All art is produced in a cultural context. As a creative person, your ideas don’t come to you from space aliens, they come to you from your own mind, which exists in a cultural frame. A modern white American fantasy novelist talking about how his black-skinned evil dudes are awesome is fundamentally different than a 7th century Tang poet talking about how his black skinned evil dudes are awesome (although not that different: China of that period had colorism, although it was more of a class thing than a race thing.)

That said, there’s nothing inherently wrong about introducing problematic material into your fiction. But good fiction is critical of the self. (likewise, bad fiction is uncritical of the self). Writing (which I’m using here as a sub for all creative arts) is more than being a transcriptionist to some alien idea entity. It’s an exercise in self-examination or a lack thereof, and it provokes in the reader self-examination or a lack thereof. Since the author and the reader both exists in cultural contexts, this extends into an examination of culture as a whole, or a lack of examination (reification) of culture as a whole.

None of what I’m talking about is, like, forced in any way. This is just something that all media does. All media drags in tropes from the society around it, and either uses them critically or uncritically. All media, when read or watched or listened to, brings tropes from the audience’s society to mind, and is critical or uncritical of them.

This isn’t all cut and dried, either. Something can be critical in some respects, uncritical in others. In fact, most media are.

But here’s the other part: Good fiction is humane. It may be cruel to the reader, but it ultimately seeks to make the reader a better person (even if that is simply “a more entertained person”) and to improve their lives. Cultural tropes are often quite negative and harmful to members of a society, and their presence in fiction (particularly in “light entertainment fiction,” where they are less expected) can be quite directly and immediately harmful to people in the society*. This is not something which I speak about in the abstract: I’ve suffered real immediate personal harm, in terms of social and economic rejection and also in terms of days lost to depression, from uncritical trope parroting regarding rape survivors, or Jews.

So if an author who is concerned with work being humane, with it benefiting his audience (including himself), it is a best practice to not uncritically repeat harmful cultural tropes. This doesn’t mean “don’t engage harmful cultural tropes” because that’s clearly BS. It means “maybe you shouldn’t engage them uncritically.” Be aware that this is a sharp, dangerous thing that you’re playing with, and you might cut yourself or others.

Just as a knife can be used to harm or heal, so can fiction, because it is that powerful, culturally, psychologically, and spiritually. If you’re handling a dangerous trope, the only concern is to make sure that the fiction around it is particularly good, with the best interests of yourself and your audience at heart.

This is not to say that fiction which uncritical parrots harmful tropes is necessarily wrong or should necessarily be dismissed. Some great works of literature fall into that category. It would be a tragedy to lose The Tempest, or Huckleberry Finn, or Lord of the Rings. I’m not advocating that, and if you don’t understand why I’m not, please do ask.

*It can also be damaging to the society as a whole.

1) Rape as an individual crime, with a perpetrator and a victim, including causes and effects. This is the baseline of experience, and when we talk honestly about rape to some extent we need to talk about this. In particular, I think that we don’t often talk about the motivations of perpetrators in any coherent sense. This is because the dialogue around rape is so culturally fucked that we feel a need to dehumanize both perpetrators and survivors: thus, talking about motivations and effects as things which are done by humans to other humans becomes very difficult. I’d like to talk more about this, upcoming.

2) Rape as a social institution. Rape isn’t an aberration: it happens in every human society throughout all of human history. It is fundamentally built into our social structure, and it forms an important part in both generating and enforcing social norms. If we’re going to take serious action to confront and reduce rape in our society, we’re going to have to address the ways it is part of our social structure. In contrast to “rape culture” we might call this “rape society.” I don’t think a lot of people talk about this, at least not in the corners of culture I frequent, so if anyone has any reading links please toss them out. I would like to eventually get to a point where I can analyze and discuss this level, but I’m not there yet.

3) Rape as a cultural concept. This is separate from the above, because it’s not about the actual practice of rape, but the idea of it and the use of the threat of rape to enforce and perpetuate social norms. A lot of anti-rape activism exists at this level: this is where the gender differences are most pronounced for instance (as a guy, for example, I have never been told that I shouldn’t walk home alone at night because I might be raped, but I have been told that if I break the law I will be punitively raped in prison.) This is where “rape culture” lives.

Of course, these things are actually so interconnected that placing them in three bullet points is misleading. Individual acts exist in a social and cultural context, the cultural context is not separate from the social hierarchy, and so on. But I think that confusion about the differences here leads to a lot of mistakes and mis-steps. When a feminist activist who is not a rape survivor tells me, a male rape survivor, that “I can’t understand rape,” she’s talking about the cultural level, where rape is strongly gendered and I will never have the female experience of it. (This is a charitable reading: she also might be a male rape denier or just ignorant and bigoted.) If I hear her as talking about the other levels, where I clearly have experience and understanding, I’m not going to take it well. So having this laid out will hopefully avoid some of those problems.

I want to talk about rape in this space, and the really fucked up way that our culture deals with it, so it behooves me to talk about my own experiences as a rape survivor. There are two reasons that it so behooves me: one good, and one bad.

The good one is that I want to talk about theories and structure of rape as a personal crime, a social institution, and a cultural concept, and thus in the interests of honesty I should be clear about my own experiences so that we can analyze and discuss how my own experiences have led to my ideas about rape, as well as biased my views about rape.

This is important, and I want to come back to this over the course this discussion, which I’m hoping will be ongoing. I’d really love to have an audience willing to go “ok, Ben, but you’re biased because of your experience in such-and-such a way” because, lord knows, I’m not going to see all my own bias.

The bad reason is that, because I am not the ideal rape survivor, I need to use my own experiences to justify my privilege to talk about rape at all. We have a cultural tendency to question, doubt, and undermine rape survivors who don’t fit our ideal (young but sexually mature, female, pretty, virginal, “broken” by the experience, depressed by not acting out violently, white, attacked with force by a stranger). I meet some of these, but not others, and thus I’m pretty consistently belittled and dismissed in discussions about rape. This has happened to me so consistently, and so many times, that I now feel like I have to prophylactically but my “talking about rape credentials” forward before I can even begin to discuss it.

To be clear, this is bullshit. Rape is a human problem, and a widespread one. Everyone, from every society and in every class of our society, has skin in the game about rape. Even if you are not a victim or a perpetrator, chances are very high that you know someone who is one or both. Even if, by some miracle of statistics, you don’t know anyone immediately affected by rape, you are no less deserving to talk about it, because you have likely been threatened with rape. The threat of rape is used widely throughout our society as a means of enforcing gender, racial, and social norms, and I find it hard to imagine someone living today who has not experienced threats of rape to “keep them in line” somehow.

I want to use this space, in the future, to talk about this. But first I want to make sure it’s okay to talk about. First let me show you my credentials, and yours. This is a place where everyone gets the right to talk about rape, the right to be right or wrong about it.

Thus I’m going to make the inaugural post a video game critique. Because that totally makes sense.

This is a critique, not a review. Know the difference.

I recently got Limbo as a Christmas present from a friend of mine. I was pretty excited to get the game, because it’s part of a lineage of new 2d platformers which, by and large, I think are really good. Others in this lineage include VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy, Redder and The Mighty Jill Off. I’ve really enjoyed most of these games; I had every reason to believe that I was really going to enjoy Limbo.

Unfortunately Limbo fails pretty much every level: aesthetic, thematic, game structural, and so on. These failures are all inter-related, but I’m going to talk about them separately for a while and then tie it together at the end.

Limbo’s first levels — about the first half of the game in terms of content, and probably more like the first third in terms of playtime — are gorgeous. The world is rendered entirely in black, white, and gray. There is a real sense of the protagonist’s loneliness and isolation, the images are beautiful, and the game’s first antagonist, a giant spider, is both naturalistic and terrifying. The structures and environments give a wonderful sense of place and being to the game’s world.

There are certainly mis-steps in this sequence: the spider’s eventual demise is weirdly comic and tone-breaking, the cocoon sequence is incredibly boring even if it is pretty, and the lush geography often has the effect of confusing actual interface elements with background. Ultimately, I was willing to attribute most of these to a designer’s desire to put beauty before gameplay, which is not necessarily the right decision for a video game, but at least it is a decision.

However, the second, much longer part of the game is completely bereft of aesthetic value or a sense of place. Midway through the game, the protagonist collapses into a factory, where he will spend the rest of the game in a boring video-game rehash of gears, switches, and sliding blocks. One could make an argument that this is a aesthetic decision: that the game brings the protagonist from a primeval forest into a technological hellscape. But this is not actually the case: the second half of the game is simply an aesthetic mess. Infrequently throughout this place, one might encounter a naturalistic element such as a tree, hill, or clump of grass as if the designers were thinking “oh, right, this game was supposed to have some pretty stuff in it.” These have no structure or reason to them, though, at least not one that was understandable by me.

To establish a theme that we will revisit throughout this essay: the aesthetic design of Limbo strikes me very much as a group of creators who had a lot of interesting ideas, and then no idea what to do with them. Confused, the ended up substituting video game clichés as if that would resolve or dismiss their difficulties in carrying out basic aesthetic decisions. This is a shame, because the initial aesthetics for the game are, in fact, breathtaking.

Limbo’s game structural failures are somewhat more complex. The game is simply not well designed: the protagonist moves in a stilted, loping manner that adds frustration and difficulty without adding challenge or interest. It may be that I’m spoiled by the enormous precision allowed to me by Super Meat Boy, but I’m not averse to games that use control imprecision to add difficulty: VVVVVV is a favorite. It’s just that, in Limbo, the difficulty is primarily in spacing the protagonist to make a jump without having him accidentally fall of a cliff: it’s not that interesting, just arbitrarily punitive.

Likewise, in the early game, game elements are often obscured by the game’s visuals. This is less of a problem later in the game, after the game eschews any visual complexity but, ironically, the visuals in the later sections are much clearer and less easily confused with landscape anyway.

Perhaps one of the most characteristic moments of the game is the first “boss fight” with a spider. Before you encounter the spider, you see a beartrap (something you’ve run into before) up in a tree. There is no way to access this. Moving on, you encounter a large spider, which attacks you by trying to spear you with its legs. I immediately thought: “oh, I should go get that bear trap and catch the spider in it.” But, no, the bear trap is still in the tree, no way to get it out.

The game’s solution for this is that, once you’ve dodged the spider an arbitrary number of times, the trap falls out of the tree. But this is not apparent: you must backtrack to find it. So, essentially, the player is punished for solving the puzzle too quickly, and is also punished in such a way that they’re likely to regard the correct solution (use the trap) as clearly incorrect, since there’s no obvious way to do it.

This is a failure of design on par with the “click the right pixel” puzzles in early adventure games. It’s simply asking the player to read the designer’s mind: no more, no less. It’s not only frustrating, but also completely disengaging from the game.

This is not limited to this encounter: examples of this come throughout the game. A particular one that I can think of is a passage where, in the first instance, stepping on the button causes a smashing block to kill you and, in the second, not stepping on the button causes a smashing block to kill you. There’s nothing interesting or exciting here: Limbo lies to you, then calls you a sucker for believing in it. The hope, presumably, is that you will go “oh Limbo, you’re so cool, you’re just smarter than me” but it comes off more as a playground bully than anything worth your time.

Which leads into another point: despite being a platformer game, which theoretically are quite simple, Limbo never really develops a functional vocabulary for its puzzles. We eventually get a sense that “box” is probably a good noun, but the verbs remain completely mysterious: What does this switch do? Oh, it causes boxes to fall up for a few seconds? Ok. Oh, this switch makes the lights go on. This one makes water flow. Each puzzle basically requires developing your vocabulary completely anew. In principle, this is not necessarily a bad plan, but Limbo doesn’t pull it off successfully: the game is not good at teaching you how things work, so you stumble through each puzzle not really quite sure of how you solved it, and then next one you then are working from the ground up. Contrast with, say, VVVVVV which gives you two verbs (move and switch gravity) and then uses them consistently and well throughout the entire game.

Limbo’s thematic failures are somewhat more difficult to address, simply because video games don’t yet have a strong language for theme. Limbo introduces a lot of things that could be themes: primeval forest vs technology, the dream of rescuing your sister vs the reality, you with the glowing eyes versus the dead eyed people who are opposing you. Each of these themes is introduced and then fails to develop into anything interesting. Your dead eyed antagonists leave the narrative aprubtly halfway through, never to return. You once hallucinate seeing your sister, but then that’s that. The game doesn’t play strong on the nature or not theme. Just as the game contains many interesting puzzle ideas, but fails to develop a vocabulary of puzzle design, the game contains many interesting thematic ideas, but fails to develop a thematic vocabulary. Even at the end of the game, the designers (when they bother to address aesthetics or theme at all) are throwing out new thematic ideas (you’re … getting smaller, apparently?) rather than developing or addressing any of their previous ones. Ultimately, this makes the game feel incoherent and rushed, when it should feel compelling and mysterious.

“Rushed” is actually a good adjective to describe Limbo. It reminds me of nothing more than a student project, full of good ideas, but very weak and development and with the second half filled in with clichés and mush as the deadline approached. The game was made possible in part by a cultural grant, and perhaps it was actually rushed out the door. This is a shame, because the first half of Limbo (for all its game design failures) is profoundly interesting, and could probably have been a good game given the effort, time, and interest on behalf of the designers.

This brings me to a final point. Video games are right now in the state that movies were in the 40s or so: desperately seeking artistic legitimacy. While we do this, we must be careful not to be suckered in by pretty faces like Limbo. Simply because a game has artistic ambitions does not make it valuable, interesting, or worthwhile. To be functional and effective art, it must both have artistic ambitions and actually fulfill them. Limbo succeeds in the first, easier part, but fails in the harder second part, and thus cannot be seen as anything but a failure.

For a game which is, in many ways, similar to Limbo but succeeds in terms of establishing both ludic and thematic vocabularies, I recommend you check out the short but excellent Loved.

Wrongness is, I think, undervalued a lot culturally, particularly in the internet culture, particularly on the blogging world, which is to say the world of argumentative individualistic writing. In this world, the goal of any particular argument, interaction, etc, is to be the one who’s right, and “winning” that rightness comes at all costs.

This is sad to me. This is sad to me because the personal value I get out of reading argumentative, individualistic writing is pretty much at a disjoint from its truth value. If all I ever wanted to read was correct things, I could easily go for the low hanging fruit of reading about, say, basic mathematics or formalistic logic. But I don’t. I seek out writing about politics, gender, race, culture, society, art, game design, linguistics, science, and so on, places where wrongness isn’t just likely, it’s basically assured. Why is this?

Well, clearly, it’s because I get some value from wrong arguments. In particular, personally, I would rather read an argument which is wrong, but makes me re-evaluate my life and world view, than an argument that is correct, but mostly reconfirms my existing prejudices. I had a recent talk with a room-mate about this, with respect to Andrea Dworkin (link to an excellent interview by Michael Moorcock), whose writing I really adore. Dworkin was wrong about a lot of stuff, including some of the critical issues of her day. But she was wrong in a way that leads a reader to re-assessing their relationship to sex, gender, society and self. I don’t agree with Dworkin’s conclusions (sometimes) but I’m a better person for having read her writing. This is clearly a superior experience, as a reader, than — for instance — wikipedia’s article about adhesive tape, which is more factually correct.

In this space, I’d like to pursue the kind of writing that makes people re-evaluate their own lives and their own relationships and thoughts, whether that is right or wrong in terms of trivial content. In this regard, I’d really like to have a space where being wrong doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person, and it doesn’t even necessarily mean that you have the worse of the argument. It means, simply, that you are wrong, and no further.

This is the ideal. I don’t even know how to start to approach it yet, and I imagine that this is going to be a work in process. Anyone reading: I would welcome your thoughts.

An argument can be wrong in one or more of the following four ways.

First, and most trivially, it can be wrong grammatically. An argument that does not have basic grammar (since I’m a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist I mean “can be parsed by a native speaker.”) In that case, the rest of the argument doesn’t really matter: it’s not parseable to a native speaker, so it’s just wrong in a purely functional sense. This sort of wrongness generally isn’t worth commenting on.

The next three modes of wrongness are actually independent from each other.

Second, an argument can base itself on the wrong assumptions. For instance, if you are making an argument for increased defense spending, and you start with the assumption that the US spends less on its military than any of its neighbors, you would be wrong in your bases and assumptions.

Third, you can be wrong in your argumentation. This means that, even if we take your basic assumptions as fact, you pursue a spurious argumentation about them, where you assume that those facts imply things that they in fact do not imply. Often the argumentation will be quite muddled. If we are being generous with the author, we can say that this is because their thinking was muddled. Another possibility is that the author is intentionally attempting to befuddle the reader. An example of this kind of wrongness is “English has 10 different words for snow and thus it is suited to people in cold and snowy climates.” The “and thus” simply does not follow, regardless of how many words English has for snow or whether or not it’s suited for cold and snowy climates.

Fourth, your conclusions can be wrong. This is relatively trivial: at the end of your argument, the point you are trying to make is, in fact, incorrect.

Something which I find particularly fascinating is that these three kinds of wrongness are often at a disjoint from each other. For instance, it is perfectly possible to have the correct bases, correct form of argumentation, and draw totally incorrect conclusions* (often such writing is really rewarding to read: I call it “wrong but thought provoking.) Also, you might reach a correct conclusion from from incorrect bases and incorrect argumentation: this is often the case when the author knows what the right answer is, but isn’t sure how to get there or from where. All sorts of other crazy mixes are possible as well.

One important thing is that a lot of these, particularly those that are correct in some aspect, can still be important learning experiences for the reader, especially if we notice and note when things are wrong. Wrong writing is not without value, as long as we don’t fall into the relativist trap of “anything could wrong or right so it doesn’t matter.”

* In a formalistic logic sense, this isn’t possible, but there are so many examples in the real world that it’s worth mentioning.

More content soon.