Current Events – Page 19 – Blue Ink Alchemy

Category: Current Events (page 19 of 91)

From The Vault: Why Take This Matters

I’m still shaking off the doldrums and getting myself back on track. While I make more steps towards that, please feel free to read over this post about one of the best initiatives I’ve ever had the pleasure of helping with, even as a source of moral and financial support. It’s important.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.

Some of the earliest, most indelible memories some of my generation has when it comes to video games involve taking a sword from an old man who just spoke those fateful words. “It’s dangerous to go alone.” The world is going to try and kill you. Monsters prowl in the shadows, ready to destroy your body and devour your dreams. Perils you won’t see coming are fully prepared to swallow you whole. You need to defend yourself. You must be prepared to combat your challenges and overcome your obstacles. “Take this.”

We didn’t know it at the time, but this wasn’t just advice that applied to the world of Hyrule. It applies to our world, too.

We may not have to deal with the extant threats in many video games, but the world is still going to try and kill you, spiritually if not physically. I’m not talking about religion specifically, but rather in terms of the human spirit. The singular and the extraordinary are far, far too often pushed and held down by society at large, and it’s easy to fall into a pattern of conformity and ‘normal’ behavior, just to get by. But not everyone can pull off acting ‘normal’. For some, it’s a daily challenge, and some days, it’s an hourly one.

I’ve both faced this struggle myself, and done my utmost to help others cope with it. It’s easy to think, in our darkest hours, that we’re facing these challenges alone. And it’s dangerous to go alone.

The fact is, however, that we are not.

Take This is, according to their site, “a charitable organization founded to increase awareness, education and empathy for those suffering from emotional issues, their families and greater institutions with the goal to eradicate the stigma of mental illness.” While not exclusively dealing with the gaming community, the founders work within that community, as journalists and organizers, and so focus a great deal of their outreach to gamers, through sharing stories via their website and holding panels at events like PAX.

I’m a little lucky, when you get right down to it. I share my stories all the time. I have some skill at articulating myself and the means to do it. I let myself take the time to breathe, to contemplate, and to share. Not everybody is so lucky. Not everybody feels they have a safe place to unburden themselves of the pain and anxiety and uncertainty and loneliness they feel.

And the fact is, everybody should have that.

That’s why Take This matters. They’re just getting started, and I want to see them grow. Their first PAX Prime panel last year was a great success, as was their first ever at PAX East 2014, and they’re returning to Boston next month (EDIT: it was another AMAZING panel). Their site is full of stories that have needed to be heard, they’re going to be looking to grow as much as possible, and they can’t do it alone. None of us should be alone in this fight. Our chances of survival are much greater if we face our challenges together.

The world is a dangerous and cold place. Emotions and mental imbalance can topple even the best of ideas when the world gets involved. It’s dangerous to go alone.

But you don’t have to be alone.

Take this.

Making Words Happen

December 2, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Writers are a curious breed, by and large. They can be very difficult to live with. They have a tendency to live inside their own heads. Over and above anything else, they are richly imaginative creatures that bring whole new worlds to life.

To make those worlds viable and accessible for an audience, a writer must put their imagination into words and assemble those words into a coherent narrative. Believe it or not, the words are the easy part. They exist in the writer’s brain like precious metal in the veins of a mine’s rock. They’re already there. They just have to get from the veins to the page.

This requires more than imagination. Making words happen requires perseverance. Crafting new stories and populating them with vibrant, believable characters is not a once-and-done sort of thing, except in the case of flash fiction. To hammer out a long narrative that will stick with audiences and have them coming back for more, a writer has to commit time, focus, and energy to the project every day, at least in some measure. Every word counts, and every letter matters.

Keep at it, writers. Don’t give up. Making words happen is what we do, and it’s something we need to do. Our stories are worth completion, because the world needs more stories that come from unique perspectives and bring entertainment and inspiration into the lives of others. Your stories are worth telling. Take the time and energy to tell them.

An Examination of Extremism

November 20, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

Courtesy leadershipdynamics.wordpress.com

We live in an increasingly interconnected world. It is not difficult to access information that can inform you of all sorts of points of view. It does, however, take time. And time is a precious thing when events are unfolding regarding a controversy or an otherwise unfortunate event. Snap judgements and knee-jerk reactions make for more inflammatory headlines – and more exciting reading.

The problem is that this leads to extremist thinking. Be a person firmly entrenched in one side of an issue, or the other, such entrenchment leads to antagonistic stances. Now, it’s easy to cast people who are using violence, intimidation, or group-based fear tactics as nothing but villainous thugs, and such methods of persuasion are always unnecessary, and any rational human being would agree to that. That is an easy admission to make, given the circumstances, and a lot of extremists have played lip service to that idea, but it is a lot more difficult to admit that extremism, even in opposition to terror, is wrong.

I’ve commented on the nature of polities before. It is actually somewhat rare for an entire polity to be monolithic in its composition. For the most part, people who have a similar viewpoint on an issue can and do vary wildly in how to approach that viewpoint and the best way to express it. On top of that, there are those who take up the banner of the polity in question but are in reality using it for entirely different goals than the polity’s leaders or expressed core values. Suffice it to say that once a movement begins, without strong leadership and defined goals, things can get very confused very quickly.

This is to be expected. We are, after all, talking about people.

People have hopes and dreams. They have fears and desires. They need food and water. They crave sex and sweets. They have passions they long to share, and embarrassing moments they long to forget. They’ll laugh and cry. They’ll argue and concede. They will get sick, bleed, grow old, and eventually die. And so will you.

I have a difficult time understanding how people can become involved with extremist points of view. Be it one extreme of a debate or the other, I find it a very bad idea to assume that everyone on the other side of the debate is either an absolutely deplorable creature or a total ignoramus. I find myself questioning why people, living breathing human beings with at least a measure of literacy and self-awareness, put themselves in positions that are entirely intractable. The best answer I can come up with – and I have no idea if this is the most accurate one or not – is laziness. They are just too lazy to imagine the other complexly. And I can understand that – I’ve withdrawn from arguments, myself, too exhausted or frustrated or confused to invest the time and energy to follow a logical line of thought. I think it happens to the best of us.

If I were able to give advice to people involved in a debate that I knew would be taken seriously and to heart, it would be this: Stop. Breathe. Think.

You can’t hear what the other person is saying if you keep talking. Taking a deep breath clears your head and opens your ears, allowing you the chance to process what you’re hearing. And once you process the words, you can try to discern meaning, and find ways to bridge the gap towards understanding. Even if you still disagree with what’s being said, you may have a better chance to find the means to express your disagreement without attacking the person with whom you disagree. Because that way lies ire, anger, bile, hatred, and even threats.

Too many people take the lazy shortcut to that end step. Don’t do that. The shortcuts lead nowhere constructive. To make the world a better place, to ensure change that matters, we have to take the long way. The higher road. And when you take those steps, it’s important to take your time. Stop. Breathe. Think.

Not only will you not come across as a lazy extremist douchebag, you just might understand another person’s point of view a bit more completely. And if more of us can do that, the world will be a better place for everyone – every human being – to live.

Lest We Forget

November 11, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

I know this is a rehash of a previous post. I’m not altering a word in or after the block quote. I believe that these ideas are worth repeating, because we’re talking about people who voluntarily walk into warzones and don’t necessarily walk back out; if they do, chances are, they will never be the same.

I tend to run a post that reads like this when a posting date falls on Memorial Day:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

We have the country we have today because people got pissed off enough to fight for it.

America’s military is based entirely on volunteer service. People enlist for various reasons, from pure-hearted desire to serve the country to paying for a college education. And those who can already afford college can embark upon a career as an officer right from the start. The important fact, though, is that none of it is compulsory. Nobody is making these young men and women sign up for service that could ultimately mean they’re going to die far from home, in some foreign land, possibly alone with no one to remember them save for a line item in a report listing them as “Missing In Action”.

Other countries compel their citizens to join the military from an early age. There’s no choice in the matter. Regardless of how you feel about your country, you’re going to be serving in its military. As much as I admire Heinlein, the idea of compulsory military service being the only route to citizenship is a pretty scary one. But unless I’m mistaken, no country has gone completely that far yet.

Here, though, every person who puts on that uniform, male or female, young or old, gay or straight, left or right, does so for the same reason. They want to serve. They chose to answer the call to duty. Nobody made them.
And if they died on a foreign shore, they did so as the ultimate result of that choice. As lonely, painful, cold and dark as it might have been for them, it is a deep hope of mine that they do not consider themselves forgotten.

We have not forgotten.

Read the rest here

It may seem we have forgotten to some veterans, though. If they make it home, they tend to bear scars, and not always obvious ones. It’s shamefully easier to sympathize with a soldier who’s lost a limb or suffered major facial trauma than it is one who seems intact in body but says nothing about what’s going on in his or her mind.

These are people who, because of a choice they made, have stared death in the face, and been told, ordered, demanded not to flinch.

We hold soldiers in high esteem. Most see them as brave or even fearless. But they’re human beings, just like you and me. They have our doubts, our fears, our weaknesses. They, like us, are mortal. They’re going to die, and some die on foreign shores because they’re told to be there.

They fight for us anyway, and that’s what makes them great, and worth remembering.

I don’t have any particular charity or cause to champion here, nor do I know how easily one can get to some place like Walter Reed to see what becomes of those who only partially make it home. All I ask is that you remember them, not just today, but every day.

The Truth About #GamerGate

November 10, 2014 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

“It’s actually about ethics in games journalism.”

To some, it’s an argument against inflammatory, despicable behavior that arises from and is associated with the GamerGate movement. To others, it’s the punchline of the bad joke the movement has become, in the light of threats of rape, damage, and even school shootings in protest of women speaking out. Evidence suggests that the movement has all of the markings and makings of a hate group. But hate groups tend to have a unified vision that, to the deranged, make perfect sense. Normally, you don’t see two narratives in a single group. You don’t have some saying the goals are one thing, and others acting in ways that completely undermine the legitimacy of the first. To this writer, it made no sense.

I backed away from the issue and looked at the bigger picture. What makes games journalism different from regular journalism? Reporters have had a very long tradition of seeking the truth, being offered rewards for hiding the truth, and risking a great deal in pursuit of the truth. Asking for ethics in journalism of all kinds is part of that tradition, and it hasn’t gone away. Even through the lens of comedy and satire – The Daily Show and The Colbert Report – people are on the lookout for peddlers of corruption and misinformation. But there’s not a lot of groundswell for that sort of lookout in general. Not with the sort of momentum GamerGate has had.

So, I put the question to some of those people. I was, frankly, surprised with the answers I got.

Now, it wasn’t the content of the answers that surprised me. It was the tone. I wasn’t expecting respect from people who use that hashtag. It got even stranger when I started putting questions to a young woman who is very proud to be a part of the movement.

I experienced what can only be described as a colossal amount of cognitive dissonance in the wake of these exchanges. This made sense. This was reasonable. This was, dare I say it, positive. I looked at the words in front of me, and then I looked at the words of others, from Chris Kluwe to Felicia Day, and I started to get a sinking feeling in my gut.

Are they talking to me like a human being because I’m a white heteronormative male?

Once the idea got into my head, I couldn’t shake it. It colored the majority of my interactions and I had to question everything I had just experienced. Too many people associated with the movement are rampant misogynists. I could not just ignore that fact and take it on good feelings that what I experienced was how they really behaved when they weren’t threatening to shoot up universities because they don’t like Anita Sarkeesian.

I must confess that, for a moment, I wanted to believe this. I really did. It seemed like there might be hope for the notion that this is, in fact, about ethics in games journalism. But I couldn’t hold onto that. Not for long.

Not when just one day later, I saw David Hill reporting on a teenage girl talking about her interest in game design. She had written about how GamerGate and other groups made her afraid to follow her dream. She was forced to delete her Twitter account and the article she’d written because of messages telling her she’s the problem, that feminism is at fault, and she’s irrational because GamerGate has had zero negative effect on things around them. A girl likely the same age as the one with whom I’d interacted.

The argument will likely be made that it wasn’t true Gaters saying those things, that the movement isn’t about harassment, so on and so forth. And that is if any argument is made in response to this article at all. Because it’s been written by a white heteronormative male. Even if I am a journalist, and a games journalist at that, I am not the target of GamerGate. I have not been doxxed, threatened, or even treated badly.

Somehow, that is even worse. If my question had been met with accusations of being a social justice warrior (I’m actually a social justice wizard, thank you very much) or implications that my mother performs sex acts for cash, at least that’d be consistent. But no: I was treated very differently from a Zoe Quinn or a Susan Arendt.

The origins of the movement are public and available. Its impact is palpable and overwhelmingly negative. Some in the community feel betrayed by the movement’s behavior, and many have an empathetic feeling of outrage at its treatment of women. So where does that leave people who are legitimately looking for ethics in journalism, and refuse to give up the tag?

It pains me to think that someone truly intelligent, truly well-meaning, and truly compassionate has been roped into the hype used to try and whitewash the movement. To such an individual, propaganda should be obvious and deplorable. Conspiracy theorists would put it that there is a deliberate smokescreen being used to try and obfuscate the true nature of every single person who uses that hashtag. I think the truth is far simpler, and far more terrifying.

Since human beings are complex and nuanced creatures, the movements they perpetuate are also complex and nuanced (for the most part: organized hate groups are not very complex). So, there is room for disparate narratives within a single polity. Especially when said polity is a disorganized, ill-defined, and relatively aimless one united under a label proposed by, at best, a very vocal and prominent public figure with inflammatory and very subjective opinions. The terrifying part is that some are so entrenched in their own intentions, positive though they might be, they will not divorce their quest for ethics from the majority of a movement. And the fact is, that majority behaves in a way that is not only unethical, but downright disturbing and deplorable. There are truly people within GamerGate who do not do this. Their intentions are good. They believe they can change the movement from within. And I want to believe in them so much that it breaks my heart.

It’s important to look at the facts. Look at where the movement started. Investigate the origins of its hashtag. See the results of the actions taken by those who carry its banner. Yes, there are some who speak in a positive way and convey earnestness in beliefs that are not objectionable. But the vast, vast majority speak and act in despicable ways, and their outlook and behavior casts a pall on the minority who do not, to the point that even an outside observer has to question positive interactions. This is not how gaming, and gamers, should be. This is wrong. This is dark. And it has to stop.

Category: Current Events (page 19 of 91)

From The Vault: Why Take This Matters

Making Words Happen

An Examination of Extremism

Lest We Forget

The Truth About #GamerGate

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