Jake

Idle Thumbs 153: Blondie, Freckles, and Glasses

Recommended Posts

OK so with offense being taken I was more referring to the controversy in general. I thought the discussion on the podcast was actually fair and nuanced, though I'm not sure I'd agree that the blog response was particularly dancing around the issue or lacking in understanding of the subject matter which is what I was trying to get at with my point about growing up in that country. I didn't mean to make generalizations and I'm sorry if I came across as attacking anyone.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

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.

??!???? Being of a particular nationality doesn't inoculate you from having your creative choices critiqued, and it doesn't make you an inborn expert or Designated Empathizer on a particular topic.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So that was originally more as a response to the thread than to the podcast and I already regret posting it as I clearly made my point poorly if I had one, but I agree, and what I was trying to say was only that in this context being surrounded by that history would make it difficult to be unaware of the historical implications of both events and imagery related to that time. I also do agree that any given background does not absolve anyone from questioning or criticism.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So that was originally more as a response to the thread than to the podcast and I already regret posting it as I clearly made my point poorly if I had one, but I agree, and what I was trying to say was only that in this context being surrounded by that history would make it difficult to be unaware of the historical implications of both events and imagery related to that time. I also do agree that any given background does not absolve anyone from questioning or criticism.

Understood. On that note, I would hope that all Americans would be fully aware and sensitive to the history of slavery in this country but that doesn't always make it so.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Also the "this was interesting" link makes good points. This is something that bothers me a lot as well. Painting nazis as cartoon villians (that should never be discussed or examined) makes us forget they were real people that did terrible things, which could absolutely happen again under the wrong circumstances. See also the rise of far right extremism in modern Europe: Golden Dawn, Front National, PVV...

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

A bit late to the this party. Luftrauser wouldn't have been a problem if they did not use a German name. Art style has nothing to do with it. If it was called Airraiders with the same style it would have been "ok". Or if they adopted a Russian sounding name and used a soviet era font (instead of a font style which exists more that 100 years before WW2 happened) then it wouldn't have been a problem!?

People freak out when something is remotely associated with Nazis, especially via symbols and art style. Yet they completely ignore the Nazi-Germany activities which are happening right in front of their eyes. The Gestapo never went as far as the NSA and similar organizations from other countries.

Bitching about luftrauser is just a distraction from the real problems that we face.

 

I am Dutch, and I'm fully aware that this country has been a great contributor to misery in this world. The Dutch made a good deal as slavers, there's a reason why we call it the golden age. The Dutch government helped Nazi Germany to locate the Jews, by the simple means of mandatory registration of religion until after the WW2.

To be honest, I think we're returning to our bad habits. You may have heard about a guy called Geert Wilders, but he isn't even the problem. We've got proponents of mass surveillance and thought crime in our government, just like the UK and USA has. The Gestapo would be proud of what the NSA and partners accomplished.

But no... the problem is with a small game company making a Sopwith style game using a Germanic Art style which was used a lot of propaganda in the WW2.

 

WW2.... Never forget. But blind to the same shit which is happening today.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Luftrauser wouldn't have been a problem if they did not use a German name.

 

Maybe the title is a tip in the Nazi direction, but a big note that the article Jake just linked to made note that you very clearly kill Churchill in a game with WW2 aesthetics, so that's another pretty big step in the direction of making the player think they're playing as Nazis.

 

"But no... the problem is with a small game company making a Sopwith style game using a Germanic Art style which was used a lot of propaganda in the WW2."

 

I feel like your comparative argument in the second half of your post would threaten to derail the conversation about an interpretation of a video game in a video game forum.  I'm pretty sure no one here thinks this is more important than real, actual problems in the world.  It's fun and constructive for us to play out a thought that a lot of the rest of the internet is currently shouting about... :)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The Gestapo never went as far as the NSA and similar organizations from other countries.

 

I don't agree with that line of thinking. I hate what the NSA is doing to my country, but the NSA has never tried to indoctrinate me. IMO, what was separates the Nazis from other factions in WW2 is the crazy lengths they went to changing the way a large portion of the country thought. Stalin did terrible things too, but his primary method of motivation was through fear and intimidation. The Nazis seduced a large portion of an entire nation, and I think that is what puts them on another level from the rest of their contemporaries. It wasn't that they tried, it was that they tried and largely succeeded. While not excusing the NSA's activities, nothing the NSA has done comes close to The Holocaust.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Long time listener, first time caller and also lttp and too long.


Re: Moonrise Kingdom/YA/coming of age (contains some spoilers)


The emotional flatness of (at least) the main characters in MK is imo not a bug, but a feature. Both Suzy and Sam base their actions on the collective (and mostly not collected, because idealized) memory of youth culture they found in literature, music, etc. They aim to emulate these ideal represantations of love, freedom and discovery.  This is reflected in a metanarrative layer that is constituted of intertextual references.


Suzy steals six books from the library and carries them with her in her suitcase. Although these books are fictious, they all can be categorized as prototypical YA novels. See e.g. this excerpt form Shelly and the Secret Universe:


"If there’s one thing competition level gymnasts know how to do, even if they’re only eleven and a half years old and they’ve been publicly betrayed by their extended families, and they’ve been grounded since February and now are going to be forced to get braces for an overbite that isn’t their fault, it’s jump. / Shelley did. / Our story begins as her feet leave the ground." (Source)


Sam first encounters Suzy backstage of a performance of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. Suzy is in costume and portrays the Raven, a character who like the protagonists in most of the books she later carries with her, is in search of something new. From wiki: "When it is calm, Noye sends out a raven saying "If this fowl come not again it is a sign sooth to say, that dry it is on hill or plain." This is a dancer, accompanied by a cello; he never returns."


The theme of discovering love and freedom in an ideal place is also mirrored in the pivotal dance to Françoise Hardy's Le temps de l'amour. The first two lines not only summarize Anderson's film(s) but pretty much every coming of age story: "C'est le temps de l'amour, / le temps des copains et de l'aventure. It is the time of love, / the time of friends and adventure."


In the end, the beach - where Suzy and Sam found a 'dry plain', where they kissed and danced to Hardy's music, and where Suzy brought her suitcase with the stolen books - is fictionalized in form of a painting by Sam. Their succesful escape to their ideal place, evoked or provoked by their reception of idealized fictional escapes, lives on as another cultural artifact depicting their fulfilled desire to escape and youthful love. But without showing the protagonists, only the things. The story stays the same, only the characters change.


Re: Vlambeer


Known issues: Games and films are harder to analyze due to their more elusive nature. A passage in a book can easily be reread. A sequence of a film or a segment of a game, especially when watched and played in their ideal conditions of reception (in a movie theatre; with the right hardware [no emulations, etc.]), cannot as easily be rewatched or replayed. To pick up the finer nuances in story, structure, etc. a rereading, replaying, rewatching is necessary.


Some not yet fully thought out thoughts: But in games like Luftrausers where there is no or only a rudamentary story and the emphasis lies on gameplay mechanics, the aesthetics become more important than in narrative driven games. The aesthetics alone set the context in which the gameplay takes place. In an article by Leigh Alexander about Threes and its clones, Ian Bogost made an apt comparison, that also can be applied to the dissussion of Luftrausers' "tylish, tight and beautfiul WWII meets Thunderbirds presentation":


Many games, particularly small mobile ones, are "more like design objects (chairs, cereals, etc) than they are like texts (films, novels, etc)," he believes. In normal markets, either branding, scarcity or both help resolve competitive similarities -- a designer bag is worth more than one that looks rather like it because of its marquee label, or because its leather is genuine, for example.
"But there's no material scarcity among games," says Bogost. "There's no equivalent to leather, and there's also scarcely little brand value, particularly for small games by unknown creators. For ordinary people, playing 2048 is just no different from playing Threes, no more than eating Kroger Flakes is different than eating Kellogg's Corn Flakes." (Source)


It is no coincidence then, that Luftrausers/Luftrauser as a 'design object' has already been cloned in March of 2013. The clone, the now banished Skyfar, not only copied the mechanics, but also some elements of the branding: Skulls. Which leads to the central problem: The relation of aesthetics and ethics. The Either/Or.


In this context, the skull is especially troubling: The SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-Skull Units) "was the SS organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps for the Third Reich" (Source). While the skull isn't part of the uniforms in Luftrausers (as it was in the case of the SS-Totenkopfverbände) it still dominates the logo. A giant skull trying to eat the name of the game. A, perhaps, prophetic choice of the logo designer.


In the last 10 months, H&M had to recall two of its products: In August of 2013  a Native-American inspired headdress. And three weeks ago a T-Shirt showing a skull in front of what looks like the Star of David. The shirt and the headdress may have been perfectly good items of clothing, succesfully fulfilling their purpose (whatever this purpose would be for that headdress), but were deemed unethical and pulled of the shelf. Symbols such as the skull are older than their use by the SS. But their old meanings are overwritten by the new meaning, especially in a militaristic context. And because the collective memory with the help of digital mediums is able store information longer, this won't change in the forseeable future. We either have to accept that the skull and other symbols associated with Nazism (like the swastika) will never lose this aura of evil, or we can go to Thailand, form a pop rock band and sing about Hitler and no one cares.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

As I said, I'm late to the party. Trying to imply that I skipped quite a few posts (especially links).

 

"So that seems a greater cultural concern to me (perhaps just because it’s so pervasive) than something like Luftrausers, which invites you to play as the bad guys"

The first thing that popped up in my mind: Spec Ops: The Line.

I don't know if that game was mentioned before, but in Spec Ops you play as the most horrible person in the game. You are the bad guy. Unlike other games, you have no choice, unless you stop playing. If you haven't, play the game, and read "Killing Is Harmless" by Brendan Keogh afterwards.

 

Either way... killing Churchill in a zeppelin, whose crash resembles the Hindenburg. That sure is an alternate reality around WW2. But to glorify Nazi's... still feels like a stretch.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Welcome frythefly, I enjoyed your thought process (though I still didn't care for MK)!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Complete side question, as I haven't played the game and any comments I could provide have already been stated much more eloquently than I could manage. Maybe I just don't see many pictures of Churchil, but the guy in the blimp didn't immediately stand out as anyone in particular to me when I saw that graphic. If they were really trying to evoke that, wouldn't they have gone with the hat?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I don't agree with that line of thinking. I hate what the NSA is doing to my country, but the NSA has never tried to indoctrinate me. IMO, what was separates the Nazis from other factions in WW2 is the crazy lengths they went to changing the way a large portion of the country thought. Stalin did terrible things too, but his primary method of motivation was through fear and intimidation. The Nazis seduced a large portion of an entire nation, and I think that is what puts them on another level from the rest of their contemporaries. It wasn't that they tried, it was that they tried and largely succeeded. While not excusing the NSA's activities, nothing the NSA has done comes close to The Holocaust.

 

I told myself I'd try to stop dominating all input in this conversation, but I react very strongly to the idea that any distinction can be drawn between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin was incredibly successful in promoting the image of Papa Stalin. In class this week, my students read accounts by several refugees from Soviet Russia that focused on their enduring love for Stalin as abstract father figure even though they now hated him as genocidal maniac. Many of the Nazi economic strategies were the same as in the US and many of the Nazi political strategies were the same as in the USSR. It's the combination of the two, in the mess that the victorious powers created in postwar Germany, that made the Nazis, not some special sauce of which we don't know the recipe today.

 

Moreover, the methods of executing genocide are immaterial next to the execution itself. The Holocaust, while the most infamous genocide of the twentieth, is particularly exceptional neither in number or nature, except that it is a genocide in which the free world successfully intervened. That is the most important difference, I am almost certain.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

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!

 

I think something important to consider in all this is that history is not static. The events don't change, but the light we view them in and the breadth of information we have changes things, sometimes dramatically. Quick examples: our previous perception of dinosaurs from big, lumbering komodo dragon-esque lizards changing to maybe the warm blooded reptile ancestors of birds is something that's changed in my lifetime. Or that show that is an Idle Thumbs sponsor about a Revolutionary War about this spy ring that no one knew about for over two centuries.

 

It's also not that people weren't in opposition prior to what we know now. Charlie Chaplin stood to ruin his reputation with The Great Dictator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator

 

Complete side question, as I haven't played the game and any comments I could provide have already been stated much more eloquently than I could manage. Maybe I just don't see many pictures of Churchil, but the guy in the blimp didn't immediately stand out as anyone in particular to me when I saw that graphic. If they were really trying to evoke that, wouldn't they have gone with the hat?

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=winston+churchill&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS502US502&es_sm=122&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=sn9IU6rOLayz0QHj-4DwDg&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&bih=955

 

The depiction in Luftrausers could hardly be more Churchill. The realization that you kill Churchill when you take down the blimp has changed my perception some. Need to gather thoughts before I weigh back in I think, lots of good discussion here.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

As I said in my first post, the Churchill appearance is the one thing that really doesn't jive with the alternate reality explanation. It pushes it towards the way the Red Alert games are alternate histories, which do use real factions, rather than just a wholly imagined set of factions.

 

It also might be worth noting that as far as I am (one challenge away from getting a 100% completion) it is the only depiction of the people behind the enemies you fight. There are no other representatives, each other cutscene simply shows the vehicle you've taken down being destroyed, or your scientist reacting to the new experimental parts you have.

 

Edit: I forgot the 1st cutscene shows a couple light haired men freaking out about seeing you on their radar. The characters don't really evoke a specific faction like the others do.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think it's just an internet thing. I used to do it all the time when I was younger. Then I stopped.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

LTTP as usual, but MAN does it ever seem weird to me to not be able to divorce really broad aesthetics of ship construction and uniform styling from the ideologies and atrocities of a very specific political party that used them. I don't get how borrowing aesthetics that were at one point used by someone who committed atrocities can in any way be said to be trivializing or condoning those atrocities. Their aesthetic choices are not why the Nazis were evil, so to say that those aesthetics are inherently taboo because someone bad used them once - or even invented them, which it could be argued they did - seems super odd to me.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

LTTP as usual, but MAN does it ever seem weird to me to not be able to divorce really broad aesthetics of ship construction and uniform styling from the ideologies and atrocities of a very specific political party that used them. I don't get how borrowing aesthetics that were at one point used by someone who committed atrocities can in any way be said to be trivializing or condoning those atrocities. Their aesthetic choices are not why the Nazis were evil, so to say that those aesthetics are inherently taboo because someone bad used them once - or even invented them, which it could be argued they did - seems super odd to me.

Since the aesthetics are so connected in the public perception to the Nazi-Party and the specific brand of german militarism at the time that the first reaction to a game that looks like it has nazis in it is going to be treating it like it is about nazis. The phrase about something looking like a duck and sounding like a duck comes to mind. If it then turns out that this game looking like it is about nazis is actually saying nothing about nazis but still invoking imagery that is connected to one of the biggest atrocities in world-history it kind of makes it look a bit like the creators are saying that the important part about the nazis and germany in World War 2 weren't the terrible things they did, but rather their shiny uniforms.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Taking offense at something is simply a weakness of your own psyche.  Consumers of art are free to broaden their mind.. or not, its their choice. It is not the responsibility of the creator to make their content more palatable.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Since the aesthetics are so connected in the public perception to the Nazi-Party and the specific brand of german militarism at the time that the first reaction to a game that looks like it has nazis in it is going to be treating it like it is about nazis. The phrase about something looking like a duck and sounding like a duck comes to mind. If it then turns out that this game looking like it is about nazis is actually saying nothing about nazis but still invoking imagery that is connected to one of the biggest atrocities in world-history it kind of makes it look a bit like the creators are saying that the important part about the nazis and germany in World War 2 weren't the terrible things they did, but rather their shiny uniforms.

I can't get down with that last sentence. I think all it says about the creators is that they're willing to divorce the aesthetics of the Nazi party from their actions, and I don't really have a problem with that. Like I said, the Nazis aren't evil because of their uniforms, and there's nothing inherently evil about that particular style of design. Sure, a lot of people are going to immediately associate that look with the Nazis and their actions, but I think maybe it's unfair to hold a creator accountable for the things your brain is free-associating with their imagery.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Ah, but it not offending you is entirely premised on you not caring about what the person is saying. If the choice between being offended and not being offended is strictly the choice between caring or not caring what someone has to say, that still puts responsibility on the party who wishes to communicate.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now