Jake

Idle Thumbs 189: Serious Ma'am

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It seems like a big mistake to make statements like "not her story to tell," or "this is bad because of the way we report about minorities, traditionally in the media." Those don't seem like useful critiques. When Scott Peterson was on trial for the double homicide of his wife and unborn baby (creating one of the biggest bullshit tv trials of the decade) a few very similar crimes had happened throughout the US, one within a poor latino family, if I remember. The story then is -- we're only caring about Lacy Peterson because she is a white woman, look what happened here in Arizona and nobody cares. I don't think that's a useful critique either. The fact of the matter is there is real thought to be put into the responsibilities of journalists (and just "the media") in reporting vs entertaining AND it's important to consider the politics of representation within the piece but in terms of Serial it seems like the criticisms and petty dismissals get chalked up to a sentence or some unsubstantiated, highly-subjected paragraphs.

If Serial were traditional media reporting, I'd agree with you, but it's not and that's been central to its success. It's okay to enjoy the podcast, because its subject matter and presentation are very entertaining, but you can't tell me that it's not also enormously problematic for the perspectives and experience of Koenig as a middle-class white person to frame and mediate the perspectives and experiences of multiple communities of people of color so heavily, let alone for that to be presented implicitly as "true crime" or "investigative journalism." I'm sure Adnan and his family are grateful that Koenig took an interest in the case, but how and why she took an interest, especially in light of centuries of white journalists playing tourist (but also sleuth and spy) among people of color, will always make me uncomfortable, whatever the benefits to whomever.

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When Scott Peterson was on trial for the double homicide of his wife and unborn baby (creating one of the biggest bullshit tv trials of the decade) a few very similar crimes had happened throughout the US, one within a poor latino family, if I remember.  The story then is -- we're only caring about Lacy Peterson because she is a white woman, look what happened here in Arizona and nobody cares.  I don't think that's a useful critique either.

 

AKA, the Missing/Dead White Woman Syndrome. It actually is a really useful critique of media, because it's able to place individual examples in the context of the greater history and environment in how media outlets approach certain kinds of stories, marrying the media's high profile history with the real world statistics on those crimes to show just how pandering the media is when it switches into entertainment mode from journalist mode.

 

In the context of that history, the story of Adnan and Hae actually stands out as a powerful counterpoint to our traditional dead lady true crime narratives.  She's not the typical victim, and he's not the typical convict.

 

To me, Serial is a fascinating study in brilliance and frustration.  It's doing so many things right, while also falling completely flat on its face in other places.  I don't have a problem with people criticizing it, or even avoiding it.  But I think studying it's place in the bigger picture, both positive and negative, is a lot more interesting than just focusing on the negative.

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...Dragon Age: Inquisition has trans characters? Are trans characters in that kind of fantasy fiction even a thing? I wanted to hear way more about that.

 

There's one major trans character that you can have any amount of real interaction with, but yes. You can talk to him and find out more about his background and how it works in DA:I's setting. I haven't delved into it yet, but I'm pretty sure some sort of magic is involved. One of the writers made a blog post about the creation of that character: http://blog.bioware.com/2014/12/04/building-a-character-cremisius-krem-aclassi/

 

Sean's comparison/assumption of DA:I and Darks Souls' similarity is one of the few times I've ever reacted out loud when listening to a podcast. "FFF-WHAT?"

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To me, Serial is a fascinating study in brilliance and frustration.  It's doing so many things right, while also falling completely flat on its face in other places.  I don't have a problem with people criticizing it, or even avoiding it.  But I think studying it's place in the bigger picture, both positive and negative, is a lot more interesting than just focusing on the negative.

 

I agree with this. I have not been so conflicted by something like this in recent memory and it's causing me to challenge my preconceptions on a few things. Stimulating, even as it is troubling.

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To me, Serial is a fascinating study in brilliance and frustration.  It's doing so many things right, while also falling completely flat on its face in other places.  I don't have a problem with people criticizing it, or even avoiding it.  But I think studying it's place in the bigger picture, both positive and negative, is a lot more interesting than just focusing on the negative. 

 

Exactly this, Bjorn. I think there's a lot of value to Serial, and I hope my earlier comments weren't implying that it's crass or thoughtless. It has great value in its highlighting the fucked CJ system in America. But I stand by my (admittedly, poorly argued on the cast) difficulty with its more problematic elements.

 

I worry, sometimes, that when I express troubling feelings about a work, based on issues of representation, that others feel as if I'm judging *them* for not feeling that same way. This is something I struggle with a lot, and I think a lot of us do, on some level, since we're all stumbling towards understanding issues that are almost infinite in their complexity. 

 

My discomfort is precisely that - discomfort. It's a personal, "gut" feeling, based on the factors I later described. I think that's why I was so inarticulate when first confronted with defending my position - those feelings are complex and weirdly subjective, more so than usual.

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Sean's comparison/assumption of DA:I and Darks Souls' similarity is one of the few times I've ever reacted out loud when listening to a podcast. "FFF-WHAT?"

 

I was asking a question, not making a comparison. "Oh, it's LIKE Dark Souls?" "No." "Oh, OK."

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There's one major trans character that you can have any amount of real interaction with, but yes. You can talk to him and find out more about his background and how it works in DA:I's setting. I haven't delved into it yet, but I'm pretty sure some sort of magic is involved. One of the writers made a blog post about the creation of that character: http://blog.bioware.com/2014/12/04/building-a-character-cremisius-krem-aclassi/

 

Sean's comparison/assumption of DA:I and Darks Souls' similarity is one of the few times I've ever reacted out loud when listening to a podcast. "FFF-WHAT?"

I'd heard about the trans character from some coworkers and was pleased that they said it wasn't an offensive thing as in previous games (where any trans character was treated as a joke).

 

Also, this quote made me laugh, because video games.

Colleen Perman gave Krem his fantastic face using the character art team’s head-morph system

 

Just employin' that ol' head-morph system.

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I'm enjoying DA:I, but I think they scaled the combat depth back a bit too much compared to DA2. I really liked playing DA2 tactically, and on the harder settings I thought it was a fun challenge, and the cooldown timings were really tight around healing, and managing CC. I'm struggling with DAI's removal of traditional healing. 

 

Unrelated I want to salute Danielle for solidly representing nerdom on the cast. I've already forgot the specific incident, but on this cast Sean, Chris, and Jake were stumbling around some reference and she's always right on that business. 

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If Serial were traditional media reporting, I'd agree with you, but it's not and that's been central to its success. It's okay to enjoy the podcast, because its subject matter and presentation are very entertaining, but you can't tell me that it's not also enormously problematic for the perspectives and experience of Koenig as a middle-class white person to frame and mediate the perspectives and experiences of multiple communities of people of color so heavily, let alone for that to be presented implicitly as "true crime" or "investigative journalism." I'm sure Adnan and his family are grateful that Koenig took an interest in the case, but how and why she took an interest, especially in light of centuries of white journalists playing tourist (but also sleuth and spy) among people of color, will always make me uncomfortable, whatever the benefits to whomever.

Is this exacerbated by you hearing her voice, by her physical presence in the piece? I mean, she has modern white woman vocal fry going on to the max and one of the people's names involved in the case is pronounced like the word "hey" which makes that fact unavoidable. You are listening to her be who she is constantly.

More specifically: Serial could have just as easily been a multi-part feature in a newspaper or magazine... it probably wouldn't have caught the audience that it did as a podcast (which is a tangential but separate issue), but the mix of original reporting, interviews, and first person perspective found on the podcast would be perfectly at home in a giant feature-style investigation piece for a major news or culture magazine... BUT, even with all that personal reporting intact, in a magazine feature version of the story, Sarah Koenig's name would just be listed in tiny print at the top of her text and beyond that she would disappear into her text. No matter how many times the words "I" or "me" appeared in the text, it would still just be those words in text, the same as me writing them just now. I don't have any evidence to go on with this, but I think that hearing her voice, feeling her presence and "who she is" as a person because of the medium Serial is released in, is contributing to this facet of the Serial Conversation more than it would if the content was identical but the medium was more traditional.

I also don't know what meaning to derive from that, but I find it interesting to think about.

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Is this exacerbated by you hearing her voice, by her physical presence in the piece? I mean, she has modern white woman vocal fry going on to the max and one of the people's names involved in the case is pronounced like the word "hey" which makes that fact unavoidable. You are listening to her be who she is constantly.

More specifically: Serial could have just as easily been a multi-part feature in a newspaper or magazine... it probably wouldn't have caught the audience that it did as a podcast (which is a tangential but separate issue), but the mix of original reporting, interviews, and first person perspective found on the podcast would be perfectly at home in a giant feature-style investigation piece for a major news or culture magazine... BUT, even with all that personal reporting intact, in a magazine feature version of the story, Sarah Koenig's name would just be listed in tiny print at the top of her text and beyond that she would disappear into her text. No matter how many times the words "I" or "me" appeared in the text, it would still just be those words in text, the same as me writing them just now. I don't have any evidence to go on with this, but I think that hearing her voice, feeling her presence and "who she is" as a person because of the medium Serial is released in, is contributing to this facet of the Serial Conversation more than it would if the content was identical but the medium was more traditional.

I also don't know what meaning to derive from that, but I find it interesting to think about.

I agree that the medium of a podcast puts problems front and center that exist in all forms of journalism, only subliminated. It might even be argued that the traditional presentation of journalistic reporting exists to obscure the presence of a human reporter inside of it, which goes back to what Bjorn and Danielle have said about Serial exposing a lot of interesting and troubling things.

But still, Koenig repeatedly chooses to present herself in ways that seem slightly sheltered and underinformed to me. It maybe be more honest than traditional reporting, where authoritativeness almost demands omniscience, but it also makes me feel like there could have been a better way. And when we're dealing with a literal matter of life and death, that makes me uncomfortable in a way that interferes with my total enjoyment of the show.

Edit: Fuckin' sclpls... Just skip my post and read his, everyone.

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Is this exacerbated by you hearing her voice, by her physical presence in the piece? I mean, she has modern white woman vocal fry going on to the max and one of the people's names involved in the case is pronounced like the word "hey" which makes that fact unavoidable. You are listening to her be who she is constantly.

More specifically: Serial could have just as easily been a multi-part feature in a newspaper or magazine... it probably wouldn't have caught the audience that it did as a podcast (which is a tangential but separate issue), but the mix of original reporting, interviews, and first person perspective found on the podcast would be perfectly at home in a giant feature-style investigation piece for a major news or culture magazine... BUT, even with all that personal reporting intact, in a magazine feature version of the story, Sarah Koenig's name would just be listed in tiny print at the top of her text and beyond that she would disappear into her text. No matter how many times the words "I" or "me" appeared in the text, it would still just be those words in text, the same as me writing them just now. I don't have any evidence to go on with this, but I think that hearing her voice, feeling her presence and "who she is" as a person because of the medium Serial is released in, is contributing to this facet of the Serial Conversation more than it would if the content was identical but the medium was more traditional.

I also don't know what meaning to derive from that, but I find it interesting to think about.

 

My takeaway from this is sort of analogous to a point Marx use to make about the exploitation of labor. When Marx was critiquing how capitalists exploited the labor of workers, he was careful to point out that he wasn't saying that this social relationship was worse compared to the previous historical relationship between a medieval lord and serf. That was also a social relationship built on the exploitation of one class over another. What changed in this historical shift is the exploitative nature of that relationship became more transparent.

 

In other words, you are right that in the traditional print media there would be less people noticing Sarah's whiteness as a problem, but in the new podcast format this relationship between a white author and the racial minorities that makeup her subject matter, and all the power dynamics it implies, become much more transparent. That doesn't make Sarah a bad person, or wrong for doing the podcast necessarily, but it is certainly a dynamic we ought to be considering more seriously. I mean, surely the events of the past couple of months make that abundantly clear.

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I would like to make one small point about the notion that has been implied or directly claimed by several people which is that This American Life found a crime involving minorities and then assigned a white woman to cover it. No. An experienced reporter came upon this case for a variety of circumstantial reasons, including the fact that she had actually reported on related elements before (such as the defense attorney knvolved) and decided to investigate. There was no version of this where a black woman reported this story instead because it wasn't an assigned story. I'm not saying that that means there should not be better representation in media, because there should be, but if the white woman in question did not investigate this it almost certainly would not have been investigated.

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Oh also, I found Sarah's skepticism about the racial component very bizarre, although she then did the intellectually honest thing of reporting and presenting a great deal of anecdotal evidence that pretty effectively destabilizes her suspicion. I am still not crazy about the way she framed that part of the investigation but I think it's clear she pounded the pavement and did her due diligence.

In general this discussion is frustrating to me because so much of it is centered on general claims that the situation is problematic, but a lot of it feels like it would be literally impossible to avoid any time any white person reports anything about a non white person and I really can't accept that as an inherently problematic concept unto itself.

The larger trends in representation are, again, clearly problems, but I feel like there are a lot of SPECIFIC problems or at least issues with Serial that merit discussion with respect to how this true crime story is reported that I strongly believe are only the most tangentially related to race but are MUCH more relevant to the general media/entertainment landscape of our culture and I have to admit it is kind of frustrating to see this very directly-relevant-to-this-one-specific-program issue get totally sidelined by discussions

of representation that realistically could not have been individually addressed by this one reporter in this one story, at least not to any significant degree. But there are a lot of choices that ARE totally under her control that I think are vital and raise a lot of questions about how we receive reporting as entertainment, even aside from the race of the people involved.

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My problems with Serial have almost nothing to do with race (although like everyone else, I was frustrated with that particular segment, and I do recognize that it's not a non-existent problem), and almost everything to do with the invasion of people's lives that's taking place. I mean I've already spelled out most of my thoughts in another thread, but it's primarily that even though the creators of Serial are not directly responsible, they still have to accept a good deal of blame in the fact that this series has unleashed the armchair detective internet collective on everyone involved in this case. Even in cases where people's names are being left out of it, or voices changed, the internet is probably STILL trying to find out who they are and whether or not they're trustworthy and and and. This is the thing I find most troubling, personally.

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In general this discussion is frustrating to me because so much of it is centered on general claims that the situation is problematic, but a lot of it feels like it would be literally impossible to avoid any time any white person reports anything about a non white person and I really can't accept that as an inherently problematic concept unto itself.

I find this really fascinating, Chris. I feel the same way about the problems of white reporting on stories of color the same way I do about misogynist tropes in video games: it's not usually the specific games' fault and I'll probably play them anyway, but I try to voice the criticisms I have to help with the visibility of those issues elsewhere, regardless of whether the only practicable solution to them is a gradual and general change in the culture.

Because Serial is so prominent and so popular, I feel it's a good venue for criticisms of white journalistic trends, even if it's not the perfect example of them, just because it's an example to which so many people have access. Anything that gets people asking why this was a story only a white woman could tell is good in my book, although if you have other unrelated criticisms that you find more pressing, I can see where your frustration would come into the picture.

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I find this really fascinating, Chris. I feel the same way about the problems of white reporting on stories of color the same way I do about misogynist tropes in video games: it's not usually the specific games' fault and I'll probably play them anyway, but I try to voice the criticisms I have to help with the visibility of those issues elsewhere, regardless of whether the only practicable solution to them is a gradual and general change in the culture.

Because Serial is so prominent and so popular, I feel it's a good venue for criticisms of white journalistic trends, even if it's not the perfect example of them, just because it's an example to which so many people have access. Anything that gets people asking why this was a story only a white woman could tell is good in my book, although if you have other unrelated criticisms that you find more pressing, I can see where your frustration would come into the picture.

It wasn't a story only a white woman could tell. It was a story that this specific white woman stumbled onto. I really think that is a huge distinction. There are SO MANY people imprisoned whose cases almost certainly have some shred of reasonable doubt, insufficient evidence, flimsy testimony, etc. This one story was not simply uniquely waiting around for someone to cover it and a white woman picked up the flag. This one specific case and this one specific white woman ended up crossing paths because of the way life works: something intersected with her unrelated work because she is a reporter and she constantly puts herself in the path of information and connections.

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I would like to make one small point about the notion that has been implied or directly claimed by several people which is that This American Life found a crime involving minorities and then assigned a white woman to cover it.

 

Just to clarify, when I said something along these lines, I was referring to the team.  Once the decision was made to create Serial as a spinoff of TAL, a team was assembled to research, produce and support Koenig.  That's how most long term investigative pieces get done.  My criticism was not so much that Koenig is white, but that her entire team is and that TAL has a long history of not having much representation on their core staff except for white folks.

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It wasn't a story only a white woman could tell. It was a story that this specific white woman stumbled onto. I really think that is a huge distinction. There are SO MANY people imprisoned whose cases almost certainly have some shred of reasonable doubt, insufficient evidence, flimsy testimony, etc. This one story was not simply uniquely waiting around for someone to cover it and a white woman picked up the flag. This one specific case and this one specific white woman ended up crossing paths because of the way life works: something intersected with her unrelated work because she is a reporter and she constantly puts herself in the path of information and connections.

I don't think it's as huge as distinction as you do, so we'll probably just have to disagree. I don't mean to discount Koenig's skills or work, but there are myriad social and cultural factors that position her to tell this story, even though she seems at times unsuited for it. That's the definition of privilege, and I am entirely sympathetic to people for whom that makes Serial difficult to enjoy. The show may be remarkable in terms of its intimacy and popularity, but it is wholly in keeping with the history of the relationship between white journalism (even good, ethical, interesting white journalism) and stories of color.

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I was asking a question, not making a comparison. "Oh, it's LIKE Dark Souls?" "No." "Oh, OK."

 

Sure, it was just kind of a surprising misconception for someone to have, sort of like someone starting to describe Company of Heroes and get the response, "Oh, so the combat's like Far Cry?"

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It's the last year of the 20th century.  My favorite video-games-related media, simultaneously more insightful, more funny, and more in touch with how ridiculous games and games media are than anyone else, is Old Man Murray [Warning: OMM links are NSFW and use lots of ironic sexism and racism in their humor that is sometimes hard to distinguish from the real thing].  Every FPS is trying to be Half-Life & Call of Duty (buried in systems, terrible stories, interminable cut scenes) or Doom 3 (dark sewers, tiny rooms with one or two monsters rendered at the limits of current graphics card technology).  OMM rates games on the Start-to-Crate scale to determine how many seconds until the developers ran out of ideas.

 

Then OMM discovers an obscure little game developed in Croatia of all places called Serious Sam, and they love it. Instead of using modern hardware to make tiny levels 12% prettier and shinier, Serious Sam gives you huge, bright, colorful open levels, hundreds of monsters,

, and Frantic Action Feeling.  The developers literally don't know the meaning of the word "crate" and are goaded into talking hilarious smack about Doom 3.  Serious Sam feels much more like an actual realization of Doom in a modern engine, simultaneously utterly crazy and free of all the tedious baggage weighing down every other FPS.

 

Fast-forward to 2014.  My favorite video-games-related media, simultaneously more insightful, more funny, and more in touch with how ridiculous games and games media are than anyone else, is Idle Thumbs.  They discover an obscure little game developed in Croatia called The Talos Principle, and they love it.  It's simultaneously full of crazy stuff and free of all the tedious baggage weighing down so many other games.  The parallels listening to this week's cast made heart unreasonably happy.  I only wish Idle Thumbs could somehow interview Roman Ribaric.

 

The only thing you folks missed is that The Talos Principle is written by Tom Jubert (Penumbra, FTL, The Swapper, Driver: SF) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything, Traitor).

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The thing about Dragon Age is that much of its point and message is very stuble and well sewed on its story, dialogue and settting. Its a very trick to get right, because I believe everyone have already watched at least one PSA which was trying to make a point about something really important, but somewho completly backfired or simple sound ridiculous, maybe a old cartoon where, you even as child, could understand the point, but the writer keeping repeating it until you got tired or stop paying attention or when a character start talking about something important, but due poor writting it sounded like he was out of character and the whole dialogue looked strange or felt like a episode which does not belong to the canon.

 

On the fantasy or sci-fi, why not both? lately I have been diggin even more jrpgs because that. Western rpg still follow a very rigid separation between such elements, made worst by the "let´s make everything over realistic " aka - everything is detailess/colorless/pratical/ect...which half of the time generate boring aesthetics/design/history that often have nothing of realism or history.

 

For a while a couple of companies in the west tried to do the fantasy + sci-fi, mainly New World Computing (Might and Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic) and Sir-Tech (Wizardry), its was a bit crude in execution, lacking the finesse of japanese developers gained over time, but they tried. However, due lots problems, both companies closed and to made worst, their game became criticized by gaming media/fans because they had this fantasy+sci-fi elements.

 

Fun thing, The Witcher works greatly mostly because, while it tread very close to the "over realistic" it still reflect much of historical eastern europe, so if fell both similar and different. One thing is look how outfits in the game are very colored and detailed, which is very correct and creates this contrast between outfits and the miserable situation ingame and in universe around them (Warhammer Fantasy does this too).

 

I found curious is how Dragon Age (and Mass Effect) are bringing back the party based rpgs, which diminished a lot in the west in late years. Also on the romance, I still know what to feel exactly, because to be fair bioware game use is very superficial dating sim mechanics which would work in visual novels (because the focus on narrative, also dating is a lot tied to routes which the story can take, or they develop more complex systems, like the classic Tokimeki Memorial), but does have mixed results outside. In BG2 romances either had answers which are to obvious or to vague, but Mass Effect and Dragon Age got better a bit.

Edited by Valorian Endymion

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Serious Sam feels much more like an actual realization of Doom in a modern engine, simultaneously utterly crazy and free of all the tedious baggage weighing down every other FPS.

 

My housemate loves the Serious Sam games. In watching him play, I realised that Serious Sam is basically what people want from Duke Nukem: hyper-fast Doom-like gunplay, all the weapons being useful, and machismo without the sexism. If Gearbox gave Croteam the Duke Nukem license they would make an excellent Duke Nukem game, except we already have four Serious Sams which is at least two more good games than Duke Nukem ever had.

 

(edit: my housemate informs me that Serious Sam 2 is not The Second Encounter, and is also not very good.)

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Wow sick burn on the old duke 2d platformers

 

got no time for no cut-rate Commander Keen

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