Fantasy Nursery Rhymes

We tell nursery rhymes to children to impart morals and enforce cultural values on them. I got to thinking that even shared stories might be altered slightly to fit others' values. Take, for example, Goldilocks and the three bears. It's told differently even in our own world context, but in a fantasy world, it would likely be different between different races (species?). These aren't meant to be definitive.

[I think we all know what a human looks like without a picture]

Humans: Natural explorers. Goldilocks comes across a cabin in the forest and knocks on the door. When no one answers, she walks in. She tries the porridge she finds on the table. Too hot, too cold, just right. After finishing the bowl, she sits in several chairs she finds. Too big, also too big, just right, but not sturdy enough. The chair breaks and Goldilocks goes upstairs to try to find some respite after her hearty meal. She finds three beds. Too hard, too soft and finally just right. When the bears who own the cottage arrive on the scene, they exclaim indignation and find Goldilocks in the smallest bear's bed. They scare her away. The End.

Elves: Ancient beings who are at ease with nature. Goldyelf's story progresses much the same, though she waits far longer before entering the house and all the stew is cold. When the bears arrive, she hears them with her keen ears and hides away the broken chair before they can find it. She communes with the beasts and negotiates her way out of the situation.

Orcs: Larger humanoids who value strength and ferocity. Goldyorc's story progresses the same as Goldilock's, but she favors the chairs and beds a size larger. Since she spends less time searching for the perfect chair and bed, she gets more rest. When the bears show up, she is more prepared to face them and battles the largest one to the death a leg from the broken chair then skins and wears its pelt after the other two bears flee. Goldyorc's furs keep her warm on the long trek back to her mountain clan.

Dwarf: Stoic people whose greed is as legendary as their appetites. Goldidwarf eats all the porridges, breaks into the pantry and packs herself a bag to go. She spies the bear's vodka and drinks herself into such a state that she does not care about beds and chairs and promptly falls asleep on the floor where she is found by the bears and thrown out into the snow where she gets frostbite on all her toes before she wakes up.

Gnomes: Diminutive and crafty people with noses as sharp as their minds. Goldignome takes one whiff of the porridge and decides it needs a pinch of clove and nutmeg, adding some from her pockets where she stores a variety of spices. She eats one bowl, tries all the chairs and breaks the last just as Goldilocks did. But rather than go to sleep, Goldignome repairs the chair, improving on it tremendously. She barely finishes in time for the bears to return. They find what she has done and aren't even mad at her for breaking in, especially when she adds some pizazz to their porridge as well.

Bright Horizons

I’ll come clean. When I built my computer, instead of shelling out for windows, I simply installed the operating system from the disk my friend had used for his computer. This meant that I couldn’t verify it, because the product key could validate only one copy.

This caused some problems. My desktop would revert to a black screen with a small message in the corner reading “this copy of windows is not genuine” after a day. Fine, no big deal. The real backbiter was the pop-up helpfully informing me that I “may be the victim of software counterfeiting.” Thanks.

This pop-up was given high priority by the computer of course, so any games I was playing would move to the background when it reared its head. Many games don’t automatically pause, but the controls are suspended, so I’d watch as enemies surrounded and killed me. Fullscreen was unplayable, so I always saw the menu at the bottom.

This was somewhat embarrassing, as I enjoy games with local coop modes, and don’t want to have to explain that my computer is a bit janky to someone playing a game for the first time with me.

But it’s fine now. I’ve gone straight, cleaned up my act. I bought a key online. No more lunging in panic for the mouse to click on the game window before a monster devours my friends or myself. Hallelujah.

 

Broforce now in full force.

No more will James Brond or the Boondock Bros from Broforce live in fear of freezing up and being unable to perform. Broforce may still be a difficult game of twitchy triggers and explosive chain reactions, but without hiccups in fifteen minute intervals, I can focus all of my anxiety on keeping track of my bros.

Cortex Command is far more attractive in fullscreen now.

In Cortex Command, your soldiers fight on autopilot, but if you’re commanding them, they’ll cede control to the player. So when I’m jetpacking over entrenched enemies, I don’t have to worry about my soldier giving up on life and falling into their blazing gun-barrels.

Gauntlet, smoother than ever.

The worst offender on the list is the fiercely competitive cooperative game Gauntlet. On certain levels the Grim Reaper himself shows up to chase your band of heroes and slays in one touch. Halt the controls for a moment and you can kiss your progress goodbye. No more!

My adventuring companions have already thanked me. I should have bought it sooner. The kicker is that it cost around seventy bucks instead of the couple hundred I had believed it to cost.

The Snakeskin

Garden Systems and I exchanged emails two months ago after they read my review of Apple’s iSkin. GS offered me a review model of their line of biological suits, and after the fun I had in my iSkin, I couldn’t turn another down.

            When the Snakeskin arrived three days ago, the box smelled of yeast and was plastered with green Garden Systems logos. A booklet affixed to the top of the cardboard read “READ FIRST.” Inside it, I was informed that I would not be able to wear the suit for 48 hours, and must first allow it to fully mature. Like the iSkin, this involved a skin and blood sample for the suit, though I didn’t understand the long wait. It promised a few more things that Apple’s second skin had, including expanded sensory suites, reduced chance of toxic buildup in the blood, and a recycling system that sounded like a turbo-charged compost bin.

            I opened the package, shared DNA with the shriveled lump inside, and arranged the chrysalis with the nutrient bladders inside the box. I’ll admit it was fun. Something like the joy you got as a kid from gimmicky chemistry sets that make silvery goo. No extraneously challenging tasks, and an exhaustive guide made the setup a breeze. Its lack of integrated networking hardware meant all the syncing problems I’d had with the iSkin were non-issues. This probably should have been a red flag.

            While I waited in anticipation, I drew a picture of how I imagined I might look in the suit.

            The thing cautioned that anything more than the included undergarments would interfere with the bonding process. I’ll spare you the photo my boyfriend took of that though. It’s not flattering. Garden Systems could have mimicked any number of styles, but they opted for speedos.

            The bonding process was admittedly easier than the iSkin. It smelled like wet dirt, which has always been a calming odor for me. Unfortunately that’s where the pros end. When Garden Systems said that the  Snakeskin would be revolutionary, they were really saying “everything’s new and we had to invent it all ourselves to avoid Apple’s patents.”

            First, the suit is snug, as all of their kind are expected to be. But being particularly organic, the thing also has an independent heart rate. Its pulse is apparently supposed to sync rates with the user’s but I guess that feature hasn’t been fine tuned. Others may not have as much of an issue with this, but I couldn’t stand it. Like when someone bounces their leg quickly on the other side of the couch during a movie, it gave me incredible anxiety.

            The expanded sensory suite was a treat, and I could locate neighbors in my apartment tower through the walls. It gave me an awful headache though, and really didn’t improve much on the iSkin’s helmet display. I felt dirty using it and quickly switched it off.

            The recycling system was fun, and I spent a few hours finding things in my fridge to feed it, but not long after the fish went in I realized my mistake. Like compost bins, it wasn’t equipped to handle meats. The smell stayed with it til the end of the week long trial period. It intensified near the end, but that was probably a quirk of the suit digesting itself.

            While inside it, the fingertips are quite sensitive and completely capable of operating touch screens, but they pick up on the electrical activity in them and the feedback is much like feeling a leg go to sleep. Not fun coupled with its lack of networking. Instead of executing a search quickly, as I did with the iSkin (thanks Siri), I had to run into the other room and ask my boyfriend to do it.

            The rotting lump is stinking up the apartment now becoming the most expensive lump of compost I’ve ever wrinkled my nose at. Better to go with Apple’s sleeker iSkin.

In Luna Bob’s blog post about the damaging effects that stereotypes and gender expectations have on male characters that play the role of savior for distressed damsels, she draws our attention to the inconsistency between the improving social climate for women and the stagnating sphere of men. She lays the groundwork for the idea that violence is romanticized by the physical depictions of men in games, and that this is damaging to male gamers. Beyond just that, the actions engaged in by male heroes enforce harmful ideals of behavior. Physically violent male characters in games do not make gamers into murderers, but they can inspire internal tension in many gamers between what we tout as the ultimate signs of success for the ideal man and what is legal within society.

            In the real world it is illegal to dismember our enemies when they bad-mouth our mothers, but within the worlds of videogames, violence is the go-to solution for all problems. When you are betrayed by Zeus do you appeal to a council of other Gods? No, you get two big honking swords and go around systematically obliterating half of the mythological pantheon of the Greeks. When the Locusts begin evacuating their underground world in the face of a toxic flood, do we provide a scenario in which the humans offer means for the Locusts to integrate into the sunlit world? No, we wage war to the last men and women standing. Heck, in PacMan we encourage players to get vengeance by giving them large point bonuses for eating the ghosts who’ve been hunting them all game. Now there are some games that do encourage peaceful success, but those are not the ones that I am speaking of, and they are in the minority, especially of games marketed to males, who developers believe are only interested by the body-armor and bullets of most big-name titles. If society shows that this is the most ideal way to manage problems in videogames, it should be unsurprising when males romanticize violent problem solving.

            This seems to clash with our societal ideals of peaceful conflict resolution. Violence is strictly prohibited by law, is it not? It is, but only through necessity. We cannot effectively run a country and operate within it if we expect to be ruthlessly butchered when we accidentally bump into someone’s car on the road. People would never leave their homes in anything less than suits of armor or tanks. This necessity exists in tandem with a prevailing societal fantasy of violence. We love our guns, are enthusiastic about kicking terrorists’ butts and largely support the death penalty. We do want to resolve our conflicts with violence, but we are blocked from it legally. It is not that videogames have begun this obsession with violence; it is that they help to perpetuate it. In an effort to combat this, we applaud the smart citizens and intelligence achievers within our country, telling our children to grow up and get an education so that they can be like them. We divert the idea of physical success, into an idea of mental success so that we can operate within society safely.

            Videogames have attempted to shore up their social standing and appeal by claiming that they value intelligence as well. Unfortunately when designers attempt to utilize this ideal in gameplay, it usually just means that excessive force is exerted in specific locations, thus serving only to complicate the violence rather than replace it with legitimately intelligent solutions. It’s so common that a trope has developed concerning creatures significantly more powerful than the hero: shoot for the glowing eyes. Even characters that are said to be intelligent rarely exercise this in any meaningful way. Kratos, protagonist of the God of War games, was an excellent commander of the Spartan army, according to game lore, a position that would require plenty of strategic skills, including planning maneuvers, interpersonal skills to maintain the morale of troops, and management of supply chains.  All of these skills seem to only serve Kratos in his ability to locate and attack weak areas on monstrously oversized enemies. Here he is utilizing the only tool in his toolbox that is presented in game:

           Image courtesy of Annick

            While game characters show violence as the ultimate solution through their actions, they also encourage violent ideals through their physical appearance. Muscles are attractive to us because they are a physical sign of power. Players enjoy success, and often a hero character is depicted in a manner that promises future success in the form of current power, usually taking the shape of excessive musculature. In this way, muscles on a character are promised power, even when the character is said to be in a weak position. This implies that developers believe male gamers would not think a character as appealing if they were anything less than visual avatars of violence. They, especially the bulging melon-biceps on display in the Gears of War and God of War franchises, are billboards on male bodies that shout to all who see them that their bearers have the ability to inflict destruction on their surroundings. The prevalence of these images in popular games and other media tells men that this is really the only true sort of power, and that men who are not physically over-developed are not powerful. There is a reason that weight lifters are stereotyped as overly aggressive “meat-heads,” and who can blame them for being so, when all they have done is better internalized this prevailing social ideal in the same way that game heroes have done.

            So lets take stock of what ingredients have been added to the pot so far; perhaps the problems with our potpourri will become clear. There’s an impossible expectation of men to be powerful only by being powerfully built, a belief that “smart” means excessively violent in very specific scenarios, a presiding display of violence as the master tool in any problem-solving arsenal, and a society that has made violence illegal. I think I can see the stew starting to bubble. You smell that aroma? That’s the smell of millions of men being torn between what is shown as the right way to solve their problems, the ideal and permanent solution to every dissatisfaction, and the rules, which prohibit them from enacting these skills that they are told to foster. I am not claiming that games make boys into murderers; I am claiming that violent games create tension inside boys between what they are shown and what they are allowed. I highly doubt that this can have positive effects.

Viewing Racism Through Skyrim

                  Skyrim is a land of blatant racism and bigotry, especially against elves and beastfolk. The player is confronted with these topics in an effort to build the history and tensions of the world in a more believable way and it does add what feels like a living history to the game, as many forums have discussed extensively online. No one however, seems to have discussed Skyrim's role as a game that not only promotes an equitable stance on vastly different races and reveals players’ inherent aptitude for seeing past negative racial biases, but also teaches us how fundamentally juvenile racism in all of its forms truly is, and that it negatively affects all parties involved. The open-minded, blank-canvas approach that players take to fantasy races in games is fundamental to the development of more understanding worldviews that allow players to gain the most from their playing experience and can translate into their real-world interaction with different peoples. 

A list of all playable races in Skyrim. Image courtesy of Mark Ryan.

                    Race is not a deciding factor for eventual play styles or game outcomes, but it is important that the player gets to choose between them so that they can feel as if they are more invested in the identity that they have chosen for themselves. This in turn will allow them to empathize more with the prejudices against their characters' races. In Skyrim, the player is asked to choose a race right from the beginning, with very little to go on besides some minor benefits to the various races’ proficiencies at certain things in the game. Nords get a bit of a resistance to the cold and Bretons are better at using magic, but these boosts don’t matter tremendously in the long run, because a player can increase the levels of any attribute to be equal or far above any other race’s simply by practicing. Some may be better than others at certain things right from the beginning, but no one is incapable of anything that others are capable of, and many veterans encourage new players to choose without regard to the skills of each race. 

                    Now, to expand on the idea that player choice in race has an effect on the player; the character's race can tell us something about the player when they decide it. What exactly does it tell us? If players choose their character to represent them in game as their avatar, a comparable real-world equivalent might be the candidates they elect to represent them in office in American politics. There is a clear statistical bias in voters towards candidates of their own race. Interestingly enough, in Skyrim, there is a statistical trend more towards diversity than homogeneity. Argonians, the exotic lizardmen from foreign swamps, are far more popular than Imperials, arguably the most relatable race to the demographic that makes up a majority of the US (Skyrim Races). Why would players choose to represent themselves as something so alien? They see that the character is alien, but they don’t hold all of the negative stigma against different races that they hold in real life. They view each race as an equally valid option rather than limiting themselves to the races closest to them as people do in real life. This is because in real life people are biased by the different socializing forces around them and cannot actively change bodies (and their associated roles) between their own race and another as one can do by playing multiple characters in Skyrim. This singularity of experience among people in real life often fosters a stunted view of equality because they are not normally well practiced at seeing situations from others’ points of view and must rely on the social situation they find themselves in based upon their own race and social standing. In Skyrim, a combination of the lack of initial socialization which allows players to enter with little bias for or against any particular race from the onset and the ability to change races at will allow players to both see that others are not much different than themselves and to realize how petty it would be to negatively stigmatize any one race for the minor differences that there are between them. 

               After that initial choice, players enter a rich world filled with believable characters who repeatedly compound the idea that racism is not beneficial to anyone involved. Key to the world's believability is the friction between the races in the game. High-Elves are snooty and look down on all others. A particular faction made up of High-Elves, the Aldmeri Dominion, is openly contemptuous of other races and, if the player does not act suitably subservient to them when confronted, will even become violent. The Stormcloak faction is made up of Nords, the native race in Skyrim, and they believe that all other races should get out of their country. They are often portrayed as rough-around-the-edges types, rude and boisterous to boot. The Khajit in the game are nomads who, because they are foreigners from distant lands with strange customs, are not allowed even within city limits. The player can find them outside city walls, where they try to keep warm against the ever-present chill. They greet the player warmly regardless of race, though they do delight in seeing another Khajit if the player chose to be one. All of these groups show that those who allow racism to decide their opinions of others cause conflict and misfortune for all involved. The player is hardly able to avoid sympathizing for the lovable Khajit, hating the obnoxiously pompous Aldmeri Dominion, and cringing whenever the Stormcloaks call for the eviction of every inhabitant of Skyrim that can’t claim Nordhood. It teaches players about the multifaceted nature of racism and further teaches them that everyone who elects to play a part in demeaning another person for their unalterable attributes is causing only conflict and misery. No one is happier for the use of racism to justify their actions, only temporarily absolved of their own guilt.

              Skyrim acts as a mediator between players and their inherent biases in real life by allowing them to see the effects of racism on hypothetical races through a lens unclouded by prevalent personal bias and negativity. In this it shows us that, on a basic level, humans do not behave in a racist manner but must inherit the behavior from a socializing force when they are growing up in one role rather than being able to swap between multiple to mitigate the formation of a singular superior race in their thoughts. When people really get down and think about it, hating Orcs doesn’t make much sense. After all, the only difference is skin color and a +10 buff to heavy armor. That’s nothing to hate them for.

Works Cited

Ryan, Mark. “Skyrim Races—Popularity Ranking.” IGN. IGN Entertainment, Nov. 13, 2011. Web. Sept. 30, 2013.

Turmer, Oli. "Does Race Really Matter in Skyrim?" Skyrim Hub Community. N.p., 22 Nov. 2011. Web. 11 Oct. 2013.