Monthly Archives: October 2015

You got a new weapon

Posted by Jason on

Leveling up is the worst mechanic in video games. Naturally, it’s also one of the most popular. From a design perspective, it’s useless at best and counterproductive at worst. From an aesthetic perspective, it’s actively evil.

Let’s start by clarifying what it is we’re talking about. Leveling up is about advancement through your in-game capabilities increasing, as opposed to your abilities as a player. There’s no such concept in a game like Super Mario Bros., where Mario’s abilities are the same throughout the entire game. While there are power-ups that can temporarily increase your abilities, these are situational upgrades rather than a persistent part of Mario’s character.

In Mega Man, on the other hand, the abilities that Mega Man gains by defeating each boss become part of his permanent arsenal. By the end of the game, Mega Man is much more capable than he was at the beginning. Indeed, if you’re having a hard time against one of the bosses in a Mega Man game, one way to proceed is to defeat a different boss in order to get their weapon, and then use it against the boss you’re having trouble on. In this way, the player can advance without actually getting better at the game. Not that this is necessarily a problem; having a variety of challenges available is a good way to keep the player from getting stuck, and they’ll presumably get better at the game naturally as long as they have the opportunity to keep trying.

This still isn’t really what we’re talking about, though, because Mega Man’s weapons are new abilities: they make him more capable, but not necessarily more powerful. There may be situations in which a new weapon isn’t actually useful. Not only that, but the player has to learn what each weapon is good for and decide when to use it, so in that sense these upgrades actually make the game more complicated to play. What we really mean by “level ups” is a general increase in power rather than a specific increase in capabilities. In Super Metroid, for example, Samus can collect energy tanks to increase her endurance, new suits to reduce the amount of damage she takes, or new beams that are strictly superior versions of her existing beam (as opposed to separate weapons in the way that Mega Man’s are). All of these are what you might think of as “background” upgrades; they make the game easier without providing the player with any new options. Of course, Super Metroid also has plenty of upgrades that do actually give Samus new abilities; there’s a clear distinction between upgrades that allow you to do new things and upgrades which are mere improvements.

Thus, we can draw a distinction between two concepts which are often conflated: skill growth and power growth. The first allows the player to do new things, resulting in increased gameplay options and possibly even increased difficulty, while the second makes the things that the player can already do more effective, resulting in a mere decrease in difficulty.

You may have noticed that I’ve deliberately avoided using any examples for the genre that is actually about level ups: RPGs. The problem with RPGs is that the concept of leveling up is so baked-in to the basic formula that it’s very difficult to separate out the relevant concepts. It’s typical for a “level” in an RPG to refer to everything at once: all of your character’s parameters increase, and you also learn new abilities, and your abilities also get stronger without actually doing anything different. Plus there’s things like new equipment, which sometimes gives you a mere power increase, or sometimes gives you what looks like an ability but is actually just a power increase (such as “increased critical hit rate” or “extra damage against dragons”), and sometimes actually gives you new options (such as a staff that regenerates your MP but can’t be used to attack). The point is that RPG design is generally a mess and what I’m taking aim at here is not everything that gets called a “level up” but the specific concept of general power growth.

Skill growth isn’t a problem; indeed, it’s easy to see why it’s an effective mechanic. In games like Mega Man and Super Metroid, skill growth is used to ease the player into the game. The player starts with only the basic abilities, allowing them to get a handle on the fundamentals, and then, with a foundation established, learn to use the new abilities one at a time. Giving the player all the abilities at the outset would be overwhelming; it would actually make the game harder to play. Furthermore, since each skill has a specific function, the process of gaining skills itself can be strategic. In Mega Man, as mentioned, you might try to gain a specific weapon for the purpose of defeating a specific boss. In this way, the player can chart their own path through the game based on an understanding of what capabilities they need to have in order to perform certain tasks (and Mega Man is really the simplest possible example here; a game that utilized this sort of progression in a meaningful way would really be something).

Power growth offers none of these advantages and also contains several drawbacks. The basic problem is that power growth adds nothing to the gameplay. Attacking a monster and dealing 50 damage is exactly the same operation as attacking it and dealing 500 damage. Furthermore, since the game’s challenges have to get harder to compensate for the player’s increased power, there’s not even any practical effect from leveling up. If a monster has 500 HP and you deal 50 damage per hit, you need to hit it 10 times to win. If, after leveling up and moving to a harder area, a new monster has 5000 HP and you’re dealing 500 damage, the situation is exactly the same. It looks different, but the actual actions you’re taking are identical to what they were before. In this way, RPGs often confuse the issue by offering a lot of flash that makes it look like something is going on when you’re actually just using the exact same tactics in every encounter. Thus, level ups often conceal a lack of actual gameplay.

It’s worse than that, though, because power growth can actually cannibalize real gameplay. For example, say you’re up against a boss that counters any physical attacks you hit it with, so instead you need to beat it with magic attacks. But suppose you’ve leveled up enough that the counterattacks aren’t strong enough to stop you. You can just blithely bash away with physical attacks and win anyway; you don’t actually have to learn the boss’s characteristics or how to deal with them. You don’t actually have to play the game.

The reason for this problem is that challenge relies on balance. To illustrate this, consider a boss battle from any Mega Man game. If you’re not familiar, they look like this:

mega_man_vs_guts_man

See those two bars? One of them is Mega Man’s health meter, and one of them is Guts Man’s. When Mega Man hits Guts Man, Guts Man’s health goes down by a certain amount, and vice versa. The fact that both bars are visibly the same size makes the situation admirably clear: the difficulty of the battle is based on the ratio of the amount of damage Mega Man deals to Guts Man to the damage he takes from Guts Man’s attacks. If Mega Man has a weapon that is highly effective against Guts Man (that’d be Bomb Man’s weapon), he might be able to win by just shooting repeatedly and not bothering to avoid any of Guts Man’s attacks. The player doesn’t have to learn anything at all; the battle becomes trivially easy. On the other hand, if Mega Man does very little damage compared to how much he takes from each hit, he may have to avoid almost all of Guts Man’s attacks in order to have a chance. The player may have a hard time even after learning how to effectively dodge most of the boss’s attacks; the battle becomes excruciatingly hard. A well-designed boss battle will have a damage ratio that puts it between these two extremes: with the correct weapon, the battle should be easy but not trivial; without it, the battle should be challenging but doable for a moderately skilled player.

But if the player can increase Mega Man’s overall power by “leveling up,” then they’re in control of the damage ratio (intentionally or otherwise), which means the actual design of the battle goes out the window. If you’re having a hard time against a boss, you have no idea whether it’s because there’s something about the gameplay you have yet to learn or whether you just haven’t leveled enough. If you’ve leveled too much, you’ll just blaze through and miss the opportunity to learn anything. In this situation, the developer has in effect abdicated their responsibility to design a meaningful encounter, instead obligating the player to “guess” what level they need to be at in order to have a good experience (the extent to which game designers often seem to be looking for any possible excuse to avoid actually designing their games is rather disheartening; see also “procedurally generated levels” as a selling point).

But it’s not just that power growth sucks, it’s also that it’s totally clowned by its cooler, more attractive cousin: skill growth. Skill growth does everything power growth can do and more, and it looks good doing it. This is easy to understand if we look at a game that uses both mechanics, but cleanly separates them so that they can be analyzed individually. That game is Final Fantasy Tactics. Whenever one of your characters takes an action, they grow in two ways: they gain Experience, which eventually levels them up in the power growth sense, and they gain Job Points, which can be used to purchase new abilities. If you play the game with this in mind, it will quickly become apparent that Experience is completely boring. It gradually accumulates and makes you stronger and you never actually think or worry about it in any way. Trying to pay attention to it is like watching someone else run on a treadmill.

Conversely, Job Points are not only interesting, they’re also awesome and basically the entire point of the game. There are several reasons for this. The most obvious is that getting new abilities is fun and interesting. A new ability allows you to do something new in battle, and since Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty well designed, new abilities are generally distinctive: they allow you to do a new type of thing rather than just being a different version of something you can already do. Another reason is that you get to choose which abilities to get, so you can make a plan about how your team is going to work and design the kind of characters that you think will be effective, or creative, or challenging, or even just fun. Thus, we get the same sense of character advancement that power growth offers, but in a way that’s both interesting and conducive to actual gameplay.

Finally, the act of gaining Job Points itself also involves a choice, because each character only gains Job Points for the class they are currently using (pedantic caveat: not actually true, but close enough). So if you want to, for example, make a White Mage that can also use Time Magic, you have to decide when you can allow the character to train in the Time Mage class and when you’re going to need them as a White Mage. And this isn’t an isolated decision, because you have other team members with the same dynamic; if one of them is training as a White Mage, the others are free to do something else. Thus, there’s an interesting tension between growing your characters for the long term and winning each battle in the short term; unlike with Experience, you don’t just get everything for free.

What all this adds up to is that you could completely excise the concept of Experience from Final Fantasy Tactics and you would lose absolutely none of what makes the game good. So from a design perspective the solution to power growth is pretty simple: just say no. Pick a power level and design your game around that. If you want to provide a couple of options for the player to make things easier or harder for themselves, that’s fine, but these ought to be explicit choices rather than just something that happens as you play the game. Furthermore, the limits of these options need to be designed appropriately in order to provide an experience that’s still meaningful even when it’s a little easier or harder.

Gameplay isn’t everything, though. The actual purpose of levels is, of course, aesthetic. They represent a character’s growth over the course of the story. If you’re making a game with a Hero’s Journey type of story, where the main character starts off as some nobody and goes through some trials and stuff and becomes powerful enough to save the day, using level ups to gradually increase the character’s attributes is a great way to represent that, even if it doesn’t actually change the gameplay.

The problem with this is that the Hero’s Journey is a bunch of fucking horseshit. Real things don’t actually happen because of some guy who’s just so strong and smart and powerful that he can defeat all the bad evil forces and make things nice and peaceful for everybody. That’s not how the real world works. It is, rather, how the rulers of an oppressive, hierarchical society want you to think the world works, because it justifies existing power structures.

For example, the jobs of a CEO and a janitor are so different that they can’t be meaningfully compared in terms of value. But we accept that a CEO should have higher pay than a janitor because we consider it to be a “higher level” job. If we instead view these two jobs are merely two different sets of skills, both of which are required for a company to operate, then the justification for not merely “outsized” CEO pay but for any pay discrepancy at all vanishes.

The truth is that the world works the way it does as a result of specific abilities that people have. The members of the ruling class are not better than you. The reason rich fucks are rich is that they’re good at the specific things that our society rewards. Warren Buffett, who is certainly one of our more self-aware rich fucks, has made precisely this point with regard to himself:

“I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.
But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing — and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.”

In other words, there’s no actual justification for someone like Buffett being rich. It’s just how things happen to be set up at the moment. Those who are invested in maintaining our current level of injustice want you to believe that the people on top of our society are there because they deserve it, because they’re just better. But they aren’t, and they don’t.

This isn’t just about rich fucks, either. The same analysis applies to the rest of us. The big paradox of justice in the internet years has been that, while the internet has been an incredible boon to the spread of anti-oppression ideologies, it has resulted in very little structural change. Marginalized people have more opportunity than ever to have their voices heard, and inconvenient ideas no longer require official channels for dissemination. At the same time, economic inequality has been steadily worsening and social progress has largely stalled out. The unfortunate truth is that “power” in the form of large numbers of people agreeing on the internet does not actually accomplish anything. What internet activists often fail to realize is that we are not dealing with some sort of cosmic scale, where we just have to put all of our weight on one side to move it. We are dealing with a specific socio-historical situation and specific sorts of actions are required to affect it. Of course, if I had any idea what these actions were, I’d be doing something a little more productive than blogging about game mechanics. But the least we can do is let go of the false hope that says that everything will work out as long as we care hard enough.

And this is where things get really interesting, because not only is there actually a game mechanic that can convey this in a way that’s applicable to the real world, but it’s precisely the good aspect of leveling up that we were just talking about: it’s skill growth. Pretty crazy coincidence, right? The alternative to power growth that’s better for gameplay just so happens to also be the alternative that’s compatible with justice. Except no shit, because it’s obviously not a coincidence, because good design is the same thing as meaningful existence.

Mr. Fix-it

Posted by Jason on

Anyone who tells you that an institution or social system is “broken” and that they have a plan to “fix” it is selling you a bridge. The terms “broken” and “fixed” imply a function, so someone who wants you to support their “fix” is asking you to do what’s good for them, without actually telling you what that is. The whole point of politics, in particular, is to reconcile the fact that people want different things, so anyone who says they want to “fix” the government without telling you what they want to fix it for is eliding the entire conversation.

In this interview, Lawrence Lessig makes the common claim that “the government is broken.” Lessig, unlike most people who make these sorts of claims, actually does get into the details of what he’s referring to: the fact that the government’s actions accord with the desires of rich fucks rather than the desires of the general population. He calls out three specific issues as causes: politicians being owned by billionaires via campaign funding, gerrymandering, and the fact that lots of people don’t have a functional right to vote. These are all obviously things that prevent the will of the people from being reflected in the actions of the government.

Lessig is currently running for president for the sole purpose of passing one bill which will supposedly “fix” these issues. What’s odd about this is that, by his own analysis, his plan is impossible. Lessig describes the importance of his bill as follows:

“Look, you want health care reform? You’re not gonna get health care reform until we deal with this issue. You want to deal with the problem of living wage, minimum wage? You’re not gonna get that dealt with until you deal with this issue.”

This is correct, and the reason it’s correct is that which bills get passed is determined by what rick fucks want. Rich fucks make money off of privatized health insurance, so we’re not getting universal heath care. Rich fucks don’t want to pay their workers, so we’re not getting a minimum wage increase. Given this, the critical contradiction is Lessig’s platform is obvious: rich fucks want to be able to control the government through money, so we’re not getting any of Lessig’s proposed reforms.

For some reason, the interviewer doesn’t actually ask how Lessig expects to get his bill passed, but Lessig does provide a sort of half-explanation:

“There’s a tradition the president gets a signature legislation quickly. Obama got stimulus in three weeks. There’s the standard idea of the hundred days.”

So basically he thinks that Congress is just going to do him a favor out of respect for the fact that he got elected. A stimulus is actually the worst possible example to use here, because it’s the kind of thing that rich fucks actually need to have happen for functional reasons. While the current ideological position of the Republican party obligates them to make a show of opposing things like this, they’re things that actually need to get done in order for the money to keep flowing, so they get done. Also, as a comment to the interview points out, Lessig is factually wrong: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed with Yea votes from three Republican senators and zero Republican representatives. This was obviously because Obama, but the point is that Congress has no obligation to be nice to the president.

More importantly, though, if the general principle is that only rich-fuck-approved bills can get passed, why on Earth would rich fucks approve a bill that specifically removes their power to determine which bills get passed? Obviously, they wouldn’t, so the question then becomes: why can’t Lessig figure this out? One possible explanation is that Lessig’s campaign is just a stunt for the purpose of getting the issue out there, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. That is, I’m sure he’s aware that he’s not going to win, but his plan appears to be serious. If it weren’t, there would be no reason for him to muddy the waters by promising to resign after passing his bill. That just raises a bunch of questions that distract from what he’s trying to say. The only reason for him to propose something like that is that he actually thinks it’ll work.

Given that Lessig has a handle on the basic dynamics, the only explanation for his blind spot is that he doesn’t want to draw the unavoidable conclusions of his own analysis. This isn’t just a mistake; the specific reason Lessig is doing what he’s doing is that he does want to believe that the problems he’s diagnosed are things that can be “fixed,” particularly if that fix happens to involve a smart man from Harvard implementing his big idea.

The other thing about the “broken/fixed” paradigm is that calling something “broken” implies that it used to work. Lessig is actually explicit about this:

“Well, 20 years ago exactly, Newt Gingrich became speaker, the first time Republicans took control of the House in 40 years. So every two years, Congress is up for grabs.”

Darn that Newt Gingrich! Seriously, think about what Lessig is claiming here: when he says that the government has been rich-fuck-controlled for the past 20 years, he’s saying that, before 20 years ago, this wasn’t the case. Thus, it’s clear that what Lessig means by “fixed” is merely a return to the years of, for example, Reagan’s presidency, a time when the voice of the people was truly being heard.

America was, of course, founded on the idea that the government ought to be controlled by rich fucks. Not only was that vast majority of the population excluded from voting, but the American system of government was designed precisely to keep the rabble as far away from the actual levers of power as possible. A lot of people get confused about this because of our whole silly middle-school mythology about how the American Revolution was all about common people not wanting to be ruled by a king or whatever, so to be clear: the Revolution was, like most major changes in government, an instance of the second highest class in society rebelling against the highest. It was about a new class of rich fucks (merchants, lawyers, plantation owners) seizing power from the old class of rich fucks (royals), on the basis that the old class was no longer needed and the new class wanted their fucking money (hence “no taxation without representation”).

So, given the historical continuity of rich fucks controlling everything (and by “historical continuity” I mean literally every civilization in history), what is the meaning of recent developments such as Citizens United? Do events such as these represent victories for the ruling class that give them even more power to control society than they already had? The answer may very well be “yes,” but I submit that this is the wrong way to understand the issue. What these events represent is the changing form of rich fuck dominance as a response to changing material conditions.

Basically, the problem rich fucks have right now is that because of all that civil rights nonsense that happened there are actually formal mechanisms in place by which the general populace can (theoretically) advance their own preferences over those of rich fucks. All of the things Lessig calls out are ways of dealing with this problem: Super PACs remove the limit on how much money can matter in an election, gerrymandering makes large numbers of votes meaningless, and obviously indirect disenfranchisement does the same thing. But while getting rid of these things would be nice, it ultimately wouldn’t matter. We’re talking about people who have enough money to do literally whatever they want regardless of the circumstances; things like Super PACs are just the tools they happen to be using at the moment. If this stuff gets outlawed, they’ll come up with something else, and they’ll get it implemented because they have the money to make it happen. When you have the kind of money that we’re talking about here, you don’t just sit on your hands and wait for the government to tell you what you’re allowed to buy with it. You use your money to make the government buyable, and then you buy it. The fundamental problem is that wealth is incompatible with justice.

When Lessig says that democracy is “broken,” he’s assuming that the government is trying to reflect the will of the people, but failing, resulting in things like super PACs and gerrymandering. But in fact, these things are precisely examples of the government working. Given that these things were implemented in the first place, they’re obviously things that the ruling class wanted. The people in power are by definition the ones who could change things like this if they actually wanted to; since they aren’t doing so, it’s obvious that they don’t want to.

Thus, the actual cause of Lessig’s blind spot is that, not only does he want to believe that the situation is “fixable” though “reforms,” but on a more fundamental level, he wants to believe that the American system is basically just and that the swathes of obvious injustice that we all slog through daily are merely the ways in which the system is “broken.” But what’s actually scary about the government isn’t the fact that it’s broken, it’s the fact that it is working as intended.

Against cleverness

Posted by Jason on

Undertale is an extremely clever game.

undertale_friendly

Aesthetically, Undertale appears to inhabit the sort of campy retro territory that’s so popular these days, but in this case it isn’t just a pointless exercise in nostalgia – it’s actually a feint. The game is full of effects that go beyond its apparent technological level, and that contrast makes them all the more striking. Boss battles in particular are totally unconstrained by what appear to be the parameters of the battle system, making each one its own unique experience.

Similarly, while the game is extremely cartoonish, the writing is really good. There’s too much dialogue overall, but the characters are grounded in relatable traits that make them feel like real (albeit exaggerated) people. The downside is that the plot falls into the common video game trap of just throwing details around as opposed to actually telling a story. Most of the backstory is just posted on signs throughout the game (seriously, think about how little sense this makes), and by the end there are literally just monsters showing up out of nowhere just to exposit the remaining information at you.

A story isn’t just a collection of plot details; the way in which the information is presented to the player matters. For example, there’s a log entry (motherfuckers love log entries for some reason) late in the game that just reads “no no no no NO,” which is obviously supposed to convey that something has gone horribly wrong. But this doesn’t make any sense: under what circumstances would somebody actually write something like that down? Things like this are just a cheap way of establishing a generic, recognizable situation. While they succeed at conveying the basic details of the plot, they lack the verisimilitude required to make the player feel something about it.

Relatedly, Undertale is a comedy that has a serious ending, which is something you can do, but in this case the pacing is completely backwards. It starts off relatively serious and then suddenly becomes completely zany, and it keeps piling on the zaniness as you progress. This has the unfortunate consequence that, as the boss battles become more complex and interesting, they also become less relevant to the story, making the clever mechanics feel like pointless flash. In the end, the game suddenly swerves back into seriousness just in time for the final conflict, making the drama of the ending feel largely unearned.

undertale_pet

The reason Undertale matters is that it’s an RPG where you never have to kill anything. It’s deeply sad that this sort of thing is still notable, but it’s really important: the set of stories that you can tell by wandering around and killing things is very limited, and few of them are stories that are going to matter to anyone.

The game pretends to have normal random battles, but there’s a set of nonviolent actions you can perform related to each enemy, and finding the correct combination of actions will allow you to resolve the conflict peacefully. For example, if you’re being attacked by a dog monster, you can play fetch with it and then pet it to calm it down. Also, there’s one battle you can resolve by getting two bros to admit that they’re gay for each other, so that’s pretty great. Resolving battles peacefully earns you money but no levels, which means you can buy the healing items you’ll need but you’ll remain a Level 1 weakling for the entire game.

The problem with the battle mechanics is that they’re completely shallow. Instead of clicking “attack,” you click “hug,” and the battle’s over just as easily. In fact, while Undertale looks like an RPG, that’s really just the framework; you don’t have any abilities or anything, so there’s no actual RPG gameplay. Instead, enemy attacks are represented as shoot-em-up-like bullet patterns that you have to avoid by moving around. Not that there’s anything wrong with this; the fact that you have to sit there and weather the enemy’s attacks while trying to convince them not to fight is a pretty decent representation of what doing pacifism is like. Boss battles in particular force you to endure wave after wave of complex attacks, making them feel like real ordeals.

The part that’s a problem is the fact that you’re never making any real choices. While you do technically have the choice to kill each enemy you meet, there’s no reason to ever consider doing so. Because winning nonviolently is so easy, and because committing to nonviolence never prevents you from doing anything, the choice has no weight. There are a lot of things that could have been done about this. There could be paths you can’t take or items that you can’t get without fighting. There could be battles where you have to sacrifice something to avoid violence. There could be enemies that are too strong for you to handle – even nonviolently – if you haven’t already leveled up by fighting.

Thus, while Undertale finds a number of clever ways to portray nonviolent conflict resolution, it doesn’t find any that are actually interesting. This is where old-fashioned RPG mechanics could really have helped. If Undertale had the sort of complex array of interlocking abilities that a normal RPG about killing things has, it could have made nonviolent gameplay interesting. Instead, all it offers is a mere choice: select either Use Violence or Don’t Use Violence from the menu.

undertale_mercy

This isn’t just a point about game mechanics, because Undertale‘s story is ultimately just as shallow as its gameplay. This is not a coincidence. Putting the required effort into making the mechanics of nonviolence deep rather than cute would have required thinking about how nonviolence actually works (or doesn’t), which would have allowed for a story that was similarly deep. Instead, we get a completely generic happy ending where the villain-with-a-tragic-backstory is defeated/redeemed by Magical Friendship Power, and everyone lives happily ever after. The end.

As a matter of fact, the final battle is ripped more-or-less directly from Earthbound, and the result is that the ending is just as hokey as Earthbound‘s. The problem is that, in Earthbound, that was the point; Earthbound was a weird sort of kids’ game. Undertale, however, has a dramatic backstory that it expects you to take seriously, and the development of this story seems to be leading up to a cynical conclusion about the limits of nonviolence. Indeed, the final conflict begins out of sheer necessity: the way things are set up, either you or the last boss has to die, even though neither of you wants to fight.

Undertale even ups the ante with some pretty extreme fourth-wall breaking, implying not only that an easy resolution is impossible, but that you, the player, are a fool for expecting that everything will work out just because you meant well and tried your best. Immediately after this, the final battle happens on autopilot and you win. Thus, it’s specifically the game’s cleverness that makes it feel fake; the game self-awarely taunts you for expecting a “happy ending,” and then gives you one that has no complications.

The reason this matters is that it’s not how things work in real life. The idea that you can follow a simple set of rules and then just sit around hoping for a happy ending is the exact opposite of how reality works. It is actually possible to overcome things that are stronger than you, but doing so isn’t a matter of purity, it’s a matter of complexity. You have to figure out complicated situations and take specific actions in order to make things happen; whether you’re a “good person” isn’t relevant to the operation of the universe. This is exactly the sort of thing that games should be able to express through mechanics, and yet all we ever get are these fake final battles where you keep selecting “hope” from the menu until you automatically win.

Despite this, there is one place where Undertale‘s self-awareness gets interesting. If you want to play again after getting the real ending, the game will actually discourage you from doing so, on the grounds that you’d be “resetting” the happy ending for your own enjoyment, which was the specific motivation of the game’s villain. This is significant because it’s an implication that basically no other video game has: rather than encouraging you to obsessively waste your time playing the game over and over again, courting every minor secret and making every possible choice just to see what happens, Undertale suggests that it’s better to do the right thing once and then leave well enough alone.

The downside to this is that, y’know, games aren’t real. It doesn’t actually matter whether a bunch of fictional characters get a happy ending or not. What makes a game (or anything else) matter is whether you, the person who experienced it, got anything out of it; whether you’re a different person after experiencing it. And if the only thing the game has to say is that nonviolence is nice and the only thing it ultimately has to offer is a facile happy ending, then the unavoidable implication is that you didn’t, and you’re not.

undertale_smart

The problem with cleverness is that it makes you feel like you’ve hit on something important, regardless of whether you actually have. The jolt of insight it gives you is easily mistaken for significance, when it might be nothing more than noticing a reference. Undertale offers a very clear example of this problem that pervades the entire game. In the intro area, the game appears to be parodying the standard video game progression mechanic of walking in a straight line and occasionally solving an arbitrary puzzle. There’s one part where merely walking down a long hallway is comically presented as a challenge, and another where a character literally holds your hand through a trivially easy puzzle. After the intro area, having established all of this, you then progress through the rest of the game by . . . walking in a straight line and occasionally solving an arbitrary puzzle. The only difference is that you, as the player, now feel like you’re in on the joke. The game is clever enough to make fun of this, but not smart enough to come up with anything better.

This is the same problem that the mechanics have. The problem with standard violent game mechanics isn’t just that they make light of killing (though that is obviously a serious problem), it’s that they’re banal. RPGs in particular rarely require much more than just selecting the “Attack” command over and over and occasionally healing. The fact that you have a bunch of different fancy attacks – as well as the mere fact that you have to select the commands yourself – makes you feel like you’re making decisions and doing something, when you’re really just acting out a very simple script. And in this regard, Undertale is no better than what it’s reacting to. The fact that the commands you’re selecting have different names that amount to cute little jokes doesn’t change the fact that playing the game requires very little thought. The cleverness of the presentation masks the hollowness of the actual mechanics.

Finally, this is also the problem that the story’s theme of nonviolence has. With all of its jokes and twists and fourth-wall breaking, as well as the fact that it’s presenting an obvious alternative to standard RPG gameplay that has somehow not been seriously pursued in 30 years, Undertale seems like it has something of significance to say. But when it comes down to it, when it’s the final battle and everything’s on the line, the game has nothing to offer but the same trite conclusion we’ve seen countless times before. During the epilogue, someone does point out that “not everything can be resolved by just being nice.” That seems like it would have some pretty big implications for the choice of whether or not to use violence, right? And yet, other than this one line of dialogue, nothing that acknowledges this very basic point is actually in the game. For all of its cleverness, Undertale has nothing to say about violence.

As just one idea, imagine if the final boss were implacably violent and you had to kill it no matter what (and that Magical Friendship Power was not an option). Imagine you went though the entire game at Level 1, feeling proud of yourself for being such a good person and not hurting anything, only to discover that being such a weak loser makes it impossible for you to win. Imagine you then had to go through the game again, making hard decisions about where to earn the minimum amount of experience needed to beat the last boss, agonizing over every decision about who to spare and who to kill. And, of course, the more you leveled, the easier the last boss would become, giving you an actual motive to use violence that you would actually have to resist. A framework like this (again, just one example) would have allowed the game to require real thought on the part of the player, and to have a point.

There’s one instance where Undertale goes beyond being simplistic and becomes offensively bad. Towards the end of the game, a character appears out of nowhere to give you a big didactic speech about how the standard RPG concepts of “experience” and “levels” actually represent your capacity for violence. This explained in pretty much the stupidest way possible: by making the terms acronyms that stand for bad things. In addition to the obvious fact that making up an acronym does not amount to making an argument, this sort of thing is exactly why the “show, don’t tell” rule exists. The entire game was available to show you how the ability to use violence can tempt you into making bad choices, but no such thing ever happens. There’s nothing that even mildly dissuades you from just picking the nonviolent option from the menu in every encounter. Really, the problem is that the entire game is ultimately just a better-presented version of this speech. In that sense, it’s actually kind of nice that this bit is included, because it’s a crystal clear example of how you can be clever while also being spectacularly dumb.

The reason this is all so disappointing is because Undertale, for just a moment, made me genuinely nervous. When the game got to the point where it appeared to be subverting its own banal message, I was actually worried that I might end up having to make a hard choice, and that I might fuck something up. But I had nothing to worry about. The game wasn’t challenging me or putting anything on the line. It was just being clever.

undertale_home

The thing about all of this is that Undertale is a really good game. The problem is not that it “could be better”; the problem is precisely that it seems to have done the best it could. And given the way that its limitations are a direct result of its idolization of its predecessors, it would seem that the whole enhanced-retro aesthetic isn’t so harmless after all.

The good news is that there are other options besides making clever updates to 20-year-old games. There is, in fact, a well-established alternative with a pretty good track record. Kill yr idols.

David Foster Wallace as reactionary

Posted by Jason on

(Part 1)

Last time I explained how David Foster Wallace’s approach to the politics of language in “Authority and American Usage” ended up backing him into a reactionary position. That essay can’t be considered a representative example, though, because Wallace obviously had some personal issues re: grammar snobbery that contributed to the muddling of his argument there. Once is an anomaly, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern. Today I’m going to argue that the issues with Wallace’s general approach were not coincidental.

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I was unable to finalize my argument here until encountering this Reddit thread, which is the only place I’ve seen DFW’s work described as reactionary. That was the last piece of the puzzle. I had been unable to make sense of Wallace’s consistent errors because I was assuming that he was “on my side.” Most discussion of Wallace seems to suffer from this same problem. People assume he was a good guy who was doing his best but had some problems, when in fact he was fundamentally misguided. Taking a genuinely adversarial approach to his work clarified everything for me, but more than that, I think this approach actually makes his work much more valuable. At the very least, it’s pretty clear by now that the DFW-as-self-help-guru approach is a dead end, so we ought to try something new.

In summary, Wallace’s general approach to political issues in his nonfiction writing was:

  1. Generalize and simplify the issue by imposing a commonly understood framework on it (e.g. liberals vs. conservatives, authority vs. anarchy, irony vs. sincerity). This results in both an overly broad approach and a dismissal of radical opinions, even when they’re directly evident in the subject matter. It also makes readers comfortable by allowing them to start from a framework that they already take for granted.
  2. Intellectualize the issue by bringing in as many ideas as possible, but fail to draw a strong conclusion, or even any conclusion at all. This confuses the issue and makes it look like there’s no real solution. Again, this makes readers feel comfortable, because Wallace isn’t “pretending like he has the answer,” and his writing doesn’t push anyone into making any real commitments.
  3. Fall back on a basic reactionary position, usually either traditional authority or individualistic who’s-to-say-ism. Step 2 makes this seem like the only possible option, and Step 1 allows this conclusion to seem much more broadly applicable than would be warranted even if it were justified.

There’s one very important tactic that Wallace uses constantly to support both steps 1 and 2, which is Both Sides-ing. This is basically the argument to moderation, but used to denigrate rather than support a position. Rather than arguing that a position must be right because it is moderate (Wallace never gets around to actually arguing in favor of any position), Both Sides-ing simply argues that anyone with an “extreme” position on either side of an issue must be wrong simply because they’re extreme. Ironically, this is the favorite tactic of precisely the type of modern thinkers that Wallace was deeply opposed to: those who believe that ridiculing a position is the same as arguing against it (namely, South Park Republicans). Naturally, Both Sides-ing is an inherently conservative tactic, since it denigrates any position that might actually change something.

To be clear, none of this has anything to do with what Wallace’s explicit political opinions were. The issue is not that he was secretly a conservative and was therefore a bad person or whatever. The issue is precisely that he was trying to be a good liberal, but his approach turned him around so consistently that he ended up defending banality.

For Your Consideration

The easiest place to start is “Consider the Lobster,” which tackles a relatively straightforward moral issue and leaves little room for complications. The ostensible purpose of this article is to cover the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine, but Wallace, commendably, uses the opportunity to question the morality of meat eating. As Wallace puts it, the question is pretty simple: “is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our own gustatory pleasure?” The problem is that the answer to this question as phrased is pretty obviously “no,” but Wallace spends the entire essay avoiding this conclusion. (Notably, he starts backtracking immediately, before even beginning to consider the actual issue: “Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental?” We certainly wouldn’t want to be sentimental about a moral issue.)

Wallace goes into a lot of detail about lobster biology, which isn’t totally irrelevant. The question of whether a creature has moral status actually is dependent on things like whether it feels pain, and grounding the issue in practical reality is much more effective than appealing to vague principles about Mother Earth’s Creatures or whatever. He also brings in the philosophical backing of Peter Singer’s famous utilitarian argument against meat-eating in Animal Liberation. The thing is, as Wallace frames the issue, the only argument on the side of meat-eating is one specific variety of pleasure, which means animals win as long as they have any moral status whatsoever, and it doesn’t take long to get to the conclusion that lobsters do. Furthermore, Wallace draws a contrast between the way we deal with “uncute” animals like lobsters as opposed to cows (he points out that, in contrast to the actually-existing World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, the idea of some state hosting the World’s Largest Killing Floor is totally implausible), demonstrating that we implicitly give animals like cows much greater moral status. But he totally fails to bring out the obvious implication of this: if eating lobsters is at all questionable, then eating cows is almost certainly immoral.

The other important thing Wallace does here is to Both Sides the issue by presenting both the festival’s glib sponsors and PETA as ideologues who are refusing to really consider the issue the way Wallace is. While it is trivially easy to make PETA look like a bunch of clowns, Wallace never actually presents a counterargument to the claim that killing things for no reason other than your own enjoyment is immoral. Wallace’s dismissive attitude towards PETA is indicative of a very basic lack of intellectual seriousness. Arguments are right or wrong on their own merits, regardless of how “fanatical” the people espousing them are. This is part of what it means to actually take a side: committing to the issue itself regardless of what a bunch of jackasses it ends up allying you with.

In a footnote, Wallace conveniently provides a perfect summary of the way in which he uses intellectualism to advance a radically anti-intellectual conclusion:

“Suffice it to say that both the scientific and philosophical arguments on either side of the animal-suffering issue are involved, abstruse, technical, often informed by self-interest or ideology, and in the end so totally inconclusive that as a practical matter, in the kitchen or restaurant, it all still seems to come down to individual conscience, going with (no pun) your gut.”

Sure, you could try to actually think about the issue, but everything is just sooo complicated, plus all those so-called “scientists” are just self-interested ideologues anyway, so you might as well just do whatever you feel like. This is literally the reactionary impulse dressed up as insight, literally Bill O’Reilly in a lab coat.

And so, Wallace ends with little more than a shrug of his shoulders. After amassing all the information necessary to draw a real conclusion, Wallace remains “concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what [he really is] is more like confused” and throws the question to his readers as an open issue. I mentioned that it was commendable for Wallace to have broached the issue in this forum, but his good intentions are completely undone by this conclusion. The piece as a whole allows its readers to feel like they’ve deeply considered all the facets of the issue, while in effect giving them the license to continue doing whatever they feel like, because how can any of us know what’s really right? If someone as smart as DFW can’t figure it out, wouldn’t it just be arrogant for the rest of us to pretend we have an answer? A commitment to continue considering the issue might not be such a bad conclusion in a different type of society, but in the world we actually live in, the slaughterhouses are going to keep churning out death until we actually do something about it. They aren’t going to wait around while we ponder difficult moral conundrums. Passivity is acquiescence.

(Not so incidentally, while Wallace does bring up the issue of factory farming and how it makes meat-eating immoral even if killing animals is not immoral, he never – and by “never” I mean in the entirety of his written output as far as I’m aware – actually brings up the issue of capitalism. He does talk about easier things like “commercialism” or “consumerism,” but I don’t recall him ever using the real c-word. I’m actually not sure what to make of this. It’s implausible that he was unfamiliar with Marx et al., but it’s also implausible that someone so concerned about the problem of meaninglessness in American culture could so thoroughly ignore the obvious culprit.)

All Aboard the Straight Talk Express

The other obvious place to go for Wallace’s political approach is his one essay actually addressing electoral politics: “Up, Simba,” his account of John McCain’s 2000 primary campaign. In retrospect, this essay is terribly easy to make fun of, now that McCain has actually had his shot and blown it about as hard as humanly possible. But despite his sympathy for McCain, the point of Wallace’s essay is not that he’s necessarily a great guy who should be president. It’s about what we actually want out of politics, and why we’re not getting it.

Unfortunately, what Wallace actually wants out of politics doesn’t seem to be anything that would actually help anyone. McCain’s policies are casually rattled through at the beginning; one might expect that the point of Wallace’s focus on McCain would be to ask how exactly a supposedly honorable straight-talking kind of guy arrives at these sort of positions, but in fact policy never comes up again. Instead we’re treated to a whirlwind tour of the McCain campaign’s buses and ad strategies and hotel arrangements, with constant condescending lectures from Wallace directed at those Young Voters who, for some reason, don’t care about politics.

The deep irony of this essay is that, for all his finger-wagging, Wallace is actually behind his “apathetic” targets. Wallace thinks the problem is that no politicians are honest anymore, that the government is “corrupt,” that there’s nothing to believe in. Wallace is afraid he’s “too cynical,” when in reality, he has only scratched the surface. Just as the problem with capitalism is not the morality of its participants, but its inherent structure, so too is the problem with the ruling class not that it consists of criminals and morons, but that it is a ruling class. This is what makes the article’s obsessive detailing of the shenanigans of the McCain campaign so deeply ridiculous. Wallace is concerned that we don’t care about politics anymore because it’s all just a bunch of clowns, and his response to this problem is to give us a tour of the circus.

It’s actually worse than that, though, thanks to the fact that John McCain is one of the few politicians who has actually been through some serious shit. Wallace uses his considerable skill as a writer to detail McCain’s harrowing experience as a Vietnamese POW, and it’s impossible not to feel some real sympathy here. The problem is that, in doing this, Wallace isn’t actually leaving the circus. As mentioned, the question of how McCain’s personal experiences led to his largely revolting political positions could have been really interesting. But for Wallace, the point is merely that McCain has some sort of abstract moral authority that we should respect for some unspecified reason. The problem here isn’t hard to see: McCain is among the biggest warmongers in the U.S. government, which is really saying something. How exactly does the experience of having been a POW legitimize advancing the sort of policy that creates POWs? Not only does Wallace not have an answer, he doesn’t even seem to realize there’s a question here.

Wallace summarizes his own political outlook as follows:

“Even in AD 2000, who among us is so cynical that he doesn’t have some good old corny American hope way down deep in his heart, lying dormant like a spinster’s ardor, not dead but just waiting for the right guy to give it to?”

Okay, “lying dormant like a spinster’s ardor” is some fucking killer writing, but as a simile, it’s exactly as wrong as the general argument. The spinster rejects romance not because she’s loveless, but because she refuses to play a game that she knows to be rigged against her. In the same way, Wallace’s Young Voters reject electoral politics not because they’re “jaded,” but because they have accurately assessed the situation and concluded that voting will not get them what they need. Wallace, meanwhile, is unable to conceive of any political progress that does not involve electing a Big Important Man to be the boss of America.

The thing is, despite all of his hand-wringing, Wallace is more than willing to blithely dismiss people who actually do believe in things:

“There are, of course, some groups of Young Voters who are way, way into modern politics. There’s Rowdy Ralph Reed’s far-Right Christians for one, and then out at the other end of the spectrum there’s ACT UP and the sensitive men and angry womyn of the PC Left. It is interesting, though, that what gives these small fringe blocs such disproportionate power is the simple failure of most mainstream Young Voters to get off their ass and vote.”

As a sensitive male leftist, I now regret never having had the opportunity to tell Wallace to go fuck himself. Seriously though, this is textbook Both Sides-ism: if only the Normal People would vote, we could get rid of all those crazy extremists and just have a nice, normal society where nobody ever complained about anything or made anyone else uncomfortable. (Also, in what universe do feminists have “disproportionate” political power – that is, in the direction that Wallace is implying?)

(Relatedly, Wallace refers to Rolling Stone‘s politics as “ur-liberal,” which, first of all, is not what that prefix means, and second, fucking lol.)

This is also a great example of Wallace’s habit of leaning on tired tropes when he has no idea what he’s talking about. By 2000, third-wave feminism had happened, and the term “womyn” was way the hell out of vogue. The name “riot grrl” was actually an explicit parody of the idea that spelling a word differently was politically meaningful. Also, ACT UP? Was about dealing with fucking AIDS. Which is really what the problem is here: we’re looking at a thought process that, while trying to find a way to make politics meaningful again, sees preventing people from dying as a “fringe” project of the “PC Left.”

Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires

Interestingly, Wallace’s dismissiveness of AIDS as a political issue has a precedent: the 1996 article “Back in New Fire” (I’m not seeing this one online). It appears in the posthumous collection Both Flesh and Not, and is, from a moral perspective, the worst thing Wallace ever wrote (Both Flesh and Not is actually valuable specifically because it contains much of Wallace’s worst writing). It is literally a defense of AIDS as a new source of meaning after the alleged vapidity of the sexual revolution.

I don’t think I need to explain what’s wrong with this; moreover, the extent to which the existence of this essay means that Wallace was a bad person is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that this argument, which is among the worst possible arguments that a person can make, is a direct result of the flaws in Wallace’s approach that we’ve been discussing. It starts by taking as a given the common framing of the sexual revolution as something that “cheapened” sexuality by making it too “easy” (hint: this is wrong), then addresses the issue on an intellectual level that ignores both the fact that people were and are fucking dying and the fact that their deaths were a political choice. The AIDS epidemic was ignored for the very basic reason that it primarily affected gay, black, and poor people. If you’re looking for meaning in AIDS, this is it: it’s a disgustingly vivid demonstration of how this society of ours actually works. But Wallace’s purely philosophical approach to the issue makes him totally blind to this important truth, so instead he winds up arguing that “the casual knights of my own bland generation [ed: speak for yourself] might well come to regard AIDS as blessing, a gift perhaps bestowed by nature to restore some critical balance.”

What’s really interesting/sad about this essay is that Wallace was close to getting it right. Regarding the virus itself, he points out that “natural things just are; the only good and bad things are people’s various choices in the face of what is.” Exactly. People, both those with power and those without, did make choices about what to do about AIDS, and those choices say something very important about the very issues that so concerned Wallace: what sense we can make of the sort of society we live in, and what we ought to do about it.

Love Me, I’m a Liberal

This dismissiveness of basic political issues in favor of lofty intellectual meandering was in fact one of Wallace’s running themes. Wallace never met an instance of racism or sexism that he couldn’t reanalyze as something that didn’t have to make anybody uncomfortable. When considered as a pattern, this actually starts to get deeply annoying, so you’ll have to forgive me for having a little fun here.

–

In “Host,” Wallace profiles right-wing radio host John Ziegler, whose primary political opinion seems to be that he hates OJ Simpson. Wallace details how Ziegler has been fired from several jobs due to his inability to refrain from publicly deploying every white bigot’s favorite word at every opportunity, and then analyzes the situation as follows: “John Ziegler does not appear to be a racist as “racist” is generally understood. What he is is more like very, very insensitive,” raising the perplexing question of what exactly Wallace thought the word “racist” meant. Similarly, regarding Ziegler’s attitude toward women: “Mr. Z is consistently cruel, both on and off the air, in his remarks about women. He seems unaware of it. There’s no clear way to explain why [ed: ?], but one senses that his mother’s death hurt him very deeply [ed: ???]”

–

Wallace’s essay on the porn industry, “Big Red Son,” is potentially the record holder for Longest Sustained What About The Menz-ing.

“Feminists of all different stripe oppose the adult industry for reasons having to do with pornography’s putative effect on women. Their arguments are well-known and in some respects persuasive. But certain antiporn arguments in the 1990s are now centered on adult entertainment’s alleged effects on the men who consume it.”

Once again, Wallace doesn’t know the facts and relies on a soundbite understanding of the issue. “Feminists of all different stripe” is exactly incorrect: pro-porn feminism is specifically a thing, and at the time this essay was written (again, Wallace is unaware that third-wave feminism happened), it was probably more popular than the alternative. Also, second-wave anti-porn arguments were very much about porn’s effect on men, the effect being that it caused them to beat and rape women. But this isn’t the sort of thing that Wallace is interested in. He opens the essay describing men who have castrated themselves, allegedly because “their sexual urges had become a source of intolerable conflict and anxiety.” Some people might be interested preventing rape and murder, but if a man somewhere is confused and anxious, Wallace is all over it.

–

One might expect that Wallace’s critical reading of John Updike, “Certainly The End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think,” would be a great place for him to finally get around to some motherfucking feminism, but Wallace’s approach is nothing if not consistent. One odd thing about this essay is that people seem to identify the quotation “just a penis with a thesaurus” (referring to Updike, obviously) with Wallace, when in fact Wallace presents this and other dismissive quotes specifically to distance himself from them. What he says about them is the following:

“There are, of course, some obvious explanations for part of this dislike – jealousy, iconoclasm, PC backlash, and the fact that many of our parents revere Updike and it’s easy to revile what your parents revere. But I think the deep reason so many of my generation dislike Updike and the other GMNs [ed: Great Male Narcissists – note how Wallace assumes his own conclusion by using this term] has to do with these writers’ radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.”

Sure, you might think you dislike Updike because he’s a blatant misogynist, but you’re just jealous, or maybe you have daddy issues. I, however, know the real, deep reason why you think you feel that way.

Given how blatantly insulting stuff like this is, it’s clear that a lot of what people see in Wallace is what they want to see. Of course, Wallace’s refusal to ever take a hard stand on anything makes this easy, but it doesn’t account for the motivation. There seems to be a very specific need that people really wish Wallace was filling.

–

This next one’s mostly for fun. This is an anecdote rather than an argument, but I’m counting it because it’s both representative and hilarious. It’s from “The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2”:

“The fact that what Skynet is attempting is in effect a retroactive abortion, together with the fact that “terminate a pregnancy” is a pretty well-known euphemism, led the female [ed: really?] I first saw the movie with in 1984 to claim, over coffee and pie afterward, that The Terminator was actually one long pro-choice allegory, which I said I thought was not w/o merit but maybe a bit too simplistic to do the movie real justice, which led to kind of an unpleasant row.”

It’s not clear what level of self-awareness Wallace is bringing to this story, but either way: a woman tries to engage him on a feminist issue, and he tells her that she’s being “simplistic” and then explains what the issue is really about from his own much deeper and more informed perspective, which does “real justice” to this action movie with Schwarzenegger in it. Somehow, this ends badly.

–

Okay, one last example. This one’s important because it’s completely unambiguous: Wallace takes a crystal-clear issue and totally fumbles it. It’s an aside from “Authority and American Usage” which seems to have been cut from the version that was published in Harper’s (as “Tense Present”) and appears therefore to not be online in plaintext form, so I guess I’m going to have to type out the whole fucking thing.

“In this reviewer’s opinion, the only really coherent position on the abortion issue is one that is both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice.”

(Yeah, okay, I could just stop here, but I’ll be professional about this.)

“Argument: as of 4 March 1999, the question of defining human life in utero is hopelessly vexed. That is, given our best present medical and philosophical understandings of what makes something not just a living organism but a person, there is no way to establish at just what point during gestation a fertilized ovum becomes a human being. This conundrum, together with the basically inarguable soundness of the principle ‘When in irresolvable doubt, about whether something is a human being or not, it is better not to kill it,’ appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Life. At the same time, however, the principle ‘When in irresolvable doubt about something, I have neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to do about it, especially if that person feels that s/he is not in doubt’ is an unassailable part of the Democratic pact we Americans all make with one another, a pact in which each adult citizen gets to be an autonomous moral agent; and this principle appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Choice.

This reviewer is thus, as a private citizen and an autonomous agent, both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. It is not an easy or comfortable position to maintain. Every time someone I know decides to terminate a pregnancy, I am required to believe simultaneously that she is doing the wrong thing and that she has every right to do it. Plus, of course, I have to believe that a Pro-Life + Pro-Choice stance is the only really coherent one and to restrain myself from trying to force that position on other people whose ideological or religious convictions seem (to me) to override reason and yield a (in my opinion) wacko dogmatic position. This restraint has to be maintained even when somebody’s (to me) wacko dogmatic position appears (to me) to reject the very Democratic tolerance that us keeping me form trying to force my position on him/her; it requires me not to press or argue or retaliate even when somebody calls me Satan’s Minion or Just Another Shithead Male, which forbearance represents the really outer and tooth-grinding limits of my own personal Democratic Spirit.

Wacko name-calling notwithstanding, I have encountered only one serious objection to this Pro-Life + Pro-Choice position. But it’s a powerful objection. It concerns not my position per se but certain facts about me, the person who’s developed and maintained it. If this sounds to you both murky and extremely remote from anything having to do with American usage, I promise that it becomes almost excruciatingly clear and relevant below.”

Does it ever. So let’s ignore the fact that Wallace is throwing himself a spectacular pity party here and – you know what, on second thought, let’s not. Wallace is fretting and sobbing and wringing his hands over the fact that sometimes people are mean to him in arguments about his objectively stupid position. Meanwhile, women are fucking dying from a lack of reproductive health care perpetuated by a tiny minority of zealots who have devoted their lives to a psychotic combination of fear and fetishization of vaginas.

And Wallace’s argument really is objectively stupid. The abortion debate has fuckall to do with whether you think abortion is a good thing or not. The idea that some people are actually in favor of abortions as such is literally an Onion article. The debate is about whether abortion ought to be available, and there’s no middle ground on that. It’s either practically possible to get an abortion, or it’s not. Based on Wallace’s description of his own opinions, it seems he wants abortion to be available but would always advise against getting one. This position is unambiguously pro-choice.

I really don’t think I’ve ever seen a better example of someone tying themselves up in knots by over-intellectualizing what is actually a very simple issue. Furthermore, Wallace is, once again, unaware of the relevant facts. There’s actually a rather famous essay arguing that abortion is morally permissible even if the abortee is assumed to be 100% human. But for all of Wallace’s concern about the issue, he never actually bothered to engage the relevant arguments. Working the whole thing out in his head was good enough for him.

–

The easy conclusion here is that Wallace was “too intellectual” and ignored the facts on the ground, which is partially true but not really an explanation. An intellectual approach is entirely compatible with the drawing of strong conclusions. For example, Peter Singer, whom Wallace cites in “Consider the Lobster,” makes an unequivocal moral utilitarian argument against meat-eating with disturbingly broad implications that remain controversial. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s essay on abortion, mentioned just above, is another example of using intellectual argument to support a radical position. Furthermore, Wallace was actually quite attentive to the facts on the ground; one of the things his work is known for is the way he vacuums up as much practical detail as possible to feed into his arguments. The problem is that he was often looking at the wrong facts; that is, facts that, correct or not, weren’t relevant.

As is hopefully obvious by now, all of this stuff isn’t just Wallace slipping up. The systematic errors in his approach were consistent, they had a cause, and that cause was Wallace’s tragic flaw.

(Part 3)