March 5, 2010
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Like anything, PAX has bad seeds
The Penny Arcade Expo (or PAX, as it’s known to most) is the largest video-game convention in North America. Started in 2004 by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of the web comic Penny Arcade, the event initially started with a modest 3,300 attendees, but has exploded to dominate the entire Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle, Washington with estimates of 75,000 attendees at PAX09, which took place from September 4–6.
As the largest event of its kind on the continent, PAX has become, in many ways, a home for the North American gaming community. Major game developers showcase upcoming titles to build hype, and the entire weekend — from legendary developer Ron Gilbert’s keynote speech, to the two nights of nerd-oriented musical performances, to the multitude of discussion panels — is designed towards creating a sense of community and belonging amongst gamers.
The bulk of the panels, from actor/writer Wil Wheaton’s ruminations on important moments in his life, to UBC psychiatrist Dr. Tyler Black’s enlightened discussion on children, psychiatry, and video games, did an admirable job of engaging the community, through both laughter and serious debate. However, no community is without its less palatable members, and they were also present at PAX alongside everyone else. Titled “Sex in Videogames: A Comparative Study,” the panel by Nathan Paine and Japanese game importers Pink Gorilla was touted as a legitimate comparison of sexual materials in North American and Japanese video games. However, immediately after the panel began, attendees were presented with a “guess the video game sex scene” competition hosted by “Hard Gay,” a PVC-clad man whose only roles were to, in this order: prance, stick his rear end in people’s faces, and yell.
After numerous technical difficulties, the body of their panel started with a history of sex in North American videogames and comparisons with Japan. Their verdict? Japan’s liberated sexual culture is far preferable to North America’s sexual culture. Japanese “love hotels,” “compensated dating,” (a practice where schoolgirls sell sexual favors to older businessmen) and video games centred around raping virtual women, all featured prominently in the panel’s presentation.
Where Dr. Black carefully dissected statistics to show how to avoid being deceived by “noisemakers,” the panelists from Pink Gorilla eagerly spouted numbers to argue that these “liberated” sexual attitudes could reduce sex crimes, without any concern for causation or alternate possibilities.
To say this thesis shocked me would be an understatement. Gamers periodically attract the stigma of the creepy, sexually frustrated loser, and surely I’ve met a few that I would categorize like this. However, I’d rarely seen anything approaching this disturbing level before. The closest I’d come to hearing things like this, truly, was listening to group therapy sessions of convicted sex offenders years ago as an intern.
Watching the panel proceed, I became increasingly uncomfortable. How would the audience react? I grew worried that Pink Gorilla would be met with warm applause and pleasant comments, that I would finally discover this seedy underbelly of the gaming community I’d been sold by what I thought were misguided news anchors for years. If that happened, I started to think, I wouldn’t be able to really enjoy the rest of my PAX experience.
Somebody stood up. “I don’t mean to come off as rude,” a young man interjected, “but what are your credentials? Who are you to be giving this panel? What’s the point of it?” The panelists declined to give an answer about their credentials. At this point, audience members started leaving, and by the time the formal question period started, only half remained. Almost every question cut into the panelists. One person asked about the lack of any women on the panel. A few more repeated the question of what the point of the panel was trying to make. Nobody was rude. In fact, everybody was exceedingly polite in their questioning — except for the panelists, that is, who with each question seemed more curt and defeated. Along the way, I discovered that their only expertise was that they owned an import games store, and that one of them lived in Japan for an indeterminate amount of time. At the end, many people simply left the room instead of applauding.
This, I began to realize, was where the heart of the gaming community lies. The audience wasn’t comfortable with the idea of compensated dating or rape video games. The wholesale rejection of the panelists’ ideas reinvigorated me, and I left the panel more appreciative than ever of the video-game community and comfortable to be a part of it. Oddly enough, this despicable panel helped me find the connection PAX promises.
A Call For Insurrection
By Not Auguste ComteA Call For Insurrection Against Psychiatry by Not Auguste Comte
Psychiatry has replaced religion as the main instrument of social control of modern industrial societies. As the intrusion of the state into previously private realms in modern democracies has caused the need for more and more coerion; the power of civil society, family and religion have continously eroded. The existential freedom (and responsibility) of the individual to create his own values and meaning has been disappearing. Irrespective of the supposedly good intentions of activists, social workers, and politicians; the excessive concern with social equality can only lead to mental and perhaps literal slavery. Only this 'excessive concern with social equality' could, for example, justify giving children CNS stimulant drugs while at the same time prohibiting adults from using them.
We reject the usage of medicine as an instrument of social control, however, we cannot totally free ourselves from the madhouse of the therapeutic state. The whole world has become a hospital. Popular opinion and politicians find it too useful to control people in this manner. We also reject most violence, not on the grounds that violence is in itself always bad, and while we will note the the rights of homosexuals was changed after the stonewall riots, violence is mostly bad and usually causes more problems than it solves. Rather than being pacificists we advocate the right kind violence in the right kind of way. We can sow the seeds for this right kind of violence by advocating out and out insurrection against psychiatry. An insurrection against psychiatry need not include violence in any way shape or form at this present time. For now we can safely advocate the following forms of insurrection:
A) Lying to the medical profession. Because psychiatry is primarily (although not always) an instrument of social control, we should have no expectation whatsoever that mental health workers are agents of our interests. We should have no reason therefore to be honest to any member of the medical profession whatsoever at this point in history unless we have good reason to be. This includes giving a false history, tampering with drug tests, lying about disability to receive benefits, misleading court officials to receive more lenient sentences, and so on.
B) Cheating at the game of psychiatry. If an age is imbued with error, then why be a victim of other people's delusions? Decent profit could possibly be made from selling ritalin, so why not sell it? How can one possibly fake having a fake disease? Why should a victim of the inner city drug war not rob methadone users by slipping them naloxtone? A well versed malingerer would note the correct diseases to have: Fibromyalgia, for instance, cannot easily be disproved. Why not get rid of an enemy by "confessing" to a mental health professional that they may be abusing their child, suicidal, or depressed? It can probably be done anonymously through an employee assistance program, some of them have passwords and codes. The drug court system will allow a way out for the right minded criminal. Im not advocating that the average reader smuggle crack over the border unless so inclined, but cheat the therapeutic state if you can!
C) Demonstrations of cheating. As it becomes obvious that some are cheating at the game of psychiatry one of two things will happen: Either it psychiatry will become more powerful or less powerful. It will only become less powerful if it is less useful to politicians. If it is becoming less powerful, well then all the better, if is becoming more powerful at least we are not being robbed by the delusions of others. So how do we demonstrate the cheating of psychiatry? Well we cant do it outright that would be too dangerous. Methods of cheating at the therapeutic state can and should be spread on books, art, writing to prisoners, leaders of gangs, psychiatry victims, Scientologists, and others who would likely be victims of psychiatric coercion.
D) Rejection of activism. This is a non-political movement, we are going to take control of our lives and ignore the therapeutic state. It is beyond reforming. The powerful economic, social and political forces that gave birth to the therapeutic state are beyond the scope of this essay and they are beyond our conscious control regardless and we are not going to be the victims of society so some useless social parasite or politician can enjoy a more comfortable existence. The state will have to change its behavior when people are ignoring or cheating at the therapeutic game in the end.
We have an exciting future ahead of us as we watch the therapeutic state crumble in front of our eyes. May we wait until the day when we can drink the blood of our enemies in the street!
I was there.
By TriI was the woman who spoke up during the Q&A about the lack of women on the panel, among other things. I'm relieved to find that I am not the only person flabbergasted and disappointed in the panel for many of the same reasons you are.
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