Of Mechropolitics and Men
The USA is undergoing a tragic, seemingly endless epidemic of mass shootings, which the National Rifle Association-funded Republicans cannot muster the (barest modicum of) political courage to oppose. Student survivors of the Parkland mass shooting last week have become an incredibly inspiring force, pushing politicians for basic, common sense gun control. In addition to this crucial national focus on the guns as the problem, various commenters have mentioned the racist and misogynistic undertones of many of these mass shootings. Writers point to the prevalence of domestic violence and hate crime charges in the pasts of many mass shooters and suggest that violence against women and minorities can predict future acts of mass murder. Yes, it's obviously a gun problem, but it's also pretty clearly an angry-white-boys problem (see this and this)
The angry-white-boy-shooter is a caricature familiar in game studies, particularly when reading early noughties conversations about the presumed connections between videogame violence and real-world violence. Teach boys to fire automatic weapons on-screen and they'll do it for real, the argument went. Many studies and shootings later, we've progressed to a much more nuanced understanding of the forces at play. For example, the work of Amanda Phillips, who in 2015 wrote "Shooting to Kill: Headshots, Twitch Reflexes, and the Mechropolitics of Video Games." Phillips' work explores "how the simulation of death as both technological feat and gamic goal produces a playground of mortality in which new orientations towards death and dying might be invented, rehearsed, and even normalized" (3). The twitchy technical expertise required for a successful headshot, she writes, turns that act into a ludic goal and divorces it from the ramifications of actual death. Combining "necropolitics" and "mechanics," she coins the term Mechropolitics: the politics of dying in videogames.
"Mechropolitics makes death fun, not merely as a visual spectacle but as a cooperative activity performed with a machine and encouraged by the mechanics of game and system design. These systemic relationships, in turn, influence how we think and behave within real death worlds" (Phillips, 4). Wark might call this the game's "allegorithm," Bogost would talk about its "procedural ethics." Ragdoll physics makes dead in-game bodies humorous as well as horrifying. The dying body jerks and spasms in ways that are intentionally over-exaggerated. This physics objectifies the corpses and turns them into the shooter's playthings, vulnerable to activities ranging from whimsical puppetry to simulated necrophilic rape (a practice called "teabagging," which is disturbingly common in competitive multiplayer games). Mechropolitics, Phillips writes, means recognizing that playing with death is a balance of many influences. Dark humor is utterly human, serves as a coping mechanism, and allows us to let off steam in play rather than in person; at the same time, a cultural admiration for the perfect headshot (when juxtaposed with mass police violence and mass shooting culture that regularly results in the murder of innocents) seems like a very dangerous kind of normalization. Negotiating the tensions between these forces is mechropolitics.
I'm interested particularly in how this intersects with understandings of "hardcore" vs. "casual" gaming. As Alenda Chang, Jesús Costantino, and Braxton Soderman recently articulated, “the hardcore-versus-casual divide is highly gendered, where hardcore gamers feminize casual games in order to masculinize hardcore forms of play (Kubick 2012; Vanderhoef 2013; Chess 2014)” (113). They identify permadeath mechanics as particularly hardcore and therefore associated with gritty machismo, and games involving headshots fall into the hardcore (and heavily macho) category, too.
The disjoint between content and mechanic (aka ludonarrative dissonance) in a game like That Dragon, Cancer (which I've written about before) leads to the categorization of a game about a child dying of cancer as "casual." Having played that game, it is hard to describe a less "casual" experience. But because its mechropolitics gift the player an unavoidable immortality (the child dies, but the player can't), it belongs solidly in the "casual" rather than the "hardcore" category.
I'm fascinated by what this says about our narrativization of masculinity.
A friend of mine is working on an article about a queer early modern Spanish nun in South America who dressed in pants, fought as a soldier, and successfully petitioned the King of Spain for benefits befitting a warrior of the crown (and then got dispensation from the Pope to wear male clothing until her death). Her claim to masculinity, my friend writes, was justified by the number of people she killed and the graphic way in which she could describe their corpses; narrative authority, in an era before science or photography, came from being able to detail the deaths one had enacted, thus "proving" physical presence. Masculinity, in this context, my friend brilliantly argues, is performed and generated by the production of corpses.
We could set it up in a binary: femininity as the production of babies, masculinity as the production of corpses. Hardcore games are masculine because of their mechropolitics—because they center around the production, again and again, of the corpses of the player and the player's opponents.
Both sides of this binary are reductive, simplistic, polemical, etc. But I'm struck by how far the cultural conversation about femininity has evolved, and how little progress we've made in the cultural conversation about masculinity. In Michael Ian Black's recent Op Ed, he agrees, writing:
"The past 50 years have redefined what it means to be female in America. Girls today are told that they can do anything, be anyone. They’ve absorbed the message: They’re outperforming boys in school at every level. But it isn’t just about performance. To be a girl today is to be the beneficiary of decades of conversation about the complexities of womanhood, its many forms and expressions.
Boys, though, have been left behind. No commensurate movement has emerged to help them navigate toward a full expression of their gender. It’s no longer enough to “be a man” — we no longer even know what that means."
Most little girls in America today hear, from many quarters, that their femininity needn't be produced by birthing children. Sure, it's still an undercurrent, but it's one that many, many conversations have addressed and articulated. Girls are taught that complexity. Boys, as Black writes, are not afforded that gift of explicit and articulated complexity nearly as often. Straight masculinity is learned by implication and the sometimes violently mediated suppression of softer (more "casual," we could say) feelings and modes of being.
Along with a large portion of the internet, I have been bingewatching Queer Eye, the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It is goddamn breathtaking to see a group of gay men and one straight man grapple with what is means to be masculine, and to watch the straight man grow into a better understanding of himself. The show teaches the message that self-care (and caring in general) is not feminine or feminizing, a perspective which really shouldn't be revolutionary but feels like it is. If we as a culture could answer Michael Ian Black's call with Queer Eye's jubilant, nuanced affirmation, that would be a powerful gamechanger.
