Jake

Idle Thumbs 153: Blondie, Freckles, and Glasses

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In your second paragraph about why it's not told why this place is forgotten or the way it is okay in my eyes. Having lived and talked to people who live in such areas, there is a feeling of abandonment, decay mixed with an underlying Midwest industrial folklore/mythology. And you can tell the inhabitens why their town or city was abandoned but it can get to abstract or big and not personal.

When I lived in Cincinnati, there was an post-industrial economic and societal depression conscious. There was a feeling of why did this happening and where do we go from here. So I can relate to the obtuseness of Kentucky and I love it; it's a game that hit close to home.

And personally, as I get older, I like obtuse or open to interpretation narratives. I read a lot if weird/magical realism/low-key fantastico stories that work this way.

 

I'm from/still live in the same kind of area, so the post-industrial midwest is a setting I really appreciate and understand. For me, the game plays off of that uncanny feeling you get in the countryside where farms have gone untended or in cities where factory areas have been abandoned. What I meant more specifically is that people who don't spend as much time in these places may not immediately identify with that feeling and so the game might not work for them as well. "The Entertainment" spells out a few things for people who aren't a part of that specific culture, so it might work to clear things up for them.

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So are you guys contemplating keeping the Nelsbot?

 

Also, I would be super interested in hearing the deeper discussion about the Burial at Sea episodes.

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I'm from/still live in the same kind of area, so the post-industrial midwest is a setting I really appreciate and understand. For me, the game plays off of that uncanny feeling you get in the countryside where farms have gone untended or in cities where factory areas have been abandoned. What I meant more specifically is that people who don't spend as much time in these places may not immediately identify with that feeling and so the game might not work for them as well. "The Entertainment" spells out a few things for people who aren't a part of that specific culture, so it might work to clear things up for them.

 

Yeah, Kentucky Route Zero and its ilk speaks really strongly to me, having lived my whole life in the Midwest and the Rust Belt. I guess it would seem affected and insincere if you hadn't lived in a place that's just one or two shades less weird and surreal than the setting of the game.

 

Also, I would be super interested in hearing the deeper discussion about the Burial at Sea episodes.

 

I am, too. I was howling "Nooo!" at my phone as Chris insisted that they wait at least a week to talk about it. Deep dives are what makes this podcast great. Every time you guys cut yourselves short on a conversation because of perceived podcast propriety, I cry a river.

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I'm really happy they delayed the talk as I haven't quite finished Burial at Sea episode 2 so it gives me time to wrap it up this weekend!

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Yeah, Kentucky Route Zero and its ilk speaks really strongly to me, having lived my whole life in the Midwest and the Rust Belt. I guess it would seem affected and insincere if you hadn't lived in a place that's just one or two shades less weird and surreal than the setting of the game.

 

You guys are really making me want to play KR0.  I own it, but had been putting it off until it was finished.  I've really avoided knowing anything about it, so this conversation is super intriguing.

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I haven't played Luftrausers or looked the apology post but looking at some youtube game play I can see the plane flying around shooting stuff with engines such as gungine and SUPERBOOST. There's some caricatures of German general dudes who might be in a WW1 or WW2 setting.

 

That this is causing people to think about it is good but that it's the one that caused people to talk is shit.

 

The Red Alerts, Company of Heroes, the Call of Duty,Medal of Honor and the million other FPS WW2 games that followed,plus Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Commandos and the mountains of real time and turn based strategy games and simulators. They took the setting of world war 2 enthusiasts and made it a backdrop to mechanics. How many of them even mentioned civilians beyond as a mission objective to take care not to blow up?

 

That's fine, they just wanted to make simulators, didn't want to make an RTS with zerg and protoss. It's made it so that the accepted WW2 setting in video games is ignoring almost everything about the war except that the allied forces had to attack Germany, there are German soldiers stationed around Europe, there is no question of what is the right thing to do beyond what the mechanics say.

 

I doubt a single game even mentioned the death camps, the holocaust or even the word jew. Probably only some of Paradox's grand strategy games and The Stick of Truth use it. Well and The Shivah.

 

That's a much bigger issue than this image: http://media1.gameinformer.com/filestorage/CommunityServer.Components.SiteFiles/imagefeed/featured/indie/vlambeer/luftrausers/luftrausers-1250-610.jpg

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this luftrausers discussion feels quite offensive. you have to remember that the guys in vlambeer are dutch. the way this is being talked about, as if those guys created something based on just making something cool, or them being ignorant.. THEY ARE DUTCH.

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I doubt a single game even mentioned the death camps, the holocaust or even the word jew. Probably only some of Paradox's grand strategy games and The Stick of Truth use it. Well and The Shivah.

 

Paradox does handle it pretty well, although they've expressed on their forums the fear they have of bad press over making anything that could be construed as a Holocaust simulator. Victoria 2 has dynamic "ethnic cleansing" events if your nation flips to a radical ideology like fascism or communism, along with a few somewhat more generic anti-Semitism events. The older Hearts of Iron games had event pop-ups recreating the escalation to the Holocaust, but I haven't played Hearts of Iron 3 to know if they're still in there. I'd almost be inclined to say that Crusader Kings 2 handles its contemporary Jewry the best, since they're actual characters that are useful to keep around and useful to expel, which makes for a historically authentic experience.

 

It is really interesting how invisible Jews are in so many otherwise historical games. I imagine if they began to appear too frequently, it'd mostly be another thing for the typical gamer to grouse about, like them wimmin issuez.

 

this luftrausers discussion feels quite offensive. you have to remember that the guys in vlambeer are dutch. the way this is being talked about, as if those guys created something based on just making something cool, or them being ignorant.. THEY ARE DUTCH.

 
And...? Is being the citizen of a nation once conquered by a foreign power seventy years ago sure proof against misuse of the symbols of that foreign power now?

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You just gave us a peek into a story that sounds not only incredibly fascinating, but enlightening to people that are not well versed in how powerful words and aesthetics can be these contexts. I would love to read a forum post or blog post from you about this experience (If it doesn't evoke horrible memories of course, see above ).

To even speak about this experience and how it lead me there I have to talk about my childhood a bit.

 

A quick intro to who I am: I was born in Torreon, Mexico and lived there for about four or five years. My Mom is Spanish/Iranian and my Dad is German/Irish, so I was a biracial child. We moved up to Cincinnati when I was 5 or 6 and I lived up a in very white neighborhood.

 

I lived close to the hood, the school I went to was private and majority white. I didn't get to see much of myself (other brown kids like me) other than my Mom and my family in Mexico (and that was when I visited them). This gave me a double consciousness: one that was white and one that was Mexican. Though I had this double consciousness, I found out quickly that I was too white for the Mexicans I did come across in Cincinnati and for the white kids I was too Mexican for them; I was stuck in an existential limbo. This rejection from both sides ruled (and still does to an extent) most of my childhood and teenage years. It made very angry and confused to who I was. Match that with a heavy depression I was going through, racist remarks & bullying from both sides, and dealing with a somewhat high dose of Ritalin (I was diagnosed with ADHD), it wasn't a pretty childhood.

 

This anger lead me to hardcore punk and I found an outlet for that anger and confusion. I really got into the music and scene. I started to delve deeper int Hardcore Punk and somehow it lead me to Black Metal and other noisy raw bands. When I found out about Black Metal, the misanthropic nihilistic transgressive nature really attracted me and I oddly found a home. The move I delved in Black Metal the more it lead me to NSBM (national socialist black metal). A side-note: I always found NSBM to be bullshit because Black Metal in its very nature is to be against everything and having a political or joyful appraise of ones own culture, I thought, went against Black Metal's nihilistic nature but that's just me; there are some great bands within that sub-genre though.

 

OKAY! Back on track. So the more I delved into BM and NSBM, I found genres like Industrial, Noise, and Neo-folk. These are bands that took that transgressive nature of BM but matured it and add many different sounds to their sounds. Bands like: Death In June, Sol Invictus, Boyd Rice, Der Blutharsch, Darkwood, Swans, Blood Axis, Current 93 and others. These bands really captured me because of their give no fucks attitude and their ability to fetish taboo things: like Nazi culture and aesthetics. A lot of these bands are anti-racist (and there are bands that are all about white supremacy) but there was something about the Nazi aesthetic that attracted them and me too. So I went in and I discovered a scene full of complexity and contradictions and very interesting people/ideas. There were minorities dressing as Nazis, the BDSM scene mixed with the scene because of the shared bands and culture, and it attracted a lot of smart and very open people. Of course there was the mixture of 88s and SSs and Hammers but they didn't bother me much because starting shit was a pain.

 

I remember talking to this black guy who had a Skrewdriver White Power tattoo; shit like this was normal. I collected rings and photography for a bit (sold them all off) and listened to racist and non-racists bands. For me, I wanted to get out of my skin and be something else. If I couldn't be accepted, I wanted to push people's button and show I give no fucks.

 

As I got older, I grew tired of the scene and became more conscious and empathic to what these images can do to oneself and the people around you. Nazi aesthetics, like everything else in life has a duality. In this instance, the evil and damage of Nazi aesthetics symbolizes outdoes the beauty of design.

NOW! I agree with Patrick and AlexB on this issue and they both represent the duality I was taking about.

I'm from/still live in the same kind of area, so the post-industrial midwest is a setting I really appreciate and understand. For me, the game plays off of that uncanny feeling you get in the countryside where farms have gone untended or in cities where factory areas have been abandoned. What I meant more specifically is that people who don't spend as much time in these places may not immediately identify with that feeling and so the game might not work for them as well. "The Entertainment" spells out a few things for people who aren't a part of that specific culture, so it might work to clear things up for them.

I can agree with that.

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To even speak about this experience and how it lead me there I have to talk about my childhood a bit.

 

A quick intro to who I am: I was born in Torreon, Mexico and lived there for about four or five years. My Mom is Spanish/Iranian and my Dad is German/Irish, so I was a biracial child. We moved up to Cincinnati when I was 5 or 6 and I lived up a in very white neighborhood.

 

I lived close to the hood, the school I went to was private and majority white. I didn't get to see much of myself (other brown kids like me) other than my Mom and my family in Mexico (and that was when I visited them). This gave me a double consciousness: one that was white and one that was Mexican. Though I had this double consciousness, I found out quickly that I was too white for the Mexicans I did come across in Cincinnati and for the white kids I was too Mexican for them; I was stuck in an existential limbo. This rejection from both sides ruled (and still does to an extent) most of my childhood and teenage years. It made very angry and confused to who I was. Match that with a heavy depression I was going through, racist remarks & bullying from both sides, and dealing with a somewhat high dose of Ritalin (I was diagnosed with ADHD), it wasn't a pretty childhood.

 

This anger lead me to hardcore punk and I found an outlet for that anger and confusion. I really got into the music and scene. I started to delve deeper int Hardcore Punk and somehow it lead me to Black Metal and other noisy raw bands. When I found out about Black Metal, the misanthropic nihilistic transgressive nature really attracted me and I oddly found a home. The move I delved in Black Metal the more it lead me to NSBM (national socialist black metal). A side-note: I always found NSBM to be bullshit because Black Metal in its very nature is to be against everything and having a political or joyful appraise of ones own culture, I thought, went against Black Metal's nihilistic nature but that's just me; there are some great bands within that sub-genre though.

 

OKAY! Back on track. So the more I delved into BM and NSBM, I found genres like Industrial, Noise, and Neo-folk. These are bands that took that transgressive nature of BM but matured it and add many different sounds to their sounds. Bands like: Death In June, Sol Invictus, Boyd Rice, Der Blutharsch, Darkwood, Swans, Blood Axis, Current 93 and others. These bands really captured me because of their give no fucks attitude and their ability to fetish taboo things: like Nazi culture and aesthetics. A lot of these bands are anti-racist (and there are bands that are all about white supremacy) but there was something about the Nazi aesthetic that attracted them and me too. So I went in and I discovered a scene full of complexity and contradictions and very interesting people/ideas. There were minorities dressing as Nazis, the BDSM scene mixed with the scene because of the shared bands and culture, and it attracted a lot of smart and very open people. Of course there was the mixture of 88s and SSs and Hammers but they didn't bother me much because starting shit was a pain.

 

I remember talking to this black guy who had a Skrewdriver White Power tattoo; shit like this was normal. I collected rings and photography for a bit (sold them all off) and listened to racist and non-racists bands. For me, I wanted to get out of my skin and be something else. If I couldn't be accepted, I wanted to push people's button and show I give no fucks.

 

As I got older, I grew tired of the scene and became more conscious and empathic to what these images can do to oneself and the people around you. Nazi aesthetics, like everything else in life has a duality. In this instance, the evil and damage of Nazi aesthetics symbolizes outdoes the beauty of design.

NOW! I agree with Patrick and AlexB on this issue and they both represent the duality I was taking about.

I can agree with that.

 

That was really interesting. Thanks for sharing.

 

Man, these episode threads are getting out there. I love it.

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Yeah, those are mostly my thoughts too, but would it really be better then to have a game where you're a low-level military officer doing logistics for the Final Solution in 1940? A lot of people hated Trains for not elucidating to their satisfaction the conscious guilt of the people packing Jews into boxcars headed for Dachau and Auschwitz. I think my point is maybe that Nazis are such a taboo in Western culture, for a variety of often correct reasons, that it's impossible for a game not to be perceived as disregarding the horrible things they're associated with.

 

Actually, I'm going to go further than that. No one really complained that you could play comical bear-wielding Soviets in the Red Alert series. No one really complained that you could play as Stalin, enslave millions of people, and then build the UN in Civilization IV. Both those things are awful and very much weaken the cultural sentiment surrounding the multiple Soviet genocides of the twentieth century, but they aren't Nazis, so... I don't know. I don't know where I'm going with this. Like I said, I think "cool" Nazis are an understandable but sometimes incongruous sticking point when games love so many other equally problematic historical aesthetics. Luftrausers seems an even odder place to draw the line when you have genocide-free Nazis shooting at Americans in Company of Heroes and then at Commies in Company of Heroes 2.

 

I really want to unpack this more. Are we having the conversation now because it's a great indie company making the game? I wish Vlambeer's response hadn't been so... nothing. Well, I'm glad the conversation (and the education accompanying it) is happening anyway, even without good input from them.

 

The fact that in Red Alert you have time machines and stealth tanks and tesla coils and Albert Einstein helps people go back in time to handshake Hitler from existence helps put some of those themes beyond the pale. They're free game because they're two steps outside of ridiculous to the point of absurd. There are stealth squids in Red Alert. Stalin is in no way portrayed as a good guy in that series. He even shows up and says some semblance of the "One person is tragedy, a million is a statistic" quote about halfway through. I wonder if maybe the Soviets are (for swathes of Western culture) the Bad Guys, but the Nazi are Evil. They are so evil the superpowers who would battle over global supremacy for 50 years afterwards teamed up to fight against them.

 

There are multiple genocidal, facist, authoritarian, etc dictators you can be in Civilization. Or just brutal and ruthless military leaders if you don't want to apply modern ideological terms to certain people. You can be Attila, Genghis, Caesar, Stalin, Alexander, Napoleon, Hannibal, Shaka Zulu. Chairman Mao! No one bats an eye at seemingly any of them. Civilization is also not a game where the leader is the person. They form broad strokes that you can make disparate gameplay partners out of based on loose ideologies. Ghandi still declares war on you sometimes.

 

So, I'm Jewish. That doesn't make my reading any more valid than anyone else's, but this is my perspective. My first reaction to seeing Luftrausers was "wow, they're going there with this?" To my eyes, there is NO Nazi imagery in Luftrausers, but they are toeing the line on Nazi aesthetic. I read Vlambeer's response on their blog, and I do honestly thing they made a stronger statement and apology than the Thumbs are giving them credit for. However, there are a couple of things they could have said that I think they thought that could have seen them through. The first was that if they just flat out said "You are not a Nazi and we never intended it that way, we're sorry if people read our aesthetic as intended to be Nazi". That's one. The other is the point that others have brought up in varying degrees, which is that the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht have been used in other medium (and other games) without being accused or portrayed as being Nazis, because many/most of them were not. I disagree with you Gormongous, that it's "Nazis" in CoH. It's the German Army. I would also agree with you if you countered that you can't just disassociate the one thing from the other, but in the context of the video game conflict it's man (and technology) against man, rather than ideologies against each other. FWIW my degree's in history and I find your teaching stories fascinating and resonant to when I was in school. I never had a concentration but I ended up taking a number of classes in both modern and business history.

 

History of the dark ages was brutal. You might be intrigued because learning about the barbarians after the fall of Rome sounds awesome. Shut up, you're wrong and everyone is named the same thing. I was tricked because the course was literally named History of Barbarian Europe. TRICKED

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Double posting, but btw Sean the Earth's atmosphere is almost 80% nitrogen, so your desperate reality is already here.

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History of the dark ages was brutal. You might be intrigued because learning about the barbarians after the fall of Rome sounds awesome. Shut up, you're wrong and everyone is named the same thing. I was tricked because the course was literally named History of Barbarian Europe. TRICKED

 

I am going to respond to the rest of your awesome post after I take a shower and a walk, but for now I just want to point out tangentially that the most popular academic work from the traditionalist "catastrophe" school of late antiquity, Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, makes the claim that German scholars want and are working for the barbarian migrations into Western Europe to be accepted as peaceful in order to provide a stepping stone for effacing their blood guilt in the Holocaust and Second World War. He also says that American scholars are helping them with this plan because they hate the Roman Empire, on account of still being mad about their oppression under a certain other empire only a few short centuries ago. The relationship between the (often artificially) timeless constructs of nationality and ethnicity, the people who currently have those constructs as part of their identity, and past acts committed under the auspices of those constructs is so goddamn complex.

 

Okay, I'm back, although I didn't get the inspiration for which I was hoping.

 

The fact that in Red Alert you have time machines and stealth tanks and tesla coils and Albert Einstein helps people go back in time to handshake Hitler from existence helps put some of those themes beyond the pale. They're free game because they're two steps outside of ridiculous to the point of absurd. There are stealth squids in Red Alert. Stalin is in no way portrayed as a good guy in that series. He even shows up and says some semblance of the "One person is tragedy, a million is a statistic" quote about halfway through. I wonder if maybe the Soviets are (for swathes of Western culture) the Bad Guys, but the Nazi are Evil. They are so evil the superpowers who would battle over global supremacy for 50 years afterwards teamed up to fight against them.

 

There are multiple genocidal, facist, authoritarian, etc dictators you can be in Civilization. Or just brutal and ruthless military leaders if you don't want to apply modern ideological terms to certain people. You can be Attila, Genghis, Caesar, Stalin, Alexander, Napoleon, Hannibal, Shaka Zulu. Chairman Mao! No one bats an eye at seemingly any of them. Civilization is also not a game where the leader is the person. They form broad strokes that you can make disparate gameplay partners out of based on loose ideologies. Ghandi still declares war on you sometimes.

 

So, I'm Jewish. That doesn't make my reading any more valid than anyone else's, but this is my perspective. My first reaction to seeing Luftrausers was "wow, they're going there with this?" To my eyes, there is NO Nazi imagery in Luftrausers, but they are toeing the line on Nazi aesthetic. I read Vlambeer's response on their blog, and I do honestly thing they made a stronger statement and apology than the Thumbs are giving them credit for. However, there are a couple of things they could have said that I think they thought that could have seen them through. The first was that if they just flat out said "You are not a Nazi and we never intended it that way, we're sorry if people read our aesthetic as intended to be Nazi". That's one. The other is the point that others have brought up in varying degrees, which is that the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht have been used in other medium (and other games) without being accused or portrayed as being Nazis, because many/most of them were not. I disagree with you Gormongous, that it's "Nazis" in CoH. It's the German Army. I would also agree with you if you countered that you can't just disassociate the one thing from the other, but in the context of the video game conflict it's man (and technology) against man, rather than ideologies against each other. FWIW my degree's in history and I find your teaching stories fascinating and resonant to when I was in school. I never had a concentration but I ended up taking a number of classes in both modern and business history.

 

Saying that Soviets are the bad guys but Nazis are evil is probably the best point that's been said thus far. I don't think it would even have been possible for Luftrausers to push their aesthetic into Red Alert territory (which is precisely what I was wondering in an earlier post) because bad guys can be made comical but true evil can only ever be evil.

 

I guess that maybe plays into how conflicted I am about this entire conversation being had. I certainly don't think all Germans became evil when Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and stopped being evil when he shot himself in 1945, so that leaves me wondering where I draw the line. I intentionally brought up Company of Heroes because the Wermacht and Luftwaffe were two staples of the Nazi state that weren't necessarily Nazis themselves, so I don't want to draw it there, even though I could (and sometimes do) for the reasons you gave. Really, I could go on with more examples, but it just feels like I personally am caught between wanting to historicize Nazism as a very specific if fluid phenomenon in interwar Germany and wanting not to confine it to something only possible in those circumstances. That's mostly why I didn't like Vlambeer's statement. You're right, they should have just said, "It looks that way, but you're not a Nazi. It wasn't our intention, but we're very sorry." Painting some specious "alternate history between World War I and the Cold War" just seems like a cowardly way to excuse a lack of historical context, when the important thing is really that there are no Nazi symbols and no Nazi acts, just a feeling that they should own when people bring it up.

 

In general, I just don't like that things can't be about Nazis. I don't like that Elizabeth Simins can tweet about how gross it is to play an implicit Nazi in Luftrausers and be totally justified. It's the same in other mediums. A good anime, The Cockpit, will never get distribution outside of Japan because it shows a Nazi pilot, devoted to his ideology, in a non-critical light. The show that isyourguy linked, Generation War, has to take repeated pains to point that its main characters are German soldiers but not Nazis, because we can't have a TV show starring Nazis. Like I said in my first post, all this feels like a taboo and we all know how taboos turn out in the long term. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I wonder how can we say "never again" if the only unobjectionable mode of discourse about Nazis is caricaturing them as inhuman and evil monsters tricking the greedy and ignorant into committing unspeakable acts. That's not how Nazis came to power and it's deeply problematic to want an expression of that in every piece of media about them. At the same time, games that borrow the historical or aesthetic baggage of Nazis could use more voices like yours and Rob Dubbin in order to keep their game from just using said baggage as a totem of evil or coolness or power or whatever the 1890-1945 Austro-Germano-Prussian thing is standing in for.

 

I don't know, I'm definitely not saying that Luftrausers wanted to be, is, or should be the game to overturn or even address this taboo, but the conversation's happening now, so here we are. I'm really just demonstrating my ability to talk myself in circles, maybe I should shut up and let the smart people who are avoiding my walls of text talk instead.

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... Saying that Soviets are the bad guys but Nazis are evil is probably the best point that's been said thus far. I don't think it would even have been possible for Luftrausers to push their aesthetic into Red Alert territory (which is precisely what I was wondering in an earlier post) because bad guys can be made comical but true evil can only ever be evil...

 

I don't know if that's strictly true. Hogan's Heroes springs to mind along with innumerable British comedy sketches. The Nazis have been mocked regularly and incessantly since the end of the war. To draw an arbitrary line between both ideologies/factions/time periods seems kinda weird. I totally agree with your point about the Vlambeer statement though. I'm really not sure why they gave this weird and nebulous response.

In the end I'm just confused as to why Bugs vs. Tanks is problematic, but Stalin vs. Martians is a-okay. If you played as the bugs and were destroying the cartoonishly evil Nazis would it be any better?

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30 minutes discussing expressed, implied, and inferred narrative in Monument Valley, Limbo, Journey, and Flower, and I didn't hear the word "bespoke" once.

I don't like what these men have become.

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I don't know if that's strictly true. Hogan's Heroes springs to mind along with innumerable British comedy sketches. The Nazis have been mocked regularly and incessantly since the end of the war. To draw an arbitrary line between both ideologies/factions/time periods seems kinda weird. I totally agree with your point about the Vlambeer statement though. I'm really not sure why they gave this weird and nebulous response.

In the end I'm just confused as to why Bugs vs. Tanks is problematic, but Stalin vs. Martians is a-okay. If you played as the bugs and were destroying the cartoonishly evil Nazis would it be any better?

 

You're correct! I would contend however, that both a) Hogan's Heroes didn't depict Nazis (Klink was a lifelong military man who was decorated in the Great War, etc) and B) (my second point is way cool according to this emoticon) that many of those sorts of comedies and sketches took place before people in the public at large were aware of the tremendous wartime atrocities that were committed under the Nazi party. I just put it forth as a thought, and it's also possible I should have said "American" rather than Western audience? But if I wanted to forge on with that line of thought regardless, you could say that sort of mocking was done when the Nazis were Bad Guys and not seen as the utter Evil they're now portrayed to be? I don't know if you had particular images in mind when you were thinking of this but my mind goes to Monty Python and various contemporaries or earlier. 

 

I'd also say that mocking Hitler specifically is quite different from laughing at Nazism writ large. it's the mustache.

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You're correct! I would contend however, that both a) Hogan's Heroes didn't depict Nazis (Klink was a lifelong military man who was decorated in the Great War, etc) and B) (my second point is way cool) that many of those sorts of comedies and sketches took place before people in the public at large were aware of the tremendous wartime atrocities that were committed under the Nazi party. I just put it forth as a thought, and it's also possible I should have said "American" rather than Western audience? But if I wanted to forge on with that line of thought regardless, you could say that sort of mocking was done when the Nazis were Bad Guys and not seen as the utter Evil they're now portrayed to be? I don't know if you had particular images in mind when you were thinking of this but my mind goes to Monty Python and various contemporaries or earlier. 

 

I'd also say that mocking Hitler specifically is quite different from laughing at Nazism writ large. it's the mustache.

 

Right, then you're getting in to what did it mean to be a Nazi during that period which is a whole different kettle of fish that I'm neither qualified or keen to get in to. I think it really does depend on how you were brought up and what you were taught. To me, Hitler is the personification of the Nazi party values. I can't really divorce the two. I don't believe you can mock Hitler as a person when the first thing we think is that he was the leader of one of the most disgusting political movements the Earth has ever seen. He *is* the Nazi party to a lot of people. That said, could mocking Hitler for his moustache without referencing the atrocities committed under his rule be considered insensitive? Isn't it minimizing the damage in its own way? To be honest, I'm really not sure. This whole topic feels super uncomfortable to talk about on the web so I might duck out here. It's been incredibly eye opening though. Thanks for the myriad of alternate perspectives!

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Walling off Nazism as purely a mid-century German thing that can be evoked by German-sounding words and riveted steel but by not political violence or mass deportations is a phenomenon about which I don't know what to think. I understand that the former two are what's more often associated with Nazism (and I can't discount the emotional reaction to them, it being the strongest and truest kind of reaction) but there's a wider range of historical evil there that Luftrausers doesn't traffic in at all.

 

While Luftrausers is clearly a pastiche of that period and aesthetic, it doesn't glorify anything about the Nazi's that made them uniquely terrible... ...Should a different cap badge, hair colour or font choice really change the entire moral core of a piece?

 

I've been thinking about this part a lot, 'what exactly is the Nazi aesthetic?' What about then contemporary German styles that the Nazi's chose to use and appropriate, should they be burned to the roots? Each component seen in Luftrausers  (skulls, banners, airships, peaked caps, blond hair, a red colour scheme etc) on its own is harmless, but at some point it clearly tips the scale towards Nazi. It would be ridiculous to deny artists the use of these individual components, but how many of them is too many? Is the absence of any explicitly defined Nazi symbology not enough? Is it really just a case of "I know it when I see it"?

 

...all this feels like a taboo and we all know how taboos turn out in the long term. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I wonder how can we say "never again" if the only unobjectionable mode of discourse about Nazis is caricaturing them as inhuman and evil monsters tricking the greedy and ignorant into committing unspeakable acts. That's not how Nazis came to power and it's deeply problematic to want an expression of that in every piece of media about them.

 

I didn't articulate it very well in my original post, but this is definitely how I feel. To me it seems that purely demonising the Nazis ignores the fact that they were just humans. If the mission is to stop this kind of thing reoccurring it is imperative to acknowledge reality. A collection of very clever people used patriotism, indoctrination and peer pressure to (justifiably, they believed) coerce the people of multiple nations to unspeakably terrible acts. Calling Hitler a genius is sure to summon the wrath of the internet, but I believe to do otherwise is dishonest and offensive to the millions of victims. Attempts to neuter the humanity from the Germans and their allies serves to belittle the true horror of events that occurred, on both sides of the war.

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I hope entirety of the next episode is spoken in Sean's (?) Homestar Runner voice.

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I hope entirety of the next episode is spoken in Sean's (?) Homestar Runner voice.

 

It's the best thing. It's done more to sell me on Bwave Wave than either of the clips (which, since both of the clips are awesome, is saying a lot).

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I like to break mystique-regarding-artistic-works into two camps: inherent and extrinsic.  

 

Inherent mystique is on display with games like Monument Valley, Ico, Limbo.  It's a part of the work and as Sean mentioned, usually involves a purposeful obfuscation.  When it works it's absolutely magical, but when it doesn't... it... it's like an uncanny valley effect.  The game continues to hammer in the mysterious nature throughout your play and you can't escape it!  When the physics puzzles appeared in Limbo!  You're in a magical world and you don't know who you are or what you're doing there, but could you please arrange these blocks just so?  To me those felt like perpendicular experiences, and it broke my belief in the mystique.

 

Inherent-mystique-as-creative-crutch is a super common thing in song writing.  You write something rather straightforward and maybe a bit dull, so to spice it up, you move the lyrics in a more and more vague but suggestive place.

 

I think being a creator of artistic content makes you a bit more skeptical of inherent mystique once you see how lazily it can be applied to bandage up weak material.

 

Then there's extrinsic mystique!  I'm a music nerd, so here are some examples that I can think of for that medium:

 

Sly and the Family Stone don't remember who played what instruments on There's a Riot Going On because they were all so coked out of their minds.  Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom was written mostly in the hospital after he fell out of a 3rd floor bathroom and was paralyzed from the waist down.  Skip Spence recorded Oar after being being diagnosed with schizophrenia and living in a psychiatric hospital for 6 months.  J Dilla finished Donuts on his deathbed.

 

The obvious "issue" with extrinsic mystique is that you can hear those albums and not be the wiser.  To think about it negatively:  it's just a placebo.  Positively, though: I think these stories make the albums more grounded in reality (as they point to the moments of creation), but also point to the ways in which extraordinary circumstances can be captured and hidden within a work.  Which is cool!

 

I'm intrigued if anyone can think of games that have an extrinsic mystique.  I can't think of any...

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My initial reaction to Luftrausers was one of "hm ok, not sure I would've gone with that, but ok"...

That said I'm going to agree with Jim Profit here. Lecturing Dutch people about the significance of WW2 imagery seems more questionable than the aesthetic being discussed.

Growing up in the Netherlands you are inundated with the history of The War. They celebrate liberation day and remember the dead every year. So yeah, the suggestion that someone who in all probability has family a couple generations back that *were there* doesn't understand the signficance of WW2 imagery is actually kind of offensive.

Thumbs' hypothetical counter example of an over-the-top fun arcade game interrupted by random  atrocities - you know, for context - actually seems a lot more offensive than the faux Third-Reich aesthetic of Luftrausers. Meanwhile playing as HOORAH Americans invading not-Iraq or any other country in all games ever gets a free pass.

I don't think any aesthetic should ever be inherently off limits or only to be discussed or depicted in a certain a way but it seems to me like the offense being taken here is rather selective.

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When you say there is a selective offense being taken, can you give any examples? I'm unaware of Idle Thumbs endorsing a game that has an American jingoistic aesthetic.

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Okay cool so its safe to assume that because someone is Dutch they have reverence for the memories of the war, whereas if they're an American it's safe to assume what exactly? Cool generalizations. How about that argument is deleted from being valid, by nature of it being not actually provably applicable to any one specific person in the conversation, let alone on Earth.

The discussion in the last couple episode threads has been stellar, but painting with a brush that wide isn't going to gain anyone a lot of ground. I thought one of Sean's points -- talking about what happens when you make a creative decision which turns out to be questionable once it's put under under scrutiny -- was valid, fertile ground for discussion. I don't think it made any accusatory assumptions about the kind of people the Vlambeer guys are, nor do I think it attempted to imply anything about their education or awareness.

When you say there is a selective offense being taken, can you give any examples? I'm unaware of Idle Thumbs endorsing a game that has an American jingoistic aesthetic.

We specifically brought up the value/valuelessness of it being a Heroic American Game instead in the discussion. Also I feel like we spent a ton of time talking about the simple fact that it is a complicated issue to discuss.

Thought this was interesting.

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