New game releases of May 20-26
Killzone: Mercenary shoots onto Vita on September 10
Trion Worlds hit with more layoffs, Defiance team impacted
Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault defending Vita next week
Game & Wario was originally going to be pre-installed on Wii U
Evening Reading
by Garnett Lee, Feb 01, 2011 5:00pm PSTOver the weekend I started up a new game of Halo: Reach for a solo run. A post I read somewhere recently--I think in chatty but can't recall for sure--got me thinking. In it, the author proposed that compared to Call of Duty, Halo puts some players off because it requires more hits, and hence more skill, to get a kill. After a couple days of playing with this in mind I can see the argument. Getting into good tactical situations to win firefights takes some thought. I always know when I've gotten a kill, and likewise, almost always know when and from where I've been tagged when I go down.
I'm curious to see how I'll feel as I get later in the game. I played Reach co-op originally, so taking it on solo also brings a different perspective. But Cinematic as it may be, the chaos of Call of Duty seems to me like it would be every bit as potentially off-putting as any perceived difficulty in Halo.
Meanwhile, back at the Shack, here's today's video game news:
http://d.pr/Dl7P
This movie is a goddamn national treasure.
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Understand, the Italian or Spanish fascists, the German Nazis or their puppet regimes throughout Europe during the Occupation were not about dictatorship and kicking in the heads of minorities, not to themselves, not in the themes of their own propaganda. Nazi Germany hid the Holocaust, and talked about the rights and dignity of the working man and the valour of the German soldier. The violence and command government is the result of their ideology colliding with reality. This is what they became because of a completely separate military romanticism.
The Roman empire was cited, hilariously, or rather the Roman Republic, as an example of a democratic society which might have been flawed but "worked". Except the Roman Republic de evolved into a romantic militarist enterprise oriented around its hero-celebrity generals, and then this martial culture went on to inspire Mussolini's Fascism itself. This is exactly what I'm talking about, and what everyone who defends Starship Troopers misses. There is no greater warning against the terrors of a martial culture in our history than the Roman Empire.
Heinlen is without question a chauvinist, and in Starship Troopers he romanticises the kind of values that develop into fascism. This is true, no matter how many qualifiers he puts on it (people vote, there's lots of brown humans etc) - these things don't matter, in fact they reinforce the romanticism by making the idea of such a marital culture seem plausible.
Here's another interesting sentence: "It is clear that Emilio's attitude is not unique; the military is, in general, looked down upon, an attitude hardly consistent with a militaristic society." victimhood is also a common theme in military romanticism, soldiers often see themselves as despised. American soldiers sense that they are despised, especially by those on the left, and yet they generally poll as one of the highest, most well respected groups in that culture. Our heroes, the troopers, are all the more romantic for the tragedy of their service. And furthermore about Rome again: the military was often despised in Rome as well, and they never ruled directly either (though most Roman emperors were generals).
The military is like a sect. The culture of a military, any military, is of highly formalised violence as a value which enriches the member of this order who does it correctly. Glory is attained and through this further socialisation with his fellow members. Because the experience is intense, physically and therefore emotionally, it can often shape people who have experienced it irreversibly. And why would it not? The reason that so many veterans find civilian life to be a dull grey noise compared to their combat life - is because it is in comparison a dull grey noise, nothing so visceral or thrilling can happen to you living a civilian life.
Such men - because in Heinlen's world all now-civilian military service persons are veterans of some kind, one does not come out of the bug war unscathed - will all be on a personal and social level bound together in a very real way to form a legally recognised ruling elite entirely separate from the public at large, a martial aristocracy. Who knows how extensive the effects on their style of governance would be, but one thing is assured, with their great expenditure of blood, and then aristocratic status there would be no group of people in that society more interested in maintaining the status quo than this group of people.
And if there is anything deadly for a society, it is a stubborn oligarchy clinging to a status quo.
Heinlen's Starship Troopers doesn't seem like a fascistic society because the men who painted the picture of fascism as we know it today painted it for all of us looking outside-in. What Heinlen painted was what the Fascists saw within themselves, a virtuous, rigorous society, one of hard thankless service then rewarded by a dubious honour - to share the burden of governance. To Heinlen this is some kind of realism, but in truth, such a fantasy would meet the wall of reality to produce something like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
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