Going for Gold in the Race to the Bottom

When I was young, I was a fool; I thought the Olympics were a good thing. These days, reading the news that comes out of the United Kingdom puts me in the same frame of mind as watching a chemical train derailment in slow motion--there may be something oddly beautiful in the way so many tons of steel can dance when given the opportunity, but the end result isn't going to be pleasant for anyone around. Only a few days are left until the Summer Olympics get underway, and already the Games have provided an unparalleled view of what a twenty-first century police state really looks like.

You may have heard about some of the more glaring abridgements of Londoners' everyday freedoms: entire lanes reserved for use of the "Olympic family," which in practice means the bigshots of the International Olympic Commission and their corporate guests; businesses, like pubs looking to draw in a crowd to watch the events on their bigscreen, are restricted from advertising with terms even as innocuous as "2012 Games," thanks to starkly overzealous government legislation, and Olympic spectators can't even bring in potato chips in their original packaging--that is, unless they were made by McDonald's, Coca-Cola or Cadbury, the official Olympic sponsors who would evidently shrivel up and die if their advertising dominance was questioned. Nevertheless, the Olympics isn't just corporate brand policing festival or the world's largest showroom for modern security methodologies. It's also pioneering the enforcement of precrime--that is, official sanctions preventing people from doing things that the Powers That Be suspect they might possibly do. No word yet on whether they're getting their information from hairless precognitives, though.

It's cold comfort to Darren Cullen, though. Billed as a "professional graffiti artist" in the Guardian, Cullen has worked for major companies including Adidas, one of those Olympic sponsors, with the creation of advertising murals and so on. Nevertheless, earlier this week Cullen and three others alleged to be graffiti artists were arrested on charges of suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage - incidentally, that sounds like the sort of charge name I'd come up with to imply an out-of-control police state - and while none were charged, they were subjected to onerous bail conditions on their release. Namely, they cannot go near any Olympic venue, they cannot own unset paint, etching equipment, spray paint or other artists' tools, and outside of a tightly defined set of circumstances, they are forbidden from accessing "any railway system, including tubes and trams, or [being] in any train, tram, or tube station or in or on any other railway property not open to the public."

And these conditions last until November, well after the Olympics become nothing but a huge balance sheet liability and a massive throbbing hangover for the British taxpaying public.

Well, you see, freedom is all well and good, but in certain circumstances...

This is the first time I've heard of restrictions like this being handed down, so I don't know how common it is, but no matter what it's a terrible precedent to set or uphold. As someone who relies on a public railway system to get around, the prospect of such a senselessly limiting restriction being passed down is chilling. Bans from public transit make sense only in limited and relevant circumstances, such as a person who habitually hits the silent alarm strip for no reason or keeps starting fistfights on the platform. Not when the "crime," if there even is one in this circumstance, has nothing to do with the railway.

This shouldn't stand. Think of it this way - if people could be arrested on suspicion of some crime that had nothing to do with activities behind the wheel, immediately released, but barred by law from using their automobile, would that be reflective of a government that's responsive to the rights and liberties due to the people it serves? Or would it represent more a government out of control, thrashing about madly, casting suspicion and blame hither and yon in a feverish daze?

When I look at this, it isn't about justice or crime prevention at all. As far as I'm concerned, it's about control. It's a reminder that the agents of the state can ruin you, should they but feel the need to do so. It's yet another data point reinforcing my view of the United Kingdom as a land that's on a downhill slope toward a police state. I wouldn't be surprised to see the UK descend into velvet-gloved authoritarianism in my lifetime, because I keep seeing news like this. Harsh news for one of the crucibles of democracy.

Plotting Out Your Motivation

Not all narratives have to have a plot. While it's very highly recommended it's not one hundred percent mandatory, and this is how the literary canon gets things like Finnegans Wake, where things like "characters" and "story" emerge not from an ordinary reading, but from decades of analysis and argument by English professors, from swerve of shore and bend of bay and so on. Still, very few of us are of the caliber of James Joyce, able to produce something that is regarded as one of those weird classics of literature and which is nevertheless absolutely opaque. Beyond that, there are successful slice-of-life works, which don't necessarily have a plot so much as a series of events. No plot in real life, after all.

On the whole, though, plots are important when you're creating a story no matter what mechanism you're using it to create it - words, art, music, and so on. What's equally important is the motivation for the characters to move through the plot. Sure, on occasion it's understandable and believable for a character to be caught up in events, but a whole story of that is unsatisfying. The key to a good story is allowing a disentangled character to follow the plot for her own reasons. The necessity for choice is a fundamental part of a good plot, as it puts control of the situation into the hands of the character you're following; particularly when you're talking about a protagonist, you want to be in control of the situation. What you don't want to be is a puppet of outside events.

It's a lot easier to encounter this problem in the modern generation of video games, many of which are essentially interactive stories. It's still a new medium, only a few decades old, and so it's understandable that creators are still coming to grips with the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in it. While this doesn't apply universally, when it comes to games that are story-driven and advertise themselves as specifically role-playing games, I think the issue of motivation should be a key one to consider.

Take, for example, Fallout 3. Released in 2008, it was the long-awaited follow-up to the two original games of the late 1990s about survival, discovery, and justice in post-apocalyptic California. Ten years of technical refinement makes it stand apart substantially from its predecessors; while the original games used an isometric, overhead view with a turn-based battle system in which the echoes of rolling dice were never far away, Fallout 3 thrusts the player into the game with a default first-person perspective and a limited third-person viewpoint that owes far more to first-person shooters than to its RPG heritage. Granted, this is a popular mechanism today, and using that kind of viewpoint does not diminish the quality of a game's story - what it does do, for me at least, is increase my investment in the story. Ordering around the Vault Dweller or the Chosen One from somewhere high in the sky is one thing, but when you're looking through the Lone Wanderer's eyes, her story gains that immediacy as well.

If only the creators of the game had actually made a story worth that feeling.

This is actually the Arizona desert, but the Capital Wasteland looks pretty much exactly like this.

The biggest problem that I saw in Fallout 3's plot was that most of the world that Bethesda created for it was wasted. When you boil it down not only is it simple, but it's extremely easy to end up on a treadmill straight to the ending without even realizing you're on it. The game's plot begins with you looking for your father and ends with you saving the Wasteland, and while there's a wealth of additional content scattered across the ruins of D.C. there is very little reason, in terms of plot and motivation, why your character would ever find it. The whole "find your father" plot is actually very straightforward - in the first town there's a guy who tells you he went somewhere else, and when you arrive there there's a guy who tells you he went to another place, and once you arrive at that place you get sent to where your father is. There's no misdirection, no uncertainty, no discovery - the only difficult bits are ensuring you have enough money or a sufficiently silver tongue to get the people with the proper knowledge to give it to you.

Where's the in-story reason to wander around the Wasteland? It's not like you have to assemble the fragments of a puzzle leading to where your dad is. There isn't one. It's a game of connect the dots, but following up on the non-plot content is basically your character saying "all right, I know where to go to find my dad so that things will be comfortable and familiar and the way they were before," and instead deciding to traipse around the blasted Wasteland with two hundred pounds of weapons and armor, getting poisoned by radscorpions and shot at by super mutants, because... because.

The first time I played through Fallout 3, I obediently followed the story because I figured "hey, Bethesda went to the trouble of building this huge-ass open world, it's not like they're going to waste ninety percent of it." Then I realized I was on the last mission of the main campaign. I'm thankful I bought the Game of the Year addition, which includes the extra downloadable content that was released after the original game, because I would have been pissed as hell if the game had ended the way it did originally.

I know that not everyone will see things the way I do - but role-playing video games are a new mode of storytelling, with a great capacity to tell stories. I don't like it when that capacity isn't used to its utmost.

Approaching NDAA-game

You may have seen it whipping around the Internet recently in yet another example of near-powerless fury: the United States' National Defense Authorization Act for the 2012 fiscal year, or just NDAA. It's a bill that has been passed and revised and passed again every year since the 1960s to codify how the Department of Defense can spend all those hundreds of billions of dollars that get shoveled its way. What's got people riled up this time is an innocuous passage buried deep within its six hundred and sixty-six pages; a passage that would allow the United States military to arrest and imprison civilians anywhere in the world without charge or trial. It's telling that a lot of the opposition to this is specifically focused on the idea that it could be American civilians arrested and imprisoned; presumably, it's A-OK for Eagleland to throw as many foreigners as it wants into a deep, dark hole and never let them out.

The problem, though, is that it's not honest. I've read the bill, and it doesn't have the balls to come out and say exactly that. No, it's all couched in legalese that appears designed to be as impenetrable and ordinary-seeming as possible - impenetrable enough that even though the bill is dated June 22, its potential implications have only been realized fairly recently. The big issues are with Section 1036 - but don't take my word for it; read it yourself.

SEC. 1036. PROCEDURES FOR STATUS DETERMINATION OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.

(a) In General- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report setting forth the procedures for determining the status of persons captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) for purposes of section 1031.

(b) Elements of Procedures- The procedures required by this section shall provide for the following in the case of any unprivileged enemy belligerent who will be held in long-term detention under the law of war pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force:

(1) A military judge shall preside at proceedings for the determination of status of an unprivileged enemy belligerent.

(2) An unprivileged enemy belligerent may, at the election of the belligerent, be represented by military counsel at proceedings for the determination of status of the belligerent.

(c) Report on Modification of Procedures- The Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report on any modification of the procedures submitted under this section. The report on any such modification shall be so submitted not later than 60 days before the date on which such modification goes into effect.

(d) Appropriate Committees of Congress Defined- In this section, the term 'appropriate committees of Congress' means--

(1) the Committee on Armed Services and the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate; and

(2) the Committee on Armed Services and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives.

And now I've gone all crosseyed.

So, yeah, it doesn't come out and say "this bill will let us arrest and indefinitely detain civilians, including American civilians." You've got to do some detective work to figure that out, back to the Authorization for Use of Military Force - one of the US government's first responses to September 11, enacted exactly one week later and thus not exactly the result of sober second thought. The factor at issue is, as I understand it, here:

Section 2 - Authorization For Use of United States Armed Forces

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

This isn't a case of "the US government is going to start herding civilians into internment camps" - things are rarely that black and white. No, this is just a door creaking open, a door that many people hoped had been bolted so securely it'd stay shut forever. When you take these two chunks of legal vomit together, what you get is a legal process for anyone to be tried and held in long-term detention by a military court so long as the President determines that they "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the September 11 attacks. Now, if that had the force of law to it, if it had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the detainee was involved in such a way, it'd be one thing.

But it isn't. As it's written, that determination lies with the President of the United States. Maybe you think Obama's a nice guy, he'd never do that... maybe you're right. But Obama's not going to be President forever. Come 2013 or 2017 there's going to be someone else behind the Resolute desk, someone with their own set of goals and priorities. Someone who might find it particularly advantageous to determine that a person or persons - say, maybe the leaders or media faces of some protest movement, or a gadfly journalist - is, through their actions, aiding the September 11 attacks; helping the terrorists win even years later.

Perhaps you think I'm off base; maybe you think that this sort of thing would never happen. It could be that you're right - I'd like to live in that sort of world. Nevertheless, the government likes to run by the letter of the law, and the letter of the law is on track to giving the President more power to detain than any President should rightfully have.

Freedom to Move

Every weekday morning around 9 Pacific Time, the day's transportation headlines from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Metro Library and Archive show up in my inbox. Over the past couple of months, ever since the midterm elections in the United States ended the Democratic Party's dominance in Congress, I've been seeing more and more stories about transit initiatives encountering heavier and heavier resistance in government committees that are now dominated, or led by, Republican Party lawmakers. Witness the case of planned intercity rail projects in Wisconsin and Ohio, where newly-elected Republican governors moved to cancel these programs.

Highways aren't getting the same rap - something that, to completely honest, comes as absolutely no surprise considering the strength of the Republicans' grip on the wheel. The open road has always carried connotations of freedom, the idea that people can just pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. While the truth is significantly more complicated, the simple meme of "roads mean freedom" is deeply entrenched in the United States' cognitive ecology.

The real barometer of freedom is choice. The infrastructural decisions of the past several decades, decisions which not only continue to echo but are echoed today, prioritized the development of highway networks over railway and urban transit expansion in both the United States and Canada. But we can't just blithely assume that what has held true for the past few decades will likewise continue uninterrupted into the future. We can't assume that people will always be able to pack up their car and go where they want, when they want, how they want. What if, for starters, they can't afford the gas?

A population's movements can be controlled by means far subtler than the internal passports demanded by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and which are still used in Russia today. We've already spent decades engineering our society around the idea of automotive mobility - it wouldn't take much now to use that dependence against us.

A China Eastern Airlines A340-600 taxis toward the runway at Vancouver International Airport

Imagine a future where the railways pull nothing but freight between cities... a future where oil shocks have come and gone, and the price of gas has reached such heights that the kind of intercity driving common today simply isn't economical anymore, or a future where the highways have been made limited-access only. It wouldn't be too hard to justify in the wake of, say, a national emergency. Sure, you could still go point-to-point by air; but air travel is the easiest method of transit for governments to control. I would not be surprised - but it would disturb me greatly - to live to see a future where air travel is far more regimented and controlled than it is now, where very few people fly anywhere other than government-approved sun destinations because the pre-ticketing background checks are just too much of a hassle. If you can't afford to drive, you can't get on a plane, and there aren't any trains you can take from one city to another - then how free are you, really?

There always need to be options in how people can get from point A to point B. In business, that competition is necessary to prevent consumer gouging. In government, it's just as necessary - to head off one potential mode of oppression and control.

The Characters of Command

It can be easy to forget the importance of the chain of command. Establishing who can give orders to which people is of vital necessity in any organization or bureaucracy, whether you're talking about one that runs a country or one that you can fit in a broom closet. What's really important about it is the establishment of responsibility: no matter what, in every situation, there should always be someone who an order can be traced back to, who could theoretically stand up and acknowledge that a specific action was taken at their behest. Otherwise, the system is ripe for abuse by people whose ambitions outstrip their authority - and it happens, more often than you'd want to think.

When I was in Los Angeles in December, one of the attractions were the costumed characters along Hollywood Boulevard: everyone from Superman to Spider-man and Stormtroopers to Captain Jack Sparrow were there, mingling with the tourists and posing for photographs. Which, really, I can understand. Costumes aren't free, particularly the kind of costumes that characters in popular entertainment generally end up wearing. I don't recall ever having been accosted by a costumed entertainer on the Boulevard; it's a busy street, and there were always plenty of tourists who had no issue with being obvious tourists to compete for the characters' attention. I'll admit that one data point is just an anecdote, but it's all I've got.

Not so anymore. Back in June, though I didn't hear about it until yesterday, the Los Angeles Police Department launched an operation to arrest and evict the costumed characters from Hollywood Boulevard, in what KTLA News described as a "'zorro' tolerance policy." The most probing issue for me, learning about this situation, was "why?" After all, it's the most important question, and a question we should *always* be asking of authority figures. An August article in Curbed LA, detailing a suit filed against the city by some of the arrested characters, suggests that the solicitation of tips was an issue - even though the charges, it seems, never went ahead. At first I thought it could be an issue of characters being masked and not easily identifiable, but they've arrested Superman as well - and without his Clark Kent glasses, there's no super-hypnosis making you think he looks different than he actually does.

As long as he stays away from Hollywood Boulevard he should be fine.

The big problem for me came up toward the end of KTLA's report, where an arresting officer indicated that the order to remove the characters came from the Los Angeles City Council - even though a city council member interviewed by KTLA supposedly knew nothing about it. Not only that, the LAPD itself didn't know where the order was coming from.

Well, if you've got no idea whose word this is on, if your organization is so convoluted that it can't disseminate a simple message, I think that's the sort of situation when an order shouldn't be followed. Verification of orders is absolutely important! If it's possible during a war, why not in day-to-day city business? Is this just another example of a desire to act going beyond the authorization to act?

We can't allow leadership to become some kind of weird ontological paradox; directives must always be created by someone who can be made to explain them and take responsibility for them.

Blizzard's GIFT

For the last fifteen years, Blizzard Entertainment has been one of the most beloved companies of the video gaming industry. Their catalog since the release of Warcraft II is success after success - Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III, and the reigning king of the massively multiplayer online RPG field, World of Warcraft. I recall many good times in the late 1990s spent on Battle.net, Blizzard's multiplayer gaming framework. Even their acquisition by Activision a few years ago didn't cramp their style, since their new bosses weren't stupid enough to think they knew how to run Blizzard better than Blizzard. At least, that's what it seemed like at first.

Now, Blizzard is dealing with one of the first large outbreaks of anger among its customer base that I can remember, thanks to its newly-announced Real ID forum identification system. Blizzard describes it as "a completely voluntary and optional level of identity that keeps players connected across all of Battle.net." If you've never heard of it, it's simple - right now, posters on Blizzard's World of Warcraft forums can post under the name of any of their in-game characters; once Real ID is rolled out, there will be no option but to post under the name that appears on the credit card that is paying for the Battle.net account that's making the post. For now, this applies only to World of Warcraft accounts - other games haven't been folded into this system of forced identification yet. Nevertheless, with this precedent set, it's only a matter of time.

When I first heard about this initiative a few days ago, my first thought was that Blizzard was that Blizzard was trying to beat John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, first elaborated by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik of the webcomic Penny Arcade back in 2004 - a commentary on Internet culture that's genius in its simplicity. Blizzard's official comments seem to support this, as they claim to be changing the nature of the system in order to "contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven't been connected before."

Personally, thanks but no thanks. I like my veil of anonymity. It's one of the bedrock principles that makes the Internet what it is - and, I think, that's what might really be at the core of the issue. After thinking on this some more, this goes beyond forum names. What this looks like to me is one of the strongest signals yet that the great, freewheeling "frontier era" of Internet culture is under siege.

If I want you to know who I am, I'll bloody well tell you.

There have always been people who conducted business online under their own names. It was common in the days of Usenet, when the wired community was small and tight-knit, but when the World Wide Web exploded into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, millions of new Internetters flooded in and upended the original social mores. By the time I got my first home internet connection, back in 1998, many of the patterns that endure today had been set. Prime among those was the forum handle - a name you chose for yourself, another identity with which you could express yourself freely. Even then there were those people who chose to post under their true names, but at the core it was their choice.

While the "Wild West" nature of the Internet is, I think, one of its greatest strengths, it's not something that's idolized everywhere. Governments and corporations, for example, would love to parcel up the online wilderness into nice, neat, manicured lots - governments to control and monitor their populace, and corporations to sell, sell, sell! Unrestrained freedom is a threat to them, because the point-to-point communication that the Internet makes possible the diminution and degradation of their authority.

The saving grace is that in this particular situation, there's an easy way for people to register their discontent with it - vote with their feet. I've heard rumors that World of Warcraft account cancellations have been spiking in the few days since this was announced, and if I had one, I would be cancelling it too. For that matter I'm reconsidering my potential purchase of Starcraft II later this month, a game I've been waiting twelve years for.

I realize that this may be weird coming from someone who posts under his own name and face. The point is that to do so is my choice - and as James Alan Gardner wrote in Ascending: "Deliberate choices are the only sacred things in the universe. Everything else is just hydrogen."