisation headquartered on an island must be counted as an oversight.) Once it reaches the subway it can disappear into the city and be distributed before the authorities have any chance of tracking it down again. Hence the NSF occupation of the shanty town and subway station. But now that UNATCO have occupied the park, how do the NSF get the Ambrosia to the subway?

Luckily for them, they have a small child in Castle Clinton, who apparently got caught up in the siege. He ‘ll do anything for a chocolate bar, and he probably shares JC Denton’s uncommon talent for hiding in ducts. All they need to do is send him on the train to Hell’s Kitchen with the Ambrosia. If the container is too big for him to carry, just take the stuff out and put it in jam jars. Problem solved.

But they don’t think of it that way. Probably because, like most real-world terrorists, the NSF are idiots. Although not sufficiently idiotic that you don’t feel clever when you outwit them.

I’d heard this expression a few times on the internet, and I didn’t really know what it meant. At first I thought it was some online equivalent of some irritating person trying to put you off speaking by humming in monotone in such a way that you can only just hear it, because that would be really annoying and distracting. I’m definitely against that.

But that didn’t seem right in context. Very often it would be unreasonable person A making a point, and reasonable person B saying something reasonable, and A saying “you’re tone trolling,” and as a casual reader one might say to oneself “it is interesting that you should be the one to make such an allegation, because trolling is unreasonable behaviour, and therefore one naturally tends to associate it with unreasonable people.”

(In referring to reasonable and unreasonable people I’m conscious of the risk of running into an ad hominem fallacy, but I think it’s fair, or at least convenient, to describe someone who happens to be behaving reasonably as “reasonable” and someone who happens to be behaving unreasonably as “unreasonable.”)

Of course the error is with B, because winning an argument with someone who’s being unreasonable is impossible by definition. The only way an argument can conclude to anyone’s satisfaction is if there’s tacit agreement by both sides to the use of reason, as I have patiently explained to my wife on a number of occasions without ever persuading her to her satisfaction.

Anyway, I wanted to make sense of “tone troll”, so I googled it. The number one hit (which I decline to link to because it crashed my browser) was unhelpful, but there was a better one from Urban Dictionary:

A tone troll is an internet troll that will effectively disrupt an internet discussion, because they feel that some of the participants are being too harsh, condescending, or use foul language. They often complain loudly and target specific subjects, even though they may actually agree with their subjects’s [sic] point of view.

Which is probably annoying, but in no way does it amount to trolling. It’s hard to imagine how it’s possible to do anything “loudly” in the medium of text, unless it means they use ALLCAPS, and if “targeting specific subjects” in the course of debate is trolling then we should all turn out computers off and go out and get some daylight and exercise. And it’s irrelevant whether trolls agree with you or not. Because they are trolls.

The skill of rhetoric, after all, does not merely consist of identifying logical points in support of an argument. It also includes phrasing them in the most effective way possible in order to persuade. If one chooses a particular manner of phrasing for one’s point of view, that manner is on the table as a legitimate topic of argument. If someone uses thuggish rhetoric, and I criticise them for being thuggish, I’m not being a troll, I’m reacting to thuggery by expressing my distaste for it.

To pick an example at random, it’s not trolling to criticise Muslims Against Crusades for picketing remembrance ceremonies and burning poppies without addressing the validity of the argument that the memorialisation of dead soldiers has been co-opted by Western governments to boost public support for further military campaigns.

Would you say this is inappropriate? You’re a tone troll.

That said, criticism of your opponents manner is not usually an effective way to win an argument, and it’s true that it can distract from more serious issues. Angry people very often have good reasons to be angry. But it’s distressingly common to see people use rhetoric which contradicts their stated positions. (Stop being so bigoted, you retard!) and it’s easy to see how angry people could fall into errors that clearer heads would easily avoid. (I’m not fucking angry!)

The generally accepted (I think) definition of a troll is summed up pretty well by Wikipedia, which doesn’t seem to have heard of the epithet “tone troll”:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

(I don’t entirely agree with this definition, by the way. “Slang” denotes an informal or non-standard expression or one used by a restricted group, and surely everyone must know what a “troll” is by now.)

Urban Dictionary, meanwhile, indicates a specific blog where “tone trolls often emerge in the comments section” (link above). A quick check confirms that that’s certainly where allegations of “tone trolling” seem to emerge. (COMMENTERS: If you accuse someone of “tone trolling” and they deny it, why not go double or quits and accuse them of “derailing“?) And by a curious coincidence, many of the links that turn up in Google searches for “tone troll” and “tone trolling” are connected to the very same blog, which makes me wonder if it’s really a thing at all, or just a hoax, perpetrated by a small number of authors and commenters, that has somehow caught on.