1250: Anger Leads to Suffering

I’ve been back on Twitter for a little while. I know I said I wouldn’t, but for professional reasons, it made sense to have it as a means of communication now I’m on USgamer — I’ve already managed to get in touch with a number of different devs and write stories thanks to that bloody service.

Twitter remains infuriating, however, because people still don’t quite seem to get that 140 characters is not a good amount of space in which to have a discussion. You can spill over into more and more tweets and rant on and on, but as soon as you start spamming like that, people switch off.

The other thing that Twitter encourages is kneejerk, usually furious responses. Sometimes these are justified; other times, all they do is damage the perception of the people who are trying to make otherwise coherent arguments.

By far the most consistently-occurring issues that come up in my Twitter feed are matters relating to any and all of sexism, feminism and transphobia in particular. As I’ve said on numerous occasions in the past, I support the causes that these people are trying to forward: women are just as awesome as men and should be treated as such; a person is a person, regardless of biological sex and/or gender, and shouldn’t be treated as a second-class citizen based on prejudice; most importantly, just don’t be a dick.

However, where the people campaigning for these things lose me is in their behaviour when it comes to advancing their causes. I do not and will not believe that the best way to enact change is to get really fucking angry at something, mock people who don’t subscribe to your exact viewpoint and then publicly shame people repeatedly until they clam up and don’t want to say anything. That shit is viral — if you behave that way, people will see the way you act towards others, and that in turn will make them not want to engage in discussions we should all feel confident and good about having. In trying to further a cause of equality and encouraging oppressed minorities to stand up for themselves, in other words, you’re actually silencing people in the process. It doesn’t matter whether those people you silence are the “privileged” — usually white men — because all you’re doing is… doing what you want people to stop doing. Do you see where the problem is, here?

Most recently, Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade attracted the ire of these particularly vocal people on Twitter by making some ill-advised and ill-informed comments about transgender people. This isn’t the first time he’s said something stupid, and it probably won’t be the last. I honestly believe he’s not saying these things from a position of genuine hatred; he’s just naturally a jerk towards a lot of people — and, as he notes in an apology on Penny Arcade, the first time these issues raised their heads he wasn’t even aware of many of them. To be fair to him for a moment here, I knew absolutely nothing about transgender people at all prior to this year, either; the subject simply hadn’t come up, so it’s not at all unreasonable to assume that he hadn’t come into contact with this particular group of people before and thus didn’t know the “appropriate” or “acceptable” ways in which to talk about them.

There’s a degree of common sense required here, of course, which Krahulik didn’t always display, particularly as the most recent incident was actually the second time he had run headlong into being perceived as “transphobic”, but for him to be immediately labelled a “bigot”, a “sexist” and outright insulted is, frankly, a little much. People don’t teach you these things. (Well, perhaps they do now; it’s a long time since I was at school and took a Humanities lesson.) And as such, when people are confronted with unfamiliar things, sometimes mistakes are made; things are said without thinking; sometimes offence is caused. The appropriate response to someone making a mistake is to point out that they made a mistake and then educate them so they don’t do it again in the future.

Key point: both the pointing out of the mistake and the education should be done in a calm, respectful manner that acknowledges ignorance isn’t the same as bigotry. If your first response to someone saying something that you believe is offensive is to start swearing at and insulting them, then of course they are going to get defensive and start flinging mud back at you rather than attempting to engage with you — particularly if they don’t understand what they did wrong in the first place, however silly that might seem to you as someone more well-informed.

It’s a natural response; look at how children respond to being yelled at as opposed to having positive behaviour reinforced, or calm explanations as to why the thing they were doing was inappropriate. These reflex behaviours continue well into adulthood for many of us; no-one likes to feel like they did wrong, so the more aggressively people shout and scream, the more the recipient of the ire will dig their heels in and just escalate the whole situation. In Krahulik’s case, this happened previously with the “rape culture/dickwolves” incident a while back — people yelled, he got defensive, discussion was shut down before it could begin — and again with this more recent incident.

There are a number of sad things about this whole situation. Krahulik could have had the opportunity to learn about part of culture he’s unfamiliar with, but the immediately aggressive response shut down any hope of rational discussion and education and caused him to get defensive. The aggressive response didn’t stop, either; it grew and grew into a seething ball of hatred, with people referring to him and his Penny Arcade partner Jerry Holkins (who had remained very quiet throughout this whole debacle — a sign which some saw as tacit approval of Krahulik’s actions) as “dicks” and other, far more spiteful terms. People started calling for boycotts of PAX. One indie developer even publicly pulled out of PAX’s indie showcase.

None of this had to happen, and it is not solely Krahulik’s fault that it did. He’s not blameless at all, no, but I place as much blame for the subsequent fallout squarely at the feet of the people who did the aggressive yelling, the swearing, the insults, the death threats as I do at the feet of Krahulik. This could have been an opportunity for everyone involved to grow; instead, it was just yet another sign that people like nothing more than a good fight rather than actually talking and educating one another. And I worry that serious damage has been done on all sides of this issue; there are no winners here.

The really sad thing, I think, is how much this sort of thing erects barriers between people. Every time I see something like this happening, I feel genuinely afraid to open my mouth for fear of saying something that will make everyone hate me; and that little nagging voice in the back of my head says “you’re not allowed to have an opinion on this; you’re a privileged white male”. I have seen how quickly people can turn on someone for one little thing that they said, and no-one will ever back down or attempt to understand or educate. It’s just shout, shout shout. It kills discussion. It kills education. And it achieves the absolute opposite of what many of these “social justice” types are supposedly fighting for; instead of promoting inclusivity and harmony, it sows discord and excludes people. We’re better than that.

So everyone, try a little harder to get along and understand one another, please.

#oneaday, Day 74: Don’t Be A Dick

Just watched Wil Wheaton‘s Awesome Hour on the PAX 09 DVD. This has made me sorry I missed his keynote speech at PAX East, as he’s a fantastic public speaker, an excellent storyteller and a genuinely funny guy. Modest, too, which is always nice to see.

It’s strange to think about these people that we got the chance to see or even meet at PAX being “celebrities” in the geeks’ world, but complete unknowns to everyone else. The thing is, I personally feel that Wheaton, along with Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade, are far more admirable human beings than many people who are constantly in the news. What is it about them?

Well, I know why they are admirable people: they’re not dicks. But why do they toil in obscurity? Because of their geeky interests? Perhaps. I say it’s a shame. But it’s probably for the best. Would these guys be the same people they are now if they were constantly in the spotlight? Who knows. Perhaps they would be. I’d like to think so. But it’s actually kind of nice to have figures to look up to that belong entirely to your own subculture.

Wheaton said some interesting things in his speech and Q&A session, particularly about self-publishing material that you’ve written yourself. It’s something that I’ve considered myself, actually. But, of course, I need to write something first. I have quite a few half-finished novels in a folder on my computer (in fact, that folder’s made the jump across at least four different hard drives now) and an abortive attempt at last year’s NaNoWriMo in the planning stages.

If there’s one thing that this One A Day experiment has proven, it’s that I certainly can churn out some writing each day. Some of it’s not great, of course – I’m writing this at the same time as watching the end of Wheaton’s spot on the PAX DVD, for example – but I certainly don’t have a problem churning out… stuff. So perhaps I should try and actually, you know, write something.

So tomorrow I’m going to try and start a novel. And try and finish it. Not tomorrow, obviously, but I’m going to make a good attempt to write a bit every day. I’m going to take the NaNoWriMo approach of doing a brain dump every day and edit it later. I have a few ideas floating around in my head and have done for some time. Some of them are compatible. Others are not. The difficult thing is coming up with a concept that’s not shit. Or coming up with a good concept and ruining it with a shit twist. If there’s anything that Douglas Coupland novels have taught me, its that you don’t have to have big, stupid, dramatic twists to make a decent story.

So let’s see where this goes. I’ll post regular updates on here. If you’re lucky, even extracts. Though I’m weird about people reading work-in-progress writing, so you’ll have to be very lucky. But it starts tomorrow. You’ll see. You’ll all see! Bwahahahaha! *jumps out of window*

#oneaday, Day 68: #PAX East, Day 1

Wow, what a rush! Day one of PAX East is already over and it’s been awesome so far.

Early part of the day was spent meeting, greeting and showering off our respective journeys. Chris “RocGaude” Whittington and I made it into the show just after Wil Wheaton’s keynote speech, which is a shame because the buzz on Twitter made it sound rather inspirational. Still, immediately after that was Gabe and Tycho’s Q&A session, which was seven degrees of pure-grade awesomeness. I’d never actually seen them in person before but their banter was hilarious and they have huge amounts of stage presence, wit and talent. I can see why they’ve become the huge successes they have.

Later, we tried to get in to a panel about the current state of storytelling in interactive fiction, hosted by, among others, Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin and Emily Short. Sadly we were just too late for that one, but we did manage to attend the first screening of GET LAMP, an extremely well put together documentary about the rise, fall and rise again of interactive fiction. The filmmaker had managed to interview a huge number of luminaries of the genre, including Don “Adventure” Woods and Steve “Infocom” Meretzky, both of whom were in attendance along with Plotkin and several others from IF’s past for a post-movie Q&A session.

We also spent a bit of time with the BitMob crowd at the puntastic “Pour House” where the beer was flowing freely and, by the sound of his tweets, Jeff Grubb is absolutely wasted. Holla. I won a T-shirt too. Awesomesauce!

Tomorrow should be a busy day. Hitting the show floor to scoop some stories for my new gigs at Kombo and Daily Joypad, then later am getting the chance to catch up with my brother. Hopefully, then, later in the evening, the Squadron of Shame will be recording something awesome from PAX to share with you all.

Anyway, it’s 1:15am EST right now and I should probably go to bed. Suffice to say that so far PAX is proving to be everything I hoped it would be. I wish there were more in the way of nerd superconventions like this in the UK. I had to cheer when Gabe and Tycho said their next aim for PAX is to do EuroPAX. That would be awesome.

Anyway. Good night!

Penny Arcade Live at the Hobbit

Photography in this post courtesy of Laura Bishop. If you’re reading on Facebook and you can’t see said pictures, click here to see the full article.

So I went out the other night. This is a pretty rare occurrence and worthy of discussion in and of itself but I’m not here to do that. Instead I’m going to be focusing on the gig I went to see – Penny Arcade, live at the Hobbit pub, Southampton, UK. I’m going to say now to all the gamers reading that this post has nothing whatsoever to do with Gabe and Tycho and the nomenclature of the band is a complete coincidence, apparently. Who am I to argue?

Live gigs here in Southampton are often a case of a million people crowding into a tiny pub that can seat about three old men and a dog around the fire, listening to ear-shatteringly loud music whilst downing drinks that look like they’ve been piped directly from the local toxic waste dump to the spigots, served frantically by an underpaid and overworked staff clearly insufficient in numbers to cope with the number of rabid, binge-drinking fans.

The Hobbit is, of course, no exception to this rule, with crowds regularly squeezing into its little downstairs bar (a little larger than the average living room) to listen to some tunes and destroy their brain-cells with the vibrant primary colours of the Lord of the Rings-themed cocktails. Actually, “themed” might be pushing things a bit far, as I don’t remember Gollum having a thing for Bols Blue, though many is the time that consumption of too many Gandalfs has led to a fall into darkness, albeit not accompanied by a big flamey demon thing. (Balrog. I know. Be quiet.) Despite all this, however, the Hobbit remains a popular nightspot with a lot of local acts of a variety of styles from the Southampton area performing there on a regular basis. Plus sometimes there’s a guy who comes around and sells fish. Really.

Penny Arcade, consisting of Alex Burton on guitar, Matt Rampton on vocals/bass and Tom Uplifter on drums, were performing as part of a complete evening’s set including other local performers Andy from Haunted Stereo, and Long Shore Drift. In total, they graced us with six songs, including Straight Through, I’m Not Sleeping, Are We Talking, Jaws of the Enemy, Katie and a work-in-progress song called “Rocket Ship” performed solo by vocalist Matt. Are We Talking and I’m Not Sleeping can both be heard on their MySpace page, if you’re reading this and are curious. You know you are.

Penny Arcade’s sound is a pleasingly smooth guitar-bass-drum combo which, when coupled with the distinctively melancholy sound of Matt’s vocals, is very listenable. The band keeps a deliberately lo-fi sound, with minimal guitar effects being used and repetitive, hypnotic guitar/bass riffs and beats making up the majority of the songs’ backings. Performing with a more “clean” sound and using minimal effects to hide behind can be a challenge for many bands as it often highlights the shortcomings of their own technical abilities, but Penny Arcade manage to perform very tightly together as an ensemble. Their songs have an intimate, personal feel to them, with Matt’s vocal performance style of eyes closed, mouth to the microphone and little in the way of body movement draws the audience in and encourages them to focus on what it is he is singing about throughout. This is a great style to perform in a venue as intimate/cramped (delete as applicable) as The Hobbit – arguably made rather more poignant by consuming just one too many Gandalfs to get one to that “drunken melancholia” stage.

Alex Burton on guitar (photo by Laura Bishop)

Penny Arcade’s style undoubtedly isn’t for everyone. They’re low on flashy glitz and overt showmanship, both in their unassuming physical performance styles and the sound of their music in general, but they’re all the better for it – to me, at least. All three performers look deep in concentration during their performance, which is in keeping with the “personal” feel to the songs, and the whole gig felt like the audience were being let in on some kind of secret. This is the kind of thing that I have a lot of time for, and it’s this kind of feel that keeps people coming to the Hobbit for gigs – however sticky the floor gets, however terrible those vibrantly-coloured cocktails may make you feel the next day, however many sweaty bodies you may be squeezing yourself up against (and not in a good way… usually) – it’s the intimacy of the venue and, by extension, the intimacy of the performances there that works so well. Penny Arcade fit right in, and I hope to see more of them in the future.

Matt Rampton on vocals and bass (photo by Laura Bishop)

As for the other bands? Well, to be honest, I couldn’t comment. Gandalf number three made me fall into darkness.