John Zeitler

It’s been a major bugaboo of mine for a long time, this wanting everyone to get along. I cannot fathom the state of mind that sets someone against another just based on hearsay or a bad reputation. Naturally, given the communication medium of the Internet, I find myself butting heads with that mentality all too often: either generalized so broadly that it insults far more people than intended, or generalized so broadly specifically to insult as many people as possible. (While that’s a behavior I can’t understand, either, it’s not a discussion I want to have right now.)

Again, then, what makes my obsession with liberating people from their fanatical devotions any different from someone who always has to have exactly fifty jelly beans over the course of the day? The answer, of course, is nothing. It’s exactly the same and exactly as harmful.

I can’t fix everyone. I can’t fix anyone but myself. It’s not a matter of capability, it’s a matter of even having the right to. I have no right to tell anyone else how they should live their lives, and especially not when I have so many of my own little problems to deal with. But one thing I can do, and one thing I hope to always do, is to lead by example. By living my life the way I think I should, the only thing that can advance my goal ethically that I can even hope to accomplish is to inspire someone else to work to fix their own problems. Maybe I never actually inspire anyone. Doesn’t matter. As long as I never cross the line into ordering people around, I’m doing what I can. My obsession becomes a passion instead.

So I’m going to be “out” as a geek. I’m going to be smart. I’m going to be at anime conventions until I’m old and gray. I’m going to watch turn-your-brain-off action movies and high-art films. I’m going to use what I want, to like what I want, and to dislike what I want. I’m going to treat people who agree with me with care, and the people who disagree with me with respect.

And if you don’t like it, that’s your problem, not mine.

So when people like a thing too much, that’s bad. When people like the “wrong” thing, that’s bad. Is it just a matter of not liking anything? Is it a matter of deriving actual enjoyment out of something being considered childish? What about hobbies that get a lot of respect– woodworking, hunting, sports? What makes the difficulty of a hobby correlate directly to how acceptably it’s seen?

We’re conditioned from a very early age that expertise is important. We see people who are “good at” things and are told that we all have something unique that we’re good at. What’s left unsaid until late in life is that the things some folks are good at aren’t always obviously useful or appreciated. Being adept in, say, literary analysis may require just as much intelligence and instinctive talent as photographing sports, but one of those people isn’t desperately trying to find some work in their field and it ain’t the reader.

So, when you have to work for your living in something other than what interests you or what you’re best at because that thing perhaps isn’t a moneymaker, you seek out a community where you can express that like. This can be good or bad. If you find a community, way to go– they’ll help you develop your passion, and who knows, maybe you can parlay it into being your moneymaker. But if you find an enclave, you might find that they drag you further and further into an unhealthy obsession.

We specialize ourselves, and we define our worth by the difficulty of the thing we specialize in because of a false perception of profitability. Communications advances shatter that delusion. If your talent and joy lies with playing the shamisen (that’s a Japanese harp, Mom), and you live in Detroit, the problem isn’t with your talent, it’s that you haven’t connected with the right people who’ll pay you for your talents.

On the flip side, the difference between passion and obsession is just as subtle, but its separation has stood the test of time. Neil Postman wrote, “The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming. [...They are] fanatical not because they are ‘false’, but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.” Someone passionate will be receptive to changing their mind, given the right reasons. Someone obsessed sees no reason that opposes their beliefs as “right”.

I freely admit to being obsessed with stamping out obsession. This is something I deeply wish I could cure myself of, because it makes me a giant flaming hypocrite.

Being a geek is okay. I hope I didn’t mislead anyone into thinking that not being a geek was “wrong”, though. I also get the feeling that some folks might have taken the wrong meaning from my tireless advocacy for nerds. I don’t want to turn people into nerds. I don’t want people to “catch teh dork”. That’s not my intent. I just want to hopefully turn folks on to the stuff I like.

But there is a valid point in the arguments of the abstract antagonist from yesterday’s post. If you like something too much, it can be a very, very bad thing. We tend to call this “addiction”, in the lighthearted meaning of the word, but it’s a smokescreen for people who do have real problems with the things they love. And while I personally love the idea that the advances in communications technology over the last thirty years have made it trivially easy to connect with like-minded people, I despair of the fact that what we’re building with this technology aren’t communities, but enclaves.

There’s a subtle, yet incredibly glaring distinction between the two. Both are groups of people united for a common purpose of advocacy of a particular idea, amusement, or course of action. Both are designed to provide support and comfort to their members. Both, ideally, offer that support unconditionally. But where they differ is in their priorities. A community puts its members first. An enclave puts its idea first.

A community has the freedom within its ideology to help its members grow and develop. The community may seek out new members now and again, and always welcomes anyone who’d join. If a member of a community is found to be acting in an unhealthy manner, the community has the responsibility to help that person overcome their problems by guiding them. More to the point, the community may even be proactive about it. Sure, they may frame it in the dressings of their particular sphere of interest, but a true community will band together when one of its own is in trouble.

An enclave, on the other hand, is insular and restrictive. The members are expected to behave in a certain way, to accomplish certain things, to follow these instructions without deviation. Anyone who doesn’t conform is summarily ejected, as “no true member of the group would ever act that way”. Anyone who isn’t a member is an enemy. The enclave doesn’t change. It doesn’t adapt. It is binding, and it is permanent. All of these mean that eventually, as more and more of its members “betray” the group, the enclave decays and stagnates.

I’m sure some of you can see a few uncomfortable parallels here.

It’s been a while now, but the fact that being a nerd is somehow acceptable is starting to filter into the consciousness of the Anglosphere. Most English-speaking cultures, pop or otherwise, are warming up to those among them for whom a wedgie might once have been a daily occurrance. And with good reason; being smart is sexy again. Person of Interest, while it certainly has some action elements, is a very cerebral show that gets its biggest thrills when the protagonists are unable to just blast their way out of a situation. And while it’s mostly a personal observance, I’ve found that more people gave the show a chance because of Michael Emerson than Jim Caviezel. Emerson’s most famous prior role was the conniving and dangerously smart Ben Linus from Lost.

Simon Pegg summed it up pretty well: “It’s okay to be a geek.” But I’m sure there’s a lot of resistance to the thought, especially from folks who have said in as many words that being a geek is a serious liability. To those people, geeks express uncomfortable enthusiasm for their hobbies in situations and ways that are completely inappropriate. The “correct” thing to express that kind of enjoyment over is something that fosters absolutely no enjoyment in the minds of the individuals who stand accused. It frankly doesn’t matter what. It boils down to the fact that people like different stuff.

Can you tell me what is more acceptable about having a piece of sports memorabilia on your desk at work than having, say, a model of a starship? If someone wants to put up a wallpaper of a forest painting on their computer, why is the fact that the person in the painting dressed as an archer suddenly more offensive than if the same person were dressed in, say, American Revolution-era clothing? What materially is the difference between liking “mainstream” hobbies and liking something different?

There is none. The individual who told me that being a geek was “wrong” would probably have the same problem with anyone taking admiration of a sports team to an excessive degree. That person’s point, near as I can tell, was actually that the threshold for “acceptable public enthusiasm” for something seldom seen is far, far lower than a more common one.

It’s funny to me how, as we get more and more connected, the concept of “something seldom seen” is, itself, becoming seldom seen.

Shortly after I’d moved to Pittsburgh, Mike, Pez, Roger, Wade and I all got together to play a game called Attack!. At the time, it was described to me as “Risk, but better”: it introduced air and naval combat into the mix, and reduced some of the random nature (but not all). It was also an incredibly long game, such that after four hours, we were all too tired to continue as we had work in the morning. So, Pez pulled out his laptop and we “saved” the game– writing down who had what units where, who had controlled what, etc. etc. For the week or so until we were able to resume it, we were on the edges of our seats with anticipation. Setting up again was simple and fast, and we had a ball with “our” world.

Risk Legacy, which I mentioned yesterday, is taking a lot of criticism for its most obvious degree of distinction from other Risk variants: you destroy parts of the game set as you play matches. The game board gets marked up with stickers, cards can be altered in value, even the rules can and will change as time goes on. Where most folks focus on the fact that the game is “ruined” after that time, though, it occurs to me that after the fifteen game “setup” phase is done, you have a world all of your own to play in. Maybe it’s balanced. Maybe one player has a dramatic advantage over the others. Maybe in your game South America is a smoldering nuclear wasteland because Australia just thought it looked funny. Who knows.

Gaming– and I’m including video gaming in this, too– is starting to take note that people like to customize stuff, to really make it their own. You saw a little bit of this with Mass Effect, and how a choice made in the first game– Virmire, to say the least– can be carried over to trigger radical changes in the third. Funny how there’s a lot of resistance to this grand concept of having an ongoing narrative and personalized resequencing of events, when one would expect the response to be along the lines of “I liked the idea back when it was called ‘Dungeons and Dragons’”.

The last ten years of gaming have seen two things rise: portable gaming and multiplayer gaming. It’s easy to forget, then, that the fusion of the two has had a really, REALLY rough time of it. The original Game Boy had an awful multiplayer scheme; it required one copy of the software for each player and a link cable. In theory, this sounds reasonable.

In practice, a family wouldn’t buy multiple copies of the same game, friends wouldn’t either when they could just trade amongst themselves, and because of both of those the link cable would get lost within a couple of weeks. I think I managed, what, three linked Tetris games on my original GB, and I traded Pokemon with my sister twice. Obviously, once the Game Boy Advance came along and permitted single-cartridge multiplayer (what we call “Download Play” now), the only problem was that the link cables weren’t included anymore and were $20. Only once the DS came along and provided built-in, easy-to-use wireless capabilities, did portable multiplayer really take off. Even then, single-card multiplayer is relatively rare, for reasons that are usually green. Even the PSP’s game sharing feature doesn’t see a lot of use.

What should be noted, though, is that smartphone gaming is really taking off in terms of solving the other problem with portable multiplayer– finding someone near you who’s set up for and receptive to playing with you. Yeah, asynchronous play is a great innovation, especially because it makes long-form games like Ticket to Ride, Scrabble, Risk, etc. more convenient to play. But linking with folks across the world to get your game on helps far more. Case in point, I’ve been having the hardest time getting some friends together to run a campaign of Risk Legacy as that requires a very long, consistent time investment. On the flip side, whenever I want to play Ascension, I just have to fire up my iPad.

As great as it is to play games together, it could be a lot easier to play the games I want to play with people.

It’s been just shy of a year since the Nintendo 3DS was released, and now that I take a look back at how it has been received, and my own use of the device, I note some similarities to endeavors from the past. This is only the second handheld since the original Game Boy that I haven’t later eliminated or replaced within a year of my first picking it up. That, if anything, is quite remarkable. Witness:

GBA: Bought launch day, replaced within a year with the silver edition
GBA SP: Bought and sold this several times during the Unemployings
DS: Same, but replaced repeatedly over two years until settling on the black Lite
DSi: The only “survivor”, lasting from launch day (2009) until late last year
PSP: See GBA SP, only with longer gaps and fewer games

Why would I go through that treadmill? Well, the Unemployings were certainly a factor, but they were not the entire reason. I thought back to my first DS game, Mr. Driller Drill Spirits. At the time, I called it a “waste of the system’s potential”, and with good reason: that title suffered greatly on its trip across the Pacific, having lost features and game modes. Ultimately it wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been done on the GBA, which was a dramatic disappointment after the quantum leap from the GBC to the GBA. Hell, even going from the original GB to the GBA was a major improvement. I went through a similar disappointment period with the 3DS, picking up Bust A Move Universe shortly after the console’s launch, and regretting it instantly.

The thing is, the DS came into its own once some really good software came out for it. More than that, I’m in a better place now than I was during that high-churn time. I have a better chance to stay stable as time goes on, and so I can stick with a console for the long haul. It hasn’t been as long a wait for the 3DS, in my opinion– Super Mario 3D Land was a great title, and Devil Survivor Overclocked has me really upset that I don’t have the time to sit down with it. But I’d like to think I’ve learned from my past habits, and am not going to go for new hardware “just because”. Software trumps all, and if that means I have to wait a little bit before I get a new console for myself, then so be it.

Tekkoshocon starts in three days. But I’m writing this from ten days ago, when things started to get really rough for a lot of the people behind the scenes. It’s not my place and it’s not appropriate for me to go into details on it, but the gist is accurately summed up by a friend’s frustrated tweet: “When did this stop being fun?” I’m not going to mince words. Working for an anime convention is not easy, and it is far, far from being fun all the time. I am in an interesting position as the curator of the game room, because my job necessarily means I’m guaranteed to have some amount of fun during the convention. But prep work can chew through a lot of goodwill during the runup to the show, until you lose sight of just what it is you’re trying to accomplish.

That’s where good friends come in. I have often said on many occasions that the group of friends that helps to put on this show is a close-knit one, where all are equally blessed with each others’ support and love. Within the convention, we have a word that describes people who’ve supported Tekkoshocon to a tremendous and unparalleled degree: “family”. It’s no exaggeration, no hyperbole that each and every one of us would go to extreme lengths for each other. We work well together.

There are too many reasons for the stress that we’re all feeling at this moment. We can trace a lot of them back to one particular source, which again I’m not at liberty to discuss right now; suffice it to say that it’s an all-pervasive one, that has influenced and affected (again without hyperbole) literally every aspect of the convention this year and has become a massive burden on us psychologically. This is because of the fact that, when we’re all working together for the common good and one particular agent is being overtly antagonistic, it drags everyone down.

Again, though, I’m writing this post with ten days of uncertainty ahead of me. As I wrote this, I was given some very good news that will help us move forward to the new year’s planning with a great deal of the pressures we currently face behind us for good. Because of this– because we’ve resolved a major hurdle that had been hanging over us– our mood has lightened considerably. And it’s only been a few minutes since we heard the news! Imagine what wonderful things have happened in the ten days since I wrote this sentence! Imagine what’s yet to come in the three days before we open!

We don’t have time for despair. We have a job to do. All of us. Together.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day today, which is traditionally celebrated most fervently in the US by drinking. There’s a tremendous amount of drinking involved, honestly, and it amazes me that that’s what we distilled the Irish holiday down to. Being of a not insignificant amount of Irish ancestry myself, I’ve had a bit of a closer link to the holiday than others around me, but I still don’t know as much as I’d like about it.

This has always been a strange point of contention with my family– I’m of Irish and Hungarian descent, but I haven’t really looked into those nations’ cultures as much as I have certain others. I’ve certainly said that Kerry and Budapest are on my travel list, but Kyoto and Brisbane are higher up. Can I really call myself Irish on this day if I can’t even tell you the first thing about “the old country”? What makes me different from any of the other people today who’ll pin on the green white and orange for the sole sake of getting a kiss?

In some way, it’s a side effect of America’s cultural melange that is at once desirable and deplorable. We want to be able to erase those seemingly arbitrary boundaries that have held back human progress, but at the same time we feel slighted when someone misappropriates a label that we genuinely do fit. Despite the fact that many of us feel the need to unite as one people, as one world,, we still can’t let our cultural and geographic differences subside to the level of “interesting quirks” that they need to be for that to happen. Put another way, right now “Irish Catholic” is a noun, when it should be two separate adjectives.

I’m no more Irish, in truth, than my father was. He spent his entire life in this general longitude band, never straying across the Atlantic or Pacific. But, we’re still an Irish family, just Irish-American. Dad never much cared for the more notorious version of St. Patrick’s Day, anyway, although my mother took the opportunity to learn how to make corned beef. In the past, we’d call Grandma and exchange cards, sometimes even going out if there was a dinner being hosted by a church in town. But for me, it was usually a quiet holiday.

Until I got to college and found that it was pretty much just another excuse to drink worse beer than usual.

In less than a week– this coming Wednesday, in fact– I’ll be working at Pittsburgh’s biggest anime convention, Tekkoshocon, as the video game room producer. I’ve taken the title “Tyrant” in a somewhat lighthearted manner, but really “producer” is more fitting to describe my role with the convention and the game room. Last year I was approached to “run” the game room, and ultimately this expanded into developing the room as an entity within itself under Tekkoshocon, to expand the scope of our operations so that we could bring in more attention to our core show. This rapidly became almost another full time job.

The thing is, though, it’s a full time job I actually enjoy doing. I’m a collector, by nature. I enjoy finding, organizing, and managing a big library of video games, and up until about 2010 or so it was only for my enjoyment. Now, I’m able to focus my efforts to the goal of ensuring that everyone has a good time and gets to play some games that maybe they haven’t seen before. This means curating some games I personally don’t like, and dealing with people who know a lot more about those games than I do.

I mentioned this a few years ago, but Matt Boyd wrote that video games are becoming the shared culture of our generation. Last week or so when Mass Effect 3 was released, so many people were discussing the game in social circles and in other aspects that it was, for me, a little difficult to get away from it. Discussion also turned to how people had played the previous two games; people shared and compared their decisions, tactics, likes and dislikes. I was really surprised by this, even though I know I shouldn’t have been.

It’s undeniable now that pop culture, no matter how vapid or intellectually shallow it can be, is still culture. As much as it pains me to admit it, twenty years from now people are going to be talking about Jersey Shore the same way my generation looks back at Beverly Hills, 90210– hopefully with faint disdain and the benefit of hindsight, but you never know. Movies, television, music, and games– these are all part of our culture, our shared experiences that are wound across the frame of time. Even solitary experiences can foster connections.