“ Racism, Sexism, and Gaming’s Cruel Optimism ”

Lisa Nakamura

As game scholar Ian Bogost writes, video games are procedural media; they fundamentally index user activity to the computer’s programmed responses to that input. They are algorithmic. And while the algorithms or set of rules that many Americans believe have governed access to the “good life” — defined as job security, a comfortable retirement, the right to be safe and secure and free from violence — have proven themselves broken, games appeal all the more because they embody this very promise. Thus, gamers’ intense attachment to games reflects the opposite of “ guilty pleasure, ” much less “time-wasting.

”

In a viciously neoliberal economy, gaming feels like a virtuous pleasure, for games reward player labor, while, in contrast, labor in the real world is often undervalued, often treated as surplus or even as worthless. 

Though Berlant [public worlds are affect worlds] [affects of belonging: foreclosure and flourishing - affective commons] [noone ever willingly abandons a libidinal position] [the desire for a world - a world you can trust with your non-sovereignty]  does not write about video games in her work, the period of U. S. culture she examines in Cruel Optimism overlaps with the rise of video games as a mass medium, and her description of cruel optimism describes gaming’s dynamic in interesting new ways. As she writes, “optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving”

Games make vividly visible what transformation might look like. The strict procedurality of games both satisfies and ignites desires for fairness in the context of a U.S. culture that is patently unfair, particularly for racial minorities and women. The attachment to games can be a cruel one for all players, but especially for those who are subject to even more unfair proceduralities and forms of systematic discrimination in real life. 

What can game studies learn from queer theory and critical ethnic studies as practiced by scholars such as Berlant, who do not study games but are centrally concerned with questions of nation, desire, attachment, feeling, and identity? There is much at stake in bringing this kind of work to bear on the state of video games and race, especially as moments of racial and gendered violence coalesce around the cultural debates surrounding gaming’s famously uncivil cultures. 

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antwork

Typically in normal conditions, humans see humans as humans, animals as animals and spirits(if they see them) as spirits; however animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals(as prey) to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animals (predators). By the same token, animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture-  they see their food as human food (jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish, etc.), they see their bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws, beaks etc.) as body decorations or cultural instruments, they see their social system as organized in the same way as human institutions are (with chiefs, shamans, ceremonies, exogamous moieties, etc.).  This 'to see as' refers literally to percepts and not analogically to concepts, although in some cases the emphasis is placed more on the categorical rather than on the sensory aspect of the phenomenon.

Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism
Author(s): Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 469- 488

zerowork

https://thesebonesofmine.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/guest-post-an-archaeologist-an-anthropologist-and-an-anarchist-walk-into-a-bar-by-stuart-rathbone/

Ri - to cut with something toothed

 

walworth sunday

anthropometry

 

NEGENTROPY

Willard Gibbs’ 1873 available energy (free energy) graph, which shows a plane perpendicular to the axis of v (volume) and passing through point A, which represents the initial state of the body. MN is the section of the surface of dissipated energy. Qε and Qη are sections of the planes η = 0 and ε = 0, and therefore parallel to the axes of ε (internal energy) and η (entropy) respectively. AD and AE are the energy and entropy of the body in its initial state, AB and AC its available energy (Gibbs free energy) and its capacity for entropy (the amount by which the entropy of the body can be increased without changing the energy of the body or increasing its volume) respectively.

In a note to What is Life? Schrödinger explained his use of this phrase.

“

[...] if I had been catering for them [physicists] alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. It is the more familiar notion in this context. But this highly technical term seemed linguistically too near to energy for making the average reader alive to the contrast between the two things.

”

Indeed, negentropy has been used by biologists as the basis for purpose or direction in life, namely cooperative or moral instincts.

#archmf

"Waiting as working" is one of the strongest legacies cinema has as a political and social mechanism,
aut

Elsaesser: 5 types of energy-movement in cinema.

http://www.thomas-elsaesser.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=41&Itemid=72

scanning the folkton drums

"Work' rather than 'labour', our ancestors' archaic occupation, which produced these objects, had concealing them from human eyes as its extravagant goal. The paradox appears to us alone. Turned towards the dead, intended for the dead, these creations were meant to be restored to them: sent back to the invisible, they were in this sense, literally, 'sacrificed'. But, in actualising that sacrifice, they were permeated with the power to which one sacrificed, the power of life and death. And even when it was displayed, the sacred work was not meant to be sampled by the eyes of the living, as is now accepted in our modern museumized culture. When they found their way into the world of the visible, these man-made artefacts continued to intercede with the invisible powers, to transpose their virtues to the living. That was their sacred logic.

Kristeva / The Severed Head/ Capital Visions / pp9-10

women work

 

max liebermann

 

color-photography-of-early-1900s-paris

endless wedgwood glass animals

one after the other

For Aristotle, the ways in which bees construct their hive in order to shelter their honey and youth, is parallel with the method in plants that produce leaves in order to surround and protect their fruits. Instinctive dispositions in animals like the construction of a hive, the construction of a nest, are comparable to certain modes of growth, which, have a visible finality in plants. What animals do by various movements such as the way bees construct their hive and benefit from the honey comb inside, is the construction of a structure comparable to what we see develop in the growth of a plant, a process with a view towards generation, reproduction. The animal and vegetal world are different, but there is a functional identity.. between these distinct operatory modes. In the less developed, least differentiated animals, the functions that liberate and define other animal forms such as imagination, anticipation. This phantasia aisthetike does not exist in ants worms, or bees, states Aristotle... They work and construct like a plant grows. The society of ants or the society of bees constructs its hive like a plant grows and constructs its branches and leaves during its development. This is where instinct appears. Instinct is a certain faculty of constructing as if it were a way of developing, like that of a plant. What is instinct in animals, is, in plants, the fact of growing in such and such a way, of developing a certain foliar scheme, formula, of the given vegetal form, with very specific characteristics. Consequently, instinct, in as much as it is an operatory mode of construction of a hive or an anthill, instinct is equivalent to a structure of development. It is specific. Instinct is part of specificity, it is a drive in animals and more specifically social animals, which is equivalent to growth defined by specific lines in the plant.

Two Lessons on Animal and Man / Simondon / Univocal Publishing 

They alone hold children in common: own the roofs

of their city as one: and pass their life under the might of the law.

They alone know a country, and a settled home,

and in summer, remembering the winter to come,

undergo labour, storing their gains for all.

For some supervise the gathering of food, and work

in the fields to an agreed rule: some, walled in their homes,

lay the first foundations of the comb, with drops of gum

taken from narcissi, and sticky glue from tree-bark,

then hang the clinging wax: others lead the mature young,

their nation’s hope, others pack purest honey together,

and swell the cells with liquid nectar:
there are those whose lot is to guard the gates,

and in turn they watch out for rain and clouds in the sky,

or accept the incoming loads, or, forming ranks,

they keep the idle crowd of drones away from the hive.

virgil georgics, book 1V

The thirde tractate of the offices of the comyn peple. The fyrst chapitre is of the office of the labourers and werkemen.

This booke conteyneth. iiii. traytees/ The first traytee is of the Invencion of this playe of the chesse/ and conteyneth. iii. chapitres.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Game and Playe of the Chesse, by Caxton

The Chronocyclegraph

The technique was developed by Frank Gilbreth and his wife, Lillian in the early 20th century to improve work methods. The couple employed time-lapse photography to reduce a complete work cycle to the shortest and most efficient sequence of gestures.

To look for this optimal "relationship of human effort to the volume of work that the effort accomplishes", they attached a camera to a timing device and photographed workers performing various tasks. The motion paths were traced by small lamps fastened to the worker's hands or fingers.

From image verso: "Left hand of drill press operator 'Positioning after transportation' (this study resulted in cutting the time in halves)." Machinist with light showing hand movements, circa 1915. Collection: Frank B. Gilbreth Motion Study Photographs (1913-1917). Repository: The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives