Personality Test

MZ got me to try this Keirsey Personality test. By the power of its crazy magic (accurate) voodoo, I now know that I am an Idealist Champion. Apparently, we passionately believe in things and really want to tell you about them. I can only resort to snarky sarcasm, because the results are an creepily dead-on description of my (ideal) self-image.

Anywho, give it a whirl (it only takes about five minutes):HumanMetrics Jung Typology Test

Show about Nothing

As a baseball fan and a rhetorician, I feel compelled to write something on the Mitchell report. But since I'm in the midst of grading, and my baby's making that "you better be ready to pick me up" face, I'll keep this brief.

The media has consistently framed the Mitchell report as a sign of Bud Selig's complicity in the steroids era. Selig, thinking of his legacy, needs a public display that says "I cleaned up the steroids problem." He is worried, this argument goes, that he will be remembered as the commish who turned a blind eye. This very well might be true.

But I would argue that the obsessive media coverage of steroids and baseball is also significant. It represents the media's guilt over the summer of 1998. I was a cynical and sophomoric 22 that summer and remember looking at McGwire and Sosa and thinking one thing: "juice." I do not believe anyone educated enough to write for a newspaper or work for a television station could look at those players and not suspect that there was something non-natural going on. Especially people who have access to locker rooms. Especially people who could see the bottles of Andro. I know 1998 was way back before Google--but I'm pretty sure professional reporters could talk to doctors. The obsessive media coverage of performance enhancing substances is an implicit acknowledgment of culpability. They know they should have acted on what we all suspect. Their claims that "we didn't have subpoena power" is hollow and shameful. And they know it. So now the witches are contributing to the hunt.

I don't mean to come off as some superior know-it-all. I knew they were using drugs and didn't care. If a professional athlete is willing to risk health and future to smash a ball 400 feet, awesome. 500 feet? Even better. See-- I told you it was cynical and sophomoric. Only one thing makes me care about the issue now, pathetic as it is (and I mean that in the most rhetorical of senses): the children. A trickle-down economics goes something like this: if I want to make the majors, I got to make the minors, if I want to make the minors, I have to get the scholarship, if I want to get the scholarship, I have to start, if I want to start, I have to make the team, if I want to make the team, I have to play AAU, etc. At the end of the chain? Steroids. I have a 12 year old nephew who plays baseball, and he's already aware of teammates using performance enhancing drugs.

But I won't buy into the excessive hype over the history of baseball. I laugh when people ask "how do we compare Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth?" A better question would be: how do you compare Hank Aaron to Babe Ruth? Consider:

• Changes to the composition of baseballs and bats
• Radically different dimensions to ball parks
• Changes to the height of the pitcher's mound [for those who don't follow baseball, this might be the greatest change of all]
• The development of closers and middle relievers [who radically change the way the game is played--back in the 1930's no one through more than a few breaking balls an inning for risk of blowing out their arm, with specialty relievers and pitch counts, pitchers throw the nasty with particularly more frequency]
• Oh yeah, the competitive impact of minorities on the game
• The introduction of weight rooms [Cal Ripken once discussed how when we came up in the early 80's players were discouraged from lifting weights. Common wisdom was that muscle was slow. Apparently they weren't aware of "twitch" muscles]

There's probably more changes that I just can't think of right now. My point is that there are so many changes in the history of baseball that we choose to ignore: steroids is just the line in the sand. I feel that history will view the steroids phenomenon as the first public foray into the ethics of cybernetic enhancement- the first time that science threatens to greatly impact the composition of a human being. It will not be the last.

Resident Evil, Silent Hill & Psychoanalysis

Slash.dot had up a link to my article on Resident Evil and Silent Hill in the Game Career Guide, an article which I realize is way too jargoned for mass publication. Oh well. This morning someone emailed me to ask a few follow-up questions, I figured I'd post my response. His questions were why we chose video games, whether we thought game makers consciously considered pscyhoanalysis, and whether we feel video game makers would benefit from an exposure to theory. To address your questions: this is our second article on the subject. The studies began in a Postmodernism and Popular Culture seminar offered by Dino Felluga at Purdue University. While many of our classmates looked at television and film, Sarah and I both enjoyed playing video games and thought that the multi-linearity of video games, the interactivity, was much closer to the core values of postmodernism than other mediums. I think George Landow's Hypertext series is illuminating here, as is Espen Aarseth's Cybertext. As we started reading, psychoanalysis seemed the logical choice (given its interest in death and the undead as the space between life and death--Zizek's introductory work on Lacan, Looking Awry, is an especially good text for someone who is looking for an introduction to this material) Our first article, "Playing with Ourselves," appeared in the edited collection Digital Gameplay and focused on how video games allow us to experiment and experience the internal struggles of our ego (torn between a desire to return to the quiet before birth and the enjoyment of life). As we played the games more, we became interested in the concept of save points... and then Silent Hill 4 came out and blew our minds. Completely. Your room, nicknamed "mother" both heals and hurts you? Lions, tigers, and psychology , oh my. So much for why gmes. As to if developers use theories directly: perhaps. I know that's a lame answer but... many game developers have a background in film theory, and film theory is heavily steeped in psychoanalysis. But I don't necessarily think that the developers are sitting down and intentionally attempting to create a game that represents Lacanian theory. These theories might be on the horizon of their minds, and influence what they do, but that influence might not necessarily be conscious. I do think a knowledge of theory and psychology can add to the horror of games--I think one of the reasons that Silent Hill is so horrifying is that we never have a stable grasp of what kind of world we are in--the technical term here would be a questionable diegesis. TV shows like X-Files (before we knew for certain there were aliens) and Lost excel at this tactic. In Resident Evil, we know that the "evil" resides in a multinational corporation researching bio-weapons. Stop the corporation, stop the evil save ourselves. Order assured. Not so easy in Silent Hill, how do you stop what may or may not exist outside of your own mind? How do you control "evil" if you can't control yourself? Derrida in Archive Fever: "Order is no longer assured." There is a moment at the end of Silent Hill 3 that epitomizes everything we have written about these games. Vincent, a shady character, asks our protagonist if she enjoys the killing she does. I forget Heather's exact response, but she comments something like why would she enjoy killing monsters. Vincent's response: "they look like monsters to you?" That did it for Sarah and I--that's when we knew we were onto something. What if we weren't really killing monsters--what if they only looked like monsters to us--what if our character isn't a hero, but a psychotic killer who has just murdered 30 people on a serial spree? Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis deal with what lies at the end of consciousness, underneath consciousness, and beyond consciousness. That stuff is always scary.