First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Welcome to our brave new world

In a shocking moment for print media, not one but two video-games related stories have featured prominently in the news sections of national newspapers in the last two days. First, the release of the second “expansion” for the world’s most lucrative (but not the world’s most-played) online role-playing game, World of Warcraft; and, second, the sadder and more bizarre story that a couple are getting divorced because of, apparently, the husband’s unfortunate habit of indulging in some virtual heavy-petting within the online world Second Life.

What do we learn about games and society from these two stories? The message is similar in each case. People take these games very seriously. On the one hand, a lot of people spend a lot of money on them, and get very excited about big new releases. On the other hand, the playing of games can have profound consequences for lives as a whole (apparently, the divorce was related to the wife’s excessive playing of Warcraft as much as to the husband’s hanky-panky.)

Why, then, is the tone of almost all of the mainstream reporting so determinedly trivial? It’s little more, in many cases, than an elaborate kind of pointing and starting. Look at the numbers involved—the millions spent, the millions of players! Look at these sad, addicted creatures and their bizarre lives! One reason, of course, is that a substantial number of readers have little or no sense whatsoever of what these games are like. Still, when very big changes are afoot—and the rise of the video game is most definitely one of those—you might hope for some slightly more sophisticated critical engagement than this:

The new game—which costs £24.99, as long as you already have the original game—allows players to fight new enemies and find extra powers for their characters. It is set in the continent of Northrend and pitches players against the evil Lich King Arthas Menethil and his undead army.

While picturesque, this kind of thing is almost meaningless to those who don’t know the game, and entirely redundant to those who do. What on earth is this rubbish about evil Lich Kings?, non-initiates are destined to mutter, while gamers shake their heads and get on with playing. As I did, last night, in a segment of Northrend known as the Howling Fjord that has a distinctly Viking feel to it—snow, trees, mountains, wild boar. I already knew all about it even before I started, of course, thanks to the information here—and on thousands of similar websites around the world, which offer between them a minute, expert analysis of almost every recordable and imaginable aspect of the game.

And this is the crucial point—that there’s something ridiculous, redundant and slightly hopeless about most newspapers writing on electronic games precisely because those who care will already have gone elsewhere (in their millions) for information, while those who don’t care will find little that they can latch onto beyond boggling statistics and silly names. It’s a media mismatch of epic proportions—and a worrying shame for newspapers, who seem so decisively out of joint with a large tranche of future culture that I can’t quite see how they’ll ever get it right…

…it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…

How can you tell whether a speech is good or not? By its reception? Its elegance? Its honesty? Its appropriateness? Its enduring power? Before my rhetorical list gets too interminable, here are two very different takes on the speech of the moment, Obama’s acceptance oration in Chicago.

The first comes from the pen of no less a critic than the New Yorker’s James Woods. “Among other triumphs,” he argues, “last Tuesday night was a very good night for the English language. A movement in American politics hostile to the possession and the possibility of words—it had repeatedly disparaged Barack Obama as “just a person of words” —was not only defeated but embarrassed by a victory speech eloquent in echo, allusion, and counterpoint.”

In a sustained close reading, Woods teases out the nature of these allusions and echoes:

Besides Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the speech’s other founder. The allusions were deeper, and quieter, than the explicit reference to King’s famous phrase about how “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (Obama said that we will put our hands “on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”) When the President-elect warned that the road will be long, and that “we may not get there in one year or even one term, but America . . . I promise you—we as a people will get there,” the word “promise” surely activated, however unconsciously, the rich narrative of exodus that found a culminating expression in King’s last speech, in Memphis…

Compare Peter Hitchens’s forthright assault on the same elements of the same speech:

[Obama's] cliché-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over…

…He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

So, was this a good or a bad speech? Rather than take sides, I’ll simply note that the Woods/Hitchens divide neatly illuminates the limitations of that lone adjective, “good” and its begged questions—good at what, and in what way? Both critics would probably agree that Obama spoke clearly, at a careful pace, at suitable length, in an appropriate manner (well, Hitchens might not take this point), and to a rapturously appreciative audience. He speaks well; he is a good speaker. But was the speech good, even great? All the eloquence in the world can’t prove it.